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Serendipity

Mandelson's Market

Peter Mandelson, whose reappointment to the Cabinet has left me feverishly indifferent, is fretting over the sanctity of the free market -the fairytale in which he is really too old now to believe.

Today’s Times reports Mandelson’s warning that the EU ‘could be hit by a surge of “economic nationalism” after European governments enacted a series of unilateral moves to shore up their financial systems at the expense of other member states.’ The examples he has in mind are the decisions by the Irish and Greek Governments to guarantee bank deposits, which have, in the case of Ireland at least, predictably meant an outflow of money from the UK to these ‘safer’ banks, thereby hurting UK banks. Opines Mandelson:

“The danger in this crisis is it may spark a new wave of economic nationalism, with each country looking for a ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card. People have to realise that selective or national approaches could lead markets to look to parts of the financial system in a distorted way.”

Well, yes, these governmental moves do distort the market because they make the banking environment more attractive in one country over an another. Financial services are a market now -they were made that way by the neo-liberal economics of which Mandelson is a champion. Banks are there to make money, which is why there were so 'innovative' during the 90s and why they are paying the price (or rather asking the rest of us to pay the price) today. That’s pretty straightforward. What’s less straightforward is why Mandelson is complaining about this but was so enthusiastic when various governments, particularly in the Far East, made their business environment so comfortable -by deregulating employment protection, slashing environmental standards and reducing or even eliminating corporate taxation – that domestic business outsourced work abroad and closed factories at home. That is also government intervention designed to make one market far more attractive to business than others. Foreign economic nationalism that causes domestic jobs to haemorrhage is apparently fair play but similar nationalism that bleeds domestic banks is caddish and unmarketly. 

It’s another demonstration of the selective application of free market principles: intervention and subsidy to protect jobs -actual human beings- is wrong, yet intervention (say, $700bn) to protected capital is an economic necessity. Taxpayers cannot be asked to support each other by bailing out a manufacturing concern and protecting jobs; that is unacceptable, economically illiterate and, frankly, Socialist. But the taxpayer can be asked to spend billions buying worthless assets in order to rescue the super rich, the super greedy and, let’s remember, the really quite stupid.

Mandelson is apparently back in the Cabinet because there is a crisis and, in a crisis, one needs one’s best people. Naturally, that’s the global economic crisis and not the Labour’s Screwed At The Next Election Crisis. No, he is an excellent Minister and has an unparalleled understanding of international finance -something that his invocation of what is only superficially a double standard demonstrates quite clearly.

 

Update 19.50:

Mrs Merkel has announced that the German Government will also now guarantee all private savings in German banks. The BBC's Robert Peston expects the UK to follow within 24hrs. Meanwhile, there is also some evidence that there hasn't yet been a major outpouring of capital to Ireland after all.

A reply to Thomas Friedman (not) on behalf of the Iraqi ‘Government’.

Mr. Friedman,

The fact that you dress up your latest stream of deluded mendacity as a letter on behalf of George W. Bush says much about your ridiculous ego. But at least it suggests you are aware that only the thinnest sliver of the remaining Iraqi population will have any idea of who you are. This is not their loss.

You write that Bush invaded Iraq because of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. And you lie. You lie because you surely know that the Bush Administration never truly believed that Iraq had any such weapons -just as you never did (although you pretended you did at the time).

So Americans are losing their homes. I’m sure that Iraqis will spare time to sympathise. After all, how many Iraqi homes have been lost -to American bombs and missiles? Maybe Americans don’t understand why their government is spending a billion a day in occupying and crushing Iraq but perhaps they would if journalists such as you had the integrity to tell them the truth rather than sing hosannas to the name of Power. 

You say that there has been a debate in America about setting a deadline for withdrawing from Iraq. In doing so, you reveal your own racism and imperialist mindset -that America should have the right to debate the matter. There is no debate in Iraq -they want you out and always have.  

You speak of finding a different war than the one for which you came looking. Again, you trumpet your pathology to the world. You ‘found’ no war in Iraq -you created it, you imposed it, you chose it: “the WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity.” Don’t blame anyone else for what you alone have done. Al-Qaeda, the inflated monster with which you try to terrify us all was not even a force in Iraq before the US came and turned Iraq into flypaper for terrorists throughout the world -just as your own planners had predicted. Even after the invasion, Al-Qaeda was a tiny fragment of those you so deceitfully call “anti-Iraqi” forces. You have been at war with the Iraqi people – and not just since the US invaded their country in 2003. You have been at war with them since you supported Saddam Hussein’s crushing of the Shi’a uprising in 1991 because he was still ‘useful’ to the American state. You declared open war on the Iraqi people the moment you described the ‘best of all worlds’ for Iraq as an ‘Iron fisted military junta’. And you were still at war when you told Iraqi families, who had suffered the horror of having their houses raided by troops to “Suck.On.This”. Don’t dare to pretend that you have anything but contempt for the Iraqi people. You personally, Mr. Friedman, are an enemy of the Iraqi people and of decent people everywhere.

You have the sheer temerity to ask the Iraqis if they “want to see fear”. By all that is profane how dare you? How many other peoples in the world have the Americans taught so comprehensively the gut burning, heart crushing meaning of fear? Fear of the American employee, Saddam, fear of cholera, of cancer, of starvation, of Shock & Awe, of the terrorists you drew to their country. Ask the mothers who were forced to give their children valium during the nights of bombing if there’s anything more you can tell them about fear.

And now you threaten the world with the prospect of a world in which there is “too little American power” - suggesting a period of American isolation, that fiction that no doubt causes grim laughter amongst the nations of South America.

How dare you lecture a people when you cheered every moment that they were brought to their knees? The only words you should ever speak should be pleas for forgiveness for all that you have done. Instead, you continue to disgrace yourself, your family, your nation, and your species with your venomous, smug dishonesty.

I am only grateful that the vast majority of Iraqi people, those who remain, will never read your contemptible words. One day there must be a monument to the dead of Iraq so that their names are never lost to the painful story of our progress. Your name will be dead to history, unread, unspoken, lost like bitter ash lost on the wind.

"Can the US afford to respect Pakistani Sovereignty?"

That was the question posed just over an hour ago by Sean Lay on Radio 4's The World This Weekend.

I don't recall it ever being asked if, given Georgia's aggression in South Ossetia, Russia could 'afford' to respect Georgian sovereignty. Nor whether, given Kuwait's slant oil drilling of Iraqi reserves, Iraq could afford to respect their sovereignty. In the latter case, the question has increased relevance since the US National Security Strategy has long since stated that the US has the right to use military force to protect its overseas economic interests and energy supplies (and access to foreign markets).

There is no doubt, at least in my mind, that there are circumstances in which a compelling case can be made that a country's sovereignty can be outweighed by other factors. The important point, however, is that the issue here is not that the media is evaluating, in each case, the arguments for respecting a given state's sovereignty. They have not weighed Pakistani sovereignty against US interests and Georgian sovereignty against Russian interests and ruled in favour of US action and against Russian action. Instead, the pertinent point is that, of the two, only the US is assumed to have the right to make such calculations in the first place. This is not even said outright because it does not need to be -it is simply understood. The US, as the imperial power, is understood to have interests that outrank those of anyone else and, by virtue of its status as the 'Leader of the Free World', the right to take decisions that are denied to the lesser peoples of the world. 

It is true that there may be some tactical discussion of the costs and benefits of these decisions. So, in the case of bombing Pakistan, the BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones, is permitted to question whether the bombings further the self-evident US intention to 'win hearts and minds'. He is even allowed to make the most powerful criticism a respectable journalist may make of their political masters, that they are not pursuing their stated strategy very well. But Bennett-Jones is 'taken aback' that the Pakistanis resent being shredded by US ordnance to the point that a secular Pakistani -who cannot therefore be said to 'hate our freedoms’ - can ask about the Americans "What are they doing here 12,000 miles away from home?" Of course, it's an obvious question to almost anyone but a carefully trained journalist. Bennett-Jones, on the other hand, has to wrap up such thorny questions -and 'the familiar complaints about foreign policy' - in the soft comforting blanket of 'anti-Americanism'. Corresponding western 'anti-Russianism' does not exist in the lexicon -that was merely legitimate criticism of Russia's refusal to understand that invading sovereign states "is simply not the way that international relations can be run in the 21st century" -unless, of course, that we decide that we cannot afford not to.

Hiatus

As my modest readership will have noticed, this blog is on hiatus. It may return later in the year.

Oh! England, my Lionheart,

Two weeks before April 1^st and Lord Goldsmith, ex-Lord Chancellor of the ex-Labour Government, has proposed that some of the most vulnerable and easily-led people in the country should show their love for democracy and British ‘values’ by swearing allegiance to a German aristocrat. Coming a mere day after the Party announced that a City fund manager has been appointed as its new General Secretary, it’s clear that our masters still appreciate a good chuckle.

The idea that we should have to swear allegiance to the Queen is a travesty of democracy, morality, and good sense as I expect most regular readers of this blog would agree (I note that Philip Challinor has given his own characteristic verdict on the matter). I also think it’s a little ironic that, while the Government is fixated on crushing and humiliating benefits claimants, there’s one family, who have never done a proper day’s work in their lives, and who live on an estate while living off the state, who we’re all supposed to love. Still, good sense and taste seem irrelevant when Lord Goldsmith can say, presumably without smirking, that he can see no reason why republicans would object to swearing an oath, even if they disagree with the present system of government. He does concede, however, that people may prefer to pledge loyalty to the country rather than to the millionairess pensioner and her dysfunctional family.

The justification for this idea, which I suspect is already peering mournfully at us through a dense canopy of long grass, is that:

"It does make sense to promote a sense of shared belonging, a sense that you are part of a community with a common venture, to integrate better newcomers to our society and be clearer about what the rights and responsibilities are."

I feel a certain degree of commonality with many of those around me, even in our modern, more individualistic society. Yet I refuse to believe that this can be heightened by swearing allegiance to a monarch with whom, so far as I’m aware, I’m engaged in no “common venture” whatsoever. The same applies to holding allegiance to the nation (whatever that might be) and certainly the State. Indeed, I’ll go further to say that I refuse to take any lessons on citizenship from the British Government, which in a global context particularly, is such an appalling citizen: an arrogant bully’s lackey; a lying, hypocritical, perfidious, selfish, murderous rogue of a state. Why should I swear allegiance? Is it not enough to support my country when I think it’s right?

National pride, they trumpet, but pride in what? In plain terms, what has my country done of which I can be proud? Ask this question and people rapidly spin us back to World War Two as the last (relatively) uncontroversial instance of this country standing proud - and even that is a difficult case. I firmly believe that many people found Hitler’s ideology abhorrent but I don’t think we “defended Europe” as some sort of great crusade for the light but because the State’s material interests were threatened by the moustachioed upstart. Indeed, I’ve met several elderly people who fought Germany while sharing most of Hitler’s views on Jews, Blacks, gays, gypsies and so on. My own grandmother was ideologically indistinguishable from Oswald Mosley and, even a few years ago, would probably have been happy to join the Ku Klux Klan if they’d allowed rubber sheets. All this talk of pride in one’s country might actually have more weight if politicians were equally inclined to encourage a sense of shame about our more shabby acts -Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Kenya, Vietnam, and so on. Yet these episodes are effaced from, or distorted in, the national narrative -and so long as that is the case the greatest service one can do for one’s country during celebrations of national glory is to leave the paper hat folded in front of you while telling anyone who’ll listen about how much the party’s cost.

Is it even possible to take pride in one’s country when one can claim no credit for being a part of it? So other people on this island, either now or in the past, have done things worthy of acclaim -I can claim no credit for that so how can I be proud of them? I’m British by an accident of birth, it is not my personal achievement. While I’m immensely fond of the place for all sorts of marvellously trivial, "warm beer and cricket" reasons, I can take no credit for the way it is or for my belonging to it. Ironically, the only people who should claim pride in being British are immigrants, both legal and illegal. There are people in this country who’ve sold everything to pay people traffickers, said goodbye to their families, braved dangerous seas and risked death in the backs of lorries before being subjected to interrogation and humiliation at the hands of the British State. They’ve worked to be British. Me? I was handed it on a plate, the fallout of a brief collision of geography and biology. I’ll do my best to be the best citizen I can, not out of loyalty to an octogenarian toff or a bunch of besuited gangsters, but out of duty to my fellow humans -regardless of whatever piece of land they happen to have been conceived on.

God save the queen cos tourists are money
And our figurehead is not what she seems
Oh God save history God save your mad parade
Oh lord God have mercy all crimes are paid

Pick up your gun and shut up.

I’ve been resisting the urge to write anything about the current flap concerning Armed Forces members being “abused” in Peterborough. The story appears to be a thin concoction based on a single incident some 15 months ago. Nor, as it happens, do I see much point in hurling verbal abuse at squaddies, anyway. Unfortunately, the sheer inanity and reflexive nationalist windbaggery that the story has called forth (exemplified by the pre-fascist racist bear pit that is the BBC’s Have Your Say) is just too maddening. I shall try to be brief.

Argument number one from the blusterers is that the troops deserve our support regardless of whether we agree with the war(s). Our anger, they say, would be better directed at the Government who sent them. This position is similar to that which the Liberal Democrats adopted during the invasion of Iraq -their “opposition” lasted only as long as it hadn’t happened. The moment it did they fell meekly into line and supported “our boys”.

I have little idea what the exhortation to support our troops really means, particularly when it is said that we can support them without supporting the war. If this is so then clearly it cannot mean wishing them success. Rather, it must mean wishing that they don’t get hurt. Well, fair enough, I don’t want to see British troops get hurt. But then I don’t want any troops to get hurt. I do recognise that it's inevitable, however, so if combatants on one side or another have to get hurt, as complicated as matters may be, I’d rather it was the aggressors. The logic of this is clear. If I see a man attacked in the street, I do not want to see either him or his assailant hurt unnecessarily but, since I recognise both the victim’s right to self defence and the attacker’s aggression, I’d rather see the latter hurt than the former. The same is true for our troops in Iraq. I don’t want to see any of them killed but if they continue to aggress against the Iraqis, then I’d rather British troops were hurt. Anything else is simple racism. Yet those who call on us to support our boys, while saying that we don’t have to support the war, were they to apply their principle evenly, would be calling on us to support the mugger even if we don’t agree with mugging. “Just doing my job” is no defence if your job stinks.

As a side point, it’s also worth stating something else that really should be obvious: there is nothing intrinsically honourable about serving in the Armed Forces. The Armed Forces are an organisation maintained to pursue certain goals, frequently through violence. How honourable it is to be a soldier depends upon how honourable the goal is and the methods one uses – if you’re defending a people against aggression with minimum force, be proud. If you do it with excessive force, be less proud. But if you’re inflicting aggression against a defenceless people, hang your head. I might feel proud of getting involved in a pub fight if the cause of my violence was to defend a man from a racist attack but I would feel ashamed if I was involved in the same fight in order to commit such an attack. Nor is being a soldier honourable becaue they are often in genuine danger and carry out their orders knowing that there is a serious risk they might be killed. Otherwise,  being a terrorist would be honourable for the same reason and suicide bombers would be confered even greater respect. There is nothing intrinically honourable or dishonourable, respectable or ignoble, about placing oneself at risk. Again, the cause in which one does it is key. Nor is bravery an issue: I’m not brave enough to be an armed robber, doesn’t mean I can’t condemn them.

Nor do I accept the defence that soldiers are only obeying orders and have no choice. Of course they have a choice, they can refuse to obey orders, which I believe they should. Yes, consequences flow from that choice but I'd rather go to the stockade than kill innocent people. I'd also hope that I'd be brave enough still to take that stance if I faced a firing squad instead. To argue in the 21^st century that “theirs is not to reason why” is actually an insult to them -it suggests that either they are incapable of moral judgements or that they should ignore their own consciences. I believe the first is false and the second indefensible, not least because those who take this line are unlikely to apply it universally. Would those who believe that our troops should follow orders without question have condemned Iraqi troops who defied Saddam? Or German troops who refused to take orders from the 3^rd Reich? Of course not. Certainly, it is true that many of our forces, from the poorer and less educated parts of society, may have joined the army because they needed a job and are very likely heavily indoctrinated once they’re in. But this can only be a mitigation. If they are fully aware of what they are doing, disagree with it, yet do it anyway, they are cowards. If they are propagandised then they are to be pitied in the same way that some who are convicted of a criminal offence are judged to be less than competent and so not entirely responsible for their actions. Uncritical devotion to authority is not honourable, it's pathological.

Then there is the argument that we should support our troops out of gratitude, for defending us now or for having defended us in the past. Both arguments are misguided. It is no more logical to support the army uncritically because of good it does in some areas than it would be to support any other organisation for similar reasons. I’m grateful for nurses: doesn’t mean I have to support them when they start offing pensioners.

The argument that we should show respect because of the British Army’s defence of Britain during WWII is similarly vacuous. What it actually amounts to is capitulating to a group of people today because a group of people under the same name 60 years ago did us a very big favour. In fact, it is entirely the same principle that a few people still use for disliking Germans today -because of what ‘they’ did 60 years ago. In fact, with a few exceptions, Germans today did nothing 60 years ago -it was another bunch of people who happened to live on the same piece of land.

Nor is true, in any case, that the army is defending us now. In fact, it is much more plausible to make the case that they are actively endangering us. Several studies have shown that, by “riding pillion” on US policy, the British Government and its Armed Forces are actually putting all of us at far greater risk. Having been reduced to a mercenary force for US strategic interests, it should hardly be surprising that the actions of the British Army have made us a target for terrorists.

In any case, it’s a pretty repugnant argument that our gratitude to troops for services rendered to us excuses atrocities committed against others. It’s a selfish assertion that our welfare outweighs that of someone else. I might be grateful to my next door neighbour for the loan of his lawnmower but I don’t have to defend him when he’s found guilty of beating his wife.

Another argument in the windbags’ arsenal is that one shouldn’t criticise the troops because we don’t know what it’s like on the front line. Again, it's a specious argument. Otherwise, it would be wrong for me to criticise the “enemy” troops as well. I certainly don’t recall criticism of Iraqi troops being off the table during the Gulf War because we didn’t know what everyday life in the Republican Guard was like. The argument makes about as much sense as saying that we shouldn't criticise a murderer because we don’t know the circumstances in which he did it. If one disagrees with the objective then the circumstances of its pursuance are simply not relevant.

Our troops may fight bravely sometimes (when they're not slaughtering people from miles away at sea or up in the air) and, amongst the imperialist carnage, there are doubtless genuine acts of bravery and heroism. Nor do I believe that every squaddie out there goes to the Middle East with the intention of doing ill. In the end, though, this does not matter. What matters is that they are thinking, feeling human beings who are responsible for their actions. If they agree with the war(s), they are culpable, if they oppose them yet fight anyway, they're cowardly. If they 're conditioned, they are pitiable. True bravery is not to fight against people who are not your enemy -it is to make a stand for what you believe is right, even knowing that you may suffer greatly for doing so. Sometimes that can mean picking up a gun. Too often, it means never picking it up to begin with.

 

NO2ID: Government to use "coercion" against us.

NO2ID have spotted the following in a document entitled "NIS Delivery Strategy -Aligning strategy and delivery", part of a Powerpoint presentation prepared some time in late 2007. You can download the document here but the key paragraph is this:

NO2ID write:

UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about "coercing" its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The 'ID card' is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident - creating what NO2ID calls 'the database state'.

NO2ID's national coordinator, Phil Booth, exhorted bloggers, freedom lovers and anyone who gives a damn about personal privacy to mirror the annotate document on their site.

"The charade is over. While ministers try to bamboozle the British public with fairytales about fingerprints, officials are plotting how to dupe and bully the population into surrendering control of their own identities."

"Biometric ID cards are a sham; a magician's flourish to cover the biggest identity fraud there has ever been."   

Suharto is Dead. So is History

So, the butcher Suharto is dead. Few will mourn the monster.

Today’s Independent on Sunday carries a lengthy obituary of the man and cannot avoid discussing the horror he wrought after his takeover in 1965:

Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.

It’s a brutal legacy from which the Independent omits the more pertinent truth: the close involvement of the British Labour Government, under Harold Wilson and the US Democratic Administration under Lyndon Johnson. As the Foreign Office said in a statement to its embassy in Jakarta in October 1965:

It seems pretty clear that the Generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-Western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the Communists. In the short run, and while the present confusion continues, we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the Generals.

Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, had put this matter a little more succinctly only a few days earlier, when he remarked to the F.O. that “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. It was considerably more than “a little shooting” for which the British offered their tacit support – as they well knew. In December 1965, a British official reported to the Ambassador that he was “readier to accept” American statistics that over 100,000 had been butchered, after receiving “horrifying” details of the purges. Such details recorded by the F. O. included,

[Some victims being] given a knife and invited to kill themselves. Most refuse and are told to turn around and are shot in the back.

A woman of 78... was taken away one night by a village execution squad... Half a dozen heads were neatly arranged on the parapet of a small bridge.

As the British consul in Medan summarized events,

Posing as saviours of the nation from a Communist terror, [the army] unleashed a ruthless terror of their own, the scars of which will take many years to heal.

Another memo referred to the purges as “an operation carried out on a very large scale and often with appalling savagery.”

What I must stress is that this was all done with clear UK (and US) knowledge and encouragement. All the quotations above are taken from official UK Government memoranda, published  by the Public Records Office and related in Chapter 19 of Mark Curtis’ excellent “Web of Deceit”. We learn further from these documents that the British Government was keen not to “distract” the Indonesian army from  its slaughter and that it assured Suharto that they had no intention of interfering. The UK also launched black propaganda operations from its MI6 base in Singapore, designed to lead people to believe that China was arming the PKI opposition and so "blacken [them] in the eyes of the army and the people of Indonesia". Indeed, Britain knew that it could stop, or at the very least seriously impede, the slaughter because it was engaged in a military confrontation with Indonesia in nearby Borneo -but they stressed to Suharto that, were he to divert troops from that stand-off to take part in the butchery, the UK would not take “military advantage”. British callousness to the brutal mass murder of “bewildered peasants” was truly awesome, with one official noting of one group of 10,005 arrestees that, “I hope they do not throw the 10,005 into the sea..., otherwise it will cause quite a shipping hazard.”

This is just a small sample of the record -directly concerning UK complicity in the most gruesome atrocities, all carried out under the pretence (and it was a pretence: the real 'threat' was left-wing nationalism endangering Western business interests) of combating Communism. For instance, I have not touched on our support for Suharto’s genocidal invasion of East Timor. Yet even this brief survey of complicity is lost beneath gallons of Independent whitewash. "Disgraced and villified" reads the headline but that's Suharto, not us. Suharto is dead. So is history.