After commenting on the fake “assistance” that the Euro countries have bestowed on Greece for the past five years — stabilising Greece just far enough to get international banks clear of the falling debris, and then pushing it off the cliff — it occurred to me that this ties in usefully with the discussion that has been bubbling up — from Thomas Piketty among others — of how chief scold Germany had its debts written off after both world wars. Or, rather, it defaulted on its WWI debts as preparation for initiating WWII; the world then decided to cancel most of its debts after WWII — including debts to Greece — at the London conference of 1953. It would be hard to say that Germany in 1953 was more deserving of international assistance or forgiveness than Greece today. In part, this reflects the predilection for strong villains: Germany was seen as inherently strong, if currently weakened; Greece is viewed with contempt, for its weak and corrupt political system. Having reduced much of Europe to rubble and murdered millions is just one of those misadventures that befall those with big plans. At least you knew, if you bailed out Germany, the money wouldn’t just be wasted…
Category: History
Plus ça change: Partition of Poland edition
If you wanted to refer to a paradigmatic example of wanton brutality in international affairs, the invasion and division of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 would likely spring to mind. That’s why I was struck by the 1903 remark on the Boer War cited by Richard Toye in his book on Churchill’s imperialism:
Bourke Cockran, Churchill’s Irish-born politician friend, thought the war to be “the greatest violation of justice attempted by any civilized nation since the partition of Poland.”
I suppose now you could say, “the partition of Poland was the greatest violation of justice since the last partition of Poland.” You’d leave out the “civilized nation” bit, not exactly because Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union wouldn’t qualify, but because the concept no longer seems to have much explanatory power.
More Zionist anti-semitism
I commented recently on the good fit between classical antisemitism and Zionism, despite the efforts of some to associate necessarily antisemitism with anti-Zionism, perhaps on the basis of both having the prefix “anti”. I just came across another forceful testimony to this alignment, from a figure less notorious than Adolf Eichmann. In the book Churchill’s Empire (about the development of Winston Churchill’s attitudes toward the British Empire), Churchill is quoted on the subject of Zionism from a 1920 newspaper article:
He distinguished between praiseworthy “National Jews”, loyal to the countries in which they lived, and the “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews” whom he claimed were largely responsible for the Bolshevik revolution. In this analysis Zionism offered a “third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race”, and Churchill predicted that, “if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown […] an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
Plaque assay
I was just in Paris for a few days. Walking past the Lycée Simone Weil, in the 3rd arrondissement, I noticed a plaque, such as one sees quite commonly on public institutions:
À la mémoire des jeunes filles, élèves de cet établissement, autrefois école de couture die la ville de Paris, déportées et assassinées de 1942 à 1944 parce qu’elles étaient nées juives, victimes innocentes de la barbarie nazie avec la complicité active du gouvernement de Vichy.
Plus de 11400 enfants furent déportés de France dont plus de 500 vivaient dans le 3ème art de Paris.
Ils furent exterminés dans les camps de la mort.
Les élèves du Lycée Simone Weil ne les oublieront jamais.
[To the memory of the girls, pupils of this establishment, which was then the Paris School of Dressmaking, deported and murdered from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jewish, innocent victims of the Nazi barbarism with the active complicity of the Vichy government.
More than 11400 children were deported from France, of whom more than 500 lived in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.
They were exterminated in the death camps.
The pupils of the Lycée Simone Weil will never forget them.]
As I read it, the formulation seemed to me strikingly perfect. The text avoids all the pitfalls that similar texts have been criticised for, whereby they seemed to either be minimising the horror, or pushing away blame, or somehow alienating the victims. The victims were “jeunes filles”, “innocent victims”, “murdered because they were born Jewish” (thus emphasising that it was a purely racist crime. They were “exterminated”, they lived right here, and then this somewhat wishful phrase at the end, usually attached to heroic martyrs, “The pupils will never forget them.” Most striking was the attribution of responsibility to “Nazi barbarism with the active complicity of the Vichy government.” They clearly were concerned to make absolutely unambiguous that they were not minimising French responsibility. Not just “complicity”, but “active complicity”. (Though it wasn’t the “French government”, but only the “Vichy government”.)
I was impressed first, then irritated. Precisely because they managed to tick every box and engrave such a perfect text on the plaque, it made it clear what a formulaic activity it is. (Perhaps the final sentence, unassailably high-minded just as it is clearly not true in any meaningful sense, also drove that point home.) It’s not that they did anything wrong, and I’m glad that they put all these plaques up. There’s just a limit to what you can achieve with a plaque, and perfecting the art of the memorial plaque in some ways undermines the spirit that it is meant to express.
Last refuge
Northern Ireland under pressure after Irish gay marriage referendum win
I’m looking forward to seeing the arguments they will use to resist the pressure. Perhaps Northern Ireland can present itself as a last refuge in Europe for the non-gay-marrying, Christian bakers and florists, antigay clerics. It will help if they can get a high profile asylum case. Maybe the straight son of two North London radical feminists fleeing an arranged marriage to another man.
In all seriousness, I doubt there is anyone who is not astonished at the rapid international progress on same-sex marriage. That includes, most especially, those of us who came of age when acceptance of same-sex relationships was the norm in our student environments and/or recognised the logical force of the argument decades ago. Logical coherence doesn’t usually carry the day in politics nor, I have to admit, should it necessarily. But here we see the power of ideology in political affairs, against those who suppose that politics is merely about balancing competing interests. It’s the ideology of marriage, which had changed enormously in the past two centuries. People like Andrew Sullivan recognised in the 1980s that people’s intuitive understanding of marriage, in Europe and its cultural confrères, had evolved to where it was actually quite hospitable to same-sex marriage. Those of us who felt little emotional attachment to marriage immediately recognised the coherence of this position, but assumed that it would take approximately forever to get over that emotional hurdle, at least everywhere but Holland.
And because I personally attached little weight to marriage, I was definitely among those who thought this an unpromising, because unnecessarily charged, ground to fight on for gay rights. I didn’t see what Sullivan saw, that marriage equality could be the linchpin of a coherent struggle that could overthrow the entire framework of homophobia.
The Nobel prize in mathematics
There was an interesting article in Der Spiegel about Angela Merkel’s visit to a Berlin secondary school as part of the the “EU-Projekttag”, a national day for teaching about the EU and its institutions. (No surprise that nothing like this happens in Britain.) This school has mostly Muslim immigrant children, and she found that instead of asking about the functions of the European Parliament the children wanted to tell her about discrimination in Germany.
Fatma, eine 15-jährige Jugendliche mit Kopftuch, klagt über Schwierigkeiten beim Praktikum im Kindergarten, weil die Eltern keine Erzieherinnen mit Kopftuch wollen. Das habe ihr Chef ihr gesagt. Ja ja, sagt Merkel, die inmitten der Schüler auf der Bühne Platz genommen hat, man kenne das Problem von Bewerbungen junger Menschen mit komplizierten, ausländisch klingenden Namen. “Viele glauben da nicht, dass jetzt gleich ein Nobelpreisträger in Mathematik um die Ecke kommt.”
[Fatma, a 15-year-old with head-scarf, complains about her difficulties in an internship in a kindergarten, because the parents don’t want a teacher with head-scarf. Her boss told her that. Yes, yes, says Merkel, who is sitting on the podium with the students, we know these problems, as with job applications from young people with complicated, foreign-sounding names. “Many people don’t think, this is a future Nobel-prize winner in mathematics coming around the corner.”]
Never mind this bizarre and nearly incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness from a major world leader asked an uncomfortable question by a 15-year-old. What is it about the chimeric Nobel prize in mathematics? Alfred Nobel established prizes in subjects that were related to the kind of practical science that he made his fortune with (chemistry and physics) and to the kind of selfless causes (medicine, literature, peace) that he hoped would blur the association of his name with weapons manufacture. There are lots of subjects that he did not create prizes in. Mathematics. Geology. Engineering. Astronomy. History. Cooking. No one thinks it odd that any of these subjects don’t have a Nobel prize, except mathematics. They think it so odd, that they either imagine that there actually is one, as above, or they invent outlandish stories to explain this lacuna, generally involving some mathematician — Gosta Magnus Mittag-Leffler, when he is given a name — running off with Nobel’s wife. (This story has the advantage of Mittag-Leffler actually having been Swedish, but the fact that Nobel never married is usually counted against its credibility.)
A bomb in mathematics
I’ve just been reading Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It’s more than a century old, and I was surprised to find it such an acute analysis of the psychology of terrorism. It follows the planning and aftermath of a ridiculous and botched scheme to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The ringleader Mr Verloc, the “secret agent” of the title, who spends his time infiltrating anarchist organisations, is put up to it by his employer, the embassy of an unnamed Central Asian nation. The crime seems almost entirely unmotivated. The new First Secretary of the embassy is irked by Verloc’s indolence and apparent uselessness, and seeks to prod him into making some exertions for his salary. The inane goal of the attack is to show up the ineptitude of the English police, and so stimulate an autocratic turn in its inconveniently soft and democratic government. Plus ça change… The target must be such as to seem senseless (hence not a tiresomely conventional target, like a crown prince or a government building), important (hence not the National Gallery — “There would be some screaming, of course, but from whom? Artists — art critics and such like — people of no account. No one minds what they say.”) and sufficiently menacing. He announces
The demonstration must be against learning—science. But not every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics. But that is impossible… What do you think of having a go at astronomy?
I was also amused by the comment of the bomb engineer:
The system’s worked perfectly. And yet you would think that a common fool in a hurry would be much more likely to forget to make the contact altogether. I was worrying myself about that sort of failure mostly. But there are more kinds of fools than one can guard against. You can’t expect a detonator to be absolutely fool-proof.
Security theatre, WWII and today
Computer security researcher Chris Roberts has been banned from United Airlines for the offense of pointing out that the lax security in their onboard wifi systems could endanger the safety of the aircraft. At the same time, they insisted that
We are confident our flight control systems could not be accessed through techniques [Mr Roberts] described.
The only danger to the flight control systems, it turns out, was the researcher who informed them (via Twitter) of the security flaws.
This reminded me of the story Richard Feynman told about cracking safes for a lark at Los Alamos. One time he decided to needle a colonel he was visiting at Oak Ridge, who had just deposited some highly secret documents extra heavy-duty safe, but with the same easy-to-crack lock on it. He’d figured out that when the safe was left open, it was easy to pick up two of the three numbers of the combination by feel.
“The only reason you think they’re safe in there is because civilians call it a ‘safe’.”
The colonel furiously challenged him to open it up. This Feynman accomplished, in two minutes, though he pretended to need much longer, to distract from what an easy trick it was.) After allowing some moments of astonishment, he decided to be responsible:
“Colonel, let me tell you something about these locks: When the door to the safe or the top drawer of the filing cabinet is left open, it’s very easy for someone to get the combination. That’s what I did while you were reading my report, just to demonstrate the danger. You should insist that everybody keep their filing cabinet drawers locked while they’re working, because when they’re open, they’re very, very vulnerable.”
The next time Feynman visited Oak Ridge, everyone was wanting to keep him out of their offices. It seems, the colonel’s response to the danger was to make everyone change their combinations if Feynman had been in or passed through their office, which was a significant nuisance.
That was his solution: I was the danger.[…] Of course, their filing cabinets were still left open while they were working.
Long-running non-dom com
UK residents who can claim that their real long-term home is somewhere else — perhaps in their family suite in Monaco, or they plan to be buried in the Cayman Islands — are termed “non-domiciled”, and spared the indignity of paying UK tax on their worldwide income. This includes people who were born and lived their whole lives in this country, if their father was foreign (or himself non-domiciled). This last is particularly galling to the ordinary taxpayer.
Now Labour has vowed to do away with the whole farce, leaving the Tories spluttering about the cost to the economy of driving away wealthy job-creators. What’s fascinating is to see Conservatives suddenly arguing that foreigners are making useful contributions to Britain, even if they are benefit cheats tax avoiders. Sure, some wealthy foreigners are probably making a positive contribution to the UK economy, while others are primarily competing with local people for scarce housing. In that they are a lot like non-wealthy foreigners, if we replace “housing” with “jobs”: some make a net positive economic contribution, some don’t.
But no one is suggesting that we really need to make sure that we retain any loopholes that allow impecunious immigrants to claim benefits in ways that seem contrary to any intended purpose or basic civic morality, because otherwise they might leave.
The Habsburg Google
It is often portrayed as an innovation of Google, to use convenient services — starting with the provision of free email — as a honeypot to attract masses of otherwise indifferent citizens to make their private information and correspondence available for lucrative snooping provision of services. But according to Adam Zamoyski’s history of counterrevolution in Europe between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the Austrian empire got there first. (The parallels to trends in the modern world are so numerous and extensive that the author coyly disclaims any effort to mark them out, starting from the overarching inclination of governments frightened by revolutionary terror to snoop on everything, and invent fantastic conspiracies — often instigating the plots themselves — to justify their spiralling tyranny, to small things, like an obsession with ciphers and politicised reinvention of archaic religious movements.)
The perennial Austrian foreign minister Count Metternich was obsessed with the need to keep an eye on the revolutionary conspiracies crisscrossing the continent, but had direct access only to letters passing through the Austrian postal service.
To ensure that as much European mail as possible continued to pass through Austrian domains, Metternich saw to it that the Habsburg postal service was cheaper and faster than the alternatives.
Common Infirmities 