An Experiment in Socialism

1848,   An Experiment in Socialism

            I am afraid I have fallen somewhat behind in my reading of newspapers, and in a vain attempt to catch up I happened to come across an article in the June 2, 1871 issue of the (New York) World that struck my fancy. This was the time of the Commune in Paris, and the article contained a brief history of  socialism.  They say that history repeats itself, the first time in tragedy, the second time in farce.  In this case farce was already reached by 1848, as can be seen from the following excerpt from that article:

“When the revolution of February 1848 became a fait accompli, it soon became evident that  there was a want of unity in the feelings and purposes of the republicans who had acceded to power. 

One party, headed by Lamartine, desired the republic for its own sake, or at least for the general prospect of good that it held out—these were called the moderate or political republicans.

The other class consisted of those who viewed the republic as a means to an end. Confident that it would come, but weary of waiting for it, they had occupied themselves with the discussion of social questions, the settlement of which they believed would form the first and principal business of the republic when it arrived.”Let others”, said they, “strive in the political arena to bring in the republic. We will assist them when it is necessary to do so, but meanwhile we will rehearse our parts in an imaginary republic of our own.” These were the social republicans. They took part in the struggle but when the fight  was over they stood aloof from their companions and attempted to dictate. “You have done your part, “ they said, “in achieving the republic and now we will show you what to do with it.”

And between these discordant factions the struggle soon commenced. The socialist leaders virtually told their political friends to attend to foreign nations and that they would manage home affairs.

Three decrees were at once forced by them upon their colleagues, and these were: First the adoption of the principal that the state is bound to guarantee subsistence to all its citizens; second, the establishment of national workshops; third, the establishment of a commission to look into the condition of the working-class.   

The National Workshops

The first business of the new republic was therefore the institution of the ateliers nationaux, or national workshops… The number of applicants for admission to these workshops was at once considerable, and more claimants daily poured in, men really in want, (also) the better class of mechanics, clerks, and even professional men, who had held out as long as they could, as well as idle vagabonds of all  sorts who calculated on a franc a day for doing nothing. and finally hosts of workmen from the country who obtained admission by means of forged certificates of residence.

The wages they received at first was two francs a day, if employed, and one franc if not, (which allowance it was after found necessary to decrease.) Unfortunately work could only be found for but a small portion of the men enrolled, and even then some of the labor to which they were sent was of the most useless nature; and thus before many weeks had elapsed a mass of dangerous idlers had accumulated in Paris, and increased daily, the whole number  enrolled on May 16 being 87,942, which total increased to over 100,000 by the end of the month, of which, owing to the difficulty of devising work, not 15,000 were employed, the rest receiving their allowance of one franc a day instead.

The ateliers nationaux degenerated therefore into a mere system of relieving pauperism in disguise, but it would have been imprudent to have told the recipients so, as they had been schooled to believe that what they received belonged to them as a right.

Louis Blanc and the Luxembourg Commission

On the formation of the Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Working Classes,… the position of President was given to Louis Blanc and the sittings appointed to be held at the Luxembourg , the other members (of the government) thus hoping to relieve themselves of the socialistic element in their (own) deliberations. With him was associated Albert the “ouvrier” and other acknowledged socialistic leaders.

In this commission all matters of dispute between workers  and employers were arranged, and in its discussions its president had an opportunity of dilating upon his favorite industrial scheme. On one occasion he committed himself to the essential principle of fraternal communism as expounded by Cabet, namely, that the ideal of society is that in which each man producing according to his aptitude and powers, shall receive according to his wants; and he declared that the vicious civilization of the time, which concealed aptitudes and begot factitious wants, was tending toward that state, and that equality of salaries would be a step in the right direction. On another occasion he told the working-classes, when they were in great distress, that “The means of subsistence during periods of difficulty were wages equal to those enjoyed during prosperity, with a participation of profits” and in the future, “the free exercise of their faculties, the entire gratification of their wants and even their desires-- en fin, the maximum of happiness. “

In the terrible commercial crisis that the revolution had occasioned, and the consequent suspension of all kinds of industry, Blanc and his colleagues at the Luxembourg were beset by the heads of bankrupt establishments, anxious for the state to buy them up and turn them into communist ateliers, or whatever they chose; in short the Palace of the Luxembourg became the depot for all sorts of complaints and the theatre for propounding all manner of visionary schemes.

Theory and Practice

            It is a mistake to credit Louis Blanc with the establishment of ateliers nationaux . In fact he condemned as “an insensate project” those workshops in which all trades were huddled together and set to perform work for which nine tenths of them were utterly disqualified. What he desired were ateliers sociaux—large factories in which persons of the same trade should be employed together and divide equally among themselves the entire profits of their industry.

            The position in which he was now placed enabled him to illustrate his theory by actual example. He therefore, along with his associates, started two industrial associations founded on the principle of equality, the one composed of saddlers, the other of tailors. The result of the experiment among the latter affords  such a curious commentary on the workings of the principle of equality as interpreted by Louis Blanc that we … present it (here).

            The tailors had placed at their disposal the Hotel Clichy, which was converted for the purpose from a debtors’ jail to a great national tailors’ shop, and given (to them) free of rent; in addition the government advanced the necessary capital, without interest, and ordered them to begin with 25,000 suits for the National Guard. The experiment was thus inaugurated under peculiarly favorable circumstances.

            As a preliminary step it was ascertained that the price for which the large tailors of Paris, who employed the bulk of the workmen and undertook government contracts, would require for same would be eleven francs each suit, which sum would include the profit of the master tailor after paying all his expenses. The government accordingly agreed to pay the same price to the new establishment, and 1,500 men were speedily collected and set to work.

            There being, however, no capital wherewith to pay the workmen while the order was being executed, the government advanced daily, in anticipation of the ultimate payment,  a sum equal to two francs per head as “subsistence money,” the balance to be paid and equally divided amongst them on the completion of the order. 

            The workmen were so delighted with the arrangement that, notwithstanding the law limiting the hours of labor to ten, the “glory, love, and fraternity” principle was so strong that they voluntarily worked twelve or thirteen hours a day, and the same on Sundays.

            But the result of the experiment was fatal. The first order was completed each man looked for his share of the gain. The riches of communism and the participation in the profits dazzled the views of the 1,500 tailors who had been content to receive the two francs a day for many weeks; and no doubt everyone in his own mind had appropriated his share of the “balance” and had felt in his own person the combined pleasure of “master and man”,

Eleven francs per dress for so many dresses came to so much. The subsistence money had to be deducted. The balance was to be divided as profit. Alas! It was a balance of loss and not of gain. Subsistence money had been paid equal to rather more, when it came to be calculated, than sixteen francs per dress; in place of eleven, at which the master tailor would have made a profit, paid his rent, the interest on his capital, and good wages to his men in place of a daily pittance for bare subsistence. The result was one of consternation and disappointment. Louis Blanc was not a match for the master tailors of Paris.”

(The “Constitutional Monarchy” of Louis-Philippe of Orleans in which franchise was limited to landholders who represented only one percent of the population, was overthrown in February of 1848 by individuals who represented all the rest of the French population. The leader was Lamartine, who however, gave some powers to the socialists, as described above. The first election under this regime was held in April of 1848, the socialists did very poorly, and the atelier nationaux, which had achieved no success and was  bankrupting the government, was doomed. The socialists attempted a revolution on May 12, and again when that scheme was altered in June (The alteration included drafting  the young unmarried men in the ateliers into the army.) The socialists also rebelled when Louis Napoleon was elected President of the Second Republic, and again when he usurped power and made himself Emperor.  Each time the rebellions were quickly defeated,  though in June with considerable damage to Paris. The Emperor made espousing socialism illegal for the twenty years his reign lasted.)

            It seems that in nature, subhuman creatures often act together as communities for subsistence or defense. Ants and bees do so, and so even do bacteria which form colonies and when threatened by the incursion of rival colonies the colonies somehow arrange to lob antibiotics at those rivals. But such creatures tend to do so without central direction, since usually they have no means of direct communication with a center, acting as a sort of distributed communication network and distributed action network as well.

            Human beings on the other hand find it almost impossible to understand the functioning of distributed networks, and find it much easier to imagine that centrally organized systems, though foreign to nature, can be made to be optimally efficient. Louis Blanc was neither the first nor the last to believe that the  concept of organization of industry that flowered in his brain would be superior to that which had evolved over time without him. The same human beings who are incapable of understanding how lowly bacterial colonies are able to produce and deploy antibiotics hope and expect to provide, out of their own brains,  rules for centrally controlling human populations (whose members are vastly more complicated than bacteria are) numbering in the hundreds of millions, more efficiently than those populations would function if left alone without them to their distributed networks.  The ludicrous failure of Blanc’s tailoring adventure provides a perfect model of the typical fate of such schemes and the same result is repeated with monotonous regularity every time such things are attempted.

           

           

Bridge to Nowhere

The Bridge to Nowhere

Every commentator on current events who mentions “the bridge to nowhere” seems to consider it a term of derision, an example of folly and an example of a boondoggle: a useless project aimed at spending other people’s money on something to benefit your supporters.

Actually this is all wrong. The fact is that any new building project replaces existing unused space with something that one hopes will be useful in the future. For example, suppose you decide to build an apartment house on a vacant lot. Before it is built, nobody lives on that lot. Would it make sense to call this “housing for nobody” because no person now lives there?

Consider a factory built to be able to manufacture a new product. Before it was built nothing was manufactured on that space. Does that make the proposed factory “ a building for nothing” since nothing is made there now? since the product to be made in it is new would it be a “factory for building nothing”?

Consider building a new road on a new route (like our interstate highways were built not that long ago). Should they have been considered roads for no one since nobody ever drove through the woods and fields that their routes replaced?

In all cases, building projects, road projects, bridge projects and whatever are designed to handle the needs and desires of the future, not those of the past or present. So the famous bridge to nowhere, which was proposed to link a town in Alaska to an (almost) uninhabited island should be judged that way. That town sits on a fjord with a barely populated island off its shore (described as nowhere because it has essentially no present use) should be judged as a project not by the present use of the island, but by its future value to the town if the bridge is built.

If the town is overcrowded, has pressure for expanded population, and its location prevents expansion on the land side, this bridge might open up a natural solution to that problem. (There are others, such as building bigger structures on the mainland which can compete with it, so it may not be the best solution.) But the value of the project depends on assessment of the future use of the bridge once built, and the future population and development of the island which would be made possible by construction of the bridge.

Only a fool judges the value of a building project by the use of the space involved before the project was built.

These facts do not imply that the project is a valuable one, worth pursuing. Assessing its value depends on our making future projections, which like all future predictions are far from certainties. And I have more faith in proposed building projects in which private entities risk their own money than in those proposed for public financing which we pay for.

The interstate highway system is, in general, an extremely valuable resource and well worth its public financing.

On the other hand, there are many government financed or subsidized projects that have turned out to be disasters. For example, when I was young, pundits blamed slum conditions on rapacious slumlords. The government tore down the slums, and replaced them with expertly designed “projects” of housing for the poor. (No housing there existed just before these were built so they were housing for nobody, but poor people had lived there before, so that depending what your base time is, you might disagree with that designation.) Most of these have turned out to be worse as housing than the slums they replaced, and many have been torn down.

In my town a large high school costing tens of millions of dollars was built thirty or forty years ago but was recently replaced by another (a school for nobody until the old one was torn down) that cost hundreds of millions, because of the failings of the old one. Private housing here seems to last several times longer than that old school did.

There are some significant problems about the “bridge to nowhere” project that are hard to handle. Federal financing for the bridge means we all would pay for it. But its benefits would accrue to only a small fraction of us, namely the future inhabitants of that town. And among these, there is an even smaller set of beneficiaries who would gain the most, namely the owners of property on that island.

It is perfectly natural for each of these groups of people to plan such a bridge and to advocate its construction and support for it and to lobby for same. However it is not right if the Congressmen or state legislators who vote on subsidies for such a venture either are relatives of those who own property on the island, or received campaign contributions from these groups and at the same time produce bills for public financing of this building project. That is corruption and evidence for it would make it improper to proceed with the project.

It would be far better to finance the project somehow based on future tax revenues on developments on the island, and on a toll on the bridge rather than as a gift from the whole country to the town. If money could be raised today based on projections on what could be taken in by such revenues in the future sufficient to finance it, though it is a bridge to nowhere, it would obviously be a worthwhile project.

A Life at Nagasaki Saved by the A-Bomb

Whenever someone tells you a story, no matter who it is, you must greet it with some skepticism. When that story comes from someone who you have come to know fairly well, who has no axe to grind, who is sober, hard working, reasonable, and honest in his dealings with you, you tend to believe whatever the story is. Perhaps I am gullible, but I believe this story. It is too strange to be made up.

I will first tell you what I know about its author, Peter (or is it Pieter) Vanderkeyl (please pardon the spelling if it is wrong). Back around 1980 or so we decided to have our basement refinished, and a friend recommended Mr. Vanderkeyl, who was a carpenter and contractor in Belmont, Massachusetts, for this job . Peter was at least in his 60’s and worked with his sons, who had various skills. We engaged him for this project, and he completed it for us in the next year.

During that time, we got to know Peter quite well, and came to consider him a friend. A bit later he had a severe heart attack on our back porch, My wife immediately called 911, response came within two or three minutes, and his life was saved, but this is irrelevant to the story.

During the period of this construction, we got to learn something of his history. In 1941 he was in the Dutch army, serving in the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia, I believe on the island of Java. When this area was captured by the Japanese in 1942 Peter became a prisoner of war. He was first held in Thailand, or Burma and then, I believe in 1944, was transported to Japan, where he was held in a prison camp in Nagasaki. He was there when the bomb was dropped.

He told us that prisoners of war held by the Japanese were not very well fed, and by the time of liberation in August of 1945, his weight was down to eighty some pounds. Since he was well over six feet in height, he must have been quite emaciated at that time. He told us that he believed that he could not survive much longer in the prison camp. In fact, he said that he could not have survived at all, if the bomb had not dropped and the war continued. As it was, he spent a considerable amount of time in a hospital recovering his health after the liberation.

He recounted only one story about his confinement as follows. As he came closer and closer to starvation, he became willing to do anything at all for food. The commander of the prison camp had a cat, and Peter became very close to that cat. He played with it, fussed over it, and loved it more than anyone else. Then one day, when he had the opportunity, he killed the cat, skinned it, cooked it and ate it. The commander was furious that the cat disappeared and made great effort to locate the villain who caused that disappearance. Peter told us he was saved because he was the person least suspected, because of his great love for the animal.

In Nagasaki, as in all Japanese cities, when American warplanes approached, alarms were sounded, and people were urged to go into air-raid shelters, where they would be protected from the effects of bombs. This was true in the prison camp as well. This was not so much to protect the prisoners, but the guards and staff had to be protected, and one could not prudently leave the prisoners alone in the open, with all the guards in shelters, so there was a shelter for prisoners as well.

One of the unexpected tragedies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, was the large civilian loss of life. This came about from a quirk in the bombing plans. In order to protect the bombing airplane from the expected blast, the bombs were dropped by parachute, and the planes had left the area of the attack before the explosions took place. When the planes arrived, most people entered air-raid shelters. But when the planes departed, the all-clear signals sounded, and the people emerged from the shelters to go about their business. And the bombs exploded with the streets full of people who had just emerged from their shelters. Most of them died.

In the prison camp, the all-clear sounded for the guards, and they came out of the shelters, but by amazing luck, they had not gotten around to letting the prisoners come out of their shelter when the bomb went off.

So Peter and the other prisoners remained in their shelter waiting for the signal permitting them to emerge. That signal never came. Instead, the guards, the camp and everything around it disappeared, destroyed by the explosion.

The bomb went off in the morning, and the prisoners, not knowing what to do, stayed in the shelter for hours, awaiting a signal that would permit them to leave.

Eventually, hunger and thirst propelled them to come out, and they discovered the devastation that had taken place above ground. They wandered about, wondering where to find food, where to go, what to do. After some time, they discovered a railroad train, intact, on a track leading out of the dead city. There were people of all skills among the prisoners, and they were able to get the train going, and run it down the track to the next town.

One can hardly imagine the consternation of the officials in that next town when the train arrived. They must have seen the mushroom cloud, have lost all communication with Nagasaki, to find, many hours later that the first contact with the city was a train full of mostly Caucasian living skeletons.

Fortunately the prisoners were able to obtain food and shelter from those officials, and liberation came a few days later. So Peter claimed as only the prisoners can: they were present in Nagasaki when the bomb went off, and it is very likely to have saved their lives!

The rest of Peter’s story is short. After recovery, he returned to the East Indies, married a local girl, and returned to the Netherlands. He or they decided to try their luck in the United States, and he did so, has led a full and productive life, and has ended up in Belmont. He may be still alive, but would be pushing 90 if so.

Posner on Blogs and the Media

Instapundit recently pointed out a NY Times article by Richard Posner on this topic.

Is this the distinguished Richard Posner or some impostor? Is he pulling our legs or is he serious?

The NY Times article by Posner on blogs and the decline of the Mainline Press at first seems exactly what you would expect when a distinguished person is asked to write on a timely topic. You find a judicious summary of everything you know about the subject and nothing at all that you did not know.

But there are some quirks to it. Here are some.

Posner seems to believe in the strange theory that competition produces polarization.

He also claims to believe that the press serves up pap and issue-free political comment because that is what the public wants. Only very few intellectual types, like himself, prefer a lively discussion of issues; or so he says.

And he confuses various definitions of the word “liberal”.

Now Posner is a very smart individual, and he knows that if you want to convert people to your views, you must convince them that you have listened to their arguments and are sympathetic to them. And I think he sees his audience as readers of the NY Times, who are familiar with the “liberal” views on issues and have to hear these from him else they will respond with them. And, to be sure he ends up skewering the Main Stream Media, so perhaps his approach, in a lawyerly way, is the best approach, if you want to change minds.

But still, some of his comments are hard to swallow.

First, does the New York Times, or the Washington Post really have intense competition that has polarized it? As far as I can tell, the Times and the Post and the Globe in Boston, and so on, were the only “quality” “intellectual” papers in their locations, and what competition they might have in the “quality” market is mainly from one another. Most other markets have exactly one large circulation newspaper, if you can call it that.

So attributing their behavior, which has been almost uniform in this group, to competition is a bit odd. But competition, far from producing polarization, brings competitors to converge. Are Walgreens and CVS grossly different from one another? Do supermarkets give up niches to their rivals, or do they all look more or less alike? And automobile makers: do they really split up markets and make cars recognizably different from one another?. Republicans never give up at trying to attract black voters, because they want all the votes they can get. They compete everywhere.

The idea of serving a niche audience is the idea of not competing for all potential readers.
It is based upon desire to avoid competition, to allocate markets between rivals rather than compete. In politics it is chracteristic of parties that represent a point of view, not parties that want to compete for votes from everyone.

I would attribute the polarization of the main stream media to complacency and entrenched political views, in particular the radicalized “liberalism” of the anti-war movement of the 1970s. In fact you can more fairly ascribe it less to “competition” than lack of competition, which allows the decision makers to ignore the wants of their customers.

Of course polarization of the press has been around for centuries, but originally newspapers were mostly creations of political parties, subsidized by them.

This does not explain the same left wing bias in TV networks that one finds in the main stream press. Here competition has led to almost perfect convergence in viewpoints among network news. And it is there that the vapidity and idea free coverage of news reaches its apogee.

Is this because that is what the public wants? The dramatic development of blogs which argue ideas, and which sniff out news developments buried by big media indicates that it is not and was not what the public wants. The development of blogs (and of the Limbaugh phenomenon) suggests, contra Posner, that there is a vast audience for idea based political argument.

Posner seems to adopt the cynical view that everyone always pursues his own interest and his own prejudicial views. He begins by accepting the notion that the main stream press, through elaborate process, checks reports meticulously and carefully while bloggers routinely lie and spread false rumors (presumably to further their causes), or at least are free to do so.

From my limited readings, I find almost the reverse. Certainly there are bloggers who write nonsense and purvey it. One quickly learns to read them (if at all) only for amusement at their folly. Most of us have the capacity to judge the reliability of a source from its past record. And many bloggers pride themselves on their honesty and integrity and are quick to point out errors that they have made. And comments by readers convey many different points of view and reactions to claims in the blogs.

The media, on the other hand, love sensation, rarely and only grudgingly admit errors, and are extraordinarily tendentious in their choices of what is newsworthy.

The great accomplishment of the press in the Viet Nam era was to convert the terrible defeat that the Viet Cong received in its Tet Offensive, into a victory for them, through tendentious reporting.

The mainstream media seems intent on doing something similar in the present conflict.

Is Posner aware that the management of corporations that own networks pride themselves on not interfering with editorial matters on their news broadcasts? Their own political orientations then have little or nothing to do with biases of the networks.

Does he remember the scandal of the faked demonstration of cars catching fire that a network flogged on 60 minutes or some such program, slandering an automaker? He insinuates that media would never do such things to big advertisers.

The word liberal at one time connoted someone who favors liberty and freedom for individuals. For a liberal in that sense to push for censorship would indeed be surprising. But today the word is used to describe the left wing of the Democrats. These are a mélange of Maoists (like one of Clinton’s cabinet members) Stalinists, Fidelists and the like, whose affinity for political correctness and for the suppression of any non pc speech is by now considered normal. What on earth can Posner mean by the comment

The argument for filtering is an argument for censorship. (That it is made by liberals is evidence that everyone secretly favors censorship of the opinions he fears.)" [Non-liberals, I suppose, in their hearts aspire to make the arguments we hear from “liberals.”]

And consider these gems:

"The mainstream media do not kick sacred cows like religion and patriotism."[I suppose Posner is too busy with his judiciary work and his thinking about deep issues to read the mainstream media, and I cannot blame him for that. But if you don’t read it, why comment idiotically on its supposed content?]

"The limited consumer interest in the truth is the key to understanding why both left and right can plausibly denounce the same media for being biased in favor of the other." [Advocates for Castro or crazy Kim or for restoration of Saddam Hussein will plausibly find our media far to their right; most of us plausibly consider it to our left. Is Posner speaking as a typical consumer here? Does he have access to information on consumer interests unknown to us?]

"The critics describe the attack (by the Swift Boat people) as consisting of lies propagated by the new right-wing media and reported as news by mainstream media made supine by anxiety over their declining fortunes." [That he quotes such comments suggests Posner is out of touch with reality. I never saw reports of the Swift Boat people in the main stream media, and their attacks consisted of very powerful commercials which most big media refused to air. One of the most powerful of these commercials consisted mainly of a tape of a speech by Kerry from many years ago.

"(They [conservatives]) would prefer that American abuse of prisoners be concealed." [Posner shows an interesting opinion of the integrity of conservatives here.]

"It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather's mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like "60 Minutes II" who have to be consulted." [Posner is a busy man, so I guess we can excuse him for not reading the report of the CBS investigation of the incident]

"So a newspaper that appeals to liberal readers will avoid exposés of bad behavior by blacks or homosexuals" [as the NY Times did the bad deeds of Stalin in the 1930s. Naturally this is no reflection on its integrity.]

"Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat veterans." [Neither the media nor the Kerry campaign deigned to comment on the Swift Boat veterans claims, as far as I can tell. I wish Posner would point out these errors to me, because I have been trying to find them myself. Ah! I guess copying that Kerry tape could be considered an error. How embarrassing!]

"Only members of the intelligentsia, a tiny slice of the population, deliberate on public issues."

I suppose then, that it is Posner’s belief that the rest of us poor slobs outside this tiny group should stop blogging and leave all decisions to these our betters. Perhaps voting should be restricted to the intelligentsia?

There is something charmingly quaint and dated about the attitudes Posner displays here. He manages to impart the notions that the hoi polloi, the non-intelligentsia conservatives, have no interest in ideas, lack integrity, have little interest in truth, and have an attitude toward censorship comparable to that of Stalinists. This is exactly what “liberals” think of the American rabble. If he were describing Jews instead of conservatives it would be appropriate to consider him an Anti-Semite. Here it supplies him with the credentials of being a member of the intelligentsia himself. Does he really need such credentials?

vieuxbois

vieuxbois
Flushing the Koran


Yet another media scandal has erupted.
This one is stranger than most. Unfortunately it has cost some loss of life, though exactly how is yet unclear.
Otherwise, and it is a stretch to allow an otherwise here, it has many comic elements.

Some person or persons at Newsweek decided to write about “torture” at Guantanamo. They found a source who fed them some stories, which claimed that an official investigation had found some peculiar instance of torture: namely, that some person had flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet apparently to torture a prisoner.
They checked this report by asking two government officials, they say. One had nothing to say, and the other had nothing to say about this, but also denied something else.

The lack of an explicit denial by this official was deemed sufficient confirmation that this tale of torture was true, and a report was published,

A Mr. Khan, a Pakistani former cricket star, and recently appointed President of Bradford University in the UK was angered at this news, and made a rabble rousing speech about it which he circulated to lots of Afghani and Pakistani Imams, who duly excited riots all over their countries, which led to upwards of 15 deaths.

This story suggests several questions:
1. Can one really flush a koran down a toilet without clogging it?
2. Are thuggish terrorists really tortured by the sight of a urine soaked koran?
3. Does any American really believe this?
4. If so, did it occur to anyone at Newsweek that many similar thugs might be tortured by a report of this?
5. Is lack of an explicit denial sufficient confirmation to verify a story?
6. Is the rabble rousing Mr. Khan really a suitable President for a British University?
7. Is rioting and killing an acceptable reaction to an insult to one’s religion?
8. Is your failure to accept Islam as your religion not an insult to Islam, and in fact one that is far more material than your treatment of any koran?

The fundamental principle that distinguishes civilized folk from everyone else is the golden rule. And the way to assure that others adhere to the golden rule is to treat others the way they treat others.

I am told that Saudi Arabia confiscates and destroys bibles that they find foreigners bring into the country. Yet they seem to find destroying a koran to be a proper ground for hatred and riot.

One has to wonder, why we accept this? One reaction might be to commission some modern “piss mohammed” for our museums. Alternatively, one could confiscate and destroy all korans belonging to Saudi’s entering this country.

Neither of these activities is acceptable to most of us. But to ignore the gross intolerance of Moslems while making exaggerated efforts to avoid insulting Islamic symbols (and doing nothing whatever of a similar vein with respect to other religions) is in effect to establish Islam as the official religion of the United States. Is this our response to gross thuggishness by Moslems?


Another thought:
The word torture is usually used to refer to the infliction of physical pain.
Yet Newsweek saw fit to describe mistreating a Koran as an act of torture presumably approved by the government of the United States.
To me it is quite a stretch to consider this torture. But if it is, it is mental torture, and mental torture affects anyone it comes in contact with. If it is torture, it is like an acute poison, like anthrax.
If one thinks this is torture, then to disseminate it to the world is a crime, on the level of sending around anthrax. It will torture every susceptible individual who comes in contact with it.

Disseminating it is exactly equivalent to crying fire in crowded theater. This I recall is the standard example of a case in which freedom of speech goes beyond its limit to become crime.

That Newsweek saw fit to publish this suggests that it considered the alleged Koran flushing to be torture. That it based its report on an unsubstantiated rumor since retracted by one anonymous source, is low and ugly, but quite on a par with current journalistic standards as exhibited by Dan Rather. Eason Jordan, etc. But to send the fumes of this alleged torture out to upset millions, this is truly loathsome.

Hundreds of race riots, pogroms, and lynchings have been caused by the spreading of similar reports, in the Twentieth Century.

Of course Newsweek didn’t do this unaided. The BBC reports that the new president of Bradford University in the UK seized on the story and gave a rabble rousing speech about it, which he disseminated to radical imams throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Purposeful incitement to riot: Another elegant test of the limits of free speech, by a British academic official at a government run university!.) This was just what they wanted to make trouble, to flagellate their followers into riot and death.

This is true Dada journalism. Will Isakoff get a Pulitzer for it?
Perhaps it should be hailed as a new art form!

They say that once a wild animal attacks and kills a human being, it finds the act enjoyable, and tends to repeat it, and the animal has to be put away.

I hope that Isakoff, having killed his man (men really), does not develop a taste for it.

The Ward Churchill Flap

The Ward Churchill flap is a sad commentary on our Academic world, and the kind of person who becomes involved in administration in this world.

First it seems that Mr. Churchill, who is a pretended Native American, according to those who should know about these things, apparently was given a professorial position by those who believed he was one. This was despite his lack of a doctoral degree, and the lack of a department with any desire to make this appointment. The charitable view is that it was a scheme of administrators, hoping to show their devotion to hiring Native Americans; unless of course it was a scheme by radical leftist administrators to bring a friendly advocate to their campus.

Recently Churchill managed to enrage lots of people by calling the victims of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 “little Eichmanns” who well deserved being murdered, without any process, let along the elaborate due process afforded to the original Eichmann.

This earned Churchill some attention. A number of people who had ignored him or been unaware of his existence, decided to take a look at him.

Some were appalled by what they found. He has been accused of selling artwork he claimed to have created, which were direct copies of the works of others. He has been accused in the past of quoting authors of writing the exact opposite of what they actually did write. Many soon convinced themselves that he was a fraud and a quack and a disgrace to any associated with him.

The administrators, who had been fooled into hiring him, or their successors, took a Rather-different approach. They proclaimed their loyalty to him and accused their critics of trying to violate his free speech and Academic Freedom. After all, had he not made himself known by his statements nobody would have bothered noticing his frauds and dishonesties and his whiteness, and thus their foolishness, and there would be no pressure to dismiss him.

Still others were delighted to find him. Among these was the noted left wing TV political wit (well at least part of one) Bill Maher. Maher decided to give Churchill the opportunity to expand on his views by interviewing him on his TV show. Some felt that this was unusually bad taste on Maher’s part, and Maher’s behavior during the interview did have elements that only a left wing kook could love.

But Churchill’s appearance was actually comical despite Maher’s efforts to turn it into liberal self-hatred and cranky anti-Americanism.

Comical, you ask?

Yes!. Churchill revealed the reason for his condemnation of the inhabitants of the Trade Center who died. It seems they were involved in efforts to promote international trade, and in particular, to export good American jobs to foreign shores. This was their crime, and the janitors and clerks who helped them, and police and firemen who tried to save them were guilty of aiding and abetting them in this horror. And so, according to Churchill, they all deserved the summary execution without trial that they received.

And Churchill insisted on this point despite all of Maher’s efforts to divert him to condemning the importation of slaves from Africa and being to violent in war and such like sins.

Apparently Churchill is not concerned with the poor and downtrodden; certainly the impoverished people abroad who improve their lives by taking on the exported jobs are considerably worse off financially than those who lose the jobs in this country; and the losers are Americans. So he is not motivated by concern for the poor and downtrodden. One wonders how all Americans can be guilty of capital crimes merely by helping poor people abroad at our own expense.

There are only two possible explanations for Churchill’s view: one is that he is a radical chauvinist, who cares not a whit for the people in Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Korea, China, Thailand, Viet Nam, and so on, who have risen to prosperity from these exported jobs. To Churchill, doing something that helps them (and in fact helps our economy and our people as well) is a capital crime, because it hurts some Americans. Never mind that economists tell us that it is beneficial to Americans as well.

The second is that he views our economic dealings with these foreign nations as evil in itself. We are, in this view exploiting the foolish individuals who take the jobs offered to them. Offering jobs to people who do not have them (or who have worse jobs) is a crime against nature. It is one because it benefits us as well, and it benefits the evil ones among us such as those who worked at the Trade Center. This, you see, makes it evil.

This view may seem strange to you, but it is entrenched at most American Universities. It is called Marxism. You see, according to Marx, all economic activity is exploitative, and therefore all those engaged in it are evil. You might think this would exclude the workers, such as those actually at the Trade Center, who are presumably also being exploited (like those Mexicans, Chinese and Vietnamese who would be so much better off without jobs). Apparently not. Do not attempt to follow the logic of it, since there is none. Foreign trade is just plain evil. Countries that avoid it, like Burma and North Korea, are the only truly happy societies.

Now be honest, isn’t this comical? That a grown person in this world, a respected professor at what I had thought was a leading American university, can pride himself on proclaiming such things, and be supported by a large number of colleagues (who seem to agree!) . You have to laugh or cry. I’d rather laugh.

But Maher may have a problem on his hands. I dimly recall a Massachusetts law that makes it a crime to exhibit freaks or midgets or otherwise handicapped persons for profit. I hope for his sake that no such law can be applied to this program.







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the eason jordan story

The Eason Jordan story is a strange one.

Some richly endowed organization decided to invite prominent people from all over the world to an all expense paid week-long boondoggle in Davos, Switzerland, a posh ski-resort in the Alps.

All sorts of folk were invited and many accepted. The meeting consisted of many discussion sections, on all sorts of issues, great food, great accommodations and some opportunities to ski.

Eason Jordan (a high official at CNN), Chris Dodd, the Senator from Connecticut, Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Representative, David Gergen, and many many others attended, and in particular attended a session that somehow concerned reporting in Iraq and its dangers.

Some one, in a talk or discussion, noted that some 65 journalists (or reasonable facsimiles to journalists) have been killed in Iraq in recent years, even without actually being targeted.

Eason Jordan knew better than that. Jordan has gone on record to state that when Saddam Hussein was in power, CNN suppressed news unfavorable to him, to avoid having its employees harmed by his minions, or expelled from the country. And CNN profited mightily from this policy, which led to the famous Arnett reports from Bagdad during the first Gulf War.

But not everyone approves of this policy. It is natural that given a conflict between sides A and B, in which representatives of side A will kill you or yours if you report the truth, and side B gives you the freedom to publish anything, you will be tempted to bend the news in the direction of side A out of mere prudence. The downside is that by doing so you become an agent of side A and a coconspirator with A in suppressing truth and flogging propaganda for side A.

Thus, by going down this path, a news agency becomes a partisan, and in most cases a partisan of terrorism. After a while the agency becomes a recognized partner in terror and carries around with it the stench of Hades. Reuters and the BBC have wallowed in this role in reportage from Israel and Palestine. CNN has been the biggest representative of this path in Iraq.

Perhaps Eason has a conscience, and has depressed even himself with his pro-terrorist policies. In any case it obviously has weighed heavily on his mind that his ‘journalists’ can be and are targeted by terrorists, and his own people would be targets if his policy of serving terrorists was changed.

So when he heard someone claim that the 65 deaths did not involve targeting, he objected. (Think of it this way: if those deaths were all mere accidents, and neither side targeted anyone, his entire policy, his Hellish odor, was sprayed on himself for no reason at all.)

He felt he had to say that terrorists do target journalists that disagree with them or publish truths about them. But as he said it he realized to himself that his very statement violates his own rule! To say that the terrorists target journalists is of course to state the truth, but will that not cost him a murdered reporter or two?

In mid claim Eason saw that he had to neutralize or defuse his comment before it exploded in the face of one of his agents.

So he embellished, claiming that both sides targeted journalists. The terrorists could be miffed about the truth concerning them, but they would be placated by his calumny against the United States.

Alas, his audience included few terrorists, and several Americans, who were fascinated by his charges. They asked for evidence for our targeting journalists, and demanded details. I suppose that Eason had assumed that his audience was friendly and would accept his remarks without question.

Since the Americans in question were Democrats, and rather leftish Democrats at that, this did not seem an unreasonable assumption.

A Republican might guess that Frank and Dodd pushed on Eason in the hopes of his revealing some new Abu Ghraib-like incident that they could use to launch a new attack on Bush and his policies. But for whatever reason, pursue him they did, and poor Eason was forced to defend his weird balancing afterthought, which was something he could not do.

Eason was on the horns of a dilemma; he could take back his comment and risk his hard earned (and dishonorably earned) reputation as an agent of terrorism; or hold to it blindly and stubbornly. He tried the latter, but failed.

All he could come up with is the claim that a soldier had kicked one of his reporters off a line waiting to do something or other, because he didn’t like his (pro-terrorist?) report on something. It does seem a bit of a stretch to call that purposely killing an individual because he is a journalist. So Eason satisfied nobody at all.

And that would have been that. Few in the audience cared much about the exchange. An American reporter invited to the conference who has recently worked in Israel (Stephens) found Eason’s comment no different from standard news service nonsense about Israel and was unimpressed by the whole thing, as he commented in the Wall Street Journal.

And then a very strange thing happened. Though there was essentially no significant press coverage of the incident, the story began to circulate on the internet and recirculate and reverberate and soon millions of Americans became aware of it. And they could become aware in remarkable depth. The quoted comments of Dodd and Frank and Gergen and Stephens were parsed and picked on in detail; details of each of the 65 cases of dead journalists were published. Eason’s former comments about his willing subservience to Saddam Hussein, the obvious pro-terrorist bias in current CNN reports, and echoes of the prostitution of the New York Times reporter (Duranty) during the 1930’s famine in the Ukraine appeared. There was an illustrated blog about an attractive female employee of CNN who, it was said, had been singled out for perhaps unwanted attention by certain members of the US military. After a week or two even the press began to notice.

And just then, Eason resigned from CNN!

Poor Eason! If he had been quizzed by Republicans he could have called it McCarthyism. If Stephens and the Wall Street Journal had piled on he could have inveighed against pro-Israel bias. But he was done in by left-wing Democrats, and treated kindly, if truthfully, by Stephens!

He never conceived that falsely accusing Bush’s myrmidons of misdeeds in front of left-wing Democrats is like bleeding in front of a shark. They will rip you to pieces trying to extract an impeachable truth from you. Let that be a lesson to you.