Blood & Treasure

lucky number

I’m a bit sceptical about the idea that the Kims are slaves to numerology and in particular to the number nine, if only because precisely the same charge involving precisely the same number was made against former Burmese dictator Ne Win: among other things he’s supposed to have completely reorganised Burmese currency so that it divided into units of 9, for instance with a 45 Kyat note.

As this piece at the Lowy institute notes, accusations of rampant superstition are a fairly common way for dissidents to try and undermine the credibility of regimes. And yet as the report also notes, Ne Win and the Burmese dictatorship's penchant for numerology and other esoteric practices is well documented, to the point where it became part of an innovative regime change strategy:

Anti-regime activists too have used magic to pursue political ends. For example, in 2007 one Thai-based group launched a global 'panties for peace' campaign, in which supporters were encouraged to send women's underwear to Burmese embassies, in the hope that contact with such garments would weaken the regime's hpoun, or spiritual power. The generals may indeed subscribe to this belief. It is widely rumoured that, before a foreign envoy visits Burma, an article of female underwear or a piece of a pregnant woman's sarong is hidden in the ceiling of the visitor's hotel suite, to weaken theirhpoun and thus their negotiating position.

It makes you wonder what they did when Hillary showed up last year. In truth, addiction to esoteric practices of one kind or other is hardly confined to either dictatorships or Asian countries, a prominent recent example being Ronald Reagan’s cultivation of Nancy’s personal astrologer. That was just about organising his shcdule rather than, say, bathing in dolphin's bood to stay young, as Ne Win reportedly did, or carrying around Richard Nixon's autograph in the belief that it made him bulletproof, as was the practice of the late Cambodian dictator Lon Nol.

One odd thing: In 1983, North Korea attempted to assassinate South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan in Rangoon with a bomb in a mausoleum he was visiting. Chun was late and survived, though four of his cabinet died among a total of 21 people. The date? October 9. 

the KPA as rationally irrational actor

Ironically, given the publicity we’ve been getting over here about it, North Korea’s pronouncement that a state of war exists between it and the South didn’t make the news in Pyongyang to anything like the same extent. Additionally, various experts canvassed by NK news org note the large element of bluster in the declaration. Some think it was a rhetorical response to the US flypast of B2 bombers earlier this week. But at the same time, a state of war has technically existed between North and South since the North renounced the 1953 armistice earlier this month. Another thing worth noting is that so far it’s all bluster, without a demonstration atrocity to drive the point home.

Perhaps the most interesting rumour to emerge revently is the claim that Jang Song-taek, Kim’s uncle and the regime’s nominal no2, recently tried to stage a coup against his nephew. This is based on his disappearance from all public appearances with Kim since February  and it plays in neatly to the article we blogged earlier this week, which claimed that the Korean People’s Army had been mounting a comprehensive pushback against the ‘civilianisation’ of the regime which seemed to be happening in the first six months or so of KJU’s rule. Both the belligerent external posture and the idea of a coup serve as a pretext for military intervention with the aim of restoring the Song’un ‘military first’ policy which initially seemed to be under threat. Perhaps what we should be looking out for here is eventual news, or at least credible reports, of the execution of Jang Song-Taek.

What we can also see here is a wholesale repudiation of Chinese policy towards the North, which mainly seemed to focus on dialing down its militancy and encouraging the kind of authoritarian economic development model used successfully in China. Note that this policy would have enriched the North Korean overclass immensely, as well as adding to their numbers many people whose interest would be in the maintenance of the system. Yet clearly this was incompatible with both the Song’un policy and the personal tyranny of the Kims.

Obviously, most claims with regard to internal NK politics are guesswork, but it’s always useful to try and assess the internal dynamics behind a particular course of action, especially one which evolves the regular emission of blood curdling threats. Where this leaves external interested parties is with the knowledge that if the regime is going to turn down a Chinese offer that would have enriched it and consolidated its wider political power, then there is actually nothing you can do about it short of bringing the regime to an end. Moreover, this point has now been made abundantly clear to Beijing.  I don’t think China’s going to do anything about this situation over the short term, especially since various of its regional relationships are so fraught, but maybe it’s time to stop thinking of China and North Korea as allied in the sense they traditionally were. The North Korean problem is now pretty much the same for everyone.

highbrow listening

“...in one of our chats she told me she always listened to Thought for the Day on Radio 4. She said ‘I’d be very good on that programme’. I said ‘You should do it’ and she said ‘I would if they’d let me.’ I approached the Reverend Ernie Ray, head of religious broadcasting at the time, but he said it was more than his job was worth.

 And so it was that Myra Hindley never got to present Thought for the Day. She was also miffed to find that Save the Children knocked back her donations. This was in the nineties at the apogee of the campaign to free her, in which she played the starring role as Repentant Sociology Woman.

That from Carol Ann Lee’s excellent One of Your Own, by the way.

progressive luminary's progress

Tom Griffin has a lovely piece up at Spinwatch on the origins and development of Miliband D’s new fiefdom, the International Rescue Committee. It's part leftist trainspotting, part Cold War history:

In his letter to South Shields Labour Party, Miliband wrote that the IRC "was founded at the suggestion of Albert Einstein in the 1930s for those fleeing the Nazis". In fact the full story is a little more involved. The IRC's earliest incarnation, the International Relief Association (IRA), was founded in 1931, not in the United States but in Germany by two left-wing factions, the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) and the Socialist Workers Party (SAP) to aid victims of state repression. After the Nazis took power in 1933, the organisation moved its headquarters to Paris (Chester, p.7).

The KPO consisted of members of the right opposition, purged by Stalin in 1929 because of their support for Nikolai Bukharin, as opposed to the left opposition of Leon Trotsky. Among those purged was Jay Lovestone, the erstwhile head of the American Communist Party. It was Lovestone who formed an American section of the International Relief Association in 1933. His intention was mainly to aid his Right Opposition comrades, but in classic Comintern style, he ensured the board consisted mainly of progressive luminaries who could attract much wider support. Einstein was one of these.

Given that Miliband is the symbol of the Blairite Right Opposition, his current post is historically quite a neat fit. Anyway, International Rescue morphed into  kind of humanitarian satellite of US postwar policy and from there to being a sort of excellently connected NQNGO, a not quite non-governmental organization. Global Dashboard notes that he’s well positioned there for a senior UN job.

makes a change from mid ranking officers

The coup leader in the Central African Republic is a former mid-ranking civil servant and appears to owe his newfound eminence in large part to excellent committee skills and his experience in Bangui's planning department. Here in the UK, there are a number of people I know who work for the local authority in Manchester who I suspect would find the thought of descending on London in a convoy of technicals quite appealing right now.

Be that as it may, I wonder what Mr Djotodia's 'Great Leader' type dictator post name will be. The Bureaucrat. The Facilitator. The Line Manager. The Factotum. The Town Clerk...

device with four spikes

How could I not bring you a story that involves caltrops?

A man who runs a car repair shop in central China's Henan province deliberately scattered caltrops on a major highway in order to boost his business, the Zhengzhou Evening News reports.

The man, surnamed Yang, allegedly to have bought 200 caltrops and then drove a mini-van to scatter the device with four spikes on 47 kilometers along the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao highway.

That's China's major North-South highway. And yes, once more, it's Henan taking the honours. On the markets in everything angle, and leaving aside the retail availability of caltrops in the historical heartland of Chinese civilisation, the purchase of a bulk order of caltrops indicates either a manufacturing facility large enough so that an individual purchase of that amount is no big deal or a network of workshop production. As a sentimentalist, one hopes for artisan highway sabotage.

what it takes

Modern ethical dilemmas:

A week earlier, a woman had been placed in charge of the CIA’s clandestine service for the first time in the agency’s history. She is a veteran officer with broad support inside the agency. But she also helped run the CIA’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture...

... She “is highly experienced, smart and capable,” and giving her the job permanently “would be a home run from a diversity standpoint,” the former senior U.S. intelligence official said. “But she was also heavily involved in the interrogation program at the beginning and for the first couple of years.”

Other sources say she apparently ran one of the CIA’s external black sites.

You do get the depressing sense here that if she were a nonwhite woman – I presume this would have been specified along with her gender -  then that might have just tip the scales in favour of the diversity argument: a double home run. But let’s brainstorm a little and attach the electrodes another way. Just think how inspiring this would be to all the other female torturers out there. Perhaps we shouldn't think of this as torture but as taking the necessary steps to break the notorious glass ceiling. Subject it to waterboarding, force it to adopt a stress position for 48 hours and menace it with large dogs. If that doesn't break it, nothing will. 

floating dead animals in China watch

Now it's Black Swans. Yep, your actual Black Swans.

Yet early this morning, five of these black and beautiful swans were found floating lifeless on the surface of the pond. The latest instance of floating dead animals in China – first pigs, then ducks, and now black swans – these mere five black swans became an object of heated discussion on the Internet right after the announcement was made.

What next? In accordance with the old saying the next thing surely  has to be enemies. People are going to sit by the riverbank and watch their enemies floating by...

'panic in Bin No 9'

At least 498 people have suffocated in grain bins since 1964, according to data analyzed for the Center and NPR by William Field, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University.

At least 165 more people drowned in wagons, trucks, rail cars or other grain storage structures. Almost 300 were engulfed but survived. Twenty percent of the 946 people caught in grain were under 18.

Read this. 

of Borises and Milibands

‘Of course we always back the Kremlin on matters of national importance,’ the Just Russia representative replied, not even trying to pretend he belonged to a genuine opposition party’

This is what Labour would have been in relation to the Coaliton if Miliband senior’s coronation hadn’t been so rudely interrupted by his brother. And now he’s gone to New York, like losers in British politics seem to do these days. As things stand...it’s not quite that bad.

I’ve said before that if you transferred the British political establishment to China, it would just join the Party and carry on in the context of internal factional conflict. Maybe it’s more interesting to consider what would happen if they were transferred to Russia. Things are a little sharper in managed democracy: if you’re not part of the same organization, ends tend to be final. So let’s assume more people would just drop out because they couldn’t stomach it. But that still leaves the question of how those who remained would function in the system as they found it. Our Boris would be pretty much as he is now, running a big city with the aid of pet media, except his Gilligan would be a Chechen. IDS was a notable failure in his run at supreme power in the UK, but he’s a killer in his current role. Still, in a Russian context, no more than a trusted sidekick. Gove would be at home, but he’s a born grey eminence: his main skill and only purpose is in identifying enemies. I can’t see either Cameron or Osborne prospering in the same way as both have here, though I can see both as marginally plausible government spokesmen, with scattered interests in nightclubs, tourist venues and other such money laundering fronts. This is maybe the actual government problem. Nigel Farage is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, off the leash.

And I can’t help feeling that ‘One Nation Labour’ sounds a lot like ‘United Russia’, at least inasmuch as it’s a vehicle for the process of taking power. It’s a flabby vehicle that allows for all sorts of vicious, competent maneuvering. Not having a Berezovsky, it needs to be cobbled together on the run. Maybe it’s interesting that Ed ‘Volodya’ Miliband  decided to try to kill off his Berezovsky, ie Murdoch, as part of the process of gaining power rather than making things clear to him afterwards, which at least proves that our democracy is open to competing styles of management.

Hey, just riffing here.