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Leninism and Lennonism aren't that far apart. Some thoughts on the Rolling Stones in Cuba.
One of the most enthralling events of the last few days was the Rolling Stones concert in Havana on Friday night. I once went to one of these strange events , as a work assignment, in Washington DC, and thought I had been clever to take binoculars so that I could get a good view of the caperings of Mr Jagger and Mr Richard (as people of my generation still think of him). Alas, the sound was so worryingly powerful (loud won't do as a word, the first wave from the banks of speakers actually seemed to strike me in the chest like a light but definite blow), that I had to spend the whole evening with my fingers jammed into my ears to preserve my hearing. So I could only take brief breaks from this to use the field glasses. If I ever go to one again (Heaven forfend) I aim to take earplugs *and* binoculars.
I reckon they are some sort of pagan celebration, a pre-Christian manifestation like football matches, in which people willingly take leave of their reason in return for feeling they are part of something greater than themselves. In my view this something is not very nice, and I find it rather frightening. Why is it that men lose their reason in crowds so much more than they do alone?
Soccer and rock music both leave me cold, but I have been tempted by this mass emotion once or twice on big demonstrations (I recall feeling a twinge of it at Easter 1966 in Trafalgar Square, my first CND ban-the-bomb demonstration and the culmination of a couple of days of mass politics, which had included sleeping on the hard wooden floor of a church hall in Kentish Town and a lot of foot slogging and shouting). It was coming on to drizzle, there had been some ritual scuffles up towards South Africa House, and we were singing a parody of 'Jerusalem' the only line of which I recall being '...and that the bland shall lead the bland'.
But I didn't like the loss of control involved and held that part of myself back. I hope I always will. People like me fear unreason. I'm fairly sure that in any but a very advanced society I would have been clubbed to death quite early in life, for the serious offence of not being one of the crowd. School bullying is a modern instance of this which does sometimes end in death, though usually in the form of suicide.
But I digress. In this moment in Havana, Cuba did a sad thing. It went straight from the depths of Castroism into the new neo-liberal world (I use this expression consciously and deliberately to annoy a conservative friend of mine who says that the use of the term is an invariable sign of hopeless stupidity. I simply don't agree. In fact I think this is a very good example of why it is a useful formula. Capitalism has not defeated communism in a triumph of Christian conservatism. It has merged with Communism in a bizarre synthesis of Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, in which it is glorious to get rich, personal morality is more or less irrelevant, the state monitors minds and regulates all, but yet takes no responsibility for anything, and the freedom of the market entails no freedom of thought, but there are lots of consumer goods and self-indugences to make up.
Cuba was admittedly never all that Christian, thanks to the great power of Santeria, a distillation of African pre-Christian faiths. But Christianity was certainly one of the things the Castro despotism strongly discouraged in its early, murderous years, when the Guevara monster was supervising mass shootings at La Cabana, and smirking at lawless show trials, and Huber Matos was, as he delicately put it, having his genitals pierced by Mr Castro's torturers, for daring to criticise his old comrade.
And Pope Francis, interestingly, tried and failed to get the concert switched to another day because (like me) he reckoned that raucous, sexually-charged and far from reverent event such as this shouldn't really be held on Good Friday in any part of the world where the Christian faith is widely practised.
I've given up trying to explain to most people why this is important. Perhaps I should mention the role of a certain rather famous raucous crowd on the first Good Friday, to give you some idea. But so few people now recall Good Friday as a solemn day of penitence and reflection (though we're happy to respect similar days in the calendars of other faiths) that it is more or less useless to suggest that it matters. Of course this mixture of indifference and scorn is reserved for the Christian faith, the one we're all trying so hard to escape because we're afraid its strictures might in some way apply to us and load us with obligations we dislike. I wonder how the Rolling Stones management would respond to a similar request to avoid performing during a solemn commemoration in a Muslim or Hindu location.
But back to the concert and the coverage of it. There was a lot of talk about how rock music was *once* banned in Cuba, as if it was seen as subversive by the Castro despotism. In fact (the use of the word 'once' is a rather feeble nod to this) this has not been the case for many years.
The Guardian, in an excellent report on this event http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/25/rolling-stones-cuba-historic-concert-diplomacy noted 'Very little rock music was played on the [Cuban] radio and TV until John Lennon released the politically driven Power to the People, which was approved by the Cuban government and heralded a change that continues. (Lennon now has a park named after him in Havana, as well as a statue of him sitting on a bench)'. That statue was unveiled 16 years ago. And Wikipedia records that 'Power to the People' (check the lyrics for yet more evidence of John Lennon's famously stupendous poetic talent) was released in March 1971, 45 years ago.
So perhaps there are other reasons why the Stones have not performed in Havana before , apart from the alleged subversiveness of rock music (which is in my view not at all subversive in Communist states, since the things it attacks, family, conservative culture, self-restraint, etc, are not things such states value). Could it be that money and logistics played a part?
I was interested by this part of the Guardian story : 'Funding was the next problem. With average salaries of about $20 a month, the vast majority of Cubans are unable to afford even a cut-price ticket, let alone the usual sky-high fees for a Stones gig. The answer was to stage a free concert, a throwback to the band's reputation-making gigs at the end of the 1960s...
'...In Cuba, they have managed to put on a free concert thanks to the sponsorship of Gregory Elias, a 62-year-old entrepreneur from Curaçao.'
This is also interesting
http://www.rollingstones.com/2016/03/01/the-rolling-stones-announce-free-concert-in-cuba/
Also note in the Guardian story that Gorki Aguila, a Cuban musician not beloved by his country's authorities because he is very rude about them, had his doubts : 'Although he is a fan of the Stones, he feels the British rockers are being used. "If I could speak to them, I would tell them they are disrespecting the rights of artists in this country who are not able to express ourselves," he said. "The tyrants here are trying to portray an image of Cuba as an island of happy people. If the Rolling Stones don't talk about what is going on here [in terms of human rights violations], then they are indirectly serving as collaborators with the Cuban tyranny."'
If The Rolling Stones did mention political liberty during their concert, I have not seen a report of it (Has anyone? Please let me know if so). Barack Obama certainly did, most emphaticall, mention this issue, on live Cuban TV as far as I can find out, though the state newspapers did not mention this. He also pointedly met dissidents at the US Embassy in Havana. Just before he arrived Cuban police arrested (yet again) the 'Women in White' whom I once saw outside the Church of Santa Rita in Miramar, making their extraordinarily courageous peaceful demonstration against the imprisonment of their husbands for political dissent .
Cuba always locks up dissidents on what it says are normal criminal charges, and thus denies having any political prisoners. It's an evasive lie. I remain deeply perplexed by the strange death in a supposed road accident in 2012 of the late Oswaldo Paya, an utterly principled opponent of the Castro state who pointedly sought no support from the USA and was opposed to neoliberalism. Look it up and see what you think.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that senior officials of the Castro police state (its 'Committees for the Defence of the Revolution' monitor the lives and thoughts of the people in every street and block of flats) had been present at the concert.
I'm not surprised. I imagine they're as indifferent to Good Friday as the Stones were. That common, shared indifference to what was once the most solemn day in Christendom is an interesting symbol of the fact that the formerly Communist states seem always to go straight from Communism to the most ultra-liberal, secular form of society, well symbolised by the Stones and their hymns to self-rule.
March 28, 2016 Comments (134) Categories: Castro, Fidel , Censorship , Cold War , Communist Party , Cuba , Culture , History | Permalink
27 March 2016 2:40 AM
We aren't fighting a 'war' - they're just a bunch of doped-up losers
Here we go again, politicians and media hand in hand, doing the work of the terrorists. They are called terrorists because their aim is to scare us into doing their will. Those who help them scare us, by exaggerating their power and importance, are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is stupid, and they should stop.
Supposed 'experts' speak in grave tones about 'security', an area about which you can say anything at all because nobody ever confirms or denies anything. The 'security services', costly and ineffectual as they are, are pleased to be given an importance they have not earned.
And they will be along in a minute demanding more powers to snoop into the lives of the innocent while continuing to fail to spot the guilty. Like anyone who is allowed to claim expenses while not being required to give details of how he spends the money, these people live by boasting and exaggeration, plus a bit of angry pomposity if anyone questions their real worth.
I especially dislike all this lofty stuff about how bad the Belgians are at tracking terrorists. Are we so much better? How will all this look if – and in truth we have no realistic way of predicting or preventing it – it is London next?
The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, says ludicrously that this is a 'war' and others bloviate and splutter along the same lines, instantly winning themselves starring roles on the 24-hour news feeds.
What nonsense. How the sordid criminals of the Brussels suburbs, who are common murderers of low morals and low intelligence, must grin like dogs and rejoice to be paid such a fat compliment.
Let Monsieur Valls visit a real war zone and see what modern munitions can do to a big city, such as Baghdad, where the shockwaves from bombs falling a mile away made the hospitals tremble so violently that women gave birth prematurely.
Let him see the enormous craters, the concrete buildings with their floors collapsed like a pile of pancakes, the general chaos. Let him observe how normal life ends, schools close, money loses its value, the shops empty as supplies dry up and the economy ceases to function.
If we were at war, life as we know it would come to a stop, and we would be set back decades, living in ruins without electricity.
That is war. They know all about it in Iraq, Syria, Libya and the other places we have 'liberated' recently. What we face is crime – stupid, vicious, cruel, but crime, actions which don't deserve to be dignified or pumped up beyond their real significance.
When we have eventually found all there is to be known about the culprits, I predict that they will turn out to be very like the drug-addled petty crooks and lowlifes who killed Lee Rigby, who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo and who murdered more defenceless people in Paris last November.
Read this report from the BBC's Secunder Kermani, which brilliantly describes the reality, quite different from our fictional picture of Wahhabi puritans directed from a bunker in Arabia: 'One friend of the [Abdeslam] brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam "watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another". He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no one took him seriously.
'Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing – this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.
'The network that the Abdeslam brothers had around them – based as much on personal loyalty, disenchantment and petty crime as radical ideology – would be key in helping Salah [the other brother] escape after the Paris attacks.'
This is not war. It is the action of deranged nobodies, trying to give their dead-end lives meaning with a grandiose cause.
If you want to know where to find them, just follow the smell of marijuana, the supposedly harmless drug which rots the reasoning powers of its users and which, when combined with radical Islam, explodes into red ruin.
The Big Dope Lobby and its many suckers and dupes constantly attack me for pointing out the dangers of the drug they want to legalise. They claim I blame everything on it. But what can I do?
This week I ask your pardon for referring to this drug twice in one column. For it is not just associated with Islamic terror. It is also linked with the most callous and cruel non-political crime.
The dreadful death of PC David Phillips was caused by Clayton Williams, a youth who smokes the drug so much that his Facebook picture showed him with a cannabis joint in his mouth.
Williams had been smoking this supposedly 'soft' drug on the evening he mowed down PC Phillips, the father of a young family – a horror Williams's doped mind still seems unable to understand.
When will the twin lies, that there is a 'war on drugs' and that taking cannabis is a harmless, peaceable recreation, be exposed for the dangerous falsehoods they are?
Though I dislike most of his views, I have always been rather impressed by Barack Obama, a thoughtful and interesting man. He has also been dead right about Cuba, realising that the best way to finish the Castro nightmare is to end the US blockade and make it clear that island's misery is the fault of its communist despots. He should do something similar in North Korea. A picture of him standing alongside Kim Jong Un might cancel out the embarrassing memory of his plainly unwanted surprise grapple with tango dancer Mora Godoy in Buenos Aires (right).
Once again you will have woken this morning to find that the clocks have been shoved forward by an hour. For me, and for many other early risers, this means weeks of something rather like jet-lag. But what's it for? Why do we do it? Nobody actually knows. We just do it because we have done it for years. There's no solid objective evidence that it does any good at all.
Wait a few weeks and the evenings will get lighter all by themselves. Yet we're told absurdly that it provides more light. It doesn't.
A Cherokee elder, baffled by the paleface habit of messing around with clocks, once asked: 'What sort of person thinks that by cutting a foot off one end of a blanket, and then sewing it on to the other end, he gets a longer blanket?'
You won't be surprised to learn that I am more interested by the gloomy bit of Easter – the betrayal by the secret police spy, the show trial, the cowardice of the government in the face of the mob, executing the innocent and releasing the murderer – than in the happy part. The really great myths, so-called, are not about something which once happened. They are about something that goes on happening all the time, and is happening now.
March 27, 2016 Comments (157) Categories: Cannabis , Cuba , North Korea , Religion , Terrorism , USA | Permalink
On Knowing What I am Talking About - my new e-book explains why I do.
My new e-book, 'Short Breaks in Mordor', for which I could not find a three-dimensional publisher, now has 47 customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk ( 43 of them awarding it five stars). On Amazon.co.uk it has 11 reviews. ten of them 5-star.
If this is enough information for you , you should know that you do not need a Kindle or other e-reader to read this book. It can be downloaded in seconds on to any computer.
You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:
See here :
http://amzn.to/1tuzY9f
You can find the book here:
http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK)
or here
http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)
But if you'd like some examples of what you will find in this book, here are a few below:
DATELINE BAGHDAD (May 2003):
'The Anglo-American attack on Iraq was supposed to be a liberation, and perhaps one day it will turn out to be one. But for most people here it has meant a return to Year Zero. Everything that made Iraq a country has gone. The currency swoops up and down in value and satchels full of dinars are needed to pay for anything important.
There is no law to speak of. The schools do not know what to teach or who should teach it. The frontiers are controlled by foreigners, if they are controlled at all. All the national TV channels have disappeared. The telephones are all dead.
Most medicines are unobtainable.
And in the world's second greatest oil producer, mile-long queues mark every petrol station - and the fuel on offer is a filthy, rancid-smelling muck which wrecks engines and fills the air with noxious clouds.
There is no gas for cooking, the tap water is tainted with sewage. Many people have not been paid for weeks and are not even sure that their jobs or businesses still exist or will ever reappear. Imagine what it must be like to be the parent of small children in such surroundings. Many Iraqis are haggard with worry and lack of sleep.
And yet in their guarded compounds, where the power always works and air conditioning cools the 95-degree heat, the American rulers of the city continue to show the clueless complacency that has marked their occupation since it began. The big men ride about in armoured convoys, machine-gunners fore and aft glaring suspiciously about them, too scared of the people they have liberated to get out, walk and see for themselves.
The real reason for the mess is that Washington knew nothing about Iraq - and cared even less - before it attacked.'…
…If the Americans had studied Britain's long-ago experience in Baghdad, they might have learned that democracy cannot simply be unpacked from crates and set up in a place like this. They might have learned that if you take over someone's country you have to use the old institutions and elites, even if you do not like them.'
DATELINE GAZA (October 2010):
'Gaza was bombed on the day I arrived in retaliation for a series of rocket strikes on Israel, made by Arab militants. Those militants knew this would happen, but they launched their rockets anyway. Many Gazans hate them for this.
One, whom I shall call Ibrahim, told me how he had begged these maniacs to leave his neighbourhood during Israel's devastating military attack nearly two years ago. His wife was close to giving birth. He knew the Israelis would quickly seek out the launcher, and that these men would bring death down on his home. But the militants sneered at his pleading, so he shoved his wife into his car and fled. Moments after he passed the first major crossroads, a huge Israeli bomb burst on the spot where his car had been.
The diabolical power of modern munitions is still visible, in the ruins of what was once a government building. It looks as if a giant has chewed and smashed it, and then come back and stamped on it.
If you can imagine trying to protect a pregnant woman from such forces, then you can begin to understand how complex it is living here, where those who claim to defend you bring death to your door.
For the Islamist rocket-firers are also the government here, supported by Iran and others who care more for an abstract cause than they do for real people. They claim that their permanent war with Israel is for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs. But is it?
Human beings will always strive for some sort of normal life. They do this even when bombs are falling and demagogues raging.
Even when, as in Gaza, there is no way out and morality patrols sweep through restaurants in search of illicit beer and women smoking in public or otherwise affronting the 14th Century values of Hamas.
So I won't give the name of the rather pleasant establishment where young women, Islamic butterflies mocking the fanatics' strict dress code with bright make-up and colourful silken hijabs, chattered as they inhaled apple-scented smoke from their water-pipes. Their menfolk, nearby, watched football on huge, flat-screen televisions. Nor will I say where I saw the Gazan young gathering for beach barbecues beneath palm-leaf umbrellas.
Of course this way of life isn't typical. But it exists, and it shows the 'prison camp' designation is a brain-dead over-simplification. If it is wrong for the rich to live next door to the desperate - and we often assume this when we criticise Israel - then what about Gaza's wealthy, and its Hamas rulers? They tolerate this gap, so they are presumably as blameworthy as the Israelis whose comfortable homes overlook chasms of poverty.
Then there is the use of the word 'siege'. Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands?'
DATELINE MOSCOW (February 2012):
This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite. Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation - bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is - or was - England.
I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.
I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died.
I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder.
When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended. I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia - heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin's frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin - a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive.
It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin - whose devastating documentary We Can't Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era - is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was 'a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust'.
But, now, he says, 'we have returned to "normal", "civilised" corruption'.
This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word 'Voruyut' - 'They steal'.
But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western 'experts' stalked the land, the nation's rulers stole the whole country.
I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.
But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia's government.
DATELINE SHANGHAI:
'They are building the future capital of the world here at the mouth of the Yangtze River, a city so vast, astonishing and potent that it ought to be a warning to the soft, declining West that the 21st Century may well see the centre of global power shift from the free, English-speaking world to the tyrannical Orient.
Those who have not seen this place simply cannot grasp the scale and nerve of the endeavour. Each day a new tower surges towards the sky in a project so gigantic it makes the Pharaohs look cautious. Forget the buried era of boilersuits and red books, tractor factories, grey pitted concrete cubes and windswept parade grounds. Chinese Communism is now just a vast machine of power, privilege and money, with the children of the mighty building great fortunes for themselves and their friends, untouchable and beyond criticism. 'To get rich is glorious' has replaced 'The East is Red' as the governing slogan of the times.
And it has been taken very seriously. The contrast between wealth and poverty here is like a Victorian morality tale. Except that in a China which has never known Christianity or the sentimentality of Charles Dickens, nobody draws any morals from it.
Filthy beggars grovel on the pavements near to where Porsches and Rolls-Royces sit in shiny showrooms. Luxury of every kind is on shameless display in the city's heart, while destitute migrant workers labour for tiny wages in construction gangs, living in spartan dormitories and sending their money home to mudbrick villages in the distant interior. While private living standards soar, the rivers are dark with muck and the smoggy, hazy air stinks of sulphur.
China is an entire alternative planet of 1.3 billion people with a shared culture and a more or less common language, in which the Third World and the First World are within a passport-free train ride of each other. And in Shanghai, only a bus ride often separates the two.
Travellers arriving at the colossal new international airport can head towards the city on a futuristic magnetic levitation train capable of more than 200mph, so fast they can barely make out the thousands struggling along the roads on decrepit bicycles.
Smart young people pour into the city's four huge B&Q warehouses to equip their fashionable new high-rise apartments to the highest standards. Superb restaurants charge London prices to smoothly dressed businessmen and their polished women amid glossy surroundings. Volkswagen and Buick cars, made in Shanghai factories, provide the growing middle class with a symbol of independence and status.
Yet overlooked by the new city of towers, respectable, decent people are still living in alleyways, known as longtangs, carting chamberpots to communal sluices, hanging washing from their windows, confined to one room where they must sleep on a shelf and sharing dismal kitchens with nine or ten neighbours.
Young married couples are often forced to share the same bedroom as their parents, separated only by a curtain. These people are so poor that they sometimes fight with each other over who has been using too much expensive water, so that each family has its own metered tap. I saw one such place with a dozen taps projecting from a riot of plumbing over the grim tiled sink. At night the kitchen is almost unusable because it is full of bicycles which cannot safely be left outside.
You might think that such people would be glad to be rehoused. But often their homes are bulldozed by unscrupulous developers and they are simply driven away without compensation. They are unlikely to find flats in the new blocks which swiftly replace their demolished alleyways.
Their plight is barely noticed. China, which has just put a man in space and plans to follow America to the Moon, is using the same driven determination to build a great megalopolis which is plainly designed to rival New York and utterly overshadow Hong Kong - whose colonial past and lingering traces of Britishness make it distasteful to the fervent, unashamed patriots who now hold power in Peking.
The sheer size of it is almost impossible to take in - the official city limits cover 2,500 square miles containing more than 13 million people, not far short of the entire population of Australia and bigger than several European countries. The packed central core of 90 square miles somehow crams in nearly eight million humans, perhaps the highest population density in the world. That would be even bigger if ruthless pressure to keep families small did not lead to 300,000 abortions a year, twice the figure for the whole of the UK.
There is plenty of ruthlessness here. You can practically feel it. Ruthlessness has drawn in nearly 20,000 foreign companies glad to make use of the low pay and high skills available in this disciplined police state with its almost limitless supply of labour and its excellent education system. Ruthlessness has created Pudong, until recently a glum district of low-rent housing and rice paddies, now planned as Asia's Wall Street.
As yet it is an eerie, inhuman city within a city of extravagant, ornate towers obviously meant to copy and eventually surpass the skylines of Manhattan and Chicago. Two of them, the Oriental Pearl TV tower, with its globes and spire, and the Jin Mao Tower with its strange pagodalike spikes, top 1,400ft. The tallest skyscraper in the world will soon stand alongside them. At their feet sits a great stone engraved with the words of Deng Xiaoping: 'Waste no time. Do not waver until the development of Pudong is complete.' If you are surprised that a communist leader demanded the swift construction of a boastful zone dedicated to rampant greed, then it is time that you realised that the world's Marxists now believe that capitalism, not state socialism, will create the classless, global, multicultural world they have always dreamed of.
These arrogant towers stare down - and it cannot be an accident - on the ghostly grandeur of the Bund, the old Shanghai riverfront which was once the symbol of Western Imperial power in Asia. But its formerly majestic Edwardian and Twenties buildings, which long ago symbolised the fact that the West's foot was on China's neck, are now grimy, sad, dingy and pathetically small, preserved as a museum of a time which Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to remember with bitterness.
Here is the riverside park where, until 1928, a notice at the gates banned Chinese people from setting foot and casually added that dogs, too, were not admitted. Here are the old British and French concessions where Chinese law did not run and Westerners controlled their own special quarters of the city. And here is the place where a brief, savage and unequal artillery duel between a Japanese cruiser and a brave but tiny British gunboat in December 1941 signalled the doom of European colonial power in China.
You cannot help feeling that we in the West are being sent a message here. The whole project seems to say: 'You came here and taught us that if you are poor and weak, then the rich and strong can rule learning Chinese over you. Now it is our turn to be rich and strong.' For a moment, the image flickers through my mind of Chinese street signs in London and parts of our cities given over to Chinese law while we are kept outside.'
DATELINE GORLOVKA, EASTERN UKRAINE (September 2010)
'It is true that there are plenty of parts of Ukraine where people do feel and speak Ukrainian - mainly in the west around the city now called Lviv (though in the past 150 years it has also been the Austrian city of Lemberg, the Polish city of Lwow and the Soviet city of Lvov - in this part of the world you can move from country to country just by staying in the same place).
But travel east, as I did, to the old coal-mining region of the Don Basin, and you will find out why so many Ukrainian citizens did not support the 2004 Orange Revolution. I went to the decayed town of Gorlovka. Independence has done little for this place. Cut off from its Russian hinterland and its markets, it is expiring. All around are dead slag heaps and ruined mines and factories, and tragic landscapes of collapse under a ferocious sun.
Gorlovka's coal mines and chemical works fed the USSR's industries. Now they are mostly dead and the town - twinned with Barnsley in the Eighties - is nearly as bereft of its traditional industries as its Yorkshire opposite number. Sad, empty playgrounds are melancholy evidence of a city condemned to die. There is still a statue of Lenin in the main square but on its flanks are scrawled graffiti - a thing I have never seen before in the former USSR. The image of Lenin was once revered, and later hated, but never trivialised by drawings of Bart Simpson.
The mayor, Ivan Sakharchuk, is proud of his treaty with Barnsley and also insists that there are no difficulties with being Ukrainian.
I am not so sure. Nobody uses the town's Ukrainian name of Horlivka. Many of the street signs are still in Russian. The names of shops are in Russian. The newspapers on sale are in Russian. In the rather smart Cafe Barnsley, the only beer on sale is Russian and the radio is tuned to a Russian station. I suspect the people are hoping for - and expecting - a Russian future.'
DATELINE HAVANA (July 2006)
'Castro was to revolution what Mick Jagger was to rock, and his image (and Guevara's) had a lot to do with the strange student revolt that destroyed Charles de Gaulle's conservative France in 1968, and with the wave of cultural revolution that changed the morals and attitudes of the Western world and has now subsided into the weary swamps of political correctness.
Interestingly, the student revolutionaries who loved Castro and Guevara got Fidel wholly wrong. He loathed rock music as degenerate and only in recent years has he recognised it as an ally, permitting a John Lennon memorial park in Havana. They got a lot of other things about him wrong, too.
Castro matters so much to the fashionable liberal Left that they have tried to deny – to themselves – the true nature of his very nasty regime. A recent example of this was a March 2005 letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Nadine Gordimer,Harry Belafonte and Danielle Mitterrand, which claimed that in Cuba 'there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised'.
This is almost total garbage and just shows what the Left will put up with when it likes someone. Castro personally reversed the verdict of an important trial when he disagreed with it. He used to round up homosexuals and put them in labour camps to 'make men of them'.
One of his old comrades, Huber Matos, confided after 20 years of brutality and starvation in Castro's jails that he was 'subjected to all kinds of horrors, including the puncturing of my genitals'.
Just three years ago, after a brief period of liberalisation, Castro threw 75 peaceful dissidents into dungeons.
Most are still there. Their wives demonstrate bravely every Sunday for their release and are attacked and abused by 'spontaneous' mobs of loyalist women.
Others who defy the leader face similar misery short of jail. They lose their jobs. Their houses are trashed by government supporters. One incredibly brave dissenter, Oswaldo Paya, remains at liberty (NOTE: Oswaldo Paya has since died in a mysterious car crash) but he is constantly watched and the state has placed an insulting poster near his house which says: 'In a country under siege, all dissent is treason.' Imagine the response of Pinter and his friends if a Right wing Latin American dictator had done half these things. No wonder one of the Alsatian guard dogs that patrol Castro's villa near Havana is called Guardian.
Or so I am told. Like all tyrants, Castro conducts his real life behind thick screens. After a long absence he has twice appeared in public recently.
During a rambling speech in Cordoba, Argentina, he continually plucked at his collar as if in some sort of discomfort.
The cameras swung away. Back in Cuba a few days later, he jokingly promised not to stay in power until he was 100.
A recent rumour that he had died was spread, as always, by Cuban exiles who yearn for him to go so that they can come back.'
September 4, 2014 Comments (7) Categories: China , Cuba , Culture , Gaza (see also Israel) , Iraq , Russia , Ukraine | Permalink
Not Interesting Enough for You?
Experience post-invasion Baghdad at dusk as the power fails yet again. Travel to Iraq's Shia shrines and witness the uncovering of a mass grave of Saddam Hussein's victims. Try to visit a bar and a bowling-alley in Pyongyang (and fail). Travel on the Mandalay-Rangoon express through the secret city of Naypyidaw. Run from the wild dogs on the prairies of what used to be Detroit. Penetrate to the heart of a Shia shrine in Iran, and meet a Mullah in the Holy City of Qom. Find out what it's really like to be an both an Arab and an Israeli. Meet the state's thugs in Cairo. Find out why the people of Sevastopol didn't like being Ukrainian, and visit a town in Ukraine (now in turmoil) that's twinned with Barnsley . Visit Spain's Gibraltar, a rocky colony on the edge of Africa. Experience the power of Shanghai, meet a Chinese caveman and cough and splutter in China's most polluted city. Enter the shanty towns of Caracas, and visit the spot in Havana where Che Guevara supervised mass executions of Castro's opponents. Meet the students at India's strangest university. Mourn as TV is introduced to beautiful, serene Bhutan. Enter the sinister mining zones of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
All this, and much more, is to be found in 'Short Breaks in Mordor', my new e-book, not available as a conventional book because conventional publishers didn't think it was interesting enough. Prove them wrong.
It's available at
July 7, 2014 Comments (23) Categories: Burma , China , Cuba , Culture , Iran , Iraq , USA , Venezuela | Permalink
'The Methods of Stalin - The Presentational Skills of Richard and Judy', my report on Hugo Chavez's Venezuela from 2008.
The death of Hugo Chavez prompts me to reproduce this article, my report from Caracas , which was first published in the Mail on Sunday in April 2008.
OUT OF the grave we thought we'd shovelled it into all those years ago, revolutionary Marxism comes climbing once again. Most of us were pleased to see it go, but not all of us.
No wonder the world's incurably fashionable Leftists, who hate their own countries, love Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. They have been homeless since the USSR fizzled away in a cloud of rust, and even more bereft since a trembling Fidel Castro laid down his combat fatigues and went off into the twilight in his pyjamas.
Comrade Chavez has given them back a fatherland, and provided them with a hero – a strangely lovable, smiling one, with a sense of humour and a good line in teasing mockery of the United States. He also has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world.
Castro, of course, never had any oil. But Venezuela is overflowing with it, which changes everything. In this increasingly sinister country, oil money sustains a more or less unhinged regime that mixes the methods of Stalin and the presentational skills of Richard and Judy to impose socialism on the Caribbean's southern shores.
It also makes global mischief, flirting with Iran and the rest of the outcast and stroppy nations of the world. Does it matter? Yes. Venezuela is now an important global focus for trouble; a rallying point for the enemies of Western society and lawful democracy, a new source of hope for every silly idealist, from London's Ken Livingstone upwards.
And it is a menace to the wobbling economies of the world. Chavez has been busily nagging Opec to keep up the world price of oil, while cunningly keeping down the cost at home to buy votes. Oil may fetch more than $100 a barrel on the world markets, but Venezuelans can fill their cars for just 75 pence .
Still, economic bungling of the standard Marxist kind can create bankruptcy and rationing out of the greatest abundance. What ought to be one of the most prosperous societies on earth is suffering grave shortages of the most basic things. This week in Caracas I have seen many queues for milk, which even the rich cannot get. If a delivery arrives at a supermarket it is gone in half an hour. Last week there was no lavatory paper. Before that, it was rice and meat you couldn't get.
Inflation is terrible, and power cuts are increasingly common.
Amid this mess, the nation's would-be despot rules largely through a curious weekly TV talk show – Hallo, President! – in which he harangues his people, argues with his audience, publicly humiliates and lectures his terrified ministers, invents policies, prophesies grandiose schemes which will never happen and occasionally breaks into song. Comrade Chavez fancies himself as a singer, a baseball player and a comedian.
As he himself says: 'It's a religious programme – because God only knows when it will end.' Which is true enough. Dignitaries invited to join the studio audience take cushions, sandwiches and bottles of water to help them endure the hours of raging, reminiscence and chatter.
El Presidente's unending rants have become a national joke. At a recent summit in Chile, King Juan Carlos of Spain snapped at Chavez: 'Why don't you shut up?' Millions of Venezuelans downloaded the rebuke and use it as the ring-tone on their mobiles.
Sleepless and obsessive, Chavez pursues his revolutionary ends into the small hours, ringing his cabinet with his latest ideas, commandeering TV stations, descending on remote townships and ordering local officials to complete 17 impossible targets before breakfast.
They just hope he won't come back and check, for his wrath can be terrible.
This might appear to be a fun revolution: student politics on a big budget. It must be the only country where the graffiti is done by the government, with the police standing guard over artists as they spray pro-Chavez murals. Activists are everywhere in their scarlet, slogan-covered T-shirts. In the squares of Caracas, little stalls called 'Hot Corners' blare out revolutionary speeches and hand out propaganda – which probably helps make up for the lavatory-paper shortage.
But it is not half so funny if you look closely. And it is not funny at all if you dare to stand up to Chavez. For this brilliant, impulsive and charming former parachute officer is also a ruthless seeker of power and true believer in revolution. And he does not really care how he gets control, or how he holds on to it.
He may go on about democracy, but he would have been perfectly happy to attain office with gunfire and tanks. His first attempt at the presidency was in 1992, when he tried a military coup. It was a clownish failure; the sort of putsch where people fail to turn up on time, get lost and cannot find the keys to vital buildings.
So much for Lieutenant Colonel Chavez's military skills. But amazingly, before they took him away to prison, the authorities put him on TV so he could order his followers to lay down their arms. He did so, but added two crucial words: 'Por ahora' (For now).
Like Schwarzenegger's 'I'll be back' in The Terminator, this has become his catchphrase – it thrills supporters and frightens opponents.
From that day, his popularity grew. And it is easy to see why. Like almost every oil state, Venezuela has fouled up its inheritance. Needless poverty besieges Caracas in the form of squalid, chaotic, violent shanty towns that are so dangerous the police won't go there at weekends. In this country of 28million people, there are 1,000 murders a month and guns are everywhere.
Yet these shameful slums lie within sight of the modern towers of the city. Chavez realised there were millions of votes in these suppurating places, so he scattered his oil bounty among them. Cuban medical workers have set up clinics in the slums. Smart new schools are being built there. Hundreds of thousands receive state handouts direct from Chavez, who has seized the state oil company and uses it as a private bank to reward supporters.
These supporters know which side their votes are buttered: pro-Chavez posters decorate their wretched homes. Standing outside his sister's tiny three-room house – or shed – in the San Agustin shanty district, Juan, a security guard working for a state project, told me: 'In all my 53 years Hugo Chavez is the best leader this country has ever had. Before him, this neighbourhood was abandoned. Now we have such good health care that doctors come to our homes on house calls.' He adds quickly: 'This is thanks to our Cuban brothers.'
Now I am sure some of what Juan said was intended for the suspicious-looking character who hung around nearby as we talked, ears flapping, plainly spying for the state.
But some of it was true. The San Agustin slum has been festering on its humid hillside for 70 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything about it. That is why Venezuela's 'democratic' non-socialist political parties are discredited and widely hated.
Chavez has proved that neglect of the poor is not inevitable, he speaks and thinks like them and has used the oil billions to build up an army of followers who will vote for him.
Nobody can claim Venezuela was ever a well-run, fair country. But it does have quite a strong civil society, independent of the state in a way Marxists cannot stand. Press and TV are free. The universities teach without state interference. The government more or less abides by the constitution. Private property is as safe as steel bars, guards and barricades at the ends of wealthy streets can make it.
Yet there is now a dark threat: last year Chavez moved beyond social reform and began to show his very sharp teeth. He began by shutting down the country's oldest TV station, RCTV, because its criticisms had annoyed him. That's when he encountered dangerous resistance for the first time.
It came from people he could not dismiss as plutocrats or supporters of the old regime. His opponents were middle-class students. One of their leaders was Geraldine Alvarez, a 22-year-old who does not look or sound like a would-be politician, but as if she would rather be out at a party. And that is what makes her so dangerous to Chavez. She is not a professional politician, she serves no vested interest and she is immune to all his nasty Bolshevik tactics.
When Chavez said he would close RCTV, she and some friends began a protest. The official TV station censored them. The police attacked their peaceful protests with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.
Geraldine said: 'When we went to the National Assembly and asked for the right of reply, they said we were terrorists and trained by the CIA. They said on state TV that I was mentally ill. But most people did not buy these lies. Poor people in this country view students with sympathy. They could see the placards we carried were home-made, not mass-produced like those of the government.'
Nor did people believe it when Chavez sneered that the students were 'spoiled rich brats', since most came from modest middle-class or working-class homes.
WHEN censorship and smears failed, the regime resorted to the bully tactics familiar in Eastern European countries as they were dragged into communism in the Forties. Supposedly spontaneous 'counter-demonstrators' appeared, hurling stones and bottles at the students – from behind police lines.
Chavez supporters, firing guns, raged through the campus of the main Caracas university. The bullet holes can still be seen in buildings.
'It was so dangerous at one time that we had to wear bulletproof vests,' Geraldine recalls. But they never fell into Chavez's trap, refusing to attack the President personally and ignoring calls from the opposition leaders: 'We said, "We are students, not politicians."'
By this time, Chavez had taken his next step: a planned new constitution that would have abolished the 12-year limit on his term of office, and which many believed would threaten private property.
Geraldine said: 'We stopped people in the streets and on the buses and urged them to read these proposals. We wanted to wake the people up.'
Their courage and determination paid off. Chavez began to lose powerful support among his own oldest friends. General Raul Isaias Baduel, 52, had been a comrade from their early days in the army together, but he resigned as defence minister in protest at the planned constitutional changes. He is now trying to build a new opposition.
The desk in Baduel's office – untypically for a paratroop commander – is covered in books on politics and philosophy.
The table behind it is crowded with Roman Catholic religious images curiously mingled with a Koran and an Israeli army camouflage skullcap. He and Chavez are no longer friends. 'I feel he has cancelled our friendship,' he says. Typically, Chavez was charming at first but later Baduel's bodyguards were abruptly withdrawn and Chavez supporters began to smear him. Baduel's actions, while commanding a paratroop unit based near the capital, saved Chavez from a Right-wing coup attempt in 2002. Yet, in 2007, Baduel accused his old friend of planning what was in effect a coup against the constitution. He says on both occasions he was acting according to the same principle.
Chavez's admirers would also find it hard to dismiss Ismael Garcia, leader of the socialist Podemos party (the name means 'we can'). Garcia shows me a picture of himself at a rally a few years ago, sitting smiling two seats away from his one-time comrade, Chavez. But he, too, has now split with him, refusing to merge his group into the single party Chavez wants, once again using Stalinist tactics from 60 years and 4,000 miles away.
Garcia says Chavez's constitutional reforms would have threatened private property had they gone ahead: 'He proposed the state model that failed in the Soviet Union, in which the state controls everything.'
Together, the student movement, the shortages and the defections of his old allies led to Chavez being narrowly beaten in a referendum on his constitutional changes. Many feared he would ignore the result and go ahead anyway, others suspected he would rig the vote, but with surprising wisdom and patience, he did neither. It is rumoured his old friend Castro called him from his sick-bed to tell him to bow to the verdict and play a long game. So he waits.
He continues to use oil money to buy the backing of the poor and – it is widely believed – arm them against the remote danger of another army coup.
He plans a slow revenge on the students: he is demanding that universities drop their entrance exams so he can pack them with his young, half-educated supporters.
Oil prices continue to climb, so Chavez will be able to buy off most trouble for the foreseeable future. And then?
To reassure supporters and intimidate critics, huge red placards have been placed on high points in the city, bearing those two words 'Por ahora' with which he once before promised to be back.
As the United States weakens and China grows in power, as the victories of the Cold War are frittered away and Russia slides back towards its ancient autocracy, what happened to all those brave hopes that free societies were here to stay and the mad experiments of the 20th Century would never be repeated?
Here we go again, red flags flapping, off to the same old disaster – and fashionable Leftists in the West are applauding, as usual.
March 9, 2013 Comments (75) Categories: 'Democracy' , Cold War , Cuba , Egalitarianism , Elections , Freedom of Speech , History , Propaganda , Venezuela | Permalink
The Guardian interviews me. And some Thoughts in Passing on Cuba and DNA
Readers here may not be regular students of the Guardian newspaper (I'm told this works both ways) so they may be interested in this interview of me by Decca Aitkenhead, which can be found here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/21/peter-hitchens-addiction-drugs-war?newsfeed=true
I much enjoyed meeting Decca Aitkenhead, and will post some thoughts about the encounter here later this week.
A couple of points from the weekend. Now that it is plain that the Castro tyranny was and is an indefensible political slum, I am now asked if I am ,by attacking it, defending the Batista government which preceded it. Obviously not. Why should I? One thing is fairly plain from that era, which is that Batista was nearing the end of his time in power, and was likely to be displaced anyway. Though I would ask any fair-minded person to compare the conditions of Fidel Castro's imprisonment, after his armed revolt against Batista at the Moncada barracks, and Castro's treatment of those who did no more than speak critically of him. I'd also mention that Cuba before Castro was a relatively advanced economy, and that many of the claims of the Castro revolution, notably to have made huge improvements in medical care, are not what they are cracked up to be. Medical care and education in Castro's Cuba are by no means as great as the propaganda claim, and the Communist elite have privileged access to both schooling and medical care, which would surely be needless if things were as good as we are told.
No more do I defend the Tsarist autocracy which ruled Russia before the Bolshevik revolution.
The logic of such questions is that the revolution which they support or defend was the only possible resolution of the problems of the country. I do not think that this was, or generally is, the case. If Russia had had only the February Revolution of 1917, and not the October putsch, it would have been saved from a long nightmare. If Castro had been what the USA believed he was when he was in the Sierras, a democratic rebel, then Cuba might likewise have been saved from much.
I am reasonably chided for disparaging the accuracy of DNA in one post, and saying that DNA evidence is a useful safeguard(though not the only one, nor a wholly reliable one) agianst wrongful conviction in murder trials. I don't think this is inconsistent. DNA seems to me to be more useul in acquitting than it is in convicting. That's why its existence is so reassuring, and another reason why a general DNA register is objectionable. Let it be taken when an accusation is made - that's in our tradition. And destroyed if there is no conviction. That too is our tradition.
But in any case, like all evidence, it cannot be separated from vital traditional protections such as the presumption of innocence, jury trial (with unanimous verdicts) and a free press.
October 22, 2012 Comments (97) Categories: Crime , Cuba , Drugs | Permalink
From Havana to Munich, some thoughts about history
First of all, I was amazed to be challenged by a contributor who doubted my description of Fidel Castro as a 'torturer' . Let's get this over with quickly. Castro is mainly a murderer, his regime having put to death, after appalling summary trials (in some of which 'not guilty' verdicts were actually reversed on the spot with the aid of the mob) or no trials at all, scores of opponents in its early years. The revolting Ernesto Guevara was much-involved in that bloodstained era. Visitors to Havana can still see the bullet scars in the walls of the great prison fortress above the city, where the murders were carried out while Guevara lounged on the walls smoking cigars.
And the recent death of the noble and peaceful dissenter Oswaldo Paya in a peculiar road accident seems to me to be a bit suspicious. Castro (or 'Fidel' as the Left matily insist on calling him) has also been known to lock people up in 'drawer' cells, a form of torture in itself which I will not describe here. Look it up.
But the single best-documented instance of torture under Castro is that inflicted on Castro's former comrade Huber Matos, who sought to resign from that regime in protest at Communist influence. He was imprisoned for 'treason and sedition' for 20 years in 1959. No remission for him. As he recounted, after his release into exile in 1979 'prison was a long agony from which I emerged alive because of God's will. I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word... I was tortured on several occasions, I was subjected to all kinds of horrors, all kinds, including the puncturing of my genitals. Once during a hunger strike a prison guard tried to crush my stomach with his boot... Terrible things.'
Enough? I'm amazed at the free pass that Castro still gets from so many people. Anyone wanting more should look up the treatment given to the poet Armando Valladares, by the funky Cuban maximum leader. .
Now, on to Munich and the book by John Charmley, 'Neville Chamberlain and the Lost Peace'. I think several things emerge from this.
One of the most interesting is that in 1936, Duff Cooper , then a junior war minister, urged that Britain should create a continental-sized army. His idea was over-ruled. At least in this matter Cooper was consistent. The policy which he and the anti-appeasers later followed would have made sense had Britain possessed a large conscript army by 1938. Such an army (though there would always have been a difficulty in getting it on to the continent) was essential if any country wanted to play a serious part in the power politics of the European landmass.
The national government , much influenced by Chamberlain's own tight management of limited funds, chose otherwise. From the beginning of rearmament in 1934, up till the arrival of war in 1939, Chamberlain strongly favoured the Air Force, and to a lesser extent the Navy. There simply wasn't enough money for all three. I should add, though Charmley doesn't go into this, that the Labour Party largely opposed rearmament during this period, claiming to believe that such weapons would be used against the USSR, though it is hard to see how, why or where that might then have happened.
Most British strategists relied completely on the huge and supposedly excellent French Army (in fact a shell, rotten, ill-equipped and badly led, and over-committed to the fatally incomplete Maginot line, which ran out exactly where it was most needed, thanks to the sudden decision of Belgium to become neutral. The theory ran that the French Army stood as an immovable barrier to German attack, and would certainly hold Germany off for long enough for Britain to create a wartime army if needed. Britain didn't introduce military conscription till Spring 1939, a move once again opposed by Labour.
Britain, meanwhile, had its own complete and functioning Maginot Line, known as the English Channel, a defence which proved crucial in the war, and which worked perfectly in deterring attempts to invade our territory.
Chamberlain and his allies chose this course because they saw the main purpose of armed forces as being to protect us from attack, and to defend the Empire in any global conflict.
They didn't envisage a continental war, and they didn't want one. And they were doubtful about the old Eyre Crowe theory (very influential in 1914, to disastrous effect) of the 'Balance of Power' . This idea, often treated by contributors here as a fact, or a gospel, was and remains a theory, that Britain needed a balance of power on the Continent to be secure in herself. Is this true? I am not sure.
Certainly, our efforts to maintain such a balance in 1939 ended up by creating first one wholly unbalanced Europe under Hitler, and then another almost as unbalanced one in which the USSR was only kept in check by US intervention, and we had to hand over our balancing instruments to Washington.
Now we have the German domination which poor dear 'Bert' is unable to perceive, because there isn't a big sign on top of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels saying 'German Empire'. Well, so there isn't. But if he looks at the history of the Bismarckian Empire, which was less tactful about its existence, he'll see that it too was constructed through customs and currency union, by centralisation and standardisation (including standardisation of time, NB) and by regulation.
Back to Mr Charmley. I'm pleased to see that he punctures the absurd myth of Anthony Eden, that terribly over-rated man, who is always given a free pass by standard histories, as if he was in the forefront of the anti-appeasement battle. He wasn't, and was much more concerned about Mussolini than about Hitler . I'm of the opinion that if we had not been scared out of the Hoare-Laval Pact, we might have kept Mussolini from getting too close to Hitler, and so changed the course of events quite a lot. The Anschluss with Austria might have been much delayed. We might not have need to fight for the Mediterranean. But Eden had a sort of 'principled' objection to dealing with such a nasty man.
Like all those who were terribly principled in the 1930s, notably Winston Churchill, he ended up appeasing Stalin instead. And not just appeasing him but being ordered about and humiliated by him.
What Charmley skates over a bit (and which few people discussing the era ever bother to record) is the curious episode of May 1938, when Czechoslovakia claimed that Germany was about to invade her. Then, when no invasion happened, the Czechoslovak President Eduard Benes boasted to the world that he had forced Hitler to back down. Pat Buchanan, in his fascinating 'Churchill, Hitler and the unnecessary War' argues, that Hitler was so enraged by this very public humiliation that he then and there resolved to destroy the Czechoslovak state.
Charmley refers to this event, but nothing like as much as Buchanan does. He does, however, make Chamberlain's behaviour seem a good deal more rational than most historians do, and produces documents to back this up. What was Britain's interest in preserving the artificial and increasingly unstable Czechoslovak state. Was France willing to fight for Prague? No. When Daladier and Bonnet came to London, they were very shifty indeed about what they would do. It was a relic of a French foreign policy dreamed up in more spacious days. Was Moscow willing to fight for Prague? Unlikely. The red Army had just been purged, and the USSR was so hated by Poland and the other East European states that they would never grant the Red Army the right of passage.
It's hard to see what Britain could have done. We had nothing much to fight with, the French were shaky, by the time we'd acted, the Germans would have seized the Czech lands anyway, much as happened after we 'defended' and 'went to war for' Poland a year later.
It would just have been 1939 a year earlier, probably with a neutral USSR. Who knows how it would have ended up, but I can't see how we could have acquitted ourselves particularly well. The anti-appeasers, on the other hand , all manage to look very noble. But in Cabinet discussions, they didn't really have much to offer by way of an alternative. We had armed forces suitable for a defensive war, or for retaliation against air attacks (or so we thought – the bombing planes and tactics turned out to be hopeless when the time came, though the fighters, luckily, were much better) and for holding on to the Empire – but not for a war in Europe. Even then, the navy was stretched far beyond its ability, quite unable to defend our Far Eastern possessions and the home islands at the same time.
As far as I can make out ( and I'm still roaming through specialist volumes on the Polish guarantee) it was Lord Halifax, Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary, who became emotional and sentimental about national pride and standing up to dictators, and who drove the guarantee forward after Hitler's seizure of Prague.
But whichever way you look at it, whoever's account you read, it is impossible to doubt that the Polish guarantee either emboldened Poland into refusing to make concessions on Danzig, or convinced Hitler that war with Poland, rather than negotiation, was the only way to get what he wanted (and that by implication, a partition of Poland with Stalin would be a neat solution). In my view it did both, so hastening the war and ensuring that we would be dragged into it at the worst possible moment. By the way, it also seems pretty clear that the British talks with the USSR were doomed from the start, as we weren't prepared to let Stalin have the Baltic states. No appeasement, there then. I wonder, if we had been ready to do so, whether he would have preferred our offer to Ribbentrop's.
Even worse, we were lashed to France, which wasn't remotely ready to face the revived German army, despite the clear warnings of German tactics provided by the Polish war. The September 1939 declaration of war still looks like a bad mess to me, and one we need to confront, whereas Roosevelt's restraint and delay appears sensible and well-considered.
Yet to this day we laugh at and scorn Chamberlain and his umbrella, and refuse to see that he might have been wiser than we thought. As I have said before, once the floor gives way beneath you, it goes on giving way, again and again until you finally reach the bottom, a disconsolate and bruised bundle covered in splinters and plaster dust, compelled to think thoughts you hate. How much easier it is to refuse to think, and fall back on the Finest Hour or even 'Two World Wars and One World Cup'.
October 19, 2012 Comments (50) Categories: Churchill Cult , Communist Party , Cuba , History , World War Two | Permalink
TV for Gnats ... or 'The Resurrection Men dig up Karl Marx'
I've always liked the expression 'Resurrection Man', used in late 18th-century England to describe the unscrupulous gents who dug up freshly-buried corpses for surgeons in need of subjects for dissection. It has a lovely English robustness and grim humour to it. Does anyone else view the world in quite the same way? And Jerry Cruncher, the bank messenger who supplements his income with a bit of resurrection work (in 'A Tale of Two Cities'), is one of my favourite minor Dickens characters, another being the redoubtable Miss Pross, so wonderfully unlike her French opposite number, Madame Defarge.
But there's really not much excuse for trying to dig up old Karl Marx, who was been weighed down with an enormous and hideous monument to himself in Highgate Cemetery, for 60-odd years (before then, the old man's grave was much less prominently marked). He was an accomplished journalist and an energetic and interesting thinker, but he was profoundly wrong about economics, and his ideas, alas, became the gospel of a very ugly and gangsterish political movement, which blasted the lives and fortunes of millions of people for 70 miserable years, and whose ugly relics and vast graveyards still litter the planet. So why on earth will the BBC give an hour to his memory on BBC-2 on Monday 1st October? I am interested in this project because I am very slightly involved in it. I was contacted several months ago and asked if I would be interviewed about Marx, as an ex-Trotskyist. Given that the BBC is crawling with left-wingers of various sorts, I assumed this was because they felt the need to have a hostile voice. They did, but the trouble was that there isn't all that much to say.
Marx's fundamental error was to assume that there was such a thing as 'capitalism', that is to say that normal economic relations were a specific state of being, out of which humanity could escape by adopting a rather vague alternative known as 'socialism'. I always object, these days, to the very idea of 'capitalism'. It treats remorseless reality as a dogmatic choice. You might as well call weather ' rainism and sunism', as if we had some way of creating and dwelling in an alternative atmosphere which dispensed with the earth's climate as it is, and instead provided perpetual delight, warmth, fertility, plenty and joy (details unspecified, to be supplied after you've handed over state power to me). But not so the BBC. They chose to rank Old Karl alongside Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, as a towering economist of our age. He is to be number three in a series of three 'Masters of Money' on BBC2 at 9.00 on Monday evening. I'm not myself sure that Hayek ranks with Keynes in influence or importance, though he is certainly interesting and original. I tend to think that he (like Keynes, only more so ) has been done in by his disciples, who have made more out of his ideas than Hayek would ever have wished to do.
The same thing happened to Keynesianism under, for example, Macmillan, who went far beyond what the great man himself would have sanctioned. Even the most rigorous economic conservatives have to concede that Keynes engaged practically in the real world, and was often right in his actions because his understanding was so great. But he never pretended, as the Marxists do, to a total understanding of reality. Nor, I think, did Hayek. The trouble with economies is that they are wherever they are when you need to fix them, and are seldom if ever easy to subject to formulae or idealistic solutions. Take our own, just now. A conservative person can do little, because the British economy is so dependent on welfare payments and high taxation that a sudden withdrawal of these things would probably kill it, just as a starving man can be killed by being given what would normally be a healthy square meal. A moral and cultural revolution must precede an economic one. Economics, as Keynes and Hayek( and Marx) knew well is subject to politics, morality, human desire and self-discipline (or the lack of it) habit and tradition. Not to mention the existence or non-existence of the rule of law, the thing which I tend to feel is vital to any truly successful state, and which is itself founded on Christian principles.
But anyway, I found myself sitting on an old chair in a bizarre, almost derelict house in West London which had recently been used as the set for 'The King's Speech', being interviewed on film (though not by Miss Flanders, whose involvement I knew nothing of) about Karl Marx. The result can be seen on Monday evening, two very brief cameo appearances, in which I laugh at the idea of an 'alternative' to 'capitalism', and in which I quote from my book , 'The Rage Against God' that 'Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and you never get there'. Well, better than nothing, but what I had hoped to get across was that intelligent modern revolutionaries see that Marx was in fact a prophet of globalism and of the cultural and moral destruction which is engendered by the race for wealth. That's why they backed the invasion of Iraq and the new multiculti, liberal interventionist, Hillary Clintonised USA. And it's why conservatives like me dig in our heels about closing borders and defending national sovereignty and monoculture. In the words of the old bearded one : 'The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. 'The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.'
And then again :' The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
'It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.'
Spooky, eh, when you think that it was published in 1848? Marx turns out not to have been the prophet of Lenin and Stalin, who hated God, wanted absolute power and needed a pretext for seizing it, but to have been the prophet of the Canton sweatshop, the computer age and the sweeping away of national borders. That is a really interesting subject, and so is the Gramscian cultural and moral revolution which has helped to make it possible, and which has accompanied it. Alas, Miss Flanders's programme (which is crammed with silly parables and games to explain matters to simple minds, and rapid editing, to help any gnats who may be watching cope with their short attention spans. TV for gnats is increasingly common, I find) is much more about whether Marx has anything to say about the current banking crisis. In my view, the answer to that is a resounding 'Nope'. There's also a silly failed joke about how a 'Marxist Broadcasting Corporation' would have reported the events of the last few years, which looks to me remarkably like what the BBC has actually been doing. See for yourselves on Monday evening.
September 29, 2012 Comments (61) Categories: BBC , BBC bias , Cuba , Economics , Egalitarianism , Gramsci, Antonio , Multiculturalism , Political Correctness , Soviet Union , Trotskyism | Permalink
On Missing The Point
In one of his latest comments, Mr Charles writes : 'PH entirely misses my point. I was not arguing for the rights or wrongs of Grammar Schools. I was asking him to tell us how he would sell their reintroduction to the voting public.'
But I dealt precisely, in detail and at length with that issue. I only mentioned the possibility that he really didn't grasp that grammar schools were better, in case this was his problem.
I do sometimes wonder if people such as Mr Charles make any serious effort to read what I write here. For likewise Mr Charles says : ' If PH really believes that those of us on the left believe we have had things "our way" for so long, he is monstrously deluded. Every Labour government since Attlee has betrayed its founding principles.'
But I didn't say the left *believed* it has had things all its own way. I said (emphasis added by me) : 'They *have* had things their way for many years now.'
The Left's strange ability to believe that it is still an outsider rebel faction, far from power, long after it has taken over the establishment, is one of the principal features of the argument I have been making ever since I published 'The Abolition of Britain' (and ever since my critics started not reading it, while thinking that they had) in 1999.
I recall particularly making fun of the fact that the horrible Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, one of the most repressive state apparatuses on earth, has an official radio station called 'Radio Rebelde' (Rebel Radio) . This seems to me to be a good metaphor for the Left's difficulty in taking responsibility for, and taking satisfaction from, its accession to power. A few years ago the editor of the Radio 4 'Today' programme paid me the great compliment of delaying the 8.30 news Bulletin, so that I could continue my debate with Lindsey German, of the 'Socialist Workers' Party', in which I tried (yet failed) to explain to Ms German that she and her comrades had much to be pleased about in modern Britain.
The fact that the Secretary of State for Defence (himself a not-very-apologetic ex-member of the pro-Soviet Communist party) had just quoted Antonio Gramsci in an interview (and only I, of those in the studio, had realised this) seemed to me to be a good example of how it takes an ex-Bolshevik to grasp what's going on. Things have surely changed a bit, if Britain can have an ex-Communist, Gramsci-quoting Defence Secretary.
If The Left don't like the anti-sovereignty, liberal intervention policy of the Blair and Cameron governments, then they haven't understood the founding principles of their own movement. Or perhaps they just don't like the look of the 'abolition of national borders' when they see it being done. Actually this has often been the problem for sensitive leftists.
They will the end of a socialist, secularist, internationalised, egalitarian society – but they dislike the means necessary to bring about this Hell-on-Earth, when they find out in too much detail what they are. The charming Nikolai Bukharin was quite happy for all kinds of repression to be used against non-Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. But he was surprised and shocked when the same thing was done to him by Stalin a few years later, in the same cause.
I can, by the way, think of few British governments of modern times which have fulfilled their manifesto commitments more fully than did the Attlee Cabinet of 1945-51. For better or worse (and often for worse) they did what they said they would do, and did it so thoroughly that Churchill himself didn't dare reverse it in 1951. Similarly, the 1964-70 Wilson government conducted a moral and social revolution of vast dimensions. And the Blair-Brown government likewise hugely expanded taxation and the public sector, shrivelled our national independence, adopted liberal interventionism on a large scale and blanketed the country in political correctness. If, after these three eras of profound change, a leftist person thinks himself betrayed or ignored, then I can only imagine he doesn't understand politics, economics or diplomacy has no interest in culture or morals, or is simply half asleep. But as we see here, there are such people.
One of the many things to be said for my brother Christopher is that at least he is prepared to look the consequences of his beliefs in the face, and acknowledge them as essential to what he desires.
And so he thinks (though he still hesitates over several points).
The problem with most Leftists is that they are in the grip of a dogmatic faith, and therefore cannot think. And so they must twist reality to suit the dogma, for they would be bereft if they had to accept that their dogma is wrong. That is why they all believe this self-serving fantasy that they are poor, sad excluded minority figures, when in fact their ideas dominate the country.
Mr Gibson says ; 'I went to a comprehensive. I achieved straight A grades at A level, went to get a 1st class honours degree, Master's with distinction and a PhD. Stop generalising!'
Two points. In a devalued education system these grades and qualifications do not necessarily mean what they would have meant in a system that was not dependent on comprehensive state secondary schools, and hadn't needed to lower its standards to conceal the decline in quality, as we have done (see John Marks, 'The Betrayed Generation').
Indeed, were Mr Gibson a regular reader here he might know ( see *index*!) that the devaluation of all examinations, all grades , including A levels and University degrees is often discussed. Thus his experience proves nothing. Second, while I have no doubt that comprehensives destroy the educational hopes of many who go to them, some people have such natural gifts, and such strong backing from home, (and attend one of the comprehensives that is less bad, less disorderly and less hostile to learning than the majority) and can therefore obtain a reasonable education in spite of being forced to attend a bad school. It is Mr Gibson who is generalising.
If Mr Wooderson can direct me to research showing that secondary moderns were worse for social mobility than comprehensives, I will examine it and comment on it. I have not heard of it. In fact I am often struck by how little is written about these schools ( some of which, by 1985, were offering A level courses and getting pupils into University) . But I would point out that secondary moderns were not *designed* to achieve social mobility. That was the job of the grammar schools. It would seem to me that you would have to take both sorts of schools together, and compare their joint results with those of comprehensives.
On the question of private tutors, etc, I have no doubt that some parents will always use private tutors. The financial incentive for a parent in a grammar school area is huge. Mr Anthony Blair, for instance, did so, even though his sons were at one of the best state schools in the country. I believe many other socialist politicians do the same, rather than admit that comprehensives are inferior to selective schools. This is only one of many hypocritical actions they undertake, to conceal this truth from themselves and others (a recent edition of BBC Radio 4's 'The House I Grew Up In ', featuring Toby Young's recollections of his education, under the influence of his egalitarian anti-grammar school father Michael, provides an example of this which is both poignant and infuriating).
But if in every area of the country there were grammar places available to between 30 and 40 per cent of children, obtained not by a single exam but by (as I advocate, see *index* !) the German system of mutual agreement between parents and teachers, with second chances at 13 and even 15, I doubt if it would happen very much. I don't think it does in Germany. Perhaps any Northern Irish readers might wish to comment on whether such tutoring is common there. I have no idea. But my guess is that, while it happens, it is not remotely comparable to what goes on in Kent and Buckinghamshire.
Tutoring was not unknown in the days of the eleven-plus, and it will not die out entirely if we reinstate a national grammar school system covering the whole of England and Wales. But the current situation where heavily oversubscribed grammar schools, within commuting distance of the capital, are overwhelmed by demand, is a result of the *abolition* of selection in neighbouring areas, not of its existence where it survives. It gives no indication of the operation of a national selective system. This too has been discussed many times before (see *index* !).
September 1, 2011 Comments (183) Categories: Abolition of Britain , BBC , Being right , Blair, Anthony , Castro, Fidel , Communist Party , Comprehensive Schools , Cuba , Education , Egalitarianism , Exam inflation , Germany , Grammar Schools , History , Labour Party , Northern Ireland (see Ulster) , Russia , Soviet Union | Permalink
Jesus vs Che Guevara: A man who laid down his life for us ... or a murderous 'rock-star' rebel? We know which the Wakefield Cross persecutors will worship this Easter
We now have to be pleased that a man has not been sacked from his job for putting a small cross on the dashboard of his company van. Please forgive me if my joy is muted this Eastertide. The real meaning of the Wakefield Palm Cross Affair is not specially happy.
Colin Atkinson would have been fired if it hadn't been for the might of this newspaper – and the dogged courage of a union official, Terry Cunliffe. Many unions are keen on 'Equality and Diversity' codes, and wouldn't have taken the case.
And as it's Easter, I'd like to focus on the fact that the manager involved, Denis Doody, had a picture (perhaps I should say 'icon') of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara on his office wall.
Interesting. Why? Well, what we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death.
The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day.
The resurrection, which some of us still celebrate today, symbolises the ultimate defeat of cruel and cynical human power by a far greater force. Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged.
Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will.
The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical.
What about the cult of Comrade Guevara, embraced by Mr Doody? It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of 'equality' as a bludgeon to flatten opposition.
Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him. He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution.
One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: 'I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.'
Later, when the rock-star rebel 'Che' was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials.
Guevara's view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. 'Don't drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don't use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.'
There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people's blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others.
Care to choose?
Did Cameron vote for Labour in 1997?
David Cameron said on Friday that it was a good thing Labour won the 1997 General Election, something that a remotely awake media would have blazoned across the sky in vast headlines, but which they buried instead.
His words, spoken in Bedford, were: 'I think we know in 1997 the country needed change.'
Do we know that? Did it 'need' the 'change' it got – 13 years of political correctness, stupid wars, tax and spending? I hardly think so.
Generally, the Prime Minister pretends at voting time that he didn't like the Blair-Brown junta. But if it turned out that he'd voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Mr Cameron, in full election mode, is now banging on (as he would call it if anyone else did it) about drunkards and illegal drug abusers claiming benefits for being drunk and drugged. He doesn't mean it. He regards types like me, who think that you can stop drinking too much if you want to, and that people take heroin because they like it, as horrible reactionary brutes.
But unless you accept that people are fully responsible for their own actions – and modish liberals like Mr Cameron spend half their lives denying this – then the logic leads - inexorably to paying them 'incapacity benefit'.
Likewise his opportunist moaning about judges making privacy law. They do this because Parliament (under his beloved Blair) gave them the power to do it. He knows perfectly well that this is the case.
How can I begin to tell you how much this man and his party do not deserve your support? And how much they laugh at you when you give it to them?
Lewis and a drugs cover-up
The issue of psychobabble versus common sense – linked to the dangers of antidepressant drugs – is increasingly important.
If you think that people are unhappy because bad things have happened to them, and that giving them mood-altering pills is wrong, you find yourself viewed as a heartless monster.
In last week's episode of the occasionally enjoyable TV police series Lewis, the detective, played as an increasingly ill-tempered and crusty figure by Kevin Whately, started out being hostile to a tricky pill-dispensing doctor. So did his funky underling, James Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox.
But the real message was different. Their boss told the younger man: 'You're supposed to be bringing Lewis out of the Stone Age, not joining him there.'
And lo, by the end, the seemingly nasty psychiatrist was revealed to be a saintly and honest character.
I find these days that even asking questions about the huge prescription of antidepressants in modern Britain gets me into trouble. Actually, that's why I keep doing it. The twitchiness of the pill-popping faction suggests they are hiding their own grave doubts.
Mr Parris civilised? I've got news for you
Some of you may have enjoyed my cameo appearance on Have I Got News For You, in which I was filmed sneering lengthily at the presentation of an award to the slippery ex-MP Matthew Parris.
What got my goat was the description of Mr Parris as 'civilised', after he had gravely misrepresented my views on a public platform and refused to make amends for this cheap behaviour. As civilised as a rattlesnake, I'd say.
As the Libya policy goes wrong, the nation's brakes have failed. Where is the high-level criticism? Where the questioning? The Prime Minister was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4's Today programme and even managed to give some (duff) racing tips but, incredibly, was not asked about Libya.
Parliament has not been recalled – did you know that only the Government can do this? The main effect of our intervention has been to prolong a civil war, and the futile carnage in Misrata is largely our fault. Having intervened supposedly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, we may be causing one in Misrata.
The only truly humanitarian course now available is to provide an evacuation fleet to get non-combatants out of that city as soon as possible.
April 23, 2011 Comments (122) Categories: 'Addiction' , Abuse of PH , Antidepressants , Atheism , BBC , Cameron, David , Castro, Fidel , Conservative Party (see also Useless Tories, Tories) , Cuba , Culture , Depression , Foreign Policy , Intervention, Liberal , Libya , Parris, Matthew , Religion , Tories , Useless Tories | Permalink
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Read about the Aakash 2's specifications. The low-cost Android tablet is targeted for students and teachers at engineering colleges in India.
The Aakash 2, an upgraded version of the $35 Aakash tablet, is on its way to being released, based on reports that India's government has approved the device's specifications. The Aakash project has faced repeated delays, and some initial shipments were rejected over conflicting statements related to unacceptable defect rates and non-settlement of payment; as a result, the original Aakash tablet was never made widely available. Since the project was transferred to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay three months ago, there is now software for video lectures, online tests, and an assignment submission system; in addition, students can write software for the Aakash 2 in C, C++, Python, and Scilab.
The Aakash 2 sports a 800MHz processor, a SD card slot, and a capacitive touchscreen instead of the original version's resistive touchscreen. Battery capacity has been upgraded from 2,000mAh to 3,200mAh, which is expected to yield about three hours of usage (the battery life was corroborated by a school director who had early access to an Aakash 2).
The Android 2.2 tablet will be available to students at a subsidized price of 2,263 rupees, or US$39. The goal is to eventually put the tablets in more than 500 engineering colleges in India, with deployment scheduled to start in August 2012.
"Instead of complicating or refining their products, Indian innovators strip them down to their bare essentials, making them affordable, accessible, durable and effective."
"It is well known that 'cost innovation' of this kind requires some iterative process."


text:
* Food Brokerage
* Food
* Tampa
Bay Food Brokerage expands with new Center Store Division
Gary Royal joins company as vice president of sales to grow consumer packaged goods business
By: Bay Food Brokerage
TAMPA, Fla. - Aug. 26, 2021 - PRLog -- Bay Food Brokerage, one of Tampa Bay's fastest-growing companies, has recently expanded operations with the addition of a new division focused on consumer packaged goods (CPG). The Center Store Division will be led by Vice President of Sales Gary Royal, a professional with over 20 years' experience in food distribution.
"Since Bay Food Brokerage was founded in 1993, we've found great success in serving manufacturers of perishable foods," said Cammie Chatterton, owner, president and CEO of Bay Food Brokerage. "The addition of the new Center Store Division broadens our ability to serve existing clients and new clients looking to sell their products in grocery stores throughout the Southeast."
Bay Food Brokerage's new division will work with food manufacturers of consumer package goods, such as non-perishable canned, boxed and bagged foods, and shelf-stable beverages. The company acts as the sales and marketing team, partnering with large retailers like Publix, Winn-Dixie and others, to sell their clients' food products in their stores.
As vice president of sales, Royal will focus on oversight of the new Center Store Division and its team of account executives. He oversees business for CPG and products that involve a food distributor.
Royal joined Bay Food Brokerage with more than two decades of experience in the specialty and natural food industry, including 15 years at KeHE Distributors, where he worked with many key retailers across the U.S. While at KeHE, Royal won numerous sales and leadership awards, and created the Golfing for Kidz charity event to give back to less fortunate children.
Bay Food Brokerage is a true Southeast broker, with very deep knowledge and relationships in this market and a strong investment in the community," Royal said. "We also provide more support to clients – with a large team of both account executives and support staff – than other brokerages I know. Our clients appreciate that commitment to doing what's best for their business."
Bay Food Brokerage has experienced tremendous growth in the past few years. The company was ranked No. 32 on the Tampa Bay Business Journal's 2021 list of fastest-growing companies in the region, ranked by percentage of revenue growth over the past three years.
About Bay Food Brokerage
Bay Food Brokerage is an industry-leading, fast-growing retail food brokerage company based in Tampa, Florida. Working as the sales and marketing partner for hundreds of food manufacturers worldwide, Bay Food Brokerage partners with the largest grocers in the Southeast U.S. to create and enhance opportunities for their clients. Since 1993, Bay Food Brokerage has combined unparalleled personal commitment and unrivaled support with cutting-edge technology to help food manufacturers achieve their goals. Visit https://www.bayfoodbrokerage.com.
Bay Food Brokerage
***@truebluecommunications.com
: ***@truebluecommunications.com
: Food Brokerage
: Food
: Tampa - Florida - United States
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