Blood & Treasure

hitchcult

Well, so this is a thing:

Dear Sirs & Madams,

We the undersigned ask you to please give permission and a plot for a memorial statue in a prime position within the UK, honouring national treasure Christopher Hitchens for his contributions to the UK and the world. We will raise the funds and build it, we just need the place and permission.

I imagine they'll still be raising the funds for this long after he's generally forgotten and his remaining acolytes are all huddled together for warmth in a small semi-detached in Luton. They will send blueprints of a heroic bronze figure gesticulating wildly against the march of islamofascism to all parties who may or may not be interested, in the meantime resting an empty Netto vodka bottle atop a small cairn in the back garden as a statement of intent. Eventually, the blueprints will be forgotten and the cairn will become the focus of their attentions. A mythology will be weaved around the emptiness of the bottle, as symbolising the absence of religous presence and the space in which Reason can flourish.

The adherents get a snide writeup in Fortean Times, and learned sources among conoisseurs of esoteric belief begin to refer to them as neo-Southcottians, with the empty bottle serving as a postmodernday Southcott's box. Such are the Hitchensians. They appear in public as ghostly presences protesting silently against the endowment of new mosques and earn some publicity when they are prevented from flying to Saudi Arabia with this purpose in mind. They are shy creatures, but their occasional indulgence in ritual drunkenness on Hitchensian high unholy days eventually causes neighbours to contact the multi-agency team at the council, who are concerned also by their militant smoking. A care plan is drawn up.

drunk in charge of a village

The WSJ has a nice, jokey story about smalltown officials who respond to cutbacks in the hospitality budget by brewing their own rice spirit:

The Baishun official quoted this week said the town consumes around 100 jin of alcohol a month during official gatherings. A jin is a traditional Chinese measure, equal to about half a liter. “When leaders come we drink close to 20 jin,” the Baishun official said. “When village and town cadres come, we can’t not drink.”

This is the rough equivalent of a parish council getting down fifty litres of grain alcohol every month while at work; a lot of baijiu comes in at around 50% abv as well. Maybe there's more to 'we can't not drink' than a standard culturalist argument. It sounds a bit like 'we have to ferment shoe polish because the big bosses cut our booze budget, the bastards'.

I believe we discussed before somewhere the effect of alcohol on British policymaking, with reference to William 'bottle of Port for Breakfast' Pitt the Younger and the Napoleonic war. Here we might be talking about something a bit more pervasive. I mean, many of China's problems are obviously down to the generally dysfunctional nature of its adminsitration, but it would still be interesting to consider how many specific cock-ups and outrages are down to institutional alcoholism especially in, say, the provoking of mass incidents.

hunter-gatherer diet, but mainly gatherer

Once you get past the wacky KCNA language, this is quite chilling: Spring hunger repurposed as part of a tourist attraction.

"Bread stuffed with vegetable or pear jam, boiled rice wrapped in leopard plant and dishes made of anise and aralia shoots are popular among visitors. They also like drinks made of barrenwort, corn floss and bellflower root, which are good for health."

The reason they're offering this stuff is because there isn't anything else. It's foraging propped up by the skeletal framework of a political economy.

nuanced modern thinking

Regarding the epic financial machinations allegedly practiced by the family of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, his supporters can draw consolation from the fact that the Wen family compares favorably to the Bo Xilai family in the matter of financial sophistication, investment success, and in not murdering its financial adviser. 

Great context on the NYT Wen Jiabao story over here.

watching and waiting

I forget which Third Reich downfall book it’s in, but I once read an anecdote about some Red Army soldiers capturing one of those cultured SS types and making him play the piano for them at gunpoint. Off he goes; waltz tunes, tinkly bits, sentimental favourites, everything he can think of, then more of the same. 17 hours later he collapses from exhaustion. His captors give him a pat on the back, a slug of vodka and a bullet in the head.

I thought of this last week in the resounding silence occasioned by Ai Weiwei’s guest editorship of the New Statesman, followed rapidly by his flap at the Gangnam style meme, though that did get a bit of comment, by no means all of it favourable. Ai couldn’t be expected to know that the New Statesman is where politics goes to die. Perhaps the realisation that he wasn’t kicking up much dust in the Staggers led to his brief outburst of jazz hands later that week.

It goes without saying that Ai’s relationship with the Chinese state is antagonistic. It also contains a number of paradoxical elements. The lonely dissident who can attract publicity for everything he does. The man under detention who somehow manages to be present when the US ambassador is confronted by a bunch of nationalist demonstrators and when anti and pro government bloggers are having a ruck in Chaoyang Park. The man's entire career is based around serial attempts to incite subversion of state power, the ‘crime’ that got Liu Xiaobo a decade in prison, but the authorities dick around with tax charges: it’s not as if they have to prove anything at a proper trial.

Obviously, Ai’s celebrity is keeping him out of prison. It’s slightly puzzling that the authorities let him get away with it. The only reason I can think of is that he was already too well known to disappear when he emerged as an overt dissident back in 2008. What’s left is the fallback position of constant harrassment at too low a level to prevent him from operating but at a high enough level for his fame to be backstopped by his status as a dissident.

There are some benefits for Beijing in this, since the image of China as a totalitarian state tends to be undermined by its most famous dissident doing a great deal of whatever the hell he pleases, including overt mocking of the regime. But I don’t think one hand’s washing the other here. From Ai’s point of view, he has to keep the music going: parody videos, sub-Damien Hirst conceptual art games, guest editorships at somnolent political journals: they all help to keep him out of serious jail time.

It all gives you a queasy feeling that you’re watching a regular performance of Chinese Dissidents Got Talent. Ai’s always coming along with something to entertain us and what freedom he has depends on his continued ability to do so, but you get the horrible feeling that art fashions will change, the projects will get a bit more threadbare, new and more exciting dissidents adopting the same strategy will come along and the sheer burden of constant, media friendly reinvention will eventually exhaust him. And it involves the rest of the world directly in Ai’s eventual fate. Can we be bothered to watch for longer than Beijing is prepared to wait?

Yorkshire, Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau!

(Richard J here - I promised Jamie this in his holidays, but work, and no home broadband got in the way.)

 "The voice of theorists of nationalism can be distant and ironic; they see that the apparently obvious is obviously mistaken, that the emperor has no clothes. The question is why naked emperors get to rule. Part of the answer is the deceptively soporific nature of irony. [...] It might also seem ironic that [...] the one line of poetry that every Pole can recite is "Lithuania, my fatherland!". If we experience irony as an invitation to investigate, we find that variants of the early modern nationality of the Commonwealth survived its demise by more than a century. In this study, irony is a way to ask questions, not a substitute for answers."

From the preface to Timothy Snyder's Reconstruction of Nations, and I think a handy summary of the book as a whole. When one looks at the awkward separation of the utterly intertwined senses of national identity in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an ironic tone is hard to avoid - that Wilno was less than 2% Lithuanian as late as World War II, or the nested chauvinisms inherent in modifying Lithuanian orthography by using Czech orthography as a basis, rather than Polish, even though Polish itself had originally based its spelling on Czech (the Czechs having in the meantime changed their orthography to purge it of German influence.)

And for a lot of the book, the able and clear way in which Snyder disentangles the squabbling and competing claims as Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian identities consciously created themselves (or failed to do so) is lighthearted knockabout fun. Until, of course, it all changed, when, for example many Lithuanians welcomed the takeover by the USSR as finally allowing them to take Vilnius back into the homeland it had never been part of, or the petty squabbling over whether a village was full of Ukranians with a misguided belief that they were Polish, or just misplaced Poles, became, literally, a life or death question.

In the West, I think we tended to view the Banderistas through a cold war prism - doomed romantics fighting against both the Germans and the USSR for an independent Ukraine (with a vague nagging doubt about what they got up to in the Holocaust) - what this book really brings out is their parallels with the Ustashe - their main targets were neither the German, nor the USSR, nor even the Jews (albeit mainly because they were already, in the main, dead, before they got fully active), but Poles - the descriptions in the book of the UPA wiping out Polish villages in Ukraine to purge Ukraine of 'alien' elements are chilling (as are, with Snyder's trademark scrupulous fairness to all sides, the retribution carried out by the Poles and the ensuing cycle of violence).

Which leads onto the book's last section, the dog that didn't bark - why did a newly free Poland not seek to recover the lost territories, and manage to avoid entirely a Yugoslavian type situation so effectively that (myself included) most Westerners aren't even aware there were such lost territories - here, the book becomes perhaps less convincing, but its core argument is that a small group of emigré Poles single-handedly steered the discourse away from lost hurts and focussing onto establishing a bulwark of friendly and stable neighbours as being in Poland's own self-interest, no matter whether Vilnius, as a city, was in living memory about as Lithuanian a city as Warsaw.

Highly recommended.

Soldaten, however, oh Soldaten. What can I say? The virtue of the book and its biggest flaw are precisely the same, and stem from the primary sources behind it all - the secret recordings of mostly unacquainted German soldiers, pilots, etc. stuck in a room together, and left to their own devices. The virtue lies in the unguarded nature of the conversations, and the further demolition of the idea of the Good Wehrmacht. This is also, paradoxically, its biggest flaw, in that people stuck together with nothing to do will bullshit and tacitly avoid calling people out on it, particularly in recordings from earlier on in the war, where, after all, admitting to being anything other than ardently pro-Hitler might cause problems once the 4th Panzer's dramatic sweep through from Camber Sands liberates you. Ultimately, despite the seductive appearance of the honest truth in these transcripts, disappointly we have to admit we're no further in understanding wie Sie eigentliches gedenken.

(The book itself is apparently translated from the German, rather than being written by the (German) authors in English. You could have fooled me. Other than that, it's fine - my vague sense of anti-climax is due to the sources themselves, not the book.)

comrade sea watcher and Fatty Romney

It looks like all the wingnuts were off on the wrong track with that Muslim Kenyan Marxist stuff.

..if you are connecting the dots as China’s social media users are, theses gifts are a coded message that Obama is a vassal of the Celestial Dynasty, and he needs to watch China from across the Pacific and listen to President Hu’s commands.

It's quite an elegant, imperial era evocative putdown for Beijing to give Obama 'permission' to command troops. But hey, conspiradudes, knock yourselves out.

secrecy and langour

If you remember the stuff I wrote about my mum's time at the BBC in the 1950's, the atmosphere conjured by Andrew O Hagan here will be familiar:

It was a time of Player’s cigarettes and gin after hours at the pubs on Great Portland Street. Broadcasting House was a maze of stairwells, long corridors and unknown powers, a world within worlds that couldn’t quite decide whether it was a branch of the civil service or a theatrical den. Many of the men who worked there were getting their own way in the national interest, and the best (or worst) of them combined the secrecy of Whitehall with the languor of Fitzrovia. It was Patrick Hamilton in conversation with George Smiley down a blind alley off Rathbone Place, with froth sliding down the insides of pint tumblers and lipsticked fags in every ashtray. Men such as Gamlin practically lived in Langham Place: their outer bounds were Soho, Bloomsbury, Marylebone, and everything else was the World Service.

The whole thing is an evocative history of the cerpuscular BBC paedophile demimonde in the pre-Savile era. My mum never told me about working with any of these people. But she was on the Third Programme (the posh bit) alongside the kind of overt bohemians who would never have been let anywhere near children's programming, lest they set a bad example.

MGI watch: Ningbo

Take it away, SCMP:

More than a thousand people gathered in the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo on Saturday to protest against plans to expand a petrochemical plant, highlighting a major challenge for the leadership as it readies for its once-in-a-decade power transition.

On Friday, protesters overturned a police car and attacked the police.

By early Saturday, protesters, watched over by police, gathered in a central shopping street in Ningbo, wearing masks and giving out pamphlets denouncing the expansion of the plant by a subsidiary of China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation in the district of Zhenhai.

Ningbo is a big city, and the protests seem to basically take the form of the 'mass urban stroll' seen in other environmental protests in Dalian and Qidong recently, except that they confirm a trend towards limited violence seen in the latter protests: cop cars were overturned and tear gas used. However, the protest as a whole wasn't a mass riot against real or perceived injustice on the classic mass incident model and the authorities have convened some kind of forum to discuss the protestors' grievances.

Perhaps surprisingly in view of the upcoming leadership handover, discussion of the affair has been permitted across the Sinosphere, though attempts to post photos from the scene are apparently blocked. You can see some over here.

 

all important nonexistant vote

I'd always thought the wumaodang thing was more about discouraging speech by making it hard to wade through rivers of comment garbage than about actually influencing public opinion. And this seems to be the direction of wider modern thinking on the matter:

Why would anyone bother with such tactics, given how hard it might be for a bot—which has few contacts and no meaningful history of tweeting—to persuade humans? First, persuasion may not be the goal. Some bots exist only to make it harder to discover timely factual information about, say, some ongoing political protests. All that investment in bots may have paid off for the Kremlin: During the protests that followed the disputed parliamentary elections in December 2011, Twitter was brimming with fake accounts that sought to overwhelm the popular hashtags with useless information. One recent studyclaims that of 46,846 Twitter accounts that participated in discussing the disputed Russian elections, 25,860—more than half!—were bots, posting 440,793 tweets on the subject.

The author notes that various Tibet related hashtags have been rendered unusuable by being filled with crap. I suspect we're going to see increasing employment of similar techniques by various parties here as well, complicated by the fact that party loyalists tend to sound like bots on twitter anyway.