Nathan’s Musings

When the (fortunately) late Jerry Falwell attacked Teletubbies because one of them was allegedly part of a gay conspiracy to turn millions of children into homosexuals, I smugly thought that such idiocy could happen only in America, the most God-fearing country in the Western world. But no…this silliness has travelled across the Atlantic, where the Polish government is now going to have some psychologists examine whether Tinky Winky is part of a homosexual Fifth Column designed to corrupt young children, because he is purple, has a triangle on his head and carries a ladies’ handbag. Apparently Winnie the Pooh is also a suspect because he only has male friends. I am glad the Polish government concerns itself with such important issues. That way, they don’t have to worry about the economy, infrastructure, the crumbling health care system, and all that other difficult stuff.

And in my own backyard, popular culture has reached a new low with a Dutch reality TV show where a terminally ill woman is going to donate a kidney to one of three contestants, based on whom she likes the most, assisted by advice she will receive from viewers by SMS during the show (it is supposed to screen this coming Friday). It just shows how out of touch I am with popular “culture” that I only heard about this on BBC World Service radio while driving to work yesterday. Even though I live in the Netherlands, speak Dutch and do watch the local news and look at the local newspapers, somehow this story had escaped me. I have never seen an episode of Big Brother. I could not recognise Paris Hilton if she walked into my office this morning. And I am proud of that…

I foresee the day when a reality TV show will be used to determine sentences in criminal cases. Much cheaper and faster than all that formal stuff with judges, lawyers and so on. And certainly more entertaining for those who watch such garbage.

I had two pleasant surprises yesterday. The first in the form of an e-mail from Dorthe, a classmate at the primary school I attended in Denmark in the 1970s. She and a few others are organising a 30-year reunion in November! I of course replied immediately that I would attend. I have not seen most of these people since 1977, but I remember them all very well. They represent a happy period in my life, the years of growing up in Denmark (I was between 11 and 15 when I attended that school).

And than later in the evening, I got a mail from another classmate, Lene, who now has has her own company distributing special software for children with learning disabilities. She was always the left-wing intellectual of the class, went on to become a journalist but has been involved in NGO work focused on disabled children most of her career. So she has stayed true to the ideals of her youth, in some way.

I can’t wait for November. It will be so nice to meet all those people again. I realise that 30 years will have taken their toll on all of us and that the recognition of that may not be a cheerful experience, but I am equally sure that November 3rd will be a special day.

The past week saw yet another period of focus on Africa on BBC. The “Have Your Say” programme has been broadcast from various African countries, development experts including Bob Geldoff and Bono have been denouncing the governments of the G8 countries for not keeping the promises to provide additional aid as promised last year, the tragedy in Darfour has continued and so on and on and on…

It is hard to be optimistic about Africa. With the exception of a few bright spots like South Africa and Mali, this is a continent that is governed by despots and corrupt elites. Can anyone tell me why I, as a European taxpayer, should send money to a government like Kenya’s? It surely will not help the poor in Nairobi’s slums; it will end up in some Swiss bank account or it will get spent on new cars for government ministers and other officials.

In addition to the general misery of poverty and corruption, there are the wars, of which at least 3 or 4 are ongoing at any given time somewhere in Africa. Most prominent right now is Darfour, where the government of Sudan is engaged in an exercise of ethnic cleansing that makes what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s look like a garden party. Will the world intervene? Should it? And by the way, where do all those governments and rebels get their weapons? Where does the money come from?

No, foreign aid will not solve any of these problems. I don’t know what will. But I do know that there is not a single example anywhere in the world of any third world country that has become rich (or middle-income) thanks to foreign donors. Lots of countries have made the leap from poor to middle-income or rich in the past few decades, but all of them are in Asia. It is worth remembering that the GDP per capita of a country like Malaysia was equal to that of a typical African country when the British Empire was dismantled about 50 years ago. When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, the famines in the news were in India. Today, white collar workers in Europe and North America are worried about their jobs being outsourced to India’s IT industry.

So what made Asia succeed while Africa has failed? Both continents were colonised by European powers, both became independent at roughly the same time, and both were roughly equally poor at independence. The difference is that in Asia, governments have pursued sensible policies–some more than others, some later than others, but in the end every country that has improved its lot has done so because it implemented sound economic policies, not because it got lots of aid. Until Africa moves in the same direction, foreign aid is just a waste of the rich world’s taxpayers’ money.

Watching BBC news this morning, I hear “Denmark” mentioned and my ears perk up. I know from my daily checking of Danish media that no big event has occurred this week: no riots, no change of government, no high-profile death, no escaped cows on the streets of Copenhagen.

No, this story was about an on-going programme started by the Danish branch of the international writers’ organisation PEN, to provide sanctuary in Denmark for persecuted writers from the many countries where people do not have the freedom of expression we in NW Europe take for granted. The newsclip showed a Chinese writer who would hide in temples in China to escape the authorities, but who now, thanks to PEN and the Danish government, lives in Odense (the town best known for being H.C. Andersen’s birthplace), receives financial support to allow him to continue writing and he has even acquired pretty good Danish.

It is nice and heart-warming to see that the country, having paid an economic price for championing freedom of speech, is not deterred by various unsavoury regimes and protects freedom wherever it is threatened. I am sure Danish business hates this kind of programme–after all, the Chinese dictatorship is probably not particularly pleased with one of its dissidents getting this kind of exposure while living happily in Odense–but, freedom of speech is a more fundamental value than the balance of trade. That was true during the cartoon controversy in 2006 and remains true now.

Yesterday was Labour Day in many European countries, but not here in Calvinist Holland. Our neighbours in Belgium, who know that one works to live and not the other way round, did have the day off, as did the French and assorted other Europeans.

For me, May 1st carries fond memories of my youth in Denmark in the 1970s. I grew up in a Social Democratic home; my grandfather was an activist in the Jewish Socialist party Bund in pre-war Lublin (incidentally, Bund still exists in New York and publishes a newspaper called Forward). My parents always voted for the Danish Social Democrats during the last 3 decades or so of their lives (before coming to Denmark, they lived in Communist Poland where the act of voting was a meaningless ritual, albeit required). And so some time in the mid-1970s, I joined Danmarks Socialdemokratiske Ungdom, DSU, the youth wing of the party. The main job of DSU was to serve as footsoldiers in the then frequent election campaigns: putting up posters on lightpoles, handing out leaflets and that sort of thing. May 1st was always a special day, starting with breakfast at party headquarters at 6 a.m., where we would eat pastries, drink an extremely bitter liquor called Gammel Dansk, and listened to some old union man telling us of the struggles in the 1920s and 1930s, when the foundations of the modern Scandinavian welfare state were laid by men like him and the politicians who represented them. At noon, we would go to a local amusement park, where the traditional May 1st rally was held, complete with the old red banners, the singing of Internationale, and of course speeches.

During my time in the party, several “socialist” ideas were being actively discussed, for example a nutty idea called “economic democracy”, a backdoor attempt to transfer the ownership of the means of production to the working class (or, rather, the unions) by obliging Danish companies to pay a portion of their profits into a central fund which would then invest in shares of those same companies. Viewed in hindsight, this was crazy, and fortunately none of this never came to pass, as is true of many other ideas we were banding about back then.

But I must also say that the Social Democrats and the labour movement in general can take a great deal of credit for creating in Denmark (and the other Scandinavian countries) some of the best functioning and humane societies the world has ever seen. This is truly capitalism with a human face. And while we who are highly educated and live in a globalized world sometimes look with a certain amount of smugness at the “dinosaur” unions who try in vain to protect factory jobs in European or American industries, we should not forget that many of the things we take for granted today–the 8-hour workday, decent working conditions, health and safety in the workplace, paid vacations, maternity leave and so on–are a direct result of the struggles fought by those men and women in the early part of the 20th century. Regardless of what one thinks of today’s Social Democratic parties across Europe, those brave men and women of 70-80 years ago deserve a day of commemoration, and May 1st is such a day.