Blood & Treasure

dial M...

My review of Watson and Hickman's Dial M for Murdoch is now up at the National. It was written a little before the most recent twists in the saga, but enjoy anyway.

el jefe Roy

A few weeks back I was stuck in a barber's chair while the perennial local UKIP candidate for the council told me at length why Angela Merkel was a Secret Communist, a fact that had evaded the German counterintelligence service but didn't get by him, oh no. He was there again today so I got revenge by baiting him with a little mild republicanism. Then I struck gold:

"You know what'll happen if we get rid of the monarchy don't you? It'll be President Roy Hattersley!"

Hattersley Klaxon! BUt you can see his point. Hattersley's got the appropriate retired statesman as amiable old doofus persona, and he's written a couple of books so we know he won't be wiping his nose on his sleeve while opening Parliament or meeting his equivalent Grand Whimwhams.

But why is it always Roy Hattersley in these arguments; and why does he feature in them as a kind of he-witch, anxious to hurry the country to final dissolution amidst the flames and the cavorting of council funded lesbians? The 'kippers, like the decents, seem to have a collective demonology in which minor or absurdly inappropriate figures loom ridculously large, weilding ptchforks. Maybe in this case it goes back to the Common Market referendum back in '75.

Anyway, it all gave me a warm feeling for the ancient teddybear of the Labour Right, and I have an urge to obtain a large flag bearing his portrait, against an appropriately scarlet background, perhaps also with some cavorting lesbians in there somewhere, to fly on weekends such as these.

magnificent charlatan

He never quite got America surrounded, but he did his best. Let's make room for the sixteenth anniversary of the death of one of the seminal chancers of the modern age:

At 12:44am on the 31st of May 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary sat bolt upright in bed startling the small group of friends and family who had gathered to keep him company during his final days. He had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer the previous year and it had finally run its course. “Why not?” he asked those keeping vigil. Again, louder, “Why not?” He repeated the question a third time. “Why not?” Then, lying back down, Dr. Leary whispered his final word… “beautiful”… and slipped into death. He was 75 years old.

The late Hitchens major used to go on tour with Jesus people in a manner reminiscent of the old Dr Tim/G Gordon Liddy vaudeville setup. And reality TV, with its origins among Dutch hippy breadheads, always struck me as one of his children, too. Though he would have called it Encounter TV, no doubt.

unpack the weaselometers

Today’s performance by Hunt at Leveson shows why we measure our pols on weaselometers these days. None of them are doing very well:

While around four in ten Britons trust all three leaders, around half do not trust Nick Clegg (51%) and David Cameron (54%) while 46% say Ed Miliband is not trustworthy. This represents David Cameron’s highest “not trustworthy” rating Ipsos MORI has recorded (though his lowest nettrustworthy rating was in August 2007). The current Prime Minister’s trustworthy ratings are very similar to those of Gordon Brown’s in his last month in Number 10, though nowhere near as bad as at the end of Tony Blair’s premiership.  

Miliband: don’t think he’d come round at night and steal your garden gnomes, but you wouldn’t lend him any money.

Cameron. Would steal your garden gnomes and then break them in an act of purple-faced spite.

Clegg. Would steal your garden gnomes, then come round your house pretending to be a concerned neighbour and nick your wallet.

Brown: would steal your children and replace them with garden gnomes.

Blair: a sort of black hole of distrust, where distrust flips over into its opposite in another part if the multiverse and you pay him to take your children away and carry the garden gnomes to the van for him while he lectures you about rights and responsibilities.

Hunt: A kind of obsidian cinder of bad faith. He is tolerated because he is perceived not so much as a human being but as physical evidence of original sin.

not doing invasions seen as popular

There’s an interesting piece here by Johan Lagerkvist on China’s possibly evolving position on foreign intervention:

Some trends are apparent. For China to accept intervention inside the territory of another state, the issue must go through the UN Security Council, and regional organizations must favor the actions.

Moreover, one or several of the following four questions must be answered in the affirmative: First, is there significant risk of military intervention in an area of Chinese economic influence? Second, are the level of Chinese investments and prospects of resource extraction high or promising? Third, are Chinese lives in harm's way? Fourth, will China's image among the community of states and in the court of worldwide public opinion be negatively affected?

In the case of Libya, China accepted intervention due its own commercial interests, the risks posed to Chinese lives, a negative fallout in world opinion and growing pressure from the West and the Arab League.

In Syria only the last and arguably least important factor for China - an image problem – exists.

I’m not sure it does. This polling back in March indicates substantial majorities against taking any military role at all in the Syrian civil war. Obviously, that was before the Houla massacre. But the poll also showed that the Libyan war was not exactly overwhelmingly endorsed by the US public either. And not getting involved in the Iraq or Afghan conflicts hardly presented China with an image problem.

Given the kind of publicity China usually gets for the way it behaves at home, a consistent stance against international intervention is probably one of its best global policy advertisements, at least in a distinctly war-weary West. After all, if the Pew polling still holds good, Beijing is doing a better job of reflecting the will of the American people than Washington.  A reputation as at best a reluctant militarist might  also come in handy if any gunplay actually breaks out in the South China Sea.

Obviously, any credit China gets for its international stance has to be balanced by our knowledge of Beijing’s internal behaviour. So you have a sort of perceptions trade off between all the people who know about the Chen Guangcheng affair on the one hand, and all those who are vaguely aware that China doesn’t do invasions on the other.

But, by and large, not doing invasions does show up in the credit half of the ledger. We don't think of China abroad as armed. We don’t know what Hu Jintao does in the office all day. But we can be pretty sure that he doesn’t sit brooding over kill lists brought to him by his intelligence people, before dispatching flying killer robots to do the necessary. And if he did, he wouldn’t have his people tell the New York Times all about it. That comparison works to China’s advantage.

papa doc and mama liz

From Alex von Tunzelmann’s excellent Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

The State Department was also excercised by the arrival in Port-au-Prince of an Egyptian businessman, Mohammed Fayed, and his apparent acceptance into the Duvalier family circle. A new Fayed-Duvalier oil refinery was announced. There were persistent rumours that Fayed was to marry Duvalier’s favourite daughter, Marie-Denise. ‘While Fayed may say this to all the girls, there remains nevertheless the possibility that he is in earnest re his alleged plans for investment in Haiti and is seeking to strengthen his ties with Duvalier by domestic marriage’ reported Timmons…

 …Fayed’s sojourn in Haiti lasted six months and ended in comedy. He sent a pot of’crude oil’ provided to him by his Haitian contacts to London for analysis. It turned out to be low grade molasses. Fayed’s Hiaitian partners had dug it out of an abandoned French-era sugar plantation. Disgraced, Fayed fled Haiti, while Papa Doc threatened vaguely to have him murdered. Eventually, he ended up in London where, under the name Mohamed al-Fayed, he would achieve considerable fame during his ownership of the department store Harrods.

If Mohammed and Marie-Denise had made a go of it and if a fatal accident hadn’t wrenched Lady Di from the arms of Dodi, the houses of Papa Doc and Mama Liz could have been brought together by marriage. Oh such might have beens…

I recommend the von Tunzelmann, book, by the way: droll without being facetious.

 

Sun reporters abase themselves before statue of Kim il-Sung

Over here. They claim that visitors have to bow before Kim, but I don't believe that's true. They did it for the story. They did it for the good of the organisation. They remain loyal. They didn't 'sneak in' either. They just lied to the tour company, like lots of other punters.

the further adventures of hooligan sparrow

You may remember ‘hooligan sparrow’, Ye Haiyan, the activist I blogged about last January, who spent a day as an unpaid prostitute – not only as part of her advocacy for pound-a-session sex workers but also to highlight the plight of migrant labourers, while doing her best to relieve it in some measure.

Last Friday she was attacked in her office by eight men, who she says were sent by local officials. Here’s what happened next:

Following a heated argument, one of them brandished a knife. The glimmer of the knife stunned me for a moment -- I could not believe they had actually brought a knife with them. Instinctively, I picked up a chair and threw it at him. Other people also distracted him from hacking me with the knife. When I yelled at Wen Dao [Editor's note: A young student visiting the office] to snap a few pictures, the men immediately prepared to flee, but the man wearing a hat lounged towards me.

I yelled at them, "Fuck you! You want to hack me? You want to kill me? Come give it all you've got!" The hat man turned around and threw a bicycle at me. I threw a chair back.

Ms  Ye says modestly that part of the reason she knew they were from the government was because real gangsters wouldn’t have retreated when she resisted. Even so, ovaries of titanium there. ‘Only eight of you? Chew on some fuckin' chair, bastards!’

Some people are wasted on peaceful protest. Ms Ye should gather a band of trusty comrades, find some hills and take to them. You may say that this would be a dangerous and irresponsible thing to do. I reckon she’d be president for life in ten years, and some fellow in the countryside would say to his friends ‘I knew her before she was famous.’ And there would be a dreamy smile on his face...

MGI watch: Rui'an

There's a common scam in China whereby migrants are hired for construction work, with payment due after the job is completed. When people turn up for their money they are confronted by goons hired by the boss, who hand out exemplary beatings to the persistent. This time, it didn't work:

“Around 1,000 migrant workers rushed the government office building, turning over an iron fence gate and damaging over a dozen cars with stones and bricks,” Xinhua’s English language report said.

“Local government sources said the protest was sparked by the death of 19-year-old migrant worker Yang Zhi, allegedly killed by his employer Xu Qiyin during a dispute over salary,” it said.

The protest ended just before midday after the family of the dead man was given 300,000 yuan ($47,300) in compensation, Xinhua said.

A couple of points. It would be nice to think of class  - or at least cross-regional - solidarity coming into play here, but its more likely that boss Xu made the elementary mistake of hiring too many people from the same place. Secondly, note that the lads didnlt try and get Boss Xu direct. Instead, they stromed the local government offices and so leveraged the power of the state. In other words, they acted politically.

my first nightmare

It's hard to tell quite what's wrong with this picture at first. Then you notice the little girl is holding a dead mouse. The baby is vomiting.

I'm actually fairly impressed with this collection of French illustrated children's books: it makes a change from all the wishy-washy-Shirley-Hughesy stuff I remember from our kid's learning to read with the aid of pictures stage. And yes, there is a book called 'my first nightmare' in there.

way it is tonight

Some long, grim reads that recently popped up in the twitter feed:

A roundtable on Tibetan self-immolation, which, after a hiatus, has now reached Lhasa from Tibetan parts of China.

Children of jihad, agency and the state of counter terrorism.

In re Syria: How mass atrocities end: an evidence based counter-narrative.

The information in this article has been available for a while in a piecemeal sort of way. Here it is presented as part of Obama’s election package: the wise, careful, judicious man who signs the death-from-the-sky warrants. The thing is, it’s all in the open now: the old idea of plausible deniability at least acknowledged implicitly that there was a moral issue involved. Now it’s a choice between the Democratic Lucky Luciano, who signs off the deaths thoughtfully, and some presumed Republican Al Capone, who just whacks guys on impulse. And who may actually win in November.

hint of a deal?

Thinking about that notorious Christine Lagarde interview a couple of days back, it occurs to me that it's the first time any big timer has put the issue of tax collection front and central in the Greek austerity debate. Up till now it's all been a combination of supposed unwillingness to work and excessive public spending - things that could be 'cured' by austerity, if you'll forgive the euphemism.

Ordinary Greek taxpayers pay up; at least these days, since taxes have been fed into things like utility prices, they don't have any choice. I also bet that a Syriza government wouldn't have a political problem at all in trying to force the evading classes into paying up; not just because they're left wing but because they're outside the old cozy duopoly.

So despite the insulting nature of Lagarde's demarche, you also have the first hint of common ground between Syriza and what may be its future creditor alliance.

If so , it's about time: it's not as if they're an actual extreme left party. They want to stay in NATO and the EU, which puts them somewhat to the right of Labour in 1983. As I understand it, what they basically want to do is to change the question from 'what are the Greeks prepared to suffer to stay in the Euro' to 'what lengths are the rest of the EU and the relevant organisations prepared to go to keep them there.'  Optimistic I know, but maybe Lagarde's hinting that a deal might be available on these terms. Something like how much extra income can you collect in return for more debt forgiveness/Eurobonds/whatever it takes.

also, they tipped off rambo

(Why, yes, I am experiencing a burst of energy after weeks of being sick, thank you for asking.)

So Bruce Franklin's M.I.A: Mythmaking in America, which is a very good book, has a fascinating but sadly brief mention that in 1979-1980, Chinese intelligence agents in Southeast Asia deliberately spread stories of live US POWs in order to damage US-Vietnamese relations.  Unfortunately the only reference is a Vietnamese govenment pamphlet. So, a) anyone heard any mention of this elsewhere, and b) does it sound credible? It does to me, save that I wonder how the Chinese, hardly the most culturally astute nation at the time, would have picked up on the American POW obsession.

vietnam veteran interview

"I was 18. I joined up to save my little sister. They were still sending people to the countryside at that time, but there was a policy that for every person who joined the army, one of your family members didn't have to go. My sister wasn't very strong, and I didn't want her to have to go.  And I figured there were so many people in the army, the odds of me having to go to fight were low. 

They sent us to Liaoning first of all, for four months' training. It was so remote, there wasn't even a village nearby. Then suddenly they put us in a truck. We couldn't see out, and we had no idea where we were going, and they didn't tell us. They only let us out at night, and we had to piss in the truck. We drove for days, and it was getting hotter and hotter, so we figured we must be going south.  

Then, when they let us out, they gave us guns and put us in the human wave. There were commissars behind us, firing. They fired into the ground, unless you retreated, then they fired at you. We weren't the first troops going in. They all died. Seven out of sixteen of my platoon survived the war. That's much better than the ones who were first in, or the ones who were last out. 

We didn't want to shoot at the Vietnamese at first. We didn't see what quarrel we had with them. Then the sergeant of my platoon was killed, and we learnt to hate them.  When we lost men, we were told to bury them deep or burn them, not to make proper graves. The leaders didn't want the Vietnamese or the West to know how many people we'd lost.  I have a scar on my arm here, look, from the enemy's artillery.

Yes, I'm still a patriot."

 

 

books I'd like to read

Some of which may even exist, and if they do, please let me know in comments.

A really good biography of Deng Xiaoping: Partially this is motivated by having forced myself to slog through Ezra Vogel's recent effort, which is fucking terrible. (Vogel strikes me as being a not-uncommon type among older US China visitors; the ones who actually believe that the Party is a conservative meritocratic technocracy, filled with sensible types just like them.  Friedman wanders in that direction occasionally too.)  

Among the many things missing from the Vogel biography is any sense of how Deng's use of power actually affected people, from the friends and colleagues he betrayed, backstabbed, or bought up with him to the ordinary Chinese whose lives he helped transform in the 1980s.  The model for this is, of course, Robert Caro's epic LBJ biography. While it has its faults, and every sentence is freighted with a sense of its own importance, the depiction of LBJ's victims and beneficaries is outstanding. You see what it meant for a man be Red-baited and forced out of his post with the complicity of someone who he considered a friend. But you also see how the lives of Texas hill farmers were transformed by LBJ's campaign to bring them electricity, or what it meant to Martin Luther King to hear him say "We shall overcome." Caro also conveys LBJ's personal charisma and bundle of political and social tricks ("You're just like a daddy to me," he would repeat to older, more powerful men, with huge success), whereas in Vogel politics - Chinese politics of the 1970s and 80s!* - comes across as a bloodless exercise.

Deng's successes have also been so obvious that his failings, like Vietnam, have been glossed over. Jonathan Fenby suggested to me a couple of months ago that one of the reasons for the 1979 war was Deng's own sense of insecurity about not having been a general, and his conviction that he could be a military genius, since he was so much smarter than the PLA guys he knew. (Deng was smarter than everyone, and very conscious of this .)   

A history of the Years of Lead in Italy - Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily covers the Mafia stuff, but I want to read a vast, tangled history of the whole mess of Red Brigades and neo-fascists and conspiracies and get some sense of how a relatively modern, Westernized quasi-democracy got so fucked up.  (I'm thinking A Savage War of Peace as a model, really.)  

A soberly written book about ninjas - Because they're really interesting, but distinguishing the historical reality of "professional spies and occasional assasins" from all the cruff made up about them for, firstly, Japanese history-plays, and secondly, Western fantasists, is bloody difficult.  

A hour by hour study of the fall of Ceaucescu - I might settle for a really good novel here, but it'd have to be at least Feast of the Goat quality. My family's from Transylvania, and I can vividly remember hearing about Ceaucescu being toppled - on the radio driving home from the annual Christmas visit to Beeston Castle.

A history of pre-colonial Africa - Because, again, the bits I have seen are really interesting, like the Ghana and Malian empires. But I couldn't even put together a loose timeline right now.

Any really good book on pre-20th century South America - So these must exist, obviously, but I have a huge gap in my knowledge here, and the bits I do know are completely fascinating. Suggestions?

*I read Winter King recently, which I recognized as being very good yet, for some reason, couldn't quite enjoy; perhaps it's just that I've never been able to care about the Tudors. But it did make me think that "factions" in Chinese politics are a lot closer to baronial intrigues than any kind of ideological groupings, with all the switching and betrayal and fundamentally being about the money and power, not the ideas, that that implies.

black elements

The visa crackdown rolls on here, exposing as it does the unsurprising biases of the Beijing police. For starters, if you're black, you're treated like a criminal; 22 Africans were dragged down to the police station and interrogated last week even though they were carrying all the right documents on them.  (This is to some extent a contempt for Africans that leaks over to blacks in general; one of my friends was once a witness to a random street murder, after which he  was arrested by the police and chained to a radiator while one of them screamed "Nik-gur! Nik-gur!" at him. Until someone brought his passport and they realized he was British, when they instantly became highly apologetic.)Sanlitun and Wudaokou, the two foreigner drinking zones (one in the center, one for students), are both seeing popular clubs regularly raided and demands for papers made.

As usual, according to Ms Blood's cousin, who works for the PSB, the police have assigned quotas for the number of arrests to make and fines to impose.  So, fun times. As a white guy with a State-run company job and a long-standing work visa, I'm at no risk of anything except inconvenience, but the general atmosphere of nervousness is unpleasant. 

I'm not feeling any particular anti-foreigner public mood, but Ms Blood is much more paranoid about that, partially because she spends a lot of time on Weibo and Xiaonei and other sites where sad little feng qing spill their bile, which, right now, is directed agianst white guys stealing their women.  A staffer for City Weekend got beaten up in Sanlitun, but getting beaten up in Sanlitun is hardly that unusual, although this was exceptionally unpleasant since it involved two assholes randomly attacking a woman. Though she's ethincally Hakka, which means she was probably targeted by gender rather than race.

It may just be that my standards are high. Things were much, much worse in Korea when I was there in 2002, where you got daily antipathy, especially if you were a white guy with a local girl.  (The trick to dealing with that was for the girl to pretend she didn't understand Korean, which would leave whatever random asshole was shouting at her deeply embarassed and apologetic.)  Of course, there you had a long-standing US army presence, with all that implies, and they'd just accidentally crushed two schoolgirls to death.  But there was a level of really corrosive, vicious anti-Americanism that was pretty disgusting; I was told several times by young children that they "loved Bin Laden" and "wished all Americans would die."  Never seen that in China, though admittedly if I'd been there after the Belgrade bombing that might be different.

A certain amount of tit for tat seems to be going on re: the visa crackdown, like the Nigerian detention of Chinese traders. Whatever the hell happened with the Confucius Institute's accreditation status probably isn't linked to that, but simply a consequence of the fact that, regardless of the political angle to the CI, their teaching is notoriously crap and their teachers often underqualified. I know at least one Chinese department in an Ivy League school that's come under administrative pressure to partner with them, and flatly refused on the grounds of both academic independence and the shitness of their teaching methods.

six ferrari dowry

A bit knocked flat by the heat, but here's some epic reportage on the multiplicitous business activities of the children of China's top leaders. These guys wouldn't hire Mark Thatcher as a butler.

I can see a looming nomenclature problem here around the tricky issue oif what term you use for the children of princelings. Maybe you could adapt the system in Brazilian football where you have Ronaldao (big Ron) Ronaldo (Ron) and Ronaldinho (little Ron). So by that, Winston Wen, Bo Guagua etc would be princelinginhos. Oh well. It's a thought.

1849

Looks like the tweeters lost the Egyptian presidential election. Strong performance by ancien regime candidate:

Shafiq's strong performance reflected widespread worries about crime and insecurity and a yearning for stability, improvements to the economy and public services.

"Polarisation is the main characteristic of Egyptian society," said a former Liberal MP. "Shafiq did much better than Moussa because all his discourse centred on security whereas Moussa talked about economic development. But the first concern is law and order."

There's your classic counter-revolutionary strategy. the people want freedom. Give them disorder and wait till enough come crawling back. The other consequence of this policy is to push people to the other pole, which in this case means the Ikhwan, whose candidate narrowly won the first round. The result of this mosque versus barracks contest will partly depend on how the Nasserist vote splits, which is actually sort of cool.

brand lockdown city

Why I don't envy you lot living in London, volume 30:

In essence, London has abdicated all rights and responsibilities to the International Olympic Committee, and implemented legislation which creates radical new spatial demarcations not only within the Olympic Park, but because of the distributed nature of the Olympic venues, across the whole of central London. London has surrendered the traditional rights to the city to the demands of the Olympic 'family' and their corporate paymasters. What the IOC want, London will give. London will be on brand lockdown.

The most carefully policed Brand Exclusion Zone will be around the Olympic Park, and extend up to 1km beyond its perimeter, for up to 35 days. Within this area, officially called an Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restrictions zone, no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed...This will be supported by preventing spectators from wearing clothing prominently displaying competing brands, or from entering the exclusion zone with unofficial snack and beverage choices. Within the Zone, the world's biggest McDonald's will be the only branded food outlet, and Visa will be the only payment card accepted.

Now we know what the SAMs are for. Firing at people making unofficial snack choices.

'to become disillusioned you must first, earlier, have been illusioned'

Paul Fussell died yesterday, so if you've not read The Great War in Modern Memory yet, now is the time to have a crack at it, at least if you're interested in the conjunction between sensitive souls, inquiring minds, mass literacy and hitherto unparalleled levels of state-organised violence. Here's an extract from My War, a later account of his own experiences as a subaltern on the Western Front.

That month away from the line helped me survive for four weeks more but it broke the rhythm and, never badly scared before, when I returned to the line early in March I found for the first time that I was terrified, unwilling to take the chances that before had seemed rather sporting. My month of safety had re newed my interest in survival, and I was psychologically and morally ill prepared to lead my platoon in the great Seventh Army attack of March 15, 1945. But lead it I did, or rather push it, staying as far in the rear as was barely decent. And before the day was over I had been severely rebuked by a sharp-eyed lieutenant-colonel who threatened court martial if I didn’t pull myself together. Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine gun holding us up: he was struck in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves. He was one to whom early on I had given the Silver Star for heroism, and he didn’t want to let me down.

As if in retribution for my cowardice, in the late afternoon, near Ingwiller, Alsace, clearing a woods full of Germans cleverly dug in, my platoon was raked by shells from an .88, and I was hit in the back and leg by shell fragments. They felt like red-hot knives going in, but I was as interested in the few quiet moans, like those of a hurt child drifting off to sleep, of my thirty-seven-year-old platoon sergeant–we’d been together since Camp Howze–killed instantly by the same shell. We were lying together, and his immediate neighbor on the other side, a lieutenant in charge of a section of heavy machine guns, was killed instantly too. My platoon was virtually wiped away. I was in disgrace, I was hurt, I was clearly expendable–while I lay there the supply sergeant removed my issue wristwatch to pass on to my replacement–and I was twenty years old.