Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The Chinese sailed the ocean blue in in 1421. Yes, that's what the book says. In this case, the book is 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, the author is Gavin Menzies, and since its publication in Britain last November, more than 200,000 hardback copies have been sold. Can't argue with those numbers now, can you? Here's an excerpt:

"?On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was 'to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas' and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe.

When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans?"

AMAZING STUFF. OK, some people say it's rubbish, er, conjecture, but that's to be expected. Doubt and jealousy are everywhere. Along with being a surprise seller, the book has created waves via its website, and I'm grateful to the Barcelona-based economist Edward Hugh for alerting me to this fact. By the way, as well as watching the numbers, Edward is the indefatigable author of the blogs Bonobo Land, Deflation Update, Japan Economic Info, China Economy Watch, Euro Watch and Italy Economic News. Does he ever sleep? And here am I thinking that running one blog and posting every day without fail was some kind of achievement. Ah, well.

So, where were we? Right. The book and its site. Well, what Edward noted while surfing the 1421 site was that an astonishing 16,000 message posts were sent in the first weeks with the result that the system collapsed. Menzies and his gallant crew were drowning in information so they trimmed sail, so to speak:

"Preparing the paperback will be very time consuming: the team will have to cut down on all extraneous activities, and sadly this includes the monitoring and recording of the message board, which has developed into a talking shop, doubtless of interest to the participants but not in the majority to the author. As a result, it is with regret that we inform you that we will be closing the message board until further notice."

This got Edward thinking about the advantages of distributed versus centralised networks. He noted:

"Obviously somewhere in all those mails there may be some interesting material, the problem will be finding it. In this sense I feel the weblog system of steady on-going message circulation represents a huge leap forward for the knowledge development and R&D process."

He's onto something here, and the growing buzz about blogs being used in business for project management and other collaborative tasks suggests that distribution is the key concept. More about this from me at a later date. Probably after my trip to the BlogTalk conference in Vienna at the end of May.

Diarist of the day: Siegfried Sassoon, 30 April 1925

"Talking (or being talked to) by Clifford Sharp after my club dinner, I put out one of my modest antennae in search of reassurance after the art of keeping a journal. But the editor of the New Statesman pooh-poohed the idea of any modern diary being important as literature. 'Pepys is the only existing masterpiece; there are no other diaries. And Pepys is great because he was that rarest thing, a man who could write and was a the same time a simple-minded man.' This rather dashed me, though he doesn't know that I am a diarist, and is probably unaware that I am somewhat simple-minded. I'd merely suggested that a modern diary might be more interesting to posterity than most modern novels."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 30 April 2003 at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was asked recently if the French economy would suffer the wrath of the US as a result of the stance taken by Jacques Chirac in the build up to the Iraq war. Given that I don't have any Washington insider sources, my prediction is just as good as yours. Still, for what it's worth, here's what I said: short-term, yes; long-term, no. My reasoning: luxury French goods and tourism will bear the brunt of US consumer anger over Chirac?s stab in the back, but the profit motive that drives the US model will ensure that once the war is history, if investment in France makes economic sense (extremely unlikely, of course), US companies will invest there.

I admit, however, that I could be reading this all wrong and that a bad moon may, indeed, be rising over Paris. Here, I return to something I mentioned last week: Tony Blair's telling the House of Commons in March during the pre-war debate that what was going on at the time would shape the pattern of international politics for the next generation.

ALTHOUGH INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS are not the only determinant in economics, they play a significant role and what has happened in the past six months is going to colour American-French dealings from now on. It's highly unlikely that the US will take an aggressive approach to the French through trade sanctions, but discussions in forums such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund will be frosty in future and, if France — or Germany — starts to complain about the impact of a weak US dollar on their economy, it is difficult to see the Americans doing anything to help them.

And that brings us back to Blair, the emerging key player in much of this. Will he be Washington's sword or Chirac?s shield? More the former going on this story from the Financial Times: "Blair warns Chirac on the future of Europe".

"Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France's Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president's vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the prime minister foreshadows a continuing Anglo-French struggle about Europe's relationship with Washington. Mr Blair seeks to keep alive the prospect of British entry to the euro but he disavows any personal ambition to become president of the European Union."

(Here's the full transcript of the FT interview with Tony Blair by Philip Stephens, UK editor, and Cathy Newman, chief political correspondent.)

A WILD CARD in all of this could be the effects of the documents found in Baghdad by the Sunday Times (registration required) purporting to show that "France gave Saddam Hussein's regime regular reports on its dealings with American officials". If it ever emerges that the French veto "under any circumstances" of UN Resolution 1441 was motivated by ties between Paris and Baghdad, concerns about France's ambitions will change dramatically. The probable result will be a new Washington policy toward the EU in general, and France in particular, designed to deal with the reality of French hostility and the fact that the country is no longer a US ally.

Diarist of the day: Lawerence Durrell, 29 April 1937

[Corfu] "It is April and we have taken an old fisherman's house in the extreme north of the island -- Kalamai. Ten sea-miles from the town, and some thirty kilometres by road, it offers all the charms of seclusion. A white house set like a dice on a rock already venerable with the scars of wind and water. The hill runs clear up into the sky behind it, so that the cypresses and olives overhang this room in which I sit and write. We are upon a bare promontory with its beautiful clean surface of metamorphic stone covered in olive and ilex: in the shape of a mons pubis. This is become our unregretted home. A world. Corcyra. "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 29 April 2003 at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back in March, when the business of removing Saddam Hussein, whose wretched subjects would have been forced to honour his 66th birthday today, was getting into gear, Belgium, in a fit of the grandiosity that only former mini-empires can display, announced that it was calling a summit to discuss the creation of a military alliance within the European Union. Invited were France, Germany and Luxembourg.

This is very much a case of the dog that didn't bark, because among those who won't be attending tomorrow's meeting in Brussels are the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and the current EU president, Greece. Representatives of Spain, Italy and Britain, the continent's biggest military power, will be absent as well.

What seemed back in March like a brilliant idea to Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian Prime Minister, is now a distinct embarrassment to the French and, especially, the Germans, who fear further damage to their relationships with the US. Germany and France were now only "reluctant supporters" of the summit, reported today's Financial Times, and would seek to tone down proposals for an independent European force. "The timing could not have been more unfortunate. The French and the Germans want as low a profile as possible. The less we talk about it the better," one EU diplomat said, quoted by Reuters news agency.

In advance of tomorrow's meeting, the Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini fired a warning shot across the Belgian bows saying that any attempts by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg to forge closer military ties would be viewed "with a very critical eye".

"If the embyro of an increased military co-operation were to develop in Brussels, I would regard it with a very critical eye," Frattini told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The event could give the impression of a "micro-territory" under formation within the EU — signalling a "return to the logic of the recent past", he said, referring to the bitter splits over Iraq. And any military alliance without the UK would be unimaginable, Mr Frattini added.

The last thing this continent needs at the moment is Belgium upsetting Italy. In almost every aspect of European life that one can imagine, from fashion to football, the Italians cut a more impressive figure than the Belgians do and Verhofstadt must accept this. Europe's relationship with Washington is a subject that requires serious discussion and an agreed defence policy would be far better that the current tatters, but letting Belgium set the terms of the debate is ridiculous. Let's hope tomorrow's summit will be accepted for the error that it is and that a genuine effort to bridge the trans-Atlantic divide will soon follow.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 28 April 2003 at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the Rainy Day team prepares to celebrate its first blogging anniversary (Thursday, 1 May), the time is right for reflecting on what we've learned during this past year of daily diarying. Our thoughts at this point are very much influenced by the ideas of Fabio Sergio, a design theorist working in Milan.

In an essay he wrote back in January called "always-on people", Sergio examined the forces, positive and negative, that drive the networked society. Central to the piece is the difference between "information anxiety" and "interaction anxiety". The former can be defined as the constant desire to find that final piece of the data puzzle that makes sense of the whole, while interaction anxiety, on the other hand, is rooted in fear of being cut off from the network, and is related to the stress of managing our interactions with family, friends, content and devices.

Terms such as "multi-tasking", "continuous partial attention" and "cyber serfdom" crop up in Sergio's essay, prompting this observation:

"As our needs for faster and faster PCs drove producers to develop chips that could do more things at once, no one probably ever thought that the day would come when we would be expected to constantly do the same. Even though I will gladly admit that human beings have always been great at multitasking, as any mother will easily attest, what has changed now is the speed and frequency at which we are required to think and act, and not necessarily in this order. We have adopted a multi-tasking-oriented mindset because the message constantly whispered by the devices that increasingly mediate our social relationships has ended up permeating our very own way of thinking."

Because always-on devices make for always-on people, Sergio is concerned about "the disappearing boundaries between work and play, between our professional and personal life." What happens to relationships, he wonders, when they move from being episodic to always-on? Nothing good, he fears.

"Will we end up living our social lives between applications, like a SETI screen-saver, using the time left by our exceeding processing power? How long will it take to build trust, or even love for always-on people? How will we over-clock our social processors? How well do you already know the names and numbers stored on your devices?"

Now, to blogging, the subject that gave rise to this post. The dangers of living lives that are a "continuous partial effort", can be seen in how blogs are evolving, says Fabio Sergio:

"Their evolution these days seems to follow a path that I would dub "from Thinklogs to Linklogs". To make a long story short, quite a few influential Webloggers have lately started stripping the links contained in their posts of all the linguistic tissue that used to hold them together. Read: their ideas. Some keep the most updated links in a "special post" that gets frequently republished. Others have been looking at ways to automate the way links are published on their pages. I've also noticed a number of people who often post to themselves, increasingly relying on connectivity to freeze in time all that they can?t possibly read on the fly, or remember afterwards. Some have just started to show signs of weariness."

Sergio has an enviable knack of coining phrases, and his "breadcrumbs to nowhere" is a gem. With it, he leads into the essay's conclusion:

"Just like anyone else maintaining one of these pages I will attest to the effort it takes to update regularly and meaningfully a Blog, but once more the real value in this case is in the path and not in the destination. How much care and time-consuming dedication does it take to ease others into unknown lands rather than just pointing the way and letting them find their own? Will we still have the time to be guides, travel mates?"

Rainy Day has taken the time to blog and Fabio Sergio has taken the time to assess the impact of such actions. Together, we're attempting to make sense of our world in the hope that those breadcrumbs lead somewhere.

Diarist of the day: Sir Hugh Casson, 28 April 1980

"Invalid Children's Exhibition by Norman St. John Stevas. A moving and desperate occasion. One of the prize-winners, sitting in his chair like a piece of crumpled-up paper thrown into a wastepaper basket, emits regular whoops of (I hope) pleasure. The pride of the parents, teachers, helpers in the achievements of their charges brings tears to the eyes."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Four games before the end of the Bundesliga season, FC Bayern secured its 18th championship yesterday. Yawn. The team that has led the league for months now (more yawns) ended the title race (!) by defeating Wolfsburg 2-0. Even typing these sentences is making me drowsy. Let's change tack.

There was an interesting German football story last month but it was buried by the war, so here's a quick summary. Bernd Stange made headlines because the threat of conflict in early March forced him to leave his residence in the Baghdad Sheraton for safer but less salubrious accommodation in Dresden. You see, Stange had been the coach of the Iraqi football team.

What made Stange so newsworthy was that it emerged in the early 1990's that he'd been an informer for the Stasi, the East German secret police. In 1972, when he was a co-trainer of the East German club Carl Zeiss Jena, he signed up to spy on his charges when they went to England to play Wolverhampton Wanderers in a UEFA Cup match. Among those he betrayed in his time is the trainer of the current Aachen side, J? Berger.

This tool of dictators then had the nerve to appear at peace rallies in Dresden, calling for the US to be shown the "red card" for "ignoring" the United Nations. He wrung gasps of outrage from pacifist crowds when describing the effects of sanctions against Iraq. "I tried to import aluminium goal posts into Iraq, but was told they could be used to make canons, so couldn't be delivered," he's reported as saying. It is not reported if Stange spoke about the president of his employer, the Iraqi Football Association. That person was none other than Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son, and a man accused by numerous exile Iraqis and international human rights groups of torture.

What will become of football in Iraq? It's a hugely popular game there and Jay Garner should put restoring the national league on his to-do list. Before regime change, the country had 20 clubs in its domestic league and there was a daily football newspaper that reported on the scene. By all accounts, the country's best players are to be found in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. Interestingly, in FIFA's listing of the Iraqi Football Association, the following appears: " President : SADDAM HUSSEIN Udai". Change comes dropping slow in Zurich.

Trivia moment: Iraq made it to the World Cup in 1986, and the Olympic team was on course to qualify for next year's Athens Games before Uday left the building and his helper Stange left the land.

Diarist of the day: William Souter, 27 April 1934

"A diary is like a drink: we tend to indulge in it over often: it becomes a habit which would ever seduce us to say more than we ought to say and more than we have the experiential qualifications to state. It is a kind of private paper which demands its quota of news every day, and not rarely becomes a mere recorder of spiritual journalese. But not only can it persuade us to betray the self -- it tempts us to betray our fellows also, becoming thereby an alter ego sharing with us the denigrations which we would be ashamed of voicing aloud; a diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 27 April 2003 at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

burn out intransitive and transitive verb become exhausted: to become or make somebody exhausted or unwell through too much hard work, stress, or reckless living: "You'll burn yourself out if you don't slow down."

Source: Encarta World English Dictionary

On Monday (21 April) the admirable Norwegian blogger, Bj?t沫, posted the following message to his readers:

"Sorry for the unannounced silence. A sudden urge to shut up came over me, and I didn't resist it. The events two weeks ago made me realize that a lot of what I've been writing about in this blog has moved back into slow-history mode, and it seems — at the moment, anyway — somewhat pointless, and distracting from the overall perspective, to continue day to day coverage of it. For now, I've said what I have to say.

So I'm granting myself an extended blog vacation. I know better than to force myself to have opinions, and I also know better than to think that I'm done with blogging for good, and kill it off. I'd just have to make up a stupid excuse to revive it again later. So a vacation of unspecified length seems the right choice."

We all wish Bj?ell and hope that he'll be back before long scourging those Scandinavians who would prefer to side with orcs and goblins rather than the race of Men.

The warblogging of the past year has taken its toll. Physical and emotional exhaustion are widespread among those who invested so much time fighting the good fight. Blogging is at its best when dealing with crisis but that means high-energy output, and the energy supply is finite. An ebb is to be expected, then. The term "burn out" might strike some as too morbid to describe the situation that many bloggers find themselves in now but it's appropriate, if one considers the definition above. Still, "burn out" should not be seen as totally negative here. The incandescence was caused by the pursuit of fact, the exposure of lies and the noble call to spread truth. Out of the ashes new shoots will spring.

While in this thought stream, let me point to a story that appeared in The Register yesterday. Andrew Orlowski penned an item titled William Gibson 'gives up blogging'. Orlowski was picking up on an interview Gibson had given to Karlin Lillington of the Irish Times. According to Lillington, Gibson fears that his blogging could interfere with the thought process for needed for a novel. This astute remark:

"I do know from doing it that it's not something I can do when I'm actually working. Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn't be able to exist if I'm in daily contact. The watched pot never boils."

Gibson added: "Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social." That's debatable, I feel. Sure, there's commenting and linking, but blogging is only "social" in a limited sense. Authors have it betters in lots of ways, and I don't mean just royalties. There's reading tours, book signings, cocktail receptions and dinner party invitations, to mention a mere handful of perks that scribblers on paper enjoy. If that's "solitary", I'm available for confinement.

Diarist of the day: Lady Cynthia Asquith, 26 April 1917

"Moira told me an amusing story of Lady Wolverton. The latter, thinking the time had come to economise, got into a bus. She sat beside a woman who kept loudly sniffing and she asked her aggressively if she hadn't got a handkerchief. The woman replied: 'Yes, but I never lends it in a bus.' "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 26 April 2003 at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara is clearly the place to be. Maybe I'll make it next year. Anyway, the big news from the West Coast confab is that Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, the content management system which powers this blog and thousands of others, made the headlines, and big. Wow!

Ben and Mina Trott (Six Apart) have secured funding from Neoteny, a Japanese venture capital firm, and this cash sets them up to launch a new product: TypePad. Coming as it does only a few weeks after Google bought Blogger, this means not only radical change in the blogging business but a sign that internet investment may be picking up again. Another pleasing aspect to this deal is that Neoteny's investment allows the great New York weblogger Anil Dash to join Six Apart as its business development guru.

So what's TypePad? From what I've read, it's a big step up for blogging tools. Unlike MovableType, TypePad is a hosted service where the software and the user's blog, are hosted on the TypePad server for a monthly fee. By way of contrast, I host Rainy Day on a commercial server, which I have to pay for and manage myself. All this, and more, will be now available via TypePad to anyone, regardless of computer skills. Prepare for an avalanche of bloggers!

And TypePad's features sound impressive. There's a powerful template builder, a built-in photo album, server stats so that you can see who is visiting your blog and lists for blogrolling, music and books as well.

Some of the TypePad ideas will be included in the upcoming professional version of MovableType, which will also contain power features needed by micro-publishers such as Nick Denton of Gizmodo and Gawker fame.

The blogging business is picking up speed. Keep your ear to the ground for more big stories.

Diarist of the day: John Evelyn, 25 April 1661

"I went to the [Royal] Society where were divers experiments in Mr. Boyls Pneumatique Engine. We put in a Snake but could not kill it, by exhausting the aire, onely made it extremly sick, but the chick died of Convulsions out right, in a short space."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 25 April 2003 at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Have added new word to growing Italian vocabulary: videofonino (plural videofonini). It means video phone and if ever a product was suited to a society then the video phone and Italy were designed for each other. Want to show off to your pals in a Milanese bar? Whip out that NEC e606 multimedia mobile, which costs a cool €740, and watch that goal Filippo Inzaghi scored for AC Milan last night in their dramatic Champions League win over Ajax at the San Siro stadium. And because you're an AC supporter, you replay it 20 times.

Five weeks after the introduction of the first UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service) network in Italy, the operator, H3G, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong conglomorate Hutchinson Whampoa, has signed up 40,000 customers. And 150,000 orders for the service are waiting to be filled. By the end of May, H3G says it will have 130,000 Italian customers sending photos, videos and music over its network and paying a monthly fee of either €85 or €140 for the service, depending on their level of usage.

The H3G network now reaches 40 per cent of the Italian population; the UMTS footprint covers 500 communes and all regional capitals, except Naples and Venice.

Diarist of the day: Alec Guinness, 24 April 1996

"I'm glad I'm not having to undergo any surgery just now. Today's press is full of photographs of the Princess of Wales, in operating-theatre gear and pale make-up, sitting in on a serious operation. We are told she is doing the rounds of several hospitals. 'Pardon me, your Royal Highness, but this is my hernia and I don't want anyone to stitch it up except the surgeon. Another whiff of gas, nurse, if you don't mind, and leave out the Cal裨e Parfum."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 24 April 2003 at 7:42 AM | Permalink

Before the Iraq war began, Tony Blair told the House of Commons that what was happening at the time would shape the pattern of international politics for the next generation. So, given mainland Europe's obvious wish to favour appeasement over action and emulate Japan as a no-growth region, would it be in Ireland's economic interest to leave the eurozone or even the EU? At the moment, any Irish politician who dared to suggest such a course would by lynched. The gravy in Brussels is far too addictive to contemplate withdrawal.

Still, the question is worth airing because as with Germany, Ireland's decision in favour of European Monetary Union was a victory for politics over economics and, as with Germany, Ireland has paid the price ever since. The country now finds itself tied to a German economy that is determined to follow Japan downhill. If there is an upside to being in the eurozone it is that Irish interest rates are exceptionally low, which is great for mortgage holders. This, however is very bad news for savers. So, not much of an upside, then.

Whatever about leaving the eurozone, leaving the EU would be a much more radical decision and one that could only be considered if Britain did likewise. At least with Britain in the EU, there is some chance that the Anglo-Saxon model will win the day, but countries like Germany and France will fight it to the bitter end.

One good byproduct of the Iraq conflict is that is has raised very real questions about the future of organizations such as the EU and UN, and issues once considered taboo can now be discussed. Thanks Jacques, thanks Gerhard!

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 23 April 2003 at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pundits are expected to have opinions, to say bold things, so here goes: Britain will never give up the pound for the euro. Never, ever. The recent differences with EU partners France and Germany will not be critical, though, it's the contradictions inherent in the common currency that will be decisive.

From the very beginning of the euro project, Marty Feldstein, Harvard professor and president of the US National Bureau of Economic Research, has been pointing out the pitfalls of the single currency and he had a timely piece called "Britain must avoid Germany's mistake" in yesterday's Financial Times. Memorable sentence: "Adopting the euro is a permanent commitment with permanent consequences." Feldstein claims it is the euro and not Germany's structural problems that has raised the country's unemployment rate over the past year to 10.6 per cent. He writes:

"Here are the facts. Germany's gross domestic product rose only 0.5 per cent last year, the lowest of all the leading European countries, and ended the year in decline. Germany also has the lowest inflation rate, just 1.2 per cent. Because the single currency means that all eurozone countries have the same nominal interest rate, Germany's real interest rate is the highest in the eurozone. This is a very dangerous situation in which the high real interest rate weakens the economy and causes inflation to fall further. As the inflation rate falls, the real interest rate rises, creating the potential for a dangerous downward economic spiral.

If the German economy were not constrained by the single currency, natural market forces would cause interest rates to decline, thereby boosting all kinds of interest-sensitive spending. Weak demand in Germany would also cause the D-mark to decline relative to its trading partners, boosting exports and helping producers to compete with imports from the rest of the world. Instead, German manufacturing has been weakened by the sharp rise of the euro over the past year. In addition to these automatic market responses, an independent Bundesbank would probably have responded to the weak economy and declining inflation by temporarily lowering short-term interest rates. This is now impossible. The European Central Bank must make monetary policy for Europe as a whole, an area in which inflation is now above the 2 per cent target ceiling. The Stability and Growth Pact also prevents Germany from using a temporary fiscal stimulus to increase growth and bring down unemployment. Although persistent deficits are harmful in the long term, a temporary rise in the fiscal deficit could in principle provide the stimulus needed to rekindle growth. But the eurozone countries have had to constrain themselves from running deficits because of the potential danger to the common currency."

But why is a single currency good for a large continental economy such as the US and not for Europe? Feldstein's answer:

"First, American employees move within the country when demand is relatively weak in a particular region, facilitated by a common language and a culture that regards moving across the country as perfectly normal. Germans are not leaving Germany in large numbers for areas of Europe with faster growth or lower unemployment. Second, wages are much more flexible in the US than in Europe, reducing the decline in regional employment that occurs when demand falls. And third, the US has a federal fiscal system that directly offsets about 40 per cent of the relative decline in any state's gross domestic product by a lower outflow of taxes to Washington and a higher inflow of transfer payments. European fiscal systems are still largely national."

Feldstein urges Britain not to make the German mistake of opting for the common currency on political rather than economic grounds. Instead of carefully evaluating the costs and benefits of his actions, Helmut Kohl gave up the Deutschemark to create a stronger European political union. He preferred a symbol of solidarity to prosaic notes and coins. Remarkably, his countrymen, who had seen him swap valuable D-marks for worthless Ostmarks in 1990, accepted his decision with barely a murmur of dissent. If the current chancellor goes down in history as the German leader who ruined his country's international stature, his predecessor may enter the annals as the man who pulled down the pillars of an exemplary economy that was built at enormous expense.

So, if Britain stays out of the eurozone will Sweden enter it? Too close to call, that one. Let's see how the year shapes up. One thing is certain, though: the ten countries earmarked to join the EU next year would be crazy to adopt the euro since they would lose their competitive edge inside the union. And by the time their turn to decide on the single currency comes the insuperable problems involved will be obvious for all to see.

Diarist of the day: Count Harry Kessler, 23 April 1929

[Berlin] "In the evening a concert by the young Yehudi Menuhin. The boy is truly marvellous. His playing has the afflatus of genius and the purity of a child. His fantastic virtuosity remains a totally secondary factor, as though it were something to be taken for granted. A wonderful feeling for style, without the slightest suggestion of cheap effects or sentimentality. On the contrary, pure and profound sensibility. He played Beethoven's Romance in F Major (Opus 50) as I have only heard Joseph Joachim render it."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Along with an internationally recognized arts programme, Schloss Elmau has all the things one expects an alpine castle to offer: romantic turrets, fantastic views, dark corridors, fine food and wine, and a room with a roaring fire that's stocked with quality newspapers for the enlightenment of the guests. One that impressed me greatly was the Rheinischer Merkur; the Bonn paper is beautifully designed and excellently written.

To the sound of crackling firewood, I was sipping a lemon soda and reading an article called "Bushs wahre Motive" (Bush's real motives) by Herfried M? in the 17 April issue of the paper, when I looked across the room and saw that the writer was sitting at the opposite table. M?, a professor at Berlin's Humboldt university, has rapidly made a name for himself as an authority on US military strategy. Der neue Golfkrieg and ܢer den Krieg are among his published works.

One of his interesting theories is that the USA very much wanted to go to war with Iraq, but not for the usual suspect reasons. Rather, it fought the war to free itself from "imperial overstretch". This sounds paradoxical, but M? says that Iraq now represents a strategic alternative to those regional options that have failed: Iran, because of revolution; Saudi Arabia, because of corruption.

On the UN, M? feels that the ability of the body to deal with the reality of US superpower status will determine its future. The fact is that the UN now consists of the US at the top, followed by the permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council. If a working relationship based on this hierarchy can be developed, the UN may be able to redefine itself and make effective contributions to global issues.

As regards the European Union's security policy, M? is scathing. The concept doesn't even deserve the name, he says. The strategic risks involved in implementing a functioning security policy are simply too hazardous for most EU states to contemplate. And Germany, he argues, doesn't even have a foreign policy, preferring to stand in the shadows of the great powers.

Herfried M? is a thinker we're going to hear more of in the coming years.

Diarist of the day: Virginia Woolf, 22 April 1934

"A curious little fact. Instead of smoking six or seven cigarettes as I write of a morning, I now, for three mornings, make myself smoke only one. And rather enjoy doing without."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 22 April 2003 at 7:30 AM | Permalink

One of the reasons people flock to Schloss Elmau at Easter, apart from the food and the alpine air, is the music. Take today's programme, for instance. In the afternoon, Constantin Floros will talk about the "secret messages" in Alban Berg's music, and tonight Berg's works will feature alongside those of Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann in performances by the Keller Quartet with Cristina Barbuti and the superb Christian Tetzlaff.

It is with heavy hearts that we shall leave Schloss Elmau.

Diarist of the day: Barbara Castle, 21 April 1968

"Ted [her husband] and I were sitting by the telly listening to the six o'clock news when there suddenly was Enoch Powell, white-faced and tight-lipped, delivering his Wolverhampton speech on immigration. As we listened to his relentless words -- 'I see the Tiber running with blood' -- intense depression gripped us. I knew he had taken the lid of Pandora's box and that race relations in Britain would never be the same again. This is certainly a historic turning point, but in which direction? I believe he has helped to make a race war, not only in Britain but perhaps in the world, inevitable."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 21 April 2003 at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sugar and alcohol are to be enjoyed once more. With a six-hour hike on the agenda and the famous Partnachklamm the goal, a sweet Kaiserschmarrn and a glass or two of Weissbier will be fitting rewards for the efforts: the walking and the Lenten fasting. Today, brilliant sunshine!

Diarist of the day: 'Chips' Channon, 20 April 1934

"After endless false starts, I have decided definitely to begin my diary again, and only hope I shall have the patience to continue. But as I am dictating it, I may be less scandalous and spontaneous than before."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 20 April 2003 at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elmau-Ferchensee-Lautersee. The signage on this walk was excellent. From the castle in Elmau, there's a bit of an ascent and then one follows the gurgling Ferchenbach to the Ferchensee. There's a lovely wooded walk along by the lake and this works up an appetite for hearty pea soup with bits of sausage. In the background, the Karwendel Range presents itself in all its glory.

Last night, the Keller Quartet treated us to Haydn's Sonata II "Amen dico tribi:Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso". Bach and Hindemith followed.

Today, heavy snow!

Diarist of the day: William L. Shirer, 19 April 1940

"Hitler's fifty-first birthday tomorrow, and the people have been asked to fly their flags. Dr Goebbels in a broadcast tonight: 'The German people have found in the F?the incarnation of their strength and the most brilliant exponent of their national aims.' When I passed the Chancellery tonight, I noticed some seventy-five people outside for a glimpse of the leader. In other years on the eve of his birthday, there were ten thousand."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 19 April 2003 at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here we are in an idyllic alpine valley in that part of Bavaria that can broadly be described as Mittenwald. Fresh air, bracing walks, hearty food and reading are on the agenda. Blogging will be light, though. If Andrew Sullivan and Nick Denton can take some time off, so can Rainy Day. We're not worried about losing market share.

By the way, Schloss Elmau, our home from home, was the scene yesterday evening of a spirited debate titled "Neue Kriege, neue Weltordnung?" (New wars, new world order?). Participants included Walter Russel Mead, Harold James, Ronald Asmus, Dan Diner and Reinhard Hesse. The castle added atmosphere to the occasion because its past contains relevant historical ghosts.

Despite his admirable ideas in so many fields, Dr. Johannes Mueller, who made Schloss Elmau a centre for cosmopolitan thinking at the beginning of the 20th century, was convinced that Hitler was Germany's destiny. He handed over the castle to the Wehrmacht in 1942 as a recreation centre for soldiers on leave from the front. After the war, the American Army confiscated SchloߠElmau and used it as a hospital and then as a TB recreation centre for "displaced persons". M?found himself in a de-Nazification trial and was declared guilty. He died disgraced in 1949, his vision of the castle as a retreat for alternative ideas, in ruins.

Today, Schloss Elmau is run by Dietmar M?Elmau, a grandson of Johannes M? and it is once again a retreat for intellectual debate and cultural dialogue. The international Chamber Music Week in January and the "Kammermusiktage" during Easter attract visitors from all over the world

History's shadow is long; its lessons painful. But there is hope. That is the message of Easter, after all.

Diarist of the day: Marie Belloc Lowndes, 18 April 1912

"Lunched at the 'Thirty' [luncheon club]. There was much talk of the Titanic tragedy. Lady Dorothy Nevill said that the wreck was a judgement from God on those idle rich people who want all earthly luxuries even on the water. She observed: 'I am told they even had a garden!' "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 18 April 2003 at 7:47 AM | Permalink

For more than seven months now, Germany's intellectual elite has trained its guns on the United States. Aided by a media bent on manufacturing anti-American consensus, the movement has experienced considerable success, but this opportunistic axis of highbrow and lowbrow took a massive hit this week. The attack came from Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany's most important poet, and a highly regarded essayist, dramatist and publisher.

Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (subscription required), Enzensberger fired some heavy ordnance in the direction of the peace movement, which depicted President Bush as the dictator of the piece and uttered neither a word about the sufferings of the Iraqis under Saddam nor a syllable about their recent liberation. Enzensberger writes:

"It is not the first disgrace of those who warn and remind; not for the first time have the worry lines, which furrow the German brow, proven to be precipitous. It is not so long ago that East Germany was regarded here as unshakeable; it was seen as one of the most successful industrial nations of the world; the social democracy did everything to co-operate with the SED [the East German communist regime]; Poland's Solidarity movement was, as a result, treated as a dangerous troublemaker. Stability was everything; the Soviet Union was an invincible colossus, which only the Americans and other cold warriors provoked, while the heroic besiegers of Mutlangen [an American military depot] dared challenge the provocative rearmament of the United States. It was astounding, and for many leftists, especially awkward, that the colossus stood on feet of clay."

When it comes to Germans and their relationship with dictators, Enzensberger knows whereof he speaks. In the autumn 1998 issue of Granta, he penned a piece called Coming to America in which he recounted his experiences of fascism and his encounters with democracy. In 1945, the 15-year-old Enzensberger was pressed into defending the rubble of the Third Reich but he quickly saw the futility of trying to repel the oncoming Sherman tanks, so he threw away his bazooka and uniform. By virtue of his schoolbook English, he became the village's point man for mediation with the Americans and this led to post-war experiences that make for uncanny parallels with the state of Iraq today. Here's a sample:

"Reams of worthless old banknotes were traded in for a new currency printed in the US. Empty shop window filled up almost overnight, as if by miracle. With shoes, sausages, screwdrivers and apples. In a frenzy of reconstruction roofs were mended, streets cleared of rubble, railway tracks repaired. At the same time, and with the same amazing speed, millions of Nazis disappeared from sight. Most of them had instantly turned into demure democrats, blithely pursuing their careers in government, business, education law and medicine. Nobody wanted to hear about what were politely, called 'Germany's darkest years'.

Within a very short time, the western part of the country had become an American protectorate. True, there were also British and French troops around, but everybody knew that the true winner of the war was the United States. To consider America a 'young nation' is a well-won European clich鮠In the event, the alleged adolescent became the guardian of a decrepit and worn-out Germany. The US took on the difficult job of re-socializing our part of the world. This was not, of course, an act of sheer benevolence. Germany's future was determined by the beginning of the Cold War. Never was a defeated nation offered more generous terms, and never were such terms less deserved.

Despite the Allies' feeble efforts at deNazificaiton, there was something murky about our recovery. Many Germans harboured silent resentment about what they saw as disaster rather than a liberation. Amnesia was a common affliction, and the old authoritarian frame of mind was still very much in evidence."

The "silent resentment" Enzensberger identified in 1945 and wrote about every decade since keeps bubbling to the surface and its 2003 manifestation is deeply troubling.

By the way, try to get your hands on issue 63 of Granta from 1998 if you can. The pieces on "The New World" by Enzensberger and Martin Amis are marvellous. Anwar Iqbal, John Barth and Hilary Mantel are in there as well.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 17 April 2003 at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Provocative piece by Ken Jowitt in the April & May 2003 issue of Policy Review. Called "Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change", it's filled with insight and wit of the driest kind: "... it is true that a more democratically inclined Iranian middle class exists. The problem? Most of it lives in Los Angeles." Or this: "the Bush administration has replaced Clinton?s 'Mother Teresa' foreign policy with a 'Mother Superior' foreign policy."

Jowitt's "movements of rage" has a ring to it and it might well become part of the vocabulary. He defines it as "a malignant political coalition that relentlessly pursues and may succeed in possessing and using weapons of mass destruction (wmd) against the United States and its allies."

The focus of the article is the Bush administration's "trinitarian" doctrine: Dominance, Preemption, Regime change. Regarding the latter, Jowitt says: "The Bush administration?s fundamental solution to the danger of terrorism, regime change, has a decidedly Jekyll-and-Hyde quality ? to wit, in trying to create democratic Dr. Jekyll regimes, it is likely to create enraged Mr. Hyde regimes."

On preemption, Jowitt is equally sceptical: "?its strategic application demands the combined wisdom of Pericles and Solomon. To begin with, the premise for an anticipatory attack posits a hostile leader and regime platonically impervious to any environmental changes whether domestic or international. This is not always a mistaken premise ? Hitler and Pol Pot are cases in point ? but it is almost always mistaken. Over time, most regimes do change substantially if not essentially. One has only to look at the Soviet Union after 1956 and China after 1978."

Jowitt's conclusion is sobering:

"Given enough power, a conquering authority can impose any kind of rule it wishes on a defeated society. More often than not, however, military-political imposition produces social dissimulation, not cultural assimilation of the conqueror's way of life. As Aristotle and Durkheim knew, the types of political innovation most likely to be accepted by a defeated society must closely resemble previous, familiar forms of political life. In the case of a defeated Iraq that requires, at a minimum, the Bush administration?s recognition of and respect for the reality of ruling families as the central feature of Arab political life. Surely an easy task for what the Financial Times considers the most successful political family in American history."

Again, that final subtle dart is typical of the man's style. Recommended reading.

Diarist of the day: Iris Origo, 17 April 1944

[Italy] "Spent the morning trying to alter the date of birth on the identity card of a young deserter who turned up this morning and firmly requested this service -- with the same confidence with which others have asked for a clean shirt or some food. It is much more difficult to do than on would think, even though the type of my machine is fortunately of the same size as that used in his document, the difficulty being to put the new figure precisely in line with the others. And clumsiness is lent to one's fingers by the thought that the boy's life may hang on it being well done."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Czech Republic. Welcome to the club! EU leaders meet in Athens today to sign a treaty expanding the European Union to 25 members and 450 million people. The occasion of the union's biggest expansion in its history should be a cause of confidence and joy for the continent, instead, the 10 new members, including eight from the former Soviet bloc, are joining a Europe filled with self-doubt and shaken by weeks of recriminations over the war in Iraq. Oh, dear.

Rainy Day will be visiting all these countries, virtually, in the coming weeks so get ready for some interesting sites. We're starting off in the Czech Republic, in the beautiful old town of Cesky Krumlov, which is near Ceske Budejovice, home of Budweiser beer. What's so impressive about the site is that it offers a history of the town's street names, plus photos of each street, many contrasted with new pictures taken from the same vantage point. Splendid. Take a look.

Tip o' the hat to Languagehat, which has switched from Blogger to Moveable Type and is sporting a snazzy new look. Welcome to the club!

Diarist of the day: Anais Nin, 16 April 1926

[Florence] "This morning, after wandering for an hour, looking at the architecture and at the people, we turned our steps naturally to the Uffizi Gallery. We sought Botticelli first, because he always pleased us, and his frescoes in the Louvre are always in our minds. We did not stay as long as we intended. The room was full of glossy-haired, smart young me from college, young women in sports suits with Baedekers, and old English couples. The young men were always interested in the same paintings which the young ladies studied, and the eyes of these ladies were always wandering off towards the glossy-haired and living works of art."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 16 April 2003 at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Books have mass. This mundane fact assumes a frightening clarity for those who build up collections and then move house. And it's much worse if your move is between continents. The expense of acquiring a library is substantial; that of transporting it across an ocean is staggering.

A decade ago, the Rainy Day team was faced with this dilemma but we opted in the end to pay the movers the ransom they demanded. There were times when this decision appeared irresponsible, but there are moments when it justifies itself. One such occasion came late last night when I reached for Patrick Seale's magisterial "Assad: The Struggle for the Middle East". First published in 1988, the book has lost none of its relevance despite the passing of time. Indeed, given the pace of current history, its 552 pages stand a chance of becoming ultra relevant.

Seale was a brilliant Observer journalist and he remains one of most informed and respected commentators on events in the Arab world. He is one of the few Orientalists whose writings demonstrate a deep understanding of the Arab mind and how it works. On page 412 of his book, Seale shows his skills as an observer and writer when describing the wiles of Hafiz al-Asad:

"Over the years, Asad had developed a negotiating technique which he frequently used with foreign guests, and [Robert] McFarlane [national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985] was no exception. He would being by exchanging a few pleasantries. Then he might ask, 'How is the weather in your country?' A Western guest would usually reply to the effect that at home it was colder than in Syria , giving Asad his opportunity. 'Indeed', he would say, 'it's warm here because the United Sates is stoking the fire!' There were two sorts of climate in the world, he would explain, one given by God, the other by the United States, and step by step he would make his point that the tension, crises and wars in the area must all be laid at Washington's door. An American visitor would feel compelled to defend himself, starting the meeting at a disadvantage. Asad's next stratagem was to be extraordinarily digressive and argumentative. If the name of God were mentioned, this might set him off on a long discourse about Islam, Judaism and Christianity before he could be brought back to the matter in hand. Negotiating sessions would last for hours. More than one envoy who suffered this treatment came to the conclusion that Asad raised all sorts of irrelevant subjects simply to tire his visitors the better to control them. At the end of a wearisome session the temptation was to accept what he had to say simply to escape."

Like father, like son? Yes, Bashar al-Assad is a dictator, but he's also an ophthalmologist and it's unlikely that he cannot read the regional writing on the wall.

Diarist of the day: Rev. James Woodforde, 15 April 1778

"Brewed a vessel of strong Beer today. My two large Piggs by drinking some Beer grounds taking out of one of my Barrels today, got so amazingly drunk by it, that they were not able to stand and appeared like dead things almost and so remained all night from dinner time today. I never saw Piggs so drunk in my life. I slit their ears for them without feeling."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 15 April 2003 at 7:30 AM | Permalink

If the web had been available to Henry Luce when he started LIFE Magazine, how would photojournalism have evolved? That?s the question posed by Dirck Halstead, who launched The Digital Journalist five years ago. The mission of Halstead and his partners is to come as close as possible to the LIFE Magazine model, and the current issue shows that they are well on the way to emulating the legend. As Halstead writes of recent events:

"The coverage of the war in Iraq by both still and video photojournalists has been nothing less than revolutionary. Never before have so many talented photographers been able to cover a conflict up close, with the ability to beam their images around the world almost instantaneously. The quality of their work, under great personal peril and discomfort has been remarkable."

One of the photojournalists who got up close to the conflict was Seamus Conlan. He covered the war for his own agency,World Picture News, and People magazine. Check out his Baghdad report "View From a Balcony", in which he talks about the plight that his friend Molly Bingham found herself in after being taken from her hotel by Iraqi officials. Great photography, great journalism.

Diarist of the day: Leo Tolstoy , 14 April 1910

"I've been reading through my books. I oughtn't to write any more. I think in this respect, I've done al I could. But I want to, I terribly want to. "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 14 April 2003 at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Fascinating little article in today's New York Times (registration required) by Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz of the Wisconsin Project, a research group in Washington that tracks weapons of mass destruction. Called The Poisons That Came From the West, it is backed up by a graphic showing the origins of what Iraq said it imported for its chemical weapon effort. Iraq gave the data to UN inspectors in the late 1990's, and reconfirmed it in its 12,000-page declaration in December last year. However, the statistical material remained confidential until recently. Milhollin and Motz note:

"The data reveals that firms in Germany and France outstripped all others in selling the most important thing — specialized chemical-industry equipment that is particularly useful for producing poison gas. Without this equipment, none of the other imports would have been of much use."

Milhollin and Kelly Motz also add:

"The absence of American firms from this picture does not mean that none supplied Mr. Hussein's mass-destruction weapons programs. American firms show up on lists of suppliers of anthrax strains to Iraq, and of advanced electronics for nuclear and missile sites."

Time for everyone involved to come clean, eh? Better to admit the involvement and accept that mistakes were made than to try to score moral points, and especially before uglier stuff comes to light.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 13 April 2003 at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From TV combat to TV surrender, and all in a week. Yesterday, General Amir al-Saadi, one of Saddam's senior aides, gave himself up to US forces in Baghdad. The suave al-Saadi was Saddam's liaison with UN weapons inspectors and he's the first from a list of 55 high ranking officials wanted by the United States dead or alive to surrender. With his name on that famous deck of cards (Note: this is a large PDF file) distributed to US forces in Iraq, the general decided to choose discretion rather than valour.

Actually, there was nothing discreet about the manner of al-Saadi's surrender. He contacted the German television station ZDF, which went to his handsome villa, filmed a statement and then took the general and his German wife to a unit of US soldiers. With his public statement and public surrender, the world was being informed that if anything untoward happened to this sophisticated family man, those "Invasoren" (invaders), as sectors of the German media term the coalition forces, would be held to account.

It was a minor scoop for ZDF and its Baghdad correspondent Ulrich Tilgner and it played well on German TV. Looking at the images of the elegant house, the concerned wife and the urbane figure making his sincere-sounding statement, in which he denied the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, membership of the Ba'ath party and knowledge Saddam Hussein's whereabouts, viewers must have felt disposed to believe his words. Could such a nice man have been a monster's assistant for all those years? And look at how carefully he and his wife covered their furniture to prevent dust from gathering upon it. Such fastidiousness. No, definitely not a mass murderer. Although, come to think of it, some of those who pulled the levers in 20th century tyrannies and authorised unspeakable crimes had impeccable manners, dressed tastefully and had charming wives. But that was then, right?

Diarist of the day: Rev. Francis Kilvert, 13 April 1872

"The two old women Hannah Jones and Sarah Probert were both laying in bed and groaning horribly. I gave them some money and their cries and groans suddenly ceased. "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 11:21 AM | Permalink

The chatterers who argued two weeks ago that the war was turning into a quagmire have found a new cause for feigned despair: looting. No weapons of mass destruction found, they cry, and now anarchy in the streets. This "freedom" is a thoroughly bad business, goes their subtext. Support your local dictator, they infer, or the dispossessed will one day liberate your lawnmower.

Time for a bit of perspective, then, and it's provided nicely in this weekend's S?sche Zeitung by Karl Stankiewitz in an article titled Die Pl?r von M? (The looters of Munich).

Back in 1945, Stankiewitz was a hungry 16-year-old in Munich. On 1 May, when Allied bombs had stopped falling and the SS were retreating feyadeen fashion, the great looting began in what Hitler liked to call the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" (the capital of the movement). The undernourished Stankiewitz found his way into a spirits factory where, confronted with a mountain of sugar, he filled himself a bucket of the sweet stuff. He then emancipated ten bottles of "Arrak", a spirit whose name, interestingly, is derived from the Arabic for "juice" or "sweat". According to Alex Lichine's New Encyclopaedia of Wines and Spirits, it's "a coarse drink made for tough palates". In other words, ideal for celebrating freedom from dictatorship.

Next stop for the young looter Stankiewitz was the historic and, for the Nazis, holy B?r䵫eller, from where Hitler had ordered the famous 1923 march to the Feldherrnhalle:

"The huge, dark vaults of the brewery were full of treasures. Wine, not beer, flowed in streams from barrels and covered the floor to half a metre deep. Two corpses swam in the red flood. Did they drink themselves to death or did they drown in the looting panic? I got out of the inferno quickly. Somewhere, I grasped a whole cheese and rolled it along by the Isar."

This is what the end of war is like. Chaotic. The freed people fill their stomachs and pockets. The shocking thing is not that it is happening — it's that so many of today's overpaid, too well-fed commentators lack the humanity to feel the forces that drive repressed and brutalised people to take back a fraction of what was taken from them.

Stankiewitz makes a very important point when he writes that the Munich looters were of all ages and nationalities and came from all levels of Munich society. The lawyer's widow and the major general's family were involved. It wasn't just the proletariat, he says. 1945 Munich; 2003 Saddam City.

Diarist of the day: Gyles Brandreth, 12 April 1994

"I invited John Gielgud to lunch to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. There were just four of us: Sir John, Michele [Brandreth], me and Glenda [Jackson] (Glenda was Michele's idea -- and inspired. She looks so sour, but she was sweet and gossipy and exactly right for the occasion.) He arrived in central lobby at one, on the dot, twinkling and cherubic, and amazingly upright and steady.
'It's a great honour that you should join us, Sir John,' I said
'Oh, I'm delighted to have been asked. All, my real friends are dead, you know.'
The stories just poured out of him. 'Marlene [Dietrich] invited me to hear her new record. We were in New York. We all went and gathered round the gramophone, and when we were settled the record was put on. It was simply an audience applauding her! We sat through the entire first side and then we listened to the other side: more of the same!' "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 12 April 2003 at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those who believe in their cause call it the "Alternative Summit"; those who don't, say it's the "Losers' Summit". The meeting today in St Petersburg of Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr? offers rich material for pundits and historians.

Having done their best to prevent the toppling of Saddam's statuary, Putin, Chirac and Schr? now wish to dress their opposition to the liberation of Iraq in the mantle of statesmanship. But it is a particularly thin garment.

When Chirac and Schr? shake the ex-KGB man's hand today, it will be difficult for them to avoid the fact that many see it as being covered in the blood of Chechens. On 10 April, Human Rights Watch raised the plight of the Chechens with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights:

"In a briefing paper published today for the commission, Human Rights Watch said that abuses by Russia's forces appear to be on the rise. Based on more than fifty interviews conducted in the region in late March, the briefing paper details new cases of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture."

How will the media blocs in France and Germany, so staunch in the support for their leaders' anti-war stance, spin this one? How would they react if the coalition razed Baghdad like the Russians have razed Grozny? The fact is that Russian policies have so dehumanized Chechnya that, according to this Guardian report of 4 April, "The council of Europe has demanded that a Hague-style war crimes tribunal must be set up by the UN to prosecute key Russian and Chechen leaders as war criminals responsible for systematic murders and disappearances in Chechnya."

Blessed be the peacemakers, but spare us, please, the tender mercies of Putin and his pals.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 11 April 2003 at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tonight, at 9 pm, the leading German TV station, ARD, plans to broadcast a satirical programme called "Scheibenwischer" (windscreen/windshield wiper). The theme is "the embedded journalist", and what makes the broadcast particularly interesting is that it comes two days after the death of Christian Liebig, a reporter for the Munich-based weekly, FOCUS magazine. He was embedded with the US 3rd Infantry Division when he was killed in an Iraqi attack on Monday. Somewhat unfortunate timing, then, for a satirical take on the embedded reporter story.

But what makes the programme even more newsworthy is that the lead figure in the satire team is Dieter Hildebrandt, doyen of German political entertainers. Yesterday, he gave an interview to Der Tagesspiegel. The first two questions and answers:

"Herr Hildebrandt, Amerika f?rieg im Irak. Als Befreier?" "Mr Hildebrandt, America is at war in Iraq. As liberator?"

"Die Amerikaner verhalten sich auf eine Weise, die best? ist. Man k?e glauben, dass die ehemalige Justizministerin D䵢ler-Gmelin, die Bush ein wenig mit Hitler verglichen hat, nicht so falsch lag. Ich habe herausgefunden, dass auch George W. Bush von der Vorsehung geleitet wird."

"The Americans are behaving in a manner that is dismaying. One could believe that the former Minister of Justice, D䵢ler-Gmelin, who had compared Bush with Hitler a little, was not that wrong. I've learned that George W. Bush is being led by providence."

"Das unterscheidet ihn von uns."
"That distinguishes him from us."

"Aber nicht von Hitler. Ich w?rau D䵢ler-Gmelin gerne rehabilitiert sehen. Ihr Vergleich mag nicht geschickt gewesen sein, aber ganz an der Wahrheit vorbei war er vielleicht auch nicht."

"But not from Hitler. I would gladly like to see Mrs D䵢ler-Gmelin vindicated. Her comparison may not have been that adroit, but perhaps it wasn't that far from the truth either."

It should be noted at Mrs D䵢ler-Gmelin was dropped from Chancellor Schr?'s cabinet last year following her reported remarks. Given the nature of Mr Hildebrandt's comments yesterday, and the death of Christian Liebig, we contacted the "Scheibenwischer" production staff in Berlin and asked if tonight's theme was not, perhaps, "tasteless". No, was the answer. When we asked about Mr Hildebrandt's comments we were informed that his opinions were a personal matter and, anyway, "This war is illegal". An ARD spokesman said Hildebrandt had the constitutional right to express his opinion and the station would not comment upon his remarks in the Tagesspiegel. As regards the programme about embedded journalists: "The theme is not tasteless," he added. "It's a political matter."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 10 April 2003 at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (34)

Germany doesn't have one Michael Moore; it has many Michael Moores. Unlike the real Michael Moore, however, the German versions are not even faintly ridiculous and, what's more, limited by their language, they are fated forever to remain unknown to the wider world. As a service to the Blogosphere, however, Rainy Day presents two of these Teutonic mini Moores.

First, there's Konstantin Wecker, a Munich songwriter who has turned musical mediocrity into a medium message. His visit to Baghdad earlier this year received enormous publicity in his homeland and this inspired him to hop on board the blog train with a screed called Hinter den Schlagzeilen (Behind the headlines). So how has it reacted to the liberation of Baghdad? Not a word. How has it portrayed the relief of the Iraqis who suffered so much under tyranny? Not a word. How has it reported on the freeing of children from political prisons? Not a word. Extraordinary.

Then there's Dieter Hildebrandt, doyen of German satirists. On 9 April he gave an interview to Der Tagesspiegel. The first two questions and answers:

"Herr Hildebrandt, Amerika f?rieg im Irak. Als Befreier?" "Mr Hildebrandt, America is at war in Iraq. As liberator?"

"Die Amerikaner verhalten sich auf eine Weise, die best? ist. Man k?e glauben, dass die ehemalige Justizministerin D䵢ler-Gmelin, die Bush ein wenig mit Hitler verglichen hat, nicht so falsch lag. Ich habe herausgefunden, dass auch George W. Bush von der Vorsehung geleitet wird."

"The Americans are behaving in a manner that is dismaying. One could believe that the former Minister of Justice, D䵢ler-Gmelin, who had compared Bush with Hitler a little, was not that wrong. I've learned that George W. Bush is being led by providence."

"Das unterscheidet ihn von uns."
"That distinguishes him from us."

"Aber nicht von Hitler. Ich w?rau D䵢ler-Gmelin gerne rehabilitiert sehen. Ihr Vergleich mag nicht geschickt gewesen sein, aber ganz an der Wahrheit vorbei war er vielleicht auch nicht."

"But not from Hitler. I would gladly like to see Mrs D䵢ler-Gmelin vindicated. Her comparison may not have been that adroit, but perhaps it wasn't that far from the truth either."

These two examples, dear visitors, should provide an amount of food for thought.

Diarist of the day: Marie Belloc Lowndes, 10 April 1917

"There has been a spate of early marriages and I head a lady who was asked if she was happy about her youthful son's marriage. She replied, 'I don't know what I should feel if it were not wartime, for in that case he would still be at Harrow.' "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those scenes of jubilant Shiites and Sunnis on the streets of Baghdad are now engraved on the minds of millions all over the world. Once again, television demonstrated its extraordinary power. One can only speculate about the impact those images of Iraqis cheering a toppling tyrant will have on Arab leaders and the so-called "Arab street". Important is that the pictures were screened across the Arab world on Arab TV services such as Al Jazeera.

Today's scenes were incredibly moving. After so much suffering, the oppressed can finally express what they feel.

But how do those who said this was a war against the Iraqi people feel? Those mendacious journalists who fomented hatred of the USA and Britain? Those opportunistic politicians, who promised us a Middle East in uproar, millions of fleeing refugees and burning oil wells? Those masses of arrogant anti-war demonstrators who never once expressed sympathy for the suffering of the Iraqis? How are they coping with their consciences now?

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 9 April 2003 at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here is how the BBC is reporting the decline of the despot:

"Crowds are trying to topple a vast statue of Saddam Hussein
The government of Saddam Hussein has lost control over Baghdad, with the advance of US forces into the centre of the capital.

US tanks drove unhindered into public squares on the eastern bank of the Tigris for the first time, including the area surrounding the Palestine hotel, where the international media are based.

As word spread, people began congregating in the square in front of the hotel.

The largely calm crowd is trying to pull down a huge statue of Saddam Hussein with a rope and a sledgehammer. "

Let us give thanks to those who made this possible.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogosphere abuzz with rumours that The New York Times (registration required) is changing its archival policy. The suggestion is that links more than 30 days old would redirect to a page requesting that you buy the article for $2.95.

Reaction to the decision has been swift. The end of the Times as a source of links is the forecast. Why should anyone link to pages that no one would be able to see after 30 days? Indeed. Bloggers will think twice before telling people about something interesting if their visitors then have to pony up three dollars to read it. And what would said visitors get for their money? A look at the article (without pictures or graphs) for 90 days. Then they?ll have to pay again.

Interestingly, many scientific journals are heading in the opposite direction. You subscribe to read the current issue but the work is then opened to everyone after a period of time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, allows open access to anything six months older or more. So, it makes sense to subscribe. You get access to six months of content at a reasonable price, and if you do not want to buy a subscription you can access all the articles on the site for seven days for $15.

Diarist of the day: Stephen Spender, 9 April 1980

"Left Vancouver 7 April. At Seattle Airport the man at the desk asked, when to pay the bill I produced my credit card, whether I was related to the poet Stephen Spender. So I said, 'That's me.' He looked pleased and said, 'Gee, a near-celebrity.' "

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ye Germans, rid your speech and writing of Anglo-Americanisms! Use Gallicisms instead! Out with "OK" and in with "d'accord"! That's the call to action coming from a body called "Sprache in der Politik" (Language in politics). And what has prompted this? "The unacceptable face of imperialism," says the organization. It's talking about what it calls an "illegal war against Iraq" led, it says, primarily by English-speaking countries.

As any visitor to Germany knows, the English language has enriched the native one enormously since the end of the Second World War. German today is peppered with borrowings from English and, despite some mutterings, there are no official attempts to purify the tongue of Goethe and Grass. The affinity for English is understandable, seeing that Germans were saved from fascism and communism in the 20th century by Anglo-American forces, and, more pragmatically, Germany, an export-driven economy, knows full well the value of using an international language to further its interests.

So what's the new order going to look and sound like? Well, if the "Sprache in der Politik" initiative is successful, these are some of the replacements the people (das Volk) will be using:

Adieu/Ade for bye bye, bassin for pool, coupe for cup, d'accord for okay, equipe for team, formidable for cool, ordinateur for computer, trikot for t-shirt? " The list goes on.

One of the reasons given by "Sprache in der Politik" for replacing Anglo-Americanisms with Gallicisms is that German already has lots of French words that could be used more often. It mentions examples such as "Portemonnaie" (purse) and "Pl䤯yer" (plea). And to which famous linguist and anti-imperialist do they owe their presence in German? Why, Napoleon! By the way, I'm only joking (nur ein Witz/je plaisantais) about his being a famous linguist.

Diarist of the day: Queen Victoria, 8 April 1871

"Still dreadful news from Paris. The Commune has everything their own way, and they go on quite as in the days of the old Revolution in the last century, though they have not proceeded to commit all the same horrors. They have, however, thrown priests into prison, etc. They have burnt the guillotine and shoot people instead. I am so glad I saw Paris once more, though I should not care to do so again."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 8 April 2003 at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm following the war largely on the web (from the Agonist to Warblogs: cc) and radio, primarily the excellent BBC World Service. Print's not getting much of a look in or look at as life's too short for reading yesterday's speculation tomorrow. TV? Not much, really, as it's only worth turning on once or twice a day — you know, the same images being discussed by the same talking heads.

However, while watching N24 yesterday I did see a short report on a peace demo that took place on Saturday in, I think, Nuremberg. The day was cold, the small crowd looked bedraggled, and just I was in the course of switching off my attention the banner caught my eye. Two rather grim anti-war activists, on whom anything as delicate as irony would be lost, were carrying a standard that bore the legend "Der Friede besiegt den Krieg" (peace conquers war).

Now where had I seen this axiom before? Racking the photographic memory didn't produce results. So I made a cup of tea, and then, eureka, I had it. Pnin. Professor Timofey Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov's comic-tragic 1957 creation, flees Leninized Russia, escapes from France and spends an academic career at Waindell College, where his struggles with the American language are the stuff of legend.

Every second Tuesday Pnin drags himself along to the college's New Hall where Christopher and Louise Starr present a programme of music and movies:

"The second part of the programme consisted of an impressive Soviet documentary film, made in the late forties. It was supposed to contain not a jot of propaganda, to be all sheer art, merrymaking, and the euphoria of proud toil. Handsome, unkempt girls marched in immemorial Spring Festival with snatches of old Russian ballads such as 'Ruki proch ot Korei', 'Bas les mains devant la Cor', 'La paz vincera a la guerra', 'Der Friede besiegt den Krieg'. A flying ambulance was shown crossing a snowy range in Tajikistan. Kirghiz actors visited a sanatorium for coalminers among palm trees and staged there a spontaneous performance. In a mountain pasture somewhere in legendary Ossetia, a herdsman reported by portable radio to the local Republic's Ministry of Agriculture on the birth of a lamb. The Moscow Metro shimmered, with its columns and statues, and six would-be travellers seated on three marble benches. A factory worker's family spent a quiet evening at home, all dressed up, in a parlour choked with ornamental plants, under a great silk lampshade. Eight thousand soccer fans watched a match between Torpedo and Dynamo. Eight thousand citizens at Moscow's Electrical Equipment Plant unanimously nominated Stalin candidate from the Stalin Election District of Moscow. The latest Zim passenger model started out with the factory worker's family and a few other people for a picnic in the country. And then — "

Der Friede besiegt den Krieg. Thank God for Nabokov. Laughter is the best anti-idiot antidote at times.

Diarist of the day: Cecil King, 7 April 1968

"The most important news since I last wrote has been the assassination of Martin Luther King at Memphis and the consequent rioting all over the United States, notably in Washington. The Negro problem was going to be a nightmare this summer anyway, but this murder makes a desperate situation even more so. Part of the attraction of the riots is the looting, which seems to be almost unrestrained. I always thought that when rioting breaks out, looters must be shot. Otherwise the situation will get entirely out of hand. [Lyndon] Johnson has made all the right gestures but it is exceedingly difficult to see any end to the tension, let alone the violence which seems to be in some way part of the American way of life."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 7 April 2003 at 7:45 AM | Permalink

Last week, Ireland's Sunday Business Post printed a piece titled
"Things are not going their way", by Sean Mac Carthaigh and Barry O' Kelly. Among the gems they cast before the unfortunate readers were:

"In a series of intelligence reports, compiled from Russia's vast electronic eavesdropping and spy network and translated for an internet website, Kremlin military specialists say the US and British forces made a series of potentially disastrous errors in the first week of the war."

This pair certainly has access to spectacularly well-informed, respected and unbiased sources. And what does this "internet website" (!) have to say in its translated form?

'Today we can see that the US advance is characterized by disorganised and impulsive actions. The troops are simply trying to find weak spots in the Iraqi defences and break through them until they hit the next ambush,' Russian analysts said.

According to the Russian reports, not a single goal set before the coalition forces was met on time.

"During the nine days of the war the coalition has failed:

• to divide Iraq in half along the an-Nassiriya-al-Ammara line
• to surround and to destroy the Iraqi group of forces at Basra
• to create an attack group between the Tigris and the Euphrates with a front toward Baghdad
• to disrupt Iraq's military and political control, to disorganise Iraq's forces and to destroy the main Iraqi attack forces."

Not content with regurgitating this badly-written nonsense, the two hacks turned to Germany (always good for an independent opinion) for a definitive summation of the rout facing coalition forces. Here's their killer graf:

"Meanwhile, the doyen of German military history research, Professor Manfred Messerschmidt, has said a military defeat for the US and British forces is now 'probable', so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power."

The Sunday Business Post has a section on its website where it holds forth on ethics and standards:

High journalistic standards: "We have built, and we intend to maintain, a reputation founded on the credibility, thoroughness and fairness of our editorial coverage. There has never been, and there will never be, any attempt either to hide or to be economical with the truth."

This paper of lofty principles, by the way, also offers a forum to the ageing rugby commentator Tom McGurk. One of his offerings, written prior to the beginning of war in Iraq, was headed "US is about to commit a wilful war crime". It contained a sentence about Saddam's regime that will surely earn an immortal place in the annals of bad-taste journalism: "That such a government is also run by a criminal monster is neither here nor there."

Neither here nor there? Neither here nor there? That's where the "journalism" of McGurk, Mac Carthaigh and O' Kelly should be.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 6 April 2003 at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A trip to Vienna is being planned. On 23-24 May, the city that was once the jewel in the Austro-Hungarian crown will play host to the BlogTalk conference. Some 300 bloggers from all over the world will gather to discuss the use of micro-content-management systems. The use of blogs within business and educational contexts is also on the agenda. Say the organizers:

"Blogs are ideally deployed in the fields of public relations, marketing, product development, knowledge-management, project-management, reporting, research, and of course journalism. They are further ideal tools for personal private publishing."

Keynote speaker will be the marvellous Rebecca Blood. Other speakers on the lengthy list include, Dan Gillmor, Jose Luis Orihuela, Henry Copeland, Gilbert Cattoire and Martin Röll.

See you in Vienna.

Diarist of the day: Adrian Mole, 6 April 1982

"The nation has been told that Britain and Argentina are not at war, we are at conflict. I am reading Scoop by a woman called Evelyn Waugh."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Christ is shorter in Ireland." So wrote the 12-year-old Michael Kelly in his diary in response to the crucifixes gracing the walls of the farmhouse where he stayed with his Irish relatives, far from his native Washington, DC. The observant eye closed forever on Thursday night when Kelly was killed in Iraq at the age of 46.

His was a brilliant career. First came television. He quickly established his credentials as a producer with ABC, and fame and fortune seemed assured. But he quit after a reporter told him that "in television news a hair dryer is every bit as important as a notebook and pencil."

So he left the big city, took a huge pay cut and started at the bottom in newspapers. He learned the trade as a junior reporter in Cincinnati and was noticed by the Baltimore Sun. After that, it was onward and upward: he covered the White House for the New York Times, became Washington editor for the New Yorker and served as a columnist and then as editor of the New Republic. And all this before he was 38 years old.

Not content with the success that would crown most journalistic careers, he contributed a column for the Washington Post, become a senior writer at the National Journal, then its editor, and finally served as editor-at-large of the venerable Atlantic Monthly. The magazine's tribute yesterday reflected the immense sadness felt by all who knew Kelly personally. Those, like myself, who knew the man only by way of his writing, are grieved by his death. His prose was provocative, informed and ironic, but never apologetic. He loved language and understood the immense power of the printed word.

Ken Ringle's appreciation in today's Washington Post is comprehensive and moving. Kelly's last column from the front, Across the Euphrates, appeared in the Washington Post on Thursday, 3 April. Meanwhile, The Atlantic has put up this page with a list of Kelly's articles.

"Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality."

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 5 April 2003 at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Munich] Sky grey, cold rain falling? perfect conditions, then, for reading the self-styled "dullest blog in the world". Typical entries

Leaving some things lying around April 4 "I noticed that there were a few things lying around here and there. I decided to leave them where they were."

Walking past the ironing board April 1
"I left the room and walked past the ironing board which I had left up in order to do some ironing. When I came back into the room I walked past the ironing board once again."

Actually, life at Rainy Day HQ isn't dull at the moment; far from it. Just sleepy, that's all. Regular blogging will resume once the public prints and coffee have been consumed

Diarist of the day: John Wesley, 5 April 1790

"I met with one of the most extraordinary phenomena that I ever saw, or heard of: -- Mr Sellers has in his yard a large Newfoundland dog, and an old raven. They have fallen deeply in love with each other, and never desire to be apart. The bird has learned the bark of the dog, do that few can distinguish them. She is inconsolable when he goes out; and, if he stays out a day or two, she will get up all the bones and scraps she can, and hoard them up for him till he comes back."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Much of the world is watching and blogging the war in Iraq in English and, to a lesser extent, Arabic. Not good news, that, for France, which is rarely in the picture outside the Francophone countries, unless it's taking a bashing from the Anglosphere, of course. Time, then, to get oneself a 24-hour satellite TV network. And that's what Jacques Chirac intends to do.

If you wish to submit a proposal to the French government to run the network, 22 April is the deadline. Don't stay up all night perfecting those Excel profit forecasts, though; they're not expected. The global audience is limited, so advertisers won't be falling over themselves to redirect their budgets. This is about politics and the war of ideologies, so lots of state subsidies can be expected and, given their experience with domestic politics and subsidies, state-owned and private French media groups, nicely fattened already by the taxpayer, are lining up at the trough. Radio France International is expected to partner with state-owned France Télévisions in tendering for the contract. The talk is of an annual budget of €35 million for the network. La Chaine Info, the all news channel, is bidding for the job as well but it says that a €100 million a year will be needed for operations.

THIS IDEA for a 24-hour satellite TV network has been doing the rounds in France for some years now and officials may yet regret not getting on the airwaves sooner. Ten years ago, the benchmark and the rival, was CNN. Today, the Atlanta-based broadcaster is bigger than ever reaching 80 million American households and 160 million internationally. Meanwhile, BBC World has come along and is making inroads all over the globe. Although far behind CNN in terms of viewers, it is earning plaudits for its journalism. The audience will come, says a confident BBC management. Then there's al-Jazeera. Started in 1996, it now counts around 35 million viewers, with 8 million of those in Europe. To complicate matters further, there are reports that CNN is holding discussions with Canal Plus, the French pay TV operator, about launching its own French-language version. And, the icing on the cake: The US government is in the process of setting up an Arab language news service that will have an operating budget of $62 million and start broadcasting at the end of next year. So, lots of competition for Chirac's network, which will be targeting opinion leaders in the Middle East, as well as those in Africa and Europe and Canada.

Do these people want to get their news exclusively in French, though? Naturally, non. That's why bidders for the network contract are being asked to estimate the cost of broadcasting in English, Spanish and Arabic as well.

IN THE MEANTIME, there's the internet, which reaches a vast global audience, but a casual inspection of news sites suggests that the voice of France is not being heard online. That's because English is the language people use on the web to reach people they want to influence. But what do the leading French publications do? That's right. They don't do English. Le Monde is in French only, as is Liberation as is Le Figaro. If this is how the French think they can win hearts and minds in the war of ideas, they're making a big mistake. So, given the poor job that France is doing in promoting its culture and ideas on the internet, one cannot expect much of its 24-hour satellite TV network, apart from huge financial losses, that is.

Diarist of the day: Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4 April 1870 "In taking off my jersey of knitted wool in the dark with an accidental stroke of my finger down the stuff I drew a flash of electric light. This explains the crackling I have often heard."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 4 April 2003 at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5, Scene 1. THESEUS: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact."

In January, Andrew Motion, the British poet laureate, wrote a 30-word poem, Causa Belli, suggesting money, greed, oil and his father were driving George Bush to war. Now he's written another anti-war verse (170 words), a lament for Iraq, called Regime Change. An excerpt:

"Take Tigris and Euphrates; once they ran Through childhood-coloured slats of sand and sun. Not any more they don't; I've filled them up With countless different kinds of human crap."

Motion describes his opposition to the Iraq war as "very vehement" and he says Regime Change is "violently opposed to the war". But it's not unpatriotic, he argues. What do you think?

Regime Change

Advancing down the road from Niniveh
Death paused a while and said 'Now listen here.

You see the names of places roundabout?
They're mine now, and I've turned them inside out.

Take Eden, further south: At dawn today
I ordered up my troops to tear away

Its walls and gates so everyone can see
That gorgeous fruit which dangles from its tree.

You want it, don't you? Go and eat it then,
And lick your lips, and pick the same again.

Take Tigris and Euphrates; once they ran
Through childhood-coloured slats of sand and sun.

Not any more they don't; I've filled them up
With countless different kinds of human crap.

Take Babylon, the palace sprouting flowers
Which sweetened empires in their peaceful hours -

I've found a different way to scent the air:
Already it's a by-word for despair.

Which leaves Baghdad -- the star-tipped minarets,
The marble courts and halls, the mirage-heat.

These places, and the ancient things you know,
You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

"Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose," said Churchill. Would that he were living that at this hour.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 3 April 2003 at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Same old clich鳠trotted out in the German parliament this morning: "failure of diplomacy", "war no solution", "only the UN?". How could anyone be expected to take seriously a debate about the shape of a liberated Iraq while listening to such banalities being uttered by a bunch of insufferable hypocrites.

Chancellor Schr? and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, cynically and calculatedly chose anti-Americanism as their trump card last year and benefited handsomely from the move — they are still in power. Recently, the German president, Johannes Rau, added his voice to the cacophony. Having now placed resentment and rancour at the core of Germany's relationship with Washington, these three, their followers and a fawning media, frightening in its Soviet-style toeing of the party line, believe that they represent some kind of moral force. They're deluded. They've gambled and lost.

Buying off tyrants with cosy deals and soothing them with weasel words is yesterday's strategy. Appeasement does not work and those who endorse it are doing an enormous disservice to their people.

Liberating the oppressed and deposing tyrants are moral choices; appeasing dictators and fomenting hatred of those who would overcome them are immoral choices

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Vladimir Putin said last night that Russia does not want the United States to fail in its war in Iraq: "For political and economic reasons, Russia is not interested in seeing the defeat of the United States in Iraq," the Interfax news agency quoted Putin as saying.

Al-Jazeera has stopped broadcasting from Iraq: "The Arabic broadcaster Al-Jazeera has suspended reporting from Iraq after Baghdad barred two of its correspondents from reporting there."

Turkey allows a convoy of more than 20 lorries loaded with light military jeeps intended for United States forces based in northern Iraq to cross the Turkish-Iraqi border: "A second convoy of military equipment on has been taken from US bases in Turkey to US forces gathering in northern Iraq.

The Ukraine has sent a unit of its anti-chemical weapons force has arrived in Kuwait in case their help is necessary to neutralize the effects of any Iraqi attack.

Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, said he hoped that the Iraqi regime would soon be deprived of power so that the war can be ended.

Some of these decisions and statements are, no doubt, cynical and opportunistic, but that's the world we live in. The stakes are high now because once the war is over the time for the sharing of spoils will come. By that I don't mean anything as crass as loot; more access to Iraq and influence in Washington.

Fence sitters might do well to read William Safire's "On Rewarding Friends" in today's New York Times (registration required). Says Safire:

"Nations have alliances, based on short-term strategic or economic interests. But peoples have friendships, based on memories forged in times of trial. These are the times that make and break friendships among peoples."

One friendship that's beginning to look very much like history is the historic US relationship with France. The break will be expensive for Paris and its pals:

"The U.S. will live up to its eight-year, $881 million contract with the French company Sodexho to provide domestic mess-hall meals to our Marine Corps (provided the souffl鳠don't fall). And most U.S. consumers will not boycott French perfume or wine (though Australian merlot deserves a try).

But on future big deals that require a trustworthy ally, public opinion will drive public policy. Right now, our Department of Energy is about to award a $30 million contract to design a system for its nuclear waste program in Yucca Mountain, Nev. The consortium that wins will have the inside track on a billion-dollar deal transporting nuclear waste within the U.S. in years to come.

Three bids were invited by D.O.E.'s general contractor, Bechtel. One is from an American-Japanese group; another is from an American-British combine; the third's from a mainly French, partly German nuclear conglomerate named Cogema.

Assuming the expertise and price are in the same ballpark, which outfit should not get this sensitive project financed by American taxpayers? In light of President Jacques Chirac's torpedo into the Atlantic alliance, the question answers itself."

As my dear mother says, "God never closes one door but he opens another."

Diarist of the day: Dawn Powell, 3 April 1941

"Fear is the basis of love loyalty. Fear to break off for fear the next will not be as good or as permanent or that the old will do too well without you. Women don't leave a drunkard as often as reported. The drunkard, being maverick, can always get another woman and besides there is always the maternal he arouses -- also the sex interest since he is likely to be a different person every time."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Which neocon is he quoting now with this "final push for freedom" jingo lingo you ask? The speaker, actually, is Morgan Tsvangirai and he's no armchair hawk in some well-feathered nest inside the Beltway. He is, rather, the leader of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change, and he uttered those words to his supporters following the party's victory Monday in two Harare by-elections.

Just because one tyrant is being edged closer to retirement doesn't mean that other members of the club are easing up on their coercion. If anything, Robert Mugabe has stepped up his intimidation since the war in Iraq began. This recent Amnesty International report, titled "Zimbabwe: Mass arrests signal new and dangerous phase of repression", states:

"Amnesty International is deeply concerned by the increasing scale of arbitrary detentions and for the safety of several hundred people including officials and supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) taken into custody in Zimbabwe since 18 March 2003. Although some of those arrested have been released, many remain in detention, whilst the whereabouts of others remain unknown. At least one person, Steven Tonera, a farmworker in Manicaland province has been killed, allegedly as a result of being beaten by state agents?

In one incident, on 18 March, a group of soldiers and state agents beat and tortured three workers on the farm of Roy Bennet, MDC MP for Chimanimani. The three men were forced to lie on their stomachs on the ground and beaten with batons, sjamboks (whips) and pieces of wire. Their fingers and toes were also broken. As a result of the beatings and torture, one of the workers Steve Tonera died. The three men were accused of being MDC supporters and of burning a bus. On 20 March, a convoy of three trucks carrying up to 60 soldiers of the Zimbabwe National Army came back to the farm and severely assaulted up to 70 people."

THE HORRORS of Mugabe's regime are heartbreakingly documented in "The Jewel of Africa" by Doris Lessing, which appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. She begins:

"You have the jewel of Africa in your hands," said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. "Now look after it."

Twenty-three years later, the "jewel" is ruined, dishonored, disgraced."

Lessing's poignant account of the ruin and disgrace of Zimbabwe makes for painful reading; her concluding paragraph is worth quoting is full, so well does it depict meglomania:

"The latest news is that Mugabe, under a contract with a Chinese company, is importing Chinese farmers to grow food, since the forcibly acquired white farms are not producing. He says this is because there is no farm machinery. Yet all the expelled white farmers had been forced to leave behind their machinery. If lack of machinery is the problem, then why not import some? But is the story true? It has the tone of zany, brutal, hasty improvisation that characterizes news from Mugabe. We can pity the Chinese, who may not be protected against Mugabe's arbitrary cruelties. And what about the poor blacks who will yet again watch their land being taken from them?"

The "final push for freedom" in Zimbabwe is on; interesting to see will be the amount of support Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change can expect from the UN, democratically elected governments the world over, and, of course, the global peace movement.

Diarist of the day: Eleanor Coppola, 2 April 1976

[During the filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines] "The helicopters used in the film are from the Philippine Air Force. Today, in the middle of the rehearsal for a complicated shot, they were called away to fight the rebels in a civil war about 150 miles to the south. It is hard to know what is going on. There is no news of the war in the government-controlled press. I was talking to one of the Filipino crewmen. He said that a group of southern islands, which are predominantly Moslem, are fighting for independence. Francis has a government-supplied bodyguard at all times. There are guards at our house. The government seems to feel that if Francis were kidnapped by rebels, they might create an incident that could attract international attention."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 2 April 2003 at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When John Robb speaks, people listen. Usually he talks about knowledge management because he's the president of Userland Software, which created the hugely popular Radio UserLand blogging tool, and Manila, the low-cost content management system. But Robb also served for seven years as a pilot in US Air Force Special Operations, after studying at Yale and the United States Air Force Academy, so he knows a thing or two about military matters.

On Sunday, he confided to readers of his blog that he's been rereading Liddell Hart's analysis of the campaigns of Belisarius (a Byzantine general who fought some of the most brilliant and bloodless campaigns in history). Robb's question: what would Belisarius do in the place of Tommy Franks? Robb's answer: He would first identify the threat and then devise an economical means to eliminate it:

"If the threat is that Iraq is able to fund terrorism and fund the development of weapons of mass destruction, then the common basis for the threats is his ability to fund. How does he fund these threats? Obviously, oil revenues. He cheats on the UN oil for food program. So, what would Belisarius do if he was leading US forces?

He would take the oil. A quick and limited military strike could have done that. The oil would then be put under a joint US/UN control and the funds would be strictly controlled. Payments to Turkey and Kuwait would be made for their inconvenience. Funds for food and medicine would be made and these goods would be shipped to Iraqi authorities. A slight modification of the plan would enable the creation of autonomous zones for Kurds (including Kirkuk and Iraq's northern oil field) and Shiites (including Basra and Iraq's southern oil field). This would require a small amount of fighting to clear these cities. These zones in turn would get access to unrestricted funds. The rest of a penniless Iraq would be left to Saddam. In order for Iraq to get the oil back, they would be forced to disarm and undergo social changes that would provide freedoms for Iraqis (effectively, that would require the removal of Saddam). The first phase would last three years and be renewed annually until the requirements were met."

Yes, but a Saddamistan propped up by a Republican Guard would surely be a grave danger, wouldn't it? Well, if that's your worry, smash the Republican Guard, says Robb, and the coup many hope for might just well come. Still, he argues that we should study Belisarius and listen to Hart's wise words:

"In the case of a state that is seeking not conquest but the maintenance of its security, the aim is fulfilled if the threat be removed — if the enemy is lead to abandon his purpose."

Unlike Belisarius, however, Tommy Franks has to win a televised war, and before the bottom falls out of the stock market, as well. That means, the option of waiting out Saddam is not, well, an option.

Diarist of the day: John Wyndham, 1 April 1941

"Sid and Mummy stayed over at the Grail House last night, so was alone in London for the first time since the blitz started. Went up to Sid's bedroom and read all her juicy books about psychopaths and sexual abnormalities and the symbolism of dreams. There was one by Kraft Ebbing that got me so excited that I remembered something Leonard had told me and took a candle from the little altar. Now I suppose I'm completely beyond the pale as far as the Church is concerned."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 1 April 2003 at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)