Lavengro in Spain

Europe’s 9/11

This is one of my favourite photographs (click to enlarge). It is a very ordinary snapshot of tourists at a major European tourist attraction. Why do I like it? Because I remember the days when …

… the Brandenburg Gate looked like this, till the Wall came down on 9 November 1989.

The Gate was in the East with the main boulevard of Unter den Linden behind it. It could be seen from the West, behind the Wall, but it was not easy to get to it.

I first went to Berlin in 1966 as part of a school trip to Germany, which I repeated in 1968. I took this panoramic photo of Potsdamer Platz from an observation platform in the West overlooking the Wall

Now the Wall has come down, and its course through the city, following municipal district boundaries, is almost lost and unknown except on old maps. Potsdamer Platz now contains the Holocaust Memorial, an eerie, close-set collection of concrete slabs, not quite vertical, that instil a powerful sense of uncertainty and oppression in the visitor.

This was a strange area, close to the border where it followed the course of the river Spree for part of its path, deserted by man except for border guards. Now the Reichstag, which was largely disused in 1980 when I took this photo, …

 

… has been rehabilitated as the German Parliament building.

The dedication ‘To the German People’ (just visible in the 1980 photo above) dates from 1916. The bronzesmith who cast the letters was Jewish and was last heard of in a camp in Lithuania.

Nearby is the new Museum of German History – a significant step in Germany's progress to becoming a normal country. And what was the derelict area near the river is now the smart new government area.

Berlin has always been one of my favourite cities. Quite enough tonnes of ink have been used and heaven knows how many megapixels have been illuminated on the subject of German reunification. Let me just say that I grew up in a continent that was divided; I always assumed that I would never see it united and that the USSR would last for ever. The fall of the Wall, followed by the collapse of the USSR, was a stunning event – and not least because it was peaceful. Fortunately, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Snr were up to the challenge. As we now know, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand were not. Kohl is on record as saying that the only ally that stood firmly beside him from the beginning was the Spanish prime minister Felipe González.

Anyone looking for a readable and reliable potted history of Germany from 1899 – 1945, and especially of how the Nazis came to power, could do a lot worse than the novel Winter by Len Deighton, followed by his Bernard Samson series (Hook, Line, Sinker, etc.)

Fort Hood

Robert Salaam, former US Marine, writes in today’s Independent about the killings at Fort Hood:

some non-Muslims still believe that an entire religious community shares responsibility for the actions of one guy that we didn’t even know existed until yesterday.

I daresay that he is right but there are also many non-Muslims, myself included, who would very much like to agree with him that the entire religious community of Muslims should not be held responsible. Unfortunately we are rather deterred from doing so by the stunning silence from the leading Muslim religious authorities in Cairo, Riyadh and Qom, who should be condemning this disgraceful abuse of the holy words Allahu Akbar. What if the perpetrator had been a Christian fundamentalist shouting ‘Long live Christ the King’? The fundamentalist atheists, never slow to be rude about Christianity, would have raised Cain of course; but the outraged statements originating from Rome, Canterbury and Jerusalem can easily be predicted, as can the condemnation by leading lay Christians.

No-one doubts that many, very many, individual Muslims are appalled by what has happened. But their religion is involved willy-nilly by the words that were used. They may not like it, they may say that the man is not a typical Muslim, but it behoves the Muslim authorities to distance themselves from this act. And they have not done so. Silence, it is said, gives consent – especially when compared with the Muslim violence that was unleashed by the perceived insult to Islam caused by the Danish cartoons – and with no clear condemnation from the top it will be ever harder for decent Muslims to distance themselves from such guilt by association.

Air passenger duty

Every passenger departing from a British airport has to pay a tax called air passenger duty. It was introduced with the justification that air transport is bad for the environment and therefore (sic) had to be taxed. It has now gone up to £11 for a flight to Europe and will go up to £12 next year; premium tickets on long-haul flights will pay as much as £170. Despite this cosmetic attempt to make it progressive in terms of distance travelled, it is a very stupid tax.

Air transport is the preferred target of the Green Stalinists*, who like telling other people how to run their lives, and of the Green puritans**, who are appalled at the idea of people doing things that they enjoy. Needless to say, there are also Green Stalinist Puritans.

Darren Johnson, from the Green Party, said it was a good thing if people were discouraged from flying. "We need to be increasing the air passenger duty," he said. "Aviation is simply not paying its way in terms of the environmental damage it causes."

Cheap air travel has had a tremendously positive effect on mobility in Europe, enabling millions of people of all ages to travel to other countries for all sorts of reasons, not only the cliché of stag parties in Riga. Nor are these travellers the stinking rich businesspeople of popular Green mythology, jetting ceaselessly around to further their international conspiracy against the working class. They are mostly perfectly ordinary people travelling on holiday, or to meet friends or lovers, or for study, or yes indeed for professional or business purposes – and why not?

I do not deny that air transport produces greenhouse gases; it is an unarguable fact of basic chemistry that burning kerosene will do so. But the extent to which air transport is responsible for overall climate change, and the extent to which it should be taxed, is another matter. The airline industry, from plane-makers to airlines to airport management, is acutely aware of environmental matters. Modern planes, not to mention the ones that will be used in the future, are not only quieter than the older ones but they produce less greenhouse gas. As it happens, I live in a city, I work at home, I rarely travel outside the city, and when I do I use public transport as I do not own a car (or even a driving licence). When I am sternly lectured about how my occasional flights are damaging the planet, I find it rather irksome.

If air travel is to be taxed, and if everything else is there seems to be no reason to exempt it, please can we have a little common sense in the debate? The idea of taxing airline fuel is barmy and has rightly been resisted. There is one very basic fact about aeroplanes: they can move around very easily and very quickly. If the UK were to tax fuel, airlines would simply refuel their planes in airports in other countries. What should be done – and easyJet support this option – is that instead of crudely taxing passengers, the airlines should be taxed on each flight that they make, with variations in the tax for the age of the plane and the passenger load. With computer records that are kept nowadays it should be quite easy to say that a flight from Barcelona to Liverpool in a certain make of plane, of a certain age, with say a 93% passenger load, will use X tonnes of fuel. It might even be possible to include in the calculation the actual flight path distance (though a nominal one could easily be assigned for each route) or even the actual quantity of fuel used on each flight. This system would place the tax in the airline’s overall accounting system, thus getting away from the very obvious fact that the UK-origin leg of a return flight costs a lot more than the flight to the UK does (bad for the country’s image) and it would encourage airlines to be fuel efficient in their choice of aircraft and in their efforts to fill their planes. easyJet supports this because it uses new planes and manages to fill them almost to capacity on every flight. It is the less efficient airlines that oppose such a tax.

 

*It is not often realised that Stalinism is a Great British Invention, having been invented by one O. Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century.

** “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” Thomas Macaulay

Stop Blair

A petition is being organised to stop Tony Blair from becoming President of the European Union. More information on European Tribune. The English text is as follows:

Petition against the nomination of Tony Blair as "President of the European Union"

We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.

The Treaty of Lisbon provides for the new post of President of the European Council, to be elected by the Council for a mandate, renewable once only, of two and a half years. Under the terms of the Treaty: "The President of the European Council shall chair it and drive forward its work" and "shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council". Further, "The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy"¹.

The future President of the European Council will therefore have a key role in determining the policies of the European Union and its relations with the rest of the world. This first Council Presidency will also have a major symbolic weight for both citizens of the European Union and for the image of the Union in the rest of the world. In this perspective, we believe it is essential that the first president embodies the spirit and values of the European project.

For some time now, increasingly insistent news reports have made evident a wish, in some quarters, to see Tony Blair appointed the first President of the European Council. This appointment, were it to take place, would be in total contradiction with the values professed by the European project.

In violation of international law, Tony Blair committed his country to a war in Iraq that a large majority of European citizens opposed. This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and displaced millions of refugees. It has been a major factor in today's profound destabilisation of the Middle East, and has weakened world security. In order to lead his country into war, Mr Blair made systematic use of fabricated evidence and the manipulation of information. His role in the Iraq war would weigh heavily on the image of the Union in the world, should he in fact be named its president.

The steps taken by Tony Blair's government, and his complicity with the Bush administration in the illegal programme of "extraordinary renditions", have led to an unprecedented decline in civil liberties. This is in contradiction with the terms of the European Convention of Human Rights, which is an integral part of the treaty.

The European Charter of Fundamental Rights formalises the founding values of the European project and is one of the pillars of the new treaty. Tony Blair fought its inclusion in the Treaty of Lisbon, and eventually managed to secure an exemption for the UK.

Rather than move European integration forward, the former British Prime Minister set a series of so-called red lines during the Lisbon negotiations², with the intent of blocking any progress in social issues and tax harmonisation, as well as common defence and foreign policy.

Furthermore, it seems unthinkable that the first President of the European Council should be the former head of a government that kept its country out of two key elements of the construction of Europe: the Schengen area of free movement of people and the Euro zone.

At a time when one of the priorities of the European institutions is to reconnect with its citizens, we believe it is essential that the President of the European Council should be a person with whom a majority of citizens can identify, rather than one rejected by a majority³. Therefore, we declare our total opposition to this nomination.

1. Treaty of Lisbon, Article 1, point 16, inserting Article 9 B into the Treaty on European Union, points 5 and 6 (2007/C 306/17, 18) ↑
2. Blair sets out EU treaty demands, BBC, June 2007 ↑
3. Table 6 in FT/Harris poll, June 2007 ↑

Go here to sign the petition (No need to be an EU citizen)

The BNP the army, and civil order

The BNP is a legal organisation As such in a constitutional state it enjoys the rights and obligations of any legal organisation. It has, among others, the right to have its data base of members subject to the same data protection laws as anyone else. It also has the obligation to take effective precautions to maintain the confidentiality of its data.

If, as some people say, the organisational and political structure of the BNP contravenes the law, then that is a matter for the courts to decide. The sight of a hot-headed Labour politician telling the BBC how to deal with a party that he thinks is illegal is not an edifying sight for those of us who believe in the rule of law and the separation of powers. It does not offer an image of constitutional order as a defence against the barbarians.

Then there’s the military. I have said consistently since spring of 2003 that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, there being no second Resolution of the UN Security Council to legitimise it. But Griffin says that:

at the Nuremberg trials, Nazi political and military leaders were charged with "waging aggressive war". He added: "Sir Richard and Sir Mike fall squarely into this bracket and they must not think that they will escape culpability for pursuing the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

One may well comment (fruitlessly in view of much entrenched British opinion) that the war in Afghanistan is indisputably legal. But apart from that one has to accept that he has a point. And what is happening is that the wind that was sown in 2003 by the British State (Prop., The Labour Party; Office boys, The Conservative Party) looks as if it could turn into a full-scale whirlwind. It is hitting the generals. Fairly? Well, they acted under orders – but they knew that the political situation was dodgy. Goldsmith had to provide a second, more robust, justification before the army chief of the time would accept his orders.

Is this latest leak of the BNP’s data base genuine? We can wait and see whether people who have been ‘taken out of the phone book’ will object to being associated with it, or whether some names and addresses are shown to be simply bogus. What is quite certain, however, is that the genius responsible for this latest leak is a first-class graduate of the Marinus van der Lubbe school of political action. Cui bono? The BNP of course, however it turns out, and no-one else.

And the army. Are “young squaddies” now voting for the BNP? Who can know? The army chiefs say that they abhor the BNP, and I have no reason to doubt them. The generals’ reaction seems genuine and honest, but how closely are they in touch with the squaddies’ voting patterns? And have those same squaddies not been inflamed by comments from those very generals to believe that the State is not supporting them properly in terms of housing and equipment? And if squaddies are inflamed against the State, is it so odd that they might support an anti-State party?

When the armed forces are controversial because of what they can and cannot do for the State within the limits of their equipment and professional ability, that is one thing. But when controversy arises because of what the State demands of them politically, that is another. A feeling, widely stated and believed among the British public but ignored by the Government, that what they are doing in Iraq is illegal, would be enough to sap the morale of any army. Between them, and from quite different standpoints, the BNP and the army seem to be making a right muck-up of things.

Will there be a coup in London? No of course not. It doesn’t work that way. This is the UK, not Spain. Who needs tanks on the streets when stern looks and strongly-worded telegrams will suffice in the corridors of power? In the Curragh mutiny in 1914 the army spoke and the Liberal government gave way. Six months later the country was at war and Ireland was kept on ice. In 1965 the army and RAF made very sure that they weren’t told to do anything about Ian Smith (the navy, admittedly, did pretend to blockade Beira – knowing full well that Rhodesia was getting its oil overland from South Africa). But now what? This time there is unrest in the ranks not refusal among the officers, who are with the State this time. The generals speak out for tolerance and for opposition to political interference in the military. That is all well and good – but the question is this: Just what is it that is going on in the army that makes it so necessary for them to speak out so clearly?

Tube worker suspended over rant

Sometimes people find it hard to understand that I prefer living in Spain to Britain. Then this sort of thing comes along to help me out:

A [London] Tube worker has been suspended after footage of him yelling at an elderly passenger and calling him a "jumped up little git" emerged.

The images, captured by another passenger, show the man in conversation with a London Underground steward.

The worker then calls him a "jumped up little git" and a "little girl" before apparently threatening to "sling him under the train".

When I had a problem last month on the Paris metro, I was dealt with courteously and efficiently by the platform staff.

Birthday cake banned

Sometimes people find it hard to understand that I prefer living in Spain to Britain. Then this sort of thing comes along to help me out:

Birthday girl Olivia Morris excitedly set off for school with a tasty chocolate cake, topped with nine pink candles, to share with her classmates.
But her pals never got to taste so much as a crumb after school staff told heartbroken Olivia, aged nine, to take her cake home again–because it fell foul of healthy eating rules.

Obama wins peace prize

Forges, El País

Becoming a superstate

The Language Log has a post from Mark Liberman discussing whether the name the United States is singular or plural; to be precise, when did it change from the United States are to the United States is?

The language element may not be of general interest but this quote has a wide implication just now (my emphasis):

“

… G H Emerson, "The Making of a Nation", The Universalist Quarterly and General Review, January 1891:

For about a decade the states, under the technical name, "The United States of America," were a Confederacy; but when the Constitution was adopted the United States was. "They" gave place to "it." And as Mr. Fiske in his latest book, "Civil Government in the United States," has noted, the change from the plural to the singular was vital, though it has taken a War of Rebellion to make the difference unmistakable.

And Fiske in turn expressed the thought this way, in his 1891 work Civil Government in the United States Considered with some Reference to its Origins:

From 1776 to 1789 the United States were a confederation; after 1789 it was a federal nation. The passage from plural to singular was accomplished, although it took some people a good while to realize the fact.

”

In other words, after a time as a confederation of almost independent states the USA adopted a constitution and became, err, a single federal superstate! And it doesn’t seem to have done it any harm. The states, even the original ones, still maintain their strong identities (I have just read Stephen Fry on America, as if I didn't know) and use the word ‘sovereign’, though admittedly in a sense that is unique to the USA. In other words they have incorporated their total independence into a federation – and a federation that has a particularly powerful sense of identity – while not being homogenised in it.

Now, what about Europe?

The Conservatives and Lisbon

Ireland has voted Yes in its referendum. The Polish President will sign it in a few days – he said that he was waiting for the Irish vote. What will David Cameron do now? Will he accept that Lisbon will come into effect or will he and his Czech friends now start stockpiling semtex and Kalashnikovs?

I am not joking or exaggerating. This is the party that smuggled German rifles to Ulster in 1912 to provide armed support for treason*, and that lent its support to treason again in Rhodesia in 1965. And the Labour government of the time acted with the firmness and backbone of a jellyfish, be it remembered.

 

Europe beware!

*Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Sir John Harrington