Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2011

Is Julian Assange a modern Senator Joe McCarthy?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Jim Goad asks if the actions of WikiLeaks are the modern-day equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade:

Upon superficial inspection, still-living superstar hacker Julian Assange and long-dead commie-stalker Joseph McCarthy seem like natural-born enemies and political polar opposites. Technically, the Arctic and Antarctica are polar opposites, too, but are they really that different?

Comparing anyone to infamous anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy, as he is popularly understood in pop culture, is to accuse them of being a torch-carrying megalomaniac with a sociopathic disregard for the damage wrought by their ruthless, Spanish Inquisition-style paranoid purges, persecutions, pogroms, and perennial pickin’ on people. “McCarthyism” is considered a smear because we all must admit it was a shameful moment in American history when some upstart cheesehead Senator dared to suggest the American government was being infiltrated with communist sympathizers. Blot from your minds forever the fact that certain Soviet “cables” decrypted after McCarthy’s death seem to have at least partially vindicated him, and let us never teach in our public schools that communist governments murdered at least a hundred million human beings.

H/T to Ilkka for the link.

January 25, 2011

Russian army still suffering from Soviet hangover

Filed under: History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:47

Strategy Page reports on the troubles the Russian army is still experiencing twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union:

Russian efforts to reform and upgrade its armed forces have, so far, failed. The basic problem is that few Russian men are willing to join, even at good pay rates. Efforts to recruit women and foreigners have not made up for this. The Russian military has an image problem that just won’t go away. This resulted in the period of service for conscripts being lowered to one year (from two) in 2008. That was partly to placate the growing number of parents who were encouraging, and assisting, their kids in avoiding military service.

But there are other problems. The latest crop of draftees are those born after the Soviet Union dissolved. That was when the birth rate went south. Not so much because the Soviet Union was gone, but more because of the economic collapse (caused by decades of communist misrule) that precipitated the collapse of the communist government. The number of available draftees went from 1.5 million a year in the early 1990s, to 800,000 today. Less than half those potential conscripts are showing up, and many have criminal records (or tendencies) that help sustain the abuse of new recruits that has made military service so unsavory. With conscripts in for only a year, rather than two, the military is forced to take a lot of marginal (sickly, overweight, bad attitudes, drug users) recruits in order to keep the military and Ministry of Interior units up to strength. But this means that even elite airborne and commando units are using a lot of conscripts. Most of these young guys take a year to master the skills needed to be useful, and then they are discharged. Few choose to remain in uniform and become a career soldiers. That’s primarily because the Russian armed forces is seen as a crippled institution, and one not likely to get better any time soon. With so many of the troops now one year conscripts, an increasing number of the best officers and NCOs get tired of coping with all the alcoholics, drug users and petty criminals that are taken in just to make quotas. With the exodus of the best leaders, and growing number of ill-trained and unreliable conscripts, the Russian military is more of a mirage than an effective combat (or even police) organization.

December 14, 2010

Christopher Hitchens on the real Henry Kissinger

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I must admit that I never understood the adulation Henry Kissinger has attracted. I started paying attention to politics in the early 1970s, and Kissinger was one of the main players on the world political stage at that point. His connection to the deeply repugnant Richard Nixon should have been enough to keep him out of the limelight after his boss was forced out of the presidency. Yet he somehow managed not only to stay in the public eye, but to increase his popularity.

Christopher Hitchens thinks that the latest revelations from that era will finally bring Kissinger the odium he so richly deserves:

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last.

Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

(One has to love that uneasy afterthought….)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger — normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing — going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

December 1, 2010

Five Books interview with P.J. O’Rourke

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

P.J. O’Rourke is asked to talk about five books from the field of political satire:

P J O’Rourke talks Swift, Huxley, Orwell and Waugh and says we now live in the world of 1984 but, instead of being a horror show, a television that looks back at you is just a pain in the ass. It’s 1984-Lite. Sad in one way, but a relief in another.

The category of political satire books is simply closed. The top five are so good that in order to make any surprising choices one has to go a long way down to the next level.

[. . .]

I’ll be careful. Animal Farm and 1984.

Yes. One is comic satire and the other is tragicomic satire.

Let’s start with the comic.

Well, Animal Farm sticks in everybody’s mind. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Again, something read twice. I read it for the first time when I was 14 or 15 and it was a funny story about badly behaved animals and then I read it again at college and someone pointed out to me that this was sharp social satire. I thought it was an animal story, a kids’ book, but when I took another look at it I realised what he was getting at. The Soviet leadership was pretty well represented there. But one of the things that’s interesting to me about both Animal Farm and 1984 is that they are warnings against collectivism from a man of the left. Sure, any old Tory or Republican might be likely to make this point, though not so well, perhaps, nor so amusingly, but the fact that it comes from a man of the left is interesting. It seems to me to be something Orwell never fully came to grips with. Maybe if he’d lived longer…

What do you mean?

The necessity for collectivism under his leftist ideals and yet the danger of collectivism no matter who it’s done by seems like something he really wrestled with. I think we all buy the necessity for collectivism in a way.

[. . .]

Have you actually been to Sweden? I’ve never been, but I find myself constantly holding it up as the pinnacle of socialist marvellousness. It could be a complete shit-hole for all I know.

I have been and you know what it is? It’s very foreign. It’s full of Swedes. I mean, there are a few immigrants, and it has more now than it did 15 years ago when I was there, but Swedes are really Swedish. They are just remarkably alike. So, when you have a country of only eight and a half million people and they’re very like each other and you take 80 per cent of their income away and redistribute it through political means and they go: ‘Ya, ya, dat’s vot I vonted! Abba records! Herring and a PhD!’ And it’s all okey-dokey. But if you take a country as diverse as the United States and you take everything away from everybody and redistribute it — oh my God, there’d be hell to pay! I mean, some people would want guns, and some people… I wouldn’t even want to ask what some people would want.

[. . .]

1984.

That’s satire more in the Roman mode. The usual definition of satire is humour used to a moral end for a moral purpose, and there’s certainly a moral purpose to 1984 but it’s not funny really. I mean there is a certain dark humour to rewriting history and things going down a memory hole.

It’s funny in the Russian sense of the word.

I like that. Believe me, I’ll steal that phrase.

I’ll see you in court.

It’s sort of like being popular in Japan.

October 27, 2010

The AK-47, the Soviet Union’s most successful export

Filed under: History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this article about the Avtomat Kalashnikov 47:

In his new book, The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War, out Oct. 12, New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers traces the origins of modern assault rifles — particularly Avtomat Kalashnikov 47, or the AK-47 — and analyzes how they’ve changed warfare. Popular Mechanics spoke to the author about how and why the AK-47 was developed and why it has had even more of an impact than nuclear weapons.

[. . .]

Q During the course of your research, did you get to meet or talk to Mikhail Kalashnikov?

A I met General Kalashnikov several times. He was a fascinating man and a very complicated figure — a master of navigating the Soviet system and its aftermath. He is often portrayed as a poor and simple peasant who, through sheer inventive genius, designed the world’s most successful automatic arm. But this is an almost absurd distillation, the carefully spun fable of Soviet propaganda mills. He’s actually something much richer: a small part of an enormous machine and a most useful and interesting lens with which to look at decades of often dreary and sometimes terrifying Soviet life. He’s also charming, beguiling, clever, funny and both intensely proud and publicly humble at the same time. The legends around him are insufficient at best and grossly inaccurate at worst. He’s quite a man and a challenging character to render.

Q Why is so much about the development of the AK-47 still shrouded in secrecy?

A After the weapon was fielded, the Soviet Union invested heavily in an official version of its creation. This was not long after the purges, when many prominent Soviet citizens and public figures had been liquidated. A new crop of heroes was being put forward by the Kremlin and the Communist Party. Mikhail Kalashnikov fit this movement perfectly — he was, by the official telling, the quintessential proletariat success story, a wounded vet with limited education and almost no training who conceived of this weapon and relentlessly conjured it into existence. The truth was more complicated. But this party-approved version was endlessly repeated in official channels, and one result of the propaganda was that many other participants in the weapon’s design were sidelined and kept silent. One important figure was even arrested, charged with anti-revolutionary activity and sentenced to hard labor. After the Soviet Union collapsed, some of these other men and their accounts began to circulate. But the archives have never fully been opened, and the myths have hardened into something that can feel like fact. We do know much more than we used to, but the full story, in crisp detail, remains elusive, and the Communist version still stands in many circles. Propaganda is a pernicious thing, and the Kalashnikov tale is an example of just how effective it can be.

August 26, 2010

WWII German spy success in Norway

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Newly released MI5 information shows that the allied defeat in Norway in 1940 may have been caused by a German espionage triumph:

[Marina] Lee is said to have infiltrated the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Forces in Norway and obtained information about the plan drawn up by British commander Gen Auchinleck.

German commander, Gen Eduard Dietl, who was holding the Norwegian port of Narvik, was reportedly considering a withdrawal, but the disclosure of these details meant his forces could block the Auchinleck plan.

British, French and Norwegian troops were later forced to withdraw from German-controlled Norway.

Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Lee was married to a Norwegian communist and had trained as a ballerina before becoming “a highly valued and experienced German agent”, according to the files.

She is described as “blonde, tall, with a beautiful figure, refined and languid in manner” and reportedly spoke five languages.

One account says she personally knew Stalin — leading to conjectures she was working for both Berlin and Moscow who, at that time, were on the same side, our reporter says.

August 10, 2010

QotD: The Finnish intelligentsia

Filed under: Education, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

I added a whole bunch of Finnish blogs to my Google Reader list that now stands at a hefty 421 subscriptions. Recalling the news back in the end of the year 2008, the Finnish intelligentsia was ecstatic for . . . well, you know why, but as Hannu Visti points out, they have recently been mysteriously quiet about their high hopes of how America will any day now abandon the free market capitalism and turn into a European-style social democratic welfare state. Now, we wingnuts sure like to laugh at the intelligentsia, but the Finnish intelligentsia has always truly been a class of its own, since as Hannu notes, they have been utterly wrong about literally everything over the past fifty years. Whereas their American colleagues merely hinted at the superiority of socialism and communism and took their marching orders and talking points from them only indirectly, the Finnish intelligentsia was proudly a stooge for the Soviet Union, worshipping its raw and brutal power that had no respect for all those pesky individual rights holding back the better world. And since they never really had any ideas of their own, these days this puppet just switched onto a new master that has his hand deep up its ass to move its grimacing mouth . . . or I don’t know if I should rather say two masters, both incidentally wearing the same colour green.

Ilkka, “Dead souls”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2010-07-23

August 9, 2010

I’ll have to remember to use this in future

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:50

As reported by Chris Taylor, Paul Jané coined exactly the right moniker to hang around Air Canada’s scrawny corporate neck:

Mapleflot

(more…)

August 7, 2010

QotD: De Gaulle

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, France, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

De Gaulle was great because he knew how to act the part. Actually doing great things was someone’s else problem. The heavy lifting of the Second World War was done by the Russian foot soldier and the English speaking powers. Objectively, Canada did more to defeat Hitler than France. Being a nation of citizen soldiers, who desperately wanted to get home, we did our bit and went home. This allowed a prima donna like De Gaulle to take the credit for liberating France. In gratitude, the Liberator then travelled to Montreal, some twenty years later, and thanked Canada by trying to destroy it.

Publius, “The Saviour of the Nation”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-08-04

August 6, 2010

QotD: Nuclear weapons

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:05

Sixty-five years ago today: “On Monday, August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged.” – Hiroshima

“Little Boy,” the aptly named 16 kiloton bomb that took out Hiroshima, was — in comparison to the nuclear devices in the world’s arsenals — sort of a light field artillery shell. There was, at the time, a second bomb called “Fat Man.” Weighing in at 21 kilotons it would put paid to Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. With the erasure of Nagasaki, the world was fresh out of nuclear weapons. It was only a temporary lapse. Today we’ve got about 25,000 of these little items of discipline scattered about.

The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated in the atmosphere was The Soviet Tsar Bomba , or “Big Ivan” which at 50 Megatons was very harmful to every living think on Novaya Zemlya Island (located above the arctic circle in the Arctic Sea) in October of 1971. Whatever else you might think about them, you can’t deny those Soviets dreamed BIG dreams.

Gerard Vanderleun, “Nukes: Time for a Live Demo”, American Digest, 2010-07-06

January 26, 2010

“Involvement in counter-espionage cases induces in some a form of paranoia”

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:19

Gordon Corera briefly looks at the KGB penetration of Britain’s intelligence agencies:

For 30 years Stephen De Mowbray has maintained a self-imposed silence on a career that once took him to the heart of one of British intelligence’s most controversial episodes.

In 1979 he quit his job with the Secret Service (MI5) because he believed officials had failed to take seriously the claim that British intelligence had been further penetrated by its enemy — the Soviet Union’s KGB.

A number of spies had been discovered in the 1960s but De Mowbray believed there were more. But he found no-one at the top willing to listen.

“People thought I was either mad or bad because I was trying to do something,” he says of that time.

Three decades later, De Mowbray decided to tell his side of the story after reading the authorised history of the Security Service, published last October.

I’m currently reading Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and just got to the start of the relevant section the other night. Between De Mowbray’s concerns and the careful concealment of “The Laundry”1 in the coverage so far, it’s a wonder they managed to find enough that was considered safe to release to the public.

If you’re interested, MI5 discusses their policies on information disclosure here.

1 I kid, I kid. “The Laundry” is the fictional department of British intelligence in The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.

January 8, 2010

Great satire . . . at least, I’m assuming it’s satire

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

In the comments to this post at the Library of Economics and Liberty site:

I think American econ textbooks were pro-Soviet for the simple reason that the Soviet system was indisputably superior to the unforgiving ‘free market’ American system.

Make whatever claims about ‘economic growth’ or ‘relative poverty’ or ‘lack of freedom’ you want but the Soviet Union created a large-scale, modern nation state dedicated to providing everyone with a solid, equitable lifestyle. Everyone had access to food, clothing, shelter, health-care, education, meaningful work and other necessities of life. It was guaranteed right there in their constitution. That is still not the case in the US, though with the recent passage of the landmark Health Care Reform bills we have at least made the first tentative steps towards correcting one of those desperate problems.

The thing that economists need to realize is that life is not all about economics & money. Having a satisfying life planned for you with no uncertainty and no crucial needs left unfulfilled is necessary too. The Soviet Union went a good a way towards providing that.

Someday we will realize what a loss it was when the vile, venal capitalists of the West arranged its downfall. After all, no amount of material wealth provided in the willy-nilly, dog-eat-dog, all-against-all ‘free market’ will ever be able to match the simple pleasures of a life dedicated to the betterment of the community, guided by the best & brightest from their commanding perch in the government.

That was commenter “blighter” either doing a pitch-perfect parody or showing that the textbook wars were won by Soviet intelligence services.

December 16, 2009

QotD: The importance of markets

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

America debated three strategies during the Cold War. The Right wanted “roll back” — dreams of Patton driving his tank into Red Square. The Left wanted détente — which is French for “surrender.” The country loosely followed containment, a program outlined by George Kennan in 1946, which argued that the political contradictions of the Soviet state would eventually cause its own demise. America had but to be patient.

Kennan may have been the first to realize that a society based on Communism would not survive politically, but it was Ludwig von Mises, in his 1922 work Socialism, who demonstrated that any such society could not survive economically.

When a collection of free individuals — the market — is willing to pay a price for a product that creates “excess” profits, it signals producers to provide more of that product. If the market does not support a given price, producers are forced to redeploy their assets for more pressing social needs. Similarly, if a factor of production, such as labor or capital, changes in price, producers instantly react, sending signals — through the prices of intermediate goods — down to the consumer. Prices effortlessly allocate society’s assets to reflect consumer preference and adjust to accommodate the ever-changing availability of scarce resources.

Mises argued that governmental interference in prices, through taxation, subsidies, and regulation, complicates this process — affecting not only the consumption of final goods, but also the economic calculations that are necessary to provide intermediate goods and services. Higher-order division of labor fails. Poverty results. For example, while Chinese and Russian central planners were busy setting quotas for steel mills, there was no method for consumers to signal that they preferred food — and millions starved to death.

Dan Oliver Jr., “Socialism in Stages: Even soft, incremental expansions of government produce poverty”, National Review, 2009-12-15

December 10, 2009

Russia does it again, to NATO’s benefit

Filed under: Military, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Sometimes, the Russian approach to diplomacy results in exactly the opposite to the intended outcome:

In the 1990s, when enlarging NATO to take in the ex-communist countries still seemed perilous and impractical, help came from an unexpected source. Yevgeny Primakov, a steely old Soviet spook who became first head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, then foreign minister and even, briefly, prime minister, liked to say that it would be “impermissible” for the alliance to admit ex-communist states.

His remarks, and others in similar vein by leading Russian politicians, proved counterproductive. The more the Kremlin huffed and puffed about ex-captive nations deciding their own future, the harder it became to dismiss those countries’ fears: if your neighbour terms it “impermissible” for you to install a burglar alarm, people will start taking your security worries seriously. Some wags even suggested that a “Primakov prize” be established to mark the boost he had given to the cause.

But the lesson apparently was not learned:

Instead, Russia is adopting the opposite course. It habitually violates Baltic airspace. It maintains a vocal propaganda offensive (such as a report being launched in Brussels this week by a Russian-backed think-tank, which criticises Baltic language and citizenship laws). This autumn, it scandalised NATO opinion by running two big military exercises, without foreign observers, based on highly threatening scenarios (culminating in a Strategic Rocket Forces drill in which Russia “nuked” Poland). The exercises demonstrated weakness and incompetence, as well as force of numbers and nasty thinking. But they made life hard for peacemongers and strengthened the arguments of NATO hawks and the twitchy eastern Europeans.

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