Boycott the 2012 Olympics

UK politics, War on Terror
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Yesterday the handoff of the Olympic flame from one repressive regime to another went smoothly. While China ended its Olympics with an impressive display of old skool mass drill, Britain opted for a more modern theme, showcasing a celebrity front against a background of aspiring –and cheap– student dancers and the like. The level of drilling needed for Britain’s eight minute presentation is of course of the same level as that of China, just appearing more relaxed. It’s a good metaphor for the differences in approach to politics in the two states, the Chinese still having a no-nonsense, heavyhanded style of dealing with dissent, while the British offer authoritarianism with the fake smile of the Argos salesperson desparate to meet his target. However the two countries are converging in their approaches, as Alex discusses:

It’s so familiar; the insistence that anyone who disagrees is doing so out of spite, that only acquiescence is “serious” or “helpful”. I’m surprised he didn’t offer them a Big Conversation, but in fact, with the right mistranslation he might have done. Similarly, the re-education through labour order for disturbing the public is just a translator’s caprice away from an anti-social behaviour order.

Perhaps there’s a wider truth here; this sort of events/urban regeneration politics seems to follow the same grammar all over the world. It’s conceived of as a project; which implies there are only participants, or else obstructions. Despite the money and the bulldozers, it respects
class boundaries; veering around the villas of the rich. It needs special security arrangements which always turn out to involve some sort of summary justice based on vague and unchallengeable notions of appropriateness, propriety, or order; similarly, these are always temporary but are never revoked. The state authorities and private interests involved are indistinguishable. (Interestingly, the legislative foundation tends to be very hard to get rid of; the Act on the Great Exhibition of 1851 is still in force and still a major headache for anyone planning to build on or near the original site.)

We saw how ruthless China dealt with everything that threatened to disrupt the Olympics, from smog to Free Tibet protests, it will be interesting to see how the British authorities do. They’ll have an easier time of it of course, because the western media aren’t already inclined to be hostile to them in the way they are to the proven “totalitarian” regime in power in China. Britain after all is still a democratic country Unfortunately, as Jamie wryly noted, China is actually liberalising slowly while Britain is going the other way, recognising each other as they pass.

Britain these days is a country where you can be arrested and sentenced not for being a terrorist, not for helping terrorists but just for writing poetry “glorifying terrorism and where innocent Brazilian electricians can be murdered by the police in broad daylight with his killers escaping justice. Let’s not even talk about the warcrimes the country is involved in abroad, in Afghanistan and Iraq. At least China isn’t involved in hanging on the coattails of dodgy American imperialistic ventures…

Plenty of reasons to boycott the 2012 Olympics as effectively as y’all did the 2008 ones, no?

Reporting War — Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

books and books review, Media
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Cover of Reporting War


Reporting War
Stuart Allan & Barbie Zelizer (editors)
374 pages including index
published in 2004

Having kept a politically orientated weblog the past half decade or so I’ve become acutely aware of the limitations of journalism, particularly during wartime. The current war for South Ossetia provides a good example of these limitations, were we’re seeing live how difficult it is for journalists to even get to the combat zone, not to mention how dangerous, as the death of a Dutch camera man proved. Perhaps more worrying, as the conflict continued the reporting on it which started off fairly neutral has become more and more partisan, especially once the United States and the European Union got involved in its resolution, with Russia pictured as the agressor when in fact it was Georgia who started the war. Russian statements are treated with skepticism while quotes from approved official sources, like the Pentagon or NATO are quoted
verbatim. In general the war is treated through an American or European lens, rarely from the point of view of the Russians or Georgians, let alone the Ossetians…

All these problems are described in Reporting War, a collection of essays on the role of journalism in wartime, its difficulties and dillemas. Published a year after the American invasion of Iraq, a lot of attention is of course paid to the problems of that particular war. The book doesn’t just look at the role of the journalists themselves, but also how they are dealt with by armies and governments involved in war, with a specific focus on the US army’s management of journalist during the first and second Gulf War. What’s more, several essays look beyond the physical reaity of reporting wars to the role the media plays in general in covering wars. Not every conflict is covered equally after all.

Read more…

New Cold War ™ happy fun time with Marko and Denis

Decentists and other ex-lefties, War on south Ossetia
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The disasters that have been Iraq and Afghanistan had sort of silenced all the humanitarian interventionists, decent leftists, war liberals and all the other surviving members of the “let you and him fight international brigage these past two years or so, but boy did the War for South Ossetia bring them back. Suddenly they have a new purpose in life, a new spring in their step: the Russians are back and everything’s all right with the world. No longer do they have to trouble themselves with tawdry, unwinnable wars in dusty countries nobody really cares about but for the oil; the Russian Bear is back and it’s happy party time for the Cold Warriors.

And nowhere more so than at the Henry Jackson Society, where Mark Attila “it’s the Serbs! The Serbs!” Hoare has been moved to ever highers flights of fancy in his descriptions of What’s To Be Done. As Aaronovitch Watch commented: “We have occasionally described the Henry Jackson Society in the past as the “I’ve got a cardboard box on my head and I’m a tank commander” element of British Decency – the breakfast cereal must be ankle deep on the floor at Peterhouse College today”

But he got competition, from none other than Denis “failed New Labour minister McShamne”, exhorting us at Comment is Free to stand Shoulder to shoulder against Russia:

As Sir Roderick Braithwaite, the astute former ambassador in Moscow and a man sympathetic to Russians pointed out some time ago, Russia has done far more invading than it has been invaded. Napoleon and Hitler failed to conquer Moscow but Russian armies – Tsarist and Soviet – have occupied every European capital east of the Rhine.

[…]

President Sarkozy’s remarks that Russia had some rights in Georgia sent a chill down the spine of Baltic states which have Russian speaking citizens, installed after Stalin’s invasion of these small countries in 1940. Finland, which fought a war with Russia in 1940, shivers at what the new Putin doctrine might mean.

[…]

Putin may have thought that sweeping the Georgian pawn off the board was the end of the game. Alas, it is is only the beginning, and Britain cannot betray Poland and its fellow EU and Nato allies as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.

McShane does seem to have a talent for distilling all the cliches uttered about Russia’s “aggression” in Georgia to the purest grade of wingnuttery, doesn’t he, with his talk about not betraying Poland “as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.” It’s great stuff, but to me Marko still has the edge, as he wouldn’t make such schoolboy errors in his rants.

Georgia: planning and propaganda

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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Jamie is annoyed at how a perfectly natural bit of Russian forward planning is seen as evidence of nefarious intentions:

Have we really got so used to just blundering about that the existence of a plan — in this case the organisation of a response if attacked, the institutional capability to bring it about and the intelligence assets to get the timing right — in itself qualifies the Russians as aggressors?

Apparantly we have, as I’ve not only seen this argument –that their quick response time proved the Russians had planned this conflict and were just waiting for an excuse to attack — in the Danger Room post that irked Jamie, but also in the big NYT
writeup of the war, as well as on various liberal geopolitical blogs. Considering the speed with which the Russians responded — Georgia started its invasion of South Ossetia on August the 7th and by August 10th the Russians had chased them back over the border– it’s a natural conclusion to jump to.

But it’s the wrong one. There’s nothing strange about the quick Russian response, considering the crisis had been simmering for months, had just heated up in July and gotten active in the first week of August. All armies make contingency plans and it makes sense for the Russian troops stationed in North Ossetia to have a plan on how to deal with a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. Furthermore, because there’s only one route between the two Ossetias, one that could be cut off relatively easy, it also makes sense for the Russians to start moving troops the moment Georgia attacks in earnest, as they can’t afford to be stuck on the wrong side of that tunnel when that happens. They need to establish a foothold outside the tunnel, keep it open for reinforcements and of course keep the Georgians from blowing it up. The Russian commander might even have standing orders to move in if Georgia gets too aggresive.

Now if we look what happened two weeks ago, we saw the Russians responding almost exactly in the pattern I just described. Their local forces moved into South Ossetia in a hurry, with some local air support but no air superiority and got to Tskhinvali roughly a day after the Georgians had started their invasion. At that time the Georgians were largely in control of that city, but there were still pockets of resistance. The Russian counterattack drove the Georgian forces from the city, but wasn’t strong enough to prevent them from regrouping and going back on the offensive. It was only after the weekend, on Monday and Tuesday that the Georgians fled South Ossetia and the Russians moved into Georgia proper. And it was then that I first saw stories saying that the Russians had planned this invasion.

By the time it became clear Saakashvili had gambled and lost, it was this narrative –that Russia had lured him into invading as to have a pretext for dealing with Georgia once and for all– that became established in the western media. With Georgian territory now in firm Russian control, it was easy to show Russia as the aggressor, as long as Saakashvili’s blunder could be ignored or whitewashed. The idea that Russia entrapted Saakashvili was tailor made for this.