Wis[s]e Words – Page 640 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

About this weblog

Published on May 28, 2002Leave a comment

Yesterday I tried to write a comprehensive and insightful overview of the weblog phenonemon and the philosophy behind my own little weblog. As you may have noticed, nothing much came from it. Instead I’ll highlight some aspects of blogging I feel particularly strong about and how they relate to this site.

To kick off, you may have noticed that I don’t have a comment system at all. This is for simple reason that while I like getting reactions to what I post, I don’t want them on my site. This is my own voice, undilutated by anything else. The proper place to comment on my posts is by either dropping me a note in e-mail at wissewords@cloggie.org or on your own site. This spot is reserved for me and me alone.

Another feature you’re not likely to see on here is the well known Amazon or Paypal begging bowl. I don’t need the money, I don’t think you should feel obligated to pay for something that’s done purely as a hobby and I don’t like to have a commercial relationship, no matter how slender between me and my readers. Frankly I dislike the omnipresent attitude that anything that’s worth doing should be done for commercial gain, that you should attempt to get some money out of everything that you do, that you are a sucker if you don’t.

If I recommend you books, I want to do it because I think you’ll like them, not because you’ll buy them at Amazon and I’ll get a kickback. If I write a controversial post, I want to do so because I feel strongly about it, not in the hope of getting more traffic and more donations.

A common weblog feature you will and in fact do see here is the list or blogroll of other weblogs honoured with a place in the left column of this site. I think it’s important to support sites I find important this way, but I won’t put just any site there.

My policy regarding the blogroll is fairly simple. If we for the moment forget the thousands of weblogs I’ve never read, there are four categories of blogs: 1) blogs I won’t read because they have nothing to offer me, are unoriginal or just plain crap, 2) blogs I read occasionally, who are tolerable but not unmissable, 3) blogs i read regularly (dailey) which are interesting and of a high quality and finally 4) blogs which are of the same standard as the third category or higher, but who also promote the style of blogging I feel should be the norm and/or agree to a high degree with my own politics and biases. The third category I bookmark, the fourth I put on the blogroll.

So what is this “style of blogging I feel should be the norm” then? Reasoned argument. It’s writing that doesn’t rely on the demonising of its opponents, doesn’t use shop worn cliches and political stopwords like “leftist“, “fascist” or “statist“. It doesn’t rely on quoting out of context, or misrepresantation of its opponents, on personal attacks. Its writers are passionate but honest. They have read and understood George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language and have absorbed its lessons.

That’s the style of writing I try to conform to and that’s the style of writing present in the list of weblogs to the left. Any blog that doesn’t adhere to this standard will not enter this list.

On said note I’ll end this entry, though I have no doubt that I will write about this again.

Dutch elections update

Published on May 28, 2002Leave a comment

Last time I wrote about the aftermath of the parliamentary elections was on May 21st high time to take another look at what’s been going on. There is also some older news I hadn’t found the opportunity yet to comment on, so let’s kill two birds with one stone.

Oops

In the previous post about the elections I wrote about several MPs from the losing parties drawing their conclusions and leaving the Tweede Kamer, but they were not the only ones. Leon Geurts of the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) was number 27 on the LPF election list, the last one elected but withdrew his application two days afterwards because he had lied about his qualifications. According to an article in Limburgs Dagblad [1]he lied about having an university level degree when in fact he still had to finish his study. He got into trouble because he couldn’t remember under which professor he did his thesis and because he insisted he got his degree in 1971 — when he was fifteen years old…

Coalition building

Everybody here knows that the only sensible coalition that could be formed after these election is the combination of LPF, VVD and CDA, as I described on 16th May. Every other possibility is either incredibly unrealistic or leads to a minority government. Yet until recently the VVD swore it would not and could not take part in the new government. Piously their current leader, ex-minister of finance Gerrit Zalm explained that the voters did not want the VVD in the government because the VVD had lost so heavily in the elections. He said that the VVD should be in the opposition this time and that others should form the government -naming a coalition of CDA,LPF and the SP (!) as a serious option.

This was of course so much bullshit. Zalm is an experienced politician and he knows he holds the aces in these coalition negotiations. His party has little to lose. As one of the losers in the elections there’s far less pressure on the VVD to be in government then there is on the CDA and LPF. In fact, four years of opposition could well be very beneficial to the VVD in rebuilding their support at the CDA and LPF’s cost. Especially since any coalition not including them would be a weak or even a minority one.

Let’s not forget the internal dynamics of CDA and LPF either. CDA is a party accustomed to governing, having been part of every coalition from World War II up till 1994, when the first VVD-PvdA-D66 cabinet was formed. After eight years of wandering aimlessly through the desert of opposition, blundering from one crisis to another they hunger for their reward. Not being in government this time would be unthinkable. This of course means the CDA has the disadvantage in any negotiations. Their own strength lies in their being the biggest party, without whom no real government is possible either.

For the LPF, their massive victory, coming from nothing to 26 seats in parliament is both a blessing and a handicap. Fast growing new parties do not tend to last long in Dutch politics. If they went in opposition they would both lose voter support (since they then cannot deliver what they promised) as well as run a very real risk of disintegrating, going under in internal squabbles. The example of the senior citizens parties, (who made a good showing in the 1994 elections, but then all but disappeared in the 1998 elections and who this time are gone for good), should be burned in their members’ brains. Even in government it will be difficult enough to survive and keep the support of the voters.

In my view, it will be difficult anyway for the LPF to make their voice heard in this coalition. Both CDA and VVD are experienced in working in coalitions; they’re also coalition partners of old. Any third party runs the risk of being mangled between them. D66 knows of this, as it happened to them in coalition with PvdA and VVD. The LPF itself can be summed up in one word: inexperienced. Their MPs are all outsiders, not trained in politics and hence could be easy prey for the CDA VVD stalwarts.

They blundered already this weekend, when several prominent LPF members called for a general amnesty for all illegal migrants in the Netherlands, whose number is estimated to be around 100,000. [1] The very next day the LPF came back on that statement. [1] Apparently they now wanted a general pardon only for those illegal immigrants who had lived in the Netherlands for longer then five years, had a job, knew the language and had a clean record. This, according to party spokeswoman Zeroual, responsible for the LPF’s migrant policies, was what the LPF had always had as their policy. It’s one example of the inexperience of the new party

It makes sense for Zalm to want to profit as much as possible from both parties weaknesses. By playing hard to get, he got a that much better negotiation position then he would have if he was too eager even if everybody knows it’s a farce. His policy is an understandable one, but somewhat reprehensible, symbolic of old style politics that should vanish in the Brave New Era of political openness the LPF was supposed to
usher in. It’s not quite there yet…

[1] Article in Dutch

Charles Horman

Published on May 28, 2002Leave a comment

Just a quick note that I’ve once again updated my booklog, adding a review of the non fiction book Missing, the story of how Charles Horman, an US citizen got caught up in the 1973 coup in Chile led by Pinochet. He was arrested, killed and very likely tortured because he accidentaly learn of the US support for and involvement with the coup. He was of course not the only one, thousands more, Chileans as well as foreigners would disappear, be tortured and eventually murdered by the brutal Pinochet regime with the full knowledge and often support of various US governments. But at least Chile was out of the hands of that dangerous Marxist, Allende.

For those of you who have wondered in all innocence why the rest of the world seems so suspicious of the US’s “War against Terror”, this is one of the reasons why.

Want more information on Chile? Read this overview of Chile under Allende’s government, take a look at the Chile documentation project, read Christopher Hitchens on Henry Kissinger.

“Let’s roll”

Published on May 23, 2002Leave a comment

September 11, 2001, a few minutes before two o’clock in the afternoon. I was idly channel surfing, having become bored with the deadly dull Kingsley Amis interview I was watching, when my eye was caught by an image on one of the local news channels. Some sort of skyscraper, one tower of which was on fire, a big hole in its side. I recognised the New York WTC and heard the newsreader say it some sort of airplane had crashed into the tower. Not conciously knowing the scale of the towers, I thought it had been some light sports plane or so which had gotten too close to the building and kept watching, switching between Dutch channels and CNN. Not that long after I started watching, while some reporter or other was talking I saw a second plane crash into the towers. Then I knew it was some sort of terrorist attack and started calling people, yelling to my brother, who was also watching upstairs in his room.

As it turned out, those would not be the only planes crashing that day: a third airplane crashed into the Pentagon and minutes later a fourth crashlanded somewhere in Pennsylvania. It’s because of that fourth airplane that I tell you this by now overly familiar story all of us experienced that day.

Because today, just minutes ago in fact, one of the dutch networks showed a reconstruction of what happened on that flight, flight 93. And once again it grabbed me by the throat, hit me deep inside.

It was the only one of the four hijacked flights not to hit its target, because of the heroism of several of its passengers and crew, because thanks to a delay of 41 minutes taking off they knew that three other planes had hit the WTC in New York and the pentagon in Washington and they knew they were going to be the fourth plane to hit an unsuspecting target, killing more innocent people. And they knew they had to stop the terrorists from doing so.

Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Sandy Bradshaw, who knows how many other passengers and crew attempted to do so. They failed in winning back control of the plane and landing safely, but they succeeded in stopping the terrorists -at the costs of their lives. In life, they had little in common other then that they were American, shared the same flight and were not afraid to do what was the right thing to do, even if it would cost them their lives. So in death they shared one more thing: they had become heroes. The US can be proud of them.

Brendan O’Neill doesn’t get it

Published on May 22, 2002

Nor does Mick Hume. They both, O’Neill in his weblog and Hume in a Times article complain about how “the left” has responded to the new revelations about the September 11 attacks. The last week or so evidence has come out that the Bush administration may have known about the upcoming attacks, or at least had enough information to know some sort of attack was imminent -why else would Ashcroft have started traveling on chartered jets?

Hume first:

Was September 11 preventable? The answer, of course, is yes. All the Bush administration had to do to
prevent those terrorist attacks was to close down the entire civil airline industry and evacuate all skyscrapers and government buildings (or, better still, empty the cities of New York and Washington). Then it could have rounded up and interned all Muslims and everybody of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ (including several million US citizens) and launched nuclear missile strikes against Afghanistan, Sudan and anywhere else that might be accused of harbouring Osama bin Laden and his agents. Job done.

Does anybody see the flaw in this? That’s right, it excludes the middle! It’s a common tactic. Juxtapose your own, entirely sensible position with something ridiculous and over the top (for bonus points imply this is what your critics think), make sure everybody knows how ridiculous it is, then declare victory. In this case Mick Hume, ignoring practical measures that could’ve been taken to prevent the attacks, instead pretends that the only choice was between doing nothing or unleashing World War III to stop the terrorists.

However, the prevention of the Millennium bombplot, because one of the bombers was stopped during a routine US border patrol suggests otherwise.

Then Brendan O’Neill jumped on hume’s bandwagon, in an article called the shame of the left:

The shame of the left. At first it was just annoying — all the endless anti-Bush carping about what Bush knew, didn’t know, should have known, and failed to do. Some left- wing websites turned their entire content over to mocking Bush and revelling in the revelations that the administration knew something prior to 11 September. It was annoying because it suggested that the left has become
incapable of developing a decent political alternative, instead jumping on the politics of chance,
rumour and conspiracy.

Then it became more than annoying. By getting bogged down in the ‘Bush knew’ fever sweeping America, the left actually granted Bush a significant moral victory and made it far harder for themselves, or anybody else, to protest against the Bush administration in the future.

[…]

With their demands that Bush do more, more, more, the anti-Bush left have effectively given him carte blanche to clamp down on civil liberties, issue panicky warnings that will heighten people’s sense of fear, and even to intervene abroad in the name of stopping attacks on the USA. The left have argued that ‘precautionary action’ should be the centre of American politics — and Bush might just be happy to take up their offer.

Here O’Neill takes Hume’s portrayal of “the left’s criticism” as fact, using it to castigate them. Again, the middle ground between doing nothing and turning the US into a police state and the rest of the world into a bomb crater is ignored:

How will the left respond when Bush and Blair and their friends in the West decide to bomb Iraq, on the dubious grounds that Saddam Hussein is building weapons of mass destruction with which to threaten the West? The ‘evidence’ for Saddam’s weapons programme may be thin bordering on non-existent, but so were the pre-11 September warnings of a hijacking in America. When Bush says he is bombing Iraq as a precautionary measure to protect America, the left won’t have a leg to stand on.

This is specious arguing at its worst. Hume and O’Neill have taken sensible criticism of the Bush administration, twisted it beyond all recognition and then used this strawman to beat up “the left” with.

I cannot help but think they have an agenda in this. O’Neill and Hume aren’t strangers to each other. Mick Hume is the editor of Spiked Online while Brendan O’Neill is its assistant editor. Spiked Online itself is the reincarnation of the old LM Magazine, previously known as Living Marxism, which disappeared after it lost a libel trial. And both magazines were involved with/part of/published by (the distincitions are unclear) the old Revolutionary Communist Party, which disappeared into its own asshole to re-emerge as the quasi libertarian-socialist Institute of Ideas [1].

Spiked touts itself as a champion of “unorthodox, enlightened thinking” but I’ve always had the nagging feeling they were just another group of establishment pundits. They often seemed to be more interested in slagging of “the left” then in doing much to shake up the established order. In this context, this latest attack on the antiwar left makes sense. It establishes once again their independence, their “freethinking” spirit, without running much risks. It impresses the punters and I bet those two articles will be quoted all over the blogosphere in the next few weeks or so.

[1] This Guardian article has some more detail about the Institute of Ideas. More about Living Marxism can be found in this Weekly Worker article.