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TALLRITE BLOG
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| July 2005 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #104 - 24th July 2005 [201+270=471]
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Sixty years ago, February was a very busy month, and with retrospect a shameful one, for the undoubtedly well-meaning US President Franklin Roosevelt, who had commandeered for his personal transportation the USS Quincy, turning it into the equivalent of today's Air Force One. It was just a month after his fourth inaugural address and though he didn't know it, he had but two further months to live. First he sailed to Yalta in the Crimea where he met with fellow World War 2 victors Winston Churchill and the dictator Josef Stalin. Together the trio cobbled together three crucial postwar deals that stood for over forty years.
Two of these three wrongs were eventually righted as the Soviet Empire crumbled and collapsed in 1989-91, and one day perhaps the UN too will be trumped by a new United Democracies. But Roosevelt was yet not done with causing half-a-century's worth of damage. For after Yalta the Quincy brought him into the Suez Canal where, in a bulge known as the Great Bitter Lake, he met with Saudi Arabia's 1932 founder and first king Abdel Aziz (also known as Ibn Saud). It was the latter's first ever trip beyond his homeland and in deference to his sensibilities, the ship's deck had been heavily carpeted so that the honoured guest would not have to put foot to metal. The president and the king struck a one-sided deal whereby in exchange for guaranteed access to Saudi oil, the Americans would make available money and technology and turn a blind eye to how the king ran his country whilst also guaranteeing to defend it. Though the king refused to countenance the creation of Israel, this nevertheless constituted a friendship alliance which persists to this day. But it is - and always was - an unnecessary and damaging arrangement. In fact no democrat should never enter into an “alliance” with an autocrat, because whereas the democrat speaks for every citizen of his country, the autocrat, who is by definition an illegitimate ruler, speaks only for himself. So Roosevelt's deal means that 296 million Americans are somehow contractually tied to a single individual, the current king Fahd (who happens to be infirm due to a stroke and a lifetime of alcoholism). How ridiculous is that! Late
note : King Fahd died on 1st August Moreover, the deal itself is a nonsense. American businesses invested in Saudi only in order to make money for their shareholders from its oil. Saudis sold their oil to American businesses solely to make money for their rulers. No “alliance” was or is needed for this; merely enlightened self-interest, and there's no shortage of that on either side. Moreover, Saudi is no ally of the US or of the West. Allies protect each other, like for instance America, Britain and Australia.
Meanwhile, the Saudi regime allows - nay, encourages - anti-Western sentiment and aggression to foment within its borders and even finances it via pro-terrorism mosques and madrassas not only internally but across the world. The regime, like all other Arab regimes save democratic Iraq and Lebanon, must preserve itself by creating external enemies, preferably American, that its people can hate instead of hating their own tyrants. Since this has been official policy for several generations it should be no surprise that the Saudis include many willing terrorist recruits against the West. Providing 11 out the 19 suicide hijackers on 9/11 is but one albeit egregious example. Roosevelt's deal has caused America to nurture and honour the Saudi royal family instead of disparaging or better still destroying it. And it set a pattern of tolerating despots provided they were willing to sell oil (which they would have had to do anyway to get their hands on money without which no-one, especially not thugocracies, can survive). The West - and ordinary Muslims - are paying the price of Roosevelt's folly today. So in the space of those three February weeks in 1945, Roosevelt the democrat signed agreements with a pair of contemporary dictators, which enslaved millions of Europeans for two generations and hooked America into a depraved arrangement which inevitably fostered the kind of ungodly Islamic terrorism that is currently plaguing the world. In April the following he died of a brain haemorrhage. A bullet in the head causes a brain haemorrhage. There have long been rumours, supported by circumstantial evidence, that this intelligent man in fact shot himself, shamed and aghast at the realisation of the wicked deals he had just struck. This would be in keeping with his otherwise honourable presidency. It is high time the US abrogated Roosevelt's pernicious agreement with the Saudi royal family. The West, because its freedoms have made it rich and oil-hungry, will always have money to pay for oil. Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing dictatorships, which without oil are poor yet they have extravagant appetites for material possessions and suppression of their citizens, will always sell their oil to the West. No special concord is needed for this.
Piteous White Faces in an Arctic Convoy For
some years I have been helping an elderly friend, Gerry, who served in
World War 2 in the British merchant marine, to write and finalise his
memoirs, a tome of over 400 pages. My
assistance became necessary when he went blind due to macular
degeneration. Back
in 2003, I published the first edition on my website here, where
all chapters
can be downloaded for free. However
so many clarifications were needed and so much new material emerged that a
completely revised edition will be issued later this year. A
particularly poignant tale concerns his sole experience sailing with one of
many Allied convoys that brought vital supplies to northern Russia.
For some two years, Gerry served as a marine engineer on a large (187 by 23 metres, 22,000 tonnes) three-funnelled, sumptuously-appointed vessel named ‘Empress of Australia’, with turbine-driven twin screws that could deliver 17 knots. She had been built by the Germans in 1912 who named her ‘Tirpitz’ after the legendary German Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of Germany's World War 1 navy. She is not to be confused with Germany's largest warship of World War 2, also named ‘Tirpitz’, after the great man. The
original 1912 Tirpitz was
later pressed into war service as a troopship and at one stage was to have
become the Kaiser’s imperial yacht. But in the end she was turned over to Britain as part of the
German surrender in 1918, and in due course acquired her Australia name.
When hostilities broke out again in 1939, she found herself back in
war service but this time on the other side. Late in 1944, with Gerry on board to keep the turbines running, the Empress sailed, under the red ensign, out of the Clyde and turned south to Le Havre in France to pick up their cargo. This was several months after the Normandy invasion and the mission was to bring a large group of Soviet passengers home to the USSR. They were mainly members of the Soviet armed forces but also included some Soviet civilians, all of whom had been liberated by the Allies from Nazi slave labour camps in France. However they included a few who had collaborated with the Germans, some of whom threw themselves overboard rather than face the music back home. Indeed a great many of the ordinary, innocent ex-prisoners were also reluctant to return to the Motherland. We now know they had good reason, for Stalin executed huge numbers of his own soldiers as traitors simply for the “crime” of having been captured by the Germans. Most of this sorry human cargo had been very poorly fed whilst in captivity and for some reason were on restricted rations while on board. Gerry and his fellow engineers therefore persuaded the catering staff to double up on their rations. White bread was like gold dust, so they had the cook working overtime to produce it for the unfortunate Soviet travellers. From France, they headed
north again to join their convoy. It included the Cunard Line’s
Scythia which was also repatriating Soviet ex-prisoners of war, a
total
of 10,139 men, 30 women and 44 boys between the two of them. It was
early winter, and Convoy JW61A would brave the packs of German U-boats
prowling the Arctic Ocean for prey, as it raced toward its destination,
Murmansk, situated in the Kola Inlet in the north of the USSR, 200
kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. A
custom prevailed on the North Atlantic and elsewhere whereby both escort
ships and merchant vessels generally stopped, even at great risk and
sometimes for long periods, to pick up survivors of stricken ships. But
this was not case on Russian convoys, where ships were forbidden to stop
in such circumstances. The
harsh justification was that a stopped vessel was itself a sitting target
and that the U-boats would show no mercy. Moreover persons cast adrift on these northern icy waters
could not survive for more than a few minutes, so by the time a rescuing
vessel could have reached them they would have perished.
Gerry recalls his own ghastly experience of this dreadful situation. Coming on deck at midnight after his watch in the engineroom, during which the convoy had been under heavy U-boat attack with the loss of several ships, he was just in time to hear two loud explosions. A vessel not far ahead had been hit. The ship sank rapidly and there was evidently no time to launch lifeboats or lifecraft. The night was
almost as clear as day, with a myriad of stars shining brightly overhead. Soon he could see lots of red lights bobbing about in the water, these lights being attached to the lifejackets worn by the unfortunate men who had jumped off the sinking ship. The Empress of Australia came so close that Gerry could see piteous white faces and waving hands as it steamed steadily past those doomed creatures. He could not help but think of himself in their position, waiting in terror, misery and cold for the end to come. Nevertheless, the Empress of Australia reached its destination unscathed, as did the Scythia, and they were able to discharge their passengers safely. The Australia sailed back to Liverpool without incident. But what became of the 10,000 ex-POWs was never known, though Gerry managed for some years to correspond with one of them, Alexei, whom he had befriended. The Allies were of course not merely victims in the Arctic Ocean; they were also aggressors. By a strange irony, at the very time that the Empress of Australia, née Tirpitz, sailed along the Norwegian coast dodging U-boats, the RAF were bombing and sinking the then Tirpitz, pride of the German navy, as it lay at anchor in a fjord near Tromsø way in the north of Nazi-occupied Norway. It is well, in the current troubled times over random bomb-attacks in the world's cities, that we remember the heroism of those ordinary men such as the “piteous white faces” who fought and died for the freedom that today's terrorists would deny to all but themselves.
India's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) is a very worthy outfit devoted to the fight against HIV/AIDS in the subcontinent. Judging by a recent advertisement, it also has great imagination, a sense of humour and key understanding of what reverberates with Indians. Yet it and the press are also surprisingly coy. Earlier this month, NACO published an HIV-beware ad in a national daily newspaper. It depicted three cricket stumps set against a blue sky, each one covered by a condom. The caption read, “Save your wicket from unwanted googlies of life. Even in your favourite sport, you never know when you'll lose your stumps. Life is also unpredictable in the same manner. Why take chances?” But here's the coy part. Though the story was picked up by both Indian and international media, not one of the outlets that I've been able to find has reproduced the actual advertisement, or even named the paper in which it appeared. Reuters for example illustrates the story with an irrelevant photo of Sri Lankan cricketers congratulating each other, with not a wicket in site, much less a condom, nor even an Indian. Not even NACO on their own website have published the advertisement; indeed they don't even mention it, though you would think they'd be pleased with the international publicity. It is now widely accepted that among the main weapons to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, are openness and frankness about the kinds of sexual behaviour that foster contagion and the measures to be taken to prevent it. Thus the shyness about publishing the picture is puzzling, particularly from NACO. We might expect this from people like President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa who regularly denies the huge AIDS problem in his country. But what good are tabloids, after all, if they quake at the thought of publishing a humorous picture about sex. We seem to be back to sniggering behind the bicycle shed.
Those of a whimsical fancy may like to take a look a the latest two true tales from Nigeria, that were published last week, after a long absence.
You can access the stories here.
Quote: “"I've never seen anything like it in my life. I saw them kill a man basically. I saw them shoot a man five times” Mark Whitby, eyewitness when
plain-clothes police ________________________ Quote: “I blame the British government and I blame the British people [for the Double-7th London bombings]. The British people did not make enough effort to stop its own government committing its own atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan ... The British people showed Tony Blair full support when they elected him again after he waged the latest Iraq war.” Sheikh
Omar Bakri Mohammed, _________________________ Quote: “The occupation in itself is a problem, Iraq not being independent is a problem, and the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war. The entire American presence causes this.” Radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr His best route to get rid of the hated
Satans _____________________ Quote: “Can you tell us why the violence is continuing? ... Can you tell us why the government is supporting the militias? ... Why should Americans believe your promises?”
Quote: “I said action, not words.” Condoleeza Rice, having secured an
apology for Mitchell's treatment, __________________ Quote: “Somebody has to take her out if she won't go ... The armed forces of the Philippines has [sic] to take her out. Do they not have a sense of smell? This government stinks and they have not done anything.” Ike Seneres, a former ambassador and
Arroyo adviser, Democracy is such a pain when you don't get what you want. “No to Junta, Yes to Democracy” Government banner strung across a major bridge in Manila
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ISSUE
#103 - 17th July 2005
[219]
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Thought I'd mention that on 14th July the Tallrite
Blog Happy Third Blogiversay also to Gavin's Blog, which seems to be a twin “Slay Them Wherever Ye Catch Them” Last week Tony Blair told the House of Commons that the London bombings were a manifestation of “an extreme and evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam.” Since when did Tony Blair become an expert interpreter of Islam? And countless other well-meaning white Christian politicians and churchmen have made a similar point. Are they also experts? Have they even read the Koran? How do they know with such certainty that phrases such as “slay them [ie non Muslims] wherever ye catch them” which pepper the Koran actually mean “don't slay them”? It is in Chapter 2 (The Cow), shurah (verse) 191 that you first find this injunction, probably the most egregious admonishment in the Koran. And in case you don't get the message, try
It is time for the world to publicly challenge these and other outrageous teachings that are to be found throughout the Koran (such as this selection or this), for they provide both comfort and religious backing for Islamic terrorists. Martyrdom via suicide-cum-homicide, leading to unlimited sexual rewards in heaven, is another insidious belief of many Muslims, which needs to be robustly confronted and not simply taken as read. As I noted last year, the 70 virgins supposedly awaiting martyrs are just as likely to be 70 white raisins; this should be shouted from the rooftops so as at least to sow legitimate doubt in the minds of would-be bombers with only one thing on their frustrated minds. Certainly non-Muslim politicians, pundits and media should not hesitate to publicise the warlike, hate-inducing shuras of the Koran and to challenge Muslims to explain or refute them. All this nonsense about Islam being a “religion of peace” should stop immediately until all this is clarified by Muslim clerics and the general Muslim community. But such challenges will only go so far, because at the end of the day a Christian or Jew or Hindu or Sikh or Buddhist or Shintoist who criticises Islam lacks the street-cred of a Muslim and just sounds like he's proselytising. Moreover, very few are Koranic experts any more than Tony Blair is. They can simply read translations of texts, as I have done, and try to understand the words. The real call for clarity and exposition should come from peace-loving Muslims themselves, for there is no doubt that the vast majority are peace-loving. Indeed, there has been much evidence of this in the aftermath of London's Double-7 bombings. One can only imagine the internal torment they must suffer whenever they see mass murder carried out in their name, in their religion's name, in the Prophet's name, in Allah's name. Yet the Koran itself seems to exonerate the killers telling them in 8:17, “Ye [Muslims] slew them [infidels] not, but Allah slew them”. Muslims should broadcast the correct interpretation of the Koran and its more controversial verses not only to help quell the anti-Islam sentiment that their co-religionists' terrorist attacks induce in the infidels, but to counter the anti-infidel vitriol that emanates from some mosques and madrassas and infects fellow-Muslims, young and old(er). Welcome as recent condemnations by Muslim leaders in UK of the London bombings as “criminal and unIslamic”, this is not the same as pointing out why what the terrorists did does not conform with with Koranic injunctions that appear to support such killings. For it is Muslims themselves who are turning out to be by far the most plentiful dead and bleeding victims of Islamic terrorism, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, and they don't deserve it. Not only that, but many ordinary Muslims and clerics also seem to be silent victims of unspoken threat. They dare not speak out for fear of being targeted as too lukewarm in their enthusiasm for jihad. The threat is probably worse should they actually defend the right of infidels not to be slain. As military historian Ralph Bennett recently pointed out, many of the most mealy-mouthed or silent among moderate, well-meaning Muslims know that they are in a position very like front-line officers vis-à-vis snipers. Show their true colours and they're dead. It can be that brutal. Yet their silence is a key contributory factor to the recruitment of jihadists and to the non-Muslim world's increasing opprobrium of Islam, in a cycle that can have no happy ending for anyone, least of all the jihadists or ordinary Muslims. Or is this, in fact, a false trail?
I wish someone would tell me and explain.
The past six weeks must have been the most miserable of
Jacques Chirac's whole political life. For a man of such hauteur
(seemingly a prerequisite for French presidents), the series of recent
humiliations, large and small, coming on top of two years of them, must be devastating. And all the
more so because every stage has corresponded with an uplifting success
for his nemesis, who goes by the name of Tony Blair. It's
been a while building up ...
It is hard to see how Mr Chirac is going to bounce back to his usual wily, ebullient if arrogant self. But hey, he's a politician. That's what they do. You can therefore be sure there there is at least one innings left to him before, to the immense relief of the French electorate and countless others, he departs the scene in 2007. If you don't believe me, just have a look at “Chirac Celebrates Bastille Day with British Rant”, one of several articles which cover his traditional Bastille Day television interview. He absolutely seethes with hubris, denial and unwarranted optimism. But on the inside, he's miserable.
David Michaels is a professor of epidemiology at George Washington University's School of Public Health and was once US assistant secretary of energy under Bill Clinton. Last month he wrote that industries that are under fire will often use uncertainty to fight back.
The essence of these types of issue is that you cannot carry out controlled experiments to prove your point definitively. For example, you can't deliberately feed people mercury. So you have to draw your conclusions from whatever data happens to be around you, from “natural experiments”. This is never precise enough: you cannot screen out all extraneous factors, you cannot replicate findings. Hence the uncertainty. Prof Michaels complains that the manufacture of uncertainty has become a business in its own right with its own professionals available for hire, and implies that it is all rather deceitful. He makes a very good point, for the science of uncertainty is indeed a bit dishonest and incomplete unless an attempt is made to quantify the uncertainty. But then the other side doesn't always do that either. Typically,
This is all much easier to say than that the probability of 'x' being bad is y percent. The real debate should be around the quantification of y%, yet this often seems to be shied away from. It's strange because this is surely exactly the figure that those “natural experiments” produce. Dealing with uncertainty is a fact of life. For example,
So if the available evidence says that there is, say, a 75% chance that tobacco causes cancer or that carbon dioxide causes climate change, there is a much stronger case to act than if that percentage is 25%. But rarely do you come across two antagonists arguing about the degree of uncertainty over a contentious issue and their reasoning behind it. It's far easier to say I'm right and you're wrong. Incidentally, not all energy companies agree with the API's rejectionist position on climate change and Kyoto. Though this rejection is championed by Esso, Shell for one has voluntarily been pursuing Kyoto targets within its own global operations for the past seven or eight years. Whether this is because Shell believes in the science is another matter, but it certainly values the public relations kudos that observance of Kyoto brings. My own view, which I expressed in the very first issue of this blog three years ago, is that, regardless of whether CO2 does cause climate change, Kyoto would incur enormous costs on the global economy ($100 bn per year) for absolutely marginal improvements in 100 years time (everyone agrees on this bit of science, including Greenpeace etc). Therefore the money, if it is to be spent at all, would be far better devoted to providing, say, clean water and sanitation to the world's poor today (cost $200 bn according to the UN), rather than asking them to wait a century to see but a improvement in their lives for the money. Kyoto is nothing more than feel-good tokenism. What is needed in its place is a solution that does not cripple the world's growth as this will hurt the poor most of all. For who is going to suffer from climate change anyway? Certainly not the rich world because it will always be able to afford mitigating measures. So that leaves the poor world. Someone should ask them what they want climate change money spent on. (How about regime change?). One thing that is only 1% uncertain is that those countries which have ratified Kyoto will certainly not observe its strictures. So I won't say that Kyoto is bad; only ask whether anybody wants to debate the 1%?
It is often said that there were no more successful, more dramatically impressive spies than a group of Englishmen who all met at Trinity College, Cambridge University in the 1930s. To one degree or another, they were active for the Soviet Union for over thirty years; one of them for fifty. They were the most efficient espionage agents against American and British interests of any collection of spies in the Twentieth Century. Three of them were exposed during their lifetimes, so they fled to the Soviet Empire as honoured guests to serve out their days, and were of course meantime hounded and vilified by the British authorities and media. The fourth was outed by Margaret Thatcher not long before he died in 1983, at home in England, curiously unprosecuted, and after a distinguished career as the Queen's most trusted art historian. All but one were gay. Outwardly pillars of British society with distinguished careers, all of them worked at some time for MI5 or MI6 whilst spying for the Soviets. They were of course Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Their fellow-Marxist friend Baron Victor Rothschild who also worked in MI5 is suspected to have been a fifth. All are now thankfully dead. But there was another British spy who faithfully served the Evil Empire undetected for over forty years until retirement, who was quite distinct from and unknown to the Cambridge four/five, far more humble, yet in some ways more formidable than any of them. Last month Melita Norwood, a gardening, jam-making great-grandmother, died peacefully and unrepentant in a nursing home, at the ripe old age of 93. From 1937 until she retired in 1977, she worked in various secretarial capacities for British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, whilst simultaneous a spy. This Association was in fact a front company for researching and developing Britain's nuclear arsenal. Norwood's crowning success was to photograph countless secret documents, which as a secretary she either had personally typed or could access, and pass them to the Soviets' KGB and GRU. These enabled the USSR to develop its own atomic bomb years ahead of what its scientists could have otherwise achieved. It was to be over two decades after her retirement before she was finally unmasked, via a KGB defector, in 1999. The BBC's David Rose then simply looked her up in the phone book, made an appointment, went to see her and was stunned when she confessed her treachery quite openly. You can listen to his fascinating account here or read this comprehensive obituary. Extraordinarily, however, despite the damage she undoubtedly did to Britain's national interest and - if the results of the Cambridge spies' activities are anything to go on - the deaths she probably caused, the British declined to prosecute or even interview her. They merely said that at 84 she was too old. I find this scandalous. Why should age or health release anyone from the consequences of his/her criminal behaviour? If anything, the penalty for elderly criminals who have escaped justice for decades should be even greater, because imprisonment will be taking the worst years of their lives instead of their best.
One can only conclude that the British establishment feared - and fear - that a prosecution of Norwood would have brought to the open the utter incompetence of Britain's military intelligence organization, then and now, which would be embarrassing. That Norwood, truly a spy extraordinaire, was able to operate freely for all those decades and remain undetected for a further two, is testament to this MI ineptitude. It is nevertheless a disgrace that she was allowed - like Blunt, incidentally - to live her remaining years, and to die, outside the prison walls that were her due and not even in a miserable exile. Burgess, MacLean and Philby should be so lucky. Good riddance to all five of them.
I am told that 80% of Kindergarten kids solved this riddle, but only 5% of Stanford University graduates figured it out. Can you answer the following question?
Can you work it out? Try hard before looking up the answer.
Quote: “This ... terrorist attack ... was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.” London
Mayor Ken Livingstone _____________________ Quote: “Let us make these unacceptable trade subsidies history; let us make waste in the CAP history; let us make developed country protectionism history.” British chancellor Go |
NBC
reporter Andrea Mitchell, part of 