How to make £10 billion in two days by doing nothing
August 20th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Does this sound impossible and crazy? Well, it is possible but it is crazy.
For most people around the world, the coronavirus global pandemic has been a terrible experience. Even if you stayed alive, even if you didn’t actually catch the virus, there’s a good chance that your business has gone bust or your job has disappeared or, at best, that your business or your job is more insecure than you’ve even known.
Meanwhile, however, stock markets – especially in the United States – are behaving as if nothing terrible is happening. In fact, they’re racing up and up.
So, if you happen to be Elon Musk, founder and part-owner of the Tesla car company, you’ve seen your wealth increase by more than $13.3 billion (around £10 billion) in just two days of trading as explained here. Musk had to do nothing to achieve this. Even he thinks the share price is too high. And he’s still only the fourth richest man in the world.
Posted in American current affairs, World current affairs | Comments (0)
Could China become a democracy?
August 18th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“China is bound to go through political transformation, toward democracy, political freedom, rule of law and constitutionalism. This is the inevitable trend of modern human political civilisation. China will enter this stage sooner or later.
Because the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has been in power since 1949, they have made many mistakes and even crimes. Between 1959 to 1961, nearly 40 million people starved to death. The anti-rightist movement of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution hurt almost all Chinese elites and intellectuals. Also the Tiananmen protests in 1989 when the CCP used its army to shoot the people. No matter what, this is unacceptable to Chinese people. It is the People’s Liberation Army, right? It is the people’s country.
Yet we see corruption within the party and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. In the future when China transitions to a democracy, all of these will be seen as the major mistakes or the sin of the CCP.”
This is a quote from a remarkable interview with Cai Xia, who was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) yesterday. Previously she was professor at China’s elite Central Party School, and in fact the interview with the “Guardian” was recorded in June. Only now that she has been expelled has Cai Xia agreed to publication of the interview.
Twenty years ago, after my first of four visit to China, I wrote an account of the trip which concluded:
“The 19th century was essentially the century of Britain; the 20th century was unquestionably the century of the United States; the 21st century might become the century of China. It depends on many factors.
It depends on the quality of the political leadership and, in the short term, Jiang Zemin is due to be succeeded by the younger Hu Jintao. It depends on the extent to which the economic changes are followed by political changes, including the development of a civil society with a free media, pressure groups, independent trade unions, and ultimately political parties. It depends on how capably and rapidly the economy moves from the bricks and mortar of the industrial society to the clicks and bricks of the information society. It depends on how China uses its growing industrial and military strength at home, specifically in relation to Tibet and Taiwan, and in the global marketplace.”
At that time, I thought that, over time, economic liberalisation would lead to political liberalisation, but the Chinese political system remains deeply centralised and authoritarian and the current President Xi Jinping has abolished term limits while being repressive at home and aggressive abroad. Now someone has spoken out.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (2)
My review of “Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race” by Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017)
August 14th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The award-winning black novelist Bernardine Evaristo has described the title of this non-fiction work – the first by Eddo-Lodge – as “gloriously provocative” and “marketing gold”. The truth is, of course, that the whole book is a conversation with white and non-white readers, by a young black woman born in north London and raised by a Nigerian mother, and it has achieved massive sales and caused a storm of comment.
Timing is important. “Why” was published the year after the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump and spoke to liberals wondering why so many people were so fearing of ‘the other’. Then, in the summer of 2020, the book soared to the top of the best-seller list. The worldwide reaction to the appalling death of George Floyd in the United States, and a global pandemic which underlined the different life chances of black and non-black people and provided more time to think about these things, ensured that Eddo-Lodge’s book had a whole new readership, including me checking my white privilege.
Although the book has been the subject of a fair amount of research and contains plenty of information and facts, this is not an academic work and the content is not novel to those who have been paying attention to the debate about race, but the style is very accessible and, for many readers (especially white ones), it presents the argument in a compelling and forceful manner than cannot be ignored. The tone is anger, but people of colour have much to be angry about.
“Why” begins with a short history of the experience of black people in Britain. Of course, a seminal event was the arrival of the 492 Caribbeans on board the “Windrush” in June 1948 (the week I was born). Eddo-Lodge underlines that the reason why the United Kingdom received immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia was because Britain had colonised these parts of the world and promoted the slave trade before, after the devastation of the Second World War, encouraging them to travel to the ‘mother country’ to take up low-skilled work as the economy revived.
The next section of the book explains that racism is not simply about prejudice by individuals but about the nature of the system. She prefers the term structural racism rather than institutional racism because “it is built into spaces much broader than our more traditional institutions”. This is why, whether we look at education, employment, health, housing, income or wealth, the life chances of people of colour are so much worse than those of white people.
There are two hard-hitting chapters examining the relationship between anti-racism on the one hand and feminism and class respectively on the other. Eddo-Lodge refers to “feminism’s race problem” and highlights “the overwhelming whiteness of feminism”. For black feminists and black socialists, a key issue is what is called “intersectionality” – a recognition that some people can and do suffer from two (or more) forms of discrimination and that we should not prioritise one to the exclusion of the other. Eddo-Lodge notes that “So much of politics is just middle-aged white men passing the ball to one another” and refers to “what writer bell hooks called ‘the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'”.
The final chapter – entitled “There’s No Justice, There’s Just Us” – is the shortest and the weakest. There is no manifesto of political change, but simply a call to white individuals to change the conversation. She declares “racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness” and urges “White people, you need to talk to other white people about race”. Of themselves, feminism and socialism will not eradicate racism, but feminism and socialism have massive roles to play in combatting the effects of racism and radicals from different corners of the fight for social justice need to beware of denigrating or disrespecting each other.
Posted in British current affairs, Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Joe Biden chooses Kamala Harris as his running mate and that is the right choice
August 11th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his Vice-Presidential running mate will come as no surprise.
Three years ago, I tipped her for the top in blog postings here and here.
Three months ago, I said that she should be on Biden’s ticket in blog postings here and here.
Given Biden’s age, if he wins the presidency, there is no guarantee that he will complete his four-year term. If he does, he will probably not run for a second term. So America needs a Vice-President who is qualified to take over at any time. Harris is up to the job and the first female president – and a woman of colour – would be a wonderful thing.
Meanwhile, Biden and Harris have to win. And hopefully the Democrats will take the Senate as well as the House,
My next tip? Susan Rice for Secretary of State.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
How did Lebanon get into this state?
August 11th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The Prime Minister of Lebanon has offered his resignation stating: “I said that corruption is rooted in every part of the state, but I found out that corruption is greater than the state.” This situation has come about because of the history of the state and the meddling of so many external players.
It may be helpful for me to reproduce a book review that I wrote just after my visit to Lebanon in 2011:
“Beware Of Small States” by David Hirst
The title comes from an 1870 quote by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin who was writing of 19th century Europe. In fact, the state that is the subject of this book is Lebanon which is indeed small: no biggest than Wales in the UK or Connecticut in the USA. The author was a long-time former Middle East correspondent for the “Guardian” newspaper and he has lived in Beirut for some 50 years.
In 460 pages, David Hirst provides a history of Lebanon from 1860 to 2009 but, in doing so, effectively offers a history of the Middle East itself because Lebanon has so often been the subject of intervention by other states, whether the rule of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, France in the mandate period from 1918-1943, the presence since 1948 of Palestinian refugees and until 1982 the PLO, the support for different militias by various states during the horrendously bitter civil war of 1975-1990, the presence of UNIFIL peacekeeping troops since 1978, the invasions by Israel in 1982-1985 and again in 2006, the support of Iran for the militia Hezbollah since 1985, and the constant interference, sometime occupation, and repeated political assassinations by neighbouring Syria.
Towards the end of this complicated, twisting and blood-soaked narrative, Hirst summarizes the current (2009) balance of forces in Lebanese politics.
The 8 March bloc takes its name from a huge demonstration called by Hezbollah on that date in 2005. Membership of the bloc includes most of the Shia Muslim community dominated by Hezbollah led by Hasan Nasrallah plus Amal and the Maronite Christians led by Michel Aoun and (now 2011) the Druze led by Walid Jumblatt. The group is supported by Syria and Iran.
The 14 March bloc takes its name from probably an even bigger demonstration which was held on 14 March 2005, exactly one month after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. Membership of the bloc includes the Sunni Muslims led by Rafiq’s son Saad and groups of the Maronite Christians led by Amine Gemayel and Samir Geagea. The group is supported by Saudi Arabia and the United States.
In short, Lebanon has never been master of its own fate. Hirst quotes the Iranian scholar R.K. Ramazani – “It is a truism that all things in the Middle East are interconnected” – and notes that “Nowhere did this truism manifest itself like it did in Lebanon”.
The reason for all this intervention and interconnectedness is partly Lebanon’s location in the cockpit of the Middle East and partly its complex religious and sectarian composition. From the beginning in 1943, this nation, which then had a mere one million citizens, reached an unwritten National Pact that specifically recognised and allocated political representation to no less than 17 groups. Today the population is some four million and a version of the National Pact remains in force with 18 groupings now recognised.
Hirst is incredibly well-informed and immensely informative but his history is not impartial. In particular he makes clear his opposition to Zionism and Israel, comparing the creation of the Jewish state with Lebanon itself and calling it “a vastly more arbitrary example of late-imperial arrogance, geopolitical caprice and perniciously misguided philanthropy”. But he is critical of the Arab states too, noting that “While Arabs may be abstractly passionate for Palestine the cause, they often display little such passion for Palestinians as persons”. He seems rather impressed by the Shiite Hezbollah though, describing it as “both the most influential political player in Lebanon and probably the most proficient guerilla organization in the world”.
I read “Beware Of Small States” while travelling in Syria and Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of the successful February 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and it certainly aided my understanding of the region’s complex history and fractious present.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
While you’re waiting for the “Top Gun’ sequel, here’s 63 other aviation films to watch
August 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Two of my many interests are aviation and cinema. I really loved the movie “Top Gun” which was released as long ago as 1986 and I can’t wait to see the sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” which is now not due to be released until summer 2021.
Fortunately there are many other aviation films around if you search for them and I’ve reviewed 63 of them here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Today my heart is with the people of Beirut
August 5th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Like so many others around the world, I was horrified to hear the news about, and see the pictures of, the huge explosion in Beirut. This is a country, and especially a city, that has already suffered so much in recent decades. Fortunately the people I know in Beirut are safe but shocked.
In 2011, just after the Arab Spring and just before the start of the Syrian civil war, I spent a few days in Lebanon, staying in Beirut. This is such an historic part of the world and it was such a marvellous experience.
You can read my account here.
Posted in My life & thoughts, World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the 2017 film “The Shape Of Water”
August 4th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Somehow I didn’t manage to see this fantasy horror movie at the cinema and, by the time I viewed it on the television, it had collected a whole host of nominations and awards, including 13 nominations at the 90th Academy Awards where it won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score. I was not surprised, therefore, that I loved it.
The work is a particular triumph for Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro, who wrote and directed “Pan’s Labyrinth” (which I really admired), since he imagined the story and co-wrote and directed the movie. But it is also a remarkable performance by Britain’s Sally Hawkins who plays a mute cleaning woman in a secret American government laboratory in 1962 where she befriends a humanoid amphibian who has been found in a South American river and held for Cold War experimentation.
The ending is pure magic.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of a book on the Texel Uprising of 1945
August 3rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Like his earlier book “Operation Basalt”, historian Eric Lee has managed to take a little-known and – in the grand scheme of the Second World War – small-scale incident and turn it in to a fascinating story by putting the events into a wider context with a variety of points of view.
Both “Operation Basalt” and “Night Of The Bayonets” are set on a Nazi-occupied island but, whereas the first was located on a tiny member of the British-owned Channel Islands and involved only a handful of deaths, the second took place on the much larger Dutch island of Texel off the west coast of the Netherlands and the death toll was more than 3,000 with probably three-quarters of them being Germans.
What makes the uprising between 6 April – 20 May 1945 truly astonishing is that it lasted more than two weeks after the surrender of German forces in the Netherlands and the attack on the occupying Wehrmacht was conducted by men wearing the same uniform: the Georgian members of the 822nd Eastern Battalion who had been taken prisoner from the Soviet Army and effectively forced to switch sides or instead to be killed or starved to death.
Commenting on the Georgians’ change of sides on two occasions, Lee states: They were young men who were simply trying to survive the war and get home”.
Lee only devotes some 45 pages of a main text of 190 pages to the Texel Uprising itself, what he calls “the final battle of the Second World War in Europe”, but cleverly and fascinatingly he goes back and forward in time to set the incident into a wider contect and to provide the reader with not just a story from history but an exercise in historiography.
So, drawing on another of his books (“The Experiment”), Lee takes us back to 1783 when Georgia lost its independence and became a protectorate of the powerful Russian Empire. He explains how, during the First World War, there was a Georgian Legion on the German side of the conflict and then, when there was an independent Georgia with a social democratic government from 1919-1921, the new state had the support of the Germans.
Therefore, by the time of the Second World War, relations between the Georgians on the one hand and the Russians and Germans on the other was not a simple matter.
Then, looking at how the Texel Uprising has been commemorated and memorialised from immediately after the war (when the returning Georgians were treated by the Soviet Union as heroes rather than as traitors) through successive decades leading to present-day independent Georgia, Lee revals how different parties at different times have interpreted and presented those weeks of battle on Texel in ways which have offered a self-serving narrative.
History may be in the past but it is never dead as this book illustrates all too well.
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A review of the new French film “The Truth”
August 2nd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In the 1960s, I was a tiny bit in love with French actress Catherine Deneuve (“Repulsion”, “Belle De Jour”, “Mayerling”). For decades, I’ve been more than a little bit in love with French actress Juliette Binoche (“The English Patient”, “Chocolat”, “Clouds Of Sils Maria”). So the opportunity to see both in this (largely) French-language film, in which they play mother (actress Fabrienne) and daughter (screenwriter Lumir) respectively was a real attraction.
They are eminently watchable – as are the support actors including Ethan Hawke – but the movie lacks cohesion and spark, probably because Japanese writer and director Hirokazu Kore-eda, so accomplished as writer and director of the Japanese film “Shoplifters”, is operating outside his milieu and over-complicates the narrative with the emphasis on the making of another film within this film.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)