Blogoir

Former Bosnia Presidency member Ejup Ganic has been released on bail, albeit subject to some strict conditions. Serbia has to continue mustering evidence for the process to move forward.

In the end current BH Bosniac Presidency member Haris Silajdzic did not visit him in jail, but instead remonstrated with David Miliband about the whole business.

The British Government are sticking to the line that this is a purely legal matter with no (no) political connotations in any way whatsoever either for the present or in terms of any view of what happened in the past. See HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Michael Tatham, on his blog (in Bosnian!).

That position, of course, is exactly what critics of the whole affair are attacking:

Please. Be serious. How can the fact that you have arrested a former senior Bosniac on war crimes charges emanating from a Serbia which refuses to hand over Mladic be 'solely' a legal matter?

Fair enough. But that's today's Europe. Better to tackle complex questions by stuffing all concerned with the Porridge of Procedure than through ethnic cleansing and the rest?

So on it all trundles. As things now stand, it is hard to imagine that the Serbia side will not assemble enough material to persuade a judge that prima facie the issue deserves a substantive hearing (unless, that is, the Bosniac side knock down the extradition application on jurisdictional or other procedural grounds).

Is a British court in due course to pore over the origins of the Bosnian conflict and the Dobrovoljacka St shootings back in 1992 and try to reach a conclusion?

"It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest."

“Yes, sir.”

“What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?”

“One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.”

“You mean imagination boggles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.

A bracing visionary view at Edge of how the Internet is transforming everything, by David Gelernter.

Interesting intro:

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head.

What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common?

All are software engineers or scientists.

So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code.

Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization...

Gelernter:

Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world.

The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon.

Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

... As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then.

The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.  (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.)  

The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past...

Read the whole thing. Clever.

I was down at Guidhall in the City yesterday, to watch the special ceremony of Poland's excellent Ambassador Barbara Tuge-Erecinksa being accepted as a Freeman of the City.

Barbara was deeply involved in the Gdansk Shipyard protests and the heroic rise of the Solidarity movement:

Active in the underground during the martial law in Poland, she was harassed by the communist party. "It wasn't a big deal compared to what happened to some," she remembers. "The worst experience was when my son was one year old -- to see those security men searching in my baby's cot."

The ceremony in part marked Guildhall's expression of appreciation for the remarkable generosity of Poles who during WW2 found a way to offer money to help repair Nazi bomb damage to the building.

And did you know another proud Polish connection? That Chopin's final concert was at Guildhall in November 1848, to raise money for Poles who had fled France to escape more continental revolutionary violence?

No, you didn't. Here is some background from Jack Gibbons, with deft musical accompaniment:

His last public appearance took place in London at the old Guildhall on 16th November 1848. The occasion was a concert and ball in aid of Polish refugees. Chopin played several of his shorter pieces on an upright piano in a side-room adjoining the main hall.

According to his pupil, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, "Chopin played like an angel". By now completely exhausted, Chopin was greatly relieved to return to Paris where he spent the last months of his life virtually bedridden, supported by the generosity of his friends and pupils.

Yesterday a delicate modern bust of Chopin by Jaroslaw Alfer (latterly not on display as renovation works at Guildhall proceeded) was unveiled by the Ambassador in a new place of honour.

Or should it be honor?

All right-thinking and/or snooty English people will say that of course it is honour.

Honor is an Americanism. Ugh.

And they are right, these days at least. The different usages became formalised in the nineteenth century.

Not that the great men of 1800 or thereabouts minded too much. Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the US Declaration of Independence used honour.

And there on the wall of the room in Guildhall where Ambassador Tuge-Erecinska was sworn in as Freeman is a framed letter from Lord Nelson, expressing his honor.

All in all, a most honourable day for UK/Polish relations.

Since Classic Communism (more or less) ended nearly twenty years ago, which country has done better, China or Russia? And why?

Big Questions

Big answers.

Are there levels of Evil?

If over the course of a couple of thousand years Hitler and his mass extermination policies represents the deepest level reached so far (only a tad deeper than Stalin/Mao, but, yes, deeper), is there anything still deeper waiting to emerge?

This is a great piece by Ron Rosenbaum relentlessly demolishing famous intellectual Hannah Arendt and her much quoted idea of the Banality of Evil:

To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism.

Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent...

Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, "radical evil." Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality. (Wasserstein dryly notes that "her epigones have tried valiantly to reconcile the two positions, she herself recognized the inconsistency"—between radical and banal evil—"but never satisfactorily resolved the fundamental self-contradiction.") But Arendt fled from radical evil into banality in more ways than one...

Ron Rosenbaum's own superb book Explaining Hitler takes one by one all available explanations for Hitler's behaviour (eg he was crazy; he had a bad childhood; he was rational; he didn't really mean it; he was evil) and takes them to bits, drawing on extensive research and tight arguement. A book for grown-ups thinking about Cause and Effect:

The following Comment is from Anticant; it somehow got lost in the comment moderation process. Apologies

Yes, Rosenbaum’s book is fascinating but I’m not sure it takes us any closer to understanding the Hitler phenomenon. Was he really ‘uniquely evil’ – a once-off human aberration? I doubt it. He was an acute psychopath and sociopath and a spellbinding orator whose delusions happened to chime in with the post-1918 demoralisation of a Germany which had, since Bismarck, been accustomed to regard itself as the up-and-coming European (and ultimately World) Power, and which was literally and emotionally shell-shocked by the self-inflicted military defeat resulting from the incompetence of Ludendorff, who promptly invented the ‘stab in the back’ myth and became Hitler’s ally in the abortive Munich beer-cellar putsch.

And it isn’t plausible to hold Hitler solely responsible for the Holocaust, even if he was its main midwife. Anti-Semitism – which Klaus P. Fisher in his brilliant book “The History of an Obsession” says should more accurately be called Judeophobia – has a long and sordid history not only in Germany but also in many other European (mostly Roman Catholic) countries as well as in Russia.

A few days ago I recommended The Historian, a long and elegantly intelligent modern reworking of the Dracula story with lots of well-tuned Balkan detail: 

Here for those who want More is a gripping look by Andrew Stuttaford at one of my favourite films, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre: 

Stuttaford describes how Herzog develops the ideas and imagery of a 1922 expressionist classic film by Friedrich Murnau but ingeniously echoes contemporary oppressiveness and evil:

So it’s perhaps fitting that the consequences of that evil resonate in the very locations where Herzog’s movie was shot. The sequences filmed in then-Communist Czechoslovakia were a reminder of an Eastern Europe torn apart and cut off by the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1979, this region seemed irrevocably lost as, in a different way, so much of the Lübeck and Wismar of Murnau’s Nosferatu were; many of those cities’ centuries-old buildings had been devastated by Allied bombing and, in Wismar’s case, the malice of the East German state. Despite one notable sequence featuring the same row of Lübeck buildings that Murnau had, Herzog’s Wismar (he dropped the idea of “Wisborg”) was largely represented by the Dutch city of Delft — gorgeous, intact, and, by its very architectural survival, a pointed comment on all that Germany had lost.

But destruction isn’t only physical. When Dracula brings an army of rats (Herzog imported 11,000 of them from Hungary, painting each of them gray) and, with them, plague, into Wismar, its buildings endure as the city empties out. Among the most striking characteristics of Herzog’s Nosferatu is the way the director uses images of great beauty to tell a story of great horror. This is never more so than in the film’s depiction of Wismar’s losing its elegance as its people lose their lives; the shreds of their civilization are shown unraveling in astounding, merciless sequences of ravishing desolation...

Dracula himself is soft-spoken, his words slow, deliberate, and almost hesitant, his voice sometimes caressing, sometimes menacing, and always weary. He comes across as an exhausted figure, still powerful, yes, but tired of his own power.

He is at the crossroads of human, demon, animal, and even insect, but he is still painfully conscious of the traces of humanity within him; he is alienated, isolated, lonely, envious, and resentful.

Check out the scene in a night-struck Wismar where Dracula (illuminated an almost electric blue) peers through a window that reveals a cozy, candle-lit domestic scene: Satan gazing at a Vermeer interior, and mourning, and wanting and craving. To watch Kinski’s evocative face for just those few moments is to understand how the loneliness that envelops Dracula will lead this iron-willed predator into vulnerability and danger

What beautiful writing. Read the whole thing.

And, for less than £4.00 from Amazon.co.uk, this DVD is a bargain to sink one's teeth into.

Even if that means ending a sentence with a preposition. 

My various blog posts on the Kaminski story have caught a wider audience.

So I have decided today to come out.

Back in May this year I, like everyone else, was revolted by the goings-on in Parliament and Government over expenses and other abuses.

What especially annoyed me was the fact that over some 28 years in the FCO I had been meticulously careful in spending public money, both under the rules and within the spirit of the rules.

Had I been caught straying in either respect, I (rightly) would have been punished. And Labour Ministers/MPs would be pointing to my punishment as evidence for their own integrity in managing public money.

Yet lo, it turned out that within that world of MPs/MEPs going to the highest levels in all Parties there were far too many people manipulating the allowances/expenses system for heavy personal gain.

So when David Cameron said that people who previously had not been involved in politics might apply to join the Conservative Party Candidates List as part of a wider move to effect a tough spring-clean at Westminster, I thought "why not?"

Thus at the end of May I set in motion the procedures for getting some serious references and formally applying. Which, of course, meant that I had to leap off the non-political fence and join the Conservative Party, which I finally did on 11 August.

That was my first time as a member of any Party since I left Oxford University in 1976, having been briefly on the OU Conservative Association committee during a period of seething left-wing activism including lots of fiery speeches by my co-lawyer at St John's College, one T Blair.

Having applied to get on the Candidates List, one then has to go through a Parliamentary Assessment Board, a half-day series of quite lively and even stressful tests (written and oral). I did that, paying £250 for the privilege, at the end of July. And I passed. See this account of the success of the Conservative initiative to attract new blood into the Party and politics more generally via these PABs.

Once one is on the List, one waits for lists of seats seeking candidates to be put round. Then one has to decide to apply or not.

The fact that one is on the List is private until the person concerns decides to make it public. I chose to maintain my privacy, mainly because I did not expect to win a chance to fight a seat and the moment would pass.

I have applied for only one seat so far, namely Devizes - not far from where we now live. I heard a couple of weeks ago that I had done well enough to be a reserve (in the top eight from some 170 candidates) but not the final six, who present themselves to the Devizes Conservatives tomorrow when the new candidate is to be chosen.

A good first showing. But not good enough. Unless one of the successful six would-be candidates drops out for some reason in the next few hours, that's that. On to the next try, if one suitable for the Crawfs as a whole emerges. 

So there it is.

Some no doubt will now crow that anything I have written about Michal Kaminski or the Labour Party or anything else can be dismissed as typical Tory double-dealing.  

Well, so be it. Nothing I have said about Kaminski was private, confidential or otherwise unavailable information. 

I served as a diplomat under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and (briefly) Gordon Brown. I rose up through the FCO ranks steadily enough under the Conservatives, enjoying my two years as Geoffrey Howe's FCO speechwriter.

But my FCO career accelerated under New Labour, since Robin Cook in particular appreciated my quirky energy and grasp of Balkan issues, as did No 10. My file of FCO appraisals contains many compliments from Ministers and politicians from different Parties. In short, I did my job as a politically neutral civil servant.

Now I am again a free person. I am happy to put myself forward to serve the public in a different role. If I am lucky enough to get the opportunity to run for a Parliamentary seat, and then persuade enough voters to vote for me so that I win an election and get in to Parliament, my life will change. If not, not. 

On my blog which has run since early 2008 without a single peep of concern or even interest from anyone in the FCO, I have been critical of the current UK government and its policies on various occasions. But I have been careful not to put out embarrassing tittle-tattle or other really confidential material gleaned from my own career in a way designed to cause deliberate embarrassment. I also have not opined on many issues where my main role in so opining would be to reveal sensitive inside information.  

Of course during 28 years in the FCO I have seen, read and heard plenty of significant and senior things which 'the public' might well like to know. Part of the code of ethics of the civil service involves respecting due professional confidentiality. That is what I have done, using some real-life examples to comment instead to my small but loyal blog readership on deeper issues of principle which rise up and collide with reality in our public life.

On we go.

The Problem of our times is not addressed by fleeting party-political bickering about who does/did what or said what.

It is the operational management of Complexity, at all levels.

We are confronted with far too many private and public institutions which (we are told) are Too Big To Fail - yet also in practice Too Big To Succeed.

Labour as currently constituted has (in my view) no philosophical answer on this question, only an instinct to extend the state in all its modern bossy intrusiveness and a hope to minimise its losses through dumbing down the arguments by smears and gimmicks.

The Conservatives in turn face appalling problems if they do get into office next time round. Where to start in hacking back the state in all its post-modern luxuriant forms, while at the same time keeping intelligent government going?

Goodness knows.

But the answer surely lies at the libertarian/conservative end of the philosophical spectrum - trusting people more, and the state less.

Perhaps it will help to have to hand some independent-minded people on board who believe that and who know the system inside out -  and are ready to wield a large spring-cleaning brush.

Welcome Iain Dale readers.

* * * * *

One of the points made by Labour against Kaminski is that he was in effect playing an anti-semitic card by arguing against the apology by then President Kwasniewski for the Jedwabne massacre.

It's obvious! Any Pole arguing against the form or principle of such an apology has to be at the very least a revolting person, and more probably a horrid anti-semitic extremist.

Well...

80% of Poles at the time (2001) felt that is was good that the crime at Jedwabne had been made public, but a similar 80% did not feel any moral responsibility for it - why should they? Opinion on President Kwasniewski's apology was divided, with a slight margin in favour.

Noting the complexity of these issues, the then Polish PM Jerzy Buzek was very careful in the way he chose his words:

The slaughter in Jedwabne was not perpetrated in the name of the nation, nor in the name of the Polish state. Poland was at the time an occupied country. Yet, if as a nation we have the right to be proud of those Poles who, at the risk of their lives, sheltered Jews then we must also acknowledge the guilt of those who took part in their slaughter.

We are ready to confront even the darkest facts of our history, but in the spirit of truth, without seeking presumed justifications. We will not, however, agree to have the Jedwabne event serve to popularize false theses of Poland's complicity in the Holocaust or about inborn Polish anti-Semitism.

Hmm. Is that formulation not just a bit defensive. Even ... shifty? Surely that crafty drafting masks a deep anti-semitic instinct!

And where is Mr Buzek these days?

Oh yes, here. 

Some things are complicated and deeply morally challenging. Simplify them for banal political purposes at your peril.

The decision by the Catholic Church to create a formula to allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church but keep some of their Anglican persona is a stunner.

Above all, because it represents the latest move in a Great Negotiation which has proceeded for some 500 years as between Rome and the English Church. Who answers to whom, and why? And who gets the valuable property portfolio? How best to effect this move itself has been the subject of learned theological manoeuvring for well over a century. 

But it is astonishing also because the current Pope performed this move in a crude but tough power-play sort of way.

He concluded that the current Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church had lost authority to the point where the Catholic Church could 'just do it' by announcing both a plan and a quite new outcome, rather than painstakingly carry on haggling over it for, say, a few more decades.

Remarkable.

Try this beyond awesome line from the Times (emphasis added):

Meanwhile, the Church of England will recapture the moral high ground in the eyes of the secular, English-speaking world by consecrating women bishops. It might even liberalise its position on homosexuality.

Exactly.

The Church of England has decided - after generations of feebly trying to please everyone - to go for the Moral High Ground of the decadent and vapid secular English-speaking world which has no moral reference points at all and, indeed, specifically asserts that in principle no such moral reference points can exist.

Because it's all relative, see?

But from that rather unlofty moral high ground vantage point rump Anglicanism will have a good but dwindling view as the Pope tidies up some loose ends to get the planet's growing Catholic/Christian world in better shape to tackle the Muslim challenge.

Now that's what I call a real Negotiation. With, say, another 1000 years or so to go before our distant descendants can decide who's winning.

In the meantime, we have merely joy. And a forlorn Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yesterday I heard an exultant Catholic friend say that the Anglican Church now looked like a lollypop left in the sun on a park bench:

"Soon all there'll be left will be a stick with a damp stain on the end".

Update: Have a look at the various links here at First Things where the Anchoress is following the issue much more closely than I ever can.

I like her reference to distinctions between the churches that teach the era throughout the faith, and those that teach the faith throughout the age.

Tory Bear does some digging on the Labour Party's zany allies in the European Parliament.

And strikes gold.

Or does he?

He is unimpressed with Mr Andrzej ("It is impossible to rape a prostitute!") Lepper:

Where to start with their leader and the sleaze, the criminal activities and the general insanity of the man. Another former communist, he has done time for assault and even demanded sexual favours for jobs in his office.

Of course I met Lepper a few times when I was Ambassador in Poland. He was a genial and wily Polish version of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, although being Polish Mr Lepper's excesses are much more genteel and do not involve shooting at voters' pets from a railway carriage.

For a few helter-skelter months Lepper was even Agriculture Minister in the Polish government, where he made a rather favourable impression on a passing House of Commons delegation. But eventually Jaroslaw Kaczynski threw him overboard, having drawn away the core of Lepper's voting base.

Alas Tory Bear is wrong to say that Labour "sit hand in hand" in Europe with Mr Lepper's Self Defence party. The empty Lepper tendency collapsed in the 2009 EP elections and they won no seats.

And is another of his targets the Troofer Giulietto Chiesa still an MEP? Apparently not.

Hmm.

Looking at the way Thomas Jefferson set about his work representing the new United States of America in France in the years immediately leading up to the French Revolution, I came across a fine observation.

Jefferson over in London was taken aback by the ribald anarchy of the British press:

The licentiousness of the press produces the same effect which the
restraint of the press was intended to do. If the restraint prevents things
from being told, the licentiousness of the press prevents things from being
believed when they are told.

No change there?

Or is it even worse? That the licentiousness and sheer babble of the press are so grotesque that people will believe every daft thing they read? And if you believe in anything, you believe in nothing?

That said, a cacophony of free voices is better than the silence of mewling media people doffing their cap to ridiculous injunctions.

A zany but prominent piece in this morning's Guardian, asserting that the newspaper has been 'prevented for reporting Parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds':

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting.

The report mentions the various battles of John Wilkes in the eighteenth century to keep the public informed over what went on in Parliament.

Indeed.

A summary of this lively fellow's life and work is here.

The point is that Wilkes several times went to prison to defend and champion and advance his and our liberties.

Not our brave Guardian friends. They apparently have been served with some sort of injunction against writing a story. They are quite free to ignore it and publish anyway, battling it in the courts subsequently.

You are only gagged if you let someone gag you - without fighting back.

Luckily we have the Internet to help us find out what is happening.

Enter Guido and Mr Eugenides. And yes, one MSM stalwart - the Independent.

The point?

Namely that in this country the liberties we have were gained incrementally over hundreds of years, usually by people fighting for them and often paying a price.

Likewise these liberties can be rolled back incrementally.

The more so if people who usually claim to make a fuss about Liberty give a sad sigh and lean forward in a resigned fashion to receive the gag as the gagger comes along.

Another part of my foraging for witty things to say about Diplomacy has involved exploring this magnificent official FCO tract from 1965:

Restricted

 Guidance

to Diplomatic Service and other Officers, and Wives

or

some "do's" and "don'ts" of Diplomatic Etiquette and other relevant matters

Almost every page is a time-machine taking us back to a period far, far before political correctness, when manners and proper behaviour were expected, albeit and in a somewhat, hem, paternalistic and sexist way.

A couple of crackers:

• Remember too that while you and your British friends may privately be critical of British institutions or British public figures, you might not like hearing the same criticisms made by, say, an American or a Frenchman
• Some post reports are better than others and some paint an unduly sombre picture, such as concluding that "there are facilities for Christian burial"

And how about these:

• Smoking:  Although smoking at table, even between courses, has now become quite customary, be wary of lighting up too soon ...
• Segregation:  There is much to be said for letting the ladies leave the men after dinner for an interval of not more than twenty minutes ... but you should in any case bear in mind that women Ministers and senior women diplomats may not like being segregated 

At least this has not changed:

• It is a horrible thought that anyone should not be able to come to your party because they lacked the right clothes ... but do not be shy of asking people to dress for dinner; it makes for a gayer scene and often has a surprisingly good effect on the conversation

Off to Paris tomorrow to give a presentation to a distinguished group of people about Diplomacy.

Meandering around the Internet for inspiration I started looking at the fine story of one of the greatest ever Ambassadors, Thomas Jefferson, who represented the newly emerging USA in Paris in the years leading up to the French Revolution. He returned home to even greater things, namely to be the third President of the USA.

Some wonderful material is to be found.

Including how Jefferson ordered a dead moose to be shipped from North America to Paris so that he could prove wrong annoying French experts who were claiming that the New World in its people, flora and fauna was a stunted, degenerate place. The moose was then displayed in all its (by then) somewhat moth-eaten glory in his Residence.

Here is some background by David Post.

Mr Post was so inspired by this story that he wrote a fine book about today's emerging Internet as it might have been described by a brilliant person like Jefferson exploring in a very practical way the frontiers of the very latest scientific innovation.

I have just ordered it on Amazon.  

So you should do so too. 

Also fascinating to read about the diplomatic machinations of the time concerning whale oil, a product vital for keeping Parisian streets lit and so deterring crime.

Products change.

The machinations of world trade do not.

Update  Aargh. My first shot had an Amazon Link to the wrong Jefferson + Moose book. Now fixed. I hope. 

Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what he might have to say.

Craig uses this interview to give some pertinent thoughts on Polish anti-semitism and other 'racist' phenomena in Poland, drawing on his own time in Poland in the 1990s:

... I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

...

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale's questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

Not quite how I would have put it, but it's a free country.

Some wider thoughts.

'Anti-semitism' comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so when we talk about so-called 'Polish anti-semitism' we need to be a bit more precise.

At one extreme of the anti-semitism spectrum there is one of my favourites, Japanese Anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with any actual Jewish people as far as one can tell but rather spirals off into surreally kinky Asian occult fantasising.

The Polish case is quite different. For centuries as Poland's borders ebbed and flowed in central Europe large communities of Jews lived in Polish villages, towns and cities, often flourishing and achieving reknown. As and when surges of anti-Jewish feeling erupted elsewhere in Europe, Jews headed for Poland or Polish-dominated places.

For example, Jews were not even allowed to live in Moscow until about 1800. Their numbers grew there until some 30,000 Jews were expelled in 1892; they headed for Lodz and Warsaw.

A further disaster happened in 1914/15 when Germany attacked Russian territory and the Russians expelled up to  500,000 supposedly disloyal Jews at virtually no notice, 100,000 people dying in the process.

To cut a long and complex story short, the reality of anti-semitism in Poland does not spring from mystic nutty theories of Jewish conspiracy/supremacy, although that strain is now there (see below). It rather comes from a combination of centuries-long Catholic anti-Jewish teaching (the Jews being deemed responsible for the crucifixion of Christ) and what might be called 'normal' ethnic rivalry/tension of the sort seen today in plenty of other places, where different language/cultural communities are jostling for position precisely because they are so close and mutually entangled (see eg Bosnia).

Which explains why, yes, Poland between the Wars did take up its share of the sort of Nazi-backed pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish propaganda and legalised oppression which by then had a thriving tradition elsewhere in Europe, but also why Poland conspicuously did not rise up against its Jewish population when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis built several big death-camps in Poland once they embarked on the Final Solution because that's where so many Jews were (plus eg Auschwitz was a handy railway junction for trains from elsewhere in Europe).

So now (as Craig rightly says) there are different legacy issues in Poland.

Plenty of Jewish cultural activities go on. A huge new museum for the history of Polish Jews is being built in Warsaw. Many Poles are discovering unexpected Jewish roots in their own families. All serious political leaders emphasise their good relations with the Jewish community. Above all, John Paul II made a massive effort to lead the Catholic Church towards reconciliation with the Jewish faith, and that is percolating its way through the Church in Poland too.

On the other hand, there is a lumpen low-level anti-semitism around on a scale which is depressing. Newspaper kiosks in Warsaw carry weird little pamphlets about Jewish conspiracies, stickers against Jews appear inside buses, football fan graffiti attacks other clubs for their Jewish affinities, and so on.

As for wider racism, Poland looks to visitors from the UK like a stunningly 'white' place. Dark-skinned people are few and far between.

Is Poland an especially racist place? Not obviously. Once (prompted by an alarming report from our Embassy in Budapest describing how dark-skinned colleagues in Hungary were being jostled on public transport and constantly receiving racist slurs) I asked one Embassy colleague with Asian DNA if she had had problems in Warsaw. "Apart from some funny looks now and then, no."

So, praise the Lord, on this one I am basically with Craig Murray.

Racist/ethnic/religious/cultural and other aggressive forms of Fear of The Other have been a feature of life round the planet for much of human history, if not all of it. We are all working our way through it, some with more integrity and open-mindedness than others. 

Poland was the default refuge of choice in Europe for Jews for hundreds of years. Its huge and successful Jewish community was obliterated by the fathers and grandfathers of the Germans sitting primly in EU meetings now. It also saw a huge number of Poles being executed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews from persecution.

In short, Poland is the last country on earth which needs to be lectured on the subject of anti-semitism.

And the noises in the UK from senior parts of the Labour Party spin-machine to try to smear the Conservative Party for their links with supposedly 'anti-semitic Poles' are beyond contempt.

Lieutenant-Commander Tadeusz Lesisz has died aged 91.

Here is a sense of what he achieved and witnessed in his extraordinary life.

People like him built the social and moral capital which today's enfeebled generations do not even understand and are frittering away.

So civilisations flow and ebb.

Dziekuje.

Some good comments from readers on my (too) long piece about the US Missile Defence decision.

Two take a different view, arguing that Putin's Russian government is not motivated by crude nationalism, and that if one stacks up various decisions taken in recent years by the USA/West it is not hard to see plenty of reasons why Russia currently is uncooperative.

Thoughts on what 'cooperation' means in this context.

I was working closely in Moscow with the Russian MFA in the mid-1990s when the post-Cold War sense of official disillusionment with the West started in earnest.

We Brits helped this along by making a serious blunder, refusing to give a visa to a close friend of Mr Primakov who was designated by the Russians to head (in an openly acknowledged way) their external intelligence representation at the Embassy in London.

This decision, taken at a very high level in London against Embassy advice, was (as far as we could see) stupid and insulting and above all pointless. It gave terrific support to those in the Russian security establishment who argued that the Brits did not want true cooperation in the grown-up areas of policy but were bent on playing more Cold War games. 

Thereafter the Contact Group and other processes continued, but with Russian enthusiasm drip-drip waning as US/UK/German support for Kosovo's independence grew. I know that the Russians did try to get through to Milosevic just how damaging his policies were likely to be to Serbia's interests - I had a vivid account from a Russian diplomat who listened to him being ridiculous about the subject until 4am, then walked out in despair.

More generally, the practical problems Russia has faced in dealing with such sprawling new borders and all the other human and policy issues arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union have been daunting, and handled pretty fairly. The Putin period has led to much greater discipline and sense of purpose.

So a lot has been achieved in a generally positive direction.

The difficulty comes from the psychological aspects of the dissolution of the USSR:

• formally the Russian elite accept Ukraine's and the other CIS states' independence. But because they (rightly) see 'Westernisation' as a threat to their privileged and untransparent status, they do not want Ukraine to modernise according to normal European standards. So Western support for the tendencies which want reform, transparency and modernisation becomes a 'threat to Russia's interests'.
• the loss of Big Power status has been especially painful. Rather than appear to accept limits on what Russian diplomacy can now do by being 'merely' part of a pro-reform bloc under US leadership, Moscow tries to project power by being awkward and obstructive - see Russia's disgraceful support for Mugabe at the UN, a classic example of the Russian leadership having nothing at stake and blocking pressure designed to bring about improvements for the mass of Zimbabweans
• elsewhere the Russians have just not tried to make use of their strong KGB-style weight to improve the behaviour of obnoxious regimes such as Iran and North Korea. They appear to dislike the very idea that US-led Western pressure might be seen to be working in such cases (since if that were so, their own role might be diminished), preferring instead to hold back and make half-hearted moves only when they 'get something' as a price.   

In short, the Russia we now have sees no real advantage for itself in the world's bad regimes (including a good few in the CIS itself) behaving in an increasingly pluralist and measured way, nor in other parts of the CIS becoming more 'European'.

Nor can the Russian ruling elite bring themselves to come fully clean about the violence and horror of the Soviet period - perhaps because their own families were either victims or perpetrators or both? 

All this is not an irrational or 'crudely nationalistic' attitude. It makes sense, once the basic hard premise is accepted that for the next few decades Russia will do better for itself - and above all its self-esteem - by defining itself separately from 'Western' processes and (as necessary) countering them where the cost of doing so is not too high. 

And, if some territorial gains can be made and loud warning shots fired across European/Western bows in the process to send a strong message of a new psychological confidence (see S Ossetia and Abkhazia), so much the better.

When the Americans pressed that famous Reset button, what new (or old) set of conditions and beliefs were they trying to reset?

Do they know themselves?

And how would they tell if it had worked?

Here (h/t Skeptical Bureaucrat) is an interesting report about apparent self-censorship among US diplomats going back some years:

One diplomat told The Washington Times that he has decided to resign in part because of frustration with "rampant self-censorship" by Foreign Service officers and their superiors that has gone so far as to ban "bad news" cables from countries that are friendly with the United States.

The diplomat, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution against himself and colleagues, said that, in one instance under the George W. Bush administration, an embassy in the Middle East did not report local government interference in elections. Senior management censored accounts of low morale at another Middle East mission that had been the target of terrorist attacks, he said.

More than a dozen diplomats serving in Washington and abroad told The Times that they agreed with most of the officer's critique, and that the censorship has continued to a lesser extent in the Obama administration. All asked not to be named to avoid retribution.

It must seem self-evident to any normal taxpayer that there is not much point in having diplomats if they do not send back their best, honest analyses of the places they live in, but rather shape their analysis to suit prevailing policy prejudices back at HQ.

Well, yes. But...

Your job as a diplomat is to represent your government's policy abroad. If after due deliberation your government has decided that it is in your country's interests to befriend the odious government/regime in the country to which you are posted, that is what you are paid to do.

It then becomes a matter of nice judgement how far and often you call that position into question. You need to find a way to get across to your political masters that the position to which they have publicly committed themselves is, for one reason or the other, unwise or counter-productive or wrong in principle. Part of Craig Murray's problem as HM Ambassador in Uzbekistan was his inability to do this with even minimum guile and judgement. See eg here. 

And it is genuinely not easy to get such changes effected. Other partners/allies may have views. Domestic lobbies too. There may be some deeply-held secret reasons for continuing the policy which even diplomats in the country concerned do not know.

In these circumstances, the issue is not so much self-censorship as avoiding fighting battles which have been fought and lost, or which are just not going to be won this time round.

This earlier post by me takes up that question with some real examples, and features an interesting exchange (well, I thought it was interesting) between Craig and myself which goes into the professional issues in some depth. 

Two examples from my own career.

1   Back in 1983/84, a couple of us middle-ranking young dips at the British Embassy to socialist Yugoslavia in Belgrade came to the view that the decay of Yugo-communism was such that this country could no longer sensibly be termed 'a pillar of stability in the Balkans' as the official briefs in London proclaimed. In fact, it was a crumbling pillar of instability.

We had various internal disagreements if not rows with our senior Embassy colleagues about this: how far was it true, and how far should those who felt the policy analysis was wrong be allowed to put their concerns to high levels in London? One of my first blog postings was all about my famous MTS/Non-MTS paper about just these questions.

2   I think now that the Embassy pulled its punches in reporting the massive devastation caused by Moscow trying to suppress separatist elements in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. The general policy instinct had it that the nascent democracy in Russia just had to be supported come what may, and that if that meant looking away from gruesome human rights excesses in and around Chechnya, so be it. That approach made political sense at the time - but what problems did it store up for later?

So, all this is not as straightforward a subject as you might think, the more so these days when just about anything is likely to leak.

Yet the hard fact remains. It is right to take a firm policy stand, and sometimes the only available choices are all deeply unattractive.

But a firm stand in the end is only as firm as the ground it stands on.

And surely Ministers need to know if that ground is not as firm as it looks:

“One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

The most important sentence I wrote in my diplomatic career? Both because it was right in fact - and because I put it on the public record that I thought our policy was wrong?

This week I distribute the prizes as guest of honour at my old school, St Albans School.

St Albans School is one of the oldest schools in the world. Thirteenth oldest in fact.

It was founded in 948 by the Abbot Ulcinus, whom I recall with affection. He was an avuncular prelate with white bushy eyebrows who chanted Latin psalms with great piety as he flogged us pert young choirboys with birchtwigs early every morning.

Later the school flourished thanks to a lucrative Wine Charter. The school still uses the historic Abbey Gateway which was attacked during the Peasants Revolt of 1381.

Its most famous Old Boy is genius Stephen Hawking, who, of course, was nothing special at school. Later in 1972 I was there to cheer as schoolmate Kirk Dumpleton whupped two other skinny teenagers (and future Olympic champions) Steve Ovett and Seb Coe to win the English cross-country championships - the only British runner ever to beat them in one race.

A distinguished former teacher who attempted to knock Music into me was Simon Lindley. He would make a half-hearted but witty attempt to beat the whole class one by one with a long ruler if we were too noisy waiting for him outside the old Lecture Room. Happy days. 

My own claim to fame at the time was more modest. I was captain of the school chess club which made it to the last eight in the Sunday Times National Competition. But I was Head Boy in my Oxbridge term. Creep Crawly Crawford indeed. 

The current Headmaster is the energetic Andrew Grant, who also currently leads the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC - national association for independent schools).

Should be a blast.

Researchers and experts have been studying the history of fairy tales and have traced different versions of Little Red Riding Hood all round the planet and back into history:

Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.

In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

I hope they have not overlooked this very modern version.