Teleologic Blog

May 06, 2008

Tibet - Ruled by China

While I realize this is an unpopular opinion, I think a careful look at Tibet's historical record shows that, on balance, the people of Tibet have benefited from being forced to be part of China. Tibet prior to the Chinese take-over in 1949 was a remarkably backward country with upwards on 30% of the adult male population living in monasteries (and contributing nothing economically to the country) and upwards of 10% of the population living as heriditory slaves of the various monasteries (because the monks did no work). Tibet had no education system (other than Buddhist teachings), they had no doctors (other than shaman), they had no industry, no roads, no telephones and this was the situation of the country in 1949!

Does their terrible backwardness justify the invasion by Mao's Communist Army? From a utilitarian perspective, I believe it does. Over the last 58 years, the Tibetan people have gained on every standard of economic and personal well-being. They are living longer, they are richer, they are (by virtue of being part of China) much more a part of the world instead of living in the isolated mountain island kingdom that Tibet once was.

Now, clearly, the Tibetan people did not ask China to conquer them and they did not ask to have their way of life radically transformed. During the "cultural revolution" a great deal of priceless ancient objects and buildings were destroyed, both in Tibet and in the rest of China. Many Tibetans fled their country (and there is a small community here in Palo Alto). Their lives were transformed but was it for the worse? I submit that a significant percentage of the population of Tibet that is alive today outside of Tibet would be dead if the Chinese had never invaded, due to the poor quality of health care and high incidence of childhood diseases and the complete unlikelihood of meaningful change occurring "naturally" in Tibet (i.e. without the Chinese invasion).

What are the odds that the Dali Lama, a man with no education other than a complete immersion in Tibetan Buddhism, would have proposed any of the changes that in fact occurred? Now days he talks about what Tibet would be like if the Chinese gave up control and let him back in the country. He talks about democracy, and good government, human rights, the need for Tibet to be transformed. All these things he learned about after he fled Tibet in 1957.

Could the Chinese treat Tibet differently? Of course. Could they be nicer? Surely. We all know the Chinese government is ham-fisted, rather closed ideologically, and somewhat paranoid. However, China is a great power in the world today (meaning that no other power really has any influence over their government's decisions). It is not going to give up control of Tibet due to street protests in Lhasa nor will it be swayed by disruptions to the (remarkably egotistical) Olympic Torch runs China is holding around the world.

The Chinese government will be (in my opinion) increasingly amenable to carefully thought out moral arguments about letting the people choose (in every part of China) how they want to live their private lives. Religion is making a slow comeback in China and over the next 50 years I strongly suspect that China will allow the people in Tibet the freedom to follow more of Tibetan Buddhism than they allowed over the previous 50 years. I also strongly suspect that street protests will not accomplish anything. I don't think Tibet will be free of Chinese control in my lifetime and as a consequence, I think the Tibetan people, both in Tibet and outside it, would be well advised to follow a policy of careful, reasoned discourse with the Chinese government. The Chinese believe in reason and in virtue, but the Tibetans will have to think long and hard about exactly what arguments they are going to make for greater autonomy because history (in the sense of who has done the most good for the most Tibetans) is not on their side

Posted by rakhier at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2006

Back in September 2006, Sistani said "to hell with it..."

According to this interesting essay by Spengler (from the Asia Times), back at the start of September 2006, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said "I will not be a political leader anymore. I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters." So, the most influential Shia leader basically threw up his hands, and gave up on trying to solve the problems of Iraq.

This explains why Muqtada al-Sadr has become a more significant figure in the last four months.

BTW: When Spengler says "Jihad is not an evil doctrine, an unfortunate afterthought, or an expression of Mohammed's aggressiveness. It is a sacrament, the Islamic cognate of the Lord's Supper."

Just because it is a sacrament to the Moslem faithful, doesn't mean it isn't evil. A sacrament in a given religion is not, ipso facto, non-evil. In this case, jihad, the conquest of the non-Moslem world, is evil.

Posted by rakhier at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2006

Demographic Troubles for Iran...

The writer Spengler (Asia Times) has another interesting article on the demographic problems of Iran. Worth the read. In the interests of keeping the information available I'm putting it in the extended entry.

Jihadis and whores
By Spengler

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.

In the interest of balanced reporting, I cite the history of Jewish prostitution before delving into the Persian example. The Jews have lived long enough to be defeated more often than any other people. After Spain expelled them in 1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the character of the Jewish prostitute figured prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in one of the earliest novels, La Lozana Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee Spanish-Jewish whores in Rome. After Russian pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying Argentina as well as Western Europe. [1] Jewish prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of the revival of the Jewish nation.

These distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's national decline, and the impulses that push the Iranian leadership toward strategic flight forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse.

One does not have to destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's United States. The Islamic world also has been defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.

That is why it is folly to approach Iran as a prospective negotiating partner, and meaningless to offer the clerical government security guarantees, for the threat to its security arises from within. Once a people has determined to extinguish itself, nothing will prevent it from doing so. There is no doubt as to the demographic data, which come from the demographers of the United Nations. But it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.

What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.

Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Half of Iranians do not speak Persian, and half of those speak Azeri. Azerbaijan's oil wealth is a giant magnet; it must attract either the largest national minority in Iran, or the military attentions of Iran itself. If a Kurdish state asserts itself out of the ruins of Iraq - a long-delayed justice for that ancient and resilient people - Iran's Kurds will be tempted to throw off the Persian yoke.

The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends. The European Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. [2] "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.

It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website reported on April 25:

Prostitution is on the rise in Iran ... Sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Moghaddam told ADNKronos International (AKI) that he believes Iran's deteriorating economy and the high unemployment rate among youths to be the main causes of this worrying phenomenon. In Iran, 28% of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are unemployed ... The age of prostitutes is increasingly younger, and girls as young as 12 are selling their bodies on Iran's streets. Overall, the number of prostitutes is also on the rise and there are an estimated 300,000 of them in Tehran alone ... Nevertheless, Gharaii Moghaddam says "the number isn't so high when compared [with] the 4 million unemployed only in Tehran and the 5 million drug addicts today in Iran".

The clerical regime vacillates between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it through "temporary marriages", an arrangement permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several "temporary marriages" per women per day.

These numbers cannot be verified, to be sure, but the spillover of Iranian prostitutes into Western Europe and the Gulf states suggests that the actual numbers must be very large indeed, so large, in fact, as to help explain the frightful rate of Iran's demographic decline. Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.

Islamism (or what George W Bush has called "Islamo-fascism") responds to the crisis of faith. As I wrote on November 8, 2005:

The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life. [3]

Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.

Notes
[1] See Edward J Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983).
[2] Research Based on Case Studies of Victims of Trafficking in Human Beings in 3 EU Member States, ie Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands (pdf file), European Commission.
[3] Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World, Part 2: The Islamist response. Asia Times Online.

Posted by rakhier at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2006

The Fall of Liberal States into Fascism...

Shanon Love from Chicago Boyz has this insightful essay on how liberal socieities fall apart

In the post-9/11 world, everyone worries that increasing government power in order to fight terrorism will lead inexorably to a loss of freedom and ultimately to a collapse of the liberal (in the classic sense) order of Western society. This concern is not a new one. Britons in the 1700s warned of "insensible loss of liberties" that would occur by the aggregate effects of the accumulation of seemingly trivial individual laws. A vast array of citizens watch with eagle eyes every new power of the state and seek to obstruct most of them. believing that the powers represent a greater threat than the enemy they seek to contain.

History, however, suggest they are looking in the wrong direction.

The history of the 20th Century paints a very clear picture of how liberal orders collapse into authoritarian ones. Contrary to popular belief, liberal orders do not gradually evolve into authoritarian ones by the accumulation of state power. Instead, liberal orders fail suddenly when they cease to provide basic physical and economic security. The functional power of the state decays until conditions reach a degree of disorder that triggers a sudden collapse into an authoritarian order. Ineffectiveness kills the liberal state, not excessive powers.

The major cases of Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan all follow this pattern. In each case, the liberal order lost the ability to provide the basic order and stability required for the economy to function, and simultaneously lost the ability to suppress the violent action of political extremists. A feedback loop arose in which the erosion of state effectiveness created disorder which empowered extremists who further sabotaged the state's ability to function. The feedback loop rather rapidly increased the power of extremists and destroyed the liberal order.

Terrorism as we know it today did not exist prior to the 1960s. Virtually everyone considered the targeting of random civilians by shadowy unaccountable organizations utterly taboo. No one had any trouble recognizing such tactics as war crimes. Any group who adopted such tactics faced political suicide if not outright extermination. Even in the '60s and '70s most major terrorist actions sought to create maximum media exposure with a minimum of civilian casualties. As the liberal West seemed unable to respond effectively to terrorism, more and more groups adopted it as a tactic and their attacks grew more violent and less precisely targeted. Now we face the very real possibility of attacks using nuclear and biological weapons which could kill millions at a stroke.

If we cannot successfully curtail the escalation of terrorism we face the collapse of our liberal order. Today we face Islamist terrorists, but if others view terrorism as successful we will face attacks from other groups as well. Terrorist attacks will undermine social and economic functions and people will increasingly view the liberal order as a failed one. 9/11 illustrates this risk in miniature. During the '90s the West proved unable to restrain Al-Qaeda and its attacks grew increasingly destructive. People worried more about increasing state power than they did about the external threat. Finally, 9/11 caused a counter-reaction and we saw a sudden expansion of state power. Had we treated terrorism more seriously and had we authorized relatively minor expansions of state power in the '90s we would not have the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance today.

Political correctness threatens to cripple the effectiveness of the liberal order. For example, we refuse to use proven techniques such as profiling airline passengers and instead use invasive and ineffective searches for any object that might contain a bomb or weapon. We consider profiling, even accurate profiling, unjust. Neither will we use data mining, keyword searching or other modern tools, preferring instead to rely on invasive techniques such as planting informants. In the end we create the illusion of programs that are both powerful and ineffective. If a future attacks succeeds on a grand scale, many may conclude, just as they did after 9/11, that the state (or worse, a successor state) needs vastly more power.

We may be sliding down a slippery slope towards authoritarianism, but I fear we do so facing up-slope and unawares. We fix our eyes uphill on the minor threat while we slide insensibly down into the maw of the beast.

As I've said before, the ultimate purpose of the state, the Prime Directive of any society is the preservation of the lives (and, by a simple extention, the property) of its citizens. All else falls before this, in the final analysis. Governments that can not (or will not) protect the lives of its citizens are in deep trouble. As Solzhenitsyn said in 1978 "No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die..."

As the previous post suggested, a refusal to face war seriously leads to more horror, not less. If your enemy is ruthless and knows you hesitate to harm the innocent, your enemy will use the innocent when fighting you.

Posted by rakhier at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2006

The War against the self-named Party of God

I fully support Israel's attempt to destroy the self-named Party of God AKA Hezbollah. Hezbollah has a stated objective to destroy the state of Israel. Hezbollah is a part of Lebanon's government and has ruled much of southern Lebanon for a decade. They have also hidden their war materials quite carefully amoung civilian infrastructurs as much as possible. To the Western idea of rules of war and keeping military supplies and soldiers seperate from civilian, Hezbollah says "We do this for good reason. We want civilian casualties."

The good news (rather, the news that could be worse) is that Hezbollah hasn't used chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against Israel. Almost certainly becuase they don't have them.

The bad news is that it is not clear how Israel's creation of a new 15-mile buffer in Lebanon will improve the situation. The limited war aims of the Israeli government seem unlikely to do much long term damage to Hezbollah. It is true a 15 mile buffer will spare Israel from bombardment by simple rockets, but what about large missiles which Hezbollah will continue to get from Iran (or Syria)?

Certainly the attacks on Israel by Hezbollah give the lie to the idea that Israel can exchange some land for peace with the Arabs. So far Gaza has been the stage for many rocket attacks and so (recently) as southern Lebanon.

This is how Melanie Phillips sees the current British media attitude towards the conflict:

But the moral crisis in Britain extends far wider and deeper than the wretched BBC and other media. The surreally distorted response by so many to Israel’s attempt to destroy the would-be purveyors of genocide raises the question of whether Britain will ever again support a just war — because it no longer knows what a just war is, and no longer has the intellectual capacity to know. This is in large measure because moral agency has disappeared altogether from the analysis. Intention, the essence of moral actions, is now tossed aside as of no significance. All that matters are the consequences of an action. This is in accordance with the prevailing amoral consensus which has negated moral agency altogether in order to remove the burden of personal responsibility. What someone intends to do is therefore held to be of no account. All that matters is the consequences of their action.

So the fact that Israel is at war solely to prevent the deaths of innocents is dismissed. All that matters is that the consequences of its actions are that Lebanese civilians are dying. The fact that the Israelis do not intend them to die is irrelevant. Those deaths are deemed to be the equivalent of the deaths caused by Hezbollah. The fact that Hezbollah deliberately sets out to murder innocent Israelis is irrelevant. Thus the only thing that matters is which side has more dead people. The fact that there are more dead Lebanese than dead Israelis settles the matter. The Israelis are in the wrong, are behaving disproportionately, are committing war crimes, are the villains of the piece. The fact that they are actually the victims of unprovoked genocidal aggression is deemed irrelevant. Thus the moral bankruptcy of Britain’s post-modern cultural desert.

I see the reason to view the current war in this moral-free-way is because there seem to be no good solutions. The Hezbollah hate Israel and are not willing to compromise. Hamas (in power in the south) also hate Israel and seem unwilling to compromise. The logical response to people who have an unwaving hatred and no willingness to negotiate is clearly violence until one side or the other is defeated and surrenders. As this level of violence will produce many civilian casualities, the average person throws up their hands and says "why can't they just live together in peace?"

Well quite clearly Israel can live peacefully with its neighbors, but Hezbollah is not interested in peace, nor is Hamas. It is possible to have no peace but no war but only if both sides refrain from using violence and that hasn't happened on the Arab side.

Posted by rakhier at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2006

Sweden is in deep, deep trouble...

This lengthy essay shows what happens when democracy gets perverted into the tyranny of moral convictions.

Read it and weep.

On the surface, Sweden is a tolerant nation and peaceful democracy. In reality, there is massive media censorship by a closed elite that is scared of having a debate about immigration. Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, and a very significant proportion of the population have for years wanted more limitations on immigration. Yet not one party represented in the Swedish Parliament is genuinely critical of the Multicultural society or the current immigration policies. The Swedish elite congratulate themselves that they have managed to keep “xenophobic” parties from gaining a foothold while the country is sinking underneath their feet.

It gets worse.

• 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents.
  
• Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six times as common today as they were a generation ago.
  
• The Jewish congregations in major cities Stockholm , Göteborg and Malmö are forced to spend up to 25 percent of their membership fees on security and hired guards.
  
• The Swedish government is looking at a proposal to reduce the size of Sweden's army to jut 5,000 men.
  

"It is an international embarrassment to Sweden as a nation that Swedes travel around the world to lecture about women’s rights, and at the same time their own young women are finding that their most basic rights, such as being able to go outside wearing normal clothes without being harassed."

Why are the people letting this happen? Has the welfare state turned the Swedes into a population of dump, helpless sheep?

Posted by rakhier at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2006

Mark Steyn explains that Europe is Dying...

You can't get a more grimly reasonable prediction about Europe than this rather long piece by Mark Steyn. In it he lays out the problems which Europe (and the West in General) faces. You can sum it up in one word: demographics.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion...

[There is] one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off...

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them...

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan...

What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?...

Personally, I didn't expect to see cultural decadence in my lifetime but that is exactly what we are seeing. A culture that will no longer defend itself is a decadent culture. Clearly in an important sense, Europe is no longer willing to defend itself. Based on demographics it is not willing to perpetuate itself. The only thing that is going to stop the sustained decline of Europe's population is increasing numbers of people who are willing to have and raise children. It turns out that the "Post-Christian hyperrationalists" aren't willing to do this at even a replacement rate. Instead we see most Western countries with fertility rates around 1.5 and lower. (Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, Germany & Austria are at 1.3, Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1). This means these countries are shrinking and they are going to keep on shrinking until something changes.

Having children is expensive. Its a burden. It means you care about the future and you want to be a part of it. When the average woman is having just one child in her life time, there is clearly a problem with the idea that you care about the future. In the long run, the world belongs to people who want to have children. Problem is: educated post-Christian-rationalist Europeans aren't in that group. Don't expect people like that to be in power in 50 years time.

Posted by rakhier at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2006

Mexico has its own rather serious rules about Immigrants...

Mexico has rather serious and far-reaching rules about legal and illegal immigrants to its country. Its outragous that their government should be demanding that the U.S. treat illegal immigrants from Mexico better than they treat legal immigrants to their own country.

In brief, the Mexican Constitution states that:

• Immigrants and foreign visitors are banned from public political discourse.
  
• Immigrants and foreigners are denied certain basic property rights.
  
• Immigrants are denied equal employment rights.
  
• Immigrants and naturalized citizens will never be treated as real Mexican citizens.
  
• Immigrants and naturalized citizens are not to be trusted in public service.
  
• Immigrants and naturalized citizens may never become members of the clergy.
  
• Private citizens may make citizens arrests of lawbreakers (i.e., illegal immigrants)
  and hand them to the authorities.
  
• Immigrants may be expelled from Mexico for any reason and without due process.

  Mexico certainly has every right to control who enters its borders, and to expel foreigners who break its laws. The Mexican constitution is designed to give the strongest protections possible to the country’s national security. Mexico’s internal immigration policy is Mexico’s business.

  However, since Mexican political leaders from the ruling party and the opposition have been demanding that the United States ignore, alter or abolish its own immigration laws, they have opened their own internal affairs to American scrutiny. The time has come to examine Mexico’s own glass house.

For the details see this PDF from the Center for Security Policy. (Hat tip to Michelle Malkin)

Posted by rakhier at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2006

Why the ICC is Happy Milosevic is Dead

A very interesting entry in the ChicagoBoyz blog on why the International Criminal Court is happy Milosevic died three days ago.

3. Evidence: Simply put, there isn't any. Of the over 2000 people initally slated to testify against Milosevic, all but 5 have refused, partially over the sovereignity dispute, and the testimony of those 5 is both weak and unreliable. There is no paper trail or any sort of documentation that links Milosevic to any of the alleged crimes. It's literally Milosevic's word against the prosecutors.

5. Legality of the Court: This is a finer point of law, but was Milosevic's main argument, which the court had no answer for. Milosevic claimed that the ICC had no legal basis to hear his (or any) international case. The judge interpreted that as a question of jurisdiction, but they are not the same thing. Jurisdiction concerns the power of the court over the defendant. I could set up the court of "plezercruz" in my back yard with Jon holding a gun as my bailiff, and, if you stumbled into my back yard, I could declare jurisdiction over you because I CAN force you to comply. But it certainly wouldn't be "legal." Jurisdiction is about power, not right.

Legality concerns whether the court actually is an agent of law in the first place. Milosevic's argument was, basically, that since the UN Security Council itself had no right or ability in law to sanction him personally, it was impossible for that same council to create a court to do that for them. Courts are agents of the sovereign, and the UN has no sovereignity by defintion. By his argument, the ICC had no more right to try him than I have of trying you in my backyard. This argument crippled the ICC. It had no answer for it.

Milosevic asked the ICC to seek a ruling from the International Court of Justice (a non-criminal UN court which settles inter-sovereign disputes and is nonbinding) as to it's own legality, but the ICC basically ignored his request, despite amicus briefs from all over the world urging them to do so, probably because the ICC likely has no legitimacy in law.

Good arguement. I personally think he died from natural causes but maybe he contributed to his own health problems?

Posted by rakhier at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)

Mexico is moving into 2nd World Status

According to some recent data:

40% of Mexican households are in the middle class.

Mexico is in the middle of a housing boom. 560,000 new homes were built last year -- a record -- and 750,000 are expected for 2006.

Posted by rakhier at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2006

Belmont Club on the Cartoon Crisis...

You can't get a better handle on the Cartoon Crisis (round-up of the info on the Cartoo war here at the Mudville Gazette)

Read Wretchard's entries here : Re-reading William Manchester's 'Alone' and here: Interesting Times.

It's possible to regard the cartoon crisis as either a strategic disaster or boon for the War on Terror. The argument for it being a disaster is the assertion that in the war against extremists it is necessary to win over the moderates. And even if winning them over is impossible one may still be capable of keeping them neutral or indifferent; but at all events to avoid raising the Muslim masses in an emotional war against the West. The Danish cartoon crisis has managed to ignite what the Bush administration hoped to avoid from the beginning: turning the War on Terror into a War with Islam. Now an incident arising from a relatively obscure newspaper in Denmark has forced a choice between the most deeply held of all Western values, freedom of speech, with the cherished strategic goal of keeping the Muslim "street" aboard in the War on Terror.

The argument for regarding the Danish cartoons as a boon is premised on the belief that President Bush's attempt to separate the War on Terror from Islam was doomed to fail anyway; that it was better to face that question now than later. According to this point of view, a view reinforced by the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, cultural and religious issues were at the root of international conflict. That mere voting -- in Palestine for example -- would never be sufficient to establish a liberal democracy for as long as the underlying culture remained hostile and aggressive to democracy's roots.

One wonders. One wonders how long the forces of the multi-cultural left are going to continue to protect and excuse the forces of intolerance, hatred, and bigotry which everyone can see in the Moslem world.

Freedom of speech? Hah. No freedom if you want to say something which someone else takes offence at. No freedom if your speech might make some other group angry. The Moslems want the freedom to tell everyone else to shut up. "Don't make us mad or we will kill you." "Don't insult Mohammed or we will kill you." "Don't practice your infidel religion openly or we will kill you."

Islamic fascism is incompatable with western ideals. Period. One of them is going to loose this war.

BTW: If anyone wants to know, there have been many depictions of Mohammed in Islamic art in history. Here are some examples. No doubt the Moslem fanatics will be out burning their own libraries to purge them of these unclean images of the prophet.

Posted by rakhier at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

The Coming War with Iran...

I should say more about the current flurry of comment about Iran and its nuclear weapon's program. But I find it very depressing. Charles Krauthammer says

Instead of being years away from the point of no return for an Iranian bomb, as we were before we allowed Europe to divert anti-proliferation efforts into transparently useless talks, Iran is probably just months away. And now, of course, Iran is run by an even more radical government, led by a president who fervently believes in the imminence of the apocalypse.

Ah, success. Having delayed two years, we now have to deal with a set of fanatical Islamists that we know in advance will not be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons by any sanctions.

Even if we could get real sanctions. Which we will not. The last remaining months before Iran goes nuclear are about to be frittered away in pursuit of this newest placebo.

First, because Russia and China will threaten to veto any serious sanctions. The Chinese in particular have secured in Iran a source of oil and gas outside the American sphere to feed their growing economy and are quite happy geopolitically to support a rogue power that -- like North Korea -- threatens, distracts and diminishes the power of China's chief global rival, the United States.

Second, because the Europeans have no appetite for real sanctions either. A travel ban on Iranian leaders would be a joke; they don't travel anyway. A cutoff of investment and high-tech trade from Europe would be a minor irritant to a country of 70 million people with the second largest oil reserves in the world and with oil at $60 a barrel. North Korea tolerated 2 million dead from starvation to get its nuclear weapons. Iran will tolerate a shortage of flat-screen TVs.

The only sanctions that might conceivably have any effect would be a boycott of Iranian oil. No one is even talking about that because no one can bear the thought of the oil shock that will instantly follow taking 4.2 million barrels a day off the market.

Indeed, the threat here works in reverse. It is the Iranians who have the world over a barrel. On Jan. 15, Iran's economy minister warned that Iran would retaliate for any sanctions by cutting its exports to ``raise oil prices beyond levels the West expects.'' A full cutoff could bring $100 oil and plunge the world into economic crisis.

Which is one of the reasons the Europeans are so mortified by the very thought of a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. The problem is not just that they are spread out and hardened, making them difficult to find and to damage sufficiently to seriously set back Iran's program.

The problem that mortifies the Europeans is what Iran might do after such an attack -- not just cut off its own oil exports but shut down the Strait of Hormuz (through which nearly half of the world's export oil passes) by firing missiles at tankers or scuttling its own vessels to make the strait impassable. It would require an international armada led by the United States to break such a blockade.

Such consequences -- serious economic disruption and possible naval action -- are something a cocooned, aging, post-historic Europe cannot even contemplate. Which is why the Europeans have had their heads in the sand for two years. And why they will spend the little time remaining -- before a group of apocalyptic madmen go nuclear -- putting their heads back in the sand. And congratulating themselves on allied solidarity as they do so in unison.

The Glittering Eye says

In my predictions for 2006 I said that Iran would obtain a nuclear weapon in 2006 and we wouldn’t do much about it. I’m sticking to that.

Over the Christmas holidays I had a conversation on the subject of Iran with my very bright brother-in-law in which I was reminded that lots of people make little distinction among things that are physically impossible (things we can’t do), things that are politically impossible (things that are hard to do), things we shouldn’t do, and things we don’t want to do. They are different and there are quite a few things we can do about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, it’s not completely clear (at least to me) that we should do any of them, and not one of them is particularly palatable.

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.net says

I personally believe that we're very likely to see at least 10 million dead in the Middle East within the next two decades, with an upper limit near 100 million. I do not believe pre-emptive action will be taken against Iran. I do, however, believe the extremist mullahs in Iran mean exactly what they say. They are steeped in an ideology that believes suicide/murder to be the holiest and most moral act possible. They have been diligent in laying strategic plans for an offensive Islamic War against Israel, America and the West. Plans backed by 25 years of action, and stated no less clearly than Mein Kampf. I believe that Ahmedinajad's talk of 12th Imam end-times and halos around his head at the UN aren't the ravings of an isolated nut, simply an unusually public (and unusually noticed) expression of beliefs that are close to mainstream within their ruling class. That class of "true believer" imams and revolutionary guard types have been quietly consolidating their control over all sectors of Iranian society over the last few months, and I do not believe anyone in the world today has both the will and the capability to stop them.

As I say, pretty depressing.

Posted by rakhier at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2006

Spawl - Its a Constant Feature of Cities

The idea that spawl (the expansion of cities out into the surrounding countryside) is a feature only of modern American cities, is false. Sorry. All cities sprawl when they aren't under threat from invasion or geographically constrained. Read the short comment by Michael Barone on Sprawl here.

It appears that all cities–at least all cities in the industrialized western world–have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal... Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax,' Bruegmann writes. 'It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy.

Posted by rakhier at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

Joe Katzman on Diplomatic Troubles with Britian...

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.net has a long essay in which he slams the U.S. Congress. Congress is putting up such road blocks to cooperation with Britian that the British are seriously talking about pulling out of our F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. This would be bad. We need to work with Britain, not put up annoying laws which make them inferior partners.

His conclusion is worth reading:

Cicero, and others here on Winds, have described the competing ideologies our world faces. Let me offer my take:
• The continental European EU model of top-down transnational socialism insulated from democracy is one. It is doomed by demographics, by the corrosive effects of its inherent unaccountability and inflexibility, and by the emptiness that lies at its heart. What is in question is what will come after, and whether its roots in the Enlightenment, Western Civilization and the dignity of man will prove strong and deep enough to overcome its failures.

• The authoritarian quasi-capitalism of China (which could morph into something either better, or far worse) and Asia is another option, one that will present a rising challenge both geopolitically and ideologically. Can material prosperity be insulated from political freedom? For how long? If so, there are many places where such a model will be attractive - and a resource-hungry colonialism that depends on its export is hardly out of the question.

• There is, of course, the Islamist alternative, which may acquire an ability to destroy that far surapsses their fallen civilization's utter inability to create. It has blended with the detrius of the 20th centry's failed totalitarian experiments, and that truth is now being observed in affiliation and action as well as in theory. In the end, what remains of Islamic civilization will either learn to love the kuffar [unbeliever] as its brother, or its own internal logic will lead to its death - at another's hands, or at its own. The Fascist death-impulse is strong, and intrinsic, but they rarely die alone. It is time for the decent people to choose, and make a stand.

• And don't forget the Anarchy alternative of warring tribes, artificial failed states, and the shadowy criminal organizations that both feed on and depend on them. for the foreseeable future they, too, will be with us. There are a number of plausible scenarios in which al-Qaeda is just the first challenge of its type, the early wave of a trend rather than the last wave of a long civilizational death-spiral.

Against all of these, there is another tradition. One of civic society organized of individuals, and characterized by accountability, flexibility, and the rule of law. It is not a tradition bound by ethnicity, geography, or past historical status - though it has many of its origins in the historical experiences of the British people and blends deeper Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins. James C. Bennett and The Anglosphere Institute call it The Anglosphere, and to the extent that Western civilization and its ideals retain a fighting chance in this world, this is where they reside most firmly.

It's a model that has proven its sustainability, and now it is learning the balance between respect for others, duty to others, and its own self-preservation. It is imperfect. It is also, I believe, the best hope for a world that represents a better future for ALL humankind.

Say it with me, Congressmen: I am a member of a civilization.

Britain is the leader that was, America, the leader that is. And if the USA plays its cards as well as Britain did, another will arise in time and become the leader that will be. Of a culture that values the creativity, exploration, freedom, and dignity of all. Perhaps one day, those values will be held by most of humankind. Perhaps one day, they will even extend beyond. I hope so with all my heart.

Hear hear! Read the whole thing...

Posted by rakhier at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Searchlight Crusade explains (again) why we are fighting this war...

Its hard to get a better summary of why we are fighting this war than that which is provided by Searchlight Crusade.

Our opponent is not constrained by, indeed, makes no pretense that they are constrained by any consideration of "civilized warfare." They have told us repeatedly, by their actions, that they do not consider civilian targets to be "off limits," indeed, their attacks on civilians, and the number of civilian casualties, greatly outnumber their attacks upon our military and our military casualties.

Furthermore, they have told us repeatedly exactly what their strategic goals are: nothing short of the annihilition of our society and way of life as it exists. This is understandable, as our civilization's great memes are in direct conflict with theirs. Evolving wisdom as opposed to revealed historical wisdom. Individual freedom of religion as opposed to enforced submission to the rule of one particular religion. However recently and imperfectly we may have come to it, respect for women and minorities of all sorts, and participation in our ruling bodies, versus subjugation of women to men, subjugation of others to the dominant religion, heavy ongoing penalties for those outside the favored class of the ruling religion...

I do not fool myself that I can live with allowing the islamic civilization to win this war. They would demand our society make changes that I could not live with. I have two daughters and a wife I love; what the requirements of the society the islamicists would impose upon them I will die before I allow them to take place.

I agree with this. The Islamic-Fascists must be defeated. Its either them, or us. Our civilization stands for everything that they hate. Their ideology is close to a complete list of the things I hate.

Posted by rakhier at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

Iran - Is War Inevitable?

This essay at the Officer's Club is strongly pesimistic on the topic of a peaceful resolution to Iran's nuclear program.

Time is running out in the Iran versus West spat. The crisis is beginning to snowball, and its number of moving parts are increasing exponentially.

Today marked a suprising announcement from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Muhammad El Baradei, as he confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran was only "months away" from developing a nuclear bomb. The announcement is surprising because the IAEA has long tried to "keep the peace" between Israel, the U.S. and Iran. El Baradei's announcement will escalate the crisis.

Also today, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (widely expected to replace Ariel Sharon as head of the Likud Party in elections next month) asserted that he would "not hesitate" to strike Iran as Prime Minister.

The point has not been lost on the Iranians, who just announced that they are purchasing sophisticated surface-to-air missiles from Russia.

Logic dictates that Israel would strike before the Iranians had a functional bomb, to assure that any Iranian retaliation would be non-nuclear. Military resolution of the crisis is looming...

His analysis is good and really if the Isralies honestly said to us "to preserve the survival of Israel we have to attack Iran's nuclear installations" we would likely go with them.

On the other side is this comment:

I am just as hawkish as the next guy, but there are certain realities that we need to accept. The United States has already decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran. The Israelis will learn to live with it, as well. As distasteful an idea as that is, it is the fact of the matter.

Macho talk of a military strike on Iran's infrastructure usually fades away once genuine logistical considerations are put on the table. And short-sighted attack proponents spend little time discussing actual consequences of such a move. Have people forgotten that the Islamic Republic's army would make Iraq their live-fire range following a Western attack?

I respect the Israelis' military competence and survival insticts. They can be squirrelly when they need to be. But even this is too much for them - and they know it. This is no Osirak and operations in Iran are not the same as operations in Lebanon. Respect Israeli wisdom along with their martial prowess.

The Iranian AND Israeli saber-rattling is purely for domestic consumption and cooler heads in DC know that. Nuclear weapons would give the mullahs the sense of security they have always lacked. The United States will not attack a nuclear state unless its own existence is at risk and the mullahs know that. Don't look now, but the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction is back in vogue!

I personally don't trust the current leadership of Iran. Theocracies are a deeply flawed system of government and Iran's is just as bad as previous theocracies. Corrupt, incompotent, paranoid, and each leader "holier than thou".

That said, Iran is geographically stronger than Iraq ever was. The Iranian population is large and capable of being unified (i.e. the majority are Persian with their own language, culture, and religion). Potentially Iran is a mid-level state, however the mis-management of the mullahs over the last 20 years has hurt them.

Iran would not be a country I'd like to attack (Syria is far weaker and more inviting). Given that a military strike against Iran is a matter of choice for us at this time, I don't think we will make that choice. Until the Iranians force us (or the Israelis) to attack them, I don't see us doing it within the next year.

Posted by rakhier at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

The Spanish Civil War - Dos Pasos and Hemmingway...

Neo-NeoCon has (as usual) a very engaging post on her Blog which centers on a New Yorker review of a book. The book in question: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch; takes up the question of what really happened in Spain during the war.

As you can tell from the Wikipedia article, it was very confusing.

Here is where the New Yorker review comes down:

Because we live in the age after the age of class war, when no idea has taken the place of socialism to carry the human aspiration for equality, the historiographical debate over the nature of the Spanish Civil War has a blind spot when it comes to the human heart of the matter. The files of the Soviet secret police have exploded forever the fiction of good versus evil in Spain...

Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies. Dos Passos, for his part, lacked the inner toughness to recover from the blow his idealism was dealt by José Robles’s murder and Hemingway’s betrayal.

Yes, you heard that right. The "good" side in the Spanish Civil war was just as "bad" as the "bad" side in the war. There was really little reason to choose between one side or the other. Both sides murdered their political enemies, both side lied about what they were doing and why. Both side made friends with the most evil governments on the planet.

What should have been done? The British and French reaction, to stay out of the fight and support neither side, actually seems like the right thing to do, given the reality of the two sides... And yet, if they had intervened, the war almost certainly would have ended sooner, the suffering might have been much reduced. It would hardly have mattered which side the British or French choose to support.

Sometimes it seems as if civil wars are necessary to resolve contradictions in society which cannot be settled through dialog. I would argue the U.S. Civil war falls into that category. Was the Spanish Civil war necessary? Was the Lebanese civil war necessary? I have no good answers to these questions.

Sometimes, there are no good choices, only bad ones. Was the choice not to interfer with the Spanish civil war the least bad choice? Or just the easiest?

Posted by rakhier at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

Sharia Law in Australia: Its not going to happen...

Here is a strong put statement by the Treasurer of Australia, Peter Costello:

If you are somebody who wants to live in an Islamic state governed by sharia law you are not going to be happy in Australia, because Australia is not an Islamic state, will never be an Islamic state and will never be governed by sharia law.

We are a secular state under our constitution, our law is made by parliament elected in democratic elections.

We do not derive our laws from religious instruction.

There are Islamic states around the world that practise sharia law and if that’s your object you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries, because it’s not going to happen.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

TigerHawk updates Steven Den Beste on the Reason for the Iraq War

TigerHawk has gone and updated Steven Den Beste's monumental analysis of the War In Iraq (which is now 2 years old). Den Beste's analysis was brilliant two years ago and re-reading it (with the additions) is still like a blast of cold air from the Sierra Nevada. Wow.

BTW: Maybe Den Beste is back!

Posted by rakhier at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2005

Riots by the Lower Class in France...

I think there are two essential texts to read to understand what is going on in France right now. First is Theodore Dalrymple's essay for City Journal Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (from the fall of 2002). (You can find it in book form here.)

An exerpt here:

The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

The other essay is by Paul Belien in Brussels Journal. Here is an exerpt

Dyab Abou Jahjah, the young and charismatic Brussels-based leader of the Arab European League, rejects assimilation and demands segregated schools and self-governing, Arab-speaking ghettos. “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation,” Jahjah says: “I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the [Westerners].”

The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.

Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a “variant of the same problem” is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory.

France, and much of Western Europe is facing a number of real problems. The people don't work very hard. They aren't having very many children. They are retiring at very early ages and they want to state (i.e. everyone else) to take care of them. The attempt to import cheap laborers from the Moslem world while still insisting that countries derived their nationality from a shared history and culture has failed.

I don't see much in the way of good solutions for France (or the Netherlands). Their economic system is going to fail but hasn't failed yet. The people who have the political power are still quite comfortable in their cozy jobs with their six weeks of paid vacation a year. Historically it is very rare to see reform before disaster. Only high quality poltical systems tackle problems before they become disasters, and high quality political systems are rare.

As a reading of Dalrymple's essay shows, the situation in France now is not very different from the situation 3 years ago. Back then cars were burned, stores were destroyed and the police didn't enforce laws in the Cites. The only difference now is the frequency of the violence, not the degree.

As Greg Djerejian points out

During a time when national unity might be demanded, with parts of the country literally in flames, the public is left to ponder the sad reality that de Villepin and Sarkozy are still going about their inter-elite squabbles and maneuverings in advance of the next presidentials.

Crisis? What crisis?

Posted by rakhier at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2005

Turkey - becoming more Islamic?

A disturbing essay about some recent events in Turkey suggest that the current party in power (AKP) is not as committed to the rule of law as one would hope.

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Istanbul — Back in June, Turks did a double-take when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan began his monthly television address. Rather than speak before the traditional backdrop of the Turkish flag and a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic, Erdogan spoke before photos of Ataturk’s mausoleum and a mosque. The message, Turks said, was clear. Ataturk was dead, but Islam lives on.

In November 2002, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party [AKP] swept to power with just over a third of votes cast but took two thirds of the seats in parliament because only one other party surpassed the mandatory ten-percent threshold to enter the national assembly.

While Erdogan describes the AKP as a mainstream, inclusive party, a bridge between East and West, his actions suggest otherwise. While Alevis — a Sufi-influenced Islamic sect — number about 15 million in Turkey, the mainstream daily Milliyet surveyed more than 300 AKP parliamentarians and found not a single Alevi deputy. Traditionally, acceptance of diverse interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence is a prime reflection of tolerance. Despite the AKP’s rhetoric, the Alevi barometer suggests a gathering storm.

Worrying signs abound in Istanbul, where East and West have long blended in harmony. While the Saudi-style (as opposed to Turkish-style) veil was once limited to outlining districts like Sultanbeyli, it is becoming increasingly common in the center of Istanbul. While secular society accepts the veil in the name of diversity, such tolerance is one-way. Turkish women say residents of more conservative districts make them feel unwelcome if they do not likewise adopt conservative Arab styles of dress.

In the past year, the AKP has begun to translate its near monopoly over most major municipalities and national government into action. Rule-of-law has been a casualty. On January 7, 2005, bulldozers and dozens of policemen showed up outside Chocolate, a trendy café adjacent to the Besiktas soccer stadium. After a Besiktas match, men and women, sons and daughters, would cross the street and relax, have a coffee or beer, and watch the boats go by on the Bosphorous. On that rainy day, the police arrived with bulldozers and told the shocked staff the municipality — run by AKP — had ordered the restaurant destroyed. Television cameras and the property owners videotaped the subsequent confrontation. The landlord’s lawyer demanded to know on what grounds the municipality would demolish the restaurant. He produced the requisite permits and demanded to see a court order. “I don’t know anything about a court order. And I don’t want to see your permits,” the AKP official said. “I have a job to do.” Minutes later, bulldozers drove through the glass atriums of the restaurant in front of shocked onlookers. The AKP did not even switch off the restaurant’s gas before the demolition. Vendetta trumped safety. Three other restaurants fell victim to the AKP’s bulldozers on the same day. The video shows waiters and cooks weeping. No restaurants meant no jobs in Turkey’s already tight job market. Had they worked at a more Islamic establishment, they need not have worried.

The January demolitions were not alone. On October 14, 2005, AKP officials demolished part of Reina, a restaurant and nightclub complex on the Bosphorous popular among affluent and Western-oriented elites. Again, the government operated without court order. The AKP-led municipality has especially targeted Istanbul districts led by other political parties. Demolitions have occurred in SiSli, Bak?rkoy, and Kadikoy.

Large firms deemed un-Islamic or pro-Western by the ruling party’s advisors have also been subject to arbitrary taxation and penalty unsupported by any financial regulation or audit. The government has targeted beer manufacturer Efes and the local Coca-Cola bottler, while promoting products manufactured by companies deemed Islamist. Turkish Airlines once served Coca-Cola on its flights. According to flight attendants, at the request of the government, it increasingly substitutes Cola Turka, a brand owned by Ulker, a confectionary company long associated with Islamist causes.

While businessmen and U.S.-Turkish trade associations describe Turkey as a prime investment opportunity, behind the scenes, long-time friends of Turkey question where Erdogan is leading Turkey. Ideology has trumped rule of law. Political arrogance is extreme. The party uses its office to shut down dissent. When Show TV broadcast this month a political advertisement for an opposition party, government officials demanded the firing of the advertising manager. The AKP’s mouthpiece, the daily Yeni Safak repeatedly brands as “enemies of Islam” or “coup-advocates” anyone who questions abuse of power. While both U.S. and Turkish diplomats say relations are back on track after disputes over Operation Iraqi Freedom, in truth there has seldom been so little confidence in Washington about a Turkish government.

Turkey has always been not only an important U.S. ally, but also a regional model of tolerance. The combination of rule of law and diversity of belief have been the bedrock of the Turkish state. Anyone enjoys full rights as a Turkish citizen so long as they uphold the law. Discrimination has been rare. The Jewish and Alevi communities have thrived. The second president of the Turkish republic was Kurdish. Istanbul is home to peoples who trace their roots across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It is ironic, then, that even as Turkey rests on the threshold of European Union membership, the AKP government is undercutting the tolerance and commitment to the rule of law that has so long made Turkey a regional model.

Posted by rakhier at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Shanghai - The New New York...

Shanghai is well on its way to becoming the most important city in the world. Certainly it ranks in the top 10 alongside London, Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, New Delhi, etc.

This article from the New York Times describes the amazing transformation occuring in China's main city.

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SHANGHAI, Oct. 16 - Move over, New York. This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City.

That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.

An apartment complex going up in Shanghai. With mortgage rates around 5 percent, energetic foreign investment, rising income and official approval, the nation is making up for years of inattention to construction.

China's real estate market is so hot that miniature cities are being created with artificial lakes, and the country's nouveau riche suddenly seem eager to put down as much as $5.3 million for a luxury apartment in skyscrapers with names like the Skyline Mansion.

For decades after the Communists took over in 1949, there was relatively little housing construction or office building under central planning. But since the early 1990's, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. And this year the building boom is at a frenzy, with the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.

"There's no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we've never seen before," said Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics. "But more importantly, it's the fastest pace of development in the past 50 or 100 years."

In Beijing, the remains of an old Taoist temple now stand in the middle of the parking lot of a new mall more than twice the size of the Mall of America. Big developers are acquiring huge swaths of prime land in the largest cities to build huge residential campuses with kitschy names like Cloudland Water Manor, Eastern Venice, Palais de Fortune and Skyway Oasis Garden.

Such developments dwarf anything being built today in the West. "I'm working on a master plan for a 46-kilometer riverfront area," said Robert Egan, who runs a landscape architecture firm in Beijing called PlaceMakers. "Scale like that doesn't happen in the U.S."

It is not uncommon to see a residential development with 10, 20 or even 30 identical high-rise apartment buildings clustered around sculpted green spaces and artificial waterways.

For increasingly wealthy Chinese, the American dream of a home and a yard has become more like a French villa with a community lake, a town square, a post office, a hospital, a cinema, a church, a hotel, a shopping mall and, of course, a power plant.

A top-of-the-line unit at one development project has a 25-acre palm-shaped artificial lake, which brochures say will feature docks with berths for private yachts.

Prices are soaring. Luxury apartments in Shanghai and Beijing with names like Home of the Tycoons now sell for prices comparable to some high-end properties in New York.

Rising prices have created a circus-like atmosphere in parts of China. Real estate fairs are mobbed, land speculation is rampant and some poor farmers dream about converting their wheat fields into the next Beverly Hills.

Indeed, prices have risen so fast over the last few years and the pace of building has been so furious here and in other large cities that the government and some leading economists have been warning about a huge property bubble in China.

The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw material to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage .

China's heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world's 10 most-polluted cities.

The construction boom is also beginning to wipe out what little is left of the old China, alarming historic preservationists. Indeed, as the world's most-populous country, at 1.3 billion, rapidly modernizes and urbanizes, producing millions of new homeowners, its social and economic fabric is being fundamentally altered.

China's housing rush is being fueled by mortgage rates around 5 percent and huge inflows of foreign capital. But the boom is also driven by landmark government housing reforms from the 1990's that for the first time since the Communist revolution of the late 1940's allowed Chinese to acquire their own homes rather than live in government housing.

As a result of this privatization, thousands of new residential projects are rising in the bustling coastal provinces. And sprawling satellite towns and luxury villa developments are sprouting in what was once farmland.

This may just a suggestion of what is ahead. China expects 75 million more farmers to move to cities over the next five years, amounting to one of the biggest mass migrations in history, according to CLSA, a brokerage house specializing in the Asia-Pacific region.

"China's demand for housing is just getting going," says Andy Rothman, a CLSA analyst in Shanghai.

The boom is most evident in the largest cities like Beijing, which will be host for the 2008 Olympics and is now draped in construction projects that are straining water and power supplies. Every big city seems to have plans for a central business district. And every big housing project seems to have a Phase 1, 2 and 3.

"Everyone wants to build a Manhattan," said Jun Xia, a principal in the Shanghai office of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. "In China, I say 'smaller, smaller' and the clients say 'wider, wider.' "

Some of the greatest financial rewards have been going to the country's new real estate tycoons - people like Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin in Beijing, and Wang Shi in Shenzhen. A property tycoon in Tianjin, Sun Hongbin, once served a two-year prison term for embezzlement but now graces the cover of magazines like China Entrepreneur.

It is not surprising that in a country where 170 metropolitan areas have more than a million people, according to government figures, everyone seems to want to be a developer. State-owned oil and steel giants, automobile companies, shipbuilders and even Communist Party newspapers are creating real estate subsidiaries.

The developer of the Fortune Residence in Shanghai, a high-end property, is a subsidiary of People's Daily, the leading newspaper of the Communist Party. And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district.

Guohua's real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.

Foreigners are also scrambling to enter the Chinese real estate market. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have invested in property. And Morgan Stanley has acquired about $700 million worth of commercial real estate this year in Shanghai. The city says it now has more than 4,000 skyscrapers - buildings 18 stories or higher - far more than New York, according to Emporis, a global real estate research group based in Germany.

Also considering investments here are Simon Property, one of the world's biggest retail developers; Triple Five Group, developer of the Mall of America; and a Japanese real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori, who is spending nearly $1 billion to build one of the world's tallest buildings - the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong district.

There is, of course, a dark side to this real estate boom. In the scramble to reallocate land and create boomtowns, China has spent much of the last decade demolishing millions of old homes and buildings and relocating tens of millions of people, many against their will.

And there are broader risks. The Chinese government is concerned that soaring prices might overheat the nation's economy and even threaten social stability. It moved this year to impose new taxes and other tough administrative measures aimed at cooling off the property sector.

Housing sales have slowed since June. But in recent months, real estate construction has picked up steam again, according to UBS. And that growth is bolstering new demand for energy and raw material. China is already the world's largest producer and consumer of steel, cement and coal.

In his report, "China Eats the World," Mr. Rothman of CLSA predicted that in coming years, "the Chinese dragon will stay very, very hungry."

Many Chinese are acting as if the housing boom will not fizzle any time soon. The economy is soaring, income is rising, Ikeas and Wal-Marts are popping up in second-tier cities and tens of millions of people are giddy about the prospects of owning their own homes, driving their own cars and adopting a more modern lifestyle.

"You know for a half-century, nothing was built in China," Mr. Jun of Gensler said. "Now there's a lot of excitement and demand for new houses, and excitement about a new way to live."

Posted by rakhier at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2005

How American High Tech Companies Support China's Government...

This essay by David Kopel (for the Rocky Mountain News) describes how Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco, and Google are all doing what the Chinese government tells them to do. Fingering people who send e-mail. Filtering out sites that talk about democracy. Sticking to the Chinese government's offical position on Taiwan. Its sickening the way these companies are complicit in the tyranny of Chinese Communist Party and how they don't care one bit that what they are doing is part and parcel to the political repression in China.

Read it in the Extended entry section...

Kopel: U.S. Web firms aid in repression by Dave Kopel
September 24, 2005

Today, many Americans get the news by reading the headlines on the Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft Web portals. Many more Americans learn about current events by using a search engine from one of these companies. In China, however, such behavior can get you thrown in prison - sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. companies that tout their supposed commitment to goodness and freedom.

Last year, assistant editors of Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) held a staff meeting about a memo sent from national Communist Party headquarters ordering journalists how to cover the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square murders, in which peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing were slaughtered by the Red Army.

Reporter Shi Tao wrote a summary of the meeting, and used his Yahoo! e-mail account to send it to the Asia Democracy Foundation, a group in New York State that supports Chinese democracy. The group published the report, anonymously, on the Web site Democracy Forum and their newsletter Democracy News.

The Chinese dictatorship asked Yahoo! to help them find the person who had sent the message. Yahoo!'s subsidiary in Hong Kong complied, and Shi Tao was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org)broke the story on Sept. 6, 2005, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang blandly replied that "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law."

Indeed, Yahoo! is so enthusiastic to comply with "local law" - however tyrannical and unjust - that in 2002 Yahoo! signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry" (www.isc.org.cn/20020417/ca102762.htm). Thus, explains Reporters Without Borders, a Chinese Web user who runs a Yahoo! search query for a controversial topic such as "Taiwan independence" will "retrieve only a limited and approved set of results." If "you try to post a message on the subject in a discussion forum, it never appears online."

Google and Microsoft have also signed the so-called "Responsibility" code. After the Chinese government blocked Google in 2002, Google modified its Chinese search engine. Google maintains on its own servers a cache of various Web content, so a Chinese surfer previously might have been able to find forbidden content by using the Google cache, rather than reading the content directly from a banned Web site.

In June 2005, Microsoft admitted that it had imposed filters on its Chinese weblogs to block "forbidden words" such as "freedom," "democracy" and "demonstration."

Reporters Without Borders also reports that much of the Chinese Internet runs through routers sold by Cisco Systems, which Cisco modified to allow searches for "subversive" key words, for visits to prohibited Web sites, and for the transmission of "dangerous" e-mail. Ethan Guttman's book Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal, supplies details. Cisco admits to having modified the routers for the Chinese government, but accepts no responsibility for how the modifications are employed.

The Rocky Mountain News mentioned the Shi Tao case in a three-paragraph item in the Sept. 7 Business Briefs, and reported more broadly on American complicity in Chinese Internet censorship in an Aug. 15 business story from Bloomberg. The Denver Post has not given the issue serious attention in 2005.

"Don't be evil" is Google's corporate motto. Microsoft defends its corporate interests on a "Freedom to Innovate Network."

But the noble phrases are contradicted by the misuse of freedom, by cooperation with evil, by assisting the technological advancement of what the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society calls "the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world."

The evil behavior of American companies in China directly endangers Americans. First of all, the dictatorship censors news about health problems, such as the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory System (SARS); suppression of the news about an epidemic significantly increases the chance that an epidemic could spread internationally.

More broadly, the censorship impedes democratic reform in China, and deprives the Chinese people of truth about their government's violations of human rights, about ethnic suppression in Tibet, and about Taiwan's right to remain independent. Thus, China suppresses popular opposition to dictatorship and to an invasion of Taiwan, which some observers believe could occur soon, and which would likely lead to war with the United States.

The architecture of repression which the American companies and their Chinese paymasters are creating could easily be exported to regimes in other nations.

A Washington Post editorial (Sept. 18) suggested that the American companies may be violating the 1989 federal law forbidding the sale of "crime control and detection" equipment to China. Unfortunately, the Commerce Department under the Bush, Clinton, and Bush presidencies has often been lax regarding Chinese exports. Perhaps only consumer and shareholder pressure can persuade the American companies to change their evil ways.

Posted by rakhier at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Why the Islamic Fascists Think They Can Win...

This small essay by Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz blog sums up why I'm trying to teach. Its a reaction to this essay on how the U.S assimilated immigrants to the U.S. in the past.

If you teach generations of people nothing but the crimes of their ancestors and the corruption of their existing institutions, which is an incomplete and hence false depiction, they are unlikely to have the cohesion and confidence needed to insist that immigrants adopt certain base-line values and practices. In ordinary times this deficiency can be "kicked down the road", since it may not seem urgent. However, it turns out to be a structural weakness when mortal threats arise.

This lack of cultural confidence become apparent when the UK, and to a lesser extent the USA, were faced by the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism. The Islamic radical looks around him in a country like England and sees people who do not respect their own way of life and are apologetic about it. The Islamic radical correctly senses weakness and has contempt for people who do not respect their own country, civilization or way of life. He sees the firmness of his own will and faith, and he discounts his material disadvantages, which he is not necessarily wrong to do. A small number of people with absolute conviction and willing to risk all for a cause can work seeming miracles. Mohammad's followers came out of nowhere and overran the world, and their descendants never forget it. Closer to our own time, they recall that a superpower invaded Afghanistan, but that mujahideen from around the Muslim Umma rallied to its defense, and the Soviet Union is no more. The soft, comfort-seeking West seems like a much easier target. And like the Soviet Union, it no longer believes in the principles that supposedly animate it. To the outside observer looking at our depraved entertainment products and listening to the self-loathing on the mainstream news, the West must seem to be an animated corpse that will crumble into a putrescent heap if it is struck hard enough.

Weakness in any sphere invites attack, and the realm of cultural confidence and identity is no exception. Morale is more important than arms, and a country that starts out believing it does not really deserve to survive is already beaten. That may be overstating the case for the UK in 2005. However, a country that tries to wage a struggle where many of its most powerful and influential people believe that the moral right resides with their enemies is far weaker than it will appear if you try to add up the tangible assets each side brings to the fray.

Fortunately, the academic and educational and media communities, while still very powerful, are weakening. They are being stripped of their quasi-monopoly positions by advancing technology. A more complete, more affirmative and truer version of Anglo-American freedom can be formulated and disseminated via the new media, the home-schooling movement, and other means. The United States and the rest of the Anglosphere are magnets for immigrants. These people have experienced alternative arrangements up-close. They are likely to see and understand what is good about these communities. All we need to do is regain this understanding ourselves, and make it available for those who want to learn. This will be a difficult challenge in the years ahead. I anticipate that it will be successful, but nothing is inevitable.

I think this is a very good analysis of the problem. We are suffering from a crisis of moral to a real degree. Academia is filled with people who think the U.S. is the source of all the evil in the world today. Most serious writers spend their books talking about how bad current Western life is. In Hollywood is it a mark of honor to be anti-U.S.

The Islamic fascists look at this in the same way that Hitler and his brown-shirt fascists looked at Wiemar Germany. From their perspective they saw the Weimar republic as corrupt, ineffective, and uncertain in their own minds about whether they deserved to rule the country.

Posted by rakhier at 01:12 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

The non-war with the Nazis in 1936

The essayist Callimachus describes a fictional war against Nazi Germany in 1936 which would have stopped Hitler in his tracks and saved the lives of tens of millions of people. He then describes how the anti-war movement of today would have completely rejected such a war (which in fact did not occur). Makes for a great read.

I'll give you my version of a necessary war: The brief 1936 conflict between Germany, alone, and France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia.

It began when Hitler, the German dictator now little remembered in history, marched 20,000 troops into the Rhineland demilitarized zone, in violation of articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles. France pulled itself out of a political crisis and united behind this threat from its old enemy. It used the treaty violation as a pretext to declare war. France's stauch allies in Czechoslovakia joined them, secure in the fastness of the Sudeten mountains, thus tying down Nazi troops in central Germany.

Britain, too, stood with its French ally, though not without some debate over France's unilateralism. The British in the end provided key air support and blockaded German North Sea ports, though relatively few British troops crossed the Channel until the fighting was almost over.

When war began, French divisions streamed into the Rhineland at several points, and the overwhelmed Germans, after brief resistance, retired across the bridges. They set up a defense on the east bank, but when the French penetrated this at several points, the German army rose up under von Blomberg and von Fristsch and overthrew Hitler and his gang. The top Nazis were executed after trial in German courts in which horrible crimes -- and even more horrible plans -- came to light, along with evidence of their vast corruption.

The German military leaders negotiated a new settlement with the Allies, revising several provisions of Versailles that no longer reflected realities on the ground. Nazi functionaries were purged from local offices, extremist parties were banned from German politics, and, with the aid of the occupying powers, after much difficulty and insurgency, Germany gradually returned to a democratic system of self-government, more robust than the failed Weimar Republic.

Why is this war "necessary?" Because it prevents World War II in Europe, the Holocaust, and the deaths of tens of millions of people, from the North Sea to the Russian steepe.

But would it stand up to the modern anti-Iraq-War activist's definitions of justified? Put him in the Wayback Machine and set the dial to 1936. Remember, he doesn't know there's going to be a World War II in Europe. Like the pacifists Orwell scorned, he probably thinks Hitler is not such a bad guy as he's made out to be in the capitalist press, and anyway the leaders of Britain and America are the real threat to world peace.
What will he say, in protesting this "unjust and unnecessary" war?

• Hitler was provoked. Just a month before the remilitarization of the Rhineland, France and Russia had signed a mutual assistance pact that was a direct threat against Germany. France had engaged in a massive build-up of fortifications right on the border of Germany, and it was denying Hitler's right to defend himself. It was the old hegemony double standard.
  
• What Hitler did was merely an internal matter. The French violated German sovereignty without just cause. Why, Hitler had never attacked France. Hitler was just moving troops in his own backyard. As G.B. Shaw said, "It was as if the British had reoccupied Portsmouth."
  
• Hiding behind the Versailles Treaty was a red herring. It had already been violated. Germany had effectively renounced it a year before by bringing back the draft, and France and Britain had done nothing but make diplomatic protests.
  
• Even worse, Britain herself had signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty with Hitler that allowed Germany to build a battle fleet that included submarines, something forbidden by Versailles. Britain itself already had participated in a violation of the treaty!
  
• There was no public support for the war in France and Britain. The people were solidly against war. They remembered the betrayed ideals of 1914, and they had indicated again and again their revulsion with the very idea of warfare.
  
• By contrast, the remilitarization was wildly popular with the German people. In the Rhineland, women tossed flowers and priests showered blessings on German troops marching under the Swastika flag.
  
• The door was still open for negotiation. Hitler, in announcing the resumption of German authority in the Rhineland, had said unequivocally, before the whole world, "we pledge that now, more than ever, we shall strive for an understanding between European peoples, especially for one with our Western neighbor nations .... We have no territorial demands to make in Europe! ... Germany will never break the peace."
  
• France did not go first to the League of Nations and attempt to use its authority to condemn the German action. Thus, its invasion lacked legitimacy. Instead of evicting the Nazis at once, France should have gone the League route and then put its military forces entirely under control of the League, to be bound by whatever the League decided to do.
  
• False pretenses! A scare that never materialized. The British were told over and over that they would be at the mercy of German bombers. Churchill asserted that the first week of the war would kill up to 40,000 Londoners [Nov. 28, 1934]. Baldwin warned the "man in the street" that, "Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through." Yet in the lightning defeat of Germany's small military, the Nazi air force never got off the ground. The mighty swarm from the skies that struck fear in so many in Britain and France existed only on paper.

The non-war in response to the Nazi occupation of the Rhineland is one of the great historical "what ifs". We now know that Germany's army was very skeptical about this move and was serious about staging a coup against Hitler if the French and British had gone to war over the move. Sadly, nothing was done and 4 years later, World War II broke out.

Posted by rakhier at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

Chris Hitchens Lays out 10 Positives for the Bush Administration

This essay by Hitchens describes the reason why he supports the neo-con view on the world. Here he lists 10 postive things that have happened since 9/11 which the Bush administration can take credit

But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

I'm optimistic about Iraq. We have made lots of mistakes (as always happens) but I think we are learning and doing better. The real advantage we have is our enemies are not supported by powerful nations that we cannot attack (unlike the North Vietnamese who were supported by both China and the U.S.S.R.).

Posted by rakhier at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2005

China's Economy is screwed up so badly... (oil prices)

This comment talks about how badly China's oil companies are being treated by the Central government of China. Essay here at Peking Duck.

The chaos created by sudden fuel shortages in Guangdong Province continues. Even yesterday, I noticed several petrol stations guarded by armed PLA troops. The signs outside warned that fuel was only available for public and government vehicles. The official reason for the shortages proffered by the central government, laughably, concerned last week’s typhoon that hit the province. Additional speculation for the shortages blamed market distortions due to price controls, alas this was only partly correct. Finally, the Hong Kong media got it right yesterday, the real reasons for the shortages have been common knowledge in Guangzhou for several weeks:

There are strong reasons to believe [Sinopec and PetroChina] have deliberately halted supplies to create seeming chaos...they want to pressure the NDRC ["National Development and Reform Commission" – the government body responsible for setting retail prices for refined oil products] for an immediate increase in oil product prices, thus cutting their considerable losses on refinery production stemming from the rising price of imported crude...the energy companies want to eventually force the NDRC to completely free oil product pricing so that they can completely dominate the market...[and] to take the opportunity to acquire the few petrol stations that they don't already run.

Still, how is it possible for two majority state-owned companies to go to war with their own government? Had any reporters bothered to visit Guangzhou and simply asked the first taxi driver they saw, they too, would have been told the following story in excruciating detail:

China's bureaucratic system makes it possible for the two giants to dare to challenge the NDRC's authority because, administratively, Sinopec and PetroChina are under the supervision of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, not the NDRC. And, in the bureaucratic hierarchy, the duo are vice ministry or ministry-level units whose top executives are appointed by the State Council or cabinet. Given the rampant turf protection and regionalism on the mainland today, it is not uncommon for government units with competing interests to run into conflicts.

That’s the ‘how’ of it, as to the ‘why’, we need only to glance at the balance sheets of the mainland’s oil refiners. Together they lost 4.19 billion yuan in the first half of this year. Compare that to a profit of 16.38 billion yuan for the same period last year (figures from the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association). No wonder there are few happy bunnies among the executives at Sinopec and PetroChina. Their crude oil refining companies have been sacrificed for the greater good of society, i.e. to bear the losses incurred in providing cheap subsidized oil. Technically, China’s domestic crude and refined oil prices are linked to the international benchmarks but, in reality, domestic price increases have only been applied to crude, domestic refined oil prices have not closely followed those of the international market and have therefore fallen way behind in the last couple of years as international prices have sky-rocketed. Indeed, US$70 per barrel is fully expected within the next week or two.

(the unlinkable) South China Morning Post columnist Eric Ng further explains:

Refiners' profitability remains at the mercy of macroeconomic policies of central government planners. With inflation control and closing the income gap between rural and urban China high on the state leaders' agenda, the soaring diesel bill of the increasingly mechanised farming community has more political value than the red ink of oil refiners' income statements.

It is hard to blame the government planners for dragging their feet on rising fuel prices, as complaints from 60 per cent of the population living in rural areas are louder than the outcry of the two domestic oil giants.

Now that the small independent refiners have shut their plants or cut production to avoid further losses, the two oil giants are asked to pick up the slack by despatching more fuel to supply-short areas. And they have to serve rising overseas demand too, as refined oil exports surged 45.5 per cent in the first seven months of this year, in contrast to a 20.9 per cent fall in imports.

It will be a tough balancing act for the government to weigh the ills of fuel smuggling, shortages and hoarding against popular discontent spawned by high fuel prices.

A couple of months ago several taxi drivers warned me about "trouble brewing" between the oil refiners and the government. "How come you're so clued-up about the machinations of the big oil refiners?" I asked.

"Because any rise in the petrol prices might mean that I can't pay the rent for my family's apartment," he replied.

Good answer, I thought.

One particularly colourful taxi driver raged at the hypocrisy of the "powers that be" in China: "The so-called principles of the big oil companies change as often as the weather," he complained. "If international crude prices crashed down to US$10 a barrel they'd slip on their red hats and become hard-nosed socialists all praising the planned socialist economy and how domestic oil prices must be maintained artificially high 'for national stability'. Now however, after making a killing for years, they complain about that same planned economy that feathered their nests for years isn't to their taste. If the government suddenly let the oil refiners raise prices how many people would suffer? The government must get its economic house in order before allowing the oil companies a free reign."

Always on the ball, Simonworld noted this
excellent point earlier:

"...as Sinopec and PetroChina have listed many of
their business operations in overseas securities
markets, they are increasingly able to cite
"shareholder interests'' as an excuse to defy
government orders.

Maybe market economics can triumph over Communism
after all? The writer is implying that Sinopec and
PetroChina are using shareholder interests as a fig
leaf to ignore orders. What if, perhaps, they actually
believe in creating shareholder value and subverting
Government orders is a means to that end?

China's economy is in a mess because the Central Government can't let go. It's on its way to free market, but not there...

Posted by rakhier at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

Cicero on the Sitzkrieg's End...

Cicero, writing at Donklephant talks about how we used to live in a world where MAD made the future very simple.

The rules of M.A.D. — all or nothing — gave us a false sense of safety during the Cold War. In an all-or-nothing world mired in a vast global political struggle, each side could attain relative normalcy. Normal life was disproportionate to the high stakes of the nuclear standoff — and we got used to it. All those layers of morality we built over that blinding apocalyptic core of immaculate annihilation could work a lot of miracles, providing that the promise of destruction was mutual, and total.

It turns out the Cold War amounted to an entire half century of having it all, creating nominal safety. The nothing part of M.A.D. — Armageddon — never came to pass. And so we did indeed create a playground of prosperity: Shopping malls, freeways, cheap global travel, and the Internet; the plethora of things, rock-n-roll, the rise of socialism and multiculturalism; baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. We got very used to that. Three generations grew up in the soil of transparent global war...

Since 9/11 we have enjoyed the seemingly endless dawn of Sitzkrieg — a period of declared emergency, but undeclared war. Our malls remain open, and gasoline flows freely. The housing market is hot. Mobilization for war is something we read about. But now there are multiple indications that terrorist nukes are either here, or coming, or in the making. Perhaps this is a long way off; perhaps it’s hearsay; perhaps it is close at hand. But if we want a meaningful definition of centrism, it should be something that can withstand the shocks of catastrophic terror. Discussing mega-terror should be on the centrist’s table, since 9/11 changed the rules. What are 9/11’s rules? That catastrophe can happen anytime, anyplace, to anyone, with no warning or apparent reason. On an unthinkable scale.

I found this first comment to the essay very thought-provoking...

I agree, and sadly the Democratic Party lags far behind the Reps in discussing the post-9/11 world. Much of the Party believes that if it can JUST get rid of Bush, dump Israel and run away from Iraq, the world will go back to 1996. Stupid but there you go. Escalation is part and parcel of the new, distributed threats we face from Islam that simply cannot accomodate Modern society. The Discovery Space shuttle was piloted by the woman commander, yet women in Saudi Arabia cannot even drive and have to live inside tents. In a shrinking world through the internet and satellite TV, jet travel this is a recipe for confrontation.

One or more of our cities WILL get nuked, if you believe Sam Nunn and www.nti.org. The question is, what will be the response? I believe the Dems must act NOW to articulate a framework for nuclear response, otherwise the reaction will be escalation on the part of the US beyond what people can conceive. “Solving” the problem by simply destroying the Muslim World, largely.

We do NOT face destruction of the entire World. Muslim extremists/terrorists can destroy three or four of our cities (likely with an Iranian, Pakistani, or North Korean set of nukes), but not the entire country. WE certainly can kill everyone in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt if we wished. No one could or would stop us if we lost, say, San Diego and Dallas. Three to nine million dead Americans through nuclear terror would certainly provoke a demand for 300-400 million dead “enemies” on the part of the American people...

We really need to talk about this now, before it happens, instead of letting the terror and anger of the moment be the time we first talk about what to do...

Posted by rakhier at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2005

Some good essays in the Carnival of History...

Here are some good essays found in the Carnival of History.

Islam, Christianity and Reform

unlike Christianity, Islam has nothing analogous to excommunication or walking away from the faith. It is simple to become a Muslim - their simple profession takes less than ten seconds, and can be stated anywhere, anytime. But at least within the eyes of Islam, it is impossible to sever yourself from it. Once you take the pledge, you are bound forever in their eyes. Christianity, at least in theory, has always had the ability to leave the faith. In Islam, it is not even a theory. Once you make the profession of faith, you are Islamic forever, and the priests will always have dominion over you. You may be a heretic or apostate, but you are never beyond the reach of the priests, who understandably consider the cessation of practice as a matter to be urgently addressed. As an outgrowth of this, once an area is Islamic, it must forever more be considered Islamic in their eyes...

Whereas christian doctrine requires a good christian to treat with all persons in good faith so long as they act in good faith, Islam does not. It has only the concept of a grudging truce between believers and non-believers, and this must only be done when there is something to be gained thereby (for instance, the Israelis do not conquer Damascus, Cairo or Baghdad within the next few weeks). In such instances, Islam permits its practitioners to make truce, and even to pretend it is permanent, but not for it actually to be permanent. As spoken by Islamic leaders from the very beginning to the religion and continuing today with every notable modern leader, the only permanent "peace" countenanced by Islam is when all the non-believers have been converted. Check out the translations provided by MEMRI for all of the evidence as to this which you should need. But the truce is exactly that - a breathing space meant to allow the Islamic soldiers time to force a more favorable situation, which they will then use to resolve the conflict in their favor. They are not giving up. Their religion does not permit them to give up.

Bad use of Nazi examples in recent arguements.

In the current (lamentable)state of popular discourse, the only identifiable evil which people are prepared to universally acknowledge as objectively true is Hitler, National Socialism, the Holocaust, etc. All other evil is subjective; i.e. a difference in "values," in the literal Weberian sense. Simply look at one cretinous facet of the debate about terrorism, summed up in the inane, but oddly credible, statement, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," as if the morality of the tactic, terrorism, is related to the aspiration of the goal, "freedom fighting."

Posted by rakhier at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2005

Mao - the great murderer...

The new book Mao - the Unknown Story by Jung Chang is reviewed in the London Times. Lots of history books will need to be re-writen based on this book. So much for the glorious leader...

Myth: The Long March was done against constant opposition. Fact: most of the way the Communists were allowed to proceed without fighting.

Myth: Mao ordered the Communist forces to fight the Japanese while the Nationalist did nothing. Fact: the Communists forces did almost nothing to fight the Japanese.

Myth: The Communists ended the use of opium in China. Fact: The Communists grew and exported vast amounts of opium to the rest of China.

Full review in the extended section.

Jung Chang not only demolishes Mao with her new book, she sets Beijing a new problem, says Jonathan Fenby

Three decades after his death the face of Mao Tse-tung still stares out over the huge expanse of Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. Though the authorities now admit that the founder of Communist China was “70% right, 30% wrong”, the man who led the greatest revolution since the second world war remains a sacrosanct figure in the world’s most heavily populated nation.

This summer, though, his reputation has been comprehensively demolished in the West by the bestselling biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang, author of the perennial bestseller Wild Swans, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday. It blames Mao for 70m deaths — far more than Hitler or Stalin.

Though travellers have brought in copies in their luggage, and it has been reviewed in newspapers in Hong Kong, the book is not on sale in mainland China. English-language newspapers in the Far East that carried articles about it were banned. On internet chat sites the censors have moved in to delete any postings critical to the man hailed as the Great Helmsman of China.

Chang’s book, published by Jonathan Cape, has attracted most attention for its portrayal of Mao as an utterly ruthless, evil figure who eliminated enemies by purges, poison and murderous traps, abandoned three wives and was driven by ambition, not ideology. But the shock might not be so great in China as in the West, given the killings and disasters the country suffered in the 20th century, the general absence of humanity among its leaders, and the personal experience so many people had of the disasters of the past half-century.

In its 70-30 valuation of Mao, Beijing is willing to admit to one major fault — the Cultural Revolution he launched in 1966 to assert his authority by unleashing the Red Guards on the political establishment, which he feared was escaping his control. But this disavowal is used for a political purpose, to argue how important it is to maintain stability and how dangerous political reform would be.

Otherwise, Mao remains untouchable in China, though it has become increasingly clear he is a figure surrounded by self-created myths that no longer hold water. There is a very good reason for this, which explains why the new biography and other recent research represent a real and present danger for the rulers of the last leading state run by a Communist party. Remove the props of Maoist history and you bring into question the foundations of the party’s legitima