Martin Wisse – Page 541

Not good

Published on August 8, 2008

Georgia invades breakaway region of South Ossetia, Russia responds by sending troops to defend it, with all the danger of turning this into a fullscale war between Georgia and Russia. Der Spiegel has the best coverage in English that I’ve seen, while the main Georgian English language news service Civil.ge, which was up earlier today now seems to have been slashdotted.

Tensions had been high for a while, with the root of the conflict going back to the last days of the Soviet Union, when newly resurgant Georgian nationalism met head to head with its Ossentian counterpart. Russia helped end the war that started when the USSR collapsed completely and has since made South Ossetia into a protectorate, providing most of the population with Russian passports. For Russia, separatist regions like this and Abkhazia have always been a way to keep a hand in its “Near Abroad”, but it also has an interest because of its own North Ossetia, which you might remember from the school siege of Breslan.

Now this socalled “frozen conflict” has occasionally erupting into open violence again but never as bad as today. This time it looks like it’s becoming a real shooting war between Georgia and Russia. But why now? Tensions had been ratcheting up in the past year, with various incidents including alleged Russian incursions of Georgian airspace, as well as Georgian attacks on South Ossetian targets and Ossetian attacks on Georgian soil. Then again, these things have all happened before and never degenerated as fast as this time.

Now Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, came to power in one of those coloured revolutions that are usually massively backed by the CIA and western business interests like George Soros. Which meant the US got an important new ally, who showed his gratitude by sending 2,000 Georgian troops to Iraq, half of which he now wants back to stop the “Russian aggression”, but that’s of lesser concern. What was important that with Georgia being pro-western, Caspian Sea oil could now be transported through a brand spanking new pipeline to Europe, without the Russians having the ability to shut down the tap. In return for this Georgia got a lot of American assistance in rebuilding its army. Thanks to this support Saakashvili has already manage to force one breakaway region, Adzharia, back into Georgia properly and while America probably isn’t keen to see its puppet engage in a shooting war with Russia, it must’ve known something was up and if not given its blessing, at least agreed to look the other way.

From what I can make out, Georgia is clearly the aggressor here, having been largely responsible for creating much of the tension in the first place, than used this as an excuse to invade South Ossetia proper. With Russia taking the bait and coming to the Ossetians’ aid, Saakashvili now can portray his country as the victim of Russian aggression and because the west is predisposed to believe the worst about post-Putin Russia anyway, he may get away with this. On the other hand, if Russia gets too riled, he may have bitten off a lot more than he could chew.

It will be …interesting… to see how our great leaders deal with this crisis. Since they gave Kosovo the right to secede from Serbia, they can hardly deny South Ossetia the same right, can they?

Britain’s Gulag — Caroline Elkins

Published on August 3, 2008Leave a comment

Cover of Britain's Gulag

Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
475 pages including index
published in 2005

Before Tom Wolfe used “Mau Mauing” to describe the ways in which well meaning, white government officials where cheated out of welfare money through racial intimidation, Mau Mau was synonymous with a much greater terror. Mau Mau was the stuff of white colonialist nightmares: a freakish native cult of criminals and gangsters that savagely attacked innocent white settlers in their very homes, killing them and their families, mutilating their bodies. Sure, these people said they were freedom fighters, but you couldn’t take this claim seriously. Everybody who mattered knew Kenya wasn’t ripe at all for independence, that only the poison the Mau Mau spread through their pagan rites would cause the natives to question the benevolence of the British civilising mission in the country. Britain was therefore justified to use harsh measures to suppress this savagery and fortunately managed to do so, protecting the white settlers and loyal natives and crush the rebels, though it took them eight years, from 1952 to 1960 to do so.

That’s the myth of Mau Mau. The reality as Caroline Ekins describes in cite>Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya is far different.There were incidents of Mau Mau savagery, but the British and settler response to it was much greater and was systematic, not incidental. It was under the Kikuyu of central Kenya, the most populous of the ethnic groups in Kenya and the group with the greatest grievances against British rule, as much of their land had been appropriated for white settlers that the Mau Mau rebellion was the most widespread, therefore the British did to the Kikuyu roughly what the Germans did to the Polish during World War II. The nazi plan for Poland had been to destroy its population as a people by murdering its intellectual elite, remove it from all the best parts of the country and herd the rest into the wastelands to serve as uneducated slave labour, with any resistance brutally put down. What the British did to the Kikuyu in Kenya was not quite as bad, but it came awfully close. It was motivated by security concerns
rather than deliberate planning, but the endresult was still that less than fifteen years after World War II the British in Kenya had recreated much of the nazi system in dealing with the Kikuyu’s struggle for freedom.

Books read in July

Published on August 1, 2008

It’s August 1st, so time for a new list of books read. Lots of history at the start of the month, as I had just bought a pile of them in June. Also a lot of Sayers novels, as I’m in the process of rereading them in order. Little in the way of science fiction this time, as I just haven’t been in the mood
for it.

Europe: Privilege and Protest 1730-1789 — Olwen Hufton
A look at European history in the decades before the French revolution would decisively end the world of the Ancien Regime, showing how interlocking systems of privilege ruled this world, both priviledges enjoyed by the leite, but also by more humbler folk. A much more modern history of the same period as covered by Europe of the Ancien Regime 1715-1783 I read at the end of June.

The World Turned Upside Down — Christopher Hill
During the English civil war of parliament against king, there were people who wanted to go much further than parliament was willing to go, to revolutionise class relations in England. Diggers, Levelers and others for a few precious years created a glimpse of a more just, more equal society, a “World Turned Upside Down”.

Europe Between Revolutions 1815-1848 — Jacques Droz
After the French revolution had been finally repressed in 1815, a deliberate attempt was made to restore the stability of the Ancien Regime as well as the authority of the old ruling classes. Jacques Droz is excellent in making clear the stresses and contradictions between the ideal and reality that would ultimately lead to the failure of this.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club — Dorothy L. Sayers
The fourth Wimsey novel, again a novel in which the detective story is used as a lens through which to look at contemporary British society. In this case it’s the impact the First World War had on the lives of an entire generation of veterans, coming to terms with their experiences as well as their difficulties adjusting to civilian life.

The Structures of Everyday Life — Fernand Braudel
The first installment in Braudel’s three part examination of the roots of capitalism, it’s a much easier read than his earlier books on the Mediterranean I read a few years ago. This part examines how ordinary people lived, how they interacted with the wider economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when our current capitalist societies were being formed.

Strong Poison — Dorothy L. Sayers
The novel that introduces Harriet Vane to the Lord Peter Wimsey series and Wimsey falls in love with her immediately. Some may think her somewhat of a Mary Sue, and there certainly may be hints of Mary Sueness here, but in the end she’s strong enough to be more than that. In the context of reading the entire Wimsey series in order, it’s clear this is a hinge point for it, where you can see the mood of the series shift.

Five Red Herrings — Dorothy L. Sayers
Reading this for the first time I liked it, but was still unfamiliar enough with Sayers to realise how much this not just a traditional detective novel of a kind Sayers never attempts anywhere else, but a critique of them. It’s quite jarring in tone with the rest of the series, not fitting in with either the pre or the post-Strong Poison novels. In fact, it reads like Sayers meant it as an example of how not to write a detective novel, with all its fuzzing about train tables and such.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City — Rajiv Chandrasekaran
A good but limited critique of the United States occupation of Iraq, which concentrates on the blunders made by the CPA, but which doesn’t question the fundamental right of America to actually be in the country.

New Skies — Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor)
A collection of science fiction stories from the past two decades, aimed at younger readers new to science fiction. Some duds, but on the whole it does give a good oversight of what you can expect from the genre.

Last van de Oorlog — Stef Scaliola
A history thesis turned into a book, this looks at the ways in which the debate about the wars fought by the Netherlands to hold on to Indonesia in 1946-1949, in particular the warcrimes committed during it and how these have been covered up or revealed. Scaliola looks at the roles journalists, historians, politicians and the veterans themselves played in this process of remembrance.

Britain’s Gulag — Caroline Elkins
Incredibly depressing, this is the history of Britain’s attempt to quash the Kenyan struggle for independence, largely by emulating the way the nazis behaved in Poland. Pogroms, a massive concentration camp system in which almost the neitre Kikuyu population of Kenya was held as slave labour, roaming death squads and institutionalised torture of the worst kind were all part of this attempt to crush the Mau Mau rebellion and make the Kikuyu into obedient, loyal subjects of the white settler population. All this seven years after World War 2.

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side — Clive Stafford Smith
Clive Stafford Smith is one of the volunteer lawyers respresenting the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. This is his personally informed account of America’s Gulag Archipelo and its absurdities. Remarkable funny in places.

Still no justice for Jean

Published on July 30, 2008

It’s been three years since Jean Charles de Menezes was brutally murdered by the Metropolitian Police and still nobody has been punished for it. Commissioner “sir” Ian Blair is still in power, Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of the operation that murdered de Menezes was actually promoted and we still don’t know the names of the police agents that actually shot him. Sure, the Metropolitian Police as a whole was found guilty of his murder last year and had to pay some insultingly low fine for it, but as I noted then we still didn’t know the exact details of what lead to Jean’s murder. One year on, and a new report says we still don’t know:

It finds officers involved are yet to be fully debriefed about the events and says legal constraints, due to the inquest to be held in September, may be partly to blame. But it lambasts senior officers it interviewed for accepting the lack of a full explanation from those under their command.

“We were presented with a paradox during our evidence sessions: on the one hand a recognition that undertaking a comprehensive debrief is important and that lessons need to be learnt, and on the other hand a complacent acceptance that, in this case, it has not happened and is unlikely to in the future.

“The scrutiny panel also wishes to emphasise that it is our perception that the MPS has a cultural predisposition to adopt an overly defensive stance when asked to explain how it is responding to criticism and challenge. It is our view that the MPS needs to counter this tendency energetically.”

After the shooting, firearms officers wrote their accounts together, and presented their notes 36 hours after the shooting. The IPCC contrasted this with civilian witnesses who gave their accounts straight away and without consulting other witnesses. The MPA says officers did nothing wrong, but: “The practice of conferring … is open to misinterpretation.”

Thirtysix hours to get their statements straight? That’s not open to misinterpretation, that’s the police protecting its own. It will be interesting to see how that tendency plays out now Ian Blair has been accused of something even the dullest law ‘n order, trust-the-police freak will admit is a crime. It’s telling of the priorities of British politics if “improper financial dealings” were what finally got Blair sacked instead of the murder of an innocent man.