Blogoir: December

A day spent poring through my year's Blogoir output trying to choose some coherent entries for the 2009 Orwell Blog Prize.

It turns out that links in earlier postings disappear for various reasons, rather reducing the effect/impact of that work months and years later. Especially poignant to see that links I put up to the FCO's eccentric tendency to grow extra Strategic Priorities from seven to ten have been 'archived' by the FCO.

But after a lot to going to and fro, I have submitted to the Prize ten entries of different shapes and sizes. So let's see.

I have made 700 postings this year. The site now has a friendly core of some 4000 Unique Visitors per month who with the Viagra and other e-spiders have given me 1.4 million 'hits'.

Many thanks to all those who have been reading regularly and/or who have posted or sent me detailed and thoughtful thoughts in response. Impressively little obscene abuse so far - no doubt that will come one day.

Enough for this year, one in which extremist language and ideas seemed to gain momentum with those defending classic 'Western' freedoms appearing unsure how best to respond.

Let's sign off 2008 with this striking thought from the Tax Justice Network, a rich source of busy ideas for those bent on getting more private money into state hands:

Tax is the link between state and citizen, and tax revenues are the lifeblood of the social contract.

Hmm. The Social Contract.

As people get more powerful, or at least more truculent, maybe we should look again at that idea in 2009. And some First Principles...

Happy New Year.

Tim Worstall and Dennis the Peasant are having it out with Richard Murphy on tax issues and economic theory in general. Good stuff if you want to see lively minds hammering away (albeit often crossly and at cross purposes) about Basic Principles.

Richard Murphy seems like a Man with a Mission. To get rid of what he calls 'neo-liberal economics':

One of the things that will be swept aside as a consequence of the current financial crisis is neo-liberal economics. Much of what is taught as economic theory will have to go with it. We will be better off for its demise.

Maybe he's right and eg the feverish warblings of Naomi Klein will become a new orthodoxy.

In which case we'll slump into stupid collectivism until an even greater slump hauls as back to our senses, sadder and poorer and maybe a teensy bit wiser.

But what caught my eye in this Murphy piece was the following sweeping claim:

... it is wholly unacceptable that at a time when banks are utterly dependent upon the state for the provision of their equity that they should show such contempt for the state by avoiding their obligation to pay tax.

Is not there a strong and nasty whiff of Liberal Fascism in that sentence?

An implicit idea that as and when the Munificent State deigns to help us, we should grovel in gratitude and turn out our pockets to repay our glorious benefactor?

Insofar as any company has a legal and moral obligation, it is to the people who have invested in it. If that category now includes the state, the state presumably made that investment to help the company stay afloat and make money for its shareholders (including the state).

If in turn that means using the usual rules of international financial dealings to minimise tax, quite right too.

In any case, what if that state investment in banks is incompetently done and starts to create even more ruin?

Or what if the state through its lumbering incompetence has created the whole mess in the first place? If a malevolent giant whacks you to your knees then offers you some coins to help you get back on your feet, should you be pleased and doff your cap in deep respect?

Or what if the state is using all that revenue sucked from the economy for idiotic propaganda? Should we all be placidly uncontemptuously grateful for that?

If 'neo-liberal economics' give way to this sort of incoherent collectivist menacing, we really are in a deep mess.

A company asks you to buy them out for $15m.

No way!

So you end up buying them some years later - for over $6 billion.

Probably a lesson in that somewhere.

What is morality?

In good part it is a form of taxonomy: identifying and classifying differences.

Hence my objection to Pinterism. This anti-morality takes the fact that gold and excrement are equally made of atoms, and proclaims no difference between them.

Thus the USA is up there with the all-time mass murderers of history, namely Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Although even H Pinter seemed to think that he needed not to overdo it, so he duly found some Differences:

Of course there is a difference. Hitler, Stalin and Mao, in one way or another, intended the death of millions. The US has, I suggest, accepted that the death of millions is inevitable if its "national interests" are to be protected—in other words, if its power is to be maintained.

In 1954 in Guatemala and in 1965 in Indonesia the US Embassies "fingered" those to be killed and recorded those deaths as efficiently as the Nazis. Where, I wonder, is the "moral" distinction between killing and "fingering" those to be killed? I can't see that it exists myself...

The great difference between the ruthless foreign policy of the United States and other equally ruthless policies is that US propaganda is infinitely cleverer and the Western media wonderfully compliant.

Pinter's tragic Nobel Prize lecture starts off as if he is proud of the fact that he has defined morality out of existence:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Good questions. Pinter proceeded to answer them in a sustained banal anti-American rant, deftly nailed by Christopher Hitchens: sinister mediocrity.

The contrast between this tragic self-indulgent burbling and the famous Harvard speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the difference between Nothing and Something.

One interesting question in all this remains. How to judge the work of people whose lives and pronouncements are deeply flawed if not downright malevolent, yet who produce some powerful works of art or other achievements?

Paul Johnson's fine book Intellectuals did a lively job in exposing the private odiousness, cheating, lying and other failings in a number of leading 'intellectuals' from Rousseau through Marx and Tolstoy to the present day. He attempted to discredit their thinking by pointing out the vast gap betweeen their idealist writings and their personal behaviour.

Was he right? Do Ideas and works of Art stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of the private failings of those who proposed them?

On the whole, yes they do.

Hence eg this gracious look at the contrast between Pinter's substantive creative achievement and his political blather.

It exemplifies a generous liberal-mindedness which makes civilisation, of a sort Harold Pinter for all his peevish, silly, sinister eloquence seemed unable to contemplate himself.

Matthew Parris writes eloquently about the role of Christianity in African development:

In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different.

Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

His point is that a traditional passive 'tribal' mind is Africa's main problem:

But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

The answer?

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described.

... Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

But what if in some way the rest of us can not fathom, Africa as a space just does not want to be liberated to walk tall amid global competition, or at least is impervious to any attempt to liberate it?

What if Africa's problem is that we think Africa has a problem?

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had - through its massive policies of enforced 'separate development' - kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Our old friend time-scale again.

Which is more likely?

That in 50,000 years' time New York and Beijing and London will be glorious cities, full of clever and successful human beings?

Or that somewhere in a warm spot a simple man will be sitting under a tree in what a long-lost civilisation called Tanzania, gazing contentedly at Mt Kilimanjaro because it is just there?

Here is a well-judged piece by Johann Hari trying to work out how Harold Pinter ended up supporting Slobodan Milosevic:

Pinter himself says "the most important line I've ever written" is when Meg's husband calls out, as Stanley is taken away, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do." The playwright said of this unobjectionable, obvious platitude, "I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now."

It's depressingly revealing: Pinter's staccato sinisterness does not illustrate a point; it distracts the audience from the fact his point is so banal.

Pinter was the archetypal Silly Noise. The fact that as he got older his noises became louder and sillier - to a level of volume and silliness meriting the award of the Nobel Prize - is a gloomy insight into the times we live in.

A comment (apparently from someone in Paris) on the Times website describes him as a 'moral giant'.

Peut-être I am old-fashioned or insufficiently French, but in my view anyone who ends up on Milosevic's side is surely more aptly described as a moral ant.

Last word with Johann Hari:

I once tried to discuss his defence of Milosevic with him and he began to scream - literally scream - at me.

Goodbye. Harold. Pinter. You shouldn't. Have defended. Milosevic. (Stage directions: Off-stage, there are howls and screams of rage. We do not know if these are from ethnic Albanians murdered by Milosevic, or from Pinter himself.)

The Crawfs have been slumped in family consumeristic torpor, the children with assorted electronic games and I with my excellent new Skeletool.

Not so impressed with the Sony Reader. This is an idea which should be good in a few years' time, but not yet (compare the early greyscreen must-have Palm Pilot with an i-Phone now). If you are thinking about buying books to read, go and buy them rather than this costly gizmo. Books (it turns out) have several advantages - they tend to be light, not too expensive and fairly easy to read.

True, the Sony Reader comes with 100 free classic books and it is not that easy to carry those around in book form in one briefcase. Yet do I really want to read these classics? Alas, not most of them. Nor do I want to waste time grappling with the gruesome Waterstones website to find other books to download. Sony seem to have tried to recreate in digital form the 'book experience' - as the i-Pod shows, the trick is to do that and redefine it too.

Most of our Christmas gift shopping this year was done on-line - anything to avoid the revolting car-parks in Oxford. Amazon, IWOOT, Photobox, John Lewis and a couple of other websites served us well. Easy-to-use sites, fast delivery, speedy light-touch service when (rarely) something was not quite right.

Is shopping as we have come to know it (large 'shopping-centres') basically an information deficiency problem? As the Long Tail phenomenon develops, what will be the social consequences of more people (ie the e-savvy ones) tending to opt out of actually going to or working in shops? Will so-called public spaces tend to get even worse?

See eg this: Blog and community first, selling things second. Voice builds trust and trust sells stuff. 

Enough ad hoc Christmas retail musings.

Cheery seasonal news: the phoney Kwanzaa holiday cult of recent years is going, if not quite gone.

So many entries. So little time.

Remember the BBC puff for kitschy little red Mass Murderer badges?

Or the oh-so-cool Che poster picture as part of a free ad for Fidel Castro?

Both worthy entries.

But, in a late surge, the BBC reaches a new height.

Can a supposedly serious global website give a free ad to a death-cult which brainwashwes young people and gets them chanting nonsensical slogans?

Yes It Can!

Meet Liaena Hernandez:

... just 18 years old. A petite young woman with long black hair and an engaging smile, she has been a political activist since her early teens.

... She represents Manuel Tames, a small rural community nestled in the foothills of the Guantanamo's Sierra Cristal mountains ... But solving constituency needs is not the primary role of Cuban deputies.

"Our most important mission is to explain to the people the politics of the state so that they understand what going on," she explained as we arrived ...

Like all good politicians, Ms Hernandez moved comfortably amongst them, kissing babies, joking and chatting with young and old.

How catastrophically weak and stupid is this article?

Very.

Ms Hernandez has 'constituents'. 'Like all good politicians' she kisses babies?!

Oh lordy. On it goes. She has learned her lines nicely:

"But at least I had free health care and education. And as a nation, everyone was willing to work together to get by and move forward."

Not quite everyone? What about all those who managed to escape?

"We need to keep perfecting our economic system, that's where the country is going."

'Perfeccionamento'

The government's priority is to try and make the state-run system work more efficiently, rather than opening up to a free market, like the Chinese have done.

Yes, Cuba has a 'government'.

You hear the word "perfeccionamento" - perfecting the system - used a lot by officials.

There are also no signs of any political reforms. Opposition parties are not allowed.

The national assembly only meets twice a year, a few days of committee sessions followed by a single day's sitting. Critics call it a rubber stamp parliament.

Action replay!

Let's have that sentence again.

Critics call it a rubber stamp parliament.

Well, what eccentric whingers those critics are!

Candidates are also selected in advance. In the elections in January there were 614 people standing for the same number of seats.

You do not have to be a member of the Communist Party to stand, but it does help.

One way of putting it, no doubt.

Ms Hernandez, though, believes that the system has served Cuba well.

"History has taught us that the Communist Party is the road that Cuba needs to follow.

"We don't need to copy other countries' systems. We are satisfied with our own and we are going to keep perfecting it."

Perfect.

The scrummy Humanoid Cuban Parrot Ms Hernandez has been 'taught' that after fifty years of going down a dead-end which leaves a nice island with inadequate food, the way forward lies in making this stupidity not just Good, but Perfect.

This reminds me of a nasty Yugoslavia-era joke.

A pert young Communist woman is sitting in the front row of the Communist League rally, busily mouthing kisses at Tito as he drones on.

Afterwards he asks her why she was being so flirtatious.

"My mum said that I should always kiss men when they are screwing me!"

Keep kissing, BBC.

I make it into the latest Britblog Round-up, No 201.

It led me to this latest tirade against Government Targets in the area of officially supported academic research activities:

Government blithely assumes that management is weightless; but the direct cost of writing detailed specifications and special software, and assembling 1,100 panellists to scrutinise submissions from 50,000 individuals in 2,500 submissions, high as it already is, is dwarfed by the indirect ones - in particular, the huge and ongoing management overheads in the universities themselves.

As with any target exercise, the RAE has developed into a costly arms race between the participants, who quickly figure out how to work the rules to their advantage, and regulators trying to plug the loopholes by adjusting and elaborating them.

The result is an RAE rulebook of staggering complexity on one side and, on the other, the generation of an army of university managers, consultants and PR spinners whose de facto purpose is not to teach, nor make intellectual discoveries, but to manage RAE scores.

Thus do societies decay, as sprawling resources get steered by stultifying process into wasteful dead-ends and malignant new bureaucratic life-forms rapidly evolve in the dank ooze.

Remember former Ambassador Craig Murray's problems in getting a publisher for his new book because it might attract a heavy libel writ?

He is pressing on by publishing it on/via the Internet.

Let the legal fun and games begin.

Any audience for a speech quickly works out what it has to face. Boring or Interesting? Routine or Inspiring?

Getting off to a good start is essential, as top US speech-writer John Shosky explains in the latest Total Politics:

Audiences decide if they like you, and if you are a person of character, in between eight and 20 seconds of the start. 

They give you only about 30 seconds of attentive listening before you begin to lose some of them. In other words, the audience will listen carefully to what you have to say for about a half minute then, with each second, more people start to fade away.

He gives examples:

That is why I applaud any speech that starts with the heart of the matter, such as Boris Yeltsin's speech at the burial of Tsar Nicholas Romanov's family in St Petersburg in 1998:

"It's an historic day for Russia. Eighty years have passed since the slaying of the last Russian emperor and his family. We have long been silent about this monstrous crime. We must say the truth: the Yekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful pages of our history."

Now that is the way to start: bold, direct, concise, clear, and quotable.

In an age where audiences have a very short attention span, you have to get right to the point. No dawdling, no setting the stage, no easing in and getting comfortable, no joke and jive prelude: right to the point...

No doubt much the same can be said for written work too.

Read the whole thing.

And other articles too. Total Politics is surging along nicely now - well done Iain Dale and his team.

The BBC website is asking weird questions:

How can the future of oil prices be stabilised? What are the alternatives? Does the problem lie with consumers or providers?

What is the 'problem' here?

What is the point of 'stabilising' the price of anything?

A price is a piece of information about what lots of people think about a product.

The whole point is that a price should not be 'stable'. It should change as ideas/innovations/priorities change.

If it were 'stable', it might well not be doing its job, and/or the activity required to stabilise it might well be doing damage elsewhere.

Volatile oil prices are no doubt a damn nuisance, on many counts.

But that is telling us something - that volatile oil prices are a damn nuisance.

So so let's stop burning all that dirty old black sludge (thereby pouring money into all sorts of strange undeserving pockets), and find something else to power our world.

Anyway, scroll down through the comments from BBC readers to find the energetic but wise thoughts of Grant from New Zealand:

Oil prices don't need to be "stabilised", they need to be left alone. We don't need any "new partnership", we need to tear down some existing ones. And that "visionary internationalism" shown over the global banking crisis was NOT a good thing.

NO company, no matter how large or institutional, is too important to be allowed to fail. No market outcome is so important as to justify government action. Free markets are far too important to allow government to do anything! Ever!

Here is a letter I am planning to send to a competent newspaper Agony Aunt, if I can find one.

I am asking for your advice.

I believe that the heart of both moral and practical wellbeing lies in defining a close, evident link between good behaviour and good outcomes, and bad behaviour and bad outcomes. This surely defines Civilisation - a steady trend towards good, cooperative, generous behaviour having positive benefits for all.

Hence I am extending this principle to our dog, a frisky and wily year-old collie. She is wonderfully but excessively friendly, jumping up at visitors and covering them with mud.

To curb this unseemly exuberance I have started to squirt her with water when she jumps up. It sometimes occurs that said guests get hit by a squirt of water as collateral damage in the confusion. But at least water evaporates, whereas mud does not.

This policy is working. The dog now jumps up less and less when visitors appear, and slinks away to hide under the table when the squirter is produced.

A clear link between negative behaviour and a negative outcome has been created, shaping much more gracious behaviour.

She gets a treat. Everyone is better off. Civilisation edges Upwards.

The problem comes when I try to apply the same principle to my teenage son, on the alas frequent occasions when he too does not respect basic norms of good manners and reasonable behaviour.

I have taken to using the same water squirter on him, immediately after some or other obnoxious remark or defiant gesture, so that the link between poor behaviour and a bad result is lodged promptly in his mind.

Yet whereas the dog appears to be smart enough to grasp this fairly simple principle, my son does not.

If anything a squirt of water on his ear area increases rather than decreases his tendency to yap and snarl and behave aggressively/irrationally.

I have always understood the whole point of evolution as being a propensity among scraps of DNA to flourish when they (inadvertently) opt for the (for them) better option.

So if microspcopic amoeba-like live phenomena can respond in a predictable life-enhancing way to positive and negative stimuli - as can my dog - why can not my teenage son?

Is he a form of life so impenetrably stupid and insensate that in effect Evolution in itself and of Civilisation more generally grinds to a halt in his case?

And how can this be given the outstanding DNA he inherited, at least from my side of the family?

All this is most disturbing. Your insight and suggestions will be much appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

UPDATE:  a radical vulpine version of the same approach is not working either!

The Serbian website Pescanik ('Hourglass') has lots of lively and nicely turned work available in both Serbian and English.

Try this piece on a profound local disposition to oppose change and modernity by romanticising primitivism:

Whenever you find yourself short on argument, it comes in handy to call your opponent, who is always an enemy, too educated or to say that his wife wears corsets and hats, which is not good – she should be wearing skirts and kerchiefs.

One of the most popular representatives often used to repeat his theory how “when there were less literate people here, Christ used to walk this earth”. Therefore, this is the concept – as soon as you get an education, you lift your head up from this warm cradle and that’s where all the problems come in.

When, for instance, there is a discussion on Belgrade in the National Assembly of Serbia how a loan should be approved for indoor plumbing or piping, the representatives used to say that Belgrade should by no means develop that way, because it would be unjust.

Here are a couple of quotes: “It would look like a barefoot dandy in a top hat” or “It would look like someone putting on a polished shoe, while his other foot is bare” or “It is like a peasant wearing a silk umbrella”.

The point being:

... equality here had always been embraced as a main value, but it was understood in a way that’s opposed to its original sense.

Here it was understood as social equality, not as legal equality – not as a right of all people to have equal social opportunities, but as a requirement for all people to remain socially the same – don’t anyone dare get rich.

That sort of understanding this ideal was a logical consequence of the type of society we had in Serbia up to WWII – a society of largely equal people, where peasants made up 87 percent of the population and 50 percent of those peasants had but 5 acres of land. To have 5 acres of land with a wooden plow and oxen meant that as soon as February you had nothing left to eat.

This is the social matrix they want to keep at all cost, so no one ever steps out of it, so the society never stratifies, never changes, so that it never modernizes – because in this equality lied some sort of protection, this is where we are secure.

Hmm.

That idea of a lumpen equality in mediocre idealised poverty seems to be what large parts of the Red-Green impulse demands for all of us, not just for Serbia.

A significant UK court ruling allows agreements reached during marriage on the disposal of assets in the case of divorce to be legally binding.

But not agreements reached before marriage.

This reads oddly:

Legal experts say the important ruling will lead to many couples deciding how to settle their financial affairs after getting married, through a postnup, because it is fairer than working it out before the wedding in a Hollywood-style pre-nup...

... "During their marriage, couples are now able to agree what they think is fair if they should split up rather than have the courts impose its version of fairness upon them.

Huh?

Why is working it our during the marriage 'fairer' than doing so beforehand?

Maybe because of a reworking of the old joke:

Rich Partner:       I'll give you £5 if you sleep with me.

Poor Partner:       Are you treating me like a slut?!

Rich Partner:       OK, £10,000!

Poor Partner:       How dare you insult me!

Rich Partner:       Here's my best offer: £2 million and marriage thrown in.

Poor Partner:       Now you're talking. Done.

Later.

Rich Spouse:      You're a piece of cheating trash. Here's a divorce - oh, and £5.

Would-be Rich Spouse:     Whaaat? Where's my £2 million?

Rich Spouse:      We established the principle - now let's negotiate the price.

Pacta sunt servanda, whenever they are made.

The courts' job should be to uphold private good faith deals between grown-ups, not start meddling with or even ignoring them.

Here is a brisk Samizdata posting about our current financial woes:

A lot of people in the financial industry are trying to figure out the individual costs to them of the $50 billion Bernard Madoff hedge fund fraud. The allegation is that Mr Madoff operated a "Ponzi scheme" scam wherby hedge fund investors were paid money, not from the performance of the funds, but by money paid in by new clients. As soon as the inflows of new clients dried up - partly due to the credit crunch - the scam came to light.

As a result of this case, no doubt those who have been calling for much tighter regulation of financial markets will have yet another stick with which to hit the system, never mind that fraud is and should be prosecuted under the normal law of the land anyway.

But what interests me, however, is that systems such as Social Security in the US or public sector pensions in the UK have been funded under what is, essentially, a Ponzi system, whereby retirees depend on future generations continuing to fund a system that is rapidly becoming broke.

Just how stupid is this crass piling up and compounding up of social democratic state entitlements turning out to be?

Pretty bigly stupid:

Federal obligations now exceed the collective net worth of all Americans, according to the New York-based Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Washington politicians and bureaucrats have essentially mortgaged everything We the People own so they can keep spending our tax dollars like there’s no tomorrow.

The foundation’s grim calculations are based on Sept. 30 consolidated federal statements, which showed that Americans’ total household net worth, diminished by falling stock prices and home equity, is $56.5 trillion.

But rising costs for unfunded social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security increased to $56.4 trillion – and that was before the more recent stock market crash, $700 billion bank bailout, and monster federal deficits chalked up in October and November.

“Given more recent developments, it’s clear that America now owes more than its citizens are worth,” said Foundation president David M. Walker, the former Comptroller-General of the United States who has been trying to warn Americans of the coming financial tsunami for years, to no avail.

Yet, we are ponderously informed, the basic problem is 'the dangerous politics of market radicalism':

In looking at possible outlines of a post-2008-crisis state, the heart of the problem that it will have to address is the entity already mentioned, the overmighty subject, in this case, the financial institutions deemed to be "too big to fail".

Whatever regulatory regime is established, preventing the emergence or re-emergence of such bodies must be central and, given climate change, targeting these bodies with an added green agenda in mind would help with its legitimacy, in order to offset the dominance of capital.

Crikey.

Dead wrong.

The problem rather is that the state has been thought to be 'too big to fail'.

Yet 'the state' in its modern form is failing as well, as its untrammelled Ponziness is increasingly starkly revealed.

Here's a thought.

What if Democracies are inherently prone to be irrational? What if they tend to give the mass of people with Less the power to impose unsustainable ways of grabbing More? And that the contradictions in insisting that water can flow uphill eventually overwhelm society?

What if, thanks to new technology, smart Authoritarianism-Lite administrations can now evolve, presiding over dynamic economic activity based on plenty of personal liberty in that sphere but without giving the masses the chance to vote for strategically stupid welfarist choices?

The argument has been for a long time that in fact Democracies are inherently smarter than Authoritarian systems, Heavy or Lite, because the pluralism which comes from voting also brings with it a far superior ability to be honest about Facts, to analyse problems better and therefore to absorb shocks and change course.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Russian Communism was thought to represent the culmination of that contest, with a knock-down victory for Democracy.

But maybe that was the beginning of the end of another, deeper phase - the end of the illusion that Democracy as hitherto practised was and must be the sole guarantor of strategic rationality..?

I am pressing on through The Exception, by Christian Jungersen.

This is a terrific novel. It is set in a small Danish NGO of experts on war crimes. The team there, almost all women, start falling out when some threatening emails arrive. The ensuing suspicions and intrigue are described in a gripping way, the more so for being delivered in a deadpan, almost banal present tense.

As their anxieties edge upwards, their wider wellbeing away from the office edges downwards. Everything seems to shrink:

She had an orgasm this time, though a small one.

What is especially impressive is the sense conveyed by the author of rising hysteria and claustrophobia as their mutual misperceptions develop. Who would ever work in an office again after reading this?

Yet the point of the book is much deeper than just this fascinating, dark story. The author ingeniously works into the text a series of short essays written by the war crimes experts, which analyse different academic/scientific and moral theories of what makes hitherto normal people behave towards others with unspeakable cruelty once the context changes abruptly.

Upbringing? Compulsion? Fear of the Other? Group-think? Power-lust? Justifying the crimes by seeing the victims as sub- or even non-human? All these explanations and more are summarised in a most readable way.

And thus the stage is set. The group of decent, rather humourless but well-meaning women who have joined an organisation whose raison d'etre is exposing and denouncing massive war crimes themselves start behaving in a loathsome, menacing way towards one another. The descriptions of their own clueless self-awareness attempts to analyse what is happening in the office are alone worth the price of admission.

Which brings us effortlessly to Andrei Lugovoi MP, chief suspect in the UK murder investigation into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko:

He told the Spanish newspaper El Pais: "If someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated.

"It's my firm belief and the belief of any normal Russian. Do I think someone could have killed Litvinenko in the interests of the Russian state?

"If you're talking about the interests of the Russian state, in the purest sense of the word, I myself would have given that order.

"I'm not talking about Litvinenko, but about any person who causes serious damage."

This is a vivid example of the totalitarian imagination in practice. The idea that alleged damage done to the 'purest' abstraction is a sufficient justification for 'exterminating' another human being.

The moral/philosophical question is, "how/where does such reasoning originate?".

The practical question is, "how can we continue to have normal relations with a European Parliament containing someone who talks like this?"

The political question is, "what happens to us (and to them) if we do continue to have normal relations with a European Parliament containing someone who talks like this?".

To help you grapple with these issues, read this magnificent analysis of Russia's rehabilitation of Stalin:

... the memory of Stalinism in Russia is almost always the memory of victims. Victims, not crimes. As the memory of crimes it does not register, as there is no consensus on this ...

... The state has produced no legal document which recognizes state terror as a crime. The two lines in the preamble to the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of victims is clearly insufficient.

There are no legal decisions that inspire any confidence - and there have not been any trials against participants of the Stalinist terror in the new Russia, not a single one...

... unlike the Nazis, who mainly killed "foreigners": Poles, Russians, and German Jews (who were not quite their "own" people), we mainly killed our own people, and our consciousness refuses to accept this fact.

In remembering the terror, we are incapable of assigning the main roles, incapable of putting the pronouns "we" and "they" in their places. This inability to assign evil is the main thing that prevents us from being able to embrace the memory of the terror properly.

This makes it far more traumatic. It is one of the main reasons why we push it to the edge of our historical memory...

... Today the memory of the war has been replaced by the memory of Victory. This change began in the mid-1960s. At the end of the 1960s, the memory of the terror was banned - for a whole 20 years! By the time this changed, there were virtually no soldiers left, and there was no one left to correct the collective stereotype with their personal recollections.

... To simplify drastically, this conflict of memories goes like this: if state terror was a crime, then who was the criminal? The state? Stalin as the head of state? But we won the war against Absolute Evil, and so we were not the subjects of a criminal regime, but a great country, the embodiment of everything good in the world.

It was under the rule of Stalin that we overcame Hitler. Victory means the Stalinist era, and the terror means the Stalinist era. It is impossible to reconcile these two images of the past, except by rejecting one of them, or at least making serious corrections to it.

And this is what happened - the memory of the terror receded. It has not disappeared completely, but it has been pushed to the periphery of people's consciousness...

So there it is.

From a fictional account of the pettiness of evil lurking even in a modest NGO with the highest intentions, all the way through the smirking viciousness of a Russian MP and on to the greatest criminal cover-up in world history.

Is Evil really big, or really small?

Which is larger - the tiny spark of hope, or the surrounding impenetrable blackness?

Long posting.

Big Questions.

Buy the book.

The Turkey/Armenia relationship still grapples with the scale and definition of the huge numbers of killings of Armenians in 1915. A new and bold initiative in Turkey aims at collecting signatures of apology, albeit not using the word 'genocide'.

Meanwhile the Polish media have picked up on work done by a determined Russian NGO to dig into the Katyn massacre and find out more about the people who actually did the killings.

According to these new findings as reported in Gazeta Wyborcza, the arch-villain was one Vasily Blochin, an arch-killer especially trusted by Stalin who from 1924 onwards took part in or presided over an astounding 50,000 executions. He worked out which revolver best dealt with overheating when killing people at a high rate, and where exactly to shoot people to cause immediate death with as little blood as possible.

The Katyn Massacre was in fact a series of official killings in various locations. Some 21,000 Polish captives were murdered in this sustained and unique war crime. If each of them had (say) 100 relatives and friends/acquaintances, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that most Polish families today either had a relative killed in these massacres or know someone who did.

Which is why the issue is still very much alive even if the ranks of victims are not, 68 years later. 

Insofar as this Blogoir has a Theme and Point, it is that we keep reminding ourselves that Decisions have Consequences.

Some consequences are planned and desirable.

Others are unplanned/unexpected/undesirable, not least because the consequences of various decisions taken independently in practice get tangled up together and make an even worse mess.

This is made worse by a chronic sickness in modern governance: to focus incessantly on the benefits of change, without looking also at the disadvantages of change and the benefits of staying where we actually are now.

This in turn stems from a deeper problem with collectivists and bureaucrats of all shapes and sizes, namely that they somehow assume (if indeed they ever think about it at all) that wealth and creativity are just 'there', waiting to be cleverly organised and reorganised for whatever the latest good reason may happen to be.

It of course is not like that.

The wealth-creating systems we have of course can withstand all sorts of indignities and inefficiencies.

Yet each small indignity and inefficiency is a cost. And slowly but surely the costs grow and grow, interacting with each other and compounding up.

And up.

Take doctors.

Doctors are not like oil or stone - stuff which is out there naturally and can be extracted more or less steadily for a very long time to come, largely at the rate we choose.

Doctors are people who decide to go through years of intensive, draining training because they see a role for themselves in helping thousands of people have a better life.

So if we keep ungratefully piling more and more costs, bureaucracy and hassle on doctors, the tendency for people to want to become doctors will diminish. And we'll get fewer doctors. 

And then (probably) we'll sit their in a sickly state whining that doctors are 'greedy'.

Or take modern administration. The numbers of people claiming to be sick and taking time off work are rising. Managers find it hard to tackle this problem, for fear of being denounced as 'macho' and 'unsympathetic'.

The costs of this behaviour (which stems from accumulating prissiness and a declining ethic of responsibility) edge inexorably upwards, leaving less to be spent on basic public services such as keeping the roads and streets clean. Just drive round Oxford which prides itself on its progressive environmental approach, and be appalled at the squalor.

So, slowly ...

The Machine Stops:

Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress.

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence.

The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole...

I make it into the 200th Britblog round-up, with my piece below on Industrial Policy.

It's hosted by the quixotic Mr Eugenides. Go and have a look. There is a link to a bafflingly random video ad for washing machines featuring topless female sky-divers.