Airstrip One

German Lessons

Germany is going to contribute towards the rebuilding of Iraq by training their military. Will this be pre war methods (invade thy neighbour) or the post war method (raise a big army but never fight)?

Oh the irony. De-Baathification means that the Yanks are so desperate they'll even let the Krauts train the new look Iraqi army. Are the de-Baathificationists (to coin a phrase) contrite, or even slightly shamefaced?

If only they'd have listened to us...

Quelle Surprise

The French Socialists vote to back European Constitution. Now this doesn't mean that the French won't be obstinate, but it does cut down their chances of getting to the right result. There's been a mood among British Eurosceptics that the Constitution will never come to a vote here, but we must not count on it.

Ourselves Alone.

Beware of the Enemy's Enemy

About four times out of five my enemy's enemy usually is my friend in just about any political or strategic tussle. However this general principle should not be taken to be a universal law. The Ukraine imbroglio shows this starkly in two ways.

Firstly there is the case of what America is doing. There is a pro-European Union candidate who favours withdrawing his country's troops from Iraq in short order. Not only is his favourable attitude to Europe not a hindrance for American support (before and after the election) but it is actually more important to America than his attitude on Iraq. (By the way Tories - do you notice how popular withdrawal can be as an election issue - even if you initially supported the war). It should be clear as daylight that supporting America will not automatically loose us from Europe.

The other side are my own side. Yuschenko may not be the angel that the press portray him, however this does not make the other guy squeaky clean. They are both crooks. Yes Western Ukraine stuffed ballot boxes, but so did the Easterners. Yes Nazis like Yuschenko, but Stalinists like Yanukovich. Yes David Aaronovitch is a fool who substitutes Google for actually researching a story, but that doesn't mean that we should jump in to defend Yanukovich. They are both crooks, they are both East Europeans, they are both politicians.

We should not be looking to foreigners to get us out of sticky entanglements. We must rely on Ourselves Alone.

In need of heroes

There's a bit of a bitch fight going on between (at the moment) John Laughland and David Aaronovitch and Justin Raimondo has joined in. While I am not too enamoured of John Laughland's urge to counterbalance the undoubted bias towards Yushchenko and other pro-Westerners by overlooking some of the warts of the pro-Moscow Yanukovich, it is fairly clear that Aaronovitch's journalism-lite is out of order. It seems that both Aaronovitch and Laughland have both got caught in the trap of hero worship - just different heroes. At least John Laughland gets marks for originality (and balance).

On another point - although clearly a large majority of Yushchenko's people are not neo-Nazis is Aaronovitch seriously claiming that there are no neo-Nazis around the anti-Russian elements of Ukraine. As anyone who has followed politics in that part of the world knows (a la Croatia or Slovakia) the pro-Nazis do tend to gravitate towards whoever is anti-Russia. That doesn't make the anti-Russian parties wrong, the attention is probably unwelcome, it just is a fact of life around there.

I suppose it all goes to show that there are no such things as heroes when foreign politicians are involved.

No surprise that Aaronovitch finds the very idea of an "opposition" candidate cheating - even with a large number of local authorities supporting him - to be scandalous. It all reminds me of the American Republicans who will go on endlessly about how Nixon was cheated in 1960 by the graveyard vote in Chicago while being scandalised by suggestion of Republican no-goodniks operating in Southern Illinois. Or for that matter Democrats who go on about hanging chads while ignoring the extraordinary turnouts and voter registration drives in Philadelphia.

I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had
contact with any institution under State control; not in school, not in
college, nor yet in my three years of irregular graduate study. No
attempt was ever made by anyone to indoctrinate me with State-inspired
views – or any views, for that matter – of patriotism or nationalism. I
was never dragooned into flag-worship or hero-worship, never was caught
in any spate of verbiage about duty to one's country, never debauched by
any of the routine devices hatched by scoundrels for inducing a
synthetic devotion to one's native land and loyalty to its jobholders.
Therefore when later the various aspects of contemporary patriotism and
nationalism appeared before me, my mind was wholly unprepossessed, and
my view of them was unaffected by any emotional distortion.

What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from
others spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one was born? But
birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having
been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of
corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of
political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his
bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Fuhrer, a camorra of
commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are
like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my
loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they
could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its
institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But
if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the
standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than
names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same
for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is
regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if
it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the
people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of
the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should
be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance
that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit
may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.

So when people speak of loyalty to one's country, one must ask them
what they mean by that. What is one's country? Mr. Jefferson said
contemptuously that 'merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand
on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they
draw their gains.' But one may ask, why should I? This motive of
patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it should be sound for
merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in
respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains,
intellectual and aesthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put
it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected.
Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it
remains his country.

Albert Jay Nock, "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man"