Blogoir

This a superb example of one form of Addictive Stupidity - people who have lulled themselves to sleep on the ambrosia of past glory, demanding that Reality apply to anyone but themselves, fine and upstanding New York Times journalists as they most certainly are. You'll need a heart of stone not to laugh.

Meanwhile here is my more substantive piece over at Commentator on this theme, taking a brisk world tour from Beijing in 1860 as we burned down part of the city via 1960s New York and round to today's Athens and Paris, where if they are not burning down their own cities they may well be doing so soon:

… those seeking new ways to engage the Negro politically should remember that public resources have always been the fuel for low-income urban political organization. If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.

Get 'em hooked, on opium or on welfare. Doesn't matter which.

Then you have 'em. Never fails.

You remember biorhythms, the theory that our bodies operate according to varying biological cycles that periodically coincide, for better or worse?

The Wikipedia page on Biorhythms absurdly suggests that this idea is all pseudoscience:

Critics state that biorhythms are based only upon numerological associations. The plausibility of biorhythmics is contested by mathematicians, biologists and other scientists. The most basic assertion is that even if it is assumed that physiological rhythms do exist, it is not clear why they should necessarily begin on the day of one's birth ... The biorhythm theory is often presented as having scientific validity. Biorhythm critics' responses range from opposing it as harmful, to ignoring it, to treating it as entertainment...

Be all that as it may, there are moments in life when the collision of different events creates something extraordinary.

Over in the USA, for example, we have three women-related stories occurring at the same time:

• a bizarre if not quasi-fascist/communist election production for President Obama looking at how a eyeless mouthless female called Julia goes through life gratefully enjoying the miracles of a munificent state which Evil Romney plans to destroy
• an election campaign by Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren (hi-end Democrat) in which it emeges that she used her 1/32 Cherokee blood quota to get into senior Harvard academic circles as n ethnic 'minority'
• and a passage from Obama's own book about his early life in which he ran together various experiences with different females to create a 'composite woman', who in one case wanted to be 'black' but had to accept that she wasn't

The abruspt alignment of these strange phenomena in the political firmament coincides with Mark Steyn's brain to produce a new high-point in his already Himalayan analysis:

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have — hang on, let me get out my calculator — duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

Coincidentally, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission last week issued an “Enforcement Guidance” limiting the rights of employers to take into account the criminal convictions and arrest records of job applicants because of the “disparate impact” the consideration of such matters might have on minorities. That’s great news, isn’t it? So Harvard Law School can’t ask Elizabeth Warren if she’s ever held up a liquor store because, if they did, the faculty might be even less Cherokee than it is.

Good grief. Read the whole thing. And marvel at how the modern sprawling liberal state has so utterly lost its way.

I have never in these pages given you an (almost) full account of the expulsion from Moscow of a number of British diplomats back in May 1996 for - the Russians said - spying.

This was the first major spy row between Moscow and a 'Western' country following the end of the Cold War. And as today is the 16^th anniversary of these momentous diplomatic negotiations, it's time to share with you some of the drama. This expands on my account given to the Cambridge Diplomatic Oral History project:

My time in Moscow ended in a dramatic way in mid-1996.  I was due to finish my posting as Counsellor at the end of May, to move on to start as HMA Sarajevo. By then I was well in with the Russian MFA.  They liked me there and we were doing good work together, not least in supporting the Contact Group’s work in former Yugoslavia – it was the high water mark of Western-Russian post-Cold War co-operation. 

The MFA were in one of the Stalin skyscraper buildings in Moscow, and I offered them a leaving party deal. They had to provide the highest possible floor in the MFA building with a great view somewhere - the 38^th floor or so – for a party. They also provide the guests and I would provide the whisky. This was an easy deal to strike, subject to the Russians getting security clearance.

We were working away on this project happily when suddenly we got this strangled phone call on a Monday morning, demanding that Ambassador Andrew Wood come immediately to the MFA. A young desk officer who normally would have accompanied had just got back from seeing her fiancé in France and was feeling miserable, so I went with him.

As we drove from the Embassy building on the river opposite the Kremlin we noted a man in a leather jacket by the Embassy gates, videoing us. “This looks bad”, said the Ambassador. “Only a tourist!” I wittily replied. We arrived at the MFA. Another tough egg in leather jacket was videoing us.

We arrived in the office of the Deputy Foreign Minister. He got to the point: “We are expelling nine British diplomats for activities incompatible with their diplomatic status  They have to leave within two weeks”.  He (oddly) did not give us a list of the names but merely read them out and I noted them down – my own name (as it happened) was not on it.

“I assume this is some sort of stupid joke”, said the Ambassador angrily. “You must know perfectly well that to expel nine diplomats on this basis is absurd.” A vivid exchange ensued, but the Russian position was fixed. “It can not be excluded that the media will hear about this” said the Deputy Minister. This is diplomatic Russian for “Our new Xerox machine is glowing red hot as we run off the press releases!”

We went back to the Embassy and sent a flash telegram to London. Then called in the Nine and told them to their utter astonishment and in most cases dismay that they might well need to think about packing their suitcases within two weeks. The Russian side duly handed the media the story, which flashed round the world.    

It was a May Bank Holiday back in London. The system managed to crank up a letter from PM John Major to President Yeltsin remonstrating in strong terms about this unfriendly Russian move. This letter was passed by us to the Russian MFA for urgent onward transmission to the President.

Foreign Minister Primakov asked to meet the Ambassador to talk about this letter.  Andrew Wood wouldn’t let me go with him.  I said “I have my training needs – how can I learn to deal with this sort of crisis without training?”  He said “Forget your training. There are moments when Ambassadors deal with things privately”. And he was right.

The Ambassador reported back. Primakov had told him that the Prime Minister’s letter was putting Primakov in a difficult position: “If I show it to the President, I’ll have to show him various other documents, and he will be annoyed that Mr Major is wasting his time with this.  What do you want me to do?”

Andrew Wood grasped the point and agreed to get back to him on that one. Some spirited high-level exchanges between the Ambassador and No 10 followed. 

We retaliated by throwing out some Russians, and the Russians fudged on those of ours whom they had asked to leave; some of them were leaving anyway in the coming weeks and months as their tours finished. The Russian side ended up with an interest in downplaying the whole business, as their ‘external’ spies in London (SVR) did not want to be expelled just to help show how clever their internal intelligence (FBR) agencies had been. Old fashioned crass wedge-driving – it never fails.

I of course was leaving anyway, so a lot of people thought I had been among those kicked out.  It was a big Embassy, so there were always people coming and going or away on leave.  Journalists never found out the names of the people expelled.  The Embassy did a superb job in keeping the names private. I wonder how that would work nowadays in our social media blabbermouth world…

The fascinating thing about this story is the way the Negotiation was handled. It had many layers of Technique. The good relationship between Russia and Western countries following the end of the Cold War, now tipping into something very different. The exchanges between Major and Yeltsin, and Primakov and Andrew Wood. Divisions between the different Russian intelligence agencies, and indeed between ours. And so on.

But basically the Russians messed up here. They started 9-0 up and ended normal time at 4-4. Chastened by this experience they came up with a much better scheme under Putin: to name British diplomats accused of spying but not expel them and so invite retaliation, instead leaving them to twist in the bracing winds of Russian public humiliation.  Why had the Russians hit upon so many British supposed MI6 agents in one swoop? Explained (obliquely) here.

Happy days.

UPDATE    Comment from former colleague, who recalls the KGB playing a typical banal dirty trick:

Ah yes, I remember it well! I was foolish enough to offer a farewell party to two departing friends at the Embassy, and suffered the consequences. I returned home that afternoon from shopping with the family to find the lights of our apartment on and our voluminous fridge-freezer - full of British meat and other goodies from the Commissariat, to make up for the meagre Russian fayre - open, contents rapidly defrosting. Thank you, the Kingston Gas Board - aka KGB. Solution? Use it all that night in one humongous party for thirty people and toast in best Russian vodka those who had tried and failed to break our spirits at the Embassy! And how come they missed us both, my friend?

Update  That one didn't take long. Chen has left the Embassy with the US Ambassador, heading for a medical facility.

It obviously suited both sides to cut some sort of quick deal, including the Chinese expressing strong dissatisfaction with the US willingness to take Chen in, and (according to the FT account) noting that the US side has expressed 'contrition' and "promised to take measures to prevent a similar event from happening again".

That, depending on what if anything has been promised, contritely or otherwise,, could be a moderately embarrassing outcome for the Americans: "we are an island of freedom - just don't try to get in!". Against that Hillary Clinton's visit to Beijing can go ahead without this issue being the main story, a vital outcome for Obama (and indeed Hillary).

If Chen ends up leaving China for the USA, it could be better for the Chinese leadership than having him in the country as a photogenic symbol of opposition. Once outside he can be dismissed as someone cowardly who 'ran away'...

* * * * *

Here is a piece I wrote for Telegraph Blogs on the different Shrekish layers involved in the flight of Chen Guangcheng to the sanctuary of the US Embassy in Beijing.

By the way, don't you just hate the word 'dissident'? It defines someone in terms of what s/he opposes (here communist one-party rule) rather than what s/he wants, and thereby subtly downgrades the cause. Here is the Guardian describing Chen as a 'dissident physicist'. I recall with honour how back in 1984 the overweight FCO HR woman in flousy peasant-style clothes ticked me off for being argumentative when I told her how senior Embassy colleagues had dismissed my conversation with Yugoslav 'dissidents':

I left the post in 1984. Back at HQ I went along to Personnel to discuss my future. ‘You are getting a reputation for being argumentative,’ said the frumpy HR lady. ‘Wouldn’t you argue if you saw disaster looming but everyone else ignored it?’ I replied in some exasperation.

‘See, you’re arguing again,’ came the smug response.

I still remember this conversation so vividly, not least the supercilious but unimaginative female on the other side of the table. I pointed out to her that it had been annoying dealing with senior Embassy colleagues who instructed me to go out and talk to Yugoslav dissidents and get their devasting observations on the fecklessness of the Yugo-communists, but then could not spell when they wrote afterwards that these people were 'obviously dissaffected'.

"I find that hard to believe", she sniffed.

Indeed.

Back to Chen:

You might ask why a host embassy does not simply smuggle such sanctuary-seekers out of the country. First, it is not that easy to do so: it took amazing preparation for the British embassy in Moscow famously to "exfiltrate" top KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky out of Moscow in 1985 under the noses of the Soviet authorities. More importantly, such a move would be a profound abuse of long-established codes of diplomatic privilege, and risk far-reaching retaliation from a furious host government, on a scale which would make normal diplomatic life for the embassy concerned impossible for a good time to come.

Similarly, host governments almost never storm an embassy to get back by force their errant citizen. Why bother? That citizen is going nowhere fast. And the new situation creates intriguing new opportunities for making difficult demands and stiffening existing positions.

What factors might influence how long he stays under US protection? It all comes down to Shrek's layers:

A more productive way to look at the problem is via Shrek and onions: it will have many layers.

One layer is all about what happens to Chen Guangcheng himself. Another is the consequences of his new situation for his friends and family and supporters. Then there is the layer of what this episode might mean for wider moves towards or back from political freedom in China. And the layer of wider US and Western support for political freedom in China. And the layer of US/China bilateral trade deals, and Chinese support for the miserable eurozone. Did I mention tensions in the Korean peninsula and other Asian defence questions? And the layer of how to begin to tackle all these subjects and many more during the forthcoming visit of Hillary Clinton.

Not to forget the fat layer of domestic politics in both countries. Mitt Romney has been quick to urge President Obama to protect Chen Guangcheng, signalling that an outcome involving Chen being handed back to the unforgiving Chinese authorities will be a major US election Republican rallying cry. That is a cheap and predictable shot (and none the worse for that). It may help the Obama administration tell Beijing that for now Chen gets free board and lodging at the US taxpayers’ expense, allowing a more leisurely process to unfold as the two sides manoeuvre within and across different layers, maybe wrapping this problem up later as part of a wider inter-layer deal which can be presented by both as honourable.

Beijing too has its own political processes to manage in China’s seething online world. Whatever the outcome, the Communist leadership will not want to appear weak, the more so after so successfully belittling President Obama at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. This is not the China of 1989 which could, perhaps, be lent on by wily Henry Kissinger and persuaded to let Fang Lizhi depart. This is a tough, confident country aspiring to global leadership, determined to show the world and its own people that it can not be pushed around, under any circumstances.

So what next? It could all be over quickly if the Chinese and Americans both want it to be over quickly, and can find a way to get Chen out of immediate US protection which does not cause either side – or Chen himself – any lasting embarrassment. It could drag on for years. Or at least until after the US Presidential elections.

One thing is for sure. Chen soon will be heartily sick of bland US embassy frozen food.

While our political elite descends into fevered squabbling about who did what to which newspaper and vice versa, the United States and China are slugging it out in a battle for psychological (and military and commercial) dominance in the Pacific and South China Sea.

Knowing next to nothing about that part of the world, I defer to people like Walter Russell Mead who gives every impression of (a) understanding the underlying dynamics and (b) following a lot of detail. Plus he is no great Obama fan, so when he gives the Obama administration credit for doing a tough job well, it's worth thinking about what's happening.

The key theme in this energetic and interesting piece is that precisely because China is getting stronger, many smaller states in the region have an interest in cosying up to the USA in one way or the other:

Last fall, the Obama administration pulled off a diplomatic revolution in maritime Asia — the coastal and trading states on and around the Asian mainland that stretch in an arc from Korea and Japan, down to Australia and Indonesia, and sweep around through southeast Asia to India and Sri Lanka. Via Meadia has been following this story closely; it is the biggest geopolitical event since 9/11 and, while it builds on a set of US policies that go back at least as far as the Clinton administration and were further developed in the Bush years, the administration’s mix of policies represent a decisive turning point in 21st century Asian history.

The legacy press, still befuddled from drinking too much of the ‘US in decline’ Koolaid so widely peddled in recent years, has still not grasped just how audacious, risky and above all successful the new strategy is: the United States is building a Pacific entente to counter — though not to contain — the consequences of China’s economic growth and military posture in the region.

The US is lending its unequivocal support to the smaller Asian states who have boundary disputes with China in the resource-rich, strategically vital South China Sea. It has announced new deployments of troops and new military agreements as it extends its military network from northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, the Pacific islands) south and east to Australia, Singapore and beyond. It continues to deepen its strategic relation with India — Asia’s other nuclear superpower with a billion plus citizens and a country which openly states that the purpose of its (growing) nuclear arsenal is to balance China.

All of which makes the dramatic escape of Chen Guangcheng in the general direction of the US Embassy in Beijing so extraordinary:

Chen’s flight to the embassy will further deepen the angry paranoia in some circles; it will seem obvious to some that he could not have made this escape without more help than a handful of dissidents could provide, and the timing is so spectacular that it must be part of some secret, long prepared American scheme.

Put these ‘facts’ together with the new American assertiveness in the region, and many serious people in China will draw the conclusion that the US is trying to do to China what it did to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, they will think we are perilously close to success — so close, that any further concessions and retreats must be resisted as a matter of life and death.

Read the whole thing. Imposingly smart in looking at immediate diplomacy and Big Picture considerations alike.

My conclusion? Mr Chen will be becalmed in US diplomatic protection for some good time to come.

Should we all be 'altruistic'? And if so, why?

Some observations from me on this ever-fascinating subject over at Commentator:

Think too about the force of a morality founded in self-respect and free trade between free people. What’s the alternative? The beggar says: “I exist, and I have misfortune. Please give me money, even though I’ll do nothing for you in return.”

What do you do to such people by tossing some money to them? Do you promote their self-reliance and thus their self-respect? If some prissy Leftist appears telling you that basic morality compels you to help the beggar or else, does that not make you a slave - and the sly beggar the master?

Conclusion? Give away as much or as little of your wealth and energy as you like. Help elderly people across the road, if they ask for help. No-one compels you to be a selfish hoarder. If you have some good fortune, why not share it if that’s what you like doing? Be generous in spirit and deed.

But note that generosity has many forms, including commitment and creativity. Don’t let others define for you the form and limits of your generosity. And, above all, remember where any wealth comes from:

News that Chinese democracy supporter Chen Guangcheng has sought asylum in the US Embassy in Beijing prompts me to link again to a piece I write for DIPLOMAT magazine about famed episodes of Embassies sheltering people fleeing from their own government.

Not forgetting the diplomacy of Wonder Woman:

This theme features in The Hiketeia, a graphic novel turning on the moral responsibilities of asylum. A mysterious young woman arrives at the Themiscyran embassy and seeks asylum under hiketeia, a ritual of the ancient Greeks involving mutual obligations of supplication and protection. Princess Diana (aka Wonder Woman) uneasily accepts, only to find herself dragged into a dark struggle of vengeance and justice – and a fierce battle with Batman.

These Embassy asylum issues can drag on. The world record is 15 YEARS:

The world record for someone staying inside an embassy – to the vexation of the host government – is 15 years, set by fiercely anti-communist Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty. In 1956 in Hungary he was freed from prison during the brief pro-democracy revolution, but when Soviet forces invaded the country a few days later, he sought sanctuary in the United States Embassy. There he stayed until 1971, when he was allowed to leave the country under Ostpolitik, never to return...

Even communist leaders have tried the Embassy escape route:

One excellent case was the peregrinating disgraced East German communist leader, Erich Honecker. Notorious for his unwavering confidence in Marxism even as it crashed around him in 1989 – ‘the Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not yet removed’– he ended up in Moscow after East Germany collapsed in 1989, only to find the Soviet Union too collapsing. With the German authorities calling for him to return home to answer for communist crimes, he fled to the Embassy of Chile where he knew the Ambassador. After months of undignified tomfoolery, he was finally sent back to Germany by the Russian authorities to face trial, but then was allowed to travel to Chile to die as his health failed.

This one has the potential to turn into a vast diplomatic and political sensation, with unfathomable implications for US/China relations.

How can the Americans bundle him out of the door to face certain abuse? Smuggling him out of the country in a diplomatic bag would be a grave abuse of international law and cause more trouble than it solves. And why should the Chinese leadership even consider making any concessions to someone who is embarrassing them so determinedly?

Maybe a dirty quick deal will be cut to find a face-saving formula for all concerned. Or not.

Here is my latest Telegraph blog piece, this time on the dilemmas in negotiating with a country such as North Korea where the usual options of Persuasion, Carrot or Stick seem to make little impact:

Many humans (and even some governments) aren’t donkeys. So another layer of analysis applies. As we saw in the Vietnam war, it was not only about the size of the heavy US bombing stick. The communist Vietnamese offered another challenge. In effect they told Washington that they would tolerate more pain than the Americans were ready to impose. They were, in a word, tougher. Of course it’s easier to present a tough face to the world when you do not have to grapple with domestic public opinion or forthcoming elections. Nonetheless they were indeed very tough. And duly won.

So to North Korea. Unlike Syria which is in some sense a ‘normal’ part of the international community and therefore more vulnerable to sanctions and the annoyance of its neighbours, North Korea is largely impervious to threats. Its puny trade is mainly with Asian partners (notably China) that won’t impose sanctions. Plus the South Korean capital is within close range of an obliterating attack.

Hence Washington – under any management – oscillates unhappily between a policy of ‘engagement’ and ‘isolation’. When the cycle calls for ‘engagement’ the best available carrot is food aid linked to some sort of bilateral process where available. When the cycle calls for isolation because the North Koreans won’t cooperate, all that stops and looks lame: there are few if any meaningful sticks. As now. Round and round it goes.

This line in the Guardian piece caught my eye:

One of Obama's deputy national security advisers, Ben Rhodes, denied that the administration's dealings with North Korea have been a failure. He argued that the president has taken a tougher stand with Pyongyang than the Bush administration because Washington will not now deliver the promised food aid … Asked if it is proper to leave ordinary North Koreans to go hungry or even starve because the actions of their government, Rhodes said that it is the regime in Pyongyang "that is holding its own people hostage".

This is a really hard dilemma in foreign policy. Do we treat the victims of evil regimes as people we ought to help, come what may? Or let them suffer in the hope that they themselves will rise up and end their agony? (See eg Syria.)

If we send in food aid to North Korea, the regime will be strengthened. If we don’t, more people die. The psychological game played by the North Korean regime here is implacably cruel. They are hoping that we care more for North Korean people than they do.

Sometimes we do care, sometimes we don't. Either way the regime there does not lose.

Of course the West's real negotiation here is with China and (to a lesser degree Russia). The Chinese leadership probably despise the North Koreans, but insist that any change there happens only on Chinese terms. Which tends to mean that the harder the West/USA presses for change, the more the Chinese will find ways to thwart it, just to show how tough and smart they are.

Quite what will happen if one day the North Koreans rise up against the regime and bring the place crashing down remains to be seen: will Beijing end up looking ridiculous for backing such losers, or simply use its economic muscle to pile in and assert some sort of new control?

When I was in Moscow I met a Russian diplomat who had had only three overseas postings - all in North Korea! That's Russian diplomatic specialisation for you. He looked very worn down by the experience

Update   I now also have a piece over at Commentator which elaborates on the material below.

* * * * *

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has pronounced on a case brought against Russia by a number of Polish relatives of victims of the Katyn Massacres.

Even though on some issues Russia was not found to have been in breach of its international law obligations, the judgement is bleak reading for Moscow. Some highlights (my emphasis):

The Court is not convinced that a public and transparent investigation into the crimes of the previous totalitarian regime could have compromised the national security interests of the contemporary democratic Russian Federation, especially taking into account that the responsibility of the Soviet authorities for that crime has been acknowledged at the highest political level. Moreover, the decision to classify the document appears to have been at variance with the requirements of the Russian law, in that section 7 of the State Secrets Act expressly precluded any information about violations of human rights by State officials from being classified. In sum, the Court finds likewise no substantive grounds which could have justified the Russian Government’s refusal to produce a copy of the requested decision.

In the light of the above considerations, the Court concludes that the Russian Government breached their obligations under Article 38 of the Convention on account of their failure to submit a copy of the requested document.

… The Court accepts that the mass murder of Polish prisoners by the Soviet secret police had the features of a war crime. Both the Hague Convention IV of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1929 prohibited acts of violence and cruelty against war prisoners and the murder of prisoners of war constituted a “war crime” within the meaning of Article 6 (b) of the Nuremberg Charter of 1945. Although the USSR was not a party to the Hague or Geneva Conventions, the obligation to treat prisoners humanely and abstain from killing them clearly formed part of the international customary law which it had a duty to respect.

 … The applicants’ expectations and hopes of having the circumstances of the Katyn massacre elucidated had been further dashed by the Russian courts’ decisions declaring that it had not been established what had happened to their relatives after they had been placed “at the disposal” of the NKVD. Those findings represented a sheer denial of the basic historical facts and were tantamount to informing a group of relatives of Holocaust victims that the victims must be considered unaccounted for as their fate could only be traced to the dead-end track of a concentration camp because the documents had been destroyed by the Nazi authorities

 … The Court is struck by the apparent reluctance of the Russian authorities to recognise the reality of the Katyn massacre, to which the applicants’ relatives had fallen victims

 … The Court considers that the approach chosen by the Russian military courts which consisted in maintaining, to the applicants’ face and contrary to the established historic facts, that the applicants’ relatives had somehow vanished in the Soviet camps, demonstrated a callous disregard for the applicants’ concerns and deliberate obfuscation of the circumstances of the Katyn massacre.

 … On 26 November 2010 the Russian Duma adopted a statement on the Katyn tragedy and its victims, in which it recognised that the Polish prisoners-of-war had been shot dead and that their death on the USSR territory had been “an arbitrary act by the totalitarian State”. It also considered necessary “to continue studying the archives, verifying the lists of victims, restoring the good names of those who perished in Katyn and other places, and uncovering the circumstances of the tragedy”. However, the declaration did not lead to a re-opening of the investigation, declassification of its materials, including the decision on its discontinuation, or any attempts on the part of the Russian authorities to establish direct contacts with the victims of the Katyn massacre and involve them into the elucidation of its circumstances. Being a mere political declaration without any visible follow-up, it did little to alleviate the feeling of frustration, since the previously made allegations that the applicants’ relatives might have been criminally responsible, were not explicitly dismissed. The Court is struck by the Russian authorities’ continued complacency in the face of the applicants’ anguish and distress, especially as they are becoming more and more fragile by virtue of their age.

By acknowledging that the applicants’ relatives had been held prisoners in the Soviet camps but declaring that their subsequent fate could not be elucidated, the Russian courts denied the reality of summary executions that had been carried out in the Katyn forest and at other mass murder sites. The Court considers that such approach chosen by the Russian authorities has been contrary to the fundamental values of the Convention and must have exacerbated the applicants’ suffering.

… In sum, the Court finds that the applicants were left to bear the brunt of the efforts to uncover any facts relating to the manner in which their relatives died, whereas the Russian authorities demonstrated a flagrant, continuous and callous disregard for their concerns and anxieties. The Court therefore considers that the manner in which the applicants’ enquiries have been dealt with by the Russian authorities has attained the minimum level of severity to be considered inhuman treatment within the meaning of Article 3 of the Convention.

Read the whole judgement here.

The problem for the Russian state is simple. It insists that it can not be held responsible for the crimes of the Stalin period. In part because it wants to show that there has been substantive discontinuity between the USSR and the New Russia. In part because it fears unending law suits over Katyn and other WW2 war crimes. Indeed, the Russian state has never even accepted that Katyn was a ‘war crime’. And is there evidence out there that the Soviet Union collaborated with the Nazis in effecting this horror? That would be hugely embarrassing for Moscow.

You might think that the fact of insisting that Russia is not responsible for USSR war crimes might make it easier to throw open the whole ghastly story. You’d be wrong. By keeping secret extensive Soviet archives on Katyn and, as the Court convincingly argues, by behaving in an odious way in response to many requests form relatives of the victims for further information, the Russian state takes firm moral and legal ownership of it.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, let’s remember that Katyn was a process, not an event. It is not easy to murder over 20,000 people. So they wheeled out Vasili Blokhin, the most prolific murderer in human history:

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.

Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher's apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform, then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2.25 ACP pistol...

His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.

As I previously have put it:

Nazism's collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism's collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply 'had' to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way. Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler's lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity - that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions. (See also Norway’s Anders Breivik: sane or not? Or in some category far beyond either?)

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to do it.

In short any normal person has to 'equate' Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them. If anything the very nihilistic 'rationality' of Communism makes it even worse.

The ECHR got this one right. The continuing refusal of Moscow in general (and Vladimir Putin in particular) to come to terms with the supreme example of Soviet wickedness, the Katyn Massacre, is one of the great moral calamities of our times.

OK, it's been done a million times before, but it never fails to amuse if done well.

And this one on Ken Livingstone and his taxes is a fine satirical effort.

Wait for the final magnificent line:

Diligent readers know how I hate the evil Precautionary Principle:

My professional concern about PP is that far from promoting policy common sense it can diminish it.

Take the refurbishment of the British Ambassador's residence in Belgrade back in 2001. The building had been neglected during the long Milosevic years. Everything which could be painted was either Excrement Brown or Rose Pink. The main reception room looked like the forlorn warehouse where all the worst sofas and curtains in the FCO crawled away to die in shame.

So it was agreed that we should upgrade things in the next couple of years. But we had not reckoned with "what if" PP as articulated by the FCO works people...

One idea we had was to remove the vile dark sticky polish and ugly carpets from the original nice woodblock floors and go for a lightly coloured, varnished modern look. But when we asked for this to be done along the upstairs landing we met: "what if a child skids and shoots up and over the landing and plummets down and dies?!"

We asked for the kitchen to have something other than industrial strip lighting, to make it a more pleasant place to work. "What if one of the cooks is ill and cuts himself and drips infected blood into food being prepared for a member of the Royal Family?!"

Work began to replace the nasty tin sentry box for our local staff Serb security team with a small brick building. I happened to stop by and asked why the roof was such a fatuous design. "It is being made of reinforced concrete. What if terrorists attack and try to break in through the ceiling?"

In each case I had to order them all to stop being ridiculous and come to a calm, elegant solution. Had I not done so the taxpayer probably would have had a worse and more expensive outcome.

Yet countless stupidities are not stopped. How does one cost this mess?

The Health and Safety industry is just the armed wing of the Emotional Correctness tendency. The issue is not about which standards in fact apply: it's about controlling who decides, and who then enforces.

Next time you hear someone emoting correctly on BBC that "even if we save only one life, the extra cost is worth it", just scream RUBBISH - LIAR.

Every day we make a totally different calculation, that some lives will be lost for wider social utility: we don't impose a 5 mph speed-limit. Likewise in the NHS we actually deliberately let some people die to save money for others. For state/NHS bean-counters, that's not a bug - it's a key feature.

These issues are all about risk management. Take building safety codes. The 'higher' the safety standards (more fire staircases, more sprinkler systems etc) the costlier the building. This will lead to fewer 'safer' buildings being built and/or displace some people into older, less 'safe' buildings. We can measure what we can measure. The necessary displacement effects are no less real, but hard to calculate so get left out.

Here via Instapundit is a superb article (click on the ecgi button) about the way different New York safety standards down the decades may or may not have contributed to casualty levels on 9/11. Were the World Trade Centre towers well built because so many people in fact escaped? Or were they badly built because so many people ended up trapped in the floors above the planes' impact?

It prompts this comment from Steve Postrel:

The economist’s perspective: If you never have an accident or disaster, your precautions are too strict. One Triangle fire and one WTC disaster over the observed timespan may well be optimal or too few when balanced against the present value of the costs of having codes strict enough to prevent such tragedies.

If you prefer not to put dollar values on human life, shift to risk/risk analysis and note that a) wealthier is generally healthier, b) building codes add to costs and reduce real wealth (gross of the prevented losses), and therefore c) building codes strict enough to prevent ever having something like the WTC collapse may well kill more people over time than the collapse itself. Or you can look at how costlier building codes lead to an increase in the average age of structures (all else equal) and so may result in more people spending time in older, less-safe buildings.

You’d need to do detailed empirical work to tell what the magnitudes are for these effects; possibly the optimum safety level is more stringent than what we have now. My armchair guess is that it goes the other way, though.

The classic socialist way to deal with such questions is that state bureaucrats decide. Their calculations and risk-management analyses stay well hidden, leaving the whole business open to corrupt 'regulatory capture' by different untransparent greedy vested interests (corporations, NGOs).

Why not let markets have far more of a role by pushing risk on to people, not rules?

Example.

Prices in Tesco are higher than they need to be, to pass on to all of us the cost of Tesco insuring itself against idiotic tort litigation brought by someone slipping on a spilled yoghurt. This need no longer be the case: it's an information management problem, highly suited to new IT.

Thus I could sign a long-term agreement with Tesco promising not to sue them for negligence in a long list of circumstances. In return for that assurance, Tesco would need lower insurance premiums and so could offer me lower prices. In other words, those people who want to reserve to themselves the right to sue Tesco for footling accidents should pay for it. Fair, huh?

Other supermarkets seeing this will compete to calculate and spread the risks in ever-more finely calibrated ways. The consumer decides for himself/herself how much risk he/she wants to pay for. Consumers and supermarkets win, lawyers and bureaucrats lose. Hurrah.

This principle can be applied to safety regulations, if they are made transparent. If building A offers higher safety and higher prices than building B, people can choose which building to use.

A huge advantage of such ideas is that they compel people to lift their level of responsibility. Which is why they will be frantically opposed by the Teacher, Guardian and Enforcer categories (maybe alas Judges and Angels too) of Moral DNA owners who fear losing their self-proclaimed right to frame other people's morality and choices.

You all are craving for a fine example of vacuous fawning over capitalism?

Search no more. Here is my latest Commentator article exploring how Marx's theory of Surplus Value applies to airport check-in procedures.

One Ann Kittenplan sees some sort of equivalence between 'tax avoidance' and benefit fraud: see her comments on my post about the moral vacuum that is Graham Norton, including:

I do have a problem with unfairness...

a) what are the relative costs to the economy of benefit fraud, tax avoidance, and tax evasion?
b) What is the relative coverage given to benefit fraud, tax avoidance, and tax evasion?

If the issue was lawbreaking then it is reasonable to expect a proportionate focus on tax avoidance (the spirit of the law) and evasion in a subsequent post isn't it?

For instance, what about the topical practice of being paid via a limited company? Tax avoidance. How about a post on that and how it differs from the actions outlined in the OP

Let's rise to the challenge.

Ever since we can remember the state in its wisdom has asserted to itself the right to use force to take money away from people to spend on its own purposes. Here's a handy if lighthearted guide to the history of tax, going right back to ancient Egypt's cooking oil tax and Lady Godiva.

Most of the taxes thereby extracted down the centuries have been taken in conditions of no democracy whatsoever. I rule, I need money, ergo I tax. I'm strong, you're weak, you pay me. Some of the money thereby raised has gone on common purposes (roads, armies); some has gone to enrich the ruler and his tax-collectors.

If you are at all interested in how we got to where we are now on taxation and many other phenomena, read this superb book by James Scott which describes how the growing need for taxation - and therefore measurement - helped define all sorts of things, including our very names: 

As James Scott explains, the emerging French state centralised in Paris wanted more money. So it taxed (say) grain. But this meant imposing nationally standardised ways to measure precisely how much grain had been paid in tax (and then demanding a nationally standardised system of names to make sure that everyone had paid). Hence the ejecting of France's myriad local weights and measures, and the arrival of our friend the kilogram.

It turns out that people do not like the state demanding money with menaces for purposes which are not necessarily wise or properly run, and that in a democracy the people have some modest say in how much money the state takes. There never have been enough 'rich' people to pay the taxes the voracious state requires, so not-so-rich people too have to cough up. Over time all sorts of complicated rules have emerged to set down the conditions under which people pay.

Mulling over this situation, the state acknowledges a problem. It wants lots of taxes. But it also mustn't overdo things (lest the rabble revolt) and it needs to keep the goose laying golden eggs. So it craftily sets up various incentives for savings, using the tax system: if you invest in X (say an ISA) you pay less tax than you otherwise might do. Plus incentives for setting up a new business (if you risk your own money and effort, you should be 'encouraged'). Plus incentives to attract wealthy people to come and live in the UK - the more of them we have, the more money they'll spend here which creates work for others. Cross the channel to France and buy a load of booze and you can bring it back tax free.

And so on.

In its blundering stupidity and inability to stop growing, the modern state in the UK and USA has created labyrinths of tax complexity which are navigable only by expert accountants who do nothing much else and expect to be paid for their efforts. It is worthwhile for wealthier people to use such accountants to find ways fully compatible with the law to advise how best to arrange their affars to minimise tax payments.

NB this does not mean that 'society'  or 'the economy' are losing out. 'Society' and 'the economy' are not the state, however much some people seem to identify them.

Wealthy people usually don't hide their money under the bed. They instal fancy new kitchens or buy expensive cars or use bespoke tailors and dress designers. They buy iPads and download lots of apps, creating work for sassy app designers where we have a global lead. Their money, in short, sloshes around the economy and ends up in other people's pockets no less effectively (and in my view more effectively) than it would if the state had grabbed even larger slabs of it.

So to respond to Ann Kittenplan:

I have no idea what tax evasion (ie illegally avoiding paying tax) 'costs' the economy. Tax evasion takes many forms.

There will be a good number of criminals purloining money illegally. Then there is the stunning phenomenon of carousel fraud, involving the tax system itself and its interaction with eg 'climate change' tax and other unwise financial incentives. Not to forget the billions of pounds 'lost' to the state by cigarette and other smuggling, another industry created directly by huge tax rates.

Sure, there will be a micro number of oligarchs who have billions tucked away far from the taxperson's grasp. But most wealthy people living openly in the UK are wealthy enough to pay accountants a lot of money to find ways to make sure that everything they do is squared away with UK law in all its sprawling complexity.

So I tend to be wary of the very notion that not paying tax 'costs' the economy anything. Huge amounts of tax evasion are found all around us in home helps and smaller traders getting paid in cash and then spending their money without declaring it. You might well argue that this 'costs' the economy nothing - it is the economy!

Illegal tax evasion does not help the state, true. But the modern state is veering out of control, and losing legitimacy. So it's not surprising that people will strain not to subsidise it.

Tax avoidance is another thing altogether. It is no more than people using the rights the state has given them to organise their affairs in ways which reduce their tax burden, thereby freeing up more of their money to invest in other things and so (in principle) create new working opportunities for others. The law deliberately creates certain incentives in this sense - using those incentives complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law.

So Ken Livingstone and other famous socialists such as myself who have our own companies are directly benefiting the economy by doing just that. (Although in Ken's case some people think that he needs to answer some questions as to the propriety of certain activities done by his company.)

So far so obvious.

What about benefit fraud? It seems to me that this is in a different moral category. It involves people who are not working stealing from people who are working.

If you work hard (eg as a plumber or even as a banker) but avoid paying all the tax due, you are at least (a) working, ie paying your own way in life, and (b) contributing to society via your work and the wealth your work generates. The benefit cheat who is not working (or who is working but still claiming benefits) is primarily a leech, a second-hander explicitly exploiting fellow citizens' good will.

This explains why vox pop radio phone-ins feature so many animated 'ordinary' people indignant about benefit fraud. They see it in their own communities, and feel it quite differently.

Likewise you hear heartbreaking stories about small business people driven to distraction if not bankruptcy by oppressive tax rules and practices and other state impositions which add amazing costs to even the simplest arrangements (thereby reducing the likelihood of people being employed). You'd have to be stupid to employ someone in a small business these days. Much better to engage them as an outsourced company or sole trader and let them take the administrative hassle.

Indeed, the 'economy' increasingly is driven by these micro-businesses, one good reason why the state will proceed very carefully in stepping up tax rates on these people. It will be both damaging to any growth prospects we still may have, and incredibly unpopular with the most dynamic risk-ready section of the population.

In short. I have sympathy with people who for reasons of genuine ill-health simply can't work. I have notably less sympathy with people who are not sick but don't work at all. If they can not find a regular job and really are unable to find basic paid employment even of a part-time nature, they should go outside and do volunteer work or even pick up litter for a few hours each day. They are getting unearned benefits from society to which I am contributing thousands of pounds a month - society should get some benefit back from them. Plus they will feel better about themselves if they are doing something useful for their neighbours and local communities.

Here, of course, the state steps in once again to make even such ad hoc 'free' work problematic. You can't help out at schools or in the NHS without exhaustive checks to ensure you're not a perv. You can't pick up litter without Health and Safety training. You can't do anything which might undercut the status of those with state jobs. Blah blah.

Cheating? Fairness? In my view More State = a trend towards More Cheating and Less Fairness.

Does that answer the questions?

I have written something for Telegraph Blogs about Trust in Europe (and scorpions). I'l put up the link when there is one.

It refers to this piece by Matthias Machnig, which, strive as I do, I simply cannot understand:

Economic growth has reached the limits of what is ecologically viable. The financial industry is now decoupled from the real economy, and the financial markets have mutated into a self-referential system. The splitting of labour markets into well-paid jobs and casual employment is creating a serious social divide. And in the face of this development, democracy is entering a crisis of legitimation and confidence.

We need a new understanding of global and social progress. We have to reinvent the idea of progress. It must become a project for hope and for the future again. Where progress fails to deliver hope, prosperity for all, a better quality of life and more participation, democracy and progress soon find themselves on a collision course. I firmly believe that new progress is possible as a new, forward-looking project, which can succeed provided we imbue progress with its productive, liberating power again and define the direction it must take.

The future lies open before us. This is an opportunity to change our existing model of progress. Progress of any kind is always new: but not everything that is new counts as progress.

That last point seems to make some sense. But there's more. Much more:

Only in such a democracy, founded on solidarity, can the idea of a society committed to the new progress be taken forward and developed. The strengthening of co-determination rights in business and industry, the establishment of direct democratic mechanisms in legislation, the extension of the rights of the European Parliament and the guarantee of equal opportunities based on sound social and education policies – these are just the beginnings of a comprehensive democratization of society, of a society committed to the new progress.

In this way the new progress can become a project for hope and for the future, a cause for which it is worth entering the arena of political debate. It rejects the conservative belief that all we need to do is to nurture the status quo and develop it further. It rejects the liberal belief that the hope of upward mobility and social participation is a matter for the markets to sort out. It distances itself from “green” thinking, which preaches self-denial from a position of material security. And it distances itself from “left” thinking, which persists in lamenting the present sorry state of affairs instead of taking the initiative and fighting for a better world.

He uses the empty exhortatory word must six times, and need five times.

Ghastly.

This sort of exhaltation of the power of the state to correct its own messes as they get bigger and bigger always reminds me of the podgy Slovenian Marxist Kardelj, whose rambling ideas created the jungle of socialist self-management jargon and process which so enchanted sundry Western useful idiots before Yugoslavia crashed. Oh - and David Miliband too:

Crawford's First Law of Bureaucracy: The capacity of a Ministry to do anything useful strategically is in indirect proportion to the amount of time it spends preparing its strategies.

A Yugoslav joke about the endless and pointless rearrangements of the communist self-management system by chief ideologue Kardelj.

Kardelj was asked how to cure a sick cow. He advised cooling it right down with ice-packs. The cow got worse.

He recommended heating it right up with blankets and electric fires. The cow got worse.

He recommended feeding it masses of extra food. The cow got worse.

He recommended starving it. The cow died.

"Boze boze, what a tragedy! I am a skilled vet and I had so many more cures to propose...!"

Here's a short piece by Raedwald on little wooden doll stereotypes of Polish Jews:

But this trip, for the first time, I briefly explored the old ghetto, and visited one of the old synagogues, where I listened briefly to a young American woman talking history to a small group. She offered the fact of these dolls, available everywhere, and often depicted holding money, as evidence that Poles were "still anti-Jewish". Restraining the impulse to respond "Tsshk - always the victim already ..." I quickly moved away. 

And here's a gallop through the ups and downs of the Jewish presence in Poland down the centuries. It helpfully reminds us that explicit anti-semitism was part of the Polish Communist Party's policy after WW2.

Meanwhile now in Warsaw a splendid new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being built, a huge project which is expected to become a major visitor attraction in that part of Europe. Part of the thinking here is that Auschwitz and the other creepy Nazi concentration camp sites in Poland and elsewhere remind us only how Europe's Jews died - the point of the new museum is to celebrate how they lived.

Back in 2009 I wrote here about Nasty Polish Right-wing Antisemitism:

All this history and far more remains highly controversial, not least because it suits a lot of people with things to hide to keep things that way.

What if any conclusions one way or the other might be drawn about the massacre by local Poles of some 400 Jews at Jedwabne in 1941? Or the fact that so many Poles were executed by the Nazis for protecting Poles? Or the later Kielce pogrom in 1946 - a horror inspired by the communist secret police?

Was/is modern antisemitism in Poland some sort of aberration reflecting wider European intellectual trends?

Or was it something much deeper in the Polish national psyche, waiting for its horrible chance to erupt?

Is Poland better or worse in these respects than eg France or Germany?

What about the role of individuals such as Helena Wolinska-Brus? She was an unrepentant post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor from a Polish Jewish family who left Poland in the antisemitic Party campaigns of 1968 and ended up in the UK. Until her death last year she successfully fought extradition back to democratic Poland to face justice on her Stalin-era judicial crimes, mendaciously citing Polish antisemitism as one reason she would not get a fair trial.

One of the other points I made there was the following:

... what about basic nomenclature?

Just as the denizens of Republika Srpska call themselves 'Bosnian Serbs' rather than Serbian Bosnians, thereby emphasising their ultimate Serbitude rather than their Bosnian-ness, should we be talking about Polish Jews or Jewish Poles?

The very words we use silently and slyly can denote sameness or 'other-ness'. Would a Museum of the History of Jewish Poles have different exhibitions? Or be able to raise international funding?

Thanks to the democratic miracle of #Twitter I have ended up in an unlikely place, namely the website of Labour Teachers (Labour at the chalkface).

I was pointed in this direction by a Tweet picking up on my Commentator piece about teaching grammar.

And there I find a really good piece by one oldandrew on how Labour (and the rest of us) have ended up having the wrong sort of arguments about education:

Traditionalists and elitists hold what are often recognised as “right-wing” positions. Radicals and egalitarians are typically described as “left-wing” positions. However, traditionalism and elitism are not the same position at all, nor are radicalism and egalitarianism. A lot of reason for the poor quality of much education debate is due to attempts to conflate this into a single spectrum, where the two alternatives are the “right-right” position of combined elitism and traditionalism and the “left-left” position of egalitarianism and radicalism.

He develops this argument with a clever diagram, which is better seen than explained. He concludes by arguing (convincingly) that Labour has messed up its own approach:

... This is the worst possible position, because it is a middle class vision of what working class families should want, which ignores the concerns of middle class voters while nevertheless patronising working class voters. The party needs to recognise that parents from all backgrounds have aspirations for their children, and that this requires a whole-hearted advocacy of academic standards for all. It is simply not good enough to go into elections promising great opportunities for “other people’s children”.

Labour needs a vision of aspiration in education that will mean something to all voters and the most important test of this will be a willingness for Labour politicians to argue that the things they want for

Not that I am any expert on education policies on the grand scale, but that analysis seems to make sense.

What is baffling in the whole business is that after running state-supported education for well over 100 years we still don't agree on what works. If we end up in a situation where poor children in rural Poland can be taught to a high level the complexities of Polish grammar (and there are plenty of them), what are we to make of system in which a fairly posh Oxford graduate in English(!) joins the FCO and serves up the word sebatical in a draft report? That person has gone through the whole system but has missed something pretty damn big about the English language.

This attitude now allows tens of thousands of young people to leave school here with barely functional literacy - a horrible social problem for all of us, a horrible betrayal of them and a horrible indictment of all that lumbering investment in state education.

Some teaching methods just work better than others. Many of them may even be 'traditional'. Until the smirking progressives in our midst stop denying reality just because 'traditional' people support it, the disaster will only grow.

By the way, when I lambasted the nonsense of Michael Rosen's views on grammar I had not realised that this man has hard-core communist form. Well done oldandrew for refreshing honesty on this score too:

It is often simply assumed that the opinions of a politician are worthless because they are “political” and the opinions of an educationalist, education journalist or education commentator are not. Michael Gove will always be identified as a Tory; David Blunkett as New Labour.

But when a non-politician talks about education, whether they are an academic, journalist or activist, their politics are considered incidental to their views. This is even the case for those education commentators who have a history of involvement in politics and extremist politics.

I for one would love it if next time Michael Rosen is on the radio arguing against teaching children to read he was described as “an associate of the SWP” or “a former candidate for Respect” rather than as “a children’s author”.

Me too. What an education that would be.

A good Guardian newsfeed on the developments in Moscow as demonstrators are arrested gives us this:

Andrei Buzin, an election expert at Golos, said that the falsifications were not widespread enough to have left Putin with less than 50% of the vote and require a run-off, but the vote was still skewed. "I wouldn't call these elections free or fair," Buzin said.

This is an important point. It is scarcely surprising that there have been crass abuses in an election on this scale, and plenty of them. But they did not happen (apparently) on a scale big enough to matter, ie to the point of seriously calling into question the strong Putin first-round victory.

In other words, Putin won because many millions of Russians really did vote for him and not for any of other candidates who in their different ways did offer alternative policies for Russia (some of them insane). That gives the result a substantive legitimacy which can not be wished away.

That's the reality.

Another reality is that unless something utterly extraordinary happens, protests against this result in Moscow and elsewhere will not build up into a significant Putin-threatening nationwide movement. Too many Russians either don't care, or if they do care prefer Putin to carry on.

The threat to Putin's position (if there is a threat) comes rather from a growing sense among the intellectual elite in Moscow and elsewhere that Russia is underperforming and letting itself down, above all through corruption. But even then a goodly proportion of those intellectuals will favour radical 'nationalist' solutions to these problems rather than more 'Western-style' pluralism and transparency.

If there is ever to be a showdown which leads to Putin's untimely fall from power it's much more likely to be in the long, dark Kremlin corridors within the ruling establishment, rather than a doomed attempt by Russian protesters to be Western Occupiers or Ukrainian-style Orange revolutionaries.

Leading UK journalist Angus Roxburgh has written a book about Putin and Putinism, drawing on his extensive experience in Russia (including a stint as a media adviser to the Putin team):

The book is good in revealing all sorts of fascinating stories about the Putin period. My favourite is the one where Putin produces a dog which sniffs Angela Merkel's legs, Putin knowing that Merkel is scared of dogs.

But the book annoyingly strives to find an angle to balance the KGB-isation of Russia with the argument that in responding to the collapse of Russia the West has been 'insensitive'.

Ha ha ha!

Here's an extract my review over at LSE EUROPP:

The problem with this book is that Roxburgh seems to think that Americans and Europeans who are unimpressed with this sort of Russia are somehow misguided. Explaining Putin’s policies and instincts in terms of his fanatical Soviet KGB training is not enough. He strains for a grand unifying theme to explain why Putin and Russia have moved back towards this corrupt unstable autocracy. He claims to find the answer in the claim that the West‘s (and especially Washington’s) failure to ‘understand’ Russia has led to ‘patronising’ and ‘insensitive’ policies which have somehow provoked the Russian elite to behave badly. We are all guilty.

This thesis is launched as the book begins, in a facile portrayal of the Western policy approach in the early Yeltsin years. It recycles without question a familiar but banal argument that the West crassly imposed capitalist ‘shock therapy’ on Russia. In fact the shock and ensuing confusion and (yes) poverty for many millions of Russians came about because the Soviet system itself abruptly keeled over. Ministries emptied out. The machine stopped.

There was no policy tool-box for dealing with this situation. Far from being patronizing or prescriptive, Western governments fell over themselves to be helpful and accommodating to Russia’s new leaders. After WW2 we ran extensive courses for influential Germans in ‘de-Nazification’. Nothing comparable by way of de-communistification was even contemplated for Russia, let alone for the rest of the Soviet Union. We did not even insist as a reasonable price for huge programmes of assistance that Lenin, the supreme symbol of communist terror, be taken from Red Square and given a decent burial.

Throughout the book Roxburgh finds himself torn between saying that we were too tough, or not tough enough. Somehow after all those supposedly patronising Western experts turned up in Moscow the Russian economy in a few years’ time was growing strongly, private initiative flourishing as never before. He seems to think that Western governments should have called for war crimes trials of senior Russians involved in smashing Chechnya; how ‘insensitive’ would that have been? Worst, he uncritically rehashes the paranoid Soviet/Putinistic assertion that the West has been ‘encircling’ Russia.

This last claim needs nailing. It takes Russia’s ‘concerns’ as the defining norm and relegates everyone else’s: Russia ‘encircles’ much of the world. Anything which happens across nine+ time zones somewhere near Russia can be presented by self-serving Russian extremists as ‘anti-Russia encirclement’.

The strategic policy issue is simple. For seventy years the Soviet Union pumped out violence, corruption and lies on an incomprehensible scale. So the basic logic of today’s situation is that the descendants of those responsible for so much brutality need to show a healthy contrition if they want their ‘concerns’ to weigh heavily with the rest of us. Today’s Russia is not responsible for the crimes of the Soviet Union. But an honest Russia can not rummage around in the mouldy bun of Soviet history and extract raisins of glory, any more than Angela Merkel can say positive things about Hitler and expect to be taken seriously...

Plenty more where that came from.

Here's another truly horrible piece at Social Europe Journal that caught my beady eye. It's by one Kinga Pozniak (someone of Polish origin no doubt, an anthropologist who lectures at the Western University in London. Not London, England. London, Canada).

It's entitled "Poland's ACTA Protests - Molecular Change in an unlikely Place". Let the fisking begin!

As the economic crisis washes over Europe, political and economic discourses across the continent make it sound as if “there is no alternative” to widespread belt-tightening that withdraws and privatizes areas of social welfare and undermines social solidarity

We know that any article including the word 'discourse' is going to be awful. Thanks for alerting us so early on. And note the superb metaphors. : Crisis 'washes'. 'Belt-tightening' 'withdraws', 'privatizes', 'undermines' - in fact almost anything rather than keep trousers safely aloft.

This discourse is certainly hegemonic in Poland, a country frequently held up as a token success story of neoliberalization.

Aaaagh. A hegemonic discourse! Note the startling Leftist sneer that follows. Poland is frequently (sic) held up (sic) as a token success story (sic) of neoliberalization.

Following socialism’s collapse in 1989, Poland eagerly embraced a variety of neoliberal reforms, including rapid privatization of formerly state-owned enterprises, withdrawal of price subsidies, cuts to state spending and decentralisation of state responsibility for social and family policy

Yup. All good policies. That's why Poland is now the EU country with the best growth rates. People working, things getting built, new investment. Solid banks, lending to new businesses. Stuff like that. What's not to like?

Since economic troubles in Europe first broke out, Poland has been on board with Europe’s austerity agenda, with the country’s major newspapers vilifying countries such as Greece for their “irresponsible spending”.

I think you'll find that Europe has had 'economic troubles' for the past 2000 years or so. The point now is that we know how to manage them. And right at the heart of sound economic policies are two simple yet profound ideas. Don't borrow money you can't pay back! Work hard!

Poland has taken these norms to heart and grown steadily over the past 20 years. Plus Poland has striven to invest wisely generous EU 'cohesion' funds, taking the Greek example as the way not to do it. Hence Poland is - not unreasonably? - annoyed that those who mess up are clamouring for funds from those who behave responsibly. This takes us back to the Prodigal Son, not the most obvious example of cruel neoliberalization in action.

And yet recent events in the country suggest that resistance may sometimes originate in unlikely places.

On 19 January 2012 news broke out in Poland that the country’s government planned on signing ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), a multi-national agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. ACTA’s critics are concerned that it will stifle civil rights, including privacy and freedom of expression on the internet.

The news triggered a massive public outcry. As hackers shut down a number of government websites, protests numbering into tens of thousands broke out across the country, and members of the opposition party Palikot’s Movement (Ruch Palikota) donned Guy Fawkes masks during a parliamentary session.

Resistance? I am no expert in ACTA, but most normal people would agree that there is some sort of balance to be struck between protecting intellectual property and allowing people do do what they want. So what do these resisting Polish folk propose?

What is significant about this wave of protests is that for the first time in over two decades (that is, since the opposition movement of the 1980s that led to socialism’s collapse), it is driven by young people. Until now, Poland’s postsocialist generation has been relatively complicit and complacent.

Oh. You don't tell us. Instead we get the astounding claim that Poland’s postsocialist generation has been relatively complicit and complacent. Complicit in what exactly? Complicit in getting off their butts and coming over to England to work hard? Complicit in working hard at college?

With national hegemonic discourses discrediting anything associated with the country’s socialist legacy, members of the postsocialist generation grew up convinced that “there is no other way”.

If 'national hegemonistic discourses' discredited Poland's appalling communist experience, what's wrong with that? Poland's socialist 'legacy' was impoverishment, subservience to Moscow, environmental degradation, vast networks of people spying on their families and colleagues, and periodic brutality against striking workers.

Kinga, focus! That sort of thing is what 'discreditable' means.

While other groups – such as nurses or coalminers – have, over the past two decades, periodically resisted certain reforms that threatened their work or welfare, Poland’s youngest generation is overwhelmingly pro-market, ascribing to the neoliberal rationality of individual responsibility, independence, and ability to bear risk. This is the generation associated with support for Poland’s current ruling party, the economically liberal and European Union-oriented Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska), which favours the privatization of the remaining public sectors of the Polish economy, fiscal responsibility, and decentralization of the state.

Neoliberal rationality of individual responsibility, independence, and ability to bear risk. Fiscal responsibility. Sure thing. All incredibly positive. Great news that one of Europe's largest young populations gets it. Unlike ours.

Kinga contrives to suggest that these virtues are part of a hegemonistic discourse and therefore ... bad!?

And yet recent events show that this support is not unconditional. Both the content of ACTA and the covert manner in which the government intended to push it through are perceived by many as testament to the erosion of democracy and the privileging of corporate rights and interests over individual ones.

Well, what's with this ACTA stuff? If I work hard to write some new software and try to sell it, is it OK for someone to steal it? Why should people who steal from 'corporation's have their 'rights' 'privileged'? #justaskin

So what will come out of these protests? Perhaps nothing, perhaps something.

At last, a sensible point.

But it is worth recalling that Gramsci identified revolutionary potential in “molecular changes” which, over time, may “modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes”.

Oh lordy. Wheel out the dead Italian Marxists. Just what Poland really needs now.

Poland’s ACTA protests hit home just as the government is recovering from a public upset about recent changes to a national drug refund plan, as well as trying to introduce unpopular reforms to the retirement system. Perhaps Poland’s ACTA protests are just that crack in the political terrain which may in time shift its foundations and open up possibilities for more widespread social critique in other areas.

Bring on the 'social critique' of Poland's reactionary failing policies. If Gramsci Pozniak and Co get their way, Poland and the rest of Europe can be de-hegemonised and thereby reduced again quickly to progressive Greek-style national socialist impoverishment .

Molecule by molecule.