International

Aflons Mucha’s Slav Epic enjoys glorious pride of place in the Czech National Gallery in Prague. It is a cycle of twenty large and portentous paintings completed between 1910 and 1928 recalling the history and myths of a heterogenous people inhabiting territory from the Asian steppe to the shores of the Mediterranean. The artist imposes his peculiar predilections and aspirations in broad strokes to produce imagery simultaneously troubling and enthralling: a peaceable nature is emphasised but a belligerent Germanic ‘other’ is also apparent. The first painting has a contemporary resonance. Mucha claimed his intention was to depict the Origin, the Adam and Eve of the Slavs. The English guide says: “He portrayed them crouched down like defenceless refugees, wearing expressions of fear”. On the hill behind we see a hostile horde that has plundered and set fire to their village. Implicit is recognition that all peoples have at one time sought refuge from invasion. But that understanding is sorely lacking in the Czech Republic along with other countries across Central and Eastern Europe today. Not since the US invasion of Iraq have attitudes differed so greatly between what Donal Rumsfeld referred to in 2003 as ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Europe. Many in Western Europe are exasperated by the attitudes of their Central and Eastern European counterparts, regarding them as hypocrisy considering the number of Central and Eastern Europeans who have migrated west as both workers and political refugees. Central and Eastern Europeans appear to be from Mars and Western Europeans from Venus; but there is hardly a genetic basis for the intracontinental differences. Perhaps most surprising to Westerners are attitudes in the Czech Republic – a state, geographically and to an extent culturally, Western European: Prague’s architectural splendours are further to the west than Berlin’s and revolutions have been pacific West-friendly Velvet affairs. The State of Czechoslovakia was the only democracy in continental Europe apart from France in 1939. But successive opinion polls have shown Czechs to be overwhelmingly opposed to receiving refugees despite shocking scenes that have generated strong feelings of empathy elsewhere. Four factors ground this apparent imperviousness to the suffering of others: the first is the historical and current relationship with minorities; the second is the enduring economic fallout from the Communist era; the next factor is the malign influence of the current Czech President Miloš Zeman; finally, after a twentieth century during which the Czech people have been unwillingly controlled by three empires – the Hapsburg, Nazi and Soviet, there is a strong sense that the Czech people should be allowed to control their own affairs. The Czech Republic has produced statesmen of international renown. Former playwright President Vaclav Havel was one of the heroes of the struggle against Communist dictatorship; although his equation of the extension of US power with the expansion of liberty, culminating in support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, was naïve at best. Nonetheless his emphasis on individual autonomy and artistic expression was an antidote to the conformity of the dark Communist years. Looking further into Czech history we find the great Jan Masaryk the first president of Czechoslovakia whose liberal sentiments contrasted with the hateful rhetoric that pervaded the leaderships in countries surrounding an embattled state that was effectively handed over to the Nazis by the British and French in 1938. In a speech in 1928 marking the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the state he said: “I repeat and emphasise what I have said before, namely, that everything in the nature of Chauvinism must be excluded from our political life”. Arguing for a pluralist civic nationalism he said that: “the necessary State unity does not mean uniformity”. Although that state did not perfectly integrate its broad composite of minorities his benign leadership engendered tolerance, especially of religious difference. He said that Czechoslovakia should only have an army as long as other countries did. One individual who grew up in inter-war Prague recalls: “One of the pleasant aspect of living in Czechoslovakia at the time was that you never really knew what religion the other person had, child or adult, and more importantly didn’t care”. Masaryk also said that: “Politics is leadership and democracy therefore has its constant and urgent problem of leadership”. The current President Milos Zamen is offering leadership of a different character. Zamen is part of a rising phenomenon, apotheosised in Donald Trump. He speaks in foul-mouthed terms about marginalised groups. He regularly departs from political correctness, and appeals to fear and xenophobia. Thus in the wake of the New Year Cologne sex attacks he typically claimed that, “it’s practically impossible to integrate Muslims into Western Europe”. He has also previously stoked anti-German feeling, referring to his opponent in the 2013 Presidential election, Karol Schwarzenberg, as a Sudeten German and claiming that Sudeten Germans had been done a favour by their forced transfer to Germany, during which many thousands died, after World War II. The heavy-drinking President has also pursued friendly relations with Vladimir Putin and is roundly denigrated in liberal, relatively cosmopolitan Prague. But his divisive views, so out of step with the legacy of Masaryk, have proved a successful political strategy and today he is the most trusted politician in the country with a 56% approval rating according to a recent survey. A major reasons for this is the continuing discontent of the majority of the population with their economic status. Thus, in a survey conducted by the CVVM agency in October 2014, 55 percent of Czechs characterised the economic system that existed in Czechoslovakia before 1989 as “better” or “on the whole better” than the current one. This nostalgia for the Communist era may come as a surprise but it reflects the two-tier economy that has grown up. Prague now contains a substantial population that has grown wealthy in particular off the back of a booming property sector that has attracted significant foreign investment. There is also a high level of corruption that stalls development. This problem dates back to the

I didn’t expect to find the China Daily in a beach town on the Algarve but then maybe that’s a logical place to find it, given the large population of expats and holidaying bureaucrats there. The same newspaper (its European edition) is also available for free in the very busy transfer lounges of Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. And there are suggestions of a distribution deal through western outlets of international coffee chains: you can already pick the China Daily up for free in Chinese outlets of Costa Coffee and Starbucks. It’s unfair that China avails of western free markets to distribute propaganda (the China Daily and other English-language titles like Global Times are stateowned and supervised by the Central Propaganda Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while the websites of every major western media outlet are blocked in China. You can forget seeking to purchase any major news magazine or newspaper at a news kiosk in Beijing (although some publications are available in international hotel chains). Meanwhile, in late May China vetoed an application from the Committee to Protect Journalists for special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN. Even while it has no intention of opening up its own media market – the opposite in fact has been the case in the past year in particular – China has been taking advantage of the precarious financial condition of western media to force a diet of propaganda and its version of events. A bunch of English language newspapers and magazines published in Beijing for global audiences are produced with no profit criteria. The China Daily and the Global Times are published with little or no advertising but lots of content disparaging enemies like the Dalai Lama and Taiwan independence campaigners. Anyone who’s watched China Central TV, also known as CCTV, will wait for several minutes before realising it’s not CNN – the set livery and the use of western anchors makes it look like an American production, clearly inspired by western television news channels. That’s no coincidence given CCTV has hired a lot of talent from down-sizing western media outlets and also broadcasts from American studios. Unsurprisingly, the production value and design of Chinese state media are increasingly sophisticated and -like CCTV – are free. And if it’s the only English-language media outlet –and it is in many places, including Beijing (online and in print) and many Asian and African capitals – you find yourself, over time, believing (or at least not questioning) its content. That at least was my experience recently when travelling from western China through central Asia with the China Daily the only reliable, or at least reliably available, source of news. Lately the China Daily has started showing up inside, as well as alongside, mainstream western media. As well as distributing the papers free in China and around the world, the Chinese Propaganda ministry is also paying respected western media to insert the paper into their own pages. And many publications, including Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Australia’s Fairfax titles, distribute the China Daily as an insert because they’re paid to do so. While piggy-backing on respected but hardup western titles, China is also barracking western media that do not pursue its line. Chinese embassies have been instructed to pursue stories in foreign media that displease Beijing. Particular targets include coverage of Tibet, Taiwan and China’s current construction of artificial islands in disputed waters of the South China Sea. Getting freesheets into the hands of readers around the world is one arm of China’s propaganda strategy. Another arm is the country’s diplomatic corps. The head of the foreign ministry set the tone recently at a press conference in Ottawa where he berated a Canadian reporter for asking him about human rights. Foreign Minister Wang Yi found the question “full of prejudice against China” and “irresponsible” and declined to answer. Rather relations between Canada and China had entered a “new golden age” – a stock phrase used to describe relations with lots of western governments which, keen on Chinese investment, have become increasingly less strident critics of the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Rather than rebutting coverage through discussion and debate, the Chinese foreign ministry and the Central Propaganda Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have also taken to hounding and courting western media headquarters. Paid-for trips to Tibet, chaperoned by officials, have taken the place of access to the region for China-based reporters, who remain barred from the region. A long-favourite tactic, regularly practised by Chinese authorities, is threatening the visas of reporters based in China. These have to be renewed annually, at the pleasure of Beijing authorities who late last year declined to renew the visa of a long-term French correspondent in Beijing because of articles critical of China’s management of its Uyghur muslim community. China ranked 176th out of 180 countries surveyed by the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, but have tightened further since Xi Jinping started to remind the Chinese media that their role is not to break news stories but to spread the word of the Communist Party. While Beijing is now putting its views into western media through insert deals for the China Daily, it isn’t reciprocal to printing alternative views. I offered several times to pen a response to opinion pieces by Chinese academics on several topics but was declined with polite silence. American diplomats visiting Beijing regularly bring up the harassment of foreign reporters with their Chinese counterparts – the issue has become important for Secretary of State John Kerry. Elsewhere US trade officials have warned China that blocking US news websites breaches China’s WTO membership commitments. While the US has long run its own propaganda operations like the Voice of America (it has a bureau in Beijing but its broadcasts are jammed in China) it has allowed free reporting access to Chinese journalists –and it has allowed CCTV to broadcast globally from its own US studios, something that’s unthinkable

The European Parliament bowed to corporate pressure last month and approved the Directive on Passenger Name Records (PNR). This Directive will oblige airlines to hand over to national authorities passenger data from all flights between EU countries and other countries. The data collected will include 42 different pieces of information, including bank details, address, seat choice and meal ordered. The European Commission and some Member States have, for the past five years, been pushing hard to get this Directive passed. The power of the corporate lobby, always king in Brussels, is also evident. Multi- National IT and security companies seeking new markets are leading policymakers by the nose on PNR. These companies are exploiting fear to further their own financial interests. This has happened despite the European Commission bringing forward no hard evidence to demonstrate the need for PNR collection. On the contrary the working group set up to look at the introduction of PNR actually stated: “There are no objective statistics of evidence which clearly show the value of PNR data in the international fight against terrorism and serious transnational crime”. The PNR is not only a waste of half a billion euro of taxpayers’ money, it actually contravenes the EU’s own rules. The mass retention of personal data has already been ruled illegal by the European Court of Justice on grounds of proportionality. The EU Data Privacy Chief Giovanni Buttarelli has said that the PNR proposal is too invasive and unlikely to stop terrorism. He commented: “I am still waiting for the relevant evidence to demonstrate, even in terms of the amount of money, and years to implement this system, how much it is essential”. In the case of the recent attacks in Brussels, Turkish authorities claimed that they gave the name of one of the bombers to the Dutch and Belgian authorities but that they failed to act on the information. According to the PNR proponents’ logic, the EU would be a safer place if the Turkish authorities had handed over the details of all 366 passengers on the plane and what they ate for dinner. All that PNR will do is create more and more information that already under-resourced police services will have to decipher. The Belgian Judiciary and Police Commissariat has emphasised many times that it is drowning in an excess of data for which humanresources deficiencies already preclude follow-up. The Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon has admitted that they have “cut the police budgets way too much” and the Belgian Police Union VSOA have said that they are dealing with a 22% shortage in staff. It is not just Belgian Police forces that are underresourced. Our own gardaí have been subject to harsh cutbacks and until recently a recruitment moratorium. Acting Minister of Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, has said that Community Policing would be part of Ireland’s frontline defence on potential terrorism. Perhaps someone should have informed the minister that a 2015 Garda Inspectorate Report confirmed that community policing in Ireland is now practically non-existent. It would serve European policymakers better to look at their austerity agenda and how they have cut the funding legs from under vital public services such as police forces. The EU has 90 binding legal instruments pronouncing on counter-terrorism. Yet it has never carried out an evaluation of their effectiveness. Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights requires the EU Commission to prove the necessity of any new Directive and to do so it must evaluate existing measures for their efficiency and necessity. How can they possibly prove PNR’s necessity when they have not evaluated the 90 existing binding instruments in order to identify any gaps that might exist? While some policymakers in the European Parliament like to be seen to be doing something, even if that something is being led by corporate lobbyists, I will continue to base my voting decisions on evidence. What we should be doing is implementing initiatives that are actually proven to work. These typically comprise intelligence-led information leading to properly manned and resourced police services. Let’s stop throwing hay onto an already very large haystack with a missing needle.

That there was something altogether more disturbing about Hitler’s Germany than Stalin’s Russia is often assumed. Perhaps it derived from disappointment at Germany, the most intellectually and industrially-advanced country of its time, being led by an individual whose core belief was the annihilation of a substantial ethno-religious minority. By comparison the aspirational ends of Stalinism are, superficially at least, universal and even Utopian. The case of Germany suggests that intellectual progress does not dovetail with moral development. But at least the defeat of Nazism has consigned Far Right ideology in Germany and the rest of Europe to the political periphery since World War II. The Cold War ended when Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally stopped projecting Soviet power and the populations of its empire rose up to gain independence. But the descent into anarchy of some of these territories has engendered a conviction, in Russia, that aspects of the ruthless means employed by Stalin are always required for stability and prosperity. The conduct of the West, both in its approach to Russia and a wider flouting of international law, has not helped matters. Nothing approximating the scale of statesponsored terror is being unleashed in Russia today but there is nonetheless evidence of an attitude to human rights that departs from values ascendant in most of the rest of Europe. A case can be made for Stalinism being more terrifying than Hitler’s Nazism, precisely because the former emerged as victor in the apocalyptic struggle between the two monsters. It was a victory of a system that embraced industrial development and rationality, over one that advocated a primitive way of life for a chosen people fusing cultish spirituality with vicious juvenile biology. There were of course unforgivable excesses on the Allied side too, in particular the firebombing of Dresden and the unnecessary use of the Atomic bomb against Japan which was on the brink of surrender, as laid out by Gar Alperowitz in his book, ‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb’ (1995). The political elites of America and Britain have not confronted their wicked pasts – America still refuses to apologise for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though Obama had an exquisite opportunity to on his recent visit – and their foreign policies in recent decades are connected to an historical amnesia that foreshadowed the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, a decision which Noam Chomsky recently described as “the crime of the century”. Instructively, George W Bush installed a bust of Winston Churchill inside his White House office as he embarked on his ‘crusade’ against terror, reaching back to history for vindication. Churchill himself had ordered the use of poison gas against Iraqis in the 1920s. Of course the schemes of Hitler and his Nazi party were more diabolically hair-brained than his opponents’. Leading Nazis sought ‘Lebensraum’ in order to restore the Germanic people to the soil in what was a rejection of urban modernity. In Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ George Orwell found: “a horrible brainless Empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder”. The notion of Hitler’s primary lieutenant and SS leader Heinrich Himmler – that Aryans were not evolved from monkeys or apes like other races, but had come down to earth from the heavens, where they had been preserved in ice from the beginning of time – was dangerously eccentric. He also established a meteorology division which was given the task of proving this cosmic ice theory. The Nazis came very close to winning the war. Britain could easily have been brought to heel if Churchill had not stood firm against a vacillating Tory party. Hitler’s decision not to complete his victory – after the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France in May 1940 – before turning his attention to the Eastern Front was an enormous blunder, as was declaring war on the isolationist United States after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in December 1941. If Hitler had been victorious, the plight of all of Europeans would have been insufferable for a time at least. The Holocaust may have been completed and many more enslaved. But surely contradictions would have begun to emerge among the Nazis especially as Hitler had allowed competing agencies including the SS, the army and the Party to develop. Blind loyalty to the Fuehrer might have dissipated as the spoils were devoured. The triumph of a profoundly irrational ideology might have brought chaos in the absence of wartime exigencies especially if a policy of compulsory re-ruralisation was rolled out. Hitler certainly harnessed Germany’s industrial might, especially through Alfred Speer’s planning agency, but only when defeat began to loom. With victory, theories about ‘cosmic ice’ might have become ascendant and the Nazis empire might be expected to have been beset by slave revolts. The dormant humanity of the German people might have awoken. A more dynamic society and economy such as the United States’ would surely have surpassed the Nazi Empire and there was no sign that Germany was close to developing Atomic technology, which required the employment of over a million men at enormous expense in the United States. We know that Stalin and his not much less unsavoury predecessor Lenin (not to mention Trotsky who was characteristically ruthless) also liquidated vast numbers to advance their cause, more than the Nazis even. One estimate (RJ Rummel) is that in the seventy years after 1917, the Soviet regime killed 61,911,000 people. State terror was foremost from the start. In August 1918 Lenin issued the following order: “1. Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2. Publish their names. 3. Take all their grain away from them. 4. Identify hostages as we described in our telegram yesterday. Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received

Most right-thinking Irish people think the UN is progressive, scrupulous and transparent. They may think the Security Council is compromised by geopolitics but the intiatives emanating from the General Assembly are benign. All that worthy peace-keeping, progressive resolutions ending wars. Climate. Children. Education. We need then to take at look at the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, the UN-managed Global Compact: “a call to companies to align strategies and operations with universal principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption, and take actions that advance societal goals”. The self-financing UN Global Compact has attracted 13000 corporate participants and other stakeholders in over 170 countries (including Smurfit Kappa and Business in the Community in Ireland) with two objectives: “to mainstream [10 worthy] principles in business activities around the world” and “to catalyse actions in support of broader UN goals, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, which include a historic pledge in September 2015, to end poverty everywhere. Impressively, this is no empty commitment, you might think: companies have been delisted from the Global Compact because they did not comply with the obligation to report on progress, and the Compact has introduced a differentiation programme allowing businesses to distinguish themselves by going further than the minimum requirements. The UN Global Compact’s Ten Principles are derived from: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labour Organisation’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. The Global Compact, however, is not all it appears. Although it can be seen as a reaction to climate change, the Enron debacle and the global anti-capitalism movement, it is also the creature of the business-fetishising wing of the UN, itself generated by some of the most right-wing influences in international affairs and their longstanding detestation of the UN. For example the Charles Koch-funded Cato Institute, a leading neo-liberal/libertarian think-tank, and the Heritage Foundation were assiduous critics of the UN in the 1990s. They adopted a similar ideological strategy, emphasising the primacy of unfettered market freedoms and calling for unilateral US funding cuts. The Cato 1997 Handbook for Congress described the UN as “a miasma of corruption, beset by inefficiency, Kafkaesque bureaucracy and misconceived programs”. Reflecting this, the Reagan administration systematically delayed the timing of US payments to the UN by appropriating funds nine months late, in the following US budget year. US payments to the regular UN budget, due on 31 January, began arriving in October or November, at the very end of the UN fiscal year. Since the US is the largest UN contributor, this occasioned the intended stress. Over the course of more than two decades, neo-liberal propagandists have defined the UN as an inefficient and unresponsive bureaucracy, threatening to impose itself on the world’s people. Again and again, editorial writers and newscasters have repeated the term “vast, bloated bureaucracy,” even though the UN staff is actually quite small. Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, who died in February, became UN Secretary General in 1992. Under heavy pressure from the United States and from lobby groups like the International Chamber of Commerce, he immediately set to work reforming the Secretariat and eliminating programmes that most irritated global commerce. For example, the annual Human Development Report drifted slowly rightwards after 1994 and began to promote economic growth as the main engine of human development. The trajectory was not all one way. Boutros-Ghali outraged the new conservatives by proposing global taxes as a solution to the UN’s financial crisis in a speech in Oxford University in 1996. Kofi Annan assumed the post of Secretary General in January 1997. Washington had summarily vetoed Boutros-Ghali’s campaign for a second term, saying it wanted a more reform-minded helmsman for the UN. Annan is a graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Business. In 2004, allegations were made that his son Kojo Annan had received unethical payments but former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker led an investigation which found insufficient evidence to indict Kofi Annan of any illegal actions, but did find the UN’s management structure and Security Council oversight deficient. Annan surfaces from time to time as one of the egregious ‘Elders’ with Mary Robinson and Jimmy Carter. After just three weeks in office, Annan made a pilgrimage to Washington to meet Congress, particularly key conservative Senator, Jesse Helms. He announced he would “streamline” the UN, bringing modern business practices to its management and setting “realistic” goals. He committed to further budget and staff cuts. Almost immediately Annan trundled to Davos, Switzerland, to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum and also held talks with senior officials of the International Chamber of Commerce. The WEF subsequently kindly installed new video-conferencing technology that it used itself to the cash-starved UN. Extraordinarily, the system worked primarily to connect the Secretary General and other UN leaders with corporate executives, bypassing the intergovernmental process. Around the same time the Secretariat decided to impose an offputting financial charge on NGOs for electronic access to UN documents. Annan exhorted heads of UN agencies to open themselves to business, and to establish partnerships with corporations. In a short time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and other agencies announced initiatives of this kind. In 1997, flamboyant media billionaire Ted Turner, who owned CNN, announced that he was making the largest charitable donation ever, a $1 billion contribution to the UN. In 1998, soon after attending his second Davos gathering, the Secretary General again met the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Geneva. This time, there were 25 corporate enormouswigs in attendance, including representatives of Coca Cola, Unilever, McDonalds, Goldman Sachs, British American Tobacco and Rio Tinto Zinc. ICC Secretary General Cattaui heralded the new relationship. “The way the United Nations regards international business has changed fundamentally”, she gloated afterwards in the International Herald Tribune. “This shift towards a stance more

The UN’s global compact is compromised by corrupt members and dodgy directors