"It will start in Kosovo and end in Kosovo"

Kosovo’s declaration of independence last Sunday was the least surprising event of this year (though, naturally, there is plenty of time to go for more dog-bites-man-supermodel-takes-drugs stories in 2008). While I am not at all surprised that Serbia and Russia are going through the motions of rage and astonishment I find the silliness and ignorance of commentators in the West – for once, I think, the blogosphere is slightly worse than the MSM – perpetually odd.

When Hashim Thaci was elected to be Prime Minister of Kosovo last November he announced that he would declare his country to be independent as soon as possible after December 10, when the international mediators were supposed to report back to the UN on the progress of negotiations over Kosovo’s status.

The negotiations led nowhere and the UN continued to procrastinate. The election of Boris Tadic, supposedly pro-Western but really little different from his more nationalist rival, as Serbia’s President earlier this month speeded up events. Mr Tadic may want Serbia to be in the EU – promising the Serbs great prosperity through that move – but he, too, was against Kosovan independence. For that matter, no Serb politician at this time is interested in any arrangements with Kosovo apart from some kind of a return to the past, something that was clearly never going to happen. But then Yugoslavia was never going to be turned into Greater Serbia either but it took ten years of war, thousands of dead, tens of thousands displaced and severe economic hardship for the Serbs to accept that.

President Tadic, backed by the Russian government, has gone to the United Nations Security Council asking for the independence to be annulled and Serbia’s “territorial integrity” to be restored.

Serbia has also recalled its ambassador from Washington and filed legal charges against Hashim Thaci and the Kosovan leadership in general. Other measures against countries that insist on recognizing Kosovo are being threatened:

Last week, Belgrade vowed to downgrade — but not break — diplomatic ties with all nations that recognize Kosovo's independence.

Later Monday, the Foreign Ministry said ambassadors to France and Turkey also were ordered back to the country, following their formal diplomatic recognition of Kosovo. They were withdrawn for "consultation until further notice," the ministry statement said.

"America and the European Union are stealing Kosovo from us, everyone must realize that," said Tomislav Nikolic, the head of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party. "From this moment on, we must count the days until we liberate Kosovo."

I haven’t heard the word “liberate” used in that sense for some time. Well, not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The Prime Minister of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica, who describes himself as being more nationalist than President Tadic, has attacked the United States for backing Kosovo’s independence bid, saying, in a way that is all too familiar to those who have ever paid any attention to Serb rhetoric, that President Bush and other European supporters of Kosovo will go down “in black letters” in Serbian history. There are rather a lot of black letters in Serbian history, so there is no real need to worry.

Prime Minister Kostunica also stated on national television:

Today on February 17, the fake state of Kosovo was illegally proclaimed on [Serbia’s] territory under the control of NATO. This was an act of legal violence. The United States puts force above law and showed that they were ready to break international laws for their own interests.

On the whole, it is not all that advisable for Serb politicians to talk about putting force above law. Those of us (and I exclude the many who have been commenting on the event in a hysterical and ignorant fashion) who recall the Yugoslav war of the nineties remember the attack on Slovenia, the bombing of Vukovar, the massive attack on Bosnia, not to mention the conduct of that war and the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. One could argue that these were all done by people who put force above law.

In fact, given the outcome of that prolonged war as far as Serbia is concerned, one has to wonder whether Serbs might not be admitting to themselves that those ambitions for Greater Serbia were a very big mistake. Without them some form of a lose federation might still have been in existence on the territory of former Yugoslavia (as created in 1918).

But then, modern Kosovo under that name has been part of modern Serbia only since 1912. The idea that Kosovo has been a Serbian province for many centuries is something of a myth propagated very successfully by the Serbs. Come to think of it, Serbia itself existed as an independent state only sporadically between the early fifteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth. At other times it was part of Hungary, of the Ottoman Empire for a very long time and, subsequently, of the Austrian one.

The argument that Kosovo is somehow naturally part of Serbia depends entirely on the fact that in the fourteenth century it was just that and the Battle of Kosovo, which was not quite a decisive Ottoman victory but which the Serbs consider themselves to have lost, was fought near Pristina in 1389.

Not many borders in the world are the same now as they were in 1389 and there is no particular reason why Serbia’s should be. This posting is not really the place for anything remotely resembling an analysis of the complicated history of the Balkans in the early modern period: the toing and froing of armies; conquests, other conquests, reconquests; alliances formed and broken; states and statelets emerging, disintegrating and reconfiguring. There has been much written on the subject by historians of the period.

The point is that none of it is of any relevance to the twenty-first century and there is no reason why decisions should be taken on the basis of what the situation was like for a few years in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

It is fair to say that Kosovan resentment has been in existence since 1912 and was certainly strengthened by the gay abandon with which it was included into a country of Southern Slavs after the First World War. The Albanians are not Slavs but neither are they Turks or close cousins thereof, as described by one blogger, whom I shall not name, not wishing to embarrass him.

The history of Yugoslavia between the wars consisted to a great extent of attempts to turn the country into the Kingdom of Serbia and resistance to that from other member states. This may sound familiar to those whose memory extends as far back as the mid-nineties.

The history of the Second World War in the region is muddled and contradictory while being possibly more violent and ferocious than anywhere else. There was a great deal of collaboration with the Nazis but also a great many uprisings and various guerrilla campaigns, sometimes against the Germans, sometimes against other guerrilla groups.

Yes, indeed, there were Albanian partisans, just as there were Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ones. And there were collaborators among all those people. That’s the way it goes under occupation where there is a certain amount of internal resentment already. Britain supporting first one group, then another did not help matters.

Moving right along we come to Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, built on the bodies of those murdered by him and his henchmen in the years after the Second World War. He did, subsequently, keep some kind of a balance between the various republics by a mixture of oppression and mild economic reform.

Even before Tito’s death it was clear to many that the country will not survive him for long. Furthermore, it was said, the trouble “will start in Kosovo and end in Kosovo”. Tito died in 1980 and the country staggered on for a few years.

Trouble did begin in Kosovo in 1987 when a youngish party apparatchik saw that he could turn a more or less routine episode of nationalist trouble-making by Serb and Montenegrin activists to his advantage.

The best description of what happened can be found in Noel Malcolm’s “Kosovo: a short history”, which may not be unbiased (no history book is) but is remarkably detailed and knowledgeable (apologies for all the funny names and spellings but that is what you get when you deal with the Balkans):

In April 1987 news came from Kosovo that the group of Serb and Montenegrin activists round Bulatovič was intending to bring another large protest to Belgrade. They asked the Serbian Party president, Stambolič, to come and speak to them first in the town of Kosovo Polje; reluctant to enter such a hostile bear-pit (he had already made several speeches criticizing Serbian nationalism), he sent his deputy, Slobodan Miloševič, instead.

As Stambolič later recalled, Miloševič had never shown any interest in Kosovo, and had even said to him on one occasion: “Forget about the provinces, let’s get back to Yugoslavia.” But the events in Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 were to change all
that.

While Miloševič listened to angry speeches by local spokesmen in the ‘House of Culture’, fighting broke out between the large crowd of Serbs outside and the police, who responded with their batons. The fighting had been carefully planned by one of the local Serb leaders, Miroslav Šolevič (local, at least, in the sense that he lived there: he had moved to Kosovo from the Serbian city of Niš): as he later admitted, he had arranged for a truck full of stones to be parked outside the building, to give the Serbs a copious supply of ammunition.

Miloševič broke off the meeting and came out to speak to the crowd, where he uttered – luckily for him, on camera – the words on which his entire political future would be built: “No one should dare to beat you!”

The crowd enraptured by these words, began chanting “Slobo, Slobo!” With a skill which he had never deployed before, Miloševič made an eloquent extempore speech in defence of the sacred rights of the Serbs. From that day his nature as a politician changed; it was as if a powerful new drug had entered his veins.

Phrasing it slightly less eloquently, I would say that he transmogrified himself from a second-rate Communist thug into a first-rate nationalist thug, in the process ridding himself of his friend and political patron Stambolič, elevating himself to the presidency of Serbia and, in a somewhat unconstitutional fashion, of Yugoslavia and acquiring a large number of either foolish or knavish supporters in the West.

The rest is history of a particularly unpleasant kind but one that seems to have disappeared down the memory hole as far as many people are concerned. The truth is that few people bothered to follow the story of the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo; or read the subsequent reports of oppression and human rights abuses that were coming out of Kosovo in the early nineties; or bothered to understand how Yugoslavia disintegrated and what Serbia under Miloševič was trying to achieve by what methods.

Just a few points to be noted: the war did not start in 1999; that was the end-game with NATO intervening decisively to prevent a repetition of the events that had taken place in Bosnia. It was not started by the German recognition of Croatia and Bosnia, which came about six months after the start of the bombing of Vukovar (that’s in Croatia and was bombed by the so-called Yugoslav but, in fact, Serbian air force) and after an EU-sponsored referendum in Bosnia had produced a decisive pro-independence result.

Once again, this is not the place to go into all the details of the war of Yugoslav disintegration that took up the nineties. In a way, it was historically satisfying to see that the end of the century resounded with problems in and around Sarajevo, the place of those famous shots (fired by a Bosnian Serb) that plunged Europe and the world into the mess from which we have not, as yet, extricated ourselves.

As far as Britain and the EU are concerned we need to remember that the part played by our own Conservative government was disgraceful. One needs to go no further than Douglas Hurd’s justification of the arms embargo of people who wanted to fight for their own and their countries’ survival by the words “we do not want to see a level killing field”.

(Subsequently, Mr Hurd was found negotiating a special deal with President Miloševič for NatWest Bank. The deal fell through after a certain amount of publicity. As I recall Dame Pauline Neville Jones, fresh out of the FCO, where she, too supported Serbian claims to keeping Yugoslavia together, was involved in those negotiations.)

The EU was in the process of being formed through the Maastricht Treaty and saw the Balkan troubles as a wonderful opportunity to assert itself on the international scene. With Jacques Poos, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, who held the presidency at the time proclaiming that this was “Europe’s hour” and Jacques Delors sniffily telling the Americans to mind their own business, the EU was all set to sort the problem out.

Unfortunately, the EU’s idea of sorting out the problem was to insist on the inviolability of federal Yugoslavia, to brand all opponents of it as nationalist extremists, to encourage Miloševič in keeping the “sovereign” state together, no matter what it took and to deny Bosnian and Croatians the right to defend themselves.

It all ended very badly, indeed, with NATO, led by the Americans and the British under a Labour government having to intervene to stabilize the situation, at least temporarily. As the Dayton Agreements refused to deal with the Kosovan problem, that temporary state was short.

In 1999 NATO had to intervene again and in effect separate Kosovo from Serbia, who has, since lost its junior partner, Montenegro, as well.

Why the EU should take that view is understandable. As the push to speed up integration in Western Europe gathered momentum, the disintegration of existing federal states, first the Soviet Union, then Yugoslavia, was distinctly unwanted. While guaranteeing the borders of the Soviet Union as Commission President Delors proposed at the infamous Rome meeting of the European Council was beyond the Europeans’ capabilities, something, they thought, could be done to keep Yugoslavia together.

The subsequent crisis clarified two problems: one is that “Europe” was not quite as united on various international issues as its leaders pretended to be; and, secondly, that in the absence of a clear policy and, above all, a military force to support that policy, neither the ideology of integrationism nor the desire to stand up to the Americans was sufficient.

A more peculiar development was among eurosceptics. While many, as could have been expected logically, supported the break-away member states of Yugoslavia, many if not the majority, astonishingly, bleated about the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, the evil Croats and the non-existent Bosnians (that was before anyone who was even theoretically Muslim was described as being evil by definition).

Much of it was half-digested propaganda emanating from Belgrade, whose officials had been well trained in such matters, being high-ranking members of the Communist Party. Some could be attributed to lack of interest until British troops were involved and since this was Blair’s war, it had to be a bad one.

There were idiotic rantings about German plots to send storm troopers into Croatia or wherever. And there were badly argued references to something called the Westphalian system, which is not quite what people seem to think it is. (At which point I must excuse myself. The Treaty of Westphalia and its implications will have to wait for another posting.)

It would have been sensible for eurosceptics to stop looking for parallels to the EU in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin (parallels that do not stand up for one minute) and to look a little closer to home. No the EU is not like Yugoslavia, though there are certain similarities, not least that strange system of rotating presidency.

The point is that Yugoslavia was an artificially created federal state, whose members decided that for various reasons they wanted out. For eurosceptics to support the representatives of the federal state in their fight to suppress those movements for national self-determination is illogical to put it mildly.

To swallow the image of Miloševič and his thugs as fighters either for Yugoslav sovereignty or freedom from Islamic jihad (as defined some years afterwards by people who have clearly never met a Bosnian or a Kosovan) and to support the “sovereignty” of whatever state he happened to be in charge of is fatuous in the extreme.

Let us imagine a situation in which the European Union has managed to transform itself into a sovereign state by considerably more peaceful means than the creation of Yugoslavia, let alone its re-creation under Tito. According to the logic outlined above, no member state will have the right to secede and no outsider will be able to help with that secession because that would be breaking up a sovereign state, which is clearly against the Westphalian system. Think about it.

So we come to the situation as it developed since Sunday’s widely expected declaration of Kosovan independence. Understandably, it has caused certain flutterings in various dovecots though why there was so little preparation for this event remains something of a mystery.

For the rest of the posting I shall ignore the stupid and ignorant comments made by eurosceptics on the subject of Kosovo and Serbia (have I used the word ignorant before?) as being par for the course. As we have said on this blog many times, the reason we keep losing lies in ourselves not in our enemy.

Let us concentrate on what matters. Kosova, as it is known, is now an independent state. Well, at least, it is independent from Serbia, though it has been described as an EU Protectorate. Dusan Reljic, the Kosovo expert interviewed by Der Spiegel sounded doubtful about the effect this will have on the international system. In particular, he was worried about the situation the UN might find itself in:

The fact that the majority of Western countries are recognizing this move by the parliament in Kosovo means that the West has opted for a resolution to this situation outside the UN system. And this of course is not strengthening the UN.

Very few things do strengthen the UN and, in particular, it is not strengthened by its venality and corruption or its inability to come to any kind of decision in emergency. Come to think of it, the UN was in the Balkans for a couple of year in the nineties – a great effort that was in Bosnia, that culminated in the Srebrenice massacre.

This seems to have been forgotten as the latest news is that Serbs in northern Kosovo have threatened the UN police.

What of that other transnational organization that once, a long time ago, felt that the Balkans were its problem not to be solved by anyone else?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think that EU's failure to show a united front on Kosovo has damaged its attempts to have a coherent foreign policy?

Reljic: It shows that there is a plurality of thinking within the European Union and the EU is not a homogenous bloc. I don't think that any one expected the EU to act as a single state. The EU is not a single state.

The decision of the Kosovo Albanians to proclaim independence is not something that the EU has endorsed. The EU has been pushed by the US into this position. This was not original EU policy.

Then again, original EU policy was not all that successful.

Before we go into the details of what the EU might or might not be doing about the latest twist of Balkan history, let us look at the notion that the international system will suffer irrevocably by this upheaval. The chances are that there will be a fall-out, though it is hard to predict where.

The most immediate result was South Ossetia and Abkhazia declaring that they wanted independence from Georgia – much to Russia’s horror but more of that later.

The question is surely whether there is something sacred about the international system as it stands. Like the climate which has been changing ever since its existence the international system has never stayed in one place for very long. The very idea of that is ludicrous.

As it happens, there was relatively little change in the years between 1945 and 1990, apart from the fully expected disintegration of the French and British empires. The descendants of those have stayed more or less in the borders defined by the “imperialists” and all joined the existing international structure, particularly the United Nations.

Is there some reason why the post-1945 construct should last for ever? Right until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the assumption among many commentators was that it would do just that. That event was not the end of a process but the beginning. Many things will change in the international system, some for the worse, some for the better.

After all, the international system, as it exists now, includes the United Nations with all its outpost organizations, the European Union and many other transnational organizations that are claiming ever more power, pointing to the Second World War as the reason for it.

In other words, many of us would like to see changes in the international system as it exists. We do not necessarily mourn events that undermine it.

So what is the European Union doing about its backyard? In the first place, as Javier Solana pointed out:

The EU has already decided to send a mission, a mission of stability, a mission of rule of law. It should contribute to the stability of the Balkans.

A mission always seems like a good idea but whether it will contribute to anybody’s stability is open to question.

The defence ministers are discussing “the possibility of building a special security force in Kosovo as well as measures needed to prevent clashes spreading to Bosnia and Herzegovina”, though Chief Foreign Affairs Honcho, Javier Solana does not seem to think that there will be any necessity for reserve forces to be employed. More like, there will be no reserve forces to employ.

KFOR is there, led by NATO with some UN involvement, trying to keep the peace in northern Kosovo, which is predominantly Serbian.

While the EU is playing some part in Kosovo in terms of its structure, its members seem unable to agree on whether to recognize the new country or not. Germany, France, Italy and the UK have more or less recognized its independence, following the lead set by the United States. Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Romania have announced that they will not do so. Slovakia and, presumably, Bulgaria are undecided. In other words, that common foreign policy remains as elusive as ever for the same reason as before: there are few common interests across the European Union.

Countries that have potential seceders are worried about the effect Kosovan independence will have on them. Others maintain that they have close relations with Serbia, what with them all being Orthodox though this does not stop Greece or Serbia from opposing the war against terror, despite most terrorists at the present being Muslim.

Serbia is once again doing is best to antagonize its possible supporters. Not only have there been riots in northern Kosovo, where the Serbs are, presumably, hoping that the Bosnian situation will repeat itself and the “motherland” will come to their rescue. Unfortunately, the situation has changed and it might be worth the Kosovan Serbs’ while to work out how they can work the system peacefully.

There have been riots in Belgrade itself. A large, government-backed rally of 200,000 or so, dissolved into violence as groups attacked embassies of western countries that had recognized or semi-recognized Kosovo. The American embassy was set on fire and an unidentified dead body was found when it was put out. The embassy staff is all accounted for so the body must be one of those who had invaded the building but did not get out in time.

It is all America’s fault, say the Serbs. They should not have encouraged or recognized Kosovo.
Meanwhile, to continue the policy of antagonizing potential friends and supporters, the Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic issued all kinds of threats as he spoke to the European Parliament.

In an emotional address to MEPs just three days after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, the country's foreign chief argued that Serbs "will not go quietly. We shall strive for what is just and rightfully ours."

In the subsequent debate there were references to the events of 1999 (though not 1989) and suggestions that Kosovo’s case was unique. Mr Jeremic, apparently, laughed though whether bitterly or not is unclear.

"The case of Kosovo is truly unique, because the international community had to step in to protect it on humanitarian grounds, and it became a protectorate for nine years," argued Dimitrij Rupel, the foreign minister of Slovenia, the current EU presidency country.

But his Serbian counterpart, Mr Jeremic, laughed off this assertion, saying: "Do any of you honestly think that just by saying that Kosovo is sui generis, you will make it so? That there will be no consequences to the stability and security of the international system, just because you say it won't?"

Mr Jeremic also confirmed that Serbia would break off diplomatic relations with all EU countries that have already recognised Kosovo or will do so. "And we shall undertake all diplomatic, political, measures designed to impede and reverse this direct and unprovoked attack on our sovereignty."

On the whole, I think we can live with those threats. Presumably, when Serbia refused to contemplate what might happen if Mr Thaci fulfils his promise, its politicians thought that the threats were of some real significance. The idea of saving us the cost of another embassy, several consulates and other diplomatic paraphernalia sounds quite attractive. Can we have a few more threats of that kind, please?

The Americans have already started evacuating some of their non-essential staff from Belgrade.

One presumes, the EU will go on discussing and debating for some time, contributing some security forces and aid to Kosovo; also criticizing Serbia for its behaviour, trying to bribe the country out of its intransigence. Will it work? With the support of the United States, probably. But on its own the EU, as ever, will achieve very little. After all, it is no use pretending we can actually afford to make members out of the detritus of former Yugoslavia, given that we are still trying to recover from taking in Romania and Bulgaria.

Serbia is being supported in the UN by Russia and China. Birds of a feather, I suppose, and I have no doubt those commentators in Britain who are weeping about Serbia are very proud of being on the same side as those two countries.

China has no dog in this fight and will do very little. Its reaction is partly an almost automatic anti-Western stance and partly a statement of its own attitude to regions that might break off. The problem is not so much Taiwan that is de facto independent, though that might change one day, but Tibet and Chinese Turkmenistan.

These are countries whose claim to independence is stronger than Kosovo’s but it is not even discussed by the Chinese government or media. There is not the slightest possibility that, unless China implodes, the example of Kosovo could be followed by Tibet. After all, the example of East Timor was not.

That leaves Russia as Serbia’s supposed patron. Back in 1999 Russia still had a free media and I used to read the newspapers avidly. Their reporting and analysis of what was going on in the Balkans were far better than anything seen in the British ones. Of greatest interest was “Izvestiya”, which has since sunk back to almost its Soviet level of boringness and inconsequence.

It was quite clear from all that was written by various people, whose opinion on what was going on in Serbia/Kosovo was different, that nobody thought Russia should get involved. Every time President Yeltsin staggered up in a drunken haze and threatened Russian retaliation, his ministers immediately made it clear that he didn’t really mean it and the old man has had one too many again. He-he.

As a result, I confidently predicted to all those in various parts of the political world who got all excited about us upsetting the poor Russians that nothing would happen. I was right. Apart from that odd and only marginally successful dash to Pristina airport after which the Russian soldiers had to be fed and watered by NATO troops, nothing happened.

Mark my words, so it will prove now. Russia is not worried about Serbia and is not going to waste its inadequate forces in the Balkans. The Wall Street Journal pointed out on Monday [subscription only, I fear]

With no troops or permanent interests on the ground, however, Moscow seems likely to be happy to score political points against the West – and then, as always in its dealings with the Balkans, abandon the Serbs to their fate.

What Russia is interested in is developments on her own borders. No, I do not mean Chechnya or Dagestan or Ingushetiya. Kosovo’s independence will not make a jot of difference to that problem, which has been going on intermittently since the end of the eighteenth century when the Russians first moved into that part of the Caucasus.

The problems I am talking about are South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both at present in Georgia and both regions where Russian has been stirring up trouble and, on various occasions, getting involved in military activity. The point that journalists here have missed is that Russia is not at all keen on these two autonomous republics becoming independent of Georgia.

Once they have shaken off the shackles of Georgian oppression (or so they seem to think) they will become Russia’s problem and the latter will lose many of the excuses for interfering in Georgian affairs, at least militarily. Furthermore, it is true, as Russian officials say (and there is good reason to suppose that they might even be telling the truth) that Chechnyan terrorists and fighters (boyeviki) routinely hide out in South Ossetia then acquiring the region all for their own may not be seen as a bonus by the security forces.

Despite the two autonomous republics declaring their wish to become independent, Russia has not so far recognized them and has not indicated that it intends to do so. Let us face it, the international structure that some people are so worried about is, at present, in Russia’s favour and she does not want to upset things too much. Oh, and by the way, it does not matter what we do or say. That nice Mr Putin will still be unpleasant to us. Live with it.

The informal meeting of the 12 CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States – all the former Soviet republics apart from the Baltic ones) heads of state yesterday has passed without any incidents. In fact, it was quite successful, as normally there is a boycott or two and you rarely get the whole dozen together.

According to Interfax, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not planning to appeal to the CIS heads of state to be recognized, anyway. President of Abkhazia Sergei Bagapsh explained that a great deal of preparatory work will have to be done before that appeal can be made. I would guess, at least some of the preparatory work will be finding out what the Russians really want from their unreliable allies.

Will Kosovo survive? For the time being yes. One can never really predict much for the Balkans but it is protected by NATO and aided by the EU. Its chances of survival are as good as those of any new Balkan state.

Will it be a democracy as the Kosovan government promises? Again, the chances of that are as good as in any other former Yugoslav country. Much will depend on the behaviour of the Serbs in the north of the country when they realize that Serbia will not come to their aid. Much will also depend on the behaviour of the Serbian government. As we know from the example of Northern Ireland, having a larger neighbour who helps troublemakers is not conducive to peaceful existence.

Much will also depend on the Kosovan government and whether they live up to their fine words.

Meanwhile we have to live with the fact that the Balkan kaleidoscope has been given another shake and this situation is likely to remain for some time. With a bit of luck, the international system has also received another blow from which it will find it hard to recover.

Who will rid us?

There is no avoiding variants of Henry II’s alleged comment, which sent the four knights on their deadly mission to Canterbury. The Sun was the only one to do so successfully by the headline “What a Burqua”. As good a reaction as any other.

When the first news of the latest faux pas by His Bloviation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, hit the internet, this blog had every intention of staying out of the mess, on the grounds that we have covered the man’s pronouncements in the past and need not do so for a little while.

Sadly, the story has become too big for us to ignore and it does fit in with one of our usual themes – the need for a British identity to be defined. There has been a great deal written about Dr Williams’s lecture and interview on Radio 4 both in the MSM and on the blogosphere. A lot of it is quite good, a lot of it uninteresting and predictable, a good deal very silly.

We have little time for the Blair Derangement Syndrome, for instance, that has informed some of the postings. We have even less time for the hysteria that sees the inevitable or even probable supremacy of Sharia law everywhere in the UK. A little calculation and study of the situation on the ground should disabuse people of that one (though there is none so blind as those who do not want to see).

For all of that the Archbishop’s latest pronouncements are extremely stupid and dangerous. The best account of how this mess developed is on Melanie Phillips’s blog. It seems that the Archbishop was due to deliver one of his “nuanced” lectures yesterday evening in which, as many knew, he intended to argue that there should be some accommodation between English law (or, presumably, Scottish law) and Sharia law. He was, one assumes, also intending to explain that Sharia law in some form or another was “unavoidable”.

In itself that is nonsense. Nothing on this earth, except death is unavoidable and the Archbishop of Canterbury ought to know that. In particular, the introduction of any kind of law or legal form is not unavoidable. You avoid it by not doing it.

The Archbishop’s lectures are notorious in that they confuse and annoy people in about equal parts and Lambeth Palace thought that the media aspect of it all should be controlled. For that purpose Dr Williams’s staff restricted even the embargoed copies of the text and organized an exclusive interview with Radio 4’s “World at One”, reckoning, perhaps, that there would be friendly sympathy from the interviewer.

As an exercise in damage limitation this was not a howling success. The Archbishop cast all restraint to the wind and said all the things some well-meaning fluffy individuals are pretending he did not say. One cannot help feeling sorry for those unfortunate officials at Lambeth Palace who have to deal with the extraordinary phenomenon with the completely undisciplined mind that is at the head of the Church of England.

By the time he stood up to deliver his lecture, the internet and some parts of the media were buzzing with the man’s unfortunate statements.

While Dr Williams asserted that he would not like to see the extreme forms of Sharia law in this country but he did think that apart from being “unavoidable” some form of it was a good thing as Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

That raises several issues immediately. In the first place, how does His Bloviation intend to control what kind of Sharia law emerges in the various communities as soon as its equality to the law of the land is accepted? The fact, that his source for analyzing, however superficially, Sharia is the highly dubious Tariq Ramadan, well-known for writing different things in different languages, a book on whom will soon be published by the Social Affairs Unit, fills one with some scepticism about his understanding of the whole subject.

Secondly, Muslims are not the only people who have to accept that cultural and state loyalty might occasionally clash. What of those Christians who think abortion is murder? Ah well, I hear people say, they do not have to have abortions. Nobody has to have abortions but it is hard to live in a state that not only allows such things to take place but apparently encourages them, if you happen to hold strong views on the subject.

If memory serves, a far greater man than the Archbishop of Canterbury dealt with that particular issue a couple of millennia ago. Something about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. Might one suggest that the Archbishop spends some time meditating on the second part of that saying?

One does find some senior prelates perplexing. After all, one has to assume that the Archbishop is a Christian and has read the Bible. He is supposed to be highly intellectual though the comment that is attributed to both Henri IV and Sully about James I of England and VI of Scotland that he was “the wisest fool in Christendom” seems remarkably appropriate.

Surely, His Grace recalls St Paul’s insistence, repeated both to the Galatians and to the Colossians in different forms:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.

St Paul, a great man and not nearly as much of a misogynist as some of his self-appointed followers are, was writing that “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. But it is that equality that is mirrored in the legal structure that has been painfully built up over centuries in the West. It is that equality that His Grace seems to want to destroy by his suggestion that there should be many different, equal laws in this country.

It is hard to imagine a subject more calculated to annoy just about everybody, those who think, with some justification, that Muslims are allowed to get away with a great deal already and those among Muslims who have finally recognized that the only way forward is integration and acceptance of a British identity.

What His Grace seems unable to recognize though a number of people, starting with Trevor Phillips, Chair of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, have been trying to tell him that removing people from the legal structure and putting them into a separate one may seem like a privilege. In actual fact it gives them a huge disadvantage. What His Bloviation is rather vaguely proposing is a form of apartheid – separate development for certain communities and denial of civic rights to all members of those communities as well as human rights to the female ones.

As Melanie Phillips explains, acknowledging Sharia courts in certain matters, including family law, as the equal of this country’s courts would not recreate the situation of the Jewish religious courts, the Beth Din:

Yes, Jewish religious courts, like sharia courts, deal with such issues as dispute arbitration, family issues, marriage and divorce. But the Jewish courts have never sought official recognition of their rulings, and these are not recognised under English law. Their dispute resolution is informal and voluntary. Their religious marriage and divorce rituals have no status in English law (with the exception of one tiny wrinkle designed to help resolve an anomaly in Jewish divorce law which causes otherwise unavoidable distress); for the state to recognise their marriages or divorces, Jews have to marry or be divorced according to English law just like everyone else.

If sharia courts were to operate in this way, there would be no problem. Why should anyone care, after all, what minorities are doing in the private sphere as long as it doesn’t break the law? But the crucial difference is that such Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law — and Dr Williams is endorsing this. But it breaks the fundamental precept that Jews have always acknowledged — that as a minority they live under the law of the land and do not seek to change it to accommodate them.

And all that is before we get to the point that Jewish family rules are not quite the same as Sharia family rules, which can include such delights as forced marriage, wife-beating, even honour killing.

To be fair, not all Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law. A number have criticized His Grace. As have politicians of all parties though their criticism left something to be desired, namely an understanding how legislation is carried out in Britain these days.

Baroness Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion and social action, said: "The Archbishop's comments are unhelpful and may add to the confusion that lready exists in our communities. "All British citizens must be subject to British laws developed through Parliament and the courts."

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said: "I think there is one law in this country and it's the democratically determined law.

"That's the law that I will uphold and that's the law that is at the heart actually of the values that we share across all communities in this country."

Quite apart from the somewhat nebulous concept of British values that no-one has yet been able to define, it might be a good idea if the good Baroness and the hapless Home Secretary understood that British laws are no longer developed through Parliament and the courts. To recap our endless theme: between seventy and eighty per cent of our legislation comes from Brussels, most without even touching Parliament. What does go through that institution cannot be rejected by our democratically elected parliamentarians.

Oh yes, and our courts are routinely over-ruled by the ECJ, whose decisions are binding. But I digress.

The curious thing about the Archbishop is that he has been known to make quite sensible speeches and the lecture he gave in Liverpool, entitled “Europe, Faith and Culture” raises some interesting points about that convoluted subject. Among other matters he emphasised the importance of the individual in western culture, in Christianity and in the modern world.

Both Marxism and Islam are in their basic conception morally serious and philosophically sophisticated visions which seem on the face of it to have relatively little place for pluralism or irony on the classical European model; both assume that the presence of a finally satisfactory human order sanctioned by God or by the objective forces of history is at least a possibility within the world we know, and both are critical of the 'interior' focus of Christian language and the pessimism or even passivity which this can, in their eyes, generate.

In both cases, the experience of searching dialogue with Christianity makes it quite clear that we are not talking here about worlds that simply can't communicate with each other; but there is no doubt that the divergences are plain and significant. Even when the Marxist or the Muslim shares substantial aspects of the cultural inheritance of the European world, they will write very different kinds of novel or drama.

This is nothing to do with the clichés about clashing civilizations that we regularly hear, nor to say that Islam is always going to be 'other' to Europe: Islam has long been bound up with Europe's internal identity as a matter of simple historical fact, and it stands on a cultural continuum with Christianity, not in some completely different frame. It is simply to underline that there is a genuine distinctiveness about the cultural mindset that most directly inherits the Christian perspective; whether this is good or bad, true or false, we ignore the distinction only at the cost of honest and effective conversation across boundaries.

More to our present point, we ignore the history of this distinction at the same cost. If we want to know why Europeans and their cultural relatives take it for granted that appearances can be deceptive and that we always need to 'decode' even the most innocent-looking claims, why we take it for granted that even our talk about what is most sacred and serious carries a shadow of incongruity, the answer is in a theology that has encouraged us to think of the world around us as never being a place to settle down for good.

In this context, the challenge posed to the classical European legacy by Marxism or by contemporary Islam is important and constructive; a growing number of European thinkers in recent years have acknowledged that the pure pluralism of some sorts of postmodernist theory does not provide a very robust or compelling alternative to the 'monotheistic' certainties of other philosophies,even within the historic territories of Europe itself. If Europe is to go on being culturally alive, it will need to ask if it has understood its own legacy too narrowly and exclusively.

It is hard to see how the same man could elaborate in his lectures the ideas of Sharia law becoming the equal in certain parts of this country to the accepted law of the land. Clearly the Archbishop understand the difficulties with Islamic law; he must know that handing over large numbers of British subjects, particularly the female ones to Sharia courts on the subject of family matters will deny everything that is essential to our country and our culture.

Then why is he saying things like:

The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.

As Melanie Phillips puts it:

If therefore we really don’t have the right to uphold the primacy of our own western liberal and Christian laws and traditions, the way is open for fragmentation and eventual rule by the religious culture which exercises the strongest muscle. Which is Islam.

What is to be done with the impossible Archbishop of Canterbury? I am reminded of an episode of “Yes, Prime Minister”, as I so often am. I think it must have been “Bishop’s Gambit” in which Jim Hacker has to appoint a new bishop and Sir Humphrey discusses the two candidates, making it clear that one is preferable on a number of political and social grounds.

Hacker expresses some doubt about the candidate’s faith. Suavely, Sir Humphrey explains that for a bishop in the Church of England, belief in God is an optional extra. What is not an optional extra is an understanding of the standing of the Church in British life. It has been tarnished, agreed, but the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury is to try to revive that standing and, if possible, support the constitutional and legal structure. The last two are, of course, the duty of everybody in this country. If those structures have been undermined, it is our duty to restore them. Certainly, the Archbishop of Canterbury should be leading that effort.

There is another aspect to this issue. The Church of England is a large world-wide organization with many members in African countries where they are under constant threat from either Marxist governments or their Islamist neighbours. People are murdered and tortured; churches are torched; villages destroyed. The people in those circumstances who courageously continue to profess their faith need the support of their leader, who seems unable to work out the simplest facts about law, Christianity, Islam or Shariah.

If, however, the Church of England and its Primate, reject their role in the definition of British identity (this does not imply in any way that to be British one has to be C of E) then we must start thinking whether the institution is quite as useful as it was for several centuries after the Elizabethan settlement.

Is there, in fact, any way of getting rid of an Archbishop of Canterbury apart from Henry II’s solution to the problem of Thomas á Becket or Mary I’s to that of Cranmer? He can be forced to resign but the man seems rather too fond of himself to fall on the metaphorical sword. Can anyone sack the man?

Or should we start thinking considerably more seriously than we have done so far about disestablishing this very fine old institution? Would the cure then be worse than the disease itself?

Memorial Days

As it happens, I have already disagreed with another blogger today. No, it was not Tim Worstall who responded in a somewhat round-about fashion to my colleague’s complaints about lack of acknowledgement of the work he has done. I have done with that particular issue for the time being, though we shall both return to the problem of intellectual work not being appreciated in this country and the difficulties that creates.

My disagreement, mild and courteous, as I like this particular blog a great deal, was posted on London Daily Photo, run by an amateur photographer called Ham and one of my daily must-see outlets. In fact, I cannot recommend the site highly enough.

Ham, decent chap that he is, posted a picture and a comment to do with Holocaust Memorial Day. My objection was to him ruminating about “tragedies” such as Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur proving that the international community still has not learnt to deal with such matters.

Let us first look at that phrase, international community, which is about as meaningless as can be. Who, precisely, is going to deal with these “tragedies”? This blog has tried to document the developments in Darfur (and Chad) as well as the difficulties of dealing with them. Somehow, I suspect that a lot of people who wring their hands about the international community would not like the only possible weapon said community has being put into place: suspend aid until the governments, armies and militias start laying down arms and behaving themselves. Then stop aid altogether except, maybe, immediate help delivered by the Anglospheric armed forces and start buying goods from those countries (including oil).

Moving on to more important points, I disapprove of the use of the word “tragedy” in this context. Yes, they were all tragedies to the victims, their families and their peoples but the word implies something passive. These tragedies simply happened because the international community was not looking where it was going.

They did not just happen. These were also enormous crimes, even mass murders, committed by certain people for certain reasons and that must be understood. Bleating about the Holocaust as if it were some kind of an inexplicable but horrible event gets us nowhere.

And talking of crimes we come to the point I actually made on the blog: Cambodia does not fit into the pattern at all. You cannot understand what happened there unless you start thinking and writing about all victims of Communism, those in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in China, in Vietnam and so on. What of them, I asked. Tomorrow morning I shall check if there are any responses.

Some weeks ago I wrote about the Russian authorities fussing about the exhibition of paintings from Russian museums that were to be exhibited in the Royal Academy. The problem was sorted by our politicians and art commissars grovelling to the Russians and speedily passing various regulations that ensured descendants of the Morozov and Shchukin families would not start claiming ownership of paintings that had been confiscated from them soon after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Actually, some of them were confiscated twice as many of the Bolsheviks rather speedily appropriated much of the decadent bourgeois property that was becoming Bolshevik state property. Then they, too, were arrested and once again the paintings were … ahem … acquired by the state.

As both the French and the Russian paintings in the two collections were considered to be somewhat decadent as well as unhealthy, they were not shown in Soviet museums for a long time and judging by the state some of them are in, not looked after very well either. There are cracks in the paint of various Cézannes and Matisses and scratches on the Russian paintings that had been taken out of their frames and, more recently, hastily surrounded by bits of wood.

Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard, who did not like the exhibition, anyway, wrote about his disgust that the British government simply rolled over for the Russians. While I think the British government should have demanded something in return, I do think that something good might come out of this mess (apart from the fact that many excellent paintings and many rather second-rate ones are being seen in London).

First of all, I can sympathize with the Russian museum curators who are still at the mercy of the political authorities and must be rather happy to be able to talk to their Euroepan colleagues. The whole Soviet and post-Soviet situation is particularly heart-breaking when one looks at the way Russian culture was integrated in European up to the end of the First World War, with a little bit going on till the mid-twenties.

Secondly, this might see the end of those preposterous claims that collateral descendants of Jewish art collectors keep making for pictures and collections that they have very dubious rights to. As Brian Sewell rightly asks, why are Nazi grabs to be pursued even when they were not, strictly speaking, grabs but not Communist ones?

Can we now draw a line under the whole thing and just acknowledge that stuff happens and just because one’s great aunt may have owned many very good pictures that does not mean that one is entitled to the profit of selling them now at hugely inflated prices?

I must admit, however, much as I liked the paintings – the Russian ones more than the French, which, with very few exceptions are also rans – I was not impressed by the way the exhibition is curated.

It is not really possible to have an exhibition of paintings from Russian museums that were originally confiscated from Russian collectors and not deal with politics at all. There must be a limit to how much grovelling we do to the Russian authorities.

Why, for instance, is there no mention of the art historian Nikolai Punin, who saved many of those decadent works of art? Could it be because then there would have to be some kind of a mention that the man, Anna Akhmatova’s third husband, was arrested twice, the second time dying in the camps in 1953?

Akhmatova’s portrait by Naum Altmann, for many years seen only in illustrations, is one of the highlights of the exhibition. But, true to our reluctance to discuss the tragedy of Communism, little is said about the great poet herself.

Presumably, there could be no explanation of the many people who had to leave the country, abandon their creativity and worse or we would have been denied the paintings.

Look at the portrait of the astonishingly inventive stage producer Vsevolod Meyerhold by Dmitri Grigoriev.

Many of those supposedly new ideas of the sixties were invented by Meyerhold in the twenties. I have seen other pictures of him, photographs by the MVD taken after he had been “interrogated” for months. I have read the letter he, like many others, was allowed to send to the authorities before he was sentenced, with complaints about treatment in prison. Guess what happened to all those letters. Oh, they survived but you will not hear Hizonner the Mayor of LondON or the Liverpool worthies read them out, though Meyerhold’s “complaints” have been translated and published.

Maybe it is best not to read the letter out. I had nightmares after my own perusal.

On Holocaust Memorial Day I feel I ought to talk a little about victims of other monstrous crimes. (When I tried to suggest a memorial meeting for those victims as well in the London Assembly I was called a Holocaust denier for my pains by Comrade Len Duvall, the leader of the Labour group and a very unpleasant ultra-left bully politico. One does not need to wonder too long what his job would be in a totalitarian state.)

So, Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s greatest poets. Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, also a poet, a traveller and an officer in the Russian army, was shot in 1921, allegedly for participating in an anti-Bolshevik, pro-monarchist plot. It has long ago been accepted by historians and researchers that there was no plot but a provocation by the Cheka.

Their son, Lev Gumilyov, eventually an historian who propounded some very peculiar theories about ethnicity, was arrested altogether three times under Stalin, released finally only after the old tyrant’s death.

Her third husband I have already written about. Her friend, Lidiya Chukovskaya, barely managed to escape arrest herself and whose own husband, the astrophysicist Matvei Bronshtein was arrested and sentenced officially to ten years without rights of correspondence. That was a phoney sentence, handed out to relatives of many of those who had actually been sentenced to death and executed (or possibly murdered during torture) in prison. It kept the execution figures down.

Chukovskaya described how Akhmatova set herself up as the conscience and memory of the nation. No-one around her was ever allowed to forget even for a moment about the vast prison camp they all lived in. Of course, they could not talk about it but they could exchange notes that were immediately destroyed and memorize poems.

Chukovskaya herself wrote two brilliant novellas about the two big purges, “Sofia Petrovna” and “Going Under”. They were published in the West in the sixties and twenty years later in the Soviet Union. She also found courage, despite everything, to support Boris Pasternak, to protest against the imprisonment of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yury Daniel, as well as other dissidents. As an old blind woman she was bullied by officials of the Writers’ Union because she had dared to protest against treatment meted out to Andrei Sakharov.

Nadezhda Mandelshtam, who also escaped arrest and whose husband, the great poet Osip Mandelshtam was arrested twice and eventually died in a transit camp outside Vladivostok, wrote that when Lyova Gumilyov was arrested for the third time even Akhmatova “howled”. She agreed to write some poems in praise of Stalin.

More to the point, however, she wrote a brilliant cycle “Requiem” about her country’s torment. The poems of the cycle were memorized by friends and were published in the West in the early sixties. They did not appear in the poet’s homeland till the late eighties, twenty years after her death.

And so, on this Memorial Day, I intend to indulge myself and post my translation of the introductory quatrain and note to “Requiem”, the best of all memorials to those millions, who are never remembered by our commentators.

No, I did not live under an alien sky
And was not protected by alien wings -
I was then among my own people,
Where my unhappy people were.


INSTEAD OF AN INTRODUCTION

In the terrible years of yezhovschina I spent seventeen months in Leningrad’s prison queues. One day somebody recognized me. The woman immediately behind me, whose lips were blue with cold, and who, presumably, had never heard of me, seemed to shake off the numbness that had overtaken us all. Leaning close to my ear she whispered (we all spoke in whispers):

- And this. Can you write about this?

I said:

- Yes I can.

Then something resembling a smile glided across what had once been her face.

“Requiem” grew out of that experience and that conversation.

On this Memorial Day, let us remember the people in those queues, the people behind bars, behind barbed wire, in the torture chambers, being dragged to the execution chambers.

Two things need to be added. Firstly, in case anybody is wondering, the reason I write about Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe rather than, say, China is very straightforward. I know more about it. It is not because I consider what happened in the Asian or Latin American countries to be unimportant.

Not enough has been written about China, Vietnam and Cambodia (that scene of an unexplained tragedy) and, in any case, my knowledge is too superficial. I can thoroughly recommend, however, the Inspector Chen novels by Qiu Xiaolong, who lives in the United States. Mostly they are excellent detective stories, far superior to the overwhelming majority of those written in Britain or America. They also give a fascinating picture of Shanghai in the nineties and a very good analysis of the traumatic effects of Maoism and of the Cultural Revolution in particular. Those who can think that far back will recall that the latter was particularly ferocious in Shanghai.

Secondly, what does this have to do with the European Union? As it happens I am not succumbing to the brain fever that considers the EU to be a reincarnation of the USSR. It is not. That very short account of very few people above ought to show that.

However, if we want to move forward in the twenty-first century and overcome the horrors of the twentieth, we must, first of all understand those horrors. Concentrating unthinkingly on the Holocaust (by which I mean not understanding even that) will get us nowhere.

If we want to survive and flourish, to revive the historical process that seemed to disintegrate in the last century we must face up to the truth. Then we can do what we need to do and discard the outdated remnant of that terrible century; the organization that is still stuck somewhere in the middle of it and cannot think its way out; the one and only European Union.

See? I told you there was a connection between all these disparate topics.

Do we know what it is we do not know?

The follow-up question there would be: and do we care that there are things we do not know we do not know.

First, let me deal with a seemingly small problem that has arisen and about which my colleague wrote in what I thought was a very moderate fashion (well, at first, anyway). It is related to the main theme, I promise you.

The point at issue was the use of material laboriously put together by the editors of this blog, chiefly my colleague, by members of the MSM without any acknowledgement and the subsequent mutual admiration society between them, their friends and sundry bloggers. Devil’s Kitchen is excepted as are all bloggers who use our material and link back to the original. That is what the blogosphere is for and we have no desire to stop that.

On the other hand, neither of us is very keen on the advice that we should shrug our shoulders and get on with life; these things happen and anyway the cause matters more than the individual. Well, that’s very nice, of course, but it is not your work that is being nobbled and we have not empowered anyone to accept apologies on our behalf.

What attitude like that shows is the sort of contempt we have in this country for intellectual labour and achievement, whether it is a piece of research, translation (as I know to my cost) or a programme to enable large companies to get financial information tailored to their needs faster (as I know from someone who works for a very big international news and financial information agency).

These are all products, hard though it is to understand about something that is not a widget and cannot be picked up. The achievement of creating them should be acknowledged.

Intellectual property is a thorny subject but we, on this blog, ask for no money from people who use our material. You are all welcome to it. We ask for acknowledgement. Incidentally, the Daily Telegraph, owner of all those clogs, goes ballistic if their material is used without payment, never mind a link or two. (I have now seen the exchange between Daniel Hannan and my colleague, as well as the odd unpleasant interjection from the odd forum reader and shall leave that particular subject alone. The principle, as far as the MSM is concerned, stands.)

Nor am I impressed by the argument that the cause matters more than the individual. First, let me say, define the cause. I think you may find that the cause as interpreted by various members of the Conservative Party may not be our cause. In any case, if one believes in liberty, as this blog does, one must believe in the importance of private property and that extends beyond widgets.

For the rest of it, people who say never mind who your allies are, think of the cause, remind me of those misguided souls who insisted that one must not oppose anything the Soviet Union did because that plays into the hands of the Fascists or the Nazis. Then the Soviet Union played into the hands of the Nazis; then luckily for the misguided souls, the thieves fell out. Alliance with the Soviet Union may have seemed like a very good idea on the morning of June 22, 1941 and, in any case, there were few choices, but the long-term damage that did is still with us.

This brings me rather neatly to the main theme of this posting. We are fighting a war of propaganda on various fronts, not least in the war against terror or against terrorism, if you prefer.

Let me remind our readers of the following statement by Donald Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are "known knowns"; there are things we know we know. We also know there are "known unknowns"; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also "unknown unknowns" — the ones we don't know we don't know.

According to the Wikipedia entry on the subject it was not an original thought, which miraculously makes it clever, though the evidence for that is not presented and is likely to be rather spurious. Furthermore, the Plain English Campaign awarded it the Foot in Mouth Award in 2003 but that must have been before they were told that it was not original by Rummy.

Frankly, the Plain English Campaign had better award itself the Stupidity of the Year Award. That sentence is very clear, very plain and makes perfect sense, unlike numerous pronouncements by said campaign. (I am told by my colleague that said campaign gave an award to the MoD website for clarity. I rest my case.)

It has, however, been a staple of jokes by clever-dick British journalists, satirists and even, I am sorry to say, bloggers. Two of those I read regularly referred to the statement sniggeringly in the last week. I shall not link to them because I do not want to embarrass them and because they were both rightly lambasted by their readers.

The idea of “unknown unknowns” is well known (if I may put it that way) to all businessmen, managers and even theoreticians of management. Would that it were well known to our policy makers and the people behind them, who supposedly produce the background work. I despair of commentators understanding anything.

As it happens I was reminded of Rumsfield’s dictum this week, reading the obituaries in the Guardian, the Times and the Daily Telegraph of a man I knew slightly for reasons that I need not go into and will not be guessed by our readers (in other words, do not waste your time or space on the forum), Charles Elwell.

Charles, as our readers can see from the two pictures I have posted, was the quintessential Englishman, tall, handsome, bumbling in manner and with a ridiculous sense of humour. It was hard to remember that he was one of the sharpest MI5 operatives this country ever had, cracking the Portland spy ring and uncovering John Vassall’s activities.

After an extremely good war, which included a stint in Colditz, he joined the Service, subsequently marrying one of his colleagues, Ann Glass, herself no mean operative. Ann Elwell, as I knew her, was impossibly glamorous in charm, person and intellect to my youthful eyes and it was even more difficult to imagine her as a successful agent.

Between them, Mr and Mrs Elwell did more for this country and its security than 99.9 per cent of all those self-important politicians, national or local or, for that matter, in Brussels, put together. I am happy to be able to pay this tribute to them here.

However, one must move on. There was an interesting point made in all the obituaries. In the 1970s Charles Elwell moved from counter-espionage to counter-subversion where he produced evidence, which was necessarily tentative, of widespread Soviet activity in the field of subversion. His bosses decided that he was exaggerating and he left the Service in sheer frustration.

Subsequently, he managed to find a useful outlet in the Institute for the Study of Conflict, where he published regular background briefings, which were considered by the authorities to be exaggerated. Even now, after much of what Charles Elwell said has been confirmed by the documents extracted from the KGB archives and published during those few years when it was possible, the obituaries still seem to agree with those MI5 bosses. One cannot help feeling that it is still considered to be somewhat infra dig to be digging into what the Soviets were really up to in all those decades.

The trouble that subversion and its close relation, agents of influence, come under the heading of “unknown unknowns”, considered to be unsuitable for our security agents and, these days when we no longer have institutes for the study of conflict or terrorism or any suchlike matter, even for analysts outside the system.

So we have a situation in which all warnings of Soviet subversion, including the stories that Islamic groups were being funded, armed and trained, were largely ignored or placed into the “exaggeration” file. Others tell that warnings from the early nineties that odd things were happening in some of the British mosques were also filed among the exaggerated “unknown unknowns”.

We are fighting an enemy that is adept at many things, including propaganda. The one thing they do not seem to be able to manage is build up a decent state with decent life for the people in it. So if they cannot have it, nobody can and they will try to make sure that will happen.

They are adept at propaganda and subversion because they were taught by the best – the Soviet elite, while people in the West, Britain in particular, sat back and talked grandly about exaggeration, just as now we snigger at the expression “unknown unknowns”.

Yet what we know about our enemies is still pitifully small and no amount of whining about those nasty Americans deciding that they were the enemy and, therefore, using "inappropriate vocabulary" forcing us to go along with it (something that I hear quite often from people in position of power and influence) while we just want to understand them and show our love for them so they love us back, will help. What we need to do is to go out there and try to find those “unknown unknowns”. Come to think of it, we could start with some of the “known unknowns”.

Coming back to the subject of our other enemy, the European Union and its minions, the same problem can be seen. That Rolls Royce of officialdom, the British civil service, has had rings run round it by the despicable Europeans for decades. No, not all of them wanted to give up everything that may have been once upon a time part of this country’s history and tradition.

Nowadays we call it the Anglospheric tradition, but that, too, gets a superior sniff from too many people, though that comes into the category of "known unknowns".

Quite simply, through not doing their homework, through not trying to understand the “known unknowns”, let alone the "unknown unknowns", they lost out. We all lost out and we are continuing to lose out.

While piecing the picture together, as best we can on this blog (yes, thank you, I don’t need any more lectures on how I must be generous with my work and how the cause matters more than anything – see all the arguments above and leave), we have realized that the EU elite is having a more difficult time than most people realize.

Seemingly victorious, they are feeling their edifice beginning to shake around them, though we, out here, may not feel the tremor yet. It is hard to know what is going on really, what are the “known unknowns” and what are the “unknown unknowns”. Any tenuous work we may do is either drowned out by the usual suspects bleating their political slogans or chanting about the need for another campaign, any campaign or it is dismissed as being an exaggeration.

One of our constant complaints on this blog has been the lack of respect the eurosceptic movement has shown for intellectual work – for research, for analysis, for attempts to get beyond the “known knowns”. All attempts to set up a genuine think-tank that would deal with these problems have failed; all money raised has gone to pointless campaigns, unnecessary umbrella organizations or superficial publications that promote politicians or their parties.

So here we are, still in a mess, still squabbling and still unable to see beyond those “known knowns”. I don’t mind the squabbling as occasionally something comes out of it but I do, very seriously, object to our inability to understand the concept of “unknown unknowns” and to get to a point when we get to know some of them. There can be no solution to problems we cannot even begin to define.

"Give me liberty or give me death" - Part I

These ringing words end the speech made by Patrick Henry on March 23, 1775. He was addressing the House of Burgesses, the legislative House of the Colony of Virginia and calling for military action against British troops. As the Wikipedia article points out, the words of the speech remain problematic as they were not noted down at the time.

After the War of Independence (or the third English Revolution) Patrick Henry was involved in the debates about the Constitution, at first as an Antifederalist but later as a staunch Federalist, being, apparently, one of the moving forces behind the Bill of Rights, which became the first ten Amendments to the Constitution and which we badly need in this country.

All the while Patrick Henry was a slave owner even though he recognized the contradictions in his stand. Possibly he even recognized the contradictions in his stand on liberty and calls for a strong federal government, though one could argue that as long as the government is controlled by well-defined states’ and individual rights, problems are less likely to arise. How wrong that argument would be can be seen in America’s own Civil War or War Between the States.

This is not, our readers will be glad to know, a posting about American history or even the American presidential elections. The latter will have to be discussed some time but, as St Augustine said in a different context, not yet.

Rather, I should like to muse a little on questions of liberty, freedom of speech, censorship and editorial control. Some readers may want to stop here and go no further. They are welcome to absent themselves.

The subject of freedom of speech is on many people’s mind at the moment and the general agreement seems to be that we are losing our rights. I may point out that when and if we do lose our rights to say what we think we should say we shall not be able to admit to it. In the Soviet Union people were imprisoned for saying that there was no freedom of speech in the country. Anyone who thinks it is the same in Britain or the EU had better produce some definite examples.

The problem with Patrick Henry’s rousing call is one of definitions. On the whole, we know what death is even if we may differ on our assumptions about what happens afterwards. But liberty? How, precisely does one define it?

For Patrick Henry it seemed easy though even he may have had the odd doubt or two after the War of Independence. Liberty meant not being ruled by another power, in this case Britain, and being a republic.

Since for a large number of colonists the notion of Britain being another power was slightly odd and they continued to fight stubbornly against what they saw as treacherous insurrection, even that, the simplest part of it all remains under question. Their liberty was denied them as it was the slaves about whom Patrick Henry did have a twinge of conscience though he seems to have announced himself rather proudly to be a hypocrite and let it go at that.

Nor is being a republic, even with an elected head of state, means necessarily that liberty is guaranteed. The twentieth century, which saw a great deal of liberty extinguished, demonstrated that all too often it is monarchies that guarantee freedom for their subjects as long as there is an adequate constitutional structure.

A long time ago when I was studying at school my history teacher did a very good job of explaining the difference between “Liberty” and “liberties”. (That shows how long ago it was as we still had history teachers who were allowed to teach the subject and explain various concepts in it. Mind you, even then we did not learn about the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars. Rum.)

Liberty with a capital letter and in singular was a grand concept that involved definitions and, all too often, impositions by those who put the definitions into practice. Roughly speaking that is the idea behind the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Liberties, on the other hand, were the acknowledged rights and freedoms of the people that the rulers or the state had no right to impinge on.

As it happens that halcyon state of affairs never existed in England or Scotland, let alone Ireland but the general idea was there somewhere in most people’s minds, as the great French political thinker Montesquieu recognized.

The general idea, I suspect, is no longer there in many people’s minds, not in those who want the state to solve whatever problem there might be from small to large; not in those who think it is always somebody else’s fault that things have not gone right in this country, from Peter Oborne downwards. With liberty comes responsibility but few people want either.

As against the difficult ideas of freedom with attendant duties as well as rights, we have only one notion left: freedom of speech. Not only this is an inadequate and useless idea, it is sometimes contrary to the ideas of real liberty.

Allow me to remind our readers of something that happened in 2005. It involved the Beckhams and their nanny, who, having signed a confidentiality agreement when she took on the job of looking after the little Beckhams, decided on leaving the job that such piffling notions did not apply to her and sold various stories about her ex-employers to the News of the World.

There were various injunctions, counter-injunctions and eventually the young lady agreed not to publish any more than had already appeared in that newspaper but walked away with a tidy sum of money (more than 30 pieces of silver). One wonders what happened to her when the money ran out as it is unlikely that anyone would have employed her as a nanny ever again.

What shocked me about the whole story was that when the Beckhams’ lawyers sought an injunction before the stories were published, citing the confidentiality agreement, Mr Justice Langley ruled that publication could go ahead, on the grounds that the Beckhams were in the public eye and, therefore, had to expect that former employees would write stories about them.

In other words, the ex-nanny’s supposed right to “freedom of speech” trumped not only the Beckhams’ right to their private existence (and let us not forget that young children were involved) but also the contract voluntarily signed by both parties. The truth is that liberty cannot exist without clear understanding of property rights and contractual agreements, honoured by all sides, including the state. Mr Justice Langley, representing the state, refused to honour the agreement.

Instead of recognizing the importance of the matter, we had the media screeching about attempts to “gag” the nanny and the News of the World, not to mention anyone else who decided to repeat the story. Because the Beckhams, particularly Victoria, are not terribly popular, there was a lot of head-nodding, instead of outraged exclamations.

It proved to me something that I had suspected for some time: the nebulous and impossible concept of “free speech” has become a substitute for freedom. The tail was now wagging the dog.

Recently, the question of freedom of speech came up in connection with the still unfinished business of the blogger Lionheart, hitherto unknown to me or many others. My colleague has already dealt with the case, as it stands at present, receiving for his pains a large number of ignorant and a few insulting responses. He ought to follow my example and abandon that forum. It’s not that I don’t believe in freedom of speech; it’s just that I see no point in arguing with people who cannot be bothered to read my postings let alone the Soviet Constitution before they pronounce on various matters.

So, setting aside the idea that freedom of speech is only one aspect of what ought to be a wider definition of freedom or liberty, which would definitely not allow newspapers publish any old rubbish they feel like doing, let us have a look at the concept.

Clearly, there can be no absolute freedom of speech. To be completely trite about it, nobody is allowed to shout “fire” in a crowded cinema. There are laws about incitement to violence, public disorder and affray (in fact there are very many laws about public disorder in the English legal system), libel and slander. These were all there before the more recent race and religious hatred legislation.

No country that has the sort of libel laws that this one does can be called free or can boast of freedom of speech. It is probably necessary to have some laws against slander and libel but the way things are, as I shall try to deal with further on, legitimate discussion of non-private activity can be silenced by the man with lots of moolah.

That is considerably less justified than those French privacy laws we so often sneer at, since freedom should involve some possibility of protecting one’s privacy unless it is in the public interest to know certain matters. It is entirely right that we should know where politicians who legally prevent the people of this country from being able to make choices about their children’s education send their own offspring. I am less certain that we either need to or, in my case, want to know if any of them are having affairs.

Even less am I certain that freedom of speech or freedom of publication is clearly understood by many people. The notion that the only acceptable form of freedom of speech is publishing everything that everybody who can be bothered to do so thinks or says shows an ignorance of writing, editing and publishing that is breathtaking in its intensity.

One of the disadvantages of the internet, heavily outweighed by the many, many advantages is that people who have little knowledge or understanding of a subject still feel the need and have the possibility to express a point of view. You may call it freedom of speech or you may call it stupidity.

Let us have a quick look at our own blog, which has been accused of self-censorship. Do we ever decide not to write about certain subjects because we do not think they are appropriate to our general themes? Sure we do.

Do we ever decide to tread carefully because we have no clear evidence about what may be happening instead of ranting away, regardless of facts and truth? Indeed, we do.

Do we try not to insult people directly but express our views in a more round-about fashion? Sometimes. Do we ever decide not to go with postings for various reasons, some outlined above? Not infrequently.

Does that amount to self-censorship? We prefer to call it editorial work that produces a blog on what we hope is a professional standard. On the other hand, nobody, not even our readers, tell us what we should or should not write about. We have the freedom to act that way. Newspapers do not. If they lose readers and, subsequently advertisers, they go to the wall and no amount of squealing about freedom of speech will save them.

Nevertheless, editors decide what they will publish and if they do not like somebody’s writings either in an article or a letter, they do not publish it. If that writing is sort of all right but needs editing, that is what happens and no, that does not mean that the author’s freedom to express him or herself has been denied. Editing is an essential part of the writing process as are self-editing and self-control.

These notions together with the concept of private property, be it a newspaper or a blog, ought to be self-evident. That they are not shows how far we have moved from any kind of understanding of liberty or freedom of speech.

The only people who believed in everything being valuable as and when it is pronounced or written were the Dadaists, led by Tristan Tzara. It was a short-lived literary trend.

Nor is stream of consciousness writing, when genuine, unedited burbling. I am not a great admirer of James Joyce but I know enough to realize that passages such as Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy is a carefully structured piece of writing unlike some of the blathering one is supposed accept in the name of freedom of speech.

Incidentally those who advocate freedom of expression and who know very little of Dadaism or James Joyce, particularly teachers in primary schools, have achieved a level of illiteracy that has not been seen in this country since the Middle Ages. (I have said it before and shall say it again: it is outrageous how many people of all ages in this country do not know and cannot be bothered to learn how to use the richest language in the world.)

This rant is becoming so very long that I find it necessary to split it into two (and you will be lucky if I stop there). In the second part I shall deal with a couple of cases where the freedom to say important matters is being taken away. This time I shall not be dealing with countries where there really is no freedom at all but with incidents in the West. So I shall end this piece with the words:

To be continued ….

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