View From a Spaceship

Amidst all of the noise surrounding the Ukraine and the celebrations of D-Day there was a spaceship launched which had a 3 man crew: A German; A Russian; and An American.  In interviews with the three none of them ever mentioned any of the geopolitical manoeuvring taking place on planet earth but rather focused on the tasks at hand as they flew to their space station.

And yet the German, on German TV did make a bizarrely political statement that I don't believe has been picked up by the media at large.

He spoke of how huge space was.  That it just stretched and stretched in every direction into a vast darkness.  And he spoke of how beautiful the earth was.  Full of colour in an otherwise black and white environment.  He noted that it was simply incomprehensible that the atmosphere surrounding the earth was all that separated our bright colourful planet from the emptiness of space. 

And then, in a voice that started to crack, he said how horribly thin that barrier to survival was, and that whatever our differences on earth might be, we are all in this together and there is a very thin line between all of us, and the great void of space.

70 Years On

Living in England there was a lot of coverage of this the 70th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy.  Additionally I have just come back from a visit to a small village near Le Havre where the celebrations were also in full swing.

This year was especially poignant given that many of the survivors of the D-Day landings are no longer alive and with their passing the "living memory" of the event moves from life to history.

As I also watch German television to try and get a more balanced view of events I was struck by the lack of coverage for D-Day in the German media. I asked a friend who edits an investigative journalism program for one of the mainline (public) television channels in Germany as to why.

His blunt answer was "It's not really discussed and no one asks our opinion anyway".

This got me to thinking as to just how deep does Germany's historical retrospection regarding the Third Reich go and as to whether the blanket of collective guilt smothered the fact that there was a German resistance-it just manifested itself very differently from the resistance in occupied countries.

So first: collective guilt.  This is a two-edged sword.  On the one side it sweeps everyone up and holds them responsible regardless of where they were on the "guilty-scale".  It also allows everyone on a very different level to shrug their shoulders as if to say we were all involved and therefore the responsibility is to the nation-not to the individual. 

Secondly is the question of resistance: What about those Germans who were against Hitler?  Those that were either demoted or fired because they wouldn't join the party.  Those that were banned from writing, painting, teaching or acting because their politics were wrong.  Those that physically escaped persecution by emigrating, not to mention those that were imprisoned and/or executed.

For on June 6th, 1944, they breathed a sigh of relief.  They saw what they hoped would be the end of the war, of the dictatorship, of the nightmare.

And yet there is still a whiff of not being patriotic in voicing those thoughts, of maybe even being a traitor. 

As far as Germany has come in trying to come to terms with its National Socialist demons I think there is still work to be done. 

Putin and the Rise of the Right

I recently read an article by Robert Kaplan on the shift to the right in Europe as reflected in the European Parliament elections. 

I won't go into full detail but essentially he was proposing that the fears and distaste for the Far Right/Totalitarian Regimes such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco had done much to discredit any attempts to emulate them in Europe, but that we were entering into a new phase in Europe which was no longer hampered by the horrors of WW II combined with the perception that the current political elites were failing their constituents.

From the end of World War II Western Europe was basically run by centrist governments, some left leaning and some right leaning but never venturing to far in either direction.

The politics of the centre led to the rise of the EU and its' evolution from a trade bloc towards a financial and political union.  Parallel to this development was the virtual collapse of the ethnocentric nationalist right wing parties as well as the far left "Stalinist" parties. 

Then the financial crisis hit.  And with it came the rise of populist parties promising a return to a past which was never as rosy as they portrayed and ignoring the fact that this nostalgia for the past was incompatible with the present and certainly not a viable vision of the future given the state of Europe today.

Despite that the ethnocentric nationalist propaganda found fertile ground amongst ethnically white populations which allowed themselves to be convinced that all their problems were caused by an influx of immigrants, primarily non-white, who were "taking our jobs, our social services, our health care and were responsible for all crime".

Add to that mix the increase in Muslim immigrants and suddenly you find that these right wing parties are bizarrely aligned to Russia in general and Putin specifically whom they perceive to be the protector of the ethnic Russians and even more importantly is aggressively anti-Muslim.

So a supposedly anti-fascist Mr Putin who conjured up a fascist West once again trying to oppress Holy Mother Russia as evidenced in the Ukraine finds himself being an icon for the truly fascist right wing parties of Western Europe.

In a similarly strange twist the fiercely anti-Gay Mr Putin has become an icon for the Gay community.

Politics does make for strange bedfellows.

Just Because it was Tony Blair Doesn't Mean it was All Bad

Although I am not a fan of Tony Blair  last week's speech was interesting despite the fact that he gave it.

In the speech, which you can read for yourself (see below), he essentially had his version of an Oriana Fallaci moment, although much more tempered and focused on Islamism as opposed to Islam.

He waves the banner against the forces of religious extremism and closed-mindedness asserting that the war is between belief and modernity.  He goes on to say that even if a political party campaigns on the basis of a dangerous corrosive political ideology but stops short of actively participating in acts of terrorism, if the political goal of that ideology is to gain power through manipulation of the political process and then transform a democracy into a dictatorship it must be stopped.

He highlights the danger that the very freedoms that our democracies represent are fertile ground for the seeds of our own destruction. We allow anti-democratic, anti-freedom of religion, closed-minded intolerant political parties to participate as if they were one side of a conventional political debate.

They are not.

Still, unfortunately, he goes on to group the "West" with Russia and China against the Islamist threat.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows but China is a dictatorship and Russia is a modern version of Czarist Russia.  Neither really promote the ideals of western liberal democracies.  The only thing binding us together is that they too are targets of Islamist extremists.

Reaching for straws are we now Tony?

http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/why-the-middle-east-matters-keynote-speech-by-tony-blair/

Conventional Warfare

I have read a number of articles recently about how the US Defence planners had presumed that with the fall of the Iron Curtain that there would no longer be a need for big "boots-on-the-ground" conventional wars and that the shift for ground troops would be to specialist units.

The same articles go on to criticise this approach suggesting that the defence planners had failed to recognise that the apparent demise of conventional wars, especially in the European arena, was the exception to the rule and that they should therefore have failed miserably in their roles as strategic thinkers.

Their analysis seems to forget Reagan's claim to have used the arms race, especially the "Star Wars" technology to demonstrate to the Soviets that they could not compete economically.  The American electorate was happy in the main to have a guns and butter policy because they were intricately intertwined.  The Russians couldn't compete on that basis thus forcing the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Or so the song goes.

What the planners actually failed to see is that the Cold War between the Soviets and the West was not really an ideological one although it was handy to present it in those terms and much more was a good old-fashioned geopolitical spat between two opposing imperialistic power centers.

So now we have Putin's Russia which has not only happily used troops to quell problems deemed necessary for national security such as Chechnya, Georgia and Moldavia, but now perhaps even into the Ukraine. 

Strangely, the Baltics, the Poles and any other former Soviet satellites clamouring for NATO membership didn't buy into the end of conventional war in Europe mantra.

Perhaps it was another case of American hubris and a serious case of selective hearing.

I don't know why the US didn't pay attention to the signs that highlighted Russia's build-up of a conventional military and the accompanying willingness to use it.

So we are now left with the Ukranians having to use their own conventional forces to combat what is actually an attempt by (pro)Russian militants to secede from the Ukraine.

Would we have acted any differently if the south-west United States was suddenly filled with armed militias clamouring to become part of Mexico?

Why Is There No Outcry

A strange thing happened last week in the US.  The meaning of "the selling of the presidency" left Madison Avenue and wandered down to Wall Street.

In one of the most convoluted rationalisations I have every seen the inalienable rights granted to citizens i.e. humans under the Constitution have now been granted to artificial legal entities such as corporations and labour unions.

Then, to add insult to injury, through the writ of the court we witnessed the transubstantiation of money into speech thus legalising the buying of the presidency and every other political seat.

I understand without hesitation the thought process behind this.  I understand that if the inalienable rights granted to humans could be given to legal entities and if the concept of freedom of speech could be granted to money then it would open the floodgates for moneyed interests to buy every politician in the land-legally!

I can even understand that in a greedy masters of the universe euphoric sort of way one could imagine creating such absurd constructs.

But I also thought that even the most corrupt captains of industry would somewhere in their reptilian brains realise that it was totally immoral to legalise corruption and bribery.

I was wrong. 

It is devastating.  And yet I don't sense any real outcry. 

Has apathy reached such a point that people just watch their political process crash and burn?

It's Not A Question of Good or Evil

There are a number of commentators who wish to couch the conflict in the Ukraine in terms of good and evil.

I think this is a mistake.

I am not overly impressed with the "Good" credentials of either side.  Nor the intelligence levels of the John and Jane Doe's that are interviewed on the street.  We have all see enough of "spontaneous" crowd scenes which only occur when the camera's are rolling and interviews filled with soundbites from semi-literate demonstrators.

No, both sides are filled with much that is to be discredited.  Both sides have groups that are easily swayed by populist propaganda and both sides are capable of brutality.

But there is a difference.  There are Ukrainians in the Ukraine who don't want to be under the control of Putin's Russia.  The Russians demonstrating in the Ukraine are clamouring precisely for that state of affairs.

And it is the Ukraine.

Ideally I would like it if we could forget nationalistic rhetoric and were able to create a global society that would actually benefit the many rather than the global market which condemns the many to poverty and benefits the oligarchical few.

But I don't see that happening and certainly not in the near future.

So my solution is to offer those Russians currently living in the Ukraine who want to live under Putin's rule to go back to Russia, voluntarily, or, if they refuse, by decree. 

I would make the same offer in all the other borderlands with "restless" Russian minorities. 

And if Russia cuts oil and gas deliveries to the Ukraine.  I would make sure that the first to feel the pain be the restless Russian nationalists.

That might make me evil....