Forces News
Published Jul 20, 2024Nicosia International Airport was once a busy hub full of holidaymakers but since the Cyprus conflict of 1974, it has been frozen in time.
Today, the disused airport resembles a ghost town as it sits abandoned in the 180km buffer zone dividing the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied north.
On the 50th anniversary of the conflict, Forces News goes inside the eerie airport and learns how it became the site of a major battle.
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November 26, 2024
The ghost airport of Nicosia: Rare glimpse inside the abandoned 1974 battleground
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November 26, 2022
Britain’s experiment with mass immigration since 2014
Ed West considers the legacy media’s quick dismissal of conservative concerns about rising immigration from poorer European countries in 2014 with the reality only eight years later:
It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be “flooded” by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).
Twitter that day was full of journalists and other public intellectuals laughing about how we were going to be “swamped”. Why would Romanians, after all, want to come here, to this miserable rainy island?
“We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January,” Vaz concluded.
Various publications, with the ill-founded confidence so often found in the journalist trade, soon declared that the Romanian influx was a conservative fantasy.
“Eastern European invasion comes to nothing”, the Independent declared on the day, just a tad prematurely you might say.
A Guardian commentator suggested the year before that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving might actually fall following accession, and that “all the ‘invasion’ predictions … have more in common with astrology than demography.”
[…]As it turned out, in the year to September 2015, 206,000 Romanians and Bulgarians took out a National Insurance number, meaning they were registering to work here. By late 2017, there were 413,000 Romanian and Bulgarians living in Britain, suggesting 90,000 had arrived each year since January 2014, while just 6,200 Britons had made the opposite journey.
By mid-2018, there were more than 400,000 Romanians in Britain, making them one of the largest national minorities in England. The real figure is hard to tell, because the British state has lost the capacity or will to count the number of foreign residents, and it may be higher.
[…]
The scale of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s led to the rise of Ukip, the referendum and the political chaos that followed; what follows now we can’t yet say, but no one has seemed to have learned the lesson: that in the 21s century, because of easier travel, smartphones, smuggling networks and establishment communities in the West, the sheer scale of potential migration is astronomical. Yet people often have a very 20th or even 19th century understanding of how much people are able and willing to move, which makes them vastly underestimate the potential numbers arriving.
The Turkish Cypriots of north London are a case in point, the example Paul Collier used in Exodus to show the huge extent of potential migration between countries with different levels of wealth.
Because of colonial links, North Cyprus had free movement with Britain and so provided a test case: as a result, there are now more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus. In fact, not only did the majority of Turkish Cypriots move, but back in their homeland they become outnumbered by arrivals from a third, even poorer country, mainland Turkey, who are permitted to settle there.
In a theoretical world of open borders, Britons would be outnumbered very quickly; infrastructure would start to buckle under the strain, and governments would find it difficult to increase the necessary number of houses, schools, hospitals and other services for this expanded population, because society would now lack the social capital and cohesion to make the personal sacrifices. People would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.
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September 29, 2022
The History of Cyprus Explained in 10 minutes
Epimetheus
Published 24 May 2022The history of Cyprus explained from ancient times to modern.
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September 19, 2022
City Minutes: Crusader States
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 13 May 2022Crusading is one thing, but holding your new kingdoms is a much trickier business. See how the many Christian states of “Outremer” rolled with the punches to evolve in form and function over multiple centuries.
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September 18, 2021
What if Pearl Harbor Never Happened, Life in Cyprus, and Peasant Armies of China – WW2 – OOTF 024
World War Two
Published 17 Sep 2021Ever wonder what would have happened if Japan just never attacked Pearl Harbor but invaded the Indies anyway? Or how the people of Cyprus are faring in the war? Or if the Chinese armies had any specialized combat forces? Find out in this Out of the Foxholes!
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August 11, 2020
David Warren offers an unusually contrarian view of the Bronze Age collapse
Sea Peoples? Faugh, Mr. Warren isn’t buying any of that old rope. It wasn’t earthquakes, famine, plagues, or even multiple waves of heavily armed undocumented immigrants landing on the shores … it was mere “progress”:
Migrations, invasions and destructions during the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200 BC), based on public domain information from DEMIS Mapserver.
Map by Alexikoua via Wikimedia Commons.
When did the Bronze Age end, and the Iron Age begin? The ages of plastic, silicon, and graphene may have succeeded even the latter, but I’m still not comfortable with iron. Neither were the Cypriots, nor the Egyptians, incidentally — some thirty-something centuries back. Before even that, iron was freely available in a globalized world. I once took a modified fishing boat from Cyprus to Mersin; I wouldn’t encourage swimming it. But the voyage is not far, and too quick with a motor. Even in a row boat, it would have been easy to smuggle ferrous materials, either way.
Yet for centuries, such “highly sophisticated” societies as those of Cyprus and Egypt, stuck with copper and bronze; with gold and silver adornments. The rest of the world might have been with the progressive agenda, but they were not. I speculate that they didn’t like the way iron rusts; there’s something cheap about it. But whatever the objection, they stood their ground. There are old iron objects to be found in both places, but few.
Much later, when the “lifestyle” advocates for the new fashionable metal had won out, and the tide of iron was flooding, it is interesting that the craftsmanship of objects is relaxed. Even ceramics become dull, boring, repetitious; skills are forgotten. We have craftsmen who obviously don’t give a damn any more, just like today. We have the encroaching realm of “productivity,” quantity. Soon these places are easy to knock over, by the conquering savages always lurking about.
We have conservative societies, overwhelmed by technology; and no longer trading on their own terms. In the larger Minoan sphere, we have barbarization. Dynastic Egypt will survive only in Coptic fragments. Greeks, Romans, and finally Arabs will be trashing the place. Ancient civilizations fall.
I regret “progress.” We should resist it heart and soul.
October 5, 2017
Four Reasons Financial Intermediaries Fail
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 26 Jul 2016As we’ve discussed in previous videos, financial intermediaries bridge savers and borrowers. When these bridges crumble, the effects can be disastrous. For businesses, credit shortages can lead to bankruptcy, or layoffs. For individuals, they rely on credit to invest in education or a new home or car. These negative effects show you how crucial intermediaries are to our lives.
Still, what exactly causes failed intermediation? Four answers:
First, insecure property rights. Simply speaking, when you save money at a bank, you expect the ability to pull out your funds when needed. But what if your deposits are frozen? Or confiscated altogether? For instance, in 2013 amidst a financial crisis, the government in Cyprus confiscated bank deposits to help pay down the country’s budget shortfall. You can see how insecure property rights can scare away potential savers.
Second, controls on interest rates. Interest rates are the price of borrowing. Thus, controls on interest rates, often called usury laws, are effectively price ceilings—they set the interest rate lower than the market equilibrium interest rate. With this forced lowering of interest rates, borrowers will want to borrow more, but lenders won’t want to lend. The effect? A lending shortage.
Third, politicized lending. Banks profit by assessing risk, and then loaning, based on that assessment. Banks that excel at assessment succeed. Those poor at it die out. Problems arise when the government intervenes to prop up failing banks, resulting in what we call “zombie banks.” In such cases, intervention undercuts normal competition, and intervention tends to favor banks that are politically connected. In fact, it’s been shown that there’s an inverse correlation between government ownership in banks and a country’s GDP per capita and productivity growth.
Fourth, you have runs, panics, and scandals. Remember, trust is vital to the financial system. When trust erodes, depositors may rush to withdraw their money from banks, causing what is known as a “bank run.” This can cause banks to fail, as we saw during the Great Depression. Scandals can also depress market confidence. Enron, WorldCom and Bernie Madoff may come to mind.
So, which of these four factors contributed to the Great Recession of 2008?
We’ll discuss that in our next video.
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May 28, 2017
Indochina – Cyprus – Puerto Rico I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 27 May 2017
What do Indochina, Cyprus and Puerto Rico have in common? They are all featured in our newest episode of Out of The Trenches where Indy answers all your questions about World War 1.
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October 9, 2015
Cyprus, the Crusades, and Commandaria
Paul Lewandowski on the quite distinctive wine of Cyprus and its place in history:
Cyprus was not just the home of Richard [the Lionheart]’s first victory; it was also the site of his marriage. His fiancé, Berengaria of Navarre, was the daughter of Sancho VI of Navarre. The marriage was a politically beneficial one. Some scholars believe that Richard and Berengaria were actually romantic lovers, since they had met many years prior, and Richard married Berengaria despite his betrothal to the Countess of Vexin. Regardless of the reason for the marriage however, Richard threw a party worthy of a king. Richard, who was unfamiliar with Cyprus, had the local wine variety served at his nuptials. Upon tasting the wine, legend has it the king proclaimed that it was, “The wine of kings and the king of wines.”
Wine in the middle ages was generally awful. The logistical difficulty of preserving wine meant that additives must be used to preserve the wine. This could include marble dust, lye-ash, or pitch. Of course, this made wine awful by today’s standards. To make it slightly palatable, the wine would sometimes be cut with honey, dried fruit, or even salt water. Wine in the middle ages was valuable not only because it could render the drinker intoxicated, but because it was also a source of potable water. Wine only began to improve when it became a commodity, a tradable good that competed with beer and tea. For someone used to a saltwater-and-pitch concoction, an authentic, Cypriot dessert wine must have tasted truly amazing. It comes as little surprise that after the crusader’s time in Cyprus, the island and its wine were deemed valuable.
Richard would go on to sell the island to the Knights Templar not long after departing for the Middle East. In 1192, the Templar Order resold the island to another nobleman. However, the Templars were so smitten with the local wine, they retained a feudal estate where wine could be produced. They named their estate La Grande Commanderie, which roughly translates to “the main command post.” The region soon became known as Commandaria. Wine production increased as the Knights Templar sought to fund their operations through the export of wine. The Templars also provided the wine to pilgrims journeying toward Jerusalem. Soon the wine assumed the name of the region, and Commandaria became famous throughout Europe. Its popularity remained high for centuries, as late as the 1870s, when the region was producing 230,000 liters of wine annually for export to Austria alone.
Commandaria is made from two strains of native Cypriot grapes: Xynisteri, a white grape, and Mavro, a red. Both are dried partially in the sun before fermentation and pressing. This concentrates the sugars, giving the wine its sweet character. Following fermentation, the wine is aged a minimum of two years in oak barrels, but high-end Commandaria is often aged longer. The result is a sweet dessert wine with honey, fruit, and toffee flavors. It is often fortified, but even unfortified Commandaria can exceed 15% alcohol by volume.
Commandaria is the world’s oldest continually cultivated wine. Descriptions of the wine and its unique manufacture appear in accounts as early as 800 BC. Some scholars claim the wine is over 3,000 years old. Its long history makes it the stuff of legend. It is supposedly the winner of the first recorded wine tasting in history, held in France in 1224. The Ottoman Sultan Selim II is said to have invaded Cyprus just to get the wine. Still another legend is that the grapes from Cyprus were exported to Portugal and were used in some of the earliest port wines. Before assuming the name Commandaria, it was known as “Mana” because it was considered a divine gift.
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April 21, 2013
EU banking governance as situational comedy
In the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner pokes a bit of fun at the EU’s self-inflicted media pratfalls over the Cypriot banking “bailout”:
For the last time, I never used the word “template”. Thus said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Eurogroup, at his IMF press conference on Saturday. This is about whether the troika’s disastrous mishandling of the Cypriot bailout should be used as a model for future banking insolvencies in the eurozone. The row shows no sign of abating. OK, so Mr Dijsselbloem never did use the word “template” in originally welcoming the Cypriot defenestration, but that’s what he meant, forcing him quickly to backtrack when it was pointed out to him that his remarks might prompt a run on banks elsewhere in the eurozone.
But hold on a moment. Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, said on Friday that Cyprus did provide a model in terms of bailing in depositors, so who’s right? Well it is sort of a model, Mr Dijsselbloem said at his IMF press conference, in the sense that common principles would in future be applied to banking resolution, but each case would no doubt be different and have its own defining characteristics. All clear now?
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April 1, 2013
Canadian government pre-approves Cyprus-style haircuts for bank depositors
Not only can it happen here, but Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is making it explicit that it will happen here:
The politicians of the western world are coming after your bank accounts. In fact, Cyprus-style “bail-ins” are actually proposed in the new Canadian government budget. When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons.
This new budget actually proposes “to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks” in Canada. “Economic Action Plan 2013″ was submitted on March 21st, which means that this “bail-in regime” was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted. So exactly what in the world is going on here? In addition, as you will see below, it is being reported that the European Parliament will soon be voting on a law which would require that large banks be “bailed in” when they fail. In other words, that new law would make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation the law of the land for the entire EU.
I can’t even begin to describe how serious all of this is. From now on, when major banks fail they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts. This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the western world.
What you are about to see absolutely amazed me when I first saw it. The Canadian government is actually proposing that what just happened in Cyprus should be used as a blueprint for future bank failures up in Canada.
March 31, 2013
The deep strangeness of the Cyprus bank haircuts
At Forbes, Tim Worstall has some thoughts on the oddities now apparent in how the Cyprus banking crisis has played out so far:
Now that we’re seeing the real numbers coming out about who loses what in the Cyprus haircut/bank consolidations there’s something very strange about the numbers. Whiffy even, and that’s not with a good odour to it either. For, as far as I can tell at least, the haircuts are far larger than they need to be in order to make good the damage that we were told about. I’m therefore coming around to the idea that this wasn’t what we’ve been told it was, a story of Russian offshore deposits and tax avoidance. Rather, it’s two banks which invested regular domestic deposits into just terrible opportunities and then lost it all.
I don’t think I can make the case absolutely but I think it’s a case worth at least investigating.
[. . .]
But back to the point I’m trying to work through here. We’ve been told that the immediate cause was all about all that foreign money which flooded the country’s banking system. Yet when we look at the amount that is being raised by the haircuts it doesn’t look as if the two bankrupt banks had all that much of those foreign deposits. It looks very much like the banks which had the deposits didn’t invest badly and thus didn’t go bankrupt. So the problem isn’t therefore one of all that foreign money.
Rather, it’s a problem of where those two banks invested their deposits. And it looks as if this was largely in Greek Government and Cypriot Government bonds. Which is why they are bust.
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March 29, 2013
Cyprus has become the EU’s “lab rat”
In sp!ked, Bruno Waterfield talks about the EU’s most recent involuntary experimental subject, Cyprus:
Every negative European political trend has deepened in the latest round of the Eurozone crisis, as Cyprus has been treated by the EU with a disdain for self-determination worthy of the high age of imperialism. It is this which is really troubling, not the haircuts for depositors or the bank closures. In effect, an entire island nation has been made a laboratory rat for a new Eurozone experiment in rebalancing economies in the EU single currency — whether the Cypriots like it or not.
Cyprus is the perfect fall guy for the EU and IMF experts who, despite the mess in Greece and elsewhere in southern Europe, still believe they know best how to run a nation’s affairs. That’s because, as well as being too small to count, especially for the markets, Cyprus is easily painted as a bad guy, a swarthy, even Levantine crook which launders dirty Russian money (nearly a third of Cypriot bank deposits) for ‘dodgy’ oligarchs. This whiff of corruption (nothing new to Cyprus, or other European banks for that matter) provides the perfect pretext for treating Cyprus as a case apart. This is meant to soothe the fears of senior northern European debt holders — it is corrupt Cyprus, and not failed private risk in general, that has been targeted.
So, because it is small, and in the eyes of the Eurozone social engineers, easily contained, Cyprus has been selected to be an experiment, potentially a model for Portugal or Spain. And if it all goes horribly wrong… well, Cyprus is small and a dodgy special case, so who cares? The EU doesn’t.
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March 25, 2013
The Cyprus “deal” decoded
With a blog post entitled “THE CYPRUS HEIST GOES THROUGH: And it’s an Orwellian masterpiece“, you could say that this is an unfair summary of the situation:
Somewhere, George Orwell is spinning in his grave — although he wouldn’t be even remotely surprised by the 1984-style nonsense being hailed as a compromise by the Troikanauts and Nicosia’s embarrassed leaders.
This is the deal: the levy is
called something elsescrapped, and none of the deposits below €100,000 will bestolenincluded.The new
lunacyidea sees Laiki Bank closed. The entirety of its €4.2bn in deposits over €100,000 will be placed in a “bad bank”: why you would put healthy deposits in a bad bank eludes me, but we’re really just moving the stash around here: the bad bank’s resources will be confiscated. We’re talk a 100% haircut for all these savers.And don’t be fooled by the Berlin propaganda about Russian money-laundering. First up, being a rich Russian doesn’t automatically make you a crook; and secondly, nowhere near all — possibly under half — are Russian anyway: UBS, several Israeli banks, a number of French banks will have depositor’s money taken out of them to pay for the ambitions of Brussels-am-Berlin.
There’s more: all the bondholders in Laiki also take a 100% haircut.
[. . .]
Entirely appropriate however was the choice of Wolfgang Schäuble to face the cameras and ‘explain’ why none of this would need the approval of the Cypriot Parliament. Just “approved by the 17 eurozone finance ministers comparatively quickly, after about two hours of further deliberations”. As to why it needed FinMin approval (but not that of the citizens’ representatives) get a load of this for jargonised bollocks:
“This plan will not require the approval of the Cypriot parliament because the losses on large depositors will be achieved through a restructuring of the island’s two largest banks and not a tax.”
In Cyprus the word you hear most often is ‘betrayal’. There is an acceptance that Cyprus made mistakes but the people feel punished,
— Gavin Hewitt (@BBCGavinHewitt) March 25, 2013
Update: I think Tyler Cowen gets it exactly correct here:
The capital controls will have to be strict. What will the price of a Cypriot euro be, relative to a German euro? 50%? I call this Cyprus leaving the euro but keeping the word “euro” to save face. And yet they fail to reap most of the advantages of leaving the euro, such as having an independent monetary policy.
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March 24, 2013
The domestic economy of Cyprus is slowing to a stop
In the Telegraph, Colin Freeman looks at how the banking crisis is impacting ordinary Cypriots and retired EU citizens in Cyprus:
Last weekend, the small Mediterranean island was plunged into the epicentre of the eurozone crisis when Brussels finance chiefs, led by Germany, demanded a levy of up to ten per cent of savers’ deposits in return for a 10bn euro bail-out of the country’s ailing banks. The move left many of Cyprus’s 60,000-strong British community facing heavy losses on retirement nest eggs — and as the week rolled on, that looked like being just the least of their worries.
On Thursday, unhappy at the Cypriot parliament’s rejection of the deal, Europe’s Central Bank then threatened to cut financial life support for the island altogether, a move that would have led to its banking sector collapsing, and savers losing not just a percentage of their money, but all of it. It was only thanks to a last-minute agreement hammered out on Friday night, which is expected to restructure the country’s banks and restrict the levy to deposits of more than 100,000 euros, that all-out chaos was averted. For now, anyway.
[. . .]
Since last weekend, when all of Cyprus’s banks were shut to stop a run on withdrawals, work has ground to a halt, as the repair man has been unable to buy in the materials he needs from suppliers, who are all now demanding cash. The job symbolises the malaise of the wider Cypriot economy, built on shaky foundations, and now in a state of paralysis, with thousands of shops, businesses and restaurants unable to operate properly because of the financial uncertainty.
“None of my food and drink suppliers are taking bank payments any more,” said Yiota Vrasida, 43, who owns a café in the winding streets of the capital, Nicosia. “We can keep going until this weekend, but that is about it.”
[. . .]
“Nobody will want to leave so much as 10 euros in any Cypriot bank any more,” said Dino Karambalis, 49, an IT worker, standing at the end of a 30-people-long queue at the Laiki Bank, where he had 90,000 euros in savings. “They say this levy is only for Cyprus, but why should anyone believe that? This is undermining confidence in the euro as a whole, and in the whole EU project itself. I was pro-European before, but not now.”
This weekend, the Cypriot parliament sought to reassure smaller savers, saying those with less than 100,000 euros would face at most a levy of less than one percent. State television also talked of a one-time charge of up to 25 percent on savings of over 100,000 euros held at the Bank of Cyprus. With that in mind, capital controls will be imposed to stop a run on the banks when they reopen next week.
But whatever new measures come in, some damage has already been done by declaring savers’ accounts to be fair game in the first place. Britain’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, warned on Friday that it could lead Northern Rock-style runs on banks all over the eurozone in future.
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