Germany’s tax scandal: an opportunity for the left

Life under Capitalism, socialism
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Germany is currently in the grip of a tax scandal, after it became known that hundreds of wealthy Germans, including Deutsche Post CEO Klaus Zumwinkel have been using Liechtenstein as a tax haven:

It is rapidly becoming one of the largest economic scandals ever in Germany’s post-World War II history. As many as 900 wealthy Germans — many of them well-known — might be involved. Berlin may have been shorted up to 4 billion euros in taxes. And the accusatory finger is pointing increasingly at what many feel is rampant greed among of many of Germany’s top earners — and at a handful of banks and foundations in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein that help the affluent hide their assets.

With dissatisfaction at Germany’s current righwing government already high, The International Herald Tribune sees the tax scandal as a chance for the left to gain ground in local elections:

The jury is still out on how the scandal will unfold politically. Just two weeks ago, the Left Party, an amalgam of former East German and radical Westerners that sharply criticizes the unchecked power of big business, made a strong showing in two state elections. Next week, German voters in the city-state of Hamburg go to the polls, and conservatives fear a blowout if the public seizes on it as a chance to vent frustrations about tax evasion and what it seems to symbolize. Hamburg could end up as another victory for the left.

In a good leftist tradition the Left Party immediately shot itself in the foot when a representative in the parliament of Lower Saxony put forth her views on former East Germany, saying the Stasi had been necessary to protect the country from “reactionary forces” and that the Berlin Wall had been built to keep West Germans from crossing into the East. Which did use to be the official DDR explenation for these things, but it seems a bit silly to still believe this almost twenty years after the fall of the wall…

The bad news movement: more Israeli propaganda

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent, Zionism
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In comments to the previous post, Branko suggested I should google for the phrase “bad news from the Netherlands”, as that would produce some interesting results. It turns out there’s a blog with that name, and that this blog is part of a whole range of similar blogs for other countries, all of which only post about negative news from the country they’re dedicated to.

So why are they doing this? Well, it turns out this is an experiment/demonstration to show what happens if you subject people to a constant flow of nothing but bad news about a country: they start thinking badly about the country itself. And why is this done? Because the person behind this experiment, Manfred Gerstenfeld from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, believes this is what has happened to Israel:

In his words, he simply uses the same methodology as the mainstream media, publishing only the bad news in order to create a negative view of, in his case, the Netherlands, and, as a result, showing the power of the media to present almost anything in whatever light they choose: “People form their judgements on countries on the basis of nothing, just a few elements.”

And the Netherlands was just an easy target since the country has a generally positive image and he happens to be reading the newspapers already for his book.

There’s just one or two problems with this methology. Israel has problems with its image not because there’s an international media conspiracy against it, but because it’s an Apartheid state. All negative news out of Israel, with the rare exception, stems from this simple fact. Whether it’s about Israel attacking civilian targets in order to assasinate an alleged Hamas terrorist, a suicide bomber blowing up a pizza parlour, or the latest condemnation by Amnesty for how Israel treats its non-Jewish population, all stem from the same source, what is usually called the “Middle East Conflict”. Gerstenfeld’s blog with bad news from the Netherlands on the other hand is filled with a hodgepodge of news items you can find about most countries: reports about a failing school system, errors in hospital tests, a rise in xenophobia, etc. There’s no connection between the items, other than that they’re about Holland. And for those who might think that Gerstenfeld might have a point with regards as to how the “Middle East Conflict” is reported about: try reading the Israeli press itself sometimes.

This experiment is therefore nothing but propaganda designed to perpetuated the myth that Israel is treated hostile by the Dutch (and other western) press. The sad thing is that it has been partially succesful in this, as several newspapers and newsshows have reported on this experiment without challenging the basic assumptions behind it. Imagine Gerstenfeld doing the same experiment with Iraq and you see how absurd it is. Israel has a bad image because it does bad things, and Gerstenfeld is like the guy who murdered his parents and asked the judge at his trial for clemency, as he was sadly an orphan.

It’s official: Holland is Islamophobic

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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So says the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance:

Geert Wilders

The new report from the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said Islamophobia in the Netherlands has ‘increased dramatically’ since 2000. ‘The criminal justice system, and notably the police, still needs to enhance its role in monitoring and countering racially-motivated offences,’ the report said.

‘The tone of Dutch political and public debate around integration and other issues relevant to ethnic minorities has experienced ‘dramatic deterioration,’ the report say and goes on to warn of a ‘worrying polarisation between majority and minority communities’. It criticises the official approach to integration for focusing too much on the ‘perceived deficiencies’ among the minority population.

The Netherlands Muslims – around 6% of the population – face ‘stereotyping, stigmatising, outright racist political discourse and biased media portrayal,’ the report continues. Anti-semitism is also on the rise.

The report calls on the Dutch authorities to take the lead in promoting a public debate on integration that avoids ‘polarisation, antagonism, and hostility’. It calls on ministers to take steps to counter the use of ‘racist and xenophobic discourse in politics’ and review a number of policies which it says result in direct and indirect racial discrimination.

All of which, to be honest, isn’t news to me or anybody else who has paid attention to what has happened here in the last decade or so. If you’ve read this blog for a while you have seen me write about this before. That the report also singles out Geert Wilders is not a surprise either. Wilders entire career has been built on xenophobia. Which of course also means that there is an audience for his xenophobia, which is worrying.

More worrying is the general acceptance of Wilders and his followers. We’ve had periods of xenophobia before, most recently in the mid eighties when the economy had tanked and the extreme rightwing Centrumparty managed to get some seats in parliament by blaming guest workers. What’s different is that polticians and the media then formed a solid block against the racists, not giving them the “oxygen of publicity”, not working or even engaging with them in Parliament, etc. This time, not so much. Wilders gets a lot of publicity for his views and is largely treated as if what he says is or may be wrong, but within the boundaries of acceptable debate, with his more extreme remarks dismissed as publicity stunts.

I’ve long found this trend worrying, as it has moved the boundaries of what’s acceptable closer and closer to naked racism and xenophobia and has helped create a climate of intolerance in the Netherlands against Muslims and other “foreigners”, where just being a Muslim is reason for fear and suspicion. The attempts by the government to come to a burka ban are a symptom of this disease.

Hopefully this report will serve as something of a wakeup call for those politicians and journalists who have been content to disapprove of, but not oppose Wilders. If not, I fear we are heading for some of what happened in France two years ago…

Steve Gerber

Comix
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Steve Gerber died yesterday.

Back when I first started reading American comics (some twenty years ago now), buying them secondhand at dodgy market stalls, what I was especially looking for were back issues of The Defenders. For some reason or other the Dutch edition of that had started translating the series from issue eighty something, only to switch back to the low twenties a few issues onward, probably because the Dutch publisher had gotten a stack of back issues from Marvel. It was this that introduced me to Steve Gerber and it was strange, not at all like the slick superheroics I was used to from Marvel. A psychotic elf shooting random people? Supervillians joining a self improvement group? The Headmen, neverdowell evil scientists who try to transplant their brains into superheroes? Now that was just weird.

It was only later that I learned who Steve Gerber really was, one of the first proper writers, not just somebody who wanted to write good superhero stories, but somebody who used the trappings of the genre to tell entirely different stories. He was somebody who, had he not worked in comics but been a “real writer”, would have an obituary in the New York Times. I’m not kidding. Greg Hatcher said it best, two years ago, when he described the essential appeal of Gerber’s seventies work:

These stories all hit a theme that Steve Gerber comes back to again and again… the alienated loner that perceives the world more truly than the people around him can, but because of that becomes more vulnerable and endures more pain. I read a review somewhere of Hard Time that was busting Steve Gerber for using that theme, and I remember thinking at the time, Jeez, if you feel that way, why are you bothering to read a Steve Gerber book at all? Look at Howard the Duck and Man-Thing and Defenders and Omega… they’re all outsiders looking in. That’s what Steve Gerber does best. I think it was Stephen King that said that if you’re a lit’ry sort of writer you can get away with exploring the same theme from different angles, but if you do it in a pop culture outlet people will assume your head’s so empty it has an echo.

A very seventies theme of course, fitting the times, but also an universal theme. Of course it can lead to mopery and general emo wankness, but Gerber had the saving grace of being funny. The Defenders, much of Man-Thing and especially Howard the Duck were incredibly absurd, and Gerber could make you laugh at all this absurdity, but without mocking the characters. He showed how much you could do in a genre that had looked stale. As Mike Sterling puts it:

Howard sprang forth from Gerber’s other major Marvel work, Man-Thing, which at first glance appeared to be a more straightforward horror title, but still had its moments of satire and offbeat humor. In fact, through most of Gerber’s work, there’s a feeling of Gerber taking things about as seriously as they needed to be…he can turn on the horror or the drama when he needs to, but just as quickly he can hit you with a scene that has a feeling of “can you believe this? I’m writing it, and I can barely believe it” — but doing it in such a way that you didn’t feel
like the characters or situation were being mocked.

And more, he was one of the first champions of creators rights, the very simple idea that really, the people who create the characters, who write the stories and draw the adventures should be in control of them, that cartoonists aren’t interchangeable cogs, that it matters who writes the story. Nothing new in book publishing, but radical in the insular, slightly dodgy world of comics. That there are publishers like Vertigo today that operate largely as a book publisher would, focusing on creators not characters is partially due to Gerber’s struggles to keep control of his characters like Howard the Duck.

Steve Gerber did his best work at a time when comics where as low as you could get on the cultural totem pole, less respectable even than porn, so a lot of his work just disappeared once it was published, not getting the attention it deserved. It’s only recently that it has started to be reprinted and collected again. In some ways he could’ve done so much more in today’s comics industry, but you have to remember that it was in no small part to the battles he fought twenty-thirty years ago that has made it possible.


Thank you, Steve.

On bookshelves

"Literature", Art & Criticism
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It’s that perennial middle class literary question: should your bookshelves accurately reflect what you read, or should it have the books read by the kind of person you would like to, as Ezra suggests:

Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read — those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject.

I can sort of understand this, in that there are always books you want to have read but are less keen on to be actually reading, but buying books with no real intention of ever reading them? That’s wankerish, only one step removed from something like George Bush’s reading list, where you know the person and see the books they supposedly read and think “naaah”. These tricks never work, because when people pull them they always get the same sort of Generically Erudite Library , with the Joyces and the Nabakovs and the 900 page Charo biographies and all that, but without the real sort of esoteric interests a proper bibliophile develops.