William PFAFF

Greece and the Burden of Balkan History

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:00 CEST

Paris, May 15, 2012 The Balkans are historically apart
from Europe for two reasons, one religious and the other political.
This has everything to do with the present crisis of Greece and the
future of Greeces membership in -- or perhaps its departure from --
the European Union and its Eurozone. To understand what is happening
it is necessary to understand something of the past.
Geography and the Great Schism in the development of Christianity
left all the Balkan peoples in the Orthodox half of the Christian
world, separating them from the Western Europe of Roman Catholic and
Protestant religion, the Renaissance and scientific revolution, from
which the modern Enlightenment West has emerged.

Living, as they subsequently did, for greater or lesser periods of
time, under the control of the Ottoman Turks left a permanent mark on
all the Balkans. None was to have a history of lasting independent
self-government. The Balkans since have been haunted by resentment
and by memories of lost battles to the Turks, or to lesser enemies,
and by paranoid sentiments of irredentism, territorial revindication,
religious conflict, clan and family vengeance.

Serbia has probably the longest record of independence, with a
Serbian Patriarchate from the ninth century until defeat in the
battle of Kosovo in 1389. It then remained under Ottoman control
until successful insurgent upheavals in the nineteenth century. The
modern post-Tito wars of Yugoslav succession that Serbia waged
between 1991 and 2000 must be understood as the Serbs revenge
against the Turks.

Greece was different. It was never entirely independent from the
time it was taken over by the Romans in the second century AD. It
then passed naturally into the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) when
Rome itself fell in the fourth century, with Constantinople its new
capital.

However Greek Christians largely ran the Byzantine Empire from that
time until the Ottoman Turk conquest in the fifteenth century. From
then on, the Greeks had become a conquered people, although a
privileged one.

Can elections in Europe solve the Crisis?

Sat, 12 May 2012 18:00:00 CEST

Paris, May 8, 2012 The weekend elections in France and
Greece seem widely to have been taken, at least on the European and
American left, as solving the great European economic crisis.
The Greeks will hold another election which a leftist coalition may
(or may not) win. A masterful François Hollande will unveil his plan
to tame Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank, and reinstall
growth in Europe and terminate sacrifice through pan-European
infrastructure building, just as soon as the June legislative
elections are over and Socialism rules, while Marine Le Pen as
planned -- dominates the scattered and demoralized remnants of the
French center and moderate right.

Time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through
austerity, Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes. He has won his
argument against austerity, in France at least, and would that this
were so everywhere. But there still are Germany and Angela Merkel to
confront, and the 23 other European Union countries already signed up
for austerity and still more of it. Moreover, the French were not
reading Paul Krugman when they voted; they were not voting on
economic theory but voting their anger at Nicolas Sarkozy, and their
nostalgia for the good old days before Wall Street greed, folly and
malfeasance wrecked the world economy.

In Europe the effect is much like that in 2005, when
France and the Netherlands voted against the proposed European
constitution the EU majority had believed that Europe needed, and had
commissioned Valery Giscard dEstaing to draft for them. Then as now
the rule was unanimity, and the EU Commission and Council were
appalled to have the constitution rejected by Giscards own French
compatriots and by the Dutch, founding members of European Union.
What to do now? Then as now, the crisis was surmounted and the
problem was recognized as one in which the ideology of European
unification had overreached political good sense and been rejected.

The same generous and ambitious error of over-reaching is
also at the root of what now has happened in Europe. The alluring
idea of a common currency, cementing the economic progress made with
the European Common Market, darkened the prudential imagination of
Europes leaders, and produced the euro Europes common currency
(with aesthetically wretched bills by comparison with most of the
European currencies it replaced!).

Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich -- Two Cases of "Invincible Error"

Fri, 4 May 2012 17:10:00 CEST

Paris, May 1, 2012 A novel aspect of the Republican
campaign for the partys presidential nomination has been the
importance placed by some candidates, their admirers, and some voters
on the Catholic religion and the claims to formal academic
certification or endorsement made by certain prominent candidates.

Begin with Newt Gingrich, who for a time was a leading figure in the
race for the Republican nomination. Like the president himself,
Congressman Gingrich possesses academic credentials, his in modern
European history from Tulane University. He makes the double-
barreled claim that America under a continuing liberal Democratic
administration will become a secular atheist countrydominated by
radical Islamists.

In Washington, his PhD. Degree in history earned him
according to his account $1.6 million as an advisor on historical
matters to the government-sponsored Federal Home Loan Mortgage
Corporation Freddie Mac. As the value of the agencys possible
concerns with European history seemed unlikely to justify such a sum,
Washington opinion assumed that his connection with the agency was
closer to that of a Washington fixer. In this he seemed more
successful than in his well-publicized triple marriage entanglements,
although the latter left his religious admirers apparently unperturbed.

The bunkum artist is a familiar figure from the folk-lore of the
American nineteenth century who makes up facts as required in the
sale of the all-healing snake oil liniment he sells (the vaudevillian
and film star W.C. Fields made a career from his impersonation).
Another familiar American figure is the earnest swot who knows less
than he thinks he does, but does know more than a lot of voters, and
indeed in the following case, and in a sensitive matter, more
apparently than most of his Republican campaign-trail cohorts, as
well as some serious national commentators. He has dazzled them
with economics and moral theology as well.

It's Class War in French Presidential Final

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:50:00 CEST

Paris, April 25, 2012 The French elections have settled one question, that of the two finalists for the presidency. There were some who believed that the nationalist right candidate, Marine Le Pen, might outdo President Nicholas Sarkozy, who in the campaign polls trailed his Socialist challenger, François Hollande. When the French voted last Sunday, the two were close to a tie, with Hollande less than one and a half percentage points ahead of the President in the final official results (28.63% over 27.18%).

This was because of the heritress of the rightist National Front Party, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a fixture on the French nationalist and anti-immigrant right since before his first presidential run in 1974 (when he got a miniscule 0.74% of the national vote).

His daughter took 17.9% of the total presidential vote on Sunday, a good percentage point more than her father ever won (sounds of gnashing teeth in the senior Le Pen household!) -- even in 2002, when Jean-Marie was all alone running against Jacques Chirac in the second and decisive tour of the presidential vote.

This year, many election observers had expected that the minor-party candidate likely to have the most influence on the over-all result, by stealing votes from Hollande, would be the new hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose dramatic and demagogic eloquence drew unexpectedly large crowds to his rallies.

He turned out to appeal mainly to older voters nostalgic for the rough-and-tumble campaigns of the old Communist Party during the days when it dominated the French left -- before the Socialist François Mitterrand in 1981 made it not only safe but chic for the French to vote for a newly united left and have a Socialist as president. Mélenchon, running as representative of a Leftist Front, got only 11.10% percent of the vote last Sunday.

Now the question is who wins on May 6, the day the electorate chooses between Sarkozy and Hollande? There will be one national televised debate (Sarkozy wanted three; Hollande probably wanted none at all, as he is not a natural debater -- or even speaker: his campaign speeches mostly rehashed Socialist party positions, as he made an awkward effort to assume the oratorical style and gestures of the late President Mitterrand).

Murder & Mystery in China

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:08:31 CEST

Paris, April 17, 2012 - Events suggest that the long-overdue crisis
of China's Communist Party has arrived. Evidence is provided by the
affair of the Chinese police chief who tried to defect to the United
States and was turned away, the sensational murder of the mysterious
Englishman, about whom Britain's foreign secretary seems to have
known more than he told us at the time of the murder, and more than
he should have known, had the mysterious Englishman been merely the
innocuous expatriate he purported to be, and the British government
had claimed that he was.

China's crisis, as I have argued in the past, is that of political legitimacy. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist
Party rests entirely on the fact that it has no political rival. It
inherited an abused and demoralized China from Mao Tse-tung in 1976,
after Mao's morbid narcissism, produced by absolute power, had
spurred him to launch the Great Leap Forward. Then came the Cultural
Revolution, culminating in the attempted coup of the "Gang of Four,"
empowered by his widow.

All this makes a history that cannot be dismissed. It remains relevant because it is recent - the treacherous false freedom of allowing "a hundred flowers bloom" began in 1956, and ended twenty years later, when Deng Xiaoping assumed power.

The actuality of this history demonstrates what could again happen. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and massacre, occurred in 1989, and the martial law
then imposed was ended in January 1990, just twenty-two years ago -
two years before Bill Clinton became president, while Margaret
Thatcher was still prime minister of Britain, and François Mitterrand
the president of France. Why, it was only yesterday!

Time to get Serious about US Decline.

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:50:00 CEST

Paris, April 10, 2012 -- Is the United States in
decline? You would certainly think so from the publishers lists,
although some of the new books, written by determined neo-
conservatives resisting indictment for complicity in causing the
decline, such as Robert Kagan, are arguing that its only a very
little decline, and temporary, and will end in November when the
Teapot boils. Certainly President Barack Obama forswears declinism.
Anyone who says that America is in decline, or that our influence
has waned, doesnt know what they are talking about, he said in his
State of the Union Address.

Well. Actually the only people who can really say that are those who
havent been to Europe or the major Asian states recently, where
everything works beautifully, even if Europes debts are not paid
off. The 200 MPH trains that criss-cross Europe not only run on
time but give you money back if they are late. The hotels in
Singapore, Tokyo and the Gulf surpass all rivals. Their national
airlines provide surpassing service, and even room enough to sit
comfortably in economy.

Even the American government luxuriates abroad. Have you ever been
an overnight guest in the visiting officers apartments of any major
American military base abroad? (Not in a combat zone, to be sure!) I
have. You can bet that everything works, every luxury and comfort
provided, every wish granted and whim gratified, as aboard Air Force
One. What great fun for the little Obama girls! The rest of us
usually fly economy.

Why the decline? First, globalization and what it did to destroy the
domestic American economy in which ordinary people live.
Globalization was the product of an economic ideology that said
removing all regulation would guarantee free markets that would
automatically produce maximum economic efficiencies, and consequent
profit, in every realm of human activity, except war and peace.
(Other priorities governed war and peace.)

French Elections Meet the Unexpected

Fri, 6 Apr 2012 18:21:50 CEST

Paris, April 3, 2012 What had seemed a long tranquil current of political success that was conveying Francois Hollande to the French presidency (first-round consultation April 22) has run into turbulence during the past few days, and while his canoe is still buoyant, Mr. Hollande has suffered a touch of mal de mer. He seems too reasonable and nice a fellow to be a great success as politician -- not accusations anyone makes about President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The contrast was evident during the recent days of the Toulouse murders and the siege and killing by a young would-be jihadist of three paratroopers, and then the cold-blooded murder of three young Jewish children and an adult at a Jewish school.

President Sarkozy was quickly at the scene of the siege that followed, witness to the drama and naming a close aide to head the governments collaboration with the police who had found and surrounded the murderer, eventually killing him in a prolonged shoot-out.

Sarkozy had once worked with the same police unit when he was a young mayor in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, and had personally gone into a school threatened by a demented bomber to rescue hostage children. That first made his political reputation. François Hollande is not action-man, and his presence on the scene in Toulouse inevitably was one of passive observer, accompanying the journalist who is now his domestic companion.

The Socialists are also more identified with sympathy and tolerance for immigrants and their rights than is Sarkozys conservative UMP party. The latter has followed the crisis with orders banning from France a number of radical Muslim imams, whereas Hollande confronts the problem that the Toulouse crimes revealed the existence of a more sizable network of jihad sympathizers than anyone expected. While the present government should logically be attributed responsibility for this situation, the Socialists record inevitably links them to the support of Muslim immigrants, and of the social practices and standards of the immigrant community.

This affair has been followed by accumulating campaign difficulties for Hollande, where his alliance with the ecologists parties, to which he ceded a certain number of reserved parliamentary constituencies, threatens to come apart.

The Green party candidate, Eva Joly, a Norwegian immigrant in France who for many years was an investigating magistrate in the police and court system, has failed to awaken much enthusiasm. She is running 2/3% in the polls, and Socialist party members are anxious that she retire and the constituencies be handed over to Socialist candidates who seem much more likely to win them.

Finally, the unexpected threat from the depths that faces Hollande is named Jean-Luc Melenchon, a former Communist leader who is now head of what is known as the Front de gauche, an electoral party built up from the remnants of the Communist Party (once the leading party of post-World War II France), combined with the survivors of various Trotskist electoral initiatives of recent years.

The latter usually have managed to establish a role in the electoral competition (sometimes a significant one, even if their adherents tend towards the adolescent or the nostalgic; their presidential candidate last time was a sympathetic postman, who went on delivering the letters during the election). This spring Melenchon has held unexpectedly large and enthusiastic rallies at the Place de Bastille and elsewhere, far outflanking, on the Left, the campaign promises of the orthodox Socialists.

A Legacy of Ronald Reagan, Edward Teller & G.W.Bush

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:00:00 CEST

Paris, March 28, 2012 One might hope that when President Barack Obama misspoke in front of an open microphone at the Seoul nuclear security conference on Tuesday, he knew he would draw attention to the need to end what has always seemed one of the biggest policy frauds of the present day, the scheme purporting to defend Europe and the United States from Iranian nuclear missiles.

The president said to the departing Russian president, Dimitri Medvedev, that he could do not discuss the issue until the U.S. Presidential election is over. He said the distraction and pressures of the race make it impossible to search for a compromise on this issue -- which is pretty obvious. The best compromise, as he may understand, would be to drop the project as useless and a waste.

Mr. Obama had already told the press in Seoul that the only way I get this stuff done is if I am consulting with the Pentagon, if I am consulting with Congress, if Ive got bipartisan support; frankly, the current environment is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations.

Medvedev repled, I understand, I will transfer this information to Vladimir [Putin: Russias former and future president.]

Hearing of this secret confiding of such a message to the highest Russian authorities, Republican Presidential candidate Milt Romney said, with deep concern for Americas national security, that it was an alarming and troubling development that an American president would confide in his Russian counterpart that in the mist of a presidential campaign he cant get around to missile defenses. Romney might have added, meaningless missile defenses, since this has from the start been the salient characteristic of this project, so far as the American taxpayer is concerned, and it has been a Republican boondoggle from the start.

France's Next President

Wed, 7 Mar 2012 17:44:38 CET

Paris, March 6, 2012 In Frances presidential election, which takes place on April 22 and May 6, the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy is running far behind his challenger, François Hollande, in a contest that has more to do with personal character than issues. Sarkozy has always been a man of action rather than theory or ideology, and the French Socialist Party, which Hollande headed for more than a decade, has been intellectually moribund for years.

Hollandes major challenges to Sarskozy in the campaign thus far include a promise (difficult to fulfill) to renegotiate the latest European growth and stability pact, signed last week. He also promises to hire sixty thousand additional teachers (the teachers unions have always been faithful supporters of the Socialist Party). He declares that his personal enemy is finance. He has just announced that he wishes to impose a 75% tax rate on everything a French citizen earns above a million euros a year.

France has far fewer millionaires than the United States or Britain, but the threat is an incentive to those it still has to leave for London or Geneva, no doubt to the cheers of the poor. Assuming, of course, that Hollande does not back off from this, as he already has done with the promise to hire new teachers, explaining that the total hires would actually be over the five years of his presidential term, and will include teachers who would have to be hired anyway to replace those retiring or otherwise leaving.

The teacher promise could ricochet against him, because of mounting middle class hostility towards the teacher unions among voters who complain of demoralization, absenteeism, and declining standards in the state system, and who recently have made a sharp turn towards private schools. In the current scholastic year these have been unable to accommodate all the new applications for places, especially in Paris.

In the past, private schools were either religious schools or high-pressure cramming institutions for students failing in what traditionally has been an intellectually demanding state system. They promise coaching to get students through the crucial secondary-school final test, the baccalaureate, the key to higher education in France. These parents are not ready to vote favors to state teacher unions.

The Arabs have Awakened to What?

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:34:13 CET

Paris, December 29, 2011 -- There are only three valid reasons why the Middle East, the focus of international attention as 2012 begins, is important to the United States and the European nations. These are energy, immigration, and Israel. Beyond that, there is no evident cause for paying more attention to this region than to such other areas in the world as Africa, Latin America, or Western Asia.

Those reasons themselves are seriously weakened today. The Arab oil states are no longer in a quasi-monopolistic position. There are many other regions with large present and future oil and natural gas reserves. They produce competitively for a diversified and open international market. The United States no longer needs to think that owning and militarily defending Saudi Arabia or any other oil-producer is essential to American security.

The idea of a politically motivated energy producers boycott was tried out by the Arabs in 1973-74 and was found not to work. It is impossible today. Italian, French, American, British and other oil companies may compete today to secure Libyan (or Iraqi) oil contracts, but this is commercial competition, not geopolitics.

Western Europe is under important migratory pressures from the Southern Mediterranean and North African populations. This has serious social and cultural consequences, but they are being managed. There has been a link between migration and Islamic terrorism but the latter is a minor, containable and probably ephemeral phenomenon, one which the post-9/11 American governments have treated, and continue to treat, with something resembling hysteria.

Finally, the Arab and Iranian Middle East is a center of potential military conflict because of the Israel-Palestine confrontation over the Palestinian lands, only because the United States is committed to defend Israel from all threats, thus implicitly underwriting the expanding Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. This now is under question in the United States, and Israel itself is changing in a way that weakens the link.

What exactly is it today that is awakening in the Middle East? It is the people. They demand justice. But are they capable of creating just and modern governments?