Tahrir Square, the Sequel

Return to Terror Square

by Guy Somerset 

In the sequel, the monster always comes back stronger than before. After a florid incarnation of the so-called “Arab Spring,” Cairo’s inhabitants have just returned election ballots whose resulting extremist successes forebode a Nuclear Winter for liberty.

It was in Tahrir Square that earlier this year protesters against “dictatorship” made their dramatic stand for human rights, civilian dignity, and liberal democratic entitlements. Also among their demands was the privilege to gang-rape Western women.

Lest any have forgotten (great efforts were made to ensure the casual observer never knew about it in the first place), only moments after the much-lauded victory against tyranny, the “protesters” took turns manhandling CBS reporter Lara Logan. Since approximately ten seconds after this occurrence, Western audiences have only heard intermittently from this portion of the international soundstage.

Following Hosni Mubarak’s resignation it was not civil rights which ruled, but a military junta. Many of the same abuses endured under Mubarak were suffered under the new gaggle of bit-player military dictators. Scant media attention was paid to the additional occupations of Tahrir Square by thousands protesting the continuing abuse. Ignored were ominous signals that the extremists who had long been outlawed from political participation were on the verge of making a very big comeback.

Only in the days after the recent election did the mainstay publishing powers offer a glance back and a look forward. More than one characterized the Freedom and Justice Party (né Muslim Brotherhood) victories as an astonishing development. Many used some variation of the theme that those rascally radicals, like all good movie villains, had “played it smart” and “lay [sic] low during the revolution,” only to emerge at full force during the aftermath.

Now arrives word from multiple sources that not only did the militant Islamists pull off a feat no one expected (except everyone who was paying any attention), they went about celebrating it in much the same way as before. Sadly this is not hyperbole, merely the plodding plotline of a formulaic script.

Caroline Sinz of France 3 television was in Tahrir Square on November 23 when a gang of men beat her and tore the clothes from her body. By her own account, they proceeded to molest her in ways which “would be considered rape.” This behavior continued for three quarters of an hour. Sinz’s cameraman was also beaten.

Another (this time Egyptian) female journalist named Mona Eltahawy was sexually assaulted while at the Egyptian Interior Ministry after being arrested in a street, again adjacent to Tahrir Square. As Eltahawy Tweeted, “5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers.”

This was while she was in the custody of the authorities, ostensibly the country’s moderates. She was later released with no statement on why she had been held, though the result (aside from psychosexual trauma) was a pair of broken wrists.

In modern Egypt, at least for women and especially for Western women, there is a Technicolor nightmare of “damned if you do get sexually assaulted by the civilians, damned if you don’t get sexually assaulted by the authorities.”

With the election of those who have even less esteem for women and divergent beliefs in general, the soundtrack has taken on an ominously Hitchcockian tone. This film is called Return to Terror Square. Subtitles are to be decided at the viewers’ discretion. This will be a performance little promoted and running only in those out-of-the-way outlets so the majority of viewers are unlikely to be unduly disturbed.

The drama progresses and the scene is set for the trilogy’s last installment, though we will have to wait for its premiere at a later date. In the meantime all the worst fears are realized and all the basest impulses indulged. Will our hero (whoever he may be, assuming he exists) rise to topple the despots and chivalrously hold malign minions liable for their misdeeds? Will the final chapter be given more exposure than this recent sequel? Will anyone still be left to care when and if humanity is restored?

The real horror story here is the lack of shock, the absence of outrage, and the casual acceptance that devious forces are now at work both in the corridors of power and the streets which slither through the Egyptian theater.

The Government v. Everyone

Happy Bill of Rights Day!

by Takis Mag 

Thursday marked 220 years since the Bill of Rights was signed. As tribute, the US government fed the Bill of Rights through a paper shredder. This week they shoved forward two bills that would neuter the constitution. Then, almost as if they were deliberately giving the finger to the entire nation, the White House Tweeted:

Happy Bill of Rights Day! The US continues to stand with citizens & governments around the world who empower free expression.

US propaganda says we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 to export democracy. Thursday marked the official end of the Iraq War. Our grand mission to export democracy was successful, because as of this week, it no longer exists here. We’ll have to move somewhere else to find it.

Like a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot, the feds came out with both fists swinging this week. On Wednesday the White House told reporters that Obama had rescinded his own public promises to veto SB1867, otherwise known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). That bouncin’ baby bill contains a clause permitting the feds to indefinitely detain anyone so much as suspected of having terrorist affiliations. On Thursday a Congressional committee held a hearing on amendments that would soften H.R. 3261, AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). That particular legislative confection would give the feds a Great Firewall of China-level authority to shut down websites at whim.

“Thursday marked 220 years since the Bill of Rights was signed. As tribute, the US government fed the Bill of Rights through a paper shredder.”

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
One of the main things that got Barack Obama elected—other than his shimmering, hazelnut-colored skin—was public outrage over the Bush Administration’s indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at places such as Guantanamo Bay. So after Obama’s election, when reputed “conspiracy theorists” such as the portly porcupine Alex Jones would warn that the feds planned to declare martial law and corral US citizens into internment camps, they were roundly dismissed as wackadiddly paranoid schizos—and, of course, racists who couldn’t stand seeing a black guy get all the chicks.

It turns out that only the cuckoo clocks knew what time it is. Sections 1031-1032 of NDAA contain the prickly clauses about indefinitely detaining terrorists without judicial review. This passage…

The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

…would seem to exempt US citizens. But critics charge it is delicately worded—unlike foreign nationals suspected of terrorism, the US is not required to hold them indefinitely, but they are still permitted to do so.

According to Senator Lindsey Graham:

1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.

On Wednesday the House passed the bill 283-136. On Thursday—Bill of Rights Day—the Senate passed it 86-13. The bill now awaits Obama’s certain signature.

Obama had originally threatened to veto the bill, but not over the indefinite-detention clauses. In fact, bill sponsor Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) says it was the White House that insisted the language be altered to include American citizens:

The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved….and the administration asked us to remove (it) which says that US citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.

Under the bill, American citizens can be indefinitely detained without proof merely on suspicion of having supported terrorist groups. Exactly what constitutes such “support” is, as always, the government’s guess.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
Similar to the PROTECT IP Act the Senate Judiciary Committee approved in May, SOPA is ostensibly designed to protect intellectual property and discourage copyright infringements. But critics say it threatens to “break the Internet.” It conveniently allows los federales to obliterate any site that’s so much as accused of featuring copywritten material. In such cases, “infringement” can consist of merely linking to another site that, say, features a stock photo of kitty-cats that it hasn’t obtained permission to use. Merely embedding a video containing copy-protected material is a felony that could result in five years’ imprisonment. A site can feature 100,000 comments on a message board, but merely on the unproved accusation that it hosts one unauthorized photo, the entire site can be made to disappear. Perfectly legal speech can be blotted from existence because the feds have flushed due process and probable cause down the loo in its quest to legalize prior restraint. The potential for governmental abuse is enormous. After reviewing dozens of proposed amendments to the bill on Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee finally delayed its vote on Friday, meaning the bill will likely not be submitted to the House floor until early next year.

While these cyclopean threats to basic American freedoms were being made this week, the mainstream media was a quiet village of sedated crickets. During Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, a gaggle of lumpy, gassy candidates fielded questions about Israel, the countries surrounding Israel, and the relations between Israel and the countries surrounding it, but nothing about either NDAA or SOPA. Some have insinuated that a deliberate blackout was in effect.

On Monday, Gallup released a poll that showed most Americans, left or right, said they feared the government more than big business. Despite the fact that both Democrat and Republican lawmakers seem to love both NDAA and SOPA, social-media voices from both the left and right howled in disapproval at the bills. On Twitter, one suddenly encountered something unimaginable only a month ago:  rightist libertarians and leftist Occupiers united in the belief that the government has gotten WAY the fuck out of hand. You’d see hashtags for #OWS and #TeaParty on the same Tweet. In the twinkling of an eye, jarheads and potheads agreed on one basic fact: The government that claims to represent them is instead their worst enemy. Instead of left versus right, it’s suddenly the government versus everyone. Whether it also becomes everyone versus the government remains to be seen.

Who celebrates a birth nowadays?

Elisabeth’s Barrenness and Ours 

By Mark Steyn

Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”

That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world — by choice.

America is not in as perilous a situation as Europe — yet. But its rendezvous with fiscal apocalypse also has demographic roots: The Baby Boomers did not have enough children to maintain the solvency of mid-20th-century welfare systems premised on mid-20th-century birthrates. The “Me Decade” turned into a Me Quarter-Century, and beyond. The “me”s are all getting a bit long in the tooth, but they never figured there might come a time when they’d need a few more “them”s still paying into the treasury.

The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for your country . . . A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words at the dawn of the “Me Decade,” “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.”

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

If you believe in God, the utilitarian argument for religion will seem insufficient and reductive: “These are useful narratives we tell ourselves,” as I once heard a wimpy Congregational pastor explain her position on the Bible. But, if Christianity is merely a “useful” story, it’s a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth. The hyper-rationalists ought at least to be able to understand that post-Christian “rationalism” has delivered much of Christendom to an utterly irrational business model: a pyramid scheme built on an upside-down pyramid. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have seen where that leads. Like the song says, Merry Christmas, baby.

The true heroes in our economy are the producers and earners

The Class Warfare We Need

The class deserving voters’ wrath is composed of society’s predators and parasites, who span all rungs of the income ladder.

By Steve Conover

Class warfare is emerging as a major theme for the 2012 presidential election campaign. “Millionaires and billionaires”—a reliable phrasethat apparently continues to test well with the Democrats’ focus groups—are the easy target, because even though they receive a large portion of national income, they represent only a small fraction of the electorate. But are the millionaires and billionaires the right enemy? Not according to the Republicans, who warn that the major victims of a class war against millionaires would be small businesses.

In short, the class war as it stands today finds "Democrats accusing Republicans of siding with the rich, and Republicans countering that Democrats were taxing small business owners who create jobs." Voters are faced with an apparent dilemma, a contest between the two powerful emotions of envy and fear: should we let our envy of the supposedly too-wealthy, too-powerful “rich” outweigh our fear of damaging the economy’s ability to create private sector jobs? Which side should we take in the unfolding class war: the Democrats’ message exploiting envy, or the Republicans’ message exploiting fear?

It’s a difficult dilemma—but, fortunately, it’s also a false dilemma. Why? Because, as it stands today, the class war has misidentified the enemy. Not all of the rich are the “bad guys” who deserve targets on their backs. By the same token, not all of the remainder are the “good guys” who deserve to be defended—and that includes the middle class, the poor, small businesses, and any other group we don’t usually think of as rich. It’s just not as simple as “the rich versus the rest.”

The graphic below illustrates the underlying error: the class of people who deserve our enmity is not precisely “the rich” at the very top of the income ladder; instead, the class deserving voters’ wrath is composed of society’s predators and parasites, who span all rungs of the income ladder.

The point is this: If we’re going to have a war, let’s do it right. The battle lines should be drawn orthogonally to the oversimplified “rich versus the rest.” A virtuous war would be one that rewards society’s honest earners and productive contributors, while punishing society’s predators, pirates, and parasites—all without regard to anyone’s income level. It is a target-rich environment that includes anyone (of any income level) who is cheating to win, any business or union (of any size) with its snout in the public trough, any politician filling that trough and feeding those snouts for reciprocal gain, and any group using the political system (at any level) to maintain its monopoly, or its winning “edge” against less-well-connected competitors.

Among “the rich” are many entertainment superstars, artists, CEOs, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Are all of them villains because of their huge incomes? Of course not. Most of them get where they are because they produce things that entertain us, make us more productive, save us money, or save us time. Most are “rich” because they earned it—and because they earned it, they do not deserve to be targets in the class war.

It’s also true that not everyone at the top earned their way to that position. For example, a few are the well-positioned rentiers leveraging their strategic position at a bottleneck in the financial system. As economist Tyler Cowen points out, "The high incomes in finance should give us all pause." Why? Because much of it was not earned; it was instead obtained bygaming the system, by staying a step ahead of the statutes, by keeping profits privatized and risks socialized, and by monetizing moral hazards. This group includes Wall Street firms employing high-speed data feeds into computers programmed to beat less-sophisticated market participants by using a trading technique known as “quote-stuffing,” a method designed to submit-and-retract thousands of dummy bids per second in the profitable quest for fleeting arbitrage events worth pennies each. This group stays one step ahead of the letter of current laws and regulations, lobbies to prevent unfavorable changes in those regulations, nudges the free market a step closer to a fake market, and extracts the resultant economic profits from a comparatively inexpert investing public.

As economic historian Joel Mokyr said of some past economic successes, “Prosperity and success led to the emergence of predators and parasites in various forms and guises who eventually slaughtered the geese that laid the golden eggs.” Might today’s Wall Street situation be a contemporary example of history repeating itself? Cowen’s article implies as much. In any case, any Republicans (or Democrats) who think the profitmaking methods described above are worth defending will have an increasingly difficult time doing that, and deservedly so. As the above diagram depicts, some of “the rich” fall into the class known as “predators and parasites” whose profits are large but not earned.

However, predators and parasites inhabit more than just the ranks of “the rich.” Examples abound. Some tech-savvy individuals and small businesses prey on the elderly, on government programs, or on vulnerable computer systems in governments and other businesses. Some public-sector union bosses are powerful enough to swing elections toward the candidates who will sit on the other side of the negotiating table, thereby bending the public trust to their special advantage. Some businesses—large and small, national and local—are sufficiently well-connected politically to maintain their comfort and longevity by extracting government subsidies for their special interest, or by getting their political friends to pass favorable legislation against competitive threats. The politicians on one side of crony capitalism, as well as the business managers on the other, are part of the problem a virtuous class war should be designed to fix.

A proper class war would require Democrats and Republicans to admit that the distinguishing characteristic of the enemy is not the level of income or wealth; rather, it is whether that income or wealth was earned. The true heroes in our economy are the producers and earners; they can be found all the way up and down the income ladder, and class warfare should defend and reward them instead of targeting them. Conversely, the proper targets are the class that includes cheaters, predators, pirates, and parasites—who can also be found at all income levels.

If class warfare is inevitable, let’s at least go after the right enemy. Fingering “millionaires and billionaires” as the culprits is the easy way out; it might pass muster in focus groups and might fit well into campaign speeches, but it doesn’t even come close to a proper description of the true enemies of economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. If we can target the right enemy, we’ll be fighting a good war; in that case, by all means, let the 2012 class war begin in earnest.

A pessimist is an informed optimist

The 7 most illuminating economic charts of 2011

By James Pethokoukis

My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. 

1. The overly optimistic unemployment forecast of the Obama White House. This may be the most infamous economic prediction in U.S. political history (helpfully updated by The Right Sphere). For the original January 2009 chart from White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, see here.

2.  The real unemployment rate. The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this:

3. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for decades—not. It is an oft-repeated liberal talking point, one that President Obama himself used in his populist Osawatomie Speech: The rich got richer the past 30 years while the middle-class went nowhere. In short, the past few decades of lower taxes and lighter regulation have been a failure. Or, rather, pro-market policies have been a failure … except that new research from the University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan find that “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.”

4. Inequality has exploded—not. According to the MSM and liberal economists, U.S. inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the 1920s or perhaps even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. And to prove their point—that the 1 percent has gotten amazingly richer in recent decades—the inequality alarmists will inevitably trot out a famous income inequality study from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Pike. But why not instead look at wealth—all financial and nonfinancial assets—instead of income? It’s less volatile and a truer measure of all the economic resources at an individual’s command. Turns out that Saez has done research on that subject, too. And he even created a revealing chart documenting the ups and downs of U.S. wealth over the past century. It reveals a very different picture of inequality in America:

5. and 6. The underwhelming Obama recovery. When you compare the current recovery to those of the past, it looks pretty anemic. And it doesn’t matter if you look at GDP growth or unemployment (via The Economist).

 7. America’s debt picture is worse than you think. If you factor in the long-term impact of rising federal debt on U.S. interest rates and economic growth—raising borrowing costs and lowering tax revenue—you’ll find that federal debt could be almost 50 percent higher by 2035 than the estimates usually bandied about in the media.

Merry Christmas

Major Quotes

Still stealing from our children and grandchildren

The ECB blew away €500 billion, and the markets still fell

By Daniel Hannan

I'm not sure people have grasped the magnitude of what has just happened. The European Central Bank firehosed €489,190,000,000 at the eurozone banking system. Five-hundred-and-twenty-three banks snatched greedily at the cheap cash. And the markets fell.

This blog has been railing for three years against the EU's bailout-and-borrow mania. I am, I realise, in danger of becoming something of a bore on the subject. But these sums are almost literally unimaginable (this might give you some sense of what half a trillion looks like in banknotes).

Just think this through. The ECB has no resources of its own: it is backed by the European taxpayer. So the money it has lent to the banks must either be drawn from EU governments or directly from their citizens in the form of inflation. And where is all the moolah to go? Well, the ECB is hoping that banks will buy government debt with it – as, indeed, they are more or less obliged to do under the Basel III rules. So eurozone governments are borrowing money to lend to private banks to lend to, er, eurozone governments.

I blogged a couple of months ago that the EU's bailout-and-borrow policy had taken on a momentum of its own, like a runaway train. That train is now going at maximum speed, and has passed the point where a switch can still be thrown. The only question is when it hits the buffers. My guess is that we are months away.

The human factor

The Long goodbye

By Rod Dreher    

Thinking about the sick feeling of disgust that came over me when I learned that Christopher Hitchens had publicly praised Lenin for crushing the Russian Orthodox Church, I was reminded of the precise moment when I began to turn from the Left. I arrived at college as a fairly convinced left-winger, and certainly an ardent one. I joined the Progressive Student Network at my university — a small, unpopular group, to be sure, but more interesting to me than the College Democrats. I’d work the table in front of the student union building, passing out pro-Sandinista literature and suchlike.

One morning, I woke up at my apartment that first semester in freshman year, turned on the news, and learned that the Achille Lauro hijackers had shot the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer and dumped his body over the transom. I was gobsmacked by the cruelty of this act, and was still fuming when I turned up at the PSN table to work that morning. When I expressed my views to my colleagues, a tall, garrulous comrade griped that our corporate media always reported on Palestinian terrorism, but never said boo about Israeli terrorism. And then — I’ll never forget this — a short Puerto Rican fellow who headed the group sat there calmly behind the table, looked at me through his Coke-bottle glasses, and said calmly, “Well, if he was rich enough to take the cruise, maybe he deserved what he got.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it. He was prepared to justify — no, was indeed justifying — the terrorist murder of an old Jewish man in a wheelchair, because that old man had the money to take a cruise. My thoughts were jumbled that morning, but I knew in my heart that I had to get as far away from these lunatics as I could.

This instinct, I think, is what made all my admiration for Hitchens, despite knowing his many flaws, evaporate. Not his hatred of religion, but his willingness to justify the murder of innocent people for the sake of cleansing the world of “heretics.” In fact, I think it must have had something to do with my ultimate decision to distance myself from the Catholic Church. In the end, I could not stand to be part of something whose leadership was willing to endure the sodomization of children by some of its clergy, and to justify tolerating it in the name of the mission. To too many bishops, Catholic children and families were simply collateral damage. Over the years of writing about this, as a Catholic, I would look at my own little children in the evenings and think that they, and their mother and father, are nothing to the bishops of the Roman Catholic church. If a priest had sodomized one or more of my children, we would have been treated in the very same way these people I was interviewing and reading about had been treated. The human factor was not relevant to them. It’s not the same as justifying murder, of course, but it’s on the spectrum.

This is not a theological argument, obviously; I am simply saying that there is something in my own emotional constitution that finds the violation of human dignity, and its justification for religious, political, or otherwise ideological reasons, abhorrent and intolerable. Every appalling thing Hitchens said, that I knew he had said, I could live with and forgive, because as he puts it in his memoir, it often happens that the right people believe and say the wrong things, and vice versa. If I stopped admiring the good in people I know who believe appalling things, my life would be lonelier, for sure. Some of the things I believe strike others as appalling too, and I hope they will, in their humanity, tolerate my beliefs and look for the good in me.

But there is a limit. As disgusting as some of Hitchens’s opinions were, and as wrong as he was about consequential questions (as, of course, I have been), nothing he said that I was aware of ever struck me as — what’s the word? — as defiling, in some foundational spiritual sense, as his justification of mass murder and torture for the sake of exterminating religion.

From the "Prague Spring" to the "Arab Spring" via the western intellectuals pre-conceptions

Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution is no script for a democratic uprising

Playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel owed his status as anti-Communist rock star more to the West than to the Czech people.

By Mick Hume

Since his death at the weekend, former Czech president Vaclav Havel’s life and career have been hailed as shining symbols of how one high-minded moral man can overcome a corrupt political system. This reveals rather more about Western fantasies than about the real state of affairs in Czechoslovakia (and now the Czech Republic) during and since the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ against Communism.

Havel, the dissident playwright and poet who became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist president, defined the West’s image of a perfect revolutionary figurehead for a small faraway country of which we know little: an urbane, Western-oriented intellectual who could play the role of media-friendly Messiah figure rather than act as political leader of a radical popular movement. It is no surprise in this respect to find that he was friends with the Dalai Lama. The Western world has subsequently elevated Havel’s non-violent, largely non-political Velvet Revolution into a supposed role model for political change from the Ukraine to Egypt.

This only shows how the term ‘revolution’ has been debased and belittled to mean whatever modest degree of political upheaval suits Western appetites. There is an important lesson here for those seeking democratic change today, such as the Arab peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya, who have seen the Western elites celebrate the triumph of their ‘revolutions’, and then quickly discovered that not too much has really changed.

The truth is that, despite all of the hype in the West two decades ago that has been repeated again since Havel’s death, there was no revolution from below in Czechoslovakia in 1989. What happened in essence – as some of us argued at the time - was that the old Soviet-backed regime corroded and collapsed from within, along with states across the Eastern bloc. Havel emerged as the figurehead of the hastily constituted new democracy that stepped in to fill the vacuum. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the transition was largely stage-managed by more moderate members of the old Communist nomenclature, in order to maintain their influence and limit any popular retribution. One of Havel’s closest aides in the human-rights group Charter 77 at the time was soon to describe the much-celebrated Czech revolution as ‘a Communist coup’ – one which suited the Western authorities since it limited instability. The prominence of old state officials in the ‘new’ market economy became the source of much public complaint under Havel’s presidency.

To Havel’s Western cheerleaders, however, none of this mattered. They were simply too delighted that he had apparently shown it was possible to have a democratic revolution without unleashing serious conflict or instability – and without the sort of messy, unpredictable upheaval across society that the word ‘revolution’ surely implies.

Havel was undoubtedly a personally brave man of principle, jailed for writing plays, poems and essays that questioned and ridiculed life under the Communist regime. Yet he was never the political leader of a movement in Czechoslovakia. His orientation was always towards the West. During the brief ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, before the Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the Czech resistance, Havel and his wife took advantage of the relaxed passport rules to leave the country for an extended tour of Western capitals, where they reportedly ‘immersed themselves in the counterculture of the London and New York rock scenes’. Havel’s plays began to be put on in the West, where he was hailed as the voice of the new Czech spirit of freedom.

However, once back in Czechoslovakia Havel led a relatively quiet life under the reimposed pro-Soviet regime, until he issued his famous Open Letter to Dr Husak, Moscow’s puppet Czech leader, in 1975. This was a telling insight into Havel’s mindset; it not only criticised the regime, but also attacked the Czech people for failing to live up to the intellectual’s expectations. The people, he complained, had chosen to abandon the search for truth and justice and instead to ‘succumb to apathy and indifference’. Havel meanwhile described himself as ‘the Watchman’, keeping a lonely vigil for liberty. The Open Letter was reprinted by like-minded liberal elitists across the West, consolidating Havel’s status as their poster boy for respectable Czech ‘civil society’.

It was perhaps equally telling that Havel’s international elevation would be finally confirmed after he took a stand against the persecution of a hippy rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe. Their advocacy of a druggie dropout lifestyle as an ‘alternative’ to Communism appealed to Havel’s Sixties counterculture sensibilities. When they were arrested and jailed, he was so upset he became an early spokesman for the Charter 77 human-rights group, which was seeking and finding favour in the West.

When the Soviet-backed regime finally began to collapse internally after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Havel was effectively appointed leader of the opposition by the international community and media. The term ‘Velvet Revolution’ was coined by his Western media fan club – partly to endorse the idea of ‘soft’, non-violent political change, and partly because of Havel’s affinity for Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. He was anointed as the rock star of East European anti-Communism, and the Western hacks and statesmen were his self-appointed groupies.

Once Havel was elected president – by parliament, not the people, according to the new constitution - he returned the favour, becoming the Czech mouthpiece for all the fashionable orthodoxies of the Western elite: he proselytised against the evils of global warming, championed the wonders of European Union membership, and even sued the tabloid media for invasion of privacy. While he was still an international celebrity, his standing among his own people became far more uncertain as the promises of the Velvet Revolution remained largely unfulfilled – ‘crushed velvet’ as one Czech writer described it. He also failed to prevent the break-up of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in January 1993.

(Speaking of the EU, the UK media used Havel’s death as an opportunity to wax nostalgic about his status as a symbol of ‘another Europe’- the united, liberal, prosperous EU that they had all fantasised about before the Fall. They still don’t get it that the current anti-democratic trends across the mess of the EU had their origins in the same Euro-courts, commissions and institutions that the Havels and Guardians welcomed as the fulfillment of their dreams.)

These things are worth thinking about now, not just to counter the hagiographies of Havel or review European history, but to take some lessons for the democratic struggles of the present. Almost everything the Western elites admired about him, from his disdain for the masses to his rejection of politics, acted to hamper the movement for change in Czechoslovakia. And the West’s praise for the partial reforms as a Velvet Revolution also contained an important message of restraint, telling the Czech people that, after just two weeks of demonstrations, their fight was over, and they could go home and leave it to Havel and Co. These are worrying patterns we have seen repeated of late in Egypt and Tunisia.

Perhaps the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s political career should be seen not so much as a role model for the Arab world and elsewhere, but as a warning of what can happen if you let the West write the script for your struggle for democracy.

Decommissioning politics in favor of technocracy

The most important history lesson of 2011

From the Japanese tsunami to the economic crisis, many believe mankind is ‘dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’. But we aren’t.

By Brendan O’Neill

Everyone is talking about what a tumultuous year 2011 was. And ‘tumultuous’ - meaning a ‘disorderly commotion or disturbance’ - is indeed the most apt adjective to describe the past 12 months. For this was a year in which many important things happened, yet no one is quite clear why or how or who was ultimately responsible. History was made - lots of it - but often it appeared as if nobody was in the driving seat. If you want to know what historic breakthroughs look like at a time when the history-making human subject has been talked down for years and effectively put out to pasture, behold 2011.

Marx famously said, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. Today, man not only continues to make history in circumstances that are not of his choosing - he also doubts or denies that he is making history at all, preferring instead to see himself as the victim of forces beyond his control, the plaything of some sentient thing called History rather than the master of history.

This was a year in which agency was accorded to events that had none, and was denied in other events that truly were driven by human ingenuity and heroism. So the catastrophe in Japan in March, when an earthquake and tsunami flattened towns and villages and killed 20,000 people, was discussed by many as an example of ‘Nature’s fury’, as if she (they always see Nature as an angry woman) made a decision to punish hubristic mankind. ‘Nature suddenly decided to go “Thwack!”’, said one observer, almost with a sense of glee, and she revealed that mankind is ‘hopelessly irrelevant… dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’.

Yet the Arab Spring, which kicked off in Tunisia and Egypt in January before spreading to Bahrain and Syria, was talked about as an ‘earthquake’, a ‘flood’, a ‘storm’, an inexplicable thing which spread from one country to another like a ‘virus’. Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain came in for some flak when he said the Arab Spring was ‘a virus spreading throughout the Middle East’, but he was only expressing in un-PC lingo an idea that has become entrenched: that the Arab uprisings are a weird and contagious, almost malarial phenomenon (liberal observers prefer to say ‘meme’ rather than ‘virus’).

So we anthropomorphise natural disasters, and naturalise manmade political upheaval. We see agency in what are in truth the amoral whims of nature, with commentators calling the Japanese tsunami an ‘all-conquering aquatic bulldozer’, yet we see strange viruses at work in something human like the Arab Spring, as if that rebellion of millions against their rulers was born of some kind of herd mentality. The personification of the tsunami, the idea that we’re ‘dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’, speaks to mankind’s increasing meekness and view of himself as the object rather than subject of history. And it has very real consequences. In response to the unhinged panic-mongering over the Fukushima nuclear-power plant in ‘thwacked’ Japan, Germany promised in May to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022.

Also this year, political agency was conferred on the August riots that rocked English cities, yet was withheld from the European masses’ continuing disgruntlement with the oligarchy in Brussels. Observers decreed that the looting and burning in London and elsewhere were ‘highly political’ acts, carried out by ‘rebels with a cause’. Yet the same observers bent over backwards to delegitimate European peoples’ permanent, sometimes unspoken rebellion against the institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg, referring to such opposition as ‘Europhobia’, as if it were a disease of the mind (‘phobia: a persistent, abnormal and irrational aversion to a specific thing’). Small mobs of shoe thieves are talked up as rebels taking a stand against the Liberal-Conservative government, while masses of Greeks and Irish and Italians who communicate their fury with the illiberal, anti-democratic Brussels regimes through referenda or graffiti are branded ‘phobic’; once again, instinctual events are historicised while political feeling is pathologised. 

One of the most striking things about 2011 is how even political actors themselves disavowed responsibility for their actions, preferring instead to see themselves as reactants in a kind of a great experiment rather than potential authors of their destinies. That was the most tragic thing about the Arab Spring: the disconnect between the heroism and organisation that was required to get tens of thousands of people on to the streets to chase Ben Ali and Mubarak from office and how the protesters conceived of themselves - as people with no political authority, possessed only of a Twitter-style emotional angst. The Arab rebels have celebrated the fact that they are leaderless and bereft of ideology and goals (one Egyptian writer noted the ‘complete absence of ideological rhetoric’), which means they weirdly deny their own history-making potential even as they demonstrate it physically.

Indeed, across the world this year, there has been a widespread unwillingness to clarify political problems or articulate political demands. In the Spanish ‘Indignados’ movement and the Occupy movements in New York and London - laugh-out-loud caricatures of the Arab Spring - activists openly celebrate the fact that they are ‘independent of any democratic structures and party hierarchies’ and have ‘no political programme’. They even use McCain-like language about viruses, claiming their movement consists more of ‘unthought’ than thought, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation as to why they’re necessary, almost as [reflexes]’. What we have here is people making a virtue out of vacuity, where the denigration of the human subject and of the idea that man might remake his world is turned from a negative into a positive: apparently, not knowing how to clarify crises and pursue goals is not a bad thing - it’s ‘liberation from dogma’.

What these radicals seem not to realise is that their disavowal of grubby politics in favour of myopic process (the Occupy movement is now entirely devoted simply to keeping itself chugging along) almost exactly echoes the outlook of the political elites in 2011. For our rulers, most notably in Europe, have likewise made it their aim to decommission politics and replace it with technocracy, because apparently things like the economic crisis are better dealt with by experts rather than through engagement with hoi polloi. Indeed, the economic crisis is now also looked upon as a kind of tsunami that dwarfs mankind - so it apparently isn’t appropriate to have a democratic debate about it, or even to treat it as a political issue, and instead what we really need is ‘expert’ firefighting. In the ousting of democratic governments in Greece and Italy, and their replacement by unelected, Brussels-approved gangs of alleged know-it-alls, 2011’s sidelining of history-making man in preference of apolitical, lifeless managerialism reached its nadir.

This has indeed been a tumultuous year - yet while much has happened, all sides deny historic responsibility for having made it happen and eschew historic responsibility for pushing it in a certain direction. Everywhere we look, historic man is being muted and mocked, whether he’s viewed as a victim of Nature or is forcibly elbowed off the political stage (as has happened to the peoples of Greece and Italy) or is voluntarily elbowing himself of the political stage (as threatens to be the case in the Arab world). Yet the fact is that man did make history this year: Japan rebuilt itself; the Arab people got rid of tyrants; and even in Athens, so thwacked by Brussels, there is graffiti everywhere saying ‘Fuck the EU’. If we can find a new language in which to express and celebrate people’s desire for political change and historic impact, 2012 could be an exciting year.