Nathan’s Musings

During the past 12 hours, a heated discussion about http://wikileaks.org/ has broken out on one of the mailing lists I frequent. The discussion is spurred by the site’s disclosure of a video allegedly showing US military killing civilians in Iraq. For those not familiar with it, Wikileaks is a site where various secret documents are posted for everyone to see in the interest of freedom of the press, global free speech and other similarly noble sentiments that I support. The site is currently in financial trouble and asking for donations. According to its plea for money, Wikileaks’s staff is unpaid but the operating budget is $600K per year of which they only have $370K at this point.

My initial instinct was to support Wikileaks. After all, I was born in the then Communist Poland, and I value the freedoms we enjoy in the West even more than the material comforts we have here. But then I started looking at the other “leaks” posted on the site. Even though Wikileaks claims that “…We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience.”, all the documents actually disclosed on the site at this moment come from Western democracies, mainly the US and UK governments. So, where are those revelations from China? Russia? the UN?

Once again, I am reminded of the bad old 1970s, when all Western actions and misdeeds were publicized in the media and criticized by my progressive friends, while the far worse crimes committed by “the other side” which back then was chiefly the Soviet Union and its various proxies, were undisclosed or simply dismissed. The openness is at once a strength and a weakness of democracies. As it was 30 years ago, so it is today, despite vastly improved technology: Western Europe, the USA, Israel are under constant barrage of criticism while inconvenient truths about China, Russia, the Arabs are swept under the rug.

I shall not be donating to Wikileaks after all.

(Note: this is the same as the previous post, but in Spanish, for the benefit of my Spanish teacher who assigned me as homework to do some of my blog entries in Spanish.)

…por supuesto, excepto el gobierno Comunista en Polonia, donde vivía hasta que tuve 11 años.

Desde mi llegada en Dinamarca en 1972, siempre he vivido en países occidentales, democráticos. De todos estos gobiernos, el de Zapatero es aun mas inútil que el gobierno danés de Anker Jørgensen, un jefe de gobierno durante los años 70. Igual a Zapatero, Jørgensen era un social demócrata con buenas intenciones pero con pocas capacidades para gestionar los problemas del país. En 1982, Jørgensen simplemente abandonó su puesto y fue sustituido por un gobierno conservador.

Una diferencia entre Jørgensen y Zapatero es que mientras que el danés era un hombre muy simpático, con un estilo de vida modesto (rechazó vivir en la residencia oficial del jefe del gobierno, y se quedó en su piso en una zona de Copenhague poblada por obreros y funcionarios de bajo nivel), Zapatero claramente tiene grandes pretensiones.

Por el momento, Zapatero se encuentra en Davos, donde pretende ser un líder importante de nivel internacional. Esta noche, discutirá “modelos alternativos de governancia mundial” con grandes pensadores como los presidentes de Vietnam, Corea, México, África del Sur (es notable la ausencia de un jefe de gobierno de cualquier país importante en este acontecimiento).

Mientras tanto, España tiene la tasa de paro mas alta en la zona Euro con 20%; las cajas, que han prestado 375 mil millones de Euros a los promotores que han construido todos estos piso vacíos, están al punto de colapso; según las previsiones mas optimistas el PIB seguirá negativo en 2010 (mientras que el resto del mundo recuperará). Los medios internacionales y los otros lideres europeos ponen a Zapatero en ridículo por sus sermoneos a otros países sobre como salir de la crisis (si el lector tiene curiosidad, las recomendaciones de Zapatero consisten en mas dialogo con sindicatos, patronales y otros “interlocutores sociales”; lo que falta son políticas audaces).

Me encanta vivir en España. La gente, la cultura, el estilo de vida, la comida, el clima, el paisaje—todos estos aspectos son encantadores. Pero me desespera la baja calidad de la vida política en este país. La triste verdad es que aunque Zapatero es incompetente, el comportamiento de la oposición y su líder Mariano Rajoy tampoco inspira confianza.

Finalmente España saldrá de la recesión, pero no lo hará por sus propios esfuerzos. La crisis aquí terminará cuando los ingleses, los alemanes, los holandeses y otros europeos del norte volverán a tener las ganas y el dinero para venir aquí y comprar pisos, ir a los restaurantes, dormir en los hoteles. España es como un país del tercer mundo, que depende completamente de las ventas de sus productos básicos a los países mas avanzados. En el caso de España, estos productos son algunos vegetales durante el invierno y, sobre todo, el sol y la playa. Es triste este estado del país, pero es la verdad.

…of course, not counting the first 11 years of my life, spent in Communist Poland.

But since coming to Denmark in 1972 I have lived only in Western democracies, and of those, the current Spanish government led by Zapatero is even more incompetent than the Danish government of Anker Jørgensen, like Zapatero a well-meaning Social Democrat who simply was not up to the job and gave up power in 1982. However, Jørgensen had the redeeming feature of being a genuinely nice and modest man who refused to move to the Prime Minister’s residence, preferring to remain in his modest apartment in a working-class area of Copenhagen.

Zapatero, on the other hand, has pretentions. Right now he is in Davos, trying to be an important statesman. Tonight, he will discuss alternative models of world government which such great thinkers as the heads of government of Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico and South Africa (notice the absence of the leaders of any serious countries?).

Meanwhile, Spain has the highest unemployment in the EU at 20%, its savings banks (which have lent 375 billion Euro to the people who have built all those empty beachfront apartments) are about to collapse, even the most optimistic predictions still have GDP shrinking in 2010 while the rest of the world recovers from recession, and Zapatero is the laughing stock of Europe for trying to lecture other countries how they should manage the crisis (in case you’re curious, it involves more talks and consensus seeking with unions, employers and other “social partners”; what it does not involve is bold policies of any kind).

I love living in Spain. The people, the culture, the lifestyle, the weather, the landscape–all are wonderful. But I despair over the low quality of the political life in this country. Because the sad truth is that while Zapatero is incompetent, the behaviour of the conservative opposition and its leader Mariano Rajoy does not exactly inspire confidence either.

Eventually Spain will exit recession, but not through its own efforts. It will happen when the Brits, Germans, Dutch and other northern Europeans again have enough spare cash to come and spend it here. In that way, we are like a third world country, utterly dependent on selling its commodities to richer nations. In Spain’s case, besides some winter vegetables, those commodities are the sea and the sunshine. Sad.

In the wake of the attempted bombing of a Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit more security measures will of course be introduced, in particular more screening and analysis of passengers’ information before they are allowed to board a plane for the US, the UK and other countries. As usual, civil liberties campaigners raise the spectre of “racial profiling”, the idea that such surveillance will concentrate on Arabs, Muslims, young Asian men etc.

Well, as a fairly frequent traveller whose wife and children currently happen to be in the US, having flown there on a Delta flight from Madrid, I sincerely hope that the security agencies do use racial profiling and will continue to do so as part of their effort to prevent terrorist attacks. Despite all the politically correct bullshit, the fact is that virtually all the terrorist attacks against Western targets in the past decade have  been carried out by young men from Islamic countries. The latest example is fairly typical, a 23-year old Nigerian who got his “training” in Yemen.

Of course it does not mean that every young Muslim is a suspect. But yes, they will have to accept increased scrutiny, much of it happening without them even knowing it or being directly impacted by it, except perhaps through slightly longer visa application processing times, or slightly more thorough checks at the airport. If, in order to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities, the security services spend as much time on Scottish grandmothers as they do on young Pakistani men, they would be denying reality and putting us all in danger. I hope and trust that they are smarter than that.

It is early afternoon. The plane begins its descent towards the white clouds that are covering the land underneath. A few moments inside the white fog, then the plane is below the cloud cover. Below, the blue-grey water of the Øresund; on the right, the Swedish coast, now bathed in sunshine.

The plane makes a slight turn, revealing the magnificent bridge that links Copenhagen and Malmö. The final approach begins. We are now over the island of Amager, where Copenhagen Airport is located. The trees are bathed in the low autumn sun–what glorious colours!

I look down on my beautiful country. I have not lived here since 1983, but every time I look at Denmark from a plane that is coming in to land, I know that I am coming home.

When I was in school, we were told that good grades would be given for results, with an occasional reward for efforts–the latter in cases where evidently a great amount of work had been done but for whatever reason it had not resulted in the desired result. However, I have never heard of a good grade being given just for having the “right” attitude–until I heard of Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize last Friday.

To be sure, Nobel Peace Prize awards have often had a touch of controversy about them. The other Nobels are given for scientific or artistic achievement, often many years after the relevant research has been published and rarely elicit much debate. The Peace Prizes are often awarded immediately following, or even during, the events that are being recognized. Particularly when they have been given to two warring parties that have just made peace, or were just about to do so, partisans of one side or the other have often objected to the “bad guy” being recognized. One can argue, however, that those are the most meaningful Peace Prizes–after all, peace is something you make with your enemies; with your friends you already have it.

So, the prizes received by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (1973), Sadat and Begin (1978),  Mandela and De Klerk (1993), Arafat, Peres and Rabin (1994), Hume and Trimble (1998) were all richly deserved even though they aroused enormous controversy at the time.

In other years, the Nobel Committee has rewarded individuals who fought for human rights against oppressive regimes: Sakharov in 1975, Walesa in 1983, Tutu in 1984, Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991. Few would argue against these individuals deserving their awards.

Likewise, few would argue about NGOs such as Amnesty International (1977), Médecins Sans Frontières (1999) or the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines (1997); or about Mother Theresa (1979), Elie Wiesel (1986) or even Gorbachev (1990).

Then there are years when the Nobel Committee has chosen to effectively punt the football and award the prize to some UN organization or other. Those prizes one can only shrug at: were there really no deserving individuals in those years? The punts include UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1981), UN Peacekeeping Forces (1988), UN (2001), the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005). There are also awards to individuals, usually elder statesmen, who have engaged in peacekeeping efforts: Oscar Arias (1987) or Jimmy Carter (2002). Common to all these awards is that they recognize effort: Jimmy Carter is a singular failure, both as US President and as peace maker, but at least he tried. The UN Peacekeeping Forces are usually completely ineffective, but at least they try.

And so now we come to Obama. What has he done? He has held some nice speeches; he is not George W. Bush; he is black and telegenic. Are those qualities really deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize? Couldn’t the committee have decided to watch Obama closely during the next 8 years and reward him when he has actually accomplished something??

A couple of my American friends have defended the award to Obama by saying that he has given hope to people both in the USA and around the world. This argument was conclusively refuted in a Spanish radio talk show on Friday afternoon, during which someone said that if prizes are now to be given for hope, then he should get the Premio del Principe de Asturias (Spain’s most prestigious literary prize) so that it might encourage him to write a book some day.

I stand baffled.

I have often thought that yes, the Russians, by signing the pact with Hitler in 1939, made World War II possible. Now I see a story on the BBC which basically says the same thing.

I really mean “survive”, in the physical, literal sense of the word. I cannot think of any other recent president in greater danger of being assassinated. Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss aspects of Obama’s policies with some self-described conservatives from Tennessee, the state that wants you to carry a gun while drinking in a bar. Fortunately, those discussions took place on Facebook, so I had no reason to fear that one of the other participants might choose to end the conversation violently.

The subject of conversation were Obama’s economic policies, mainly the stimulus package and health care reform. None of the social issues that are usually red meat for the right-wingers were touched upon, not even the appointment to the Supreme Court of Sottomayor. And yet, the level of pure, visceral hatred towards Obama displayed by these people was mind-boggling. This is way beyond political disagreement. To these people, Obama is devil incarnate; they call him, at various times, “the Kenyan”, a “closet Muslim” or worse. They believe he is out to deliberately destroy the USA as they understand it and turn it into a communist country, or worse, an Islamist-Communist country…

Sure, progressives also despised GWB. But progressives are generally non-violent (the main reason for despising Bush was the Iraq war, after all).

Now, I am not saying that the specific people with whom I communicated on Facebook are going to grab their weapons and head for Washington DC tomorrow.  But their opinions are representative of those held by the right-wingers who hate Obama with such fervour.  Some of those extremists form armed militias, believe that abortion is murder and that therefore it is OK to shoot a doctor who performs abortions, and that the 2nd Amendment was handed down by God to Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore. I am certain that some, right now, holed up somewhere in Idaho or Wyoming or Tennessee, are thinking about their duty to save the USA from “the Kenyan”.

Let’s all hope that the Secret Service does its job well…

No comment needed, just read this story and make up your mind about the NRA. I’m sure that family feels safer now…

The line in the title is from Shakespeare’s play King Richard II. What made me think of it? Last Saturday I was in London, a city I really love, not least because it has so much to offer that even after visiting it frequently during the past 15 years, I “discover” something new every time I go.

And so it was this time. I had passed the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square many times, but never actually gone inside. This time I did. What a fantastic place! What makes it so remarkable is not just the wealth of portraits (and in modern times photographs) of important historical figures, but also the explanations next to each portrait, which do a wonderful job of placing the person depicted in a historical context, so that the visitor learns not only that s/he was important but also why. In effect, I enjoyed a 3-hour tour of British history.

In doing so, I was reminded of the enormous contribution made by Britain to Western civilisation (which despite all the politically correct bullshit about multi-culti is the same as world civilisation). During my 3-hour visit I looked at the faces of the man who basically founded modern mathematics (Isaac Newton), the man who invented the steam engine (James Watt), Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the greatest builders and engineers of all time, James Watson (discoverer of the double helix), Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin) and countless other great  scientists.  In the world of arts and letters: Shakespeare, Byron, Austen, Dickens…I could go on. In my own field of economics, the founding fathers of the discipline: Adam Smith and David Ricardo…And of course the statesmen, where the highlight must be Winston Churchill, who saved the West and hence the world during the dark days of 1940.

The contribution to our civilisation, knowledge and culture made by inhabitants of this modestly-sized island off the coast of Europe is simply immense and far surpasses that of any other country on Earth.