1421 and All That

(Cross-posted.)

Australia's history wars may take on a whole new dimension. While the education minister was writing her speech about bringing Captain Cook back into our classrooms, Four Corners was busy exploring the claim that the Chinese got here first. Last Monday's program was nothing new to afficionados of 15th century history, but for most viewers it would have been a startling introduction to Gavin Menzies and his notorious book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

Not that it's first time this revisionist tsunami has reached the local news. Hu Jintao's announcement to federal parliament during his 2003 visit that Australia was discovered by his people didn't escape notice. More recently, Melbourne University's decision to fete Menzies in April drew a fair amount of comment. Overall though it's provoked surprisingly little discussion for a theory that, if accepted, explodes the traditional narrative of antipodean history (as usual it's fallen to New Zealand to take the lead). Especially given that Menzies' claims go beyond discovery to encompass Chinese colonies from Port Philip Bay to Darwin and miscegenation of the Aboriginal population.

It's these sort of assertions that have sent experts worldwide into apoplexy, in one case to the point of dragging Menzies' publisher before the UK's Consumer Complaints body for marketing the book as 'non-fiction'. Menzies' Melbourne lecture featured an extraordinary tirade from the head of the university's history department, who read from a prepared list of points to show that the man is a fraud (the MC cut him off after number one). Four Corners tactfully declined to broadcast that part, but they did interview the professor in question as the local rep in a string of academics striving to outdo each other in disdain for Menzies' theories and, in most cases, for the man himself.

Both lecture and program gave salutary insights into why academics often lose in the court of public opinion. At the lecture, Professor Wheatcroft's bluster fared badly against Menzies' poise and the array of presentation technology used to make his case. But that's why we have investigative journalism, which probes through the stage management with which Menzies has (by his own admission) cloaked this pseudo-academic enterprise.

Four Corners revealed the dapper ex-Royal Navy commander as a charlatan, who conveniently forgets blackmail threats against his critics, admits that he doesn't check evidence and defends himself by citing the number of books he's sold. The program was denounced by Menzies as a hachet-job, an accusation that may sting with the stench of Forest-Gate still in the air. But given the chance to defend himself, Menzies managed to appear not merely a crank but a fraud and a white-collar thug, traits born out by his tactics against critics and presence on the English vexatious litigant list. Any hope that he makes up for this with academic rigour is dispelled by a visit the official 1421 website. 'Sophomoric' is a generous description; it would certainly never have passed my VCE history class.

I knew that both Menzies' claims and his academic method were dubious, but to see the man himself articulate them on Four Corners was surreal. I think he lost me with the claim that the Chinese fleet sailed up the Thames and presented Henry V with a set of underwear, an event that has left no surviving records (at least, none discovered yet). Or maybe it was when he waxed lyrical about Marco Polo touring Hudson's Bay in the 1200's. Or maybe it was one of his converts enthusing about the remains of 45 junks washed up on the New Zealand coast by a tsunami, itself caused by a meteor. The same meteor that wiped out Chinese settlements around the New World, leaving it free for the Europeans to colonise a century later.

Four Corners pertinently observed that since 1421's publication the claims have steadily ratcheted up, from the 'discovery' of the Liu Gang map early this year through to the Henry V and Marco Polo revelations. Not surprising, since by Menzies' own admission this has been a marketing exercise from day one.

"[I] hoped that there would be lots of critics there, and they'd all lambast it, and it would make excellent publicity. And therefore, I'd be able to clinch a sale for my book. So, really, it was a public relations exercise on my part, to hopefully create a lot of controversy and sell literary rights."

Of course there's nothing wrong with hyping revisionist history, so long as it's not bunkum. But the fact that Menzies' case is an academic sieve raises serious ethical questions about his PR spin, especially given the lengths that his publisher went to in bolstering his credentials to write on Chinese maritime achievements (like incorrectly claiming on the dust jacket that Menzies was born in China).

The irony is that this marketing blitz targets the very demographic that ought to be most sceptical, and with great success. I knew about the criticisms of Menzies and his book before I bought it, but priding myself as a world history buff I felt a need to have it on my shelf. In other words, my intellectual ego drove me to subsidise the quack history that I've been denouncing in this post. Lest I be further hoist by my own petard, I should stop wasting time on things like blogging and sit down to dissect Menzies' 'evidence' for myself. I've yet to get past the book's third chapter, despite the army of editors provided by Bantam Press to make his manuscript readable.


Further pontification -
1421 Exposed
Debunking Gavin Menzies
China History Forum
Salon

There Should Be An Amendment To The United States Constitution Forcing Republican Populists To Read 'The New Yorker'

For the love of God, click on the link and read 'For Which It Stands' by Hendrik Hertzberg, who was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and now writes for The New Yorker, talking about the proposed amendment to the United States Constitution banning flag-burning. Wonderful writing, superbly articulated argument...

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060703ta_talk_hertzberg

So Why Did That Chicken Cross the Road? - Uncut

For light holiday reading, here's a chicken-joke special I did for the 2005 summer edition of AAP, including those that failed to escape the editor's space-saving buzzsaw. Some of them are a little dated by now, but not too much.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Philosophy major: To get to the other side.

Adam Smith: The comparative advantage of chickens lies in crossing roads.

John Kerry: The chicken crossed because this President was fighting the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Swift Boat Veteran for Truth: I was there and I can assure you, that chicken did not cross that road.

Steve Bracks: The impact of the chicken’s road-crossing on the state's finances meant the Government had to make a difficult decision. The decision to fund the road by a toll was not made lightly, but it is the responsible decision for the future.

John Howard: In a world where chickens cross roads, who do you trust to manage the economy and keep interest rates low?

Lee Kuan Yew: The chicken’s behaviour illustrates the moral breakdown of western society.

John Stuart Mill: So long as the chicken’s action does not harm others, it is at liberty to cross roads.

Michel Foucault: This was the chicken’s journey of self-actualisation, an act of mapping its own external reality in resistance to the hidden normative. By crossing the road the chicken shows how power is socially constructed, bottom-up and inherently diffuse.

Ralph Nader: Our two-party system left the chicken no other choice.

Phillip Ruddock: Given the suspicious circumstances of the chicken’s crossing, the Americans were quite justified in locking it up for three years without charge.

Dan Rather: After extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in the fact of this chicken crossing the road that would allow us to continue vouching for it journalistically.

Deng Xiaoping: Black chicken, white chicken – if it crosses the road it’s a good chicken.

Thucydides: What made the crossing inevitable was the growth of the farmer’s power and the fear which this caused in the chicken.

Noam Chomsky: The chicken’s action is another step in the expansion of the US hegemonic system.

Rush Limbaugh: I mean, before we even get a proper report about this chicken, naturally America is already the guilty party!!

Franklin Graham: I believe that road-crossing is a very evil and wicked religion. I don’t believe chickens are evil because they cross roads – I personally have many friends who are chickens – but I decry the evil that has been done in the name of road-crossing.

Osama bin Laden: It is a sacred duty of all Muslims to kill chickens that cross roads.

Thomas Hobbes: Because life for chickens is nasty, brutish and short.

Mark Latham: Chickens cross roads because they don’t have a ladder of opportunity. There are two types of chicken on this road, slackers and hard workers, and we need to ease the squeeze on them and practice democracy in the raw.

Pentagon spokesman: We can neither confirm nor deny that a chicken crossed the road.

Donald Rumsfeld (1): It’s a misunderstanding to see that image over and over, of a chicken crossing the road, and say ‘You didn’t have a plan’. Freedom’s untidy, and that chicken is free to make mistakes and cross roads.

Donald Rumsfeld (2): The Army leadership is sensitive to the fact that not every road is as clear of chickens as would be desirable, but you go to war with the Army you have. It’s essentially a matter of physics.

Lenin: Any act of the chicken was justified, if it advances the revolution.

Homer Simpson: Mmmmm, chicken.

Chinese Communist: This chicken was clearly taking the capitalist road, as part of a hypocritical imperialist effort to split the sovereign Chinese nation. The Chinese People will never bow to such blatant aggression but will resolutely pursue the Four Modernisations along the scientific materalist path of socialist spiritual civilisation, adhering steadfastly to the Four Cardinal Principles and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence while fortifying their minds with the unshakeable dictates of Marxist-Leninist-MaoZedong Thought!

Team America, World Police: Who gives a f--k? Let’s f-----n blow the G-dd-mn sh-t out of it!

Return Of Ozone Man

Follow the link below to a very good article by one of the Guardian's top writers, Jonathon Freedland, interviewing a previously ridiculed US Democrat - American comedian Bill Maher said he ran in the 2000 campaign "on a platform of ending charisma as we know it" - who is very suddenly back in vogue as a presidential candidate for 2008.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1786438,00.html

Abolish full-fee places…and raise HECS

Universities need money. To be world-class, as the University of Melbourne aspires to be, requires lots of money. And government is steadily decreasing the amount of money it supplies. That means, inevitably, this shortfall will have to be filled, at least in part, by the students who attend.

I see nothing particularly evil about this. Why should education be free, or even cheap? Education sets you up in life: most courses more or less guarantee you a relatively prosperous career path. And the fact that in Australia, students are not charged while they are studying and hence impoverished, but take on a no-interest loan until they are earning enough to pay it back, sweetens the deal further.

But it’s simply wrong to lower academic standards to get money, as is the current situation. Students, international and domestic, with lots of up-front cash, can get into uni with lower qualifications than those with more smarts but less money.

I say, all remaining hold-outs should reach the conclusion that the basic formula, of students having to pay their university more money to ensure its quality, is the only realistic one. But instead of a double-standard of entry to unis, a more equitable solution is to progressively phase out full-fee places, while significantly raising HECS fees - doubling or tripling them, probably - to make up the shortfall.

Affirmative action for public schools?

I don’t actually agree with the Labor Party that funding for private schools should be slashed and put into public schools. It’s reasonable to think government schools need more money – very reasonable – but this should come from elsewhere in the coffers. The only immediate effect of taking funding away from independent schools would be to cause their fees to rise, and so drive away everyone except the rich. The only major effective change, then, would be to make some worse off without making anybody much better off, as there’d be no real improvement in school quality from the cash redistribution in the short term.

For a better way of redressing the ugly imbalance that is a two-tiered school system, why not affirmative action for government schools? Defenders of private schools and the taxpayer money that sustains them are always banging on about how parents who make the private ‘choice’ are not actually trying to buy a high ENTER score. They say it’s much more than that: better facilities, better students and staff, and, of course, ‘values’. Well, let’s test it. Let’s start adding, say, five, even ten percent to the ENTERs of students from government schools, as a way of addressing the obvious inequality, fixing the skewed entry to uni, without reducing the (supposed) quality of private school education.

It wouldn’t damage the goal of a meritocratic education system, either. The old analogy comes to mind about two sports players, one fully fit, the other recovering from illness, and both seem relatively even in ability at training. The coach, having to pick a single player for the upcoming season, chooses the one not fully fit – the one with potential to get better.

The Taiwan Strait War, 2013

Fast-forward to June, 2013. Consider the following sequence of events -

The Republic of China's president, a DPP independence hawk with a legislative majority, announces his intention to seek a constitutional amendment changing the island's name to the Republic of Taiwan. Despite PRC warnings, the US government's response is watered down to 'non-support', in the face of overwhelming sympathy for Taiwan from Congress and the American public.

Amidst mounting rhetoric from Beijing, two US carrier battlegroups are despatched to the waters east of Taiwan. The ROC government unveils its constitutional changes, which - in another unpleasant surprise for Washington - exclude any part of mainland China from the new republic, amounting to irrevocable rejection of the 'One China' principle. The PLA is mobilised.

With the American media howling 'appeasement', the US president reiterates that an attack on Taiwan is a matter of grave concern for the United States. All Washington's regional allies declare neutrality; Japan and South Korea even deny the US use of military bases on their soil. China's central bank floods the market with US treasuries, sending Wall Street and the US dollar into tailspin. Congress passes a landslide resolution pledging to defend Taiwan.

The PLA occupies Jinmen and Matsu, and in response the two US carriers enter the Strait. China announces a blockade and fires a hundred missiles into Taiwan; the ROC airforce hits back at mainland targets. The penny drops when US and Chinese forces engage. Who shot first remains in doubt, but the Chinese simultaneously launch an electronic warfare offensive, cancelling the traditional US information dominance of the battlefield.

A US carrier goes to the bottom, with almost all hands. The American public cries for blood and US planes join the ROC airforce to plaster targets along China's southeast coast. Both Washington and Beijing put their strategic nuclear forces on maximum alert. Urged to send the B2's against Beijing and Shanghai, the US president blinks at armageddon and calls his Chinese counterpart, who's also getting cold feet. China lifts the blockade and withdraws its forces on a number of conditions, including the resignation of Taiwan's president and the opening of reunification talks. Faced with a threatened US withdrawal, Taipei buckles.

In the aftermath, the US severs diplomatic ties with China and slaps a total ban on commercial intercourse. The US and the world economy suffer, but not as much as China, which for a while looks ready to descend into chaos. But the Communist Party clings on and settles in for a new cold war across the Pacific, which three decades later is still going strong. After a decade of talks, Taiwan joins China in a loose confederation.

At this point I should confess that this cheerful scenario isn't my own work, but a summary of the second chapter in America's Coming War with China. It does happen to tally almost exactly with an essay I wrote last year on the ominous trends in the 'Taiwan problem'. Unless some serious political lifting is done, we're more likely than not to have a war in the Strait within the next ten years.

That lifting needs to come from both sides of the Pacific. At a general level the whole power structure of the Asia-Pacific needs a makeover, as I argued a while back on this blog, if Sino-US conflict is to be averted. On Taiwan specifically, the US needs to junk 'strategic ambiguity' in favour of a tougher stance towards the governments on both sides of the Strait. The key elements of the above scenario are Beijing's readiness to attack Taiwan upon a decisive bid for independence, and Washington's failure to preempt such a bid or squash it the moment it happens (as happened to Taipei's nuclear program). A clearer US commitment to the status quo wouldn't guarantee against this situation, but it would help.

It's high time that someone with foreign policy credentials spotlighted this issue, in the form of an accessible read. So kudos to America's Coming War With China, even if in other bits it shows up the incapacity of Western commentators to get basic China facts straight. Memo to Mr. Carpenter: it wasn't the Ming dynasty which occupied Taiwan in 1661.

Scoff at this scenario if you like, but recall that September 11 was unthinkable before it happened. (Whether some people foresaw the use of passenger jets as weapons of terrorism is besides the point). By contrast, analysts have been warning for the better part of a decade - Carpenter's book was published in 2001 - that the 'Taiwan problem' is heading towards a violent resolution. We even had a dress rehearsal in the form of the 1996 Straits Crisis, which played out along similar lines to Carpenter's scenario. Since then the PRC's military position has strengthened, vis-a-vis the US and especially the Republic of China, which has elected a president who rejects the basic principle underpinning Beijing's approach to the problem.

And yet we're sill waiting for some creative thinking in Washington about management of the Taiwan issue and relations with the PRC more generally. Instead we've got a 'China Threat' literary industry, long on hysteria and short on knowledge of contemporary China, let alone the country's history and long-term prospects. At the official level we now have a US strategy for 'full-spectrum dominance' and the cleansing of terrorism from the earth, into which China is expected to fit meekly. The issue of Taiwan's independence gets once sentence, and it doesn't offer concessions to Beijing.

Next to the potential consequences of this war, the threat posed by Islamic extremism pales into insignificance.

The Red Shadow of the Past

The Communist Party of China is big on anniversaries. When I visited Bejing in 1999, half the city was locked down after 7pm to allow dress rehearsals for the PRC's golden jubilee. China's tumultous history for the first half of the 20th century provides lots of nation-building material - the May Fourth Movement, the Nanchang Uprising, the Liberation itself - all suitably commemorated with flag-waving children, goosestepping soldiers and overdecorated floats.

After 1949, the anniversaries stop. So this Thursday is likely to pass quietly, notwithstanding that it marks forty years to the day when a Peking University lecturer kicked off the Cultural Revolution. Nie Yuanzi was a radical forty-five year old when she stuck up her 'big character poster' denouncing the university authorities. She's now a pensionless eighty-five year old who shares a borrowed apartment with her pet cats and her memories, sharpened by seventeen years in prison; a victim of the monster she helped unleash.

China must have a dialogue about the Cultural Revolution, says Nie, who was one of the Five Leading Red Guards but fell from grace when the political winds shifted in 1968. The reason is less therapeutic than prescriptive, to avoid a repeat catastrophe springing from a flawed understanding of history. One gets the impression that those scarred personally are past the need for reconciliation; the scattered but growing number of voices calling for a national debate talk about the future, as much as the past.

Certainly the responses one gets from people who lived through the "Ten Years of Chaos" remain laconic, even casual. Like a tutor of mine recounting how as a child she watched her father (a university lecturer) paraded through the streets in a dunce cap past baying mobs. Or a friend's father making off-hand references to his years as a teenage 'barefoot doctor' in one of the hundreds of rural counties that the Red Guard generation was exiled to from 1969, in an attempt to expiate the madness.

On top of the human cost, there's a need to confront the most comprehensive effort yet seen to destroy a nation's cultural heritage. I remember admiring the coffin of an Empress at the Ming tombs outside Beijing, complete with an apologetic sign explaining that it's a replica, the original having received the attention of axe-wielding Red Guards during the swinging sixties. Left-leaning western college students may still find the mass mobilisation and ideological fervour inspiring; Chinese intellectuals view it the same way that cultured Germans view the Nazi rallies at Munich.

But within China itself, the subject remains taboo. As far as the Party's concerned the matter was closed on June 27, 1981, with the Central Committee resolution pinning the blame on Chairman Mao and the counterrevolutionary clique behind him. Nie's is one of the few voices to penerate the blanket of censorship that still lies across the country, smothering even the one private museum dedicated to the Cultural Revolution.

The root problem is that reevaluating the Cultural Revolution means reevaluating the role of Mao Zedong - and by extension that of the Communist Party - in the nation's history. China has yet to go through an equivalent of Russia's de-Stalinisation process. Instead the verdict on the Great Helmsman remains frozen in Deng Xiaoping's 70-30 formula: 70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong. An honest discussion about the historical black hole from 1966-76 would open a pandora's box, one that the Party has tried to keep shut with the weight of economic growth.

So this is just another instance of the CCP's propensity to sweep its problems under the carpet of history, if necessary by waiting for the main protagonists to die. Last year saw the exit of both Zhao Ziyang and Zhang Chunqiao, the last survivor of the Gang of Four. Neither the baggage of the Cultural Revolution nor that from the June 4th Incident seems to have impeded China's headlong rush to modernity; one of Zhao's proteges even happens to be Premier, while the memorabilia of Mao's personality cult now furnishes trendy cafes. But faced with the mounting contradictions of marketisation within the framework of a Party-State, China's leaders may eventually find that the cherished goal of national stability requires them to use history as a mirror, a lesson they readily dispense to China's neighbours.

As was observed about another national cataclysm, one that festered for a hundred years after the violence ceased:
"The past isn't dead. It's not even past".


(cross-posted)

Meet the 2006-7 PIS Committee

Thanks to all those who turned for the club AGM this arvo. And congratulations to the new committee on their election:

President - David Fettling
Secretary - Michael Crozier
Treasurer - Stephen Bain
Speakers Officer - Charlie Goodman
Social Secretary - Sophie Wilson
Publications Editor - Aditi Gorur
Publicity Officer - Lutz Golbs


Don't miss the biscuit-tin swearing-in ceremony next Wednesday.

Standard minimum sentences, anyone?

MUDS are having a public debate on Thursday, and it promises to be interesting:

Public Debate 2006

In the lead up to the Victorian State election, the Melbourne University Debating Society proudly invites you to a debate on a central election issue...

Come and hear expert speakers talk about Law & Order and sentencing issues of the Victorian criminal system.

If you do the crime, you should do the time....
That we should have standard minimum sentences for criminal offences.

Speaking for the Affirmative

Mr Peter Ryan, MP
Leader of the Victorian National Party
Shadow Attorney-General

Dr Kevin Donnelly
Former Chief of Staff to Kevin Andrews, MP


Speaking for the Negative

Mr Ian Gray
Chief Magistrate of Victoria

Ms Jenny Mikakos, MP
Victorian Parliamentary Secretary for Justice


Time: 7:30pm
Date: Thursday 11th May, 2006
Place: G08, Law School, University of Melbourne

The debate will be followed by a light supper.

Click here for more info.

Solomon Islands and the WTO

Even though it sounded quite incredible to some participants of last weeks meeting, the Solomon Islands are indeed one of 149 member states of the WTO, and this since 26 July 1996.

Why do I mention this, and what does it imply? The libertarians in PIS certainly like the efforts of the WTO to enable free trade. Personally, I see the triumvirate of World Bank, IMF and WTO way more critical. For one thing, the structural changes imposed by those organisations ruined the economy of quite some countries, especially in South America, Asia and Africa. That this happened, is not even denied by the WTO, it is just seen as unfortunate.

The major critique against this institutional axis of evil is its entire lack of democratic control. By signing agreements with the WTO governments lose their sovereignty about areas like environmental and energy politics, their autonomy about social systems and education.

The issue of the dependency from the WTO will become into the international focus soon, when Bolivia has its new constitution, which will reorganise land ownership and reverse privatisation - just, of course, if Bolivia's new president Evo Morales stays in power for long enough.

Michel Chossudovsky was written some books elucidating the mechanics of WTO, IMF and WB, and is well worth reading if you're interested in finding out how democracy is undermined by this triumvirate.

The Battle that Saved Australia - or not

Further to today's discussion about Steve Barton and the Kokoda controversy, see these threads at Larvatus Prodeo and John Quiggin. See Barton's original Australian piece here, last night's Lateline interview here, and an older piece with some additional details here (looks like debunking the Kokoda 'myth' is an ongoing project of his).

No new Epoch in US-China relations

Cross-posted. For a different angle to the US MSM and blogosphere, see this running CHF thread.
__________________

When not handing out propaganda at Melbourne's train stations, the Epoch Times folks keep busy heckling the Chinese president. It was shaping up as a bad day for Hu Jintao, what with being snubbed dinner at the White House and the MC announcing "the national anthem of the Republic of China." But official visits don't get much worse than being told "your days are numbered" before the world media, by an advocate of a sect your country persecutes, while standing next to the President of the United States.

Nor was it a great moment for the hosts. The Bush administration got things off on the wrong foot by not according this the status of a 'state visit', as Clinton did for Hu's predecessor. Then there was the small matter of confusing one's guests with their archenemies across the Taiwan Strait. But the ultimate gaffe was to let a Falungong practitioner not only slip security but abuse Hu for three minutes before the secret service hustled her off, leaving bureaucrats and thinktanks around the country to stress about how those inscrutable orientals will react (inside word says they're not happy).

Whoever was giving out press passes obviously didn't do their homework on the Epoch Times, a Falungong-linked paper with a prophecy fetish and a big chip on their shoulder called the Chinese Communist Party. The ET has disowned Dr Wang's actions, but the fact that she heckled Jiang Zemin in Malta five years ago should have tipped someone off. The State Department's woes didn't end there, however, with Bush and Hu later trying to hold dialogue over the chants of the Free-Tibet crowd across South Lawn. Clearly the event planners didn't watch how the Brits handled Hu's London trip last year, either.

Hu stayed all smiles, but used the occasion to teach Bush a lesson about negotiating with the Chinese that American businessmen learned long ago: expect much gilded language, but no progress unless you hand over something first. Faced with the high expectations held of this 'official' (not 'state') visit by a swathe of US lobbies, George also resorted to the fine art of using many words to say nothing, in which he is of course well practiced.

Bush said, "We would hope there would be more appreciation'' in allowing the currency to rise with market forces.

[Regarding Iran] the United States and China are in a position to ''work on tactics'' to achieve that goal, Bush said.

"We don't agree on everything but we are able to discuss our disagreements in friendship and cooperation,'' Bush told reporters.

So the bottom line is that noone's happy, least of all Hu Jintao. Having finally clawed his way to the top of the Fourth Generation leadership last year, when he eased Jiang out of the old man's last bastion in the state CMC, Hu doubtless felt entitled to 'state visit' recognition and a black-tie dinner at the White House. Instead he got a luncheon of halibut and dumplings to the strains of the Nashville Bluegrass band, after half an hour watching soldiers prance past in Continental Army uniforms.

No visiting head-of-state can have been this disappointed since the secret service ruled out Kruschev's trip to Disneyland.


Non Sequitur

I never thought I'd see an American columnist arguing the US would be better off under a parliamentary system. But then I, like Thomas Friedman, never thought I'd see a US administration determined to jump from an Iraqi frying pan into an Iranian fire.

Blogging in the End Times

The internet is a crowded place these days. Type in this blog's name wrong and you still end up somewhere: mupis.blogsopt.com. Or better, mupis.blogpsot.com, some of whose material I've extracted below. Sounds a lot like the stuff I was fed at church camps as a kid -

THE SOON COMING CLIMAX
(BIBLE PROPHECY—PROOF THE BIBLE IS TRUE AND
WE ARE NOW IN THE LATTER DAYS) and HOW TO BE SAVED
(A brief summary)

This message may be called a road sign of warning. Some may look at a sign that reads—THE BRIDGE IS OUT, and say, "Oh, someone is just trying to scare us into taking another road; let’s go on the same way." They go on and plunge to their death. The sign was not meant to scare people, but to warn them of impending danger. The sign was put there, because someone cared and didn’t want others to perish.
God wants you to know, WHEN YOU SEE THESE THINGS COME TO PASS (the prophecies from the Bible in this message), KNOW YE THAT THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS NIGH AT HAND-Lk 21:31.

• Will Russia and some Arab nations invade Israel and the U.S.A. become involved? Yes.

• Will 1/4^th of the world’s population die? Yes.

• Will there be a one-world system or global economy? Yes.

• Will diseases increase such as AIDS? Yes.

• Did you know the Bible tells us about what is happening?

Would you like to know more? Read on...

Containing Iran

Just further to the discussion in the meeting yesterday, here's one analysis of the Iran situation which pretty much sums up my position:

All the war games and simulations that I have seen have concluded that it isn't possible to disarm Iran by airstrikes. Learning perhaps from what happened to Saddam's nuclear plant at Osirak, the authorities have dispersed the program widely and put a lot of it underground. Nor can the Israelis be expected to do much by proxy: They would have to fly over Iraq this time, and it would be even more obvious than usual that they were acting as an American surrogate. Professor Edward Luttwak claims, in the Wall Street Journal, that selective strikes could still retard or degrade the program, but this, if true, would only restate the problem in a different form.
...
This means that our options are down to three: reliance on the United Nations/European Union bargaining table, a "decapitating" military strike, or Nixon goes to China. The first being demonstrably useless and somewhat humiliating, and the second being possibly futile as well as hazardous, it might be worth giving some thought to the third of these.
...
But they have a crucial vulnerability on the inside. The overwhelmingly young population—an ironic result of the mullahs' attempt to increase the birth rate after the calamitous war with Iraq—is fed up with medieval rule.
...
So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.

Hitchens is something of a hawk, being strongly in favour of the Iraq invasion and frequently critical of the "anti-war" left (I put that in scare quotes because it's his contention that many peace activists are actually in favour of war, when it's done against US/Israeli). But he's not at all in favour of a military attack on Iran. I think his analysis comes from a position of some authority and it accords with other analyses I've read.

To Get Rich Is Glorious

Chris Berg, one of our guest speakers at Pub Politics a few weeks back, was on last night's Insight program defending materialism as a road to happiness. Good libertarian that he is, his cumulative minute and a half of airtime can be picked out by the keywords 'choice', 'preference' and 'capacity'. Indulge yourself - read the transcript...

The Political Objectives Test

There are all sorts of interesting online tests of your political beliefs and ideology. A friend of mine, Daniel (or "Originaluddite") has composed a new test and it's worth a try. Check it out here.

This is how it described me, and I think it's a fair assessment:

Liberal-Conservative
You scored 21 Equality, 78 Liberty, and 64 Stability!

Your commitment to both liberty and stability puts you in the hazy area that exists between the Liberal and the Conservative. You value liberty particularly in economic life and embrace private enterprise. You also recognise the value of traditional culture and institutions. Occasionally your economic and cultural positions may clash but in general you will find practical ways to reconcile them.

Anyone else care to bare their soul in the comments section?

The Prime Minister on Whom the Sun has Set

Here's a take on Smiling Tony by Scott Cresswell, who's currently doing a polsci Ph.D thesis on the EU policy of the Conservative Party.

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Few British Prime Ministers since the Great Reform Act of 1832 have dominated British politics as has Tony Blair. Blair's parliamentary majorities have been unsurpassed (in normal circumstances at least) and his personal popularity has never quite gone through the troughs that dogged that other twentieth century Titan, Margaret Thatcher. There is a quite viable argument that Blair is the most successful British prime minister of the century, predicated on the size of his majorities and the lack of rancour he has inspired. And yet, Blair's premiership is over.

Blair is, to use words that haunted the Major premiership, 'in office, but not in power'. Reports in British newspapers have him definitely gone by Christmas; autumn (spring in Australia) looks more likely. Every piece of speculation brings the date closer. The Guardian, the staunchest of Labour newspapers, has bid him gone now. He will not go of his own accord, pushed out by his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, a dour Scotsman. Indeed, since the last election (2005) Blair and Brown have been in a sort of transitional phase, the two old rivals (dating from the 1994 leadership election) in an uneasy embrace termed the 'dual premiership'. Admitting the mistake of announcing his retirement prematurely (and yet annoying a twice jilted Brown by not naming a date), even his vaunted political judgment looks to have left him. The final years of his premiership, mirroring Thatcher's in many respects, have been a failure at best, at worst a farce. The mistakes of Iraq, the suicide of weapons scientist David Kelly, and the infamous weapons dossier do not bear re-telling. They have diminished him, his standing in the country, in the party, and, I think, the most important of all, history. His errors have emboldened the Labour left, once cowed into submission, into the rediscovery of its voice and its power. Editor of the Spectator Matthew d'Ancona writes in the Telegraph, "It is not simply factional warfare - bitter as that undoubtedly is - but full-scale fragmentation. Labour's National Executive Committee and parliamentary party are flexing their muscles recklessly. Last week's industrial action by council workers showed how emboldened the unions have been by the Government's travails."

This is crucial, as the whole 'New Labour' project was the transformation of Labour from an unelectable socialist rabble (its 1983 election manifesto, a grab-bag of socialist measure, was called by a Labour MP "the longest suicide note in history" and so it proved) into a modern, professional, ruthless, and centrist party. Power was shifted from the party and its institutions to the leadership.

This point bears expanding for those unfamiliar with British politics. On election day 1992, with the polls putting Labour by up to 10 points in front, the Murdoch owned Sun newspaper printed a front page, headlined "If Kinnock wins, will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights?" Labour lost. Not because of the Sun ("It was the Sun wot won it" arrogantly appeared on the front page the following day), but because Labour was still struggling to throw off the vestiges of Tony Benn, the Militant Tendency, and every other loony left-wing organisation that had infiltrated it since Thatcher's win in 1979. Blair exorcised all of those ghosts and made Labour electable once more. It is worth noting that in 1997, 2001, and 2005, the Sun backed Labour, not the Conservatives. (Well, allegedly, anyway. I don't know if any Sun readers bother reading past page 3.)

(There's an old joke, with variants for each country. "People who read The Times think they run the country, people who read The Financial Times own the country, people who read the Mirror don't care who runs the country, people who read the Daily Telegraph [me!] think that the country should be run by another country [America], and people who read The Guardian think that it is." It is at this point in a 'Yes, Minister' episode where Hacker enquires about the Sun readers, to which Bernard replies, "they don't care, just so long as she has big tits!" Touché.)

This newly found confidence on the left has dismayed Blair and loyal Blairites. They are, in all honesty, less comfortable with the old Labour tradition, seemingly personified by the tax-and-spend Brown, than even with Thatcherism. With his departure announced and the left poised for control, Blair has spent much time trying to shore up his legacy. The civil (public) service, the health system, and the education system have all come in for Blair's newly found zeal for addressing the stuff-ups he's spent the last ten years ignoring. Why? Because Tony Blair, the great social democrat, has discovered 'the market'. 'Market-orientated reform' has become the Blairite buzzword of the moment.

It is personified in the attempt to reform the education system. A White Paper was compiled, under the auspices of the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, a Blair loyalist. But Blair, too weak to withstand a Labour left openly flouting his leadership and for whom the measure was too radical, was forced to neuter the bill. (It was reported in last week's Spectator that rebels are confident enough even to plot in front of party whips!) Yet not even that was enough for the rebels, who voted against the bill in droves. It passed, but only with Conservative votes. Blair being forced to rely on the Conservative leader, David Cameron, a Blair in the making (and seen as Blair's true heir by some Blairites and even the man himself reportedly), to shore up his legacy is indeed rich in symbolism. With Parliament due for summer recess and the scandal of the loans for peerages affair taking whatever lustre was left, Blair will go unfulfilled. And unloved. It is one of the ironies of British politics that when Thatcher left, she organized for the succession of John Major, thinking he would be a proper heir. He was not. She had to wait for Tony Blair, who was/is closer to Thatcher than either Major was or Cameron is. (Thatcher reportedly is very fond of Blair and he has reciprocated publicly.) Blair may get his serve of irony as he waits to see whether Cameron will be his heir.

Summing up Blair's legacy is not for me, I lack the in-depth familiarity with the period to nail my trousers to any masts. But one point is, I think, illustrative, sticking with the Thatcher – Blair theme. When leaving London I was given a going away present by the hippie playwright mother of a friend of mine, a kilt of MacDonald tartan, in recognition for my numerous (and good natured, of course) jokes about Scotland and her Scottish-ness. In return, I left her a copy of Thatcher's Downing Street Years (she positively despises Tories, I am merely tolerated). Apparently, it's going to get thrown at me next time I'm in the general vicinity. Whether for better or worse, I can't see anyone throwing Blair's memoirs about (except Gordon Brown…)

The Universality of Human Rights

Following up the 'Asian values' debate at the last meeting, here's a not-so-old essay of mine - minus footnotes, introduction and conclusion - on drawing the line between human rights and culture. This issue happens to be getting the media glare right now, with the impending execution of an Afghan citizen for converting from Islam to Christianity.

I'll try to follow this up with something more specific on 'Asian values', assuming I have any energy left to think after homework, job applications and LSS tutes.

Cross-posted, as usual.

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Human rights must have legitimacy if they are to be realised within a given community. The widespread perception in Muslim countries that human rights are ‘un-Islamic’ or a tool of western imperialism, for example, makes it difficult for governments to implement human right or for rights advocates to gain social and political traction. In developed states like the US, opposition to judicial enforcement of economic and social rights stems more from perceptions that they are not bona fide ‘rights’ than from persuasive separation-of-powers arguments. Attempts to give human rights an objective basis, for instance by linking them to economic development, have met little success; implementation of human rights depends on a cultural choice by the community in question, a choice that can only spring from cultural legitimacy.

The basic problem faced by the global human rights movement is that the very concept of human rights, defined as inalienable claims by an abstract individual upon society, lacks legitimacy outside the western world. If one attempts to ground human rights in religion or moral philosophy, they appear as a western cultural construct. Even accepting that numerous belief systems recognise the inherent human dignity on which human rights are founded, many manifest practices that are inconsistent with ‘international’ human rights norms; certain principles in Islamic jurisprudence, for example, conflict directly with the rights to freedom of belief, freedom of speech and equality before the law. A strong argument can be made that other key concepts underpinning human rights – the individual’s autonomy from society and the cosmos, for instance – are specifically western cultural developments. As such, their introduction into non-western societies presupposes that these societies are either culturally deficient or on an evolutionary path that will turn them into facsimiles of the contemporary west.

Nor have positivist approaches to human rights given non-western peoples the sense of cultural ownership that grounds legitimacy. The core of international human rights, expressed in the Universal Declaration, was articulated by western states in the context of the ideological struggle with communism. On an ongoing basis, Western states are perceived to serve vested commercial interests by promoting civil and political rights over economic and social ones, abandoning even the former when inconvenient (take Australia’s reservations to the ICCPR regarding federal implementation and juvenile detention). Non-western governments stand accused of using communitarian conceptions of human rights to justify internal repression. In this context, the non-western world at large has unsurprisingly developed a cynical understanding of human rights.

Yet despite the rhetoric of cultural distinctiveness from their elites, non-western societies are taking an evolutionary path similar in many respects to that of the west: industrialising, evolving powerful bureaucracies, developing market economies. In this changing social context, human rights are necessary to shield ‘authentic human life’ – whatever cultural expression that life may take – from the corrosive effects of modernity. Freedom of speech and association, for example, may be needed to protect traditional social structures or cultural practices from exploitative employers, corrupt bureaucrats and callous state policies.

Critiques of human rights as exclusively ‘western’ also employ an excessively static notion of culture. Muslim rights advocates have argued that the Shari’a provisions referenced above are a historically contingent interpretation of Islamic texts, which should be reinterpreted consistently with contemporary conditions. Torture and poverty were once considered legitimate by virtually all societies (including western ones) but are now widely rejected, at least in theory. These are instances of a global cultural evolution towards recognition that certain practices and conditions diminish human personality in any cultural context. Critics of the universal rights discourse correctly assert that ‘personality’ is culturally defined, but miss the point that it attaches to a universal ‘individual’ who is the subject of human rights. If the individual’s integrity is compromised, for instance through torture or poverty, personality cannot be fully realised. Pace Douzinas, the ‘human’ in human rights signifies a physical and mental core on which all cultures operate.

Human rights thus have a universal moral basis, notwithstanding their initial conception in the west, and as such are universally applicable. The global human rights machinery serves a legitimate role in monitoring adherence to human rights within all states, including their western progenitors; consider the Human Rights Committee’s (HRC’s) declaration of a US reservation to ICCPR subordinating that treaty to the US constitution as invalid, or the UN High Commissioner’s finding in 2002 that Australia had breached the ICCPR and the ICESCR. However, the precise content and means of enforcement of human rights must correspond to social organisation and conditions, which differ between nations and cultures. The right to freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy or family, for instance, may need to countenance traditional forms of community supervision and authority (for example the role of village elders in regulating social relationships).

Implementation of human rights should therefore take place as locally as practicable, for instance through national or regional human rights commissions, rather than via international treaty mechanisms such as the HRC’s individual complaints mechanism. Localised implementation avoids the charge of western cultural imposition, and allows rights to become ‘foundations for actions and policy’ rather than meaningless abstractions. It is only through such ‘concretisation in the [local] context’ that human rights will acquire the legitimacy needed to take root in a particular community.

Another take on Labor's woes

Here is my take on Labor's woes, as ignored by Op-ed editors from The Age, The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald:

A glance at the Labor caucus reveals a depressing site. Amongst its ranks are a chorus of those in the 'political class', whose professional lives have been spent mostly or entirely within the Labor party or the labour movement. Whilst their political opponents might boast of lawyers, entrepreneurs and a variety of other white collar professionals, the same cannot be said of the Labor Party. According to a Parliamentary Library research note (no. 24 2005-2006), 34% of Labor parliamentarians had as their previous occupation ‘party and union administrators and officials', whilst just 7% worked in the law and 11% as business managers. Amongst the coalition, only 2% were in this first category.

We have long passed the point in Labor history when representing the party in parliament was a reward for achievements in the outside world. Instead it is merely a logical continuation of work within the labour bureaucracy.

The starting point for this "career", from want of a better word, are our university campuses. On campuses across the country, young, talented left-leaning students are sucked into the world of political machinations. For some this means playing the game of student politics, whilst for others it involves a plumb appointment as a staff member of a state or federal member of parliament. The idea of seeking to achieve things outside of the Labor machine is frowned upon.

Plenty has been said about the total lack of perspective held by many inside student politics. To its participants, student politics is a life or death struggle for power where every possible advantage is sought over one's opponent. To those watching from the outside, though, it's a remarkably silly battle of little consequence. Regardless of which perception is closer to the truth, the bearpit of student politics is considered a training ground for the real thing.

It's doubtful, though, that it's teaching the skills that are worth learning. Rarely does student politics involve serious policy discussion or a nuanced understanding of different points of view. Rarely does it involve the art of persuasion. Rarely does it involve the tricky business of reasoning and rational argument. Instead, it's a bombastic power struggle. Participants are encouraged to count numbers and stack their way to success whilst intimidation and deception are commonplace. Student politics involves the worst elements of the real thing, and that's just why it's such an unfortunate training ground, but one that lives on nonetheless.

It's also worth remembering that in student politics, the battle is rarely between Liberal and Labor. More often, it is between different factions of the Labor Party, who operate completely independently and consider each other to be their arch political enemies. The animousity between the left faction (Australian Labor Students and National Organisation of Labor Students) and the right faction (Student Unity) is the stuff of legends. In must be quite jarring for these junior pollies to leave university and find themselves shoulder to shoulder with fellow Labor members that they previously despised. There's little wonder, then, that the factional divide lives on.

All this is not to say, of course, that Liberal-minded students aren't engaged in the same shenanigans. To some extent they are, although the lack of a political gravy train of student political and union jobs prevents Liberal students from venturing further down this path. (Perhaps, ironically, the introduction of Voluntary Student Unionism will help the Labor Party by reducing the number of cosy political positions within the student union movement.) There's also a clear realisation amongst aspiring young liberals that their path to Parliament House must invariably go via another profession. This realisation is part of the reason why the Liberals have managed to avoid the same malaise the Labor Party currently finds itself in.

There's no suggestion that factional warfare in the Labor Party is the result of factionalism in junior politics. The problem, though, is that the shallow gene pool of participants in junior politics seem to be the major source of future parliamentarians in the Labor Party. This depressing situation will continue so long as the caucus is filled with career politicians who spend their younger days wallowing in the pettiness of student politics and then make no attempt to learn skills or establish their credentials elsewhere. This trend is not unstoppable. The preselection of entrepreneur (and, incidentally, former student politician) Evan Thornley to a state Labor seat in Victoria and the preselection of lawyer Mark Dreyfus in the federal seat of Isaacs are steps in the right direction. What is necessary is that these preselections be the rule rather than the exception, in order to send a message out to aspiring young hacks and hackettes that they must broaden their skill base if they are to be successful in politics.

If Labor is to make a serious attempt at entering government, it will need to work hard to change the composition of its party room. Rewarding talent ahead of loyal service would be a good start. These hackneyed Labor groupies are surely not the basis of the next Labor Government.

Ari Sharp is a Commerce/Arts student at the University of Melbourne.