Wis[s]e Words

Congratulations North Korea

Published on May 25, 20096 Comments

mushroom cloud

…For showing your nuclear arsenal is as powerful as America’s was in 1945… That’ll show them.

But seriously, is it too much to ask that for once, the news coverage of these events does not follow the well worn, wrong paths in which everything is looked at through the point of view of “the west”, anything North Korea does is dangerous and irrational, a threat to world peace and only lip service is paid to the context in which North Korea has decided on building a nuclear arsenal, that this is in fact a rational strategy on their part? And would it kill journalists to every now and then mention the greatest “rogue” nuclear power in the world, Israel, which still does not admit to owning nuclear weapons but is thought to have an arsenal of in the hundreds? I won’t mind if nobody mentions the inconsiderate fact that the sole nuclear power to have ever used the weapon in anger is that bastion of liberty and justice, America itself and that it used the atom bomb largely as a warning against the USSR?

North Korea, even though it is an opressive dictatorship, has valid reasons to arm itself with the sole weapons to command the respect of the world’s sole superpower. It can’t really trust its supposed superiority in conventional weapons (and in any case, they still think the Mig-21 is a frontline fighter and upgunned T-55s a match for modern tanks) to deter South Korea and the US from attacking it, but the prospect of a nuclear battlefield still scares America enough to deter it from doing anything drastic. Again and again in the last two decades the US has shown North Korea it will only take it seriously if it rattles the nuclear sabre. Can we blame it then for doing so?

Bos want smaller, safer Dutch banks

Published on May 25, 2009

Fucking rich coming from the man who allowed the takeover of ABN-Amro which laid bare the weaknesses of the overextended Dutch banking system. When he had the opportunity to do something to stop the rot, he declined to take action. What’s more, even now he may say he wants smaller banks, but the takeover of ABN-Amro by Fortis is still going ahead. Surely that would be the first thing to stop if he really meant what he said?

The problem with Wouter Bos is that he’s a product of the same system he supposedly wants to reform, a minister for a social democratic party who before he went into politics fulltime worked for decades at Shell in various management and consultant positions. Of course any social democratic principles his party adhered to had been long ago been abandonded under the previous party leaders, most notably Wim Kok, who had urged his members to “let go of the social democratic plumage” (prompting the Socialist Party to later remark that “it can get cold without feathers”). Other than some platitudes about “equal opportunities” and the like the PvdA has long since resigned itself to the status quo and in time has become just as much a supporter of it as the liberal or christian-democratic parties. It is therefore not suprising that despite their presence in the current Dutch government, it is ill-suited to handle the crisis. there has been some tough talka bout bankers taking their responsibilities and anger about their bonuses, but any real measures to radically change the system are not even considered. It’s subsidies for banks, some halfhearted measures to alleviate the pain in other sectors and budget cuts or tax hikes for everything else.

Chipping away at Stone

Published on May 23, 2009

It’s downright fitting that it’s Commentary Magazine (or what’s left of it), that Cold War CIA warhorse, that’s started the latest round of retroactive redbaiting, with the claim that I. F. Stone was a Soviet agent. Despite the end of the Cold War being almost twenty years behind us, redbaiting s still alive and well in America, with claims like this still having the potential to ruin reputations.

Few people my age or younger will have more than a vague idea who I. F. Stone was, but many of the people he annoyed in his lifetime are still around and more than willing to take their revenge posthumously. As you can see from the Wikipedia article linked above, already the allegations of espionage take up most of the space. Just another little rewrite of history in which an independent leftwing critic of America is turned into a two dimensional Soviet stooge. It may not look important in the great scheme of things, but its all part of the continuing marginalisation of critics of American foreign policy. Smear the man and you smear his reporting; obviously you can’t trust what a commie spy wrote about America’s motives for fighting the Korean War. Stone’s reputation needs to be defended, and I’m glad to see Brad Delong and other liberals do so, even if their defence can be as wrong as the original redbaiting, as it operates on the same flawed assumptions that anybody who was supportive of the USSR was ignorant, wrong or a traitor, but that there are special circumstances that can excuse this support.

Now I called Commentary a CIA warhorse because while it may be a liberal or even leftist magazine, many of its more influential writers and editors (e.g. Irving Kristol and Sidney Hook) have been deeply involved in the CIA’s Cold War Kulturkamp, as documented in Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper and elsewhere. As part of the socalled “anticommunist left” Commentary was as much an agent of the CIA as Stone is accused of being of the KGB.

The real crime I. F. Stone committed therefore was not that he may or may not have supported a brutal and ruthless regime that oppressed millions of its citizens and brutally subjugated its neighbours, but that he may have supported the wrong one. It doesn’t matter whether or not Stone was a supporter of the USSR, as his influence on that country was nihil: what mattered was that he was critical of his own country and its rulers.

Socalled respectable journalists meanwhile can always be found cheerleading the latest US invasion of a third world country, the latest dictator installed by the CIA to “fight communism” (or “terrorism”) or the latest interference in a supposedly sovereign country’s elections for the sake of “democracy”, happily excusing murder, rape, torture or worse, but since they’re on the right side they’re rarely held to account. A journalist like Judith Miller could lie and lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for years before she finally “retired”.

For anybody who doesn’t operate on the principle of “my country, right or wrong”, it’s obvious that the behaviour of Miller and generations of journalists like her, enabling and supporting American imperialism is much worse than what somebody like Stone could ever do. We shouldn’t excuse Stone for his allegiance as pillorate his critics for supporting a country that has been and still is a far greater menace.

Blame Wouter Bos

Published on May 22, 2009

John Lanchester has written yet another brilliant article on the financial crisis for the London Review of Books. Much of the article deals with the RBS and how its takeover of ABN Amro led to disaster:

The consortium’s plan was to split ABN Amro up, with RBS getting the Anglo-American and wholesale parts of the business, Fortis the Belgo-Dutch, and Banco Santander the South American. It wasn’t in principle a ridiculous scheme, but the problem was the price. Most of what has been written about the financial crisis is pure hindsight, but not this: many observers thought that the winning consortium had overpaid. The consortium won their takeover on 10 October 2007; by April 2008, RBS was going to the markets to raise more capital, to cover losses from the deal; by July 2008, Fortis had lost two-thirds of its value and its CEO, Jean-Paul Votron, had resigned; on 28 September, Fortis was part-nationalised by the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourgeois governments. We’ve already read what happened to RBS. So within months, the ABN Amro takeover destroyed RBS and Fortis and what was left of ABN Amro itself. Along with the AOL-Time Warner merger and the Daimler-Chrysler merger, the ABN Amro takeover is one of the biggest flops in corporate history.

There’s one person who could’ve avoided this mess, but didn’t, whose role in the whole debacle has never been fully acknowledged, not by the media and certainly not by him: the Dutch finance minister, Wouter Bos. Had he vetoed the takeover, or the earlier Barclays bid, ABN Amro, Fortis, Barclays and RBS would’ve been in much better shape now, perhaps not have needed the Dutch and British state to bail them out.

Hazel sodding Blears

Published on May 22, 2009

Owen Hatherley shares his fascination of Hazel Blears with us:

Partly because of a history that would surely once have assured her of a place on a Smiths single sleeve, Blears, like Blunkett, Prescott, Caroline Flint, fascinates me in a way other New Labour politicians do not. James Purnell, Jacqui Smith, Blair himself, these are apparatchiks who would fit into any party at any time, but who historical happenstance, youthful leftism and ruthless careerism elevated to positions in what was apparently the workers’ party. Blears and her ilk are different, and more symptomatically interesting – the New Labour proleface contingent, constantly ‘flexing their roots’ (copyright Julie Burchill). I know people in the Labour Party like Blears, old friends of my Mum’s who junked every serious element of their politics, from the egalitarianism to the opposition to imperialism to the respect for something as basic and elementary as habeas corpus, but who retain their implacable hatred of the bourgeoisie, or at least the liberal segment of it; those who supported tuition fees and the abolition of student grants, because they didn’t see why people like their parents should have to pay taxes for the children of the middle classes to go to college (conveniently forgetting their own entirely free education and its place in their self-advancement). Perfectly prepared to defend alleged working class racism, if not working class socialism as anything other than a sentimental memory, she is a Burchill column made flesh, minus the wit or the excuse of coke-induced brain damage (presumably, although we can speculate about what made her Blair’s ‘ray of sunshine’).

My Prog Gold coblogger Palau hates Hazel Blears with the passion of a thousand burning suns, as she has firsthand experiences with so many of these New Labour mock-prole women desperate to climb the greasy pole of local party politics, with no other goal than their own advancement. She have seen what that attitude does to local politics, with desperately needed unemployement projects being destroyed because they were set up without them in control or being abused to provide “jobs for the sisters”. But she also knows how seductive it is to go along with the game and how quickly doors open if you have the right, vaguely working class background as long as you are properly middleclass yourself and you play along. Seeing Hazel Blears for her is like looking in a distorted mirror, somebody she could’ve been if she was slightly less self-aware and events had fallen out somewhat different.

The Hazel Blears approach to politicies, that is, the idea that “my dodgy policies and ideology are justified by my proletarian background” is of course not unique to her or even the Labour party. Having spent much of the current decade being involved in socialist politics and in discussions with socialists of all stripes, I’ve seen this idea coming up over and over again. If you can’t win a discussion, just accuse your opponent of being too bourgeois or too studenty and not “in touch” with the working classes; excuse your own casual racism/sexism with coming from a prole background, and so on, undsoweiter. It’s as corrosive an attitude there as it is with Blears.

And I may be mistaken but I think it’s largely a generational thing. In my experience it tend to be baby boomers and the generation just after them, those who got into politics from the late sixties up to the early eighties, who’ve largely drifted rightward over time but still have a sort of tribal nostalgia for their leftist/working class background. In the media Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch are classic examples of the type; Harry’s Place is thick with them.