Cui Bono?

Warning: Contains greater than 1000% of the RDA of crackpot conspiracy theories. Maybe much greater. 

Marco has avowed recently that he no longer believes anything he reads in the media, and is of the opinion that the freedom of the press in the West is about as great, in real terms, as the freedom of the press in the renegade mainland provinces of the Republic of China. It is clear to him that much of what passes for news and news analysis is simply “off the wall out and out lies”. He says he is close to believing all left-wing conspiracy theories about the media, and he cites this article from the Economist about Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine as an example of Western journalism starting from a basis of pure propaganda, and professes a generally pro-Russian view of the situation in Ukraine.

While sharing Marco’s distrust of the media, I replied that on the contrary, I am close to believing all right-wing conspiracy theories about the media. Rather than the Western media being manipulated to defame Russia, I think it is much more likely that it is a puppet dancing on Russian strings. This was after all the case for the left-wing Western media throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union. In the twenties Western journalists reported things that were later found to be untrue; in the thirties Western journalists reported things that were later found to be untrue; in the forties Western journalists enthusiastically participated in creating propaganda for ‘Uncle Joe’; throughout the Cold War the Western Media was infected with defeatism; up to the very last moment of August 1991 a false moral-equivalence and exaggerated respect for the solidity and effectiveness of the Soviet Union permeated the Western media. They did not produce much in the Soviet Union that was better than the West: Energiya rockets, certainly; but besides that, lies. They were masters at generating every kind of lie for every kind of purpose. Brash, unsubtle big lies that worked through their sheer audacity; little lies that slowly wore away resistance by constant repetition; subtle lies that were almost the truth. The Cold War was a war of disinformation.  And Putin, former KGB man, is an heir to this tradition.  I think that he has taken up the dusty levers for steering western public opinion that were left untended in 1991-1999, and that the Western media has to a large extent been reporting exactly what he wants it to during the 21^st century. I think he is a master both of the brash unsubtle lie for domestic consumption and the insidious byzantine lie for foreign consumption. I think if negative press about Putin gets traction in the West, it is because he no longer cares what we think.

 

I am now going to consider three cases, two big ones and one almost trivial one, where the narrative of the Western media has made no sense, asking the question: who benefits from this narrative? 

Exhibit A: Kosovo cf. Iraq

Kuwait was to Iraq as Crimea is to Russia. They both should be back where they belong. (Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Times, 21^st December 1993)

In 1999 the government of Serbia and Montenegro, the rump of Yugoslavia, fought to maintain the territorial integrity of their country against an secessionist ethnic minority, in much the same way that NATO members the United Kingdom, Spain, and Turkey have acted against their own secessionist ethnic minorities. Serbia and Montenegro had never shown any territorial ambitions outside the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia. All of their aggression had been in an attempt to prevent the disintegration of a country that had been a solid member of the community of nations for seventy years: the communist state that had been best integrated into the rest of Europe. They had never attacked anyone outside the borders of Yugoslavia. Since 1995 they had accepted with good grace peace agreements negotiated in Bosnia and Hercegovina and in Croatia. They were not causing trouble to anyone outside their own country. They were trying their best to rebuild from the damage (largely self-inflicted) they had suffered during the break of Yugoslavia.

NATO bombed them and set up an unviable kleptocratic state of Kosovo. There was no basis in international law for the attack. The government of Serbia and Montenegro was not a threat to anyone outside of Serbia and Montenegro.A few people protested. In Sydney, I remember, they all seemed to be Serbs. The Western media yawned. Western public opinion applauded.

The dictator of Iraq had launched the worst war of the 1980s in an unprovoked attack on one of his neighbours; at the beginning of the 1990s he annexed another of his neighbours, and in the course of the war fought to liberate this neighbour, he mounted a ground invasion of a third neighbour and bombed a fourth country. He was a clear menace to the neighbourhood. He was not removed from power in 1991, only because he was in the Soviet orbit, and the lingering Cold War mentality of the West shrank from pushing so far. Internally, he had pursued policies against ethnic minorities and political opponents that were vastly worse than anything done in Serbia and Montenegro. In 2003 he had been in breach of United Nations resolutions for twelve years. But it was the war to get rid of him – a war with a justification in international law, fought with a coalition much broader than NATO - that brought out protesters in tens of thousands in every capital city of the West. It was the war against him that we argued about for years, the war that is still excoriated by the entire left and repudiated by a plurality of the right. Why? 

Sure, party politics inside the United States might lead the media in that country to reflexively support Clinton in 1999 but not Bush in 2003, but why should this solipsistic madness infect the rest of the world? I never understood.

Who benefits from keeping a genocidal, aggressive dictator in the heart of the Middle East? Not his neighbours, four of which he waged war on. Not Europe or Japan, who want the region that is the source of a large fraction of their fossil fuels to be calm and reliable. Not China: it doesn’t have global ambitions, and has an interest in cheap fuel. Not the United States: it has no ticker for being the world’s policeman, and wishes it could sit securely behind its oceans and ignore the rest of the world like it did in the 19^th century.

I have just finished re-reading ’Zhirinovksy: The Little Black Book’, a collection of quotes cobbled together back in 1994 from the speeches and writings of Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. A probable KGB-stooge, renowned sayer of crazy things and vile misogynist, he was deputy speaker of the Russian parliament for more than a decade. To compare him to members of the Australian parliament who are renowned for saying crazy things - to Bob Katter or Christine Milne, f’rinstance – is to involuntarily fall to one’s knees and thank God for Australia.

One thing that struck me on rereading the book is a recurring theme in the quotes made by the early Zhirinovsky: the importance to Russia of the countries immediately to the south of the old Soviet Union. He wants Russian soldiers to wash their boots in the Indian Ocean. He does not have global ambitions, but he wants the near abroad back, and he wants Russia to be the hegemon of the Middle East. He wants Iran; he wants Turkey. This was an old tsarist ambition, and the kind of thing Bob Santamaria used to endlessly warn us about on television. I think it is still there. Russia cannot expand into a Middle East that is peaceful and stable and secure under the umbrella of the Pax Americana. If it is too weak at the moment to act against it now, it is in its interests to keep it weak and divided until it can. Russia is also a major exporter of fossil fuels. It is in its interests to keep other major exporters of fossil fuels insecure, to push up prices and to increase its comparative advantage as a stable, reliable source. Russia is the one nation whose long-term interests clearly align with continued chaos in the Middle East.

So consider this difference between 1999 and 2003 as one possible explanation for the bizarre difference between the public reaction to these two wars: Putin was in charge of the old Soviet propaganda mill in 2003, but not in 1999. He was horrified at how badly the propaganda machine had been mismanaged in aid of his slavic brethren in Kosovo, and swore ‘never again’.  Correlation is not causation; but I respectfully submit that this is less batshit insane than most other explanations I can come up with. It’s just a theory. 

Exhibit B: Climate Change

The observational evidence for anthropogenic global warming was strong in the 1990s. The evidence since then has been weak, but the media frenzy has been much greater in the 2000s, peaking in 2007.

I have argued about this ad nauseam, so I won’t bore you now. Much. It has just been always blindingly obvious to me that Bjorn Lomberg is right. The cost-benefit analysis of taking action to stop emission of carbon dioxide now, to such an extent that it might actually reduce warming, shows that it is almost the dumbest possible thing we could do. Why should the media interest increase, and continue to increase, as the observational evidence gets weaker and weaker? This is another thing I could never understand.

Who benefits from the West hobbling its economy in a precipitous rush to head off a crisis that is a media beat-up? Not the West itself. Not any country that is integrated into the global economy and earns it living selling us stuff; or that aspires to such a position. Not the poorer Third World, whose restive urban populations need cheap food from the fossil-fuel-dependent farms of the West. No, only a country that is poorly integrated with the global economy, with long-term ambitions to autarky, that knows it is at a competitive disadvantage and needs time to catch up, could benefit from ill-thought out climate change action by the West. Did I mention it is a major supplier of a fuel that can give a large immediate impact on reducing greenhouse emissions by replacing coal? And there’s this. I would be willing to bet that Russian involvement in the anti-fracking movement is deeper and broader than anyone imagines.

Again, this is just a theory. Please don’t send anyone around to put polonium in my coffee.

Exhibit C: Assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh

You might recall the assassination of a top Hamas official in Dubai in 2010, attributed to Mossad. It was carried out by a ridiculously large number of agents, all travelling on forged Western passports. The faces of the assassins were captured on camera; the details of their forged passports were recorded; the whole operation seemed rather amateurish.  Yet none of the assassins has ever been identified publicly. It struck me as strange that all the passports used were from European countries or Australia and all the agents could pass for Western Europeans or Australians, when there are many more people in the pool of potential Mossad agents who are fluent speakers of Arabic and Russian than of Western European languages, and could pass for nationals of those countries who are common travellers in the UAE: but this may well be because the passports are all from countries that don’t need visas to enter the UAE (and Russia and the Arab countries aren’t).

But, why haven’t any of these people been identified? Israel is a fairly open society with a population about the same as New South Wales. There is a free press. There is a big Israeli emigre population all over the world. How come nobody has come out in London or Berkeley and given an interview to one of the many rabidly anti-Zionist papers out there, saying ‘I recognise that guy, that’s X, we used to play volleyball together in high school in Petah Tikvah’? Where are all the acquaintances of these 11 suspects? I don’t understand. And I think, where are you going to find 11 educated white people who don’t have any acquaintances who are going to show up in the Western media? Russia, that’s where I think. And maybe Western European and Australian passports were just to avoid having to get a visa, and Mossad didn’t mind limiting their pool of potential agents in this way; or maybe instead, someone with a background in byzantine spycraft wanted to pin the blame for the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh on Israel, and at the same time sow trouble between Israel and its near-allies in the West. Two birds with one stone: get rid of a Hamas loose cannon who is about to (f’rinstance) spill the beans on the extent of Russian involvement in the Iranian nuclear program, and cause trouble for Israel.

Just a wacky conspiracy theory, again. If true, an amazingly successful piece of FSB disinformation. I am in awe. But I don’t have any evidence, so there’s no need to hunt me down. Thanks!

Parenthetically consider this: A weak and disorderly Middle-East is good for Russia. A demonised Israel is a good way to ensure a weak and disorderly Middle East. The first intifada stopped about the time the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Al-Aqsa intifada started up in 2000, shortly after Putin came to power.

10-11, The Middle Ages

Number 4 in a Series on Countries Named After Peeps

We have had a lot of countries named after Jews, and a lot of countries named after citizens of the Roman Empire, with a fair amount of overlap between the two. There have also been quite a few peeps compressed into a relatively short period of time. Now there is a long stretch of time, approximately from the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity until the Age of Exploration, where only two people lived whose names feature in the names of countries today.

10. Hashim ibn 'Abd Manaf ?- 511

The only peep on the list who was never a formal member of any of the Judeao-Christo-Islamic religions, Hashim was a popular leader of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca who is said to have saved the city from famine by sending a hundred of his camels to collect grain in Syria, which he distributed freely to his fellow Meccans (the name ‘Hashim’ is related to a root meaning ‘starving’). His descendants proudly took his name, and his great-grandson founded a religion you may have heard of. The ‘Hashimi’ family name is taken now to refer to descendants of Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, and the royal families of Morocco and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan can trace their ancestry back to her.

Hashim is anecdotally said to be buried in Gaza, making him the only person a country is named after whose remains are not in an officially recognised country.

11. Domingo Félix de Guzmán 1170 –1221

A young man from a wealthy family in Old Castille, Domingo’s first recorded act of any importance was also feeding the hungry: as a student, he is said to have sold all of his possessions to buy food for the poor at a time of famine. In 1215 he founded the Order of Preachers, more commonly known as the Dominican Order – one of the two big orders of ‘friars’, distinguished from ‘monks’ in that they did not sit still in one place praying and working, but wandered about the countryside doing things. His career was the basis for one of the big pop hits of 1963-1964. 

Long before then, the first permanent European settlement inthe Americas was (re)named after him, in 1495 or 1496. The name of this city became an alternative designation for the island it was located on, which in English we call ‘Hispaniola’. The western half of the island was taken by the French, but Saint Domingue had a population that was 90% slaves which turned out to be an unviable arrangement for the colonizers, and the rebellious slaves gave their half a non-European name derived from the original Taino inhabitants . The eastern half of the island, which remained in Spanish hands most of the time until independence, is now the Dominican Republic.

6-9, Victims of the Diocletian Persecution

Number Three in a Series on Countries Named after Peeps

Around about the year 300, four people who had countries named after them were alive at the same time, during the last and most savage persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. For all of them, there is tantalisingly little information about their actual lives, as opposed to the traditions that have built up about them over the years.

6. Saint Lucy of Syracuse, ?283-304

The only woman who has a whole country named after her, and the most recent woman on the list.  She died at the age of about 21, and almost nothing concrete is known about her life. The island nation of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean is named after Saint Lucy.

7. Saint Vincent of Saragossa, ?-304

Another martyr who died young, in Valencia rather than Syracuse. Saint Vincent is the patron saint of wine-makers, and vinegar-makers, and Lisbon, as well as lending his name to the most south-westernly point of Europe. The island of Saint Vincent, the larger part of the Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, is named after him.

8. Saint Mina the Martyr, ?-309?

A soldier in the Roman army who became a wildly popular saint in Christian Egypt - and still is in the remaining Christian bits of Egypt, it seems to be the opinion of scholars that Saint Mina, or Menas, was the original for the thoroughly ahistorical Saint Christopher, or 'Christ-bearer', removed from the calendar of the Roman Catholic church in 1970, long after he gave his name to the Caribbean island of Saint Christopher, aka St. Kitts, the other half of the smallest nation where a World Cup cricket match has been played.


9. Saint Marinus, ?-366

Not to be confused with Saint Marinus, or Marinus the Monk, this Saint Marinus escaped the Diocletian persecution, became a hermit, then founded a monastery, which somehow survived for a ridiculous length of time and became the still-extant statelet of San Marino.

1-5 , Biblical Figures

Number Two in a series on Countries named after Peeps

1. Jacob son of Isaac son of Abraham

Yes, he almost certainly never really existed. And there are quite a few legendary founder figures whose names have become associated with countries in a false etymology. For instance, the derivation of  'Britain' from Brutus of Troy, 'Misr' (Egypt) from Mizraim son of Ham, and the doubly-incorrect derivation of the name of the country known in English as 'Georgia': in English, from St George (which is wrong) and in Kartvelian from 'Kartvel', an apocryphal son of Japheth (also wrong).

But I think it is quite likely that the first incarnation of the land of Israel, c.1000 BCE, was named as claimed after a legendary ancestor figure, instead of the other way around, given that the biblical accounts of its foundation have it being conquered a relatively short time before it is known by that name. I can't be sure; but I'm going to call it as a valid country named after a peep.

2. King Solomon son of David

Third king of the united kingdom of Israel, immortalised in Judeao-Christo-Islamic culture for his wisdom and fabulous wealth, whose name was given by a Spanish explorer to the Solomon Islands, sort of like Erik the Red naming Greenland 'Greenland', in hope that they would be chock full of treasure.

3. Mary mother of Jesus
You will search the roll of the United Nations in vain for a 'Santa Maria'.  No, the Blessed Virgin Mary makes this list in a rather obcure fashion. One of her many titles is 'Our Lady of the Snows', in reference to a 4th century miracle, which led a Spanish explorer to give the name 'Nuestra Señora de las Nieves' to a Caribbean island. This was gradually corrupted to 'Nevis', which is one half of the name of the nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.


 4. Jesus Christ
While going forth to conquer new lands on the southern edge of New Spain with their armies of Nahuatl auxilaries, the Spanish (again) gave a region on the Pacific coast of Central America the pious but rather unwieldy name of 'The Province of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of the World'. This has been shortened to 'The Saviour', El Salvador.

5. Thomas the Apostle
Of the many saints that have had countries named after them, the only biblical one is the Apostle Thomas, aka Doubting Thomas. A volcanic island off the coast of Africa, discovered on St. Thomas' day (December 21st) by Portuguese explorers, was given his name, and now forms one half of the nation of  Sao Tome and Principe.

Countries Named After Peeps

Number 1 in a Series

Last Saturday a bird struck the window of our living room with an almighty bang and broke its neck. It was one those pigeons with the spiky tufts on their heads that we never had in Townsville and I can first remember seeing in Alice Springs on my honeymoon. I noticed this morning that it has left a mark – it is like an eye, an arc over a circle, and the circle with enough feathery fine structure to satisfy any iridologist. Poor bird. We will have to hang somethings on strings to stop it from happening again. It will never happen again for that particular bird, though: it was killed instantly. It had beautiful iridescent feathers on its side. It was a simply amazing thing from a chemical point of view. From any reasonable point of view. Fearfully and wonderfully made, it was. Life casts so much beauty and complexity so carelessly about the world. Life is so very profligate of beauty – and of suffering. Life is so wonderful and so fearful.

I also finished my virtual ride across the Sahara last Saturday: from Oran to Lagos, roughly tracing the journey in ‘Beau Geste’ on Google Maps. It took me a little less than three years. Most all of it is paved road. It would be great to see it all in real life some day, when Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib and Boko Haram have calmed down. 

And a few days before last Saturday, I deactivated my Twitter account. We will see if I am stubborn enough to wait out the thirty days beyond which – it is written – return is impossible. I don’t think there is anything I ought to be saying that can be said in 140 characters or less. There didn’t seem to be any flow through from Youtube to Twitter followers, or vice versa, and it was making me depressed almost every day. On days when it wasn’t making me depressed, it was encouraging my troll-nature to a dangerous degree, and I kept having to bite back inflammatory things I thought of tweeting. For example I was going to take advantage of the existence of the International Date Line to cheerily tweet #IndependenceDay greetings on our 5^th of July to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Which brings me to my point, which is countries named after peeps. I thought, hmm, is there anyone else besides Simon Bolivar whose name features in the official names of more than one country? I thought perhaps Saint Dominic, but it turns out that the island of Dominica is named after the day it was discovered. I think Bolivar is the only one. But of course this got me thinking of countries named after peeps more generally, and I have put a map together, like so.

The countries in blue have names with a noun part that derives from the name of a particular individual person; the countries in cyan have names with an adjectival part that derives from the name of a particular individual person. I count 22 people who have been immortalised this way. I was going to go through them all (in chronological order) in one big post of geography pedantry jollity, but I think I will do them instead in a whole bunch of individual posts. Because having a country named after you is a pretty big deal.

Some Ruminations on 'Green Left Weekly'

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views, which is infuriating; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same voice. 

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  I don’t doubt that that the writers at the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald believe what they are writing: and to an extent, perhaps, if exactly the same op-eds had appeared in a paper explicitly aimed at a leftist fringe, they would not bother me as much.

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same infuriating voice.

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.