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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Big capture, big questions
Number's up for Taliban No. 2
By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
February 17, 2010
The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's equivalent of Gen. Stan McChrystal -- by Pakistani agents and CIA operatives is a big win.
Subordinate only to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's CEO, Baradar ran the Taliban's military operations in Afghanistan. Responsible for the upgrade in insurgent tactics -- fighting smart, rather than just fighting -- he also created the Taliban's hearts-and-minds campaign.
For two weeks, he's been under interrogation by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency. The CIA's also involved in the questioning on some level -- but the ISI always holds back some chips.
Reuters
Pakistan's new proxy? Afghan thug Gulbuddin Hektmatyar may be the big winner from the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The grab won't affect the ongoing fight for Marjah in Afghanistan, but the loss of Baradar's operational savvy could degrade future Taliban operations. And if he sings -- as we're told he's doing -- it could be the biggest anti-Taliban bonanza since 2001.
Or maybe not. While it's excellent news that Baradar's been nabbed, his capture in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, raises questions Washington yearns to ignore:
* Why did the ISI and its overseers agree to bust him now? They've known his whereabouts for years -- intermittently, if not consistently -- just as they monitor the movements of most insurgent bigwigs.
* Did the Pakistanis act at last because the CIA cornered them into it? Or is this a deeper tale of rivalries, betrayals and Pakistan's long-term ambitions? Perhaps Baradar was too effective a commander for Islamabad's plans -- or too independent for the ISI.
Reportedly, Baradar had been defying commands from Mullah Omar, who the ISI has backed for almost 20 years. Was this the intel equivalent of a gangland hit?
And what role did the other insurgent groups play? Pledged to cooperate with the Taliban, the savage Haqqani network based in North Waziristan is protective of its turf. Was Baradar's growing power a threat to Maulavi Jalajuddin Haqqani and his bloodthirsty son, Sirajuddin? Did they rat him out?
Then there's the Hezb-e-Islam, the durable mujaheddin outfit of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a ruthless survivor of decades of Afghan conflict. He spent years fighting the Taliban (and just about everybody else), but has cooperated with the Taliban in the wake of 9/11 on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Behind his displays of Muslim piety, Hekmatyar's an opportunist out for Hekmatyar. He's also the figure the ISI is most confident it can control (the Taliban's become annoyingly independent). The Pakistanis may foresee a deal between Hekmatyar and President Hamid Karzai, which would get the Americans out -- then leave the hapless Karzai dangling from a lamp post like Najibullah, Moscow's last man in Kabul.
To make that work, the Taliban would have to be under control: still a menace to Americans, but manageable for Pakistan, once our troops and NATO's go home (the Obama administration would leap at the chance to recognize "Afghan reconciliation").
This is a crime-family power struggle -- "The Godfather," AfPak style. The ISI may have pretended to roll over for us on Baradar, when Pakistan's generals wanted him out of the picture, anyway. If he turns stoolie (angered by his betrayal) and the ISI finally does move against the Taliban, it signals they've tipped decisively toward Hekmatyar.
Or Baradar may not be talking. He's one tough customer. Leaking news of his capture and that he's blabbing may be a ruse to get other Taliban leaders to expose themselves as they scramble for new hide-outs.
Of course, the Taliban claims Baradar's safe in Afghanistan.
My money says that the Pakistanis will turn out to be too clever for their own good (as always). Meanwhile, if we can capture -- or, better, kill -- some Taliban bigwigs because of the Baradar bust, well, Allah be praised!
Ralph Peters' new book, "Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization," goes on sale in March.
By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
February 17, 2010
The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's equivalent of Gen. Stan McChrystal -- by Pakistani agents and CIA operatives is a big win.
Subordinate only to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's CEO, Baradar ran the Taliban's military operations in Afghanistan. Responsible for the upgrade in insurgent tactics -- fighting smart, rather than just fighting -- he also created the Taliban's hearts-and-minds campaign.
For two weeks, he's been under interrogation by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency. The CIA's also involved in the questioning on some level -- but the ISI always holds back some chips.
Reuters
Pakistan's new proxy? Afghan thug Gulbuddin Hektmatyar may be the big winner from the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The grab won't affect the ongoing fight for Marjah in Afghanistan, but the loss of Baradar's operational savvy could degrade future Taliban operations. And if he sings -- as we're told he's doing -- it could be the biggest anti-Taliban bonanza since 2001.
Or maybe not. While it's excellent news that Baradar's been nabbed, his capture in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, raises questions Washington yearns to ignore:
* Why did the ISI and its overseers agree to bust him now? They've known his whereabouts for years -- intermittently, if not consistently -- just as they monitor the movements of most insurgent bigwigs.
* Did the Pakistanis act at last because the CIA cornered them into it? Or is this a deeper tale of rivalries, betrayals and Pakistan's long-term ambitions? Perhaps Baradar was too effective a commander for Islamabad's plans -- or too independent for the ISI.
Reportedly, Baradar had been defying commands from Mullah Omar, who the ISI has backed for almost 20 years. Was this the intel equivalent of a gangland hit?
And what role did the other insurgent groups play? Pledged to cooperate with the Taliban, the savage Haqqani network based in North Waziristan is protective of its turf. Was Baradar's growing power a threat to Maulavi Jalajuddin Haqqani and his bloodthirsty son, Sirajuddin? Did they rat him out?
Then there's the Hezb-e-Islam, the durable mujaheddin outfit of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a ruthless survivor of decades of Afghan conflict. He spent years fighting the Taliban (and just about everybody else), but has cooperated with the Taliban in the wake of 9/11 on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Behind his displays of Muslim piety, Hekmatyar's an opportunist out for Hekmatyar. He's also the figure the ISI is most confident it can control (the Taliban's become annoyingly independent). The Pakistanis may foresee a deal between Hekmatyar and President Hamid Karzai, which would get the Americans out -- then leave the hapless Karzai dangling from a lamp post like Najibullah, Moscow's last man in Kabul.
To make that work, the Taliban would have to be under control: still a menace to Americans, but manageable for Pakistan, once our troops and NATO's go home (the Obama administration would leap at the chance to recognize "Afghan reconciliation").
This is a crime-family power struggle -- "The Godfather," AfPak style. The ISI may have pretended to roll over for us on Baradar, when Pakistan's generals wanted him out of the picture, anyway. If he turns stoolie (angered by his betrayal) and the ISI finally does move against the Taliban, it signals they've tipped decisively toward Hekmatyar.
Or Baradar may not be talking. He's one tough customer. Leaking news of his capture and that he's blabbing may be a ruse to get other Taliban leaders to expose themselves as they scramble for new hide-outs.
Of course, the Taliban claims Baradar's safe in Afghanistan.
My money says that the Pakistanis will turn out to be too clever for their own good (as always). Meanwhile, if we can capture -- or, better, kill -- some Taliban bigwigs because of the Baradar bust, well, Allah be praised!
Ralph Peters' new book, "Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization," goes on sale in March.
Breaking the Taliban
by Ryan Mauro on Feb 17th, 2010
http://frontpagemag.com/
The war in Afghanistan may have reached a decisive tuning point this week. Just as a U.S. offensive into Helmand Province is making progress, a joint Pakistani-American raid has resulted in the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second-in-command of the Taliban.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar
Strategically, Mullah Baradar’s capture may be even more important than taking out Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader. If a successful interrogation of Baradar is completed, it will result in an intelligence coup that can cripple the terrorist networks in the region and dramatically turn the tide in the ongoing conflict.
Baradar was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, proving that the Taliban leadership operated on that country’s soil. The Pakistani role in the raid is significant, as they have supported the Taliban and have only taken action against them under severe pressure. Last spring, U.S. officials complained to The New York Times about how the Pakistani ISI intelligence service was covertly helping the Taliban, providing them with supplies and even holding meetings to strategize. In October, the foreign minister of Afghanistan claimed that his nation provided the U.S. and U.K. with proof that ISI officers were directing Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, specifically mentioning an attack on the Indian embassy the previous year.
The Pakistani ISI’s role in arresting Baradar is therefore extremely significant. It shows that one of the Taliban’s important allies has turned against them. This has happened for several reasons. Pakistani opinion has turned against the Taliban as they have established Sharia Law where they take power and have carried out ruthless attacks on the country’s citizens. They have attacked ISI offices and last spring, advanced to within 60 miles of Islamabad. At the same time, outrage over CIA drone attacks is putting pressure on the Pakistani government that can only be alleviated by doing the work that the Americans have been forced to do for them. This does not necessarily mean that the Pakistanis will undertake a full-fledged offensive against safe havens in their country, but it’s a notable improvement in their behavior.
The Taliban first denied that Baradar had been caught, perhaps honestly believing that it was simply Western propaganda. Taliban commanders then tried to say he was captured in Helmand Province, probably in an attempt to disguise the fact that they do indeed rely upon Pakistani safe haven to operate.
Baradar has been the operational leader of the Taliban for years. He is responsible for reorienting the Taliban strategy to focus on guerilla warfare similar to that practiced in Iraq, rather than engaging American forces in the open. His orders to focus on ambushes and the use of improvised explosive devices led to a significant increase in casualties over the past year. His skill has caused him to be called a “brilliant commander” by one expert on Afghanistan. He also led the Shura Council in the Pakistani Baluchistan Province capital of Quetta, controlled the Taliban’s finances and managed the “shadow government” of Taliban governors, mayors and other officials. In Newsweek’s words, “A cunning, little-know figure, he may be more dangerous than [Mullah] Omar ever was.”
This picture of Baradar’s role indicates that the Taliban effort is more centralized than is often assumed. This means that there will be leaders that can quickly replace him, but it also means that his oversized role in all of the Taliban’s affairs makes his absence extremely destabilizing for them.
It also means that he has a treasure trove of knowledge about all of the organization’s functions. He likely knows where Mullah Omar is hiding, and his history of close dealings with Osama Bin Laden means he will know much about his operations. It’s been believed for a long time that Mullah Omar is residing in Quetta, and last fall, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Islamabad said it was believed that Bin Laden also was there. If that report is true, then there is a very good chance that Baradar knows the location of Bin Laden as well—or that if he doesn’t, he can reveal the people closest to him.
One other area he can certainly shed light on is Iran’s alliance with the Taliban. Small arms and IEDs became the staple of the Taliban’s attacks under Baradar’s guidance, and the U.S. military knows that these are being provided by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, along with training. In one raid in Heart Province in August, over 100 BM-1 rockets and dozens of C4 explosives made by the Iranians were seized.
It’s possible that the removal of Baradar from Taliban’s hierarchy could spark some internal strife. It is known that he has had several major rivals in the past, with the sharpest challenge coming from Mullah Dadullah Akhund, who Baradar viewed as reckless. As their conflict escalated, Dadullah was killed in a raid that “was clearly guided by inside information.” Dadullah’s younger brother then began attacking Baradar, resulting in his expulsion from the Taliban. Soon after, someone provided inside information on his location allowing the Pakistanis to arrest him, just as had happened to his brother.
Luckily, U.S. officials claim that Baradar is talking and giving up intelligence. This will be a test of the Obama Administration’s interrogation policy, although the Pakistanis are also involved, with their much more lax restrictions. If Baradar’s information leads to more captures, causing a domino effect that turns the war in Afghanistan around, the Obama Administration will undoubtedly use it to vindicate their policy on Pakistan and interrogations. If the information he provides is limited, President Obama’s opposition will take aim.
Baradar’s inability to serve won’t end the Taliban, as he has trained many of his fighters in his tactics and strategy. It would not be an exaggeration, however, to state that the intelligence he gives could begin the Taliban’s darkest days. A large amount of the information will only be useful, though, if it can be acted upon and the willingness of the Pakistanis to act quickly and aggressively against the safe havens on their territory before such intelligence becomes outdated is still in question.
http://frontpagemag.com/
The war in Afghanistan may have reached a decisive tuning point this week. Just as a U.S. offensive into Helmand Province is making progress, a joint Pakistani-American raid has resulted in the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second-in-command of the Taliban.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar
Strategically, Mullah Baradar’s capture may be even more important than taking out Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader. If a successful interrogation of Baradar is completed, it will result in an intelligence coup that can cripple the terrorist networks in the region and dramatically turn the tide in the ongoing conflict.
Baradar was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, proving that the Taliban leadership operated on that country’s soil. The Pakistani role in the raid is significant, as they have supported the Taliban and have only taken action against them under severe pressure. Last spring, U.S. officials complained to The New York Times about how the Pakistani ISI intelligence service was covertly helping the Taliban, providing them with supplies and even holding meetings to strategize. In October, the foreign minister of Afghanistan claimed that his nation provided the U.S. and U.K. with proof that ISI officers were directing Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, specifically mentioning an attack on the Indian embassy the previous year.
The Pakistani ISI’s role in arresting Baradar is therefore extremely significant. It shows that one of the Taliban’s important allies has turned against them. This has happened for several reasons. Pakistani opinion has turned against the Taliban as they have established Sharia Law where they take power and have carried out ruthless attacks on the country’s citizens. They have attacked ISI offices and last spring, advanced to within 60 miles of Islamabad. At the same time, outrage over CIA drone attacks is putting pressure on the Pakistani government that can only be alleviated by doing the work that the Americans have been forced to do for them. This does not necessarily mean that the Pakistanis will undertake a full-fledged offensive against safe havens in their country, but it’s a notable improvement in their behavior.
The Taliban first denied that Baradar had been caught, perhaps honestly believing that it was simply Western propaganda. Taliban commanders then tried to say he was captured in Helmand Province, probably in an attempt to disguise the fact that they do indeed rely upon Pakistani safe haven to operate.
Baradar has been the operational leader of the Taliban for years. He is responsible for reorienting the Taliban strategy to focus on guerilla warfare similar to that practiced in Iraq, rather than engaging American forces in the open. His orders to focus on ambushes and the use of improvised explosive devices led to a significant increase in casualties over the past year. His skill has caused him to be called a “brilliant commander” by one expert on Afghanistan. He also led the Shura Council in the Pakistani Baluchistan Province capital of Quetta, controlled the Taliban’s finances and managed the “shadow government” of Taliban governors, mayors and other officials. In Newsweek’s words, “A cunning, little-know figure, he may be more dangerous than [Mullah] Omar ever was.”
This picture of Baradar’s role indicates that the Taliban effort is more centralized than is often assumed. This means that there will be leaders that can quickly replace him, but it also means that his oversized role in all of the Taliban’s affairs makes his absence extremely destabilizing for them.
It also means that he has a treasure trove of knowledge about all of the organization’s functions. He likely knows where Mullah Omar is hiding, and his history of close dealings with Osama Bin Laden means he will know much about his operations. It’s been believed for a long time that Mullah Omar is residing in Quetta, and last fall, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Islamabad said it was believed that Bin Laden also was there. If that report is true, then there is a very good chance that Baradar knows the location of Bin Laden as well—or that if he doesn’t, he can reveal the people closest to him.
One other area he can certainly shed light on is Iran’s alliance with the Taliban. Small arms and IEDs became the staple of the Taliban’s attacks under Baradar’s guidance, and the U.S. military knows that these are being provided by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, along with training. In one raid in Heart Province in August, over 100 BM-1 rockets and dozens of C4 explosives made by the Iranians were seized.
It’s possible that the removal of Baradar from Taliban’s hierarchy could spark some internal strife. It is known that he has had several major rivals in the past, with the sharpest challenge coming from Mullah Dadullah Akhund, who Baradar viewed as reckless. As their conflict escalated, Dadullah was killed in a raid that “was clearly guided by inside information.” Dadullah’s younger brother then began attacking Baradar, resulting in his expulsion from the Taliban. Soon after, someone provided inside information on his location allowing the Pakistanis to arrest him, just as had happened to his brother.
Luckily, U.S. officials claim that Baradar is talking and giving up intelligence. This will be a test of the Obama Administration’s interrogation policy, although the Pakistanis are also involved, with their much more lax restrictions. If Baradar’s information leads to more captures, causing a domino effect that turns the war in Afghanistan around, the Obama Administration will undoubtedly use it to vindicate their policy on Pakistan and interrogations. If the information he provides is limited, President Obama’s opposition will take aim.
Baradar’s inability to serve won’t end the Taliban, as he has trained many of his fighters in his tactics and strategy. It would not be an exaggeration, however, to state that the intelligence he gives could begin the Taliban’s darkest days. A large amount of the information will only be useful, though, if it can be acted upon and the willingness of the Pakistanis to act quickly and aggressively against the safe havens on their territory before such intelligence becomes outdated is still in question.
The New, Upside-Down War on Terror
[Victor Davis Hanson]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Is there any logic in the confusion of the Obama administration's actions and statements on fighting the war on terror?
On the one hand, we had a two-year campaign (2007–08) of damning the Bush protocols, from renditions and military tribunals to Guantanamo and Predator strikes. Then, the Obama administration unleashed Eric Holder and John Brennan, who in highly partisan fashion attacked the anti-terrorism policies implemented from 2001–08 and reflected the themes voiced by Obama himself in his al-Arabiya interview and Cairo speech, many of which were reified by the Mirandizing of the Christmas Day bomber and the announced civilian trial of KSM in New York.
But all that said, Obama never shut down Guantanamo; has not tried KSM in New York; has kept the wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, and tribunals he once castigated; has escalated the war in Afghanistan; and has kept the status-of-forces agreements that Bush negotiated with the Iraqis — and Joe Biden now claims that Bush's Iraq agreements were Obama's greatest success!
Most importantly, Obama has vastly increased the Predator assassination missions along the Afghan-Pakistani border. If one were to sort out the politics of all this, one would conclude that Obama's cynical strategy looked something like this:
1) Run against Bush as the candidate of the Democratic party's hard-Left, anti-war, pro-ACLU base.
2) When elected, pacify that same base with soaring multicultural-outreach rhetoric of the Cairo sort and grand gestures, such as promising to close Guantanamo, investigate former CIA interrogators, appoint a Muslim-American liaison to the Islamic world, and end waterboarding.
3) Meanwhile, up the fighting in Afghanistan and the Predator assassination missions to prevent another 9/11-style attack.
Bottom line?
a) Obama really does (privately) believe that radical Islamists wish to kill us, and apparently has decided the only effective means of combating them is to copy the Bush strategy but drop the "smoke 'em out" rhetoric and substitute hope-and-change therapeutic banalities as we blow up suspected killers. The more conservatives rail about the KSM trial, the more Obama gains trust with the Left, and the more he can keep quietly killing suspected terrorists in Waziristan. (Dead men need no Miranda rights.)
b) So at home, Obama's calculation is even more cynical: He assumes that left-wing hatred of Bush's war on terror was never principled, but was always about partisan politics, and that left-wingers were far "angrier" about Bush's waterboarding of three admitted terrorists than they ever will be about Obama's assassinating suspected terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
c) Conservatives are then supposedly put in a bind: They may be angry that Obama demagogued the issue for two years as a candidate, and they may be upset that he so brazenly reversed course and emulated what he had demonized, and they may be mad about the hypocrisy of the hard Left — but they are also relieved that Obama is fighting terror and killing terrorists, and might even be impressed that he is doing so as a Nobel Peace laureate immune from the criticism that nearly destroyed Bush, and as someone who quietly executes suspected terrorists by remote control but worries publicly about confessed detainees in Bush's gulag.
I think that sums up the present Obama policy, which is far more cynical than confusing. I have no idea whether it is sustainable.
02/16 02:23 PM
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Is there any logic in the confusion of the Obama administration's actions and statements on fighting the war on terror?On the one hand, we had a two-year campaign (2007–08) of damning the Bush protocols, from renditions and military tribunals to Guantanamo and Predator strikes. Then, the Obama administration unleashed Eric Holder and John Brennan, who in highly partisan fashion attacked the anti-terrorism policies implemented from 2001–08 and reflected the themes voiced by Obama himself in his al-Arabiya interview and Cairo speech, many of which were reified by the Mirandizing of the Christmas Day bomber and the announced civilian trial of KSM in New York.
But all that said, Obama never shut down Guantanamo; has not tried KSM in New York; has kept the wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, and tribunals he once castigated; has escalated the war in Afghanistan; and has kept the status-of-forces agreements that Bush negotiated with the Iraqis — and Joe Biden now claims that Bush's Iraq agreements were Obama's greatest success!
Most importantly, Obama has vastly increased the Predator assassination missions along the Afghan-Pakistani border. If one were to sort out the politics of all this, one would conclude that Obama's cynical strategy looked something like this:
1) Run against Bush as the candidate of the Democratic party's hard-Left, anti-war, pro-ACLU base.
2) When elected, pacify that same base with soaring multicultural-outreach rhetoric of the Cairo sort and grand gestures, such as promising to close Guantanamo, investigate former CIA interrogators, appoint a Muslim-American liaison to the Islamic world, and end waterboarding.
3) Meanwhile, up the fighting in Afghanistan and the Predator assassination missions to prevent another 9/11-style attack.
Bottom line?
a) Obama really does (privately) believe that radical Islamists wish to kill us, and apparently has decided the only effective means of combating them is to copy the Bush strategy but drop the "smoke 'em out" rhetoric and substitute hope-and-change therapeutic banalities as we blow up suspected killers. The more conservatives rail about the KSM trial, the more Obama gains trust with the Left, and the more he can keep quietly killing suspected terrorists in Waziristan. (Dead men need no Miranda rights.)
b) So at home, Obama's calculation is even more cynical: He assumes that left-wing hatred of Bush's war on terror was never principled, but was always about partisan politics, and that left-wingers were far "angrier" about Bush's waterboarding of three admitted terrorists than they ever will be about Obama's assassinating suspected terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
c) Conservatives are then supposedly put in a bind: They may be angry that Obama demagogued the issue for two years as a candidate, and they may be upset that he so brazenly reversed course and emulated what he had demonized, and they may be mad about the hypocrisy of the hard Left — but they are also relieved that Obama is fighting terror and killing terrorists, and might even be impressed that he is doing so as a Nobel Peace laureate immune from the criticism that nearly destroyed Bush, and as someone who quietly executes suspected terrorists by remote control but worries publicly about confessed detainees in Bush's gulag.
I think that sums up the present Obama policy, which is far more cynical than confusing. I have no idea whether it is sustainable.
02/16 02:23 PM
The Disappearing Science of Global Warming
Special Report
By Peter Ferrara on 2.17.10 @ 6:09AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
Establishment figures intone about the substantial "body of science" supporting the notion of man-caused global warming. But based on recent events, they need to check the body's pulse. The body is dead, and rapidly wasting away before our very eyes.
Over the past 3 months, a circus of scandals has played around the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its periodic Assessment Reports on global warming. The latest report issued in 2007 proclaimed a consensus regarding a 90% probability that mankind's activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, were causing global warming that would lead to catastrophic results if drastic steps were not taken to reverse it.
The lasting scientific upshot of that circus of scandals is that the historical global surface temperature record on which the contention of global warming has been based has been thoroughly discredited as manipulated and mangled beyond recovery.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Three official global surface temperature data sets exist. These include British data (Hadley-CRU) maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office). Another is maintained by the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. The third is maintained by NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS).
Last October, Hadley-CRU admitted in response to Freedom of Information requests that they had actually thrown away the raw temperature data from which they constructed their historical surface temperature record. The original Climategate scandal revelations included emails from CRU Director Phil Jones proclaiming to co-conspirators that he will delete the raw data files before publicly disclosing them under Freedom of Information legal requirements. But if global warming science was so sound and supported by the evidence, why would Jones not want to publicly disclose the evidence to allow full peer review under the scientific method, and prove the case?
A later revelation from the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) explains why. The IEA disclosed that Hadley-CRU had failed to record reports from weather stations in colder regions of Russia, leaving the false impression that those stations were no longer reporting. The IEA believes that the complete Russian data do not support the notion of man-caused global warming. Other revelations disclose the same sort of shenanigans throughout the Hadley-CRU data set.
In any event, without the raw data available for peer review by other scientists to check and replicate the underlying calculations, and examine them for consistency with the publicly reported results, the Hadley-CRU surface temperature record is not science. It provides no foundation for government regulations imposing trillions in additional costs, and foreclosing trillions more in future economic output, nor any basis for the demanded trillions in wealth transfers from developed to underdeveloped countries. You can file it on the library shelf between Alice in Wonderland and Grimm's Fairy Tales.
More recently have come scandalous revelations regarding the same problems with the U.S. data sets kept by NOAA and NASA-GISS. In the 1970s, when it was just honestly trying to report the science, NOAA collected the temperature data from 600 Canadian weather stations. But this number has dwindled over the years to just 35 today for the entire expanse of Canada, including just one above the Arctic Circle. Yet, the Canadian government now operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, with more than 100 above the Arctic Circle. The same problems have now been found in the NASA-GISS surface temperature record.
American researchers Joseph D'Aleo and E. Michael Smith published a study on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) disclosing these results based on a review of the reports of NOAA and NASA-GISS themselves regarding the collection of data for their surface temperature records. According to a write-up in the National Post:
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and [NASA-GISS] have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry-picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.
D'Aleo and Smith further report that over the past two decades the percentage of Canadian stations in the lower elevations included in the temperature records of the two agencies tripled, while those at higher elevations above 300 feet, where the temperatures are colder, were cut in half. The National Post story continues:
Using the agency's own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA's Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S., and China….The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record. "NOAA… systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which have a tendency to be cooler," the authors say. "The thermometers, in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs."
NASA GISS is run by the unbalanced James Hansen, who, as Patrick Michaels recently explained in National Review Online, "became famous for calling coal [shipments] to your local power plant 'death trains' and advocating war-crime trials for the executives who daily force you to put gasoline in your car." Hansen also testified in defense of saboteurs on trial for vandalism at power plant construction sites in Britain, saying their violence was justified by the contribution to global warming that the power plants would produce. He can certainly be relied upon as an objective data source.
The Truth About Temperature
As a result of this unscientific behavior, the only reliable temperature record now is the one produced by U.S. weather satellites measuring global atmospheric temperatures. Such satellites have only been in operation since 1979, but show no increase in global temperature trends until the unrelated El Nino spike of 1998, with temperatures declining back down since then. By April of this year, that decline had completely offset the 1998 spike, with temperatures back to where they were in 1980. In recent months, another El Nino effect may be causing increased temperatures, but El Nino effects are a normal, temporary, temperature pattern not related to global warming.
Even the distorted surface temperature record was not consistent with man-caused global warming. That record still showed declining temperatures from 1940 until the late 1970s, despite all the burning of fossil fuels during that time, prompting media alarms about a returning ice age. U.S. temperatures by then were little different than in 1900. Heartland Institute President Joe Bast recently summarized, "Earlier this year, the onset of global cooling in 2000 was recognized by all leading scientists and could no longer be kept hidden by the mainstream media. Some scientists forecast two more decades of cooling before any warming returns."
In a shocking recent BBC interview, even CRU director and IPCC temperature guru Phil Jones admits that there has been no global warming over the last decade, and that he doesn't believe "the vast majority of climate scientists think" the debate on climate change is over. Most importantly, he confesses that even the increase in surface temperatures in the record, such as it is, for 1975 to 1998, which is the foundation for IPCC global warming claims, is not unprecedented. He admits that the record shows similar and not statistically significant warming for 1910 to 1940 and 1860 to 1880. That means the ballyhooed warming from 1975 to 1998, for which we have been asked to repeal the industrial revolution, is not outside the range of natural variability.
IPCC Follies
Among other recently revealed IPCC follies, the 2007 Assessment Report hysterically claimed that it was highly likely (up to a 90% probability) that the massive Himalayan glaciers would melt away completely by 2035.
Turns out, as the London Sunday Times reported in January, that this claim arose not from a scientific, peer-reviewed study, but from a 1999 news story interviewing a single Indian glaciologist, which was repeated by an article in the popular science magazine New Scientist, which was echoed in a publicity brochure from the World Wildlife Fund, which was the actual basis for the IPCC claim. The original glaciologist now says he was misquoted and provided no date for the doomsday melting of the glaciers, which are the source of a critical water supply for millions.
The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, also runs an energy institute in India which has now received millions in grants to further study Himalayan glaciers, based on the original bogus 2035 melting claim. Running that project for Pachauri is Syed Hasnain, the original glaciologist who started the phony melting scare. This smacks of corruption.
When the actual environment minister of India, Jairam Ramesh, issued a report last year concluding there was no proof that the glaciers were melting abnormally fast, Pachauri self-servingly denounced it as "voodoo science." Email correspondence now proves that Pachauri was aware last fall that the 2035 melting claim was false, but he continued to try to hide that from the public through the December Copenhagen summit. After the full story became public, Pachauri and the IPCC finally admitted the falsehood.
The IPCC's 2007 Assessment Report also claimed that the world has "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s." The cited source for this was one unpublished study which, when actually published in 2008, concluded, "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
The 2007 IPCC report, which, remember, won a Nobel Prize, also claimed that global warming threatened up to 40% of the beloved Amazon rain forest, allegedly because it is extremely sensitive to even modest decreases in rainfall that supposedly may result from warming. That turns out to have been based, again, not on any scientific, peer-reviewed studies, but on a magazine article by two non-scientists, one being an environmental activist who has worked for the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.
Further claims in the 2007 report regarding disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps, and Africa turn out now to have been based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine written by a hiker. So much for the IPCC's supposed gold-plated standard of peer reviewed science.
This is all consistent with what I have been arguing in this column for over a year, that the U.N. cannot be trusted to report objectively on the science of global warming because it has an institutional self-interest in hyping the issue to gain greatly expanded institutional powers. The right conclusion to draw from all these IPCC follies is as recently editorialized by the Washington Times: "Man-made global warming is not backed up by the science; it's a hoax….It's time to admit it's all baloney and move on."
The Crisis of American Media
As Rick Moran explained at the American Thinker website on January 31, we know of this circus of IPCC follies because
newspapers in Great Britain have been doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN….
Perhaps it's time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can't get any traction here, [where] we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and -- outside of Fox News -- the cable nets.
Instead, American media outlets like Time and Newsweek are still disgracefully reporting the arrant nonsense from global warming fabulists that the record snowfalls pummeling America this winter are actually due to global warming. In America, we can no longer even get the news from the political activists posing as journalists at our major media outlets, which can no longer be distinguished from the Democrat National Committee.
Last year, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was calling for civil disobedience by global warming activists to force legislation. He now owes his readers, and global warming "deniers," an apology. If he can't do that, the Times would do better turning over his column to Jayson Blair, the disgraced former Times reporter who was discovered fabricating his front-page news stories. Today's wildly leftist New York Times has reached such a low point that one has to turn to publications like Playboy for stories of greater social value.
The disappearing science of global warming now calls for action. In states that have joined interstate compacts to start imposing sacrifices on their people to the global warming gods, the people should rise up and demand that their elected officials withdraw from those commitments or be replaced. Note that 18 states provide for recall of elected state officials. If your Congressman or Senator voted for or supports cap and trade, then join a campaign to replace him or her for foolishness and dereliction of duty. Congress should pass legislation instead to withdraw authority from the EPA over global warming regulation. Representatives who won't support that need to be replaced by those who will.
And America needs to stop looking to the UN for global warming science. Our own bureaucracy has already been corrupted by its own self-interest in using global warming to expand its powers. Instead, we need to appoint a Team B of expert scientists to report on alternative views. It should be headed by Fred Singer, the founder of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, and Richard Lindzen of MIT. Let James Hansen and his co-religionists debate with them, and then let the American people decide.
topics:Global Warming, Climategate, Rajendra Pachauri
Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
By Peter Ferrara on 2.17.10 @ 6:09AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
Establishment figures intone about the substantial "body of science" supporting the notion of man-caused global warming. But based on recent events, they need to check the body's pulse. The body is dead, and rapidly wasting away before our very eyes.Over the past 3 months, a circus of scandals has played around the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its periodic Assessment Reports on global warming. The latest report issued in 2007 proclaimed a consensus regarding a 90% probability that mankind's activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, were causing global warming that would lead to catastrophic results if drastic steps were not taken to reverse it.
The lasting scientific upshot of that circus of scandals is that the historical global surface temperature record on which the contention of global warming has been based has been thoroughly discredited as manipulated and mangled beyond recovery.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Three official global surface temperature data sets exist. These include British data (Hadley-CRU) maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office). Another is maintained by the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. The third is maintained by NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS).
Last October, Hadley-CRU admitted in response to Freedom of Information requests that they had actually thrown away the raw temperature data from which they constructed their historical surface temperature record. The original Climategate scandal revelations included emails from CRU Director Phil Jones proclaiming to co-conspirators that he will delete the raw data files before publicly disclosing them under Freedom of Information legal requirements. But if global warming science was so sound and supported by the evidence, why would Jones not want to publicly disclose the evidence to allow full peer review under the scientific method, and prove the case?
A later revelation from the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) explains why. The IEA disclosed that Hadley-CRU had failed to record reports from weather stations in colder regions of Russia, leaving the false impression that those stations were no longer reporting. The IEA believes that the complete Russian data do not support the notion of man-caused global warming. Other revelations disclose the same sort of shenanigans throughout the Hadley-CRU data set.
In any event, without the raw data available for peer review by other scientists to check and replicate the underlying calculations, and examine them for consistency with the publicly reported results, the Hadley-CRU surface temperature record is not science. It provides no foundation for government regulations imposing trillions in additional costs, and foreclosing trillions more in future economic output, nor any basis for the demanded trillions in wealth transfers from developed to underdeveloped countries. You can file it on the library shelf between Alice in Wonderland and Grimm's Fairy Tales.
More recently have come scandalous revelations regarding the same problems with the U.S. data sets kept by NOAA and NASA-GISS. In the 1970s, when it was just honestly trying to report the science, NOAA collected the temperature data from 600 Canadian weather stations. But this number has dwindled over the years to just 35 today for the entire expanse of Canada, including just one above the Arctic Circle. Yet, the Canadian government now operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, with more than 100 above the Arctic Circle. The same problems have now been found in the NASA-GISS surface temperature record.
American researchers Joseph D'Aleo and E. Michael Smith published a study on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) disclosing these results based on a review of the reports of NOAA and NASA-GISS themselves regarding the collection of data for their surface temperature records. According to a write-up in the National Post:
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and [NASA-GISS] have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry-picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.
D'Aleo and Smith further report that over the past two decades the percentage of Canadian stations in the lower elevations included in the temperature records of the two agencies tripled, while those at higher elevations above 300 feet, where the temperatures are colder, were cut in half. The National Post story continues:
Using the agency's own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA's Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S., and China….The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record. "NOAA… systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which have a tendency to be cooler," the authors say. "The thermometers, in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs."
NASA GISS is run by the unbalanced James Hansen, who, as Patrick Michaels recently explained in National Review Online, "became famous for calling coal [shipments] to your local power plant 'death trains' and advocating war-crime trials for the executives who daily force you to put gasoline in your car." Hansen also testified in defense of saboteurs on trial for vandalism at power plant construction sites in Britain, saying their violence was justified by the contribution to global warming that the power plants would produce. He can certainly be relied upon as an objective data source.
The Truth About Temperature
As a result of this unscientific behavior, the only reliable temperature record now is the one produced by U.S. weather satellites measuring global atmospheric temperatures. Such satellites have only been in operation since 1979, but show no increase in global temperature trends until the unrelated El Nino spike of 1998, with temperatures declining back down since then. By April of this year, that decline had completely offset the 1998 spike, with temperatures back to where they were in 1980. In recent months, another El Nino effect may be causing increased temperatures, but El Nino effects are a normal, temporary, temperature pattern not related to global warming.
Even the distorted surface temperature record was not consistent with man-caused global warming. That record still showed declining temperatures from 1940 until the late 1970s, despite all the burning of fossil fuels during that time, prompting media alarms about a returning ice age. U.S. temperatures by then were little different than in 1900. Heartland Institute President Joe Bast recently summarized, "Earlier this year, the onset of global cooling in 2000 was recognized by all leading scientists and could no longer be kept hidden by the mainstream media. Some scientists forecast two more decades of cooling before any warming returns."
In a shocking recent BBC interview, even CRU director and IPCC temperature guru Phil Jones admits that there has been no global warming over the last decade, and that he doesn't believe "the vast majority of climate scientists think" the debate on climate change is over. Most importantly, he confesses that even the increase in surface temperatures in the record, such as it is, for 1975 to 1998, which is the foundation for IPCC global warming claims, is not unprecedented. He admits that the record shows similar and not statistically significant warming for 1910 to 1940 and 1860 to 1880. That means the ballyhooed warming from 1975 to 1998, for which we have been asked to repeal the industrial revolution, is not outside the range of natural variability.
IPCC Follies
Among other recently revealed IPCC follies, the 2007 Assessment Report hysterically claimed that it was highly likely (up to a 90% probability) that the massive Himalayan glaciers would melt away completely by 2035.
Turns out, as the London Sunday Times reported in January, that this claim arose not from a scientific, peer-reviewed study, but from a 1999 news story interviewing a single Indian glaciologist, which was repeated by an article in the popular science magazine New Scientist, which was echoed in a publicity brochure from the World Wildlife Fund, which was the actual basis for the IPCC claim. The original glaciologist now says he was misquoted and provided no date for the doomsday melting of the glaciers, which are the source of a critical water supply for millions.
The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, also runs an energy institute in India which has now received millions in grants to further study Himalayan glaciers, based on the original bogus 2035 melting claim. Running that project for Pachauri is Syed Hasnain, the original glaciologist who started the phony melting scare. This smacks of corruption.
When the actual environment minister of India, Jairam Ramesh, issued a report last year concluding there was no proof that the glaciers were melting abnormally fast, Pachauri self-servingly denounced it as "voodoo science." Email correspondence now proves that Pachauri was aware last fall that the 2035 melting claim was false, but he continued to try to hide that from the public through the December Copenhagen summit. After the full story became public, Pachauri and the IPCC finally admitted the falsehood.
The IPCC's 2007 Assessment Report also claimed that the world has "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s." The cited source for this was one unpublished study which, when actually published in 2008, concluded, "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
The 2007 IPCC report, which, remember, won a Nobel Prize, also claimed that global warming threatened up to 40% of the beloved Amazon rain forest, allegedly because it is extremely sensitive to even modest decreases in rainfall that supposedly may result from warming. That turns out to have been based, again, not on any scientific, peer-reviewed studies, but on a magazine article by two non-scientists, one being an environmental activist who has worked for the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.
Further claims in the 2007 report regarding disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps, and Africa turn out now to have been based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine written by a hiker. So much for the IPCC's supposed gold-plated standard of peer reviewed science.
This is all consistent with what I have been arguing in this column for over a year, that the U.N. cannot be trusted to report objectively on the science of global warming because it has an institutional self-interest in hyping the issue to gain greatly expanded institutional powers. The right conclusion to draw from all these IPCC follies is as recently editorialized by the Washington Times: "Man-made global warming is not backed up by the science; it's a hoax….It's time to admit it's all baloney and move on."
The Crisis of American Media
As Rick Moran explained at the American Thinker website on January 31, we know of this circus of IPCC follies because
newspapers in Great Britain have been doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN….
Perhaps it's time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can't get any traction here, [where] we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and -- outside of Fox News -- the cable nets.
Instead, American media outlets like Time and Newsweek are still disgracefully reporting the arrant nonsense from global warming fabulists that the record snowfalls pummeling America this winter are actually due to global warming. In America, we can no longer even get the news from the political activists posing as journalists at our major media outlets, which can no longer be distinguished from the Democrat National Committee.
Last year, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was calling for civil disobedience by global warming activists to force legislation. He now owes his readers, and global warming "deniers," an apology. If he can't do that, the Times would do better turning over his column to Jayson Blair, the disgraced former Times reporter who was discovered fabricating his front-page news stories. Today's wildly leftist New York Times has reached such a low point that one has to turn to publications like Playboy for stories of greater social value.
The disappearing science of global warming now calls for action. In states that have joined interstate compacts to start imposing sacrifices on their people to the global warming gods, the people should rise up and demand that their elected officials withdraw from those commitments or be replaced. Note that 18 states provide for recall of elected state officials. If your Congressman or Senator voted for or supports cap and trade, then join a campaign to replace him or her for foolishness and dereliction of duty. Congress should pass legislation instead to withdraw authority from the EPA over global warming regulation. Representatives who won't support that need to be replaced by those who will.
And America needs to stop looking to the UN for global warming science. Our own bureaucracy has already been corrupted by its own self-interest in using global warming to expand its powers. Instead, we need to appoint a Team B of expert scientists to report on alternative views. It should be headed by Fred Singer, the founder of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, and Richard Lindzen of MIT. Let James Hansen and his co-religionists debate with them, and then let the American people decide.
topics:Global Warming, Climategate, Rajendra Pachauri
Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
In Mideast, Bet on a Strong Horse
A new book on Arab politics has diagnosed a pathology.
By Daniel Pipes
Author Archive Latest
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 16, 2010 12:00 A.M.
The violence and cruelty of Arabs often perplexes Westerners.
Not only does the leader of Hezbollah proclaim “We love death,” but so too does, for example, the 24-year-old man who last month yelled “We love death more than you love life” as he crashed his car on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York City. As two parents in St. Louis honor-killed their teenage daughter with thirteen stabs of a butcher’s knife, the Palestinian father shouted “Die! Die quickly! Die quickly! . . . Quiet, little one! Die, my daughter, die!” — and the local Arab community supported them against murder charges. A prince from Abu Dhabi recently tortured a grain dealer whom he accused of fraud; although a video of the atrocity appeared on television internationally, the prince was acquitted while his accusers were convicted.
On a larger scale, one accounting finds 15,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11. Governments throughout the Arabic-speaking world rely more on brutality than on the rule of law. The drive to eliminate Israel still persists even as new insurrections take hold; the latest one has flared up in Yemen.
Several excellent attempts to explain the pathology of Arab politics exist; my personal favorites include studies by David Pryce-Jones and Philip Salzman. Now add to these The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday, $26), an entertaining yet deep and important analysis by Lee Smith, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Smith takes as his prooftext Osama bin Laden’s comment in 2001, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” What Smith calls the strong-horse principle contains two banal elements: Seize power and then maintain it. This principle predominates because Arab public life has “no mechanism for peaceful transitions of authority or power sharing, and therefore [it] sees political conflict as a fight to the death between strong horses.” Violence, Smith observes is “central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.” It also, more subtly, implies keeping a wary eye on the next strong horse, triangulating, and hedging bets.
Smith argues that the strong-horse principle, not Western imperialism or Zionism, “has determined the fundamental character of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.” The Islamic religion itself both fits into the ancient pattern of strong-horse assertiveness and actively promulgates it. Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, was a strongman as well as a religious figure. Sunni Muslims have ruled though the centuries “by violence, repression, and coercion.” Ibn Khaldun’s famous theory of history amounts to a cycle of violence in which strong horses replace weak ones. The humiliation of dhimmis daily reminds non-Muslims who rules.
Smith’s prism offers insights into modern Middle East history. He presents Pan-Arab nationalism as an effort to transform the mini-horses of the national states into a single super-horse and Islamism as an effort to make Muslims powerful again. Israel serves as “a proxy strong horse” for both the United States and the Saudi-Egyptian bloc in the latter’s Cold War rivalry with Iran’s bloc. In a strong-horse environment, militias appeal more than do elections. Lacking a strong horse, Arab liberals make little headway. The United States being the most powerful non-Arab and non-Muslim state makes anti-Americanism both inevitable and endemic.
Which brings us to the policies of non-Arab actors: Unless they are forceful and show true staying power, Smith stresses, they lose. Being nice — say, withdrawing unilaterally from southern Lebanon and Gaza — leads to inevitable failure. The George W. Bush administration rightly initiated a democratization project, raising high hopes, but then betrayed Arab liberals by not carrying through. In Iraq, the administration ignored advice to install a democratically minded strongman.
More broadly, when the U.S. government flinches, others (e.g., the Iranian leadership) have an opportunity to “force their own order on the region.” Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese leader, has half-seriously suggested that Washington “send car bombs to Damascus” to get its message across and signal its understanding of Arab ways.
Smith’s simple and near-universal principle provides a tool to comprehend the Arabs’ cult of death, honor killings, terrorist attacks, despotism, warfare, and much else. He acknowledges that the strong-horse principle may strike Westerners as ineffably crude, but he correctly insists on its being a cold reality that outsiders must recognize, take into account, and respond to.
— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
By Daniel Pipes
Author Archive Latest
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 16, 2010 12:00 A.M.
The violence and cruelty of Arabs often perplexes Westerners.
Not only does the leader of Hezbollah proclaim “We love death,” but so too does, for example, the 24-year-old man who last month yelled “We love death more than you love life” as he crashed his car on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York City. As two parents in St. Louis honor-killed their teenage daughter with thirteen stabs of a butcher’s knife, the Palestinian father shouted “Die! Die quickly! Die quickly! . . . Quiet, little one! Die, my daughter, die!” — and the local Arab community supported them against murder charges. A prince from Abu Dhabi recently tortured a grain dealer whom he accused of fraud; although a video of the atrocity appeared on television internationally, the prince was acquitted while his accusers were convicted.
On a larger scale, one accounting finds 15,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11. Governments throughout the Arabic-speaking world rely more on brutality than on the rule of law. The drive to eliminate Israel still persists even as new insurrections take hold; the latest one has flared up in Yemen.
Several excellent attempts to explain the pathology of Arab politics exist; my personal favorites include studies by David Pryce-Jones and Philip Salzman. Now add to these The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday, $26), an entertaining yet deep and important analysis by Lee Smith, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.Smith takes as his prooftext Osama bin Laden’s comment in 2001, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” What Smith calls the strong-horse principle contains two banal elements: Seize power and then maintain it. This principle predominates because Arab public life has “no mechanism for peaceful transitions of authority or power sharing, and therefore [it] sees political conflict as a fight to the death between strong horses.” Violence, Smith observes is “central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.” It also, more subtly, implies keeping a wary eye on the next strong horse, triangulating, and hedging bets.
Smith argues that the strong-horse principle, not Western imperialism or Zionism, “has determined the fundamental character of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.” The Islamic religion itself both fits into the ancient pattern of strong-horse assertiveness and actively promulgates it. Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, was a strongman as well as a religious figure. Sunni Muslims have ruled though the centuries “by violence, repression, and coercion.” Ibn Khaldun’s famous theory of history amounts to a cycle of violence in which strong horses replace weak ones. The humiliation of dhimmis daily reminds non-Muslims who rules.
Smith’s prism offers insights into modern Middle East history. He presents Pan-Arab nationalism as an effort to transform the mini-horses of the national states into a single super-horse and Islamism as an effort to make Muslims powerful again. Israel serves as “a proxy strong horse” for both the United States and the Saudi-Egyptian bloc in the latter’s Cold War rivalry with Iran’s bloc. In a strong-horse environment, militias appeal more than do elections. Lacking a strong horse, Arab liberals make little headway. The United States being the most powerful non-Arab and non-Muslim state makes anti-Americanism both inevitable and endemic.
Which brings us to the policies of non-Arab actors: Unless they are forceful and show true staying power, Smith stresses, they lose. Being nice — say, withdrawing unilaterally from southern Lebanon and Gaza — leads to inevitable failure. The George W. Bush administration rightly initiated a democratization project, raising high hopes, but then betrayed Arab liberals by not carrying through. In Iraq, the administration ignored advice to install a democratically minded strongman.
More broadly, when the U.S. government flinches, others (e.g., the Iranian leadership) have an opportunity to “force their own order on the region.” Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese leader, has half-seriously suggested that Washington “send car bombs to Damascus” to get its message across and signal its understanding of Arab ways.
Smith’s simple and near-universal principle provides a tool to comprehend the Arabs’ cult of death, honor killings, terrorist attacks, despotism, warfare, and much else. He acknowledges that the strong-horse principle may strike Westerners as ineffably crude, but he correctly insists on its being a cold reality that outsiders must recognize, take into account, and respond to.
— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Monday, February 15, 2010
A Cosy Chat with Roger Smith
A cosy chat with Roger Smith
March 25th, 2009 by Mike Nicol
http://crimebeat.book.co.za/
[Click on article title to watch video of Roger Smith discussing Cape Town and his debut novel Mixed Blood. - jtf]
We’ve brought you his list of top 10 krimi reading. You’ve read the first chapter of his hard riding Mixed Blood. On the strength of it you’ve probably by now read the book. So Crime Beat did a stakeout on Roger Smith and when he emerged on the mean streets got him to answer some questions.
Crime Beat: You’ve hit Cape Town a bit like a bolt from the blue, and all we have is a short biog note about your being born in Johannesburg and being a scriptwriter. Can you expand on that?
Roger Smith: I grew up in Jo’burg and lived there until the late 90s. In the 80s I was one of those dinner party lefties, filled with loathing for apartheid but not ballsy enough to get locked up for my beliefs. Or go into exile. I was into movies, a founder member of a non-racial film co-op. Apartheid for export. Boycotted the SABC, that kind of thing. I started off with ambitions to direct, and did quite a bit of that. As well as producing. In the last five or ten years I’ve worked mainly as a screenwriter.
Crime Beat: What made you decide to head south?
Roger Smith: Through the 80s and early 90s Jo’burg was the place to be, the centre of the action. I wouldn’t have dreamed of moving to Slaapstad. But by the late 90s I got seduced by the promise of a very different lifestyle, so I slid on down. For a couple of years I lived quite happily inside a Cape Town bubble of sun and sea. Then I fell in love with a woman who grew up out on the Cape Flats and my vision of Cape Town had to expand dramatically.
Crime Beat: Okay, now to the book. Cape Town has become the setting of choice for many of the crime writers currently putting the city on a different sort of map. It offers ideal contrasts: a spectacular natural beauty that clashes with some of the worst urban slums in the country let alone the vast gap between the rich and the poor. You chose to look differently at the city. You set some of your scenes on the luxurious Atlantic seaboard but your real intentions are the Cape Flats or the railways suburbs to the north. Your Cape Town, too, is hellish in many ways: the mountain burns, the hard gritty southeaster howls, people are drunk or on tik, or gorging themselves on fast foods. This is not a nice place. Why did you want this background?
Roger Smith: No matter what the “shoowah” brigade may say, Cape Town is not a mellow, temperate spot. It bakes and blows and burns in summer. The sea rages and the city floods in winter. And two thirds of the population live on the flipside of the Cape Town picture postcard, which is about as violent a place as you’ll find outside a war zone.
Crime Beat: You have been harder on the city than other writers. Apart from a brief beach scene with your protagonist Jack Burn and his son Matt, you pretty much stick with the bad edge of the city. What laughter there is is often cynical, we don’t see people having a good time. Or when they have a good time it is to get wasted or stoned – to escape reality. But then your novel is a hard concentrated take on Cape Town’s worst excesses. Clearly you didn’t want to offer any relief, in fact it’s an angry book.
Roger Smith: I’m not sure if Mixed Blood is an angry book – but some of its characters are pretty pissed off… I find your questions about my depiction of Cape Town quite amusing, actually, as if I’ve just gone and slapped the prettiest girl at the party! If I’d written a gritty skop-skiet-en-donder set in Johannesburg, I doubt these questions would be asked, because that’s Jo’burg isn’t it? Hard-edged, ugly, driven by greed.
Crime Beat: Ummm! I wonder…
Roger Smith: Whereas Cape Town is the beautiful one, and somehow demands special treatment. Yes, Cape Town is beautiful. It is Clifton and Camps Bay and the Waterfront. But it’s also the escort agencies and junk-food joints on Voortrekker Road, and the endless sprawl of the Flats.
Crime Beat: A Siamese city, in fact, two twins joined at the hip.
Roger Smith: I was interested in the collision between plush Cape Town and the Cape Flats, and portraying what I believe to be the reality of many people’s lives, without sentimentalizing that reality, even if it’s uncomfortable.
A great compliment came from a guy from the Flats who works in local publishing. The manuscript reached him via my New York publishers, so he had no idea who I was. After reading Mixed Blood he was convinced that I had to have grown up on the Cape Flats, saying only an insider would have been able to portray that world as I did.
Crime Beat: You’ve put into Mixed Blood an array of characters that are anything but likeable. Let’s look at the men first: Jack Burn might love his wife and son but he can kill as easily as the cop ‘Gatsby’ (Rudi Barnard) – named after that great delicacy of steak chunks, slap chips, eggs, industrial cheddar cheese and mayonnaise and chilli squashed into a half-loaf. Benny Mongrel might love his dog but he can torture and kill with the flick of his knife. And the supporting cast be they cops or gangsters are, for the most part, bad or weak men. Undoubtedly the best among them is Special Investigator Disaster Zondi sent in to investigate Gatsby’s rogue behaviour. But even he has his sexual appetites, although he has enough will power to curb them. They are a rough crew.
Roger Smith: I’m not really interested in squeaky-clean middle-class characters, or quaint and colourful working-class stereotypes. I like characters who are up against it, out on the fringes of society. I could have taken a more conventional (maybe even more commercial) route and written about some sweet, white bread American family who come to Cape Town and are gobbled up by the horrors of the city. Instead I purposely created a cast of characters who are nearly all compromised. This to me is more interesting. And more realistic.
By the way, I think there’s a lot of humour in Mixed Blood: albeit typically South African gallows humour. We do it well, because we’ve had so much practice.
Crime Beat: Just before we move on, I was intrigued to see another Zondi surfacing in our crime fiction. No doubt this is a tribute to James McClure’s Mickey Zondi. Actually your Zondi, like the original is smart and good at heart, and a worthy successor. Do you intend reusing him?
Roger Smith: Well spotted. The Zondi thing is a little tug of the forelock in direction of James McClure, who wrote a series of great crime novels back in the dark old days. My Zondi, though, is a very much of product of contemporary South Africa, with all its contradictions.
Investigator Disaster Zondi is smart, and would think of himself as “good” in the moral sense. But good at heart? I’m not sure he remembers where his heart is. Since he swapped his hymn book for Trotsky’s manifesto twenty-odd years ago, he’s insulated himself from his emotions.
I have no intention of writing a series, and Zondi’s nowhere to be seen in my second thriller, but he seems to be booking a place in my third.
Crime Beat: Let’s take a look at the female contingent. Jack’s wife Susan moves from a moral lapse (her association with Jack) to a decision to straighten out her life even though it will mean punishment. The other major female figure Carmen Fortune, a tik addict, living off her baby son’s child grant is about as low as anyone can go. She soon loses her baby to social services and takes to the street to earn money. But in the end she displays compassion towards a strange child, Matt, and visits her dying father even though he sexually abused her as a child. Both these women undertake a journey towards redemption whereas the only male character to do so is Benny Mongrel. The other two minor female characters Mrs Dollie and Berenice September stand for nurture and in Berenice’s instance due process. Why this contrast between the male and female characters?
Roger Smith: I suppose I could say that men are more likely to commit acts of violence, but that would be short-changing Najwa [Petersen] and Dina [Rodrigues]. Although they did hire in men to do the wet work. Simply put, Mixed Blood is a story driven by violent men. Women, children (and dogs) beware.
Crime Beat: Your story is a classic one and a classic one for the genre: a man on the run being run down by his past. Are you fascinated by this relationship the present has to the past?
Roger Smith: It’s hard not to be, in a country that lives so much in the shadow of its past. Both Jack Burn and Rudi Barnard are brought down by their past actions. Burn’s fate is pretty karmic. He commits a crime in the States and takes his family and runs to what he thinks is a safe haven: idyllic Cape Town. Total strangers – two tik-heads from the Flats – bust into his house one night ready to rape and pillage. Burn defends his family and it all goes to hell from there.
Barnard was a CCB hit man in the 80s, and Zondi, sent down from Jo’burg to investigate the cop for corruption, realizes that he has a personal score to settle with the fat man that goes back over twenty years. In this strand of the story, maybe I’m just tapping into a sense that some people want a different type of closure than the TRC had to offer, as laudable as it was.
Crime Beat: The end of the novel is about redemption: the baddies get their comeuppance. Now poetic justice has almost become a convention in crime fiction, did you feel that given the moral –or rather immoral – excesses of your story you needed to set the world to rights?
Roger Smith: I don’t believe the book ends on a redemptive note. Nobody rides off into the sunset. Some die. Others are left suspended in limbo, probably to be reclaimed by the tide of poverty and crime. Not a happy ending.
Crime Beat: Well, not for the characters perhaps, but certainly for the readers the world has been tidied up. Interestingly, Mixed Blood opens with a random act and closes with a random act. The only other local crime novel that I know of offhand that opens with a random act of violence is Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak. What made you go for this opener?
Roger Smith: I was robbed at knife-point outside my house when I lived in Jo’burg. A few years back I caught an intruder who was cooked on something (crack? tik?) in the bedroom of my flat here in Cape Town. Not long ago my 70-year-old mother was mugged and assaulted by two men in broad daylight in a leafy suburban Cape Town street. Friends of mine have been shot in hijackings and home invasions. So, no matter what the stats say, this stuff happens. To us and people close to us. And all of these incidents were random and opportunistic.
So to start Mixed Blood with an act of random violence seemed very believable to me. But the violence directed at Jack Burn and his wife and child has to be seen as a form of reply to the violent act he was part of in the States: the murder of a policeman after a bank heist. Burn is not an innocent. And neither is his wife: she fled the US with him, knowing what he was implicated in. Jack Burn can run, but he can’t hide. No matter how he tries to avoid his fate, there is a reckoning at the end of the book. The laws of karma are immutable. In this story anyway…
Crime Beat: I’d like to finish up by looking at the style as you’ve pared down your sentences until they’re as clear as glass and as sharp as glass shards. This has allowed you to write a book that is fast and gripping and lean. An ideal vehicle for your story? Do you think your scriptwriting background came into play here?
Roger Smith: Thank you for your kind words. Having written scripts led naturally to a multi-POV structure, which is pretty much a screenplay norm. I can’t imagine ever writing in the first person, and I dislike the mixing of first and third, which so many people are trying now. I find it clumsy and pretentious. But I suppose I tried to write what I like to read: a fast-moving, multi-character story without too much padding. I get very bored with those flabby, overlong, crime novels that bog down in endless navel gazing and descriptions of the landscape (inner and outer), or spend pages telling you about a character’s taste in coffee or music. Almost as if the authors are ashamed of writing genre fiction, and feel that by fluffing up their manuscripts, they’re making them more “literary.” What was it that Elmore Leonard said? “Cut out all the bits that readers skip.”
Crime Beat: Finally, what of the future? You’re writing another stand-alone, I believe. Have you thought further ahead than that?
Roger Smith: I’ve finished my second book, ‘Wake Up Dead’, to be published by Henry Holt in early 2010. Yes, it’s a stand-alone, also set in Cape Town. I’m doing preliminary scratchings on my third, which looks like it’s going to start in Cape Town and then hit the road and end up in Zondiland. Or Zumaland. KZN. We’ll see…
Roger Smith will be interviewed by Kader Asmal at the Book Lounge in Cape Town this evening at 6pm. Be there.
Roger Smith's Backstory
http://www.rogersmithbooks.com/
One day in June 1976, when I was sixteen, I was riding on a bus in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, watching as a few thousand black school kids my age smashed store windows and torched cars. Watching as a lot of them got taken down by white cops with pump-action shot guns. This was day one of the youth uprising that spread out of Soweto and started a two-decade-long struggle that finally killed apartheid. These kids, like me, are a lot older now. Wiser, less idealistic.
Some of them still have old scores to settle, like Disaster Zondi, the Zulu detective in my debut thriller, Mixed Blood.
When I was seventeen I was drafted into South Africa’s white army busy fighting a meaningless bush war against ragged bands of black men with guns, some of them those kids from Soweto. The army called them communists and they called themselves freedom fighters. One Sunday morning I saw thirty of them dead, dumped off the back of a truck, the tailgate dark with blood. They lay on the sand and a group of white men in black suits – some still carrying bibles from the church they had just been praying in – walked among their bodies like vultures. The men had blunt haircuts and brutal accents and believed that whatever they did, they did in the name of their god. I saw these men often through the next decades; on the streets; in bars; in cop cars; on TV, standing over corpses – always fuelled by the belief that what they were doing was just and good.
Men like Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard, the psychopathic cop in Mixed Blood.
Tired of Johannesburg and its hard edges and grit, I moved down to Cape Town, seduced by the mountain and the ocean. People say Cape Town looks like the south of France, or California, just more beautiful. More than geography separates picture-postcard Cape Town from the windswept badlands of the Cape Flats, a sprawling ghetto home to millions of people of mixed race. The rape and murder count on the Flats is the highest in the world and every day children are violated and slaughtered and nobody seems to pay much attention. The media prefers to discuss who is wearing what and eating where and dating whom, back on the beautiful side of town. A few years ago I fell in love with a woman who grew up out on the Flats and the true stories she told me and the world she introduced me to changed my view of Cape Town forever.
The first person I met in her family was her brother. I went with her to prison to visit him. He was in his thirties and, since the age of fourteen, had spent a total of two years out of jail. We took his child with us: a boy of five. The prisoner, in his orange jumpsuit – gang tattoos carved into his skin – scared the boy. He scared me too, with his dead eyes and shaking hands. And I think we scared him, because we were part of the world outside. A world where he was powerless. He knew if he ever went out there again he wouldn’t stand a chance, would end up where he always ended up: back in prison.
Part of that man found his way into Benny Mongrel, Mixed Blood’s dog-loving, ex-con night watchman.
So, I had these people – all products of South African violence – running around in my head, looking for a home.
Last year I saw a TV news report about a good-looking American couple who lived in a smart part of Cape Town, just minutes away from my apartment. They ran a restaurant and everybody said how friendly and nice they were. But they’d robbed a couple of banks in the US and were hiding out in my city. After they were captured they were sent back home to do serious prison time.
This story made me think: “what if ?”
What if a man with a past, a man on the run – Jack Burn, Mixed Blood’s conflicted hero – brings his family to Cape Town, seduced by those images of mountains and beaches and freedom? What if they are building new lives for themselves when they are confronted by a random act of violence – a collision between the Cape Flats and privileged Cape Town – that hooks them into the world of Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard and Benny Mongrel and Disaster Zondi?
Those “what ifs” became Mixed Blood.
March 25th, 2009 by Mike Nicol
http://crimebeat.book.co.za/
[Click on article title to watch video of Roger Smith discussing Cape Town and his debut novel Mixed Blood. - jtf]
We’ve brought you his list of top 10 krimi reading. You’ve read the first chapter of his hard riding Mixed Blood. On the strength of it you’ve probably by now read the book. So Crime Beat did a stakeout on Roger Smith and when he emerged on the mean streets got him to answer some questions.
Crime Beat: You’ve hit Cape Town a bit like a bolt from the blue, and all we have is a short biog note about your being born in Johannesburg and being a scriptwriter. Can you expand on that?
Roger Smith: I grew up in Jo’burg and lived there until the late 90s. In the 80s I was one of those dinner party lefties, filled with loathing for apartheid but not ballsy enough to get locked up for my beliefs. Or go into exile. I was into movies, a founder member of a non-racial film co-op. Apartheid for export. Boycotted the SABC, that kind of thing. I started off with ambitions to direct, and did quite a bit of that. As well as producing. In the last five or ten years I’ve worked mainly as a screenwriter.Crime Beat: What made you decide to head south?
Roger Smith: Through the 80s and early 90s Jo’burg was the place to be, the centre of the action. I wouldn’t have dreamed of moving to Slaapstad. But by the late 90s I got seduced by the promise of a very different lifestyle, so I slid on down. For a couple of years I lived quite happily inside a Cape Town bubble of sun and sea. Then I fell in love with a woman who grew up out on the Cape Flats and my vision of Cape Town had to expand dramatically.
Crime Beat: Okay, now to the book. Cape Town has become the setting of choice for many of the crime writers currently putting the city on a different sort of map. It offers ideal contrasts: a spectacular natural beauty that clashes with some of the worst urban slums in the country let alone the vast gap between the rich and the poor. You chose to look differently at the city. You set some of your scenes on the luxurious Atlantic seaboard but your real intentions are the Cape Flats or the railways suburbs to the north. Your Cape Town, too, is hellish in many ways: the mountain burns, the hard gritty southeaster howls, people are drunk or on tik, or gorging themselves on fast foods. This is not a nice place. Why did you want this background?
Roger Smith: No matter what the “shoowah” brigade may say, Cape Town is not a mellow, temperate spot. It bakes and blows and burns in summer. The sea rages and the city floods in winter. And two thirds of the population live on the flipside of the Cape Town picture postcard, which is about as violent a place as you’ll find outside a war zone.
Crime Beat: You have been harder on the city than other writers. Apart from a brief beach scene with your protagonist Jack Burn and his son Matt, you pretty much stick with the bad edge of the city. What laughter there is is often cynical, we don’t see people having a good time. Or when they have a good time it is to get wasted or stoned – to escape reality. But then your novel is a hard concentrated take on Cape Town’s worst excesses. Clearly you didn’t want to offer any relief, in fact it’s an angry book.
Roger Smith: I’m not sure if Mixed Blood is an angry book – but some of its characters are pretty pissed off… I find your questions about my depiction of Cape Town quite amusing, actually, as if I’ve just gone and slapped the prettiest girl at the party! If I’d written a gritty skop-skiet-en-donder set in Johannesburg, I doubt these questions would be asked, because that’s Jo’burg isn’t it? Hard-edged, ugly, driven by greed.
Crime Beat: Ummm! I wonder…
Roger Smith: Whereas Cape Town is the beautiful one, and somehow demands special treatment. Yes, Cape Town is beautiful. It is Clifton and Camps Bay and the Waterfront. But it’s also the escort agencies and junk-food joints on Voortrekker Road, and the endless sprawl of the Flats.
Crime Beat: A Siamese city, in fact, two twins joined at the hip.
Roger Smith: I was interested in the collision between plush Cape Town and the Cape Flats, and portraying what I believe to be the reality of many people’s lives, without sentimentalizing that reality, even if it’s uncomfortable.
A great compliment came from a guy from the Flats who works in local publishing. The manuscript reached him via my New York publishers, so he had no idea who I was. After reading Mixed Blood he was convinced that I had to have grown up on the Cape Flats, saying only an insider would have been able to portray that world as I did.
Crime Beat: You’ve put into Mixed Blood an array of characters that are anything but likeable. Let’s look at the men first: Jack Burn might love his wife and son but he can kill as easily as the cop ‘Gatsby’ (Rudi Barnard) – named after that great delicacy of steak chunks, slap chips, eggs, industrial cheddar cheese and mayonnaise and chilli squashed into a half-loaf. Benny Mongrel might love his dog but he can torture and kill with the flick of his knife. And the supporting cast be they cops or gangsters are, for the most part, bad or weak men. Undoubtedly the best among them is Special Investigator Disaster Zondi sent in to investigate Gatsby’s rogue behaviour. But even he has his sexual appetites, although he has enough will power to curb them. They are a rough crew.
Roger Smith: I’m not really interested in squeaky-clean middle-class characters, or quaint and colourful working-class stereotypes. I like characters who are up against it, out on the fringes of society. I could have taken a more conventional (maybe even more commercial) route and written about some sweet, white bread American family who come to Cape Town and are gobbled up by the horrors of the city. Instead I purposely created a cast of characters who are nearly all compromised. This to me is more interesting. And more realistic.
By the way, I think there’s a lot of humour in Mixed Blood: albeit typically South African gallows humour. We do it well, because we’ve had so much practice.
Crime Beat: Just before we move on, I was intrigued to see another Zondi surfacing in our crime fiction. No doubt this is a tribute to James McClure’s Mickey Zondi. Actually your Zondi, like the original is smart and good at heart, and a worthy successor. Do you intend reusing him?
Roger Smith: Well spotted. The Zondi thing is a little tug of the forelock in direction of James McClure, who wrote a series of great crime novels back in the dark old days. My Zondi, though, is a very much of product of contemporary South Africa, with all its contradictions.
Investigator Disaster Zondi is smart, and would think of himself as “good” in the moral sense. But good at heart? I’m not sure he remembers where his heart is. Since he swapped his hymn book for Trotsky’s manifesto twenty-odd years ago, he’s insulated himself from his emotions.
I have no intention of writing a series, and Zondi’s nowhere to be seen in my second thriller, but he seems to be booking a place in my third.
Crime Beat: Let’s take a look at the female contingent. Jack’s wife Susan moves from a moral lapse (her association with Jack) to a decision to straighten out her life even though it will mean punishment. The other major female figure Carmen Fortune, a tik addict, living off her baby son’s child grant is about as low as anyone can go. She soon loses her baby to social services and takes to the street to earn money. But in the end she displays compassion towards a strange child, Matt, and visits her dying father even though he sexually abused her as a child. Both these women undertake a journey towards redemption whereas the only male character to do so is Benny Mongrel. The other two minor female characters Mrs Dollie and Berenice September stand for nurture and in Berenice’s instance due process. Why this contrast between the male and female characters?
Roger Smith: I suppose I could say that men are more likely to commit acts of violence, but that would be short-changing Najwa [Petersen] and Dina [Rodrigues]. Although they did hire in men to do the wet work. Simply put, Mixed Blood is a story driven by violent men. Women, children (and dogs) beware.
Crime Beat: Your story is a classic one and a classic one for the genre: a man on the run being run down by his past. Are you fascinated by this relationship the present has to the past?
Roger Smith: It’s hard not to be, in a country that lives so much in the shadow of its past. Both Jack Burn and Rudi Barnard are brought down by their past actions. Burn’s fate is pretty karmic. He commits a crime in the States and takes his family and runs to what he thinks is a safe haven: idyllic Cape Town. Total strangers – two tik-heads from the Flats – bust into his house one night ready to rape and pillage. Burn defends his family and it all goes to hell from there.Barnard was a CCB hit man in the 80s, and Zondi, sent down from Jo’burg to investigate the cop for corruption, realizes that he has a personal score to settle with the fat man that goes back over twenty years. In this strand of the story, maybe I’m just tapping into a sense that some people want a different type of closure than the TRC had to offer, as laudable as it was.
Crime Beat: The end of the novel is about redemption: the baddies get their comeuppance. Now poetic justice has almost become a convention in crime fiction, did you feel that given the moral –or rather immoral – excesses of your story you needed to set the world to rights?
Roger Smith: I don’t believe the book ends on a redemptive note. Nobody rides off into the sunset. Some die. Others are left suspended in limbo, probably to be reclaimed by the tide of poverty and crime. Not a happy ending.
Crime Beat: Well, not for the characters perhaps, but certainly for the readers the world has been tidied up. Interestingly, Mixed Blood opens with a random act and closes with a random act. The only other local crime novel that I know of offhand that opens with a random act of violence is Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak. What made you go for this opener?
Roger Smith: I was robbed at knife-point outside my house when I lived in Jo’burg. A few years back I caught an intruder who was cooked on something (crack? tik?) in the bedroom of my flat here in Cape Town. Not long ago my 70-year-old mother was mugged and assaulted by two men in broad daylight in a leafy suburban Cape Town street. Friends of mine have been shot in hijackings and home invasions. So, no matter what the stats say, this stuff happens. To us and people close to us. And all of these incidents were random and opportunistic.
So to start Mixed Blood with an act of random violence seemed very believable to me. But the violence directed at Jack Burn and his wife and child has to be seen as a form of reply to the violent act he was part of in the States: the murder of a policeman after a bank heist. Burn is not an innocent. And neither is his wife: she fled the US with him, knowing what he was implicated in. Jack Burn can run, but he can’t hide. No matter how he tries to avoid his fate, there is a reckoning at the end of the book. The laws of karma are immutable. In this story anyway…
Crime Beat: I’d like to finish up by looking at the style as you’ve pared down your sentences until they’re as clear as glass and as sharp as glass shards. This has allowed you to write a book that is fast and gripping and lean. An ideal vehicle for your story? Do you think your scriptwriting background came into play here?
Roger Smith: Thank you for your kind words. Having written scripts led naturally to a multi-POV structure, which is pretty much a screenplay norm. I can’t imagine ever writing in the first person, and I dislike the mixing of first and third, which so many people are trying now. I find it clumsy and pretentious. But I suppose I tried to write what I like to read: a fast-moving, multi-character story without too much padding. I get very bored with those flabby, overlong, crime novels that bog down in endless navel gazing and descriptions of the landscape (inner and outer), or spend pages telling you about a character’s taste in coffee or music. Almost as if the authors are ashamed of writing genre fiction, and feel that by fluffing up their manuscripts, they’re making them more “literary.” What was it that Elmore Leonard said? “Cut out all the bits that readers skip.”
Crime Beat: Finally, what of the future? You’re writing another stand-alone, I believe. Have you thought further ahead than that?
Roger Smith: I’ve finished my second book, ‘Wake Up Dead’, to be published by Henry Holt in early 2010. Yes, it’s a stand-alone, also set in Cape Town. I’m doing preliminary scratchings on my third, which looks like it’s going to start in Cape Town and then hit the road and end up in Zondiland. Or Zumaland. KZN. We’ll see…
Roger Smith will be interviewed by Kader Asmal at the Book Lounge in Cape Town this evening at 6pm. Be there.
Roger Smith's Backstory
http://www.rogersmithbooks.com/
One day in June 1976, when I was sixteen, I was riding on a bus in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, watching as a few thousand black school kids my age smashed store windows and torched cars. Watching as a lot of them got taken down by white cops with pump-action shot guns. This was day one of the youth uprising that spread out of Soweto and started a two-decade-long struggle that finally killed apartheid. These kids, like me, are a lot older now. Wiser, less idealistic.
Some of them still have old scores to settle, like Disaster Zondi, the Zulu detective in my debut thriller, Mixed Blood.When I was seventeen I was drafted into South Africa’s white army busy fighting a meaningless bush war against ragged bands of black men with guns, some of them those kids from Soweto. The army called them communists and they called themselves freedom fighters. One Sunday morning I saw thirty of them dead, dumped off the back of a truck, the tailgate dark with blood. They lay on the sand and a group of white men in black suits – some still carrying bibles from the church they had just been praying in – walked among their bodies like vultures. The men had blunt haircuts and brutal accents and believed that whatever they did, they did in the name of their god. I saw these men often through the next decades; on the streets; in bars; in cop cars; on TV, standing over corpses – always fuelled by the belief that what they were doing was just and good.
Men like Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard, the psychopathic cop in Mixed Blood.
Tired of Johannesburg and its hard edges and grit, I moved down to Cape Town, seduced by the mountain and the ocean. People say Cape Town looks like the south of France, or California, just more beautiful. More than geography separates picture-postcard Cape Town from the windswept badlands of the Cape Flats, a sprawling ghetto home to millions of people of mixed race. The rape and murder count on the Flats is the highest in the world and every day children are violated and slaughtered and nobody seems to pay much attention. The media prefers to discuss who is wearing what and eating where and dating whom, back on the beautiful side of town. A few years ago I fell in love with a woman who grew up out on the Flats and the true stories she told me and the world she introduced me to changed my view of Cape Town forever.
The first person I met in her family was her brother. I went with her to prison to visit him. He was in his thirties and, since the age of fourteen, had spent a total of two years out of jail. We took his child with us: a boy of five. The prisoner, in his orange jumpsuit – gang tattoos carved into his skin – scared the boy. He scared me too, with his dead eyes and shaking hands. And I think we scared him, because we were part of the world outside. A world where he was powerless. He knew if he ever went out there again he wouldn’t stand a chance, would end up where he always ended up: back in prison.
Part of that man found his way into Benny Mongrel, Mixed Blood’s dog-loving, ex-con night watchman.
So, I had these people – all products of South African violence – running around in my head, looking for a home.
Last year I saw a TV news report about a good-looking American couple who lived in a smart part of Cape Town, just minutes away from my apartment. They ran a restaurant and everybody said how friendly and nice they were. But they’d robbed a couple of banks in the US and were hiding out in my city. After they were captured they were sent back home to do serious prison time.
This story made me think: “what if ?”
What if a man with a past, a man on the run – Jack Burn, Mixed Blood’s conflicted hero – brings his family to Cape Town, seduced by those images of mountains and beaches and freedom? What if they are building new lives for themselves when they are confronted by a random act of violence – a collision between the Cape Flats and privileged Cape Town – that hooks them into the world of Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard and Benny Mongrel and Disaster Zondi?
Those “what ifs” became Mixed Blood.
Founding Father
Special Report
By John Berlau on 2.15.10 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
February is an important month in the history of American commerce. In this month is the birthday of one of the country's earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.
During a time period of America's existence as an English colony and then a young nation -- when, to put it mildly, communication and transportation faced challenges -- this businessman's enterprise processed 1.5 million fish per year sent throughout the 13 American colonies and the British West Indies. The mill he built grinded 278,000 pounds of branded flour annually that was shipped through America and, unusual during colonization, even exported to England as well as Portugal. And in the 1790s, during the last years of his life, this mogul built one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the new nation.
Don't think you've heard of this entrepreneur? Well, it's possible you might know him from some of his achievements in the political sphere. He did, in fact, have a few notable accomplishments there. Like serving as a representative in colonial Virginia's House of Burgesses and as a Virginia delegate to the pre-Revolutionary War Continental Congress. Then being chosen to lead the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and leading the American nation to a hard-fought victory for independence. And then, a few years after that, becoming the new nation's first president.
For many Americans, and indeed quite a few scholars, George Washington has been little more than just the face on Mount Rushmore and the one-dollar bill. People revered him but just didn't know how to relate to him. Whereas Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin generated interest with their passions and achievements in practical science and architecture, Washington didn't seem to have a career -- or much of a life -- outside of his leadership as general and president.
But now, some pioneering scholars are documenting that Washington's life's work was just as enthralling as that of any of the Founding Fathers. His pursuits can be said to be just as creative as those of Franklin and Jefferson, but in a different way. Washington's creativity of the type one associates with modern entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and even Donald Trump. Whereas Franklin built gadgets at his homestead, and Jefferson built fancy buildings, the notable thing Washington built were a series of interconnected businesses.
In the 2006 biography The Unexpected George Washington, historian Harlow Giles Unger calls Washington "one of America's leading entrepreneurs" and chronicles Washington's transformation of Mount Vernon from a sleepy tobacco farm into a type of industrial village. As Unger writes, Washington "expanded a relatively small tobacco plantation into a diversified agroindustrial enterprise that stretched over thousands of acres and included, among other ventures, a fishery, meat processing facility, textile and weaving manufactory, distillery, gristmill, smithy [blacksmith shop], brickmaking kiln, cargo-carrying schooner, and, of course, endless fields of grain."
Some of these enterprises are now on display at the Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens historical site in Alexandria, Virginia, available for visitors to see as we approach the national holiday of Washington's Birthday, celebrated on a Monday -- today although Washington's real birthday is the 22nd. (And the federal holiday, by the way, is still officially Washington's Birthday, not President's Day. Although many celebrate the birth of Abraham Lincoln in February, and some states have their own legal holidays for him, Congress never formally merged Washington's day with Lincoln's birthday nor gave Lincoln his own official holiday.) The Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, opened on the grounds of Mount Vernon in 2006, has a display of the Mount Vernon fishery and other facets of his career as a "visionary entrepreneur." And Washington's gristmill and whiskey distillery were themselves recently reopened for attendees to get a first-hand look at some of Washington's interconnected ventures.
In this challenging time for free enterprise, Washington's business, as well as his political, biography can be seen as emblematic of the American Dream. Washington's background wasn't exactly poor, but it was not as rich as many of his contemporaries among the Founders. His father died when he was 11, and, among the youngest of many brothers, he didn't inherit much, and the family lacked money to give him a formal education.
So at 16, Washington became an apprentice land surveyor for Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron. From Fairfax (namesake of Fairfax County, which is now part of the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.), Washington learned about land acquisition, and became skilled in the practice that today we would call a real estate speculator.
After fighting with distinction in the French and Indian War, Washington inherited the 2,000-acre Mount Vernon farm from his older brother Lawrence and began acquiring other land around it, extending his homestead to 8,000 acres at the time of his death. In 1759, Washington married the widow Martha Custis, and she and her two children came to live at Mount Vernon. But although Martha had considerable wealth, as has been noted, running a productive farm against the backdrop of British trade restrictions and taxes, as well as nature's unpredictability, was not an easy task. It was then that Washington began his innovative agribusiness practices that made Mount Vernon, as described in a paper (not available online) by Mount Vernon director of restoration Dennis J. Pogue, "an expansive and ambitious commercial enterprise."
Washington's first step to becoming an entrepreneur was to abandon the most common cash crop of his native Virginia. That would be the now-dreaded tobacco. But it was not for health reasons that Washington stopped planting it. It was because of taxes and duties that reduced his profits and the fact that the tobacco crop was hurting Mount Vernon's soil. As Pogue writes in another paper (pdf), "By 1766 the disappointingly low prices that he was receiving in return for his tobacco harvest convinced Washington that he would be better off devoting the labor of his workers to producing other commodities that had a more dependable payoff."
Washington grew hundreds of crops, many of which were imported from Europe. (And yes, he did grow hemp, but not very much and not for very long.) But for his main cash crop, he chose wheat. But he didn't stop fulfilling the market need with the growing of this wheat. He became a manufacturer of two products that contained his crop: flour and distilled whiskey.
Recently replicated on their original foundations at Mount Vernon, Washington's gristmill and distillery are architectural wonders that anticipated modern factories. The flour mill is three levels high with two sets of mill stones, including French buhr stones that were used to make the finest quality of flour. The mill produced about 278,000 pounds of flower per year, branded with the Washington name, sold throughout the colonies and exported to England and as far away as Portugal. The flour bore the identification of George Washington, in effect making it similar to a modern branded food product.
Statue in the George Washington Museum in the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Alexandria Virginia. Photo by Ben Schumin on March 8, 2003.
Washington also "farmed" the banks of the Potomac for shad, herring and other fish. His fishery consisted of rowboats and large nets, and in a six-week fishing season each spring, Washington's men netted about 1.5 million fish, according to the Reynolds museum at Mount Vernon. And the inedible portions of the fish were used as fertilizer for crops such as wheat.
But it is the distillery may offer the most fascinating example of Washington's entrepreneurial prowess. After retiring from the presidency and returning to Mount Vernon -- setting a precedent for voluntarily relinquishing power -- Washington built a distillery in 1797 on the advice of his plantation manager James Anderson, a native of Scotland who knew a thing or two about distilled spirits. The whiskey was made largely from crops grown at Mount Vernon. As one Virginia magazine describes it, "rye, malted barley and corn were mixed with boiling water to make a mash in 120 gallon barrels."
This process is now reenacted at Mount Vernon at the distillery that was reopened in 2007, thanks to a grant from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. A few times a year, Washington's whiskey -- using one of the old recipes -- is even sold to Mount Vernon visitors.
Washington's lifelong entrepreneurship sheds new light on his fight for liberty, and his motivation to develop a constitutional structure in which all were free to develop their many talents. Like that of other Founding Fathers, Washington's career was stained by the evils of slavery, and this extended to his business enterprises, most of which made use of the labor of the slaves at Mount Vernon. But his correspondence shows that Washington realized this contradiction more than most of the Founding Fathers, and he worked tirelessly the last few years of his life to free all of his slaves upon his and Martha's death and also make provisions for their education and for the support of the former slave children and elderly.
So this month, if you can't make it to the celebrations at Mount Vernon, you just may want to toast George Washington -- the politician and entrepreneur -- with a plate of herring washed down with a glass of whiskey.
John Berlau is director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and blogs at OpenMarket.org.
By John Berlau on 2.15.10 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
February is an important month in the history of American commerce. In this month is the birthday of one of the country's earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.
During a time period of America's existence as an English colony and then a young nation -- when, to put it mildly, communication and transportation faced challenges -- this businessman's enterprise processed 1.5 million fish per year sent throughout the 13 American colonies and the British West Indies. The mill he built grinded 278,000 pounds of branded flour annually that was shipped through America and, unusual during colonization, even exported to England as well as Portugal. And in the 1790s, during the last years of his life, this mogul built one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the new nation.
Don't think you've heard of this entrepreneur? Well, it's possible you might know him from some of his achievements in the political sphere. He did, in fact, have a few notable accomplishments there. Like serving as a representative in colonial Virginia's House of Burgesses and as a Virginia delegate to the pre-Revolutionary War Continental Congress. Then being chosen to lead the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and leading the American nation to a hard-fought victory for independence. And then, a few years after that, becoming the new nation's first president.For many Americans, and indeed quite a few scholars, George Washington has been little more than just the face on Mount Rushmore and the one-dollar bill. People revered him but just didn't know how to relate to him. Whereas Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin generated interest with their passions and achievements in practical science and architecture, Washington didn't seem to have a career -- or much of a life -- outside of his leadership as general and president.
But now, some pioneering scholars are documenting that Washington's life's work was just as enthralling as that of any of the Founding Fathers. His pursuits can be said to be just as creative as those of Franklin and Jefferson, but in a different way. Washington's creativity of the type one associates with modern entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and even Donald Trump. Whereas Franklin built gadgets at his homestead, and Jefferson built fancy buildings, the notable thing Washington built were a series of interconnected businesses.
In the 2006 biography The Unexpected George Washington, historian Harlow Giles Unger calls Washington "one of America's leading entrepreneurs" and chronicles Washington's transformation of Mount Vernon from a sleepy tobacco farm into a type of industrial village. As Unger writes, Washington "expanded a relatively small tobacco plantation into a diversified agroindustrial enterprise that stretched over thousands of acres and included, among other ventures, a fishery, meat processing facility, textile and weaving manufactory, distillery, gristmill, smithy [blacksmith shop], brickmaking kiln, cargo-carrying schooner, and, of course, endless fields of grain."
Some of these enterprises are now on display at the Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens historical site in Alexandria, Virginia, available for visitors to see as we approach the national holiday of Washington's Birthday, celebrated on a Monday -- today although Washington's real birthday is the 22nd. (And the federal holiday, by the way, is still officially Washington's Birthday, not President's Day. Although many celebrate the birth of Abraham Lincoln in February, and some states have their own legal holidays for him, Congress never formally merged Washington's day with Lincoln's birthday nor gave Lincoln his own official holiday.) The Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, opened on the grounds of Mount Vernon in 2006, has a display of the Mount Vernon fishery and other facets of his career as a "visionary entrepreneur." And Washington's gristmill and whiskey distillery were themselves recently reopened for attendees to get a first-hand look at some of Washington's interconnected ventures.
In this challenging time for free enterprise, Washington's business, as well as his political, biography can be seen as emblematic of the American Dream. Washington's background wasn't exactly poor, but it was not as rich as many of his contemporaries among the Founders. His father died when he was 11, and, among the youngest of many brothers, he didn't inherit much, and the family lacked money to give him a formal education.
So at 16, Washington became an apprentice land surveyor for Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron. From Fairfax (namesake of Fairfax County, which is now part of the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.), Washington learned about land acquisition, and became skilled in the practice that today we would call a real estate speculator.
After fighting with distinction in the French and Indian War, Washington inherited the 2,000-acre Mount Vernon farm from his older brother Lawrence and began acquiring other land around it, extending his homestead to 8,000 acres at the time of his death. In 1759, Washington married the widow Martha Custis, and she and her two children came to live at Mount Vernon. But although Martha had considerable wealth, as has been noted, running a productive farm against the backdrop of British trade restrictions and taxes, as well as nature's unpredictability, was not an easy task. It was then that Washington began his innovative agribusiness practices that made Mount Vernon, as described in a paper (not available online) by Mount Vernon director of restoration Dennis J. Pogue, "an expansive and ambitious commercial enterprise."
Washington's first step to becoming an entrepreneur was to abandon the most common cash crop of his native Virginia. That would be the now-dreaded tobacco. But it was not for health reasons that Washington stopped planting it. It was because of taxes and duties that reduced his profits and the fact that the tobacco crop was hurting Mount Vernon's soil. As Pogue writes in another paper (pdf), "By 1766 the disappointingly low prices that he was receiving in return for his tobacco harvest convinced Washington that he would be better off devoting the labor of his workers to producing other commodities that had a more dependable payoff."
Washington grew hundreds of crops, many of which were imported from Europe. (And yes, he did grow hemp, but not very much and not for very long.) But for his main cash crop, he chose wheat. But he didn't stop fulfilling the market need with the growing of this wheat. He became a manufacturer of two products that contained his crop: flour and distilled whiskey.
Recently replicated on their original foundations at Mount Vernon, Washington's gristmill and distillery are architectural wonders that anticipated modern factories. The flour mill is three levels high with two sets of mill stones, including French buhr stones that were used to make the finest quality of flour. The mill produced about 278,000 pounds of flower per year, branded with the Washington name, sold throughout the colonies and exported to England and as far away as Portugal. The flour bore the identification of George Washington, in effect making it similar to a modern branded food product.
Statue in the George Washington Museum in the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Alexandria Virginia. Photo by Ben Schumin on March 8, 2003.
Washington also "farmed" the banks of the Potomac for shad, herring and other fish. His fishery consisted of rowboats and large nets, and in a six-week fishing season each spring, Washington's men netted about 1.5 million fish, according to the Reynolds museum at Mount Vernon. And the inedible portions of the fish were used as fertilizer for crops such as wheat.
But it is the distillery may offer the most fascinating example of Washington's entrepreneurial prowess. After retiring from the presidency and returning to Mount Vernon -- setting a precedent for voluntarily relinquishing power -- Washington built a distillery in 1797 on the advice of his plantation manager James Anderson, a native of Scotland who knew a thing or two about distilled spirits. The whiskey was made largely from crops grown at Mount Vernon. As one Virginia magazine describes it, "rye, malted barley and corn were mixed with boiling water to make a mash in 120 gallon barrels."
This process is now reenacted at Mount Vernon at the distillery that was reopened in 2007, thanks to a grant from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. A few times a year, Washington's whiskey -- using one of the old recipes -- is even sold to Mount Vernon visitors.
Washington's lifelong entrepreneurship sheds new light on his fight for liberty, and his motivation to develop a constitutional structure in which all were free to develop their many talents. Like that of other Founding Fathers, Washington's career was stained by the evils of slavery, and this extended to his business enterprises, most of which made use of the labor of the slaves at Mount Vernon. But his correspondence shows that Washington realized this contradiction more than most of the Founding Fathers, and he worked tirelessly the last few years of his life to free all of his slaves upon his and Martha's death and also make provisions for their education and for the support of the former slave children and elderly.
So this month, if you can't make it to the celebrations at Mount Vernon, you just may want to toast George Washington -- the politician and entrepreneur -- with a plate of herring washed down with a glass of whiskey.
John Berlau is director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and blogs at OpenMarket.org.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Professor of Contempt
The legacy of Howard Zinn.
By Roger Kimball
Author Archive Latest
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 3, 2010 4:00 A.M.
With Howard Zinn, contemporary American academia found its court historian. Zinn, who died January 27 at 87, was like a gigantic echo chamber, accurately reproducing — and actively reinforcing — every left-wing cliché with which the academy has abetted its sense of election these past several decades. “You see how smart he is,” saith the tribe, “he thinks exactly as we do.” Zinn’s biography tells us that he was the author of “more than 20 books.” But only one matters: A People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980 with appropriately modest expectations — it had, I read somewhere, an initial print run of only 5,000 copies — the book went on to sell some 2 million and is still going strong. Its Amazon sales rank as of February 1, 2010, was 7. Seven. That’s a number most authors would climb over broken bottles to achieve 30 days after their books were published. Here it is 30 years on.
How to explain such phenomenal success? The publisher had doubtless assayed the book’s intellectual merits and proceeded accordingly. Left out of account was the presumption of its political message. The extremity and consistency of that message — that America is and always has been an evil, exploitative country — guaranteed its success among the tenured radicals to whom we have entrusted the education of our children. More to the point, this history “from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated” nudged out all other contenders for the prize of becoming the preferred catechism in American — that is to say, anti-American — history. A People’s History is the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges across the country. No other account of our past comes even close in influence or ubiquity. No other, more responsible, telling of the American story had a chance. How could it? Given a choice between a book that portrayed America honestly — as an extraordinary success story — and a book that portrayed the history of America as a litany of depredations and failures, which do you suppose your average graduate of a teachers college, your average member of the National Education Association, would choose? To ask the question is to answer it. What this means is that most American students are battened on a story of their country in which Blame America First is a cardinal principle. No element of our heritage, from the derring-do of Christopher Columbus to the valor of the U.S. military in World War II, escapes the perverting alchemy of Howard Zinn’s exercise in deflationary revision.
To his credit — well, it’s not really to his credit, since he offers the admission only to disarm criticism, but Zinn is entirely candid about the ideological nature of his opus. All history, he says, involves a choice of perspectives. Maybe so. Are we therefore to assume all perspectives are equally valuable? Zinn employs this relativist’s sleight of hand in order to promulgate his preferred species of intolerance, which appeals to latitudinarian sensitivities only because it is an intolerance fabricated in opposition to the established order. If “all history is ideological” (it isn’t really), then why not make your choice based on what appeals to your political sympathies, truth be damned? That’s the takeaway of Zinn’s admission, and it’s all he offers to explain his decision, which he details at the beginning of his book, to tell the story of
the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish–American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by the black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.
In other words, what Zinn offers us is not a corrective, but a distortion. It is as if someone said to you, “Would you like to see Versailles?” and then took you on a tour of a broken shed on the outskirts of the palace grounds. “You see, pretty shabby, isn’t it?”
The one indisputably valuable thing about A People’s History of the United States is the way it illustrates a melancholy fact about the place of reasoned argument in human affairs. In brief, it occupies a lamentably attenuated place. Placed in opposition to a wish driven by the Zeitgeist (that’s German for “what the New York Times preaches”), reasoned argument doesn’t stand a chance. Item: Soon after A People’s History of the United States was published, the historian Oscar Handlin wrote a devastating review of the book for The American Scholar (which was still a respectable magazine).
“It simply is not true,” Mr. Handlin noted,
that “what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.” It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. “Tet” was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.
And on and on. In any normal world, Zinn would have stolen away in the middle of the night, fled to a mountain fastness in Peru, and taken up llama ranching. In this world, however, he went on to fame and fortune.
Oscar Handlin left Zinn’s “deranged . . . fairy tale” in tatters. But the eye of love continued to regard it as an unspoilt beauty. Hence the 2 million copies, the Amazon ranking, the exuberant grief that taxed the powers of hyperbole commanded by obituarists across the republic as they competed with one another to freight the word “progressive” with ever more awesome pulpit tones.
The obituaries of Howard Zinn make for interesting, if not exactly edifying, reading. Zinn himself, of course, is the hero of the moment, the model “progressive” warrior who spoke truth to power, struggled against the demons of American imperialism, and condoled the weak, the oppressed, the inarticulate. The villain of the story was John Silber, former president of Boston University and for the 24 years Howard Zinn taught there the bane of his existence. In the obituaries, Silber is invariably described as “conservative” or “right-wing.” In fact, he is a liberal in the antique, i.e., the classical mode. While a dean at the University of Texas, Silber labored to abolish segregation. He was an energetic supporter of Head Start, was instrumental in Boston University’s involvement in improving an inner-city school, and has battled tirelessly to further the vocation of the liberal arts and the life of the university as a primary institutional home for that vocation. During his disreputable tenure as a professor at Boston University, Howard Zinn did everything in his power to subvert the university, partly by subordinating its intellectual mandate to trendy political causes, partly by short-circuiting with malicious levity the high seriousness of a liberal-arts education. He would, for example, pass around his classes a bag containing bits of paper imprinted with the letters “A” or “B.” Whichever token a student picked denominated his grade, no matter what work he did or didn’t do.
The point? It wasn’t merely grade inflation. More insidiously, it was an expression of contempt for the entire enterprise of which he was a privileged beneficiary. Contempt, in fact, was Howard Zinn’s leading characteristic. Its primary focus was America, because that was the biggest game in town. But he had plenty left over for the rest of the world. As Oscar Handlin observed in his review, “It would be a mistake . . . to regard Zinn as merely anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book. No other modern country receives a favorable mention. He speaks well of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but not of the states they created. He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man — that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks.” Howard Zinn has left us. But his repellent ideas — and even more, the contemptuous nihilism that stands behind and fires those ideas — live on.
— Roger Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books, and co-publisher and co-editor of The New Criterion. This essay appears in the February 22, 2010, issue of National Review.
By Roger Kimball
Author Archive Latest
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 3, 2010 4:00 A.M.
With Howard Zinn, contemporary American academia found its court historian. Zinn, who died January 27 at 87, was like a gigantic echo chamber, accurately reproducing — and actively reinforcing — every left-wing cliché with which the academy has abetted its sense of election these past several decades. “You see how smart he is,” saith the tribe, “he thinks exactly as we do.” Zinn’s biography tells us that he was the author of “more than 20 books.” But only one matters: A People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980 with appropriately modest expectations — it had, I read somewhere, an initial print run of only 5,000 copies — the book went on to sell some 2 million and is still going strong. Its Amazon sales rank as of February 1, 2010, was 7. Seven. That’s a number most authors would climb over broken bottles to achieve 30 days after their books were published. Here it is 30 years on.
How to explain such phenomenal success? The publisher had doubtless assayed the book’s intellectual merits and proceeded accordingly. Left out of account was the presumption of its political message. The extremity and consistency of that message — that America is and always has been an evil, exploitative country — guaranteed its success among the tenured radicals to whom we have entrusted the education of our children. More to the point, this history “from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated” nudged out all other contenders for the prize of becoming the preferred catechism in American — that is to say, anti-American — history. A People’s History is the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges across the country. No other account of our past comes even close in influence or ubiquity. No other, more responsible, telling of the American story had a chance. How could it? Given a choice between a book that portrayed America honestly — as an extraordinary success story — and a book that portrayed the history of America as a litany of depredations and failures, which do you suppose your average graduate of a teachers college, your average member of the National Education Association, would choose? To ask the question is to answer it. What this means is that most American students are battened on a story of their country in which Blame America First is a cardinal principle. No element of our heritage, from the derring-do of Christopher Columbus to the valor of the U.S. military in World War II, escapes the perverting alchemy of Howard Zinn’s exercise in deflationary revision.To his credit — well, it’s not really to his credit, since he offers the admission only to disarm criticism, but Zinn is entirely candid about the ideological nature of his opus. All history, he says, involves a choice of perspectives. Maybe so. Are we therefore to assume all perspectives are equally valuable? Zinn employs this relativist’s sleight of hand in order to promulgate his preferred species of intolerance, which appeals to latitudinarian sensitivities only because it is an intolerance fabricated in opposition to the established order. If “all history is ideological” (it isn’t really), then why not make your choice based on what appeals to your political sympathies, truth be damned? That’s the takeaway of Zinn’s admission, and it’s all he offers to explain his decision, which he details at the beginning of his book, to tell the story of
the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish–American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by the black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.
In other words, what Zinn offers us is not a corrective, but a distortion. It is as if someone said to you, “Would you like to see Versailles?” and then took you on a tour of a broken shed on the outskirts of the palace grounds. “You see, pretty shabby, isn’t it?”
The one indisputably valuable thing about A People’s History of the United States is the way it illustrates a melancholy fact about the place of reasoned argument in human affairs. In brief, it occupies a lamentably attenuated place. Placed in opposition to a wish driven by the Zeitgeist (that’s German for “what the New York Times preaches”), reasoned argument doesn’t stand a chance. Item: Soon after A People’s History of the United States was published, the historian Oscar Handlin wrote a devastating review of the book for The American Scholar (which was still a respectable magazine).
“It simply is not true,” Mr. Handlin noted,
that “what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.” It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. “Tet” was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.
And on and on. In any normal world, Zinn would have stolen away in the middle of the night, fled to a mountain fastness in Peru, and taken up llama ranching. In this world, however, he went on to fame and fortune.Oscar Handlin left Zinn’s “deranged . . . fairy tale” in tatters. But the eye of love continued to regard it as an unspoilt beauty. Hence the 2 million copies, the Amazon ranking, the exuberant grief that taxed the powers of hyperbole commanded by obituarists across the republic as they competed with one another to freight the word “progressive” with ever more awesome pulpit tones.
The obituaries of Howard Zinn make for interesting, if not exactly edifying, reading. Zinn himself, of course, is the hero of the moment, the model “progressive” warrior who spoke truth to power, struggled against the demons of American imperialism, and condoled the weak, the oppressed, the inarticulate. The villain of the story was John Silber, former president of Boston University and for the 24 years Howard Zinn taught there the bane of his existence. In the obituaries, Silber is invariably described as “conservative” or “right-wing.” In fact, he is a liberal in the antique, i.e., the classical mode. While a dean at the University of Texas, Silber labored to abolish segregation. He was an energetic supporter of Head Start, was instrumental in Boston University’s involvement in improving an inner-city school, and has battled tirelessly to further the vocation of the liberal arts and the life of the university as a primary institutional home for that vocation. During his disreputable tenure as a professor at Boston University, Howard Zinn did everything in his power to subvert the university, partly by subordinating its intellectual mandate to trendy political causes, partly by short-circuiting with malicious levity the high seriousness of a liberal-arts education. He would, for example, pass around his classes a bag containing bits of paper imprinted with the letters “A” or “B.” Whichever token a student picked denominated his grade, no matter what work he did or didn’t do.
The point? It wasn’t merely grade inflation. More insidiously, it was an expression of contempt for the entire enterprise of which he was a privileged beneficiary. Contempt, in fact, was Howard Zinn’s leading characteristic. Its primary focus was America, because that was the biggest game in town. But he had plenty left over for the rest of the world. As Oscar Handlin observed in his review, “It would be a mistake . . . to regard Zinn as merely anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book. No other modern country receives a favorable mention. He speaks well of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but not of the states they created. He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man — that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks.” Howard Zinn has left us. But his repellent ideas — and even more, the contemptuous nihilism that stands behind and fires those ideas — live on.
— Roger Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books, and co-publisher and co-editor of The New Criterion. This essay appears in the February 22, 2010, issue of National Review.
Progressives and the growing dependency agenda
By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Sunday, February 14, 2010; A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Only two things are infinite -- the expanding universe and Democrats' hostility to the District of Columbia's school choice program. Killing this small program, which benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large -- the Democrats' dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.
The Washington Post
Sunday, February 14, 2010; A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Only two things are infinite -- the expanding universe and Democrats' hostility to the District of Columbia's school choice program. Killing this small program, which benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large -- the Democrats' dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.Democrats, in their canine devotion to teachers unions, oppose empowering poor children to escape dependency on even terrible government schools. Unions and their poodles say school choice siphons money from public schools. But federal money funds the D.C. program, so killing it denies education money to the District while increasing the number of pupils the District must support.
Most Democrats favor a "public option" -- a government health insurance program. They say there is insufficient competition among the 1,300 private providers of insurance, so people should not be dependent on those insurers. But tuition vouchers redeemable at private as well as public schools are a "private option" providing minimal competition with public schools. Government, with 89 percent of the pupils, dominates education grades K through 12. So, do Democrats favor vouchers to reduce Americans' dependence on government education? Of course not.
For congressional Democrats, however, expanding dependency on government is an end in itself. They began the Obama administration by expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It was created for children of the working poor, but the expansion made millions of middle-class children eligible -- some in households earning $125,000. The aim was to swell the number of people who grow up assuming that dependency on government health care is normal.
Many Democrats favor -- as Barack Obama did in 2003 -- a "single-payer" health insurance system, which means universal dependency on government. The "public option" insurance proposal was a step toward that. So was the proposed "alternative" of making 55- to 64-year-olds eligible for Medicare. Both these dependency multipliers will be revived.
As will the Democrats' drive for "cramdown" legislation that would empower government (courts) to shred mortgage contracts, making borrowers eager to embrace dependency on judges. Soon, the most important financial decisions most families make -- to get a mortgage and a college tuition loan -- will almost always be transactions with the government.
The government used TARP funds not for their stipulated purpose of buying the "toxic assets" of banks but to pull auto companies and other economic entities into the spreading web of dependency. Servile -- because dependent -- banks were pliable during the farce of Chrysler's bankruptcy, but secured creditors resisted when settled law was disregarded. Nevertheless, those creditors received less per dollar than did an unsecured creditor, the United Auto Workers, which relishes dependency on government as an alternative to economic realism.
Democrats' "reforms" of the financial sector may aim to reduce financial institutions to dependent appendages of the government. By reducing banks to public utilities, credit, which is the lifeblood of capitalism, could be priced and allocated by government.
Many Democrats are untroubled by governments' rampant abuses of eminent-domain powers. Wealthy interests embrace dependency on collaborative governments that seize property from less wealthy people and transfer it to those wealthy interests who will pay more taxes to those governments.
Many Democrats, opposing the Supreme Court, advocate campaign finance "reforms" that will further empower government to regulate the quantity, timing and content of speech about government. Otherwise voters will hear more such speech than government considers good for them. Such paternalism is American progressivism's oldest tradition.
A century ago, Herbert Croly published "The Promise of American Life," a book -- still in print -- that was prophetic about today's progressives. Contemplating with distaste America's "unregenerate citizens," he said that "the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities." Therefore, Croly said, national life should be a "school" taught by the government:
"The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?" Unregenerate Americans would be "saved many costly perversions" if "the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate."
Subordination is dependency seen from above. Today, it is seen approvingly by progressives imposing, from above, their dependency agenda.
There is no school choice here; no voucher will enable Americans to escape from enveloping dependency on this "government as school." The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children.
“Al Gore, Call Your Agent”
by Ed Driscoll
http://pajamasmedia.com/
February 13th, 2010 10:15 pm
Back in early December, Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd called on the Motion Picture Academy to rescind their Oscar to Al Gore’s movie, which is more and more looking like it was produced by Industrial PowerPoint and Magical Thinking:
embedded by Embedded Video
Climategate Hits Hollywood: Should the Academy Rescind Gore's Oscar? (PJTV's 'Poliwood')
Click at right to watch video: YouTube Direkt
At Big Journalism, Michael Walsh adds, “Al Gore, Call Your Agent: It Really May Be Time to Give Back That Oscar:”
Oops! The wheels may have just come off Al Gore’s Oscar-winning, eco-friendly tricycle/global-warming scam. From the U.K. Times on Line today (Sunday):
World may not be warming, say scientists
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
And even Phil Jones, East Anglia’s Mr. “Hide the Decline” himself, is rapidly backtracking, as Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters:
In a lengthy Q&A published at BBC.com Saturday, Jones also said: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.
Perhaps the most significant quote from Jones is this:
N – When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over”, what exactly do they mean — and what don’t they mean?
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
Definitely keep that paragraph handy the next time a politician attempts the inevitable “the time for talking is over / this is settled science” dodge to shut down debate.
Which brings us back to Al Gore. He’s on record as being the number one fan of the Marxist Frankfurt School; at some point I wonder if he’ll quietly switch the defense of his movie from “this is settled science” to some variation on the postmodern “this my truth” trope, to help sell his Sorelian Myth, as Lee Harris defined the term in 2006:
[Georges Sorel 1847-1922], for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed — yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism — if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual’s lives. Thus for Sorel there was “an…analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task.”
Which sounds like it defines Al’s film remarkably well.
Filed under: God And Man At Dupont University, Hollywood, Interrupted, Liberal Fascism, The Assault On Reason, The Future and its Enemies, The Return of the Primitive
http://pajamasmedia.com/
February 13th, 2010 10:15 pm
Back in early December, Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd called on the Motion Picture Academy to rescind their Oscar to Al Gore’s movie, which is more and more looking like it was produced by Industrial PowerPoint and Magical Thinking:
embedded by Embedded Video
Climategate Hits Hollywood: Should the Academy Rescind Gore's Oscar? (PJTV's 'Poliwood')
Click at right to watch video: YouTube Direkt
At Big Journalism, Michael Walsh adds, “Al Gore, Call Your Agent: It Really May Be Time to Give Back That Oscar:”
Oops! The wheels may have just come off Al Gore’s Oscar-winning, eco-friendly tricycle/global-warming scam. From the U.K. Times on Line today (Sunday):
World may not be warming, say scientists
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
And even Phil Jones, East Anglia’s Mr. “Hide the Decline” himself, is rapidly backtracking, as Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters:
In a lengthy Q&A published at BBC.com Saturday, Jones also said: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.
Perhaps the most significant quote from Jones is this:
N – When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over”, what exactly do they mean — and what don’t they mean?
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
Definitely keep that paragraph handy the next time a politician attempts the inevitable “the time for talking is over / this is settled science” dodge to shut down debate.
Which brings us back to Al Gore. He’s on record as being the number one fan of the Marxist Frankfurt School; at some point I wonder if he’ll quietly switch the defense of his movie from “this is settled science” to some variation on the postmodern “this my truth” trope, to help sell his Sorelian Myth, as Lee Harris defined the term in 2006:
[Georges Sorel 1847-1922], for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed — yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism — if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual’s lives. Thus for Sorel there was “an…analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task.”
Which sounds like it defines Al’s film remarkably well.
Filed under: God And Man At Dupont University, Hollywood, Interrupted, Liberal Fascism, The Assault On Reason, The Future and its Enemies, The Return of the Primitive
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