Politik 09

I've decided to move my posts on German politics to a dedicated blog, Politik 09. Teuteronomy will return to its good old dormant self.

Game-changer in Hessen?

Sunday's election in Hessen has opened up new possibilities for the main event in September. The result was as followed:

CDU 37.2% (+0.4%)

SPD 23.7% (-13%)

FDP 16.3% (+6.8%)

Greens 13.7% (+6.2%)

Left 5.4% (+0.3%)

The collapse of the SPD was expected; they spent just about the whole of 2008 trying to form a government in Hessen after elections last January and failed, largely because they botched an attempt to work with the cooperation of the Left Party - which is taboo to many (more on that another time).

More striking is the performance of the Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens. Both made huge gains, but the FDP's success is more significant here, both regionally and on the national level.

Regionally, the FDP will now join a government in Hessen in coalition with the CDU. They'll have plenty of bargaining power: the CDU hardly added to its vote at all, so the FDP can justly claim to have won this election for the "black-yellow" coalition.

Nationally, this is important in two ways. First, CDU-FDP governments now control Germany's five most populous states, giving the centre-right a majority in the Bundesrat, the regionally based upper house of parliament. (CDU-SPD - the grand coalition running things in Berlin - no longer has a majority in the Bundesrat.) As a result the FDP leverage over legislation - most pressingly, with regard to the stimulus package just agreed by the government. The FDP says it wants to see changes, although it has promised not to block the bill. (Party leaders have been saying: we're a "patriotic" party, we wouldn't do that!)

Second, if the FDP manages to repeat its Hessen performance across the country in November, it will give a comfortable majority to a black-yellow coalition. Until now that's looked almost beyond reach: with the CDU polling in the high thirties and the FDP in the high single digits, many had assumed a three-way black-yellow-green (or "Jamaica") coalition, or even a repeat of the dreaded grand coalition, were more likely outcomes.

Now the FDP has given Angela Merkel's party both government in Hessen and the prospect of a strong centre-right coalition in the autumn. The FDP's leader Guido Westerwelle is due to meet Merkel on Wednesday. I wonder what he'll ask for in return.

Politics in the downturn

I'm going to start using this blog to keep notes on politics in Germany ahead of September's general election. German politics are usually very dry, but this is no ordinary year. Not just because the economy is tanking; this election was always going to be an unusual one. The government is not standing for re-election: the CDU and the SPD in the "grand coalition" are traditional rivals who hope they won't have to share power again.

And yet the scale of the downturn is forcing them to work together with as little rancour as possible. Last night they agreed a stimulus package that at EUR 50 bn has turned out larger than many had expected. The package has the flavour of compromise - with each party trying to dilute the measures favoured by the other. Still, the sum total is nothing to sneeze at and the main criticism is that it will be the summer before the package comes into force.

However long that takes, the economy is going to deteriorate fast this year and the main parties will be worried about getting the blame in September. Since both are in government now, the CDU and the SPD are both vulnerable - as are some of their leading figures. As chancellor, the CDU's Angela Merkel could take the biggest hit - and her usually stratospheric approval ratings haven't looked so good lately. On the other hand as finance minister, the SPD’s cantankerous Peer Steinbrück might stand to lose more.

In the coming months I'll make occasional entries here as things play out.

Obama 2

Obama 1

Osama's not welcome

Reuters on the release of Abu Qatada:
Abu Qatada was among the highest profile terrorism suspects in a British jail. A special tribunal dealing with foreign terrorism suspects published a seven-page document setting stringent conditions for his release. He is forbidden from using any mobile telephone or computer, or connecting in any way to the Internet, and may leave home only between 10 and 11 a.m. and 2 and 3 p.m. The document also sets out a list of individuals that he may not contact or receive visits from -- headed by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahri.

I take the mike with my pinkie extended, because: I am a woman!

Phase IV

Say goodbye to secession, superstition, gambling, fraud and pornography

From AFP:
Virtual police officers will soon begin visible patrols on Chinese Internet sites to warn surfers they are being monitored, Beijing authorities said in comments published Wednesday.
The images of the "Beijing Internet Police", one male and one female dressed in uniform and saluting, will from Saturday start popping up every 30 minutes on computer screens run by 13 major portals based in the Chinese capital.
The cyber cops will be on the look out for websites and Internet activities that incite secession, promote superstition, gambling, fraud and pornography, the China Daily said, citing Beijing's public security bureau.
"It is our duty to wipe out information that does public harm and disrupts social order," the bureau's deputy chief of Internet surveillance, Zhao Hongzhi, was quoted as saying.

Take who you are and integrate it into everything you do

From the New York Times:

William Arruda, a branding expert and the co-author of “Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand”, believes that managing one’s personal brands is something to be thinking about all the time.

Arruda emphasizes behaving in ways that exhibit your personal brand, the old “show rather than tell” advice all writing students learn.

As an example, he describes Brandy Cler-Kneissler, an information technology professional from Boston, who was determined to bring fun into her career and to cultivate a personal brand around that quality.

“Brandy has this fervent belief that work should be fun,” Mr. Arruda said. “She believes so strongly that she makes it fun every day for her team and the people on her floor. She posts the joke of the week on her door. Her e-mails have jokes attached at the bottom. She starts every meeting with a real true-life crazy story of hers. On her conference table she has toys. What she has done is taking who she really is and integrating it into everything she does. And there is not a person in her company who doesn’t now know this about her.”

New York Times: Selling Yourself by Showing Yourself, in a Good Way

How to win an Australian election

From the Washington Post:

Air Force Two touched down in Sydney this past Feb. 24. Dick Cheney had come to discuss Iraq. Prime Minister John Howard brought the conversation around to an Australian citizen who had unexpectedly become a political threat.

Under pressure at home, Howard said he told Cheney that there must be a trial "with no further delay" for David Hicks, 31, who was beginning his sixth year at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay. Five days later, Hicks was indicted as a war criminal. On March 26, he pleaded guilty to providing "material support" for terrorism.

Hicks was Detainee 002 at Guantanamo Bay, arriving on opening day at an asserted no man's land beyond the reach of sovereign law. Interrogators questioned him under guidelines that gave legal cover to the infliction of pain and fear -- and, according to an affidavit filed by British lawyer Steven Grosz, Hicks was subjected to beatings, sodomy with a foreign object, sensory deprivation, disorienting drugs and prolonged shackling in painful positions.

The U.S. government denied those claims, and before accepting Hicks's guilty plea it required him to affirm that he had "never been illegally treated." But the tribunal's rules, written under principles Cheney advanced, would have allowed the Australian's conviction with evidence obtained entirely by "cruel, inhuman or degrading" techniques.

Shortly after Cheney returned from Australia, the Hicks case died with a whimper. The U.S. government abruptly shifted its stance in plea negotiations, dropping the sentence it offered from 20 years in prison to nine months if Hicks would say that he was guilty.

Only the dramatic shift to lenience, said Joshua Dratel, one of three defense lawyers, resolved the case in time to return Hicks to Australia before Howard faces reelection late this year.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/pushing_the_envelope_on_presi/index.html

Dogshit and graffiti

From the BBC:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested. The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found. The survey suggested that terrorism, graffiti, crime and dog mess were all of more concern than climate change.

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=6229

Wishful thinking

Al Gore in "The Assault on Reason":
"Many Americans are realizing the folly of borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the Persian Gulf and to make huge amounts of pollution that destroy the planet's climate. Increasingly, most Americans believe that we have to change every part of that equation."

Visiblement un peu éméché

Choking on their own vomit

Judge at Guantanamo throws out second case against prisoner

The judge, Army Colonel Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw out the case against Omar Khadr because he had been classified as an "enemy combatant" by a military panel years earlier - and not as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant."

The Military Commissions Act, signed by President George W. Bush last year, specifically says that only those classified as "unlawful" enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted during the arraignment in a hilltop courtroom.

Chief Defence Attorney Dwight Sullivan told journalists the dismissal had "huge" impact because none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an "unlawful" enemy combatant.

And he said that in order to reclassify the detainees as "unlawful" combatants, the whole review system would have to be overhauled, a time-consuming act.

A prosecuting attorney said he would appeal the dismissal.

The new war-crimes trial system give prosecutors 72 hours to appeal, but the court designated to hear the appeal - known as the court of military commissions review - doesn't even exist, Sullivan noted.

Unintended consequences

Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris
From http://www.errolmorris.com

On October 31, 2005, Errol Morris, Academy Award winning director of The Fog of War, interviewed Adam Curtis, director of “The Power of Nightmares”, the documentary film which asks the question “Did Johnny Mercer bring down the World Trade Center?” Originally broadcast on the BBC, a film version was shown at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, where it was widely praised. Drawing extensively on archival footage from the BBC Library, the film has encountered difficulties in finding distribution in the U.S.

Morris and Curtis discuss conspiracy theories, unintended consequences, and notional moles.

I. ONE MAINE

EM: The Power of Nightmares uses a substantial quantity of archival material and stock-footage. I call it re-processed media. Perhaps a better expression would be re-purposed media. It’s different from the traditional use of found footage in news documentaries. Here stock-footage becomes expressionistic – never literal – an excursion into a dream – or, if you prefer – nightmare. I tried at various times in the last six months to find out why The Power of Nightmares is not being shown in the United States. The archival material from the BBC library has been cleared for use in the UK but not worldwide.

AC: It’s not physical censorship, although none of the TV networks want to show it. Something I always wanted to ask you, was McNamara happy with the way you cut him?

EM: No, he was not happy. But I'm not sure that anything would’ve made him happy. He never said this to me directly, but he did tell Craig, his son, that he liked the movie.

AC: I thought you treated him just fine. You were ambiguous. It was difficult to know what you thought about him.

EM: I still don’t know what I think. The New York Times, today on the front page, had an article about new evidence concerning incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The incidents – which are discussed in The Fog of War – have been disputed for over forty years. There are those that believe that they were part of a conspiracy to escalate the Vietnam War. Here’s a question: Are they right? And, in an even more general sense, is history primarily a history of conspiracy? Or is it just a series of blunders, one after the other? Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one kind or another?

AC: It’s the latter. Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they're supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended. For example, you could say the Gulf of Tonkin was a conspiratorial action to accelerate entry into war, yes?

EM: Here’s the conspiracy argument. The Johnson administration wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam. But they needed a pretext. And so they provoked these two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to get Congressional approval for escalation. The claim is: they had a grand plan. And the plan was war. I’ve never had much of an appetite for conspiracy theories. Here's my argument in a nutshell. People are too much at cross purposes with each other, too stupid, too self absorbed to ever effectively conspire to do anything.

AC: “Just too self-absorbed” is the key element. To make a conspiracy work, you have to see it from all different angles to make sure the plan works. They don’t. Every time you ever read transcripts or detailed descriptions of what goes on at high level policy decisions - I'm sure it’s true of the Kennedy administration, I'm sure it’s true today in the Bush administration - The arguments, the self-absorption, the disagreements and the narcissism are incredible. And I'm sure the Gulf of Tonkin thing probably emerged as a compromise between lots of different people arguing as much as from a single, clear principle.

EM: Here’s something that has puzzled me about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. If you wanted to create a pretext to go to war, why go to the trouble of creating two pretexts?

AC: When you just need one?

EM: There weren’t two Maines. We needed only one Maine in order to go to war with Spain.

AC: That’s a good question, why did they need two incidents?

EM: Conspiracies imply that someone, somewhere, is in control of what’s going on. But history is the product of people out of control. What interests me in your work is your obsession with ideas and their unforeseen consequences.

AC: Once an idea gets legs, it has its own internal logic that tends to take over. Yeah. I'm a great believer in unintended consequences. I'm part of that generation that’s actually against the grand plans of McNamara’s generation… I mean, they genuinely believed that they could plan things, didn't they?

EM: Yes.

AC: That idea was born out of an incredible optimism. But I was brought up in the 70’s during a period of economic crisis – a result of all those attempts in Britain and America and the Soviet Union to plan things. So I never shared that optimism. How could you believe that you could mathematically work out how to pacify a village? They genuinely believed that there was a sort of rational way of doing this. That rationality can be applied to create rational solutions. It’s the idea that you can apply a sort of technocratic rationality to a physical situation, believing you’re neutral. What's fascinating about someone like McNamara is that he believed he was neutral. He didn't really seem to think of himself as a political being. He was a manager. But the approach toward Iraq is different. The Bush Administration are moralists, whereas McNamara didn't see himself that way. He saw himself as solving a technical problem. Oddly enough, the person I have the most sympathy with in the face of all this is Henry Kissinger. When people say to me, “Oh yeah, The Power of Nightmares a left wing film,” I argue, “Well, how can this be a left wing film when I make Henry Kissinger one of the heroes?” Kissinger had this completely amoral attitude. He did what was necessary in order to make the geopolitics of the world work. But that was a very interesting reaction to the chaos of the ‘70s. You just do what's necessary. But of course that didn't help him when he went and bombed Cambodia. Have you thought about filming Kissinger?

EM: No, not really. I like tortured characters, and I don't know how tortured Kissinger really is.

AC: I suspect you would never find out.

EM: McNamara is a more puzzling figure. It’s one of the things that makes him interesting. He’s difficult to dismiss as an out and out monster, even though undeniably many of the things he did were monstrous.

AC: That's the traditional liberal way of dismissing bad people. He doesn't think of himself as a monster, does he?

EM: No.

AC: And that’s actually what's interesting. He knows that in some ways what he did could be considered monstrous, but he doesn’t think of himself as a monster. And that's presumably the root of his torture and puzzlement about it. But no one thinks of themselves as really bad, do they?

EM: People prefer to be the hero of their life story rather than the villain.

AC: Quite.

EM: It’s that internal space, what people imagine themselves as doing.

AC: Yes, as opposed to what really is happening.

EM: I think that’s at the heart of what I really like about The Power of Nightmares.

II. NOTIONAL MOLES

EM: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sheer perversity of The Power of Nightmares.

AC: Perverse?

EM: I’ll give you an example of a perverse argument – that Johnny Mercer brought down the World Trade Center. [The Power of Nightmares traces the odd career trajectory of Qutb, a founder of Islamic fundamentalism, to a high-school in Denver, Colorado and a senior prom where the students danced to Mercer’s Baby It’s Cold Outside. ]

AC: The person I love best in the whole world is a sociologist from the late 19th century named Max Weber who believed that ideas have consequences. People have experiences out of which they form ideas. And those ideas have an effect on the world. It is true that a man listening to music back in 1949 had an experience that became one of the rivulets that ran into his formation of an idea. And that idea, in a very strange way, led people to do destroy the World Trade Center. Now, of course, that's the construction and maybe people prefer to believe that history is much more complicated. Which, of course, it is. But the construction has a truth to it. It shows dramatically how particular experiences form particular ideas with particular consequences. Even though it doesn’t actually ever work out the way the person who had the idea intended. It’s perverse, but it’s also a way of dramatizing to people how ideas work, how history works - in a different way from all those boring history programs on American television that try to explain the world to you. They just make it dull.

EM: It’s not just dullness. There’s a received idea about how to do history.

AC: Well, what would you describe that as being?

EM: The balanced viewpoint. I’ve heard so many arguments about it. The Fog of War doesn’t provide a new generation – a generation born after the 60’s and 70’s – with a context. It doesn’t tell us what to think. But it allows you to get a glimpse of what this person was thinking. Even if it’s colored by a desire to make himself look better or to skew what he’d done or create some revisionist interpretation of the past, whatever, he’s still in that process of engaging his past – what he thought then and what he thinks now.

AC: Yes. And also, you judge him, like you judge anyone you listen to. I'm very suspicious of this idea of a balanced version of history, All history is a construction – often by the powerful. What I do is construct an imaginative interpretation of history to make people look again at what they think they know. I like to ask people, “Have you thought of this?” Like zooming up in a helicopter and looking at the ground, looking at the world in a new way. Because I think that so much of this interpretation of events is a deadening repetition agreed upon by certain people, a sort of collectivity of news reports. And often it’s completely wrong. But somehow, they all agree on it. People criticized my film by saying things like, “Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?” And my response was, “What if the other view is wrong?” That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what's called ‘perceived wisdom.’ What if perceived wisdom’s wrong? What if – when you go and look at the evidence for sleeper cells in America – there doesn’t appear to be anything there? You know, that's the difficult area. And so it becomes up to you to judge whether to go against perceived wisdom or not.

EM: And what if the people who deeply believe in something that isn’t there – like sleeper cells - They really believe it, for whatever reason? Ron Rosenbaum, a friend of mine, has written a number of articles on James Jesus Angleton and the CIA. [Angleton was the head of counter-intelligence during the height of the Cold War.]

AC: Oh, yes.

EM: He talked about “notional moles” in the article. And the notional mole – according to Rosenbaum – is that you make the other side believe that you’ve planted a mole in their midst without ever having actually planted a mole. This is very much an Adam Curtis idea. You drive them insane.

AC: Because they're looking for something that doesn’t actually exist.

EM: Exactly.

AC: Well, that's what I was trying to do. What I’m trying to say to people is: “Look, you do face a terrorist threat, as is obvious from the attacks on America and more recently on my country. But you're looking in the wrong place. You’ve created this sort of phantom enemy, which is a disorganized network. When in fact what you're actually facing is an idea that springs up all over the place.” You've created a notional enemy that’s driving you mad looking for it, when in fact, it’s something else entirely. And that's when I went back and tried to explain the ideas. I thought that was much more important for people to understand. Because when something that doesn’t exist becomes perceived wisdom, people tend to go slightly bonkers. That's sort of the mood of our times. I like the idea of a notional mole, it’s good. Because no one ever found one, did they?

EM: No. And they still don’t know to this day whether—

AC: There really was a real mole?

EM: Whether the mole was notional or real.

AC: Because, of course, that might be another trick as well. You release a piece of information through the real mole to say—Well, we think it’s a notional mole.

EM: But in The Power of Nightmares, it’s not a notional mole planted by the enemy.

AC: No, we created it ourselves.

EM: Yes. It’s a form of self-fertilization, parthenogenesis.

AC: To be honest, the neoconservatives are their own worst enemy. They’ve created something out of their own fevered imagination, which was borne out of the Cold War. That's one of the great unexamined areas – how recently the Cold War ended and how so many of our institutions and our mindset and everything is still trapped in that. And that's also true of a lot of journalists who are—I mean, I’m not so sure in America, but in my country, a lot of the senior journalists had a very good Cold War and still have that mentality as well. They hang on to it. You know, that's why they kept on thinking there were hidden things out there in Iraq. I don’t think they made it up, I think they genuinely believed it in Iraq. Because that's what the Soviets were like. They hid these things.

EM: It’s far more frightening than the idea that they were knowingly peddling lies. The more frightening version is they truly believed in all of it.

AC: I think that's true. And it was after that sort of self-created fantasy that they could then go to war. I mean, that's weird, isn’t it?

EM: They had to go to war, because if their fantasies are true, it would be horribly irresponsible not to go to war. Munich all over again.

AC: You get trapped by this. Trapped by a false idea. That's what I was trying to describe in The Power of Nightmares. Once you get trapped by your imagination, you think the worst and therefore you have to plan for the worst. It becomes a self-fulfilling thing.

III. MUNICH

EM: Take historical analogies. I believe that historical analogies are always wrong. This a long discussion, but, to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions. LeMay called JFK’s recommendation for a “quarantine” (that is, a blockade) in the Cuban Missile Crisis “worse than Munich”. Would nuclear war have been a better alternative? But nuclear war was averted by Kennedy’s policies. And thirty years later the Soviet Union collapsed without the need for nuclear war. Was LeMay right? I don’t think so. But again, the example of Munich was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq. Appeasing Saddam, appeasing Hitler. The use of the Munich analogy does not clarify, it obscures. History is like the weather. Themes do repeat themselves, but never in the same way. And analogies became rhetorical flourishes and sad ex post facto justifications rather than explanations. In the end, they explain nothing.

AC: That's right. Last night on television someone who was pro-the Iraq war was saying that the alliance between the insurgents in Iraq and the foreign fighters is the equivalent of the Nazi-Soviet pact and that that's what we’re really fighting against. It’s all so weird. That the men who sit in neon-lit rooms with very nicely done tables and who question you and tell you things, are actually weird.

EM: Yeah. Well, as we all know, the banal and the weird are not incompatible.

AC: That's the whole point - that's what's so fascinating about our time. The banal and the weird are one and the same thing.

EM: Yes. They hold hands.