Wonder who’s the greatest Brit then - Princess David?

Crossposted from European Tribune.

BBC News:

It’s time to face it: Yoweri Museveni, hailed in Europe and the US as the finest in a ‘new generation of African leaders,’ is a self-serving dictator. Those who think otherwise - and they are many - have been taken for a ride. I know for a fact that Museveni has been promising MPs to become his anointed successor; those were conned as well.

Term limits were invented for a reason. Power does, after all, corrupt. As Museveni put it in 1987: “Any president staying in power beyond fifteen years is courting disaster.” Evidently he feels better about such courtship now, nearly two decades hence.

Let’s take a look, then, at the President’s record. Southern Uganda, where the ruling elite has its origins, has enjoyed a fine economic growth. However, in Uganda’s three northern provinces a war has raged for 19 years, the entire duration of Museveni’s time in office. In this interminable clash with the Lord’s Resistance Army - a bizarre cult-at-arms led by the illiterate former altar boy Joseph Kony - up to 30 000 children down to seven years of age have been abducted and forced into slavery as sex toys or guerrilla fighters. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the population have been hoarded into refugee camps ostensibly for their own protection, their villages torched by the Ugandan army. In reality, scant protection is offered, which is why up to 40 000 children ‘night commute’ to the towns every night, sleeping under open sky or in UNICEF shelters. This is what Museveni affords the children of an ethnic group, the Acholi, that understandably declines to sing his praises.

Why can’t the mighty Ugandan army protect the camps from rebel attacks? In part, perhaps, because it isn’t quite as mighty as on paper. Thousands of ghost soldiers are alleged to grace its payrolls, the money channeled into commercially motivated warlordism in the northeastern DR Congo - where an estimated 1000 perish every day. Museveni, however, is ever one to turn the tables on his critics:

According to the Oxford Analytica, the extensive ghost soldier scam is one reason why no peace has been struck with the Lord’s Resistance Army:

In any case, Museveni has repeatedly frustrated efforts to broker a solution. Instead he prefers to shell the abducted children from the air. But then, as he said a few years ago after a vicious bout of abductions: “By now they are HIV-infected anyway.”

Speaking of HIV: In the 1990’s Uganda was the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to experience a significant drop in HIV prevalence. The winning formula was education, especially encouraging the use of condoms. But now Museveni has publicly condemned condoms as inappropriate for Ugandans, placed new restrictions on their import, and let his ministers tout abstinence instead as a prevention strategy. This, as Human Rights Watch documented in an 80-page report released in March, is a surefire recipe for failure. But at least it is also sure to have pleased the first lady, Janet Museveni - a Christian fundamentalist who has scolded groups teaching youth about condoms and called for a ‘national virgin census.’

Human Rights Watch and similar detractors can be charmed in other ways, Museveni believes. The government is now spending £350 000 spiffing up its fading image on the human rights front:

I am sure the Bush administration, whose darling Museveni is, doesn’t mind so much. But maybe Europe should?

BBC News:

OK, just a brief point here. Iran is going to press ahead with developing nuclear weapons. That much is clear and has been so for a while.

Why? Because the regime considers it vital to national security. Now, whatever reward the EU can offer in return for abstaining, that reward is necessarily economic. And economic interests virtually always take the back seat to vital security interests, in Tehran as in any other capital.

Why does Iran feel a need for nukes? In order to deter invasion by hostile nations above it in the food chain. Are there any such in the region? There is exactly one: The USA, which now surrounds it on both sides.

So Iran will press ahead with the program unless physically hindered by US or Israeli air strikes. I am not holding my breath for that to happen, but it cannot be ruled out. By contrast, a US invasion is ruled out by the sheer lack of troops. (The mullahs surely know this, but take a longer view - swayed, no doubt, by the plight of Saddam Hussein.)

If Iran goes nuclear, and it probably will, is that not disastrous? Not necessarily. The purpose of the weapons is and must remain a defensive one, simply because they are useless for anything else. A first strike at Israel is not an option, for Israel either has, or will duly acquire, a second-strike capability. And even with delivery systems capable of reaching the US homeland, which Iran will not have in some time, the US could flatten Iran with a single submarine.

That leaves the threat of Iran supplying nukes to terrorists, which is also unlikely in the extreme. Even assuming a motive for this, it is hard to see how it could ever be worth the risk. Iraq was invaded on the mere possibility that it might provide WMDs to terrorists in the future, despite having no such thing and not even being suspected of having nukes. So the risk associated with handing over a warhead must be prohibitive.

To sum up: Iran is going to continue pursuing nukes; it will likely get them; and it’s not as big a deal as it is made out to be - especially on the Potomac.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Nigeria’s anti-corruption commission has compiled some astounding figures, The Telegraph reports:

Even by the standards of African tyrants, Abacha was special. Taking power in 1993, he modeled his rule on Mobutu, the Congolese dictator who inspired the notion of kleptocracy (the rule by thieves). His hoarding of astronomical sums into overseas accounts was so shameless as to disgust even his predecessor General Ibrahim Babangida - ‘Nigeria’s Idi Amin.’ Had he not succumbed to a heart attack in the arms of two Indian prostitutes on June 8, 1998, Abacha might still have been plundering the world’s 9th most populous country, which harbors 1/7 of Africa’s population. Happily, however, this ‘Coup from Heaven’ - surely among the more fortunate effects of Viagra - led to the election of Olusegun Obasanjo, a civil war hero and born-again Christian with a past as a fairly benevolent dictator.

A cautious optimism has now taken hold in a country ruled by generals for nearly two-thirds of the 45 years since independence. Time and time again, military dictatorships have seized power by coup, quashed all opposition, pillaged the Treasury, squandered the spoils on absurd largesse, and placated Western critics by signing harsh austerity agreements. Typically starting out by pledging economic reform and routing of corruption, they would proceed to do the opposite. They also tended to legitimate themselves by what has been called a ‘Permanent Transition’ to democratic civilian rule.

Obasanjo, who took office in May 1999, earned his trust 20 years earlier by actually stepping aside for such rule. Even more uniquely, he has made fighting corruption a top priority in deed as well as word. Yet the task is daunting; for the behavior is a way of life from village to National Assembly in a nation which last year was rated as the third most corrupt in the world.

As The Telegraph notes, the petroleum curse is key. The oil revenue flowing since the mid-70s has transformed Nigeria, and mostly for the worse. Lonely Planet’s Africa on a Shoestring, 8th edition, sums it up:

Outside of said hellholes, agriculture has been neglected and in some areas - like the Ogoni Territory in the Niger Delta, championing which got Ken Saro-Wiwa hanged in 1995 - ruined by pollution. This further boosts urbanization as people seek to the cities for a taste of the wealth so eagerly displayed by the nouveaux riches. A get-rich-quick mentality has entrenched itself at the expense of traditional values. No doubt this helps explain Nigeria’s most dubious claim to fame: the ‘419 Scam’ industry responsible for much of the money transfers to the region.

Society, in brief, has become a hierarchy defined by access to material riches. If anywhere near the top, you steal because you can. That, of course, impoverishes the majority near the bottom, who steal because they must - and because, if the government can do it, why not they?

Related to this dog-eats-dog culture is an ethos whereby it is not merely foolish but positively immoral for an official not to grease his pockets and - in theory, anyway - let it trickle down to kith and kin. There is a culture of tolerance for embezzlement by members of own ethnicity. When, as is usual, mere crumbs reach the hometown folks, it is bad form to criticize ‘one’s own’ who have ‘made good’: Doing so would amount to cleaning ethnic linen in public.

A weak sense of national identity feeds the problem. With its 133 million citizens and somewhere between 250 and 400 ethnic groups, Nigeria is Africa’s answer to Indonesia and India, but much less of a nation-state than either. In part this is because the Brits, who in 1914 established the country by cobbling together some of their possessions, governed by divide-and-rule. They also favored the Christian south over the predominantly Muslim north, leaving a legacy of resentment in the latter. Most of the military juntas were rooted in the northern Hausa-Fulani people and imposed distributive schemes designed to benefit the north. Adding to the quandary, the oil is located in the south.

This is the landscape which President Obasanjo, reelected in a probably fraudulent 2003 poll, must negotiate if serious about increasing transparency. So far things look moderately well: Guarded by a new constitution, a civil society and a vibrant public sphere have begun to blossom. Considerable media attention is awarded claims of shoddy deals, of which the National Assembly is widely perceived to have plenty.

Such openness about what used to be matters of course is itself quite a step ahead. Meanwhile, however, high oil prices are floating the economy, filling the coffers with more wealth to be distributed one way or another. And that may become Obasanjo’s greatest challenge. Lao Tze councels in the Dao De Jing that an Emperor, to discourage theft, should ensure that there is nothing to steal. The advice may appear somewhat radical, but in light of the Nigerian experience it does make a certain sense.

The link between oil and corruption is, however, almost universal. Remarked Peter Eigen, the Chairman of Transparency International, upon the release of its 2004 report:

Extreme though Nigeria may be, it is not unique.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Following up this, I have translated another story by existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe — an animal fable from his 1941 masterpiece, On the Tragic. Here a bunch of castaway cats face a deep dilemma in trying to survive on a desert island. The fable is an image of the human condition, of which Zapffe took a pessimistic view.

Once upon a time there was a ship carrying cats, a lot of cats of all kinds, to a World Exhibition on Hawaii. Underway, the ship sunk ‘with men and mice’, the cats clinging to matresses and other strange things and drifting ashore on a desolate island. There was no life on this island except certain sprightly and irresistibly funny, but sadly inedible beetles, so at first sight they appeared all condemned to miserable death.

Then it was discovered that the soft clay along the beach brimmed with fat and delicious clamshells, easily opened with a claw or two. Thus arose for most a terrible dilemma. The only decent path was surely to leap like tigers for the beetles, the alternative being a foul activity to which no cat of the genus Felidae would descend. They represented the Cat as it had jumped forth from the mind of God, as one of them had learned by mom’s knee while a kitten at Mrs. Bloom’s, and the very thought of it abhorred them utterly.

But ‘cat, schmat’, as the madam also used to say, and sure enough, it was not long before the first ones dipped their paws and were followed by others, there being soon a veritable rush. Indeed they displayed such indifference to feline standards as to lie in the pleasantly sun-warmed mud merely gorging and breeding — their progeny slurping clams as soon as weaned. At fitting intervals they would raise their mudstained faces to squint at the snobs ashore; scorn and ridicule altered with a glowing hatred as the sight of land cats reminded them of their betrayal against the family’s precious heritage.

Optimism became a treasured way to dull their awareness of guilt and inferiority. Before long, they had to extend their defences; the land cats were called neurotics and psychotics — tricky words, but stimulating to the mud colony. Finally an analyst was sent up from the beach; he found resistance against recovery and diagnosed a fear of water. The plebeians were in triumph, but the others too were convinced by the explanation and acknowledged it, knowing well what the bottom line was.

By contrast, the cats of prey became pessimists. Not due to such burdens as the others gave weight to — lesions and starvation, choking and cold — but to finding themselves put into a world of poor terms for the sacred formula in their hearts. In recognition of this fact they instilled reproduction, the future appearing darker day by day.

Then prophets arose among them to teach the art of hope: Once upon a time we all came from a land where the objects of our noble pursuit could also be eaten and digested. Yet many were slothful, neglecting to exercise their nimbleness and strength, and that is why the ship went ashore. Now death awaits the faithful, but after death a new ship will come for the ones who did not fail. And then all those who lived in sin shall perish, and no ship shall come to deliver them.

But hunger tore their bowels, and they would whine in many keys and say: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in unsrer Brust!” Still some became traitors and went into vulgus and sated themselves, whilst others converted by the prophet’s word and went ashore and cleansed their pelt and prepared for their great departure. The proudest of them formed a fraternity, publically declaring it the duty of any honest cat to die before selling one’s soul for a dish of clams. And when the leader felt his powers waning, he laid down on a stub to die what humans call a tragic-heroic death. Many would revere him as a saint and follow his lead, as they could not bring themselves to useful resignation; those stayed faithful to the highest ideals of felinity, though they saw through the prophet’s consolation and fought despair in their hearts.

Yet a majority in both camps became slaves of eternal doubt, dividing their time between uneasy satedness and abstinence with devouring wants. It was of course a relief to be rid the aristocrats; but the new maxim of merging with the crabs proved unrealisable in the end.

So what’s the deal here, Markos? Didn’t the Pie Wars exodus free up enough bandwidth?

Update: Ah, they’ve tweaked the horrid colors. Looks less appalling now. Not all that different from my menu column, in fact.

As well it might: It offers some of the most insightful analysis of military matters on the Internet. This is not least thanks to Lind’s overarching perspective, which he calls ‘Fourth Generation Warfare.’ Like his friend, the noted military historian Martin van Creveld, Lind argues that the age in which the nation state monopolizes warfare is ending globally. Instead we are returning to war as it was before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, with a range of armed non-state actors operating in the crumbling hulls of failed territorial states:

Lind’s application of this model may at times appear exaggerated, but it is consistently illuminating nonetheless. Despite all political disagreement, then, it was a rude surprise to find this 2002 interview in The Jewish World Review. Here, for instance, is Lind on Islamic law:

I will not insult the reader’s knowledge by explaining what is wrong with this little lecture. But maybe Dr. Lind should stick to subjects about which he has a clue. There is no lack of those, after all.

My last entry, cross-posted at dKos and Booman Tribune, generated the following e-mail exchange between Juan Cole and my online buddy Mark:

While I find Cole’s response intriguing, thought-provoking, and well put, his insistence that what he calls ‘the global South’ has “every incentive to solve the problem” sits uneasily with yesterday’s cynical reference to “the cupidity of the world” and “how to play on it.”

The nature of the incentive - aside from the envisioned cash reward - is supposedly that either US persistence in Iraq, or its withdrawal without replacement, “could well throw Iraq into civil war [which] would bring in the Iranians, the Saudis and the Turks” and lead to a global petroleum crisis which would disproportionately harm the south. Yes, it certainly could. But so could the replacement of highy skilled and well-equipped forces with a motley of militarily inferior troops whose morale would soon deteriorate to below that of GI Joe, since they’d have an even harder time preserving the illusion of defending their own countries.

And though he is right that $60 a barrel is already a strain on third world economies, it seems to me that the political strain of sending their soldiers into a meat-grinder would be appreciably worse. Which is one reason why I can’t really see ‘the global South’ drum up the hundreds of thousands of blue helmets that are probably needed. It won’t, insofar as it knows where its interests lie.

Needless to say, Professor Cole is incomparably more knowledgeable than I on these thorny issues. And while I remain unconvinced, his proposal may merit more thought.

The astute Juan Cole, who does more to make sense of the waking nightmare in Iraq than most of the media outlets combined, outlines a plan for US withdrawal. The United Nations, he submits, could be induced to replace the former as it leaves with the tail firmly tucked between its legs. And here is how:

Indeed, progressives are usually people of principle, which is why they may want to think twice about this idea. What Cole basically proposes is that poor countries be bribed off to do the dying now that the hyperpower which insisted on; led; and botched this sorry war of choice has had enough. His reference to ‘cupidity’ makes it clear, furthermore, that he knows they would get a raw deal. And unless he has in mind specifically India and the handful of other fairly democratic third world states, the odds are that the citizens - let alone troops - of said countries would have precious little say in the matter. Nor would they necessarily be the main beneficients of the multi-billion dollar bribe.

Cole explains his motivation thus:

I appreciate the effort to carve out such a middle ground, so it is with some regret that I must ask for a better suggestion.

And what’s with the ‘us’ there, Professor Cole?

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Here is the second and final part of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Science Fiction fable from 1936, as translated by yours truly. Professor Dreistein has successfully returned to earth after his revolutionary co-discovery of a perished civilization on Venus. His new challenge is to decipher the alien document he brought along.

The inscribed-upon, or more accurately, nucleostilographed cylinder, now preserved in the Professor’s laboratory where it has already begun to corrode, is believed to be a kind of matrix for audiographic replication… The cryptic tokens are of course resisting any and all interpretation at the present time. – Thus declared the official communiqué.

Yet the Professor did not begin work on the cylinder before having paid his respects to his brave colleague’s bereaved ones; his old lonely mother and pregnant wife. He personally felt it a poor consolation that the earthly shape of the deceased had gained eternal preservation by freezing to -273 degrees, now being as hard as diamond. But he did, at any rate, promise them a copy of the translation when available, complete with a personal dedication, and this seemed to help a little.

Professor Dreistein then went into total seclusion in his highly modern laboratory, to which no sound, beam, or living soul was allowed – except the two young philologists who had shared the last Nobel prize for their work on cryptogral coefficients. The thousand-headed crowd besieging the building all day and all night, preferring to starve and freeze rather than to miss any opportunity of whatever nature, had to be dispersed by the police as it began to assume a threatening attitude. The silence from within the building caused psychosis; many would kneel and pray out loud while others presented their ailing children to the Professor’s blackened windows. Armed sentries had to guard the entrance; nothing, it was felt, was quite impossible anymore.

The frantic efforts of the three gentlemen did not fail to bear fruit. On the 24th of December the press, in inch-thick headlines, announced that the Professor and his co-workers, by a supra-brilliant synthesis, had discovered the key to interpreting the cylinder, it being now a matter of time before the first word from transglobal cultures would come forth in intelligible form.

Already on the next morning the trinitarian team, in the Professor’s name, dared offer a waiting world the prospect that he, on the following Monday at 20.00.00 o’clock, in a lecture at the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften, would outline the phases of the interpretive process and likely, allow a preliminary glimpse of the result. His sole caveat concerned the eventuality that ill health might preclude his public appearance. The Professor’s old age, combined with a lengthy period of late hours and with the absorbing excitement of it all, gave his physicians cause for concern.

The key discovered, the philologists retreated leaving the old enthusiast bent in cosmic solitude over the final hermeneutic meta-theses. One wished to allow him the glory of being alone about this gift to humankind; the apex of his life and of his century.

“There is every reason”, wrote Berliner Abend in high-flown Aryan syntax, “to anticipate the deciphering’s impending announcement, not only with the utmost interest, but even with disquieting unease. A world that has lived its life to the fullest measure can be presumed to have attained such outer and inner maturity, such harmonious balance of technology and spirit, as humans too anticipate at our journey’s end – the end that shall validate our efforts and bestow meaning upon the self-denial and forgotten heroism of all perished generations, upon their shining, unfaltering faith, their productive labours, suffering, and struggle. A world that has passed through the concluding phases of its thousand times ten thousand years of history, onto the final stage, and engraved its profoundest insight into a material everlasting1 – that insight which is now spilling over to our own world in one fertilising flash, a spark from the singing forge of Depth itself – whatever may it not divulge to a humankind still so painfully on its way, so ravaged by the storms of mature existence? Whatever may not be awaiting us in terms of scientific impulses, of occult apocalyptic revelation, of food for popular thought and conversation, of novel spiritual domains – indeed, in plain terms: of gates flung wide open into the ultimate, so yearningly desired deliverance of the human soul? Surely we do not go too far when anticipating that Professor Dreistein’s lecture on next Monday will signify no less than a mutation in the history of the human spirit, without thereby losing sight of the awe-inspiring fact that culture does not die as planets do, but instead, carries on its elated crusade across universes ever new…”

Every room in the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften was crammed to capacity. From all over Europe, indeed, from the remotest corners of the globe, distinguished scholars had gathered to fully savour the impressions of this event and its creator, while every transmitter on earth was attuned to the little steely lectern in the Hörsaal für Sinnesempfang.

It was already a quarter past eight, yet none would dream of taking offense at this slight academic delay. The Professor’s excuse would doubtless be a valid one.

At about nine o’clock a certain unrest was felt in the lecture hall, and at half past nine the Presidency decided to make for the Professor’s study. One knocked on the door, but there was no reply. One waited another fifteen minutes before knocking again – with the same result. One then withdrew to cancel the meeting. At five o’clock the next morning, after exhaustive deliberation, one determined to force open the door.

For a moment the little assembly stood as if nailed to the floor – before scrambling to the rescue. Lying on the isolopyrium tiles in front of his desk was Professor Dreistein, his hair whitened overnight, with a bloody wound in his temple and an expression on his harried face suggesting to the gaping adepts the profoundest human despair. His bony, sinewy graybeard’s hand convulsively clutched a short-barrelled laser gun.

At the center of the desk were papers indicating various stages of interpretation, and in front of these, at the table’s edge, was a sheet with the first few sentences in modern German.

With throbbing heart, the President leaned over the table and recited:

“The prohibition of sale of intoxicating drink will lead to bitterness in wide circles of our people.”

—————–
(1) In a sterile atmosphere, that is.

Alas; they are both spot on.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Europeans are from Venus while Americans are from Mars, right? As a Saturday amusement I have translated a humorous fable from the mid-1930’s by the Norwegian existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990). A lampoon of golden age Science Fiction, it features two daring Europeans venturing upon Venus in a homemade rocket. Their journey is more than a space flight: It is a quest for the Meaning of Life.

To fully appreciate this story it helps to know the outline of Zapffe’s philosophy, which can be stated thus:

Like all living species, humans are endowed with a certain number of physiological and social needs; the need for food, rest, security and so on. These needs are quite easily satisfied. However, we humans have an additional need, lacking in all other species, for an overarching meaning of life. This need, according to Zapffe, can never be satisfied unless we deceive ourselves. We can thus either delude ourselves into belief in a false meaning of life, or we can remain honest and realise that life is meaningless. Unlike Sartre’s existentialism, which was ultimately an optimistic doctrine, Zapffe’s existential view was bleak. His great survey of tragedy in literature, politics and the arts indicated that all human endeavour was ultimately futile. He was a worthy heir to the great German pessimist Schopenhauer, and his view on the human destiny was simply that we ought to stop procreation immediately.

Here goes, for the first time in English, AFAIK (I adopted British spelling conventions for the occasion).

Berlin was in seething fever. And as the voice from Grosse Rundfunken collapsed upon the planet like a cloth, the peoples held their breath until the whole of earth, hirsute with humans, trembled in painfully tense expectation. Month after month the rumours had been swirling, at times met by disdainful snorts, at others, by exultation, at still others, by solemn silence. For this was something else and more than all the technical adventures that had so far come to life before people’s eyes; this was the epoch of the epochs, the leap and the metamorphosis, the most decisive crisis in the life of humanity, the realisation of its boldest dreams. And now it had actually happened; now it would no longer do to make a skeptical face; now it was a matter of historical fact!

On the Fourteenth of March Nineteenhundredandninetythree, Professor Amadeus Dreistein, the world-renowned astrophysicist and philosopher, accompanied by his loyal disciple, Dr. Viertelstein, began his journey to the planet Venus. At 21.51.33 ½ o’clock, a sky-threatening pillar of smoke arose from Tempelhofer Feld, followed by a million staring eyes all unable to believe themselves. On its top rode a rocket on which Dreistein had been working for a lifetime – his own, not just anyone’s - and baptised in champagne, ‘Flos Veneris’. Inside the rocket, suspended in clever anti-gravitational springs, were two men with less regard for their lives than for the ecstatic consummation of a thirty year long mass at the altar of science. The Argus eyes of telescopes traced them to the edge of emptiness, where they could no longer be distinguished from a mote on the lens.

When the estimated time expired, everyone on earth outside of camps and prisons went on lookout. Endless debates arose on the morning tram and swept around the globe like breaker waves. Had the rocket missed its target, to be consumed by infinity? Many still remembered the transmission from the moonbus ‘Hubris XV’, which in 1987 passed an Ameuropean astronaut; presumably one ejected during the collision of ‘Hubris II’ with the unmanned ‘Lunatic VIII’. In its obituary, Space Times had pointed out that this was the third of those austronauts who, after the big shipwrecks in the heavily polluted whirls of northern light, continue in orbit ‘on their own’. Dressed in their white spacesuits and lit by the set sun, they are, during interlunar periods, visible by ordinary telescope. Unfortunately they can only be identified by position, but their birth certificate names have been retained, and the Institute for Astrology, in cooperation with the Salvation Army, may on request provide their families with the azimuth at the next culmination.

This could have been the destiny of ‘R/K Flos Veneris’, but the heroic pioneers might also have been caught, slain and devoured by Venuvians. Or was one in store for a triumph to shake the Milky Way? At the least unusual noise, people would leave their desks and workshops and dash to the windows. Crowds, staring and clashing in midroad, behaved threateningly toward buses trying to pass. A state of emergency had to be declared in Berlin, but there were also grave effects elsewhere. In the South of Norway a cult arose which, in accordance with Malachi 4,5, believed that Eliah would join the return to appoint a date for the Day of Reckoning. The hopes invested in the expedition knew no bounds; unfathomable amounts of gems, gold, and radium would be anyone’s as soon as a permanent link was established. The Office of Migration spawned an interplanetary department and The Oslo Evening Gazette planned an ambulatory branch.

The 9th of September the following year, the bomb went off: ‘Flos Veneris’ had landed in the Mediterranean, the Professor being on his way to Berlin. As the morning papers came out on the 10th, the newsstands were rushed and paperboys all across Europe obliterated by the advance of their customers. Indeed, the stacks of the special edition might be so obnoxiously described as ‘worth their weight in blood’. The editor of The Swedish Central Times, who had never, even in the heat of polemic, used a stronger word than ‘quite’, met his secretary with the following morning salutation: “Scimitars in my kidneys, lad, today we have one god-damned, storm-ridden, enormous-as-hell sensation!”

Dreistein and his heroic companion had discovered an extinct planet, its surface so shot through with architectonic filigree as to seem, from a distance, like a hovering bone-coloured lacework against the jet black sky. At landing the two scientists had just enough oxygen left four a half-hour stay outside the rocket. Singleminded as they were, they did not indulge in aimless sight-seeing as was certainly invited by the unutterably beautiful buildings, the strange contraptions of unknown purpose, and the grotesque wax-imbued figures of the crypts. Dreistein sought one matter only: archives and libraries. As the half-hour drew to a close and the quest remained unsuccessful, the Professor, with a heart as heavy as iridium, ordered the retreat.

Then it is that Dr. Viertelstein resolves to sacrifice his life. He shuts off his can of oxygen, and before the Professor can get a hold of the tap, his companion has unwrapped his Nirwana suit, whereupon he drops dead to the ground. Dreistein grasped the situation immediately. His assistant had donated his oxygen supply, not to him, but to Science. He was obliged to use it, and right away. And now the miracle occurs: the Professor makes his way to a vault full of steel cylinders with inscriptions. Semi-conscious and with waning powers, he pulls one of them back to the rocket, slots his respirator into the main supply – and sets course for 14 Unter den Linden.

To be continued.

Crossposted from European Tribune, joining which is a classy move.

I did not adopt my pen name in honor of Sirocco (1951). This is a dull Casablanca knock-off, casting Bogart as another jaded ex-pat with a conscience buried so deep underneath his trenchcoat that it can barely be retrieved. One of the few reviewers at Amazon.com ranks it the 48th best of his 50 films.

From Sirocco (1951). Director: Curtis Bernhardt.

Yet the plot rings oddly familiar, and not just for riding Casablanca’s coattails through the clichés of exotic melodrama. The Bogart tough-guy, Harry Smith, is an American war profiteer in a Middle Eastern country ravaged by insurgency against a hamfisted Western occupant. Nick Clooney in The Cincinnati Post recounts his viewing experience so:

As when taking a rook exposes you to checkmate, tactical gain can cause strategic defeat. The uprising, explains the Syrian emir, aims to provoke the French into defeating themselves by lashing out in a way that cedes the moral high ground in the eyes of the world. And of course, his men believe themselves to be fighting for their homeland, while their enemies know themselves to be fighting to retain somebody else’s.

These are universal traits of de facto occupation scenarios, as the French discovered the hard way. Chirac was himself a soldier in the Algerian War - a conflict in which France had more at stake than the US does in Iraq. Algeria was not only the most hard-won colonial asset of the French Republic, seized at great cost in the war of 1830-1847. It was considered a province of France itself, unlike, for instance, Morocco. Even so, France lost its will to administer and endure the required inhuman violence. And contrary to myth, that is not because the French are ’soft.’

Improbably in light of the past, the Arab street now looks to France as its defender against imperial aggression. An excellent BBC World Service documentary series from last year, France and the Arab World, explores the dealings of Paris with its clients in Damascus and Alger and its motives for assisting these undeniably oppressive regimes. To reveal the conclusions would be unkind, since all three programs can be listened to for free at the BBC site.

What is clear, though, is that France has learned a lesson the USA has not: To de facto occupy a territory whose population has a national consciousness, even a fledgling such, is incompatible with democracy. If it lasts, the situation spurs not the democratization of the occupied as much as the de-democratization of the occupant.

It is unlikely to last, however.

By the way: Bienvenue to my blog.