Blood & Treasure

return to hell

OK, back to the North Korean museum of American imperialist atrocities, and specifically to the comparison I made with Buddhist hell theme parks: 

 Exhibit one:   

  Exhibit two: 

Naturally, I return to this subject entirely in the spirit of the self reinforcing blogosphere, or whatever it is these days: I’m a one man army of Jamie, me. Also, I can now confidently state that this is the only British blog with two pictures of people being sawn apart in the same post. 

Orwell prize? I spit on the Orwell prize.

take a lecture, Ms Zhou

Yesterday we did the Party. Today, we do the Central Party School, where budding dictators send their personal assistants to take dictation: 

The Central Party School is the main educational institution for the training of senior Party officials from across the country, such as provincial governors and ministers. It is also the think tank for decision making in the CPC, as well as a theoretical research institute. 

However, rumors have circulated that some officials brought their secretaries in to attend classes and write theses on their behalf, while they themselves made use of the school as a platform to "meet people, make acquaintances, have a good meal and have a good rest". 

There’s apparently a competitive banqueting culture, but overall it sounds as boring as Bilderberg probably is.

reporting from the North West Frontier in their head...

...the folks at Next Media Animation continue to amaze:

life in hell

 

I don’t think a sunny June day would be complete without a slideshow from the American Imperial Massacre Museum in North Korea. (via) NB: there are also some pretty gruesome actual photos included.

There certainly were atrocities committed during the Korean war on both sides. But actual atrocities never seem to be quite enough, somehow. Shooting people, bombing dams and stuff just won’t do: you've got to gild the lily, or as it happens, the priest has got to be burning the baby. Maybe this is as much in conformation with tradition as ideology. The paintings here remind me a bit of the Buddhist hell tableaux you get across East Asia, with the American soldiers playing the part of the various imps and demons. The thing as a whole is meant to be a representation of life in hell.

Shanklyism

Comrade Barnes calls for the embrace of Shanklyism in team England.

"The teams which embrace the socialist ideology rather than having superstars, are the teams that are successful. Or if there are superstars they don't perceive themselves to be that. That's why I use Messi as an example. As much as he's a superstar he respects his team-mates and their collective efforts."

Via.The obvious joke here is that the North Korea slot is now very probably open, and John’s talents as a manager are not currently in demand. But on the other hand, North Korea would be a good place to go to avoid being selected as the next England manager. Anyway, more Shankly on socialism: People go on about Miliband and Balls and the rest of that crowd of insipid chancers without a chance. I say that what the left needs right now is the advocacy of a successful, respected man who sounds like he’d be quite happy to rip your liver out once the democratic process had been exhausted. Tell me I’m wrong.

it's football

The US presence in previous world cups was pretty anonymous and also slightly apologetic, maybe a bit too much concerned with protecting its flank against the various loons who think that one way of moving a ball around is 100% Americanism, while another is a beachhead for Islamic communism, or just dirty foreigners, as much as these two things are divisible in their minds. 

Both the team and its fans seem to be feeling their oats a little more this time round. (via) But a word of advice. Football is never going to achieve its due prominence, which is to say its absolute domination, in the United States until it is called by its true name, ie until United Statespersons stop calling it soccer. 

Soccer is what the sports master at my rugby playing school called football – and yes, he had the nerve to call that thing they do with their hands with odd shaped balls football. Soccer is what the rugby type execs at my regional ITV station included in the name of the Sunday highlights show. I had to watch Jimmy Greenhoff scoring a hat trick against Birmingham back in ’74 on a show called Star Soccer. Well, it was good enough for the plebs, the people who watch football. Soccer is what you call the pastime, the thing you put aside for serious sport later on. 

As such, it’s arguably an appropriate name for what is, in American terms, still a cadet sport. But it's a term that needs to go once you get into the group of sixteen. Even in Britain it took a long, obstinate struggle – a matter of calling the game by its true name over and over again - until it finally sank in. That was a matter of acknowledging reality. Football fans in the US have a much longer, harder push ahead of them, and need to stop admitting defeat before they start.

Start now, my friends. Practice in front of the mirror: “It’s football”. For the road is long, but one day you will bestride the world of football while all those people in tights and helmets are playing American Rugby before small clumps of nostalgics and sour bigots, and maybe a few tourists from England, wishing we could still play football.

only game in town

The CPC: less of a party, more of a club (in varied senses of the word club) 

Party membership in 2009 swelled to nearly 78 million people - an increase of more than 2 million people or nearly 3 per cent from 2008, said Wang Qinfeng, the party's deputy minister, according to a transcript posted on the website of the party's flagship People's Daily newspaper. 

The number of members is almost equal to Germany's total population. More than just an ideology, membership in the elite Communist Party also means access to a large networking opportunity with China's ruling class - including health care perks, retirement benefits and heightened career opportunities. 

Mr Wang said 20 million people applied to join in 2009, but only 10 per cent were accepted. Applicants for party membership need recommendations from current members and his or her company or work unit leader showing a strong degree of party loyalty, plus 'good behaviour.' They also have to submit essays expressing support for the party. 

...which can no doubt be downloaded for a small fee. There’s also the fact that if you want to get beyond a certain point in a profession then you have to join. This is a bit more than a “heightened career opportunity”. It basically enforces a monopoly on talent, or tries to enforce it: likewise, social mobility. 

I’m not sure that the 10% figure is general or just referred to this year. Anyway, you’re now talking in the range of one in twelve of the adult population. At that level this is bound to include anyone who, as the saying goes “wants to make a difference”, all the people who have ideas they want put into action, improvements they want to make, who have the civic bug generally. In short, China’s political class as a whole. It’s the absence of ideology that enables it to do this, and in doing this it makes it much harder to build anything up outside. The basic hardware’s still Leninist, but there’s a reason why the CPC leadership’s pronouncements - three represents, harmonious society, scientific view of development and so on – are so banal.

for the eternal glory of Putinism

Some of the activities of the alleged Russian spy ring have a slightly absurd smack to them: 

This involved Murphy meeting an SVR agent outside a bookshop on a quiet street just south of Rome's city centre. The agent was to identify Murphy by a copy of Time magazine he was holding, and give him the coded message: "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?" Murphy was to reply, "Yes indeed, I was in La Valetta, but in 2000," before being given the passport. 

But then, how do you get non-Russians to spy for the Russians anyway, these days – I mean, apart from through money and kompromat? There’s presumably a pool of people out there who like the idea of spying: the message drops, the arranged random brief encounters in foreign parts, the trench coats, the gadgets, all that. Maybe you have to arrange a kind of theme park experience for the people who want to go to that kind of theme park. 

The same’s true of the US, or anywhere else for that matter. You’d have to be an absolute fool these days to think that furthering the interests of one nation or other, as defined by its intelligence services, furthers the general interest of a set of ideals. That leaves money, blackmail, patriotism – in the case of country nationals – or boredom and postmodern fun. 

So let's say you’ve got people going around doing espionage for you, supposedly homing in on the nerve centres of the US government. Or at least that’s what they think they’re doing. Maybe they’re just “being spies” and as such, attracting the interest of the FBI. And the kicker is that they think they’re spies, too. And while all that’s going on, you get on with the spying. 

I have no idea whether there’s any maskirovka going on at that level. But Russia is the home of the virtual political party: a virtual espionage ring works in the same way.

old saying adapted

 

When it comes to world cups, those who insist on obsessively remembering the past are condemned to never repeat it. 

Though that wing commander moustache is quite funny. And the bloke on the left looks like he might just be on the point of realising that he's made a bit of a dick of himself.

Wayne, rootless cosmopolitan

Someone sent an angry tweet to the BBC complaining that England players “get tens of thousands per match, so why couldn’t they etc, etc”. 

Obviously, they don’t. Not when they turn out for England they don’t. The players are paid by the clubs, and are the financial motor of the premier league. The EPL occasionally loan players out to the FA for international tournaments. The whole In-ger-lund setup, with all its orchestrated hysteria and commercial hoo-haa is a kind of consolation prize from the EPL to the FA after it seized control over the game: OK, we’ll lend you some of our assets, go whoop up the punters with a load of flag wagging and make a bundle for a few weeks. 

People sometimes talk about the way globalisation has created a kind of international class of people who wander from place to place, for profit or from necessity. The classic examples are refugees and managers of multinational companies. The same is true of footballers. The EPL is a globalised institution and its major players live within its boundaries. True, they spend more of their actual time in the tax boundary known as the UK, but I bet the life of your average England player has a lot of the same weird affectlessness of life in a gated compound for foreigners in Shanghai, only with added celebrity status to cope with and profit from. 

Wayne Rooney, rootless cosmopolitan. Who’d have thought it? But you can’t really blame the players, because look what happens to the country when they do become the focus of its attention. England’s world cup victory back in 1966 didn’t make a few of the back pages, let alone the front: there was some cricket going on or something. These days, England turns into In-ger-lund and the team become the subject of orchestrated mass hysteria. How many death threats have been logged at Rooney’s agents office between five o clock and now? Not less than fifty, I bet. 

So the World Cup is an occasion that brings about a particularly sharp collision between globalisation and national sentiment, both financially driven. I’m not arguing that this is the entire cause of England’s general crapness, though I think it also has significant downstream consequences (such as: how do you make a team from an assemblage of players who work in various supporting roles in multinational teams, often with players better than they are). At any rate, it’s a weird atmosphere in which to try and play football. Best to shrink back behind the wall of agents and sponsors and lie low till it all goes away. It's not as if they'd get that much out of winning the thing.