SPANISH
DEMOCRACY: Despite the history of the last 40 years, The
Guardian remains optimistic that things
can only get better. Which is possibly true, even if it currently
looks likely that - thanks largely to corrupt, independence-obsessed
Catalan politicians - the even more corrupt, anti-democratic, very
right-wing PP party will get back into (shared?) power in December.
ANTI-FRANCOISM: The campaigning judge, Baltasar Garzón, has railed
against the "quasi official silence" on the dictator's
rule. "We have", he says, "a serious problem with
coming to terms with what was done and in finding solutions".
Garzón has initiated a petition aimed at the conversion of the
appalling monuments in the Valley of the Fallen into a Civel War memorial. More
here.
SPANISH AURAL ABUSE: Well, well, well. Not before time, some Spanish
folk want to reduce the level of noise in restaurants here. "Oír
es Clave (Hearing is Key) has launched
a campaign - Comer sin ruido
or 'Dine Quietly' in English - calling on Spanish restaurants to
implement a series of simple changes to improve their sound quality".
Ojala
(Alhamdulillah)!
This is especially important for we foreigners trying and failing to
understand several Spanish friends all talking/shouting at the same
time. Something which may take even longer to eradicate. More on this
here. Meanwhile . . . "The Dine
Quietly website includes a list of 20 restaurants where
patrons will be guaranteed a headache-free meal in a nice, quiet
atmosphere." These are located around Spain and
there's even one in Pontevedra - naturally our most expensive venue.
Book now. There might be a rush of guiris.
THE EU: A "gigantic sham"??. Well, this commentator thinks
so. And I've always thought so. Or at least an impossible dream,
pushed through at a ridiculous pace and without a democratic mandarte, in the face of age-old national
realities, now being amply demonstrated. As long-term readers will
know, I've frequently claimed, the EU will surely one day collapse
under the weight of its internal incongruities, a process which now
seems to have begun. A sampler from the article: "If
national borders may be reinstated by individual governments, and
EU budget rules can be thrown out whenever circumstances require,
what does the authority of the EU Commission and Council and
Parliament amount to? Possible answer: a largely useless,
self-perpetuating, massively overpaid bureaucracy presiding over
Potemkin institutions whose deliberations count for nothing when the
lives of real people living under real governments are at stake".
And another: "So the crucial question cannot
be put: how do you subsume the contradictory wishes and needs of
different countries, each with its own mandated government, under one
super-European authority which has no democratic mandate at all?" Well, you can't, of course.
P. S. I initially typed 'Scam', instead of 'Sham'.
Surveying the history of huge EU frauds, this might have rung just as
true.
FINALLY . . . . TERRORISM: Here's the complete text of another fine
article from Niall Ferguson in today's Times:-
The
three-headed monster ushering the world to hell
It
is usual for horror to be followed by hysteria. The unusual thing
about the Paris massacre of November 13 is that the most hysterical
reactions have been thousands of miles from the scene.
The
calmest man I met last week was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the
swashbuckling philosopher, who had just flown in from Paris. Over
dinner in New York he was far more interested in discussing the
latest success of the Kurdish peshmerga against Isis (also known as
Islamic State).
By
contrast, it was American politicians who appeared to be suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ben Carson, one of the
frontrunners in the race for the Republican party’s presidential
nomination, called for new “screening mechanisms that allow us to
determine who the mad dogs are”.
His rival Donald Trump
vaguely threatened to do “things . . . that we never thought would
happen in this country”.
Yet mental disturbance is
sometimes more dangerous when it is repressed. “The terrible events
in Paris” were a “setback”, declared a haggard and at times
wild-eyed President Barack Obama in a press conference that was
painful to watch.
Bernie Sanders, who dreams of winning
the Democratic nomination, offered the Corbynesque analysis that “the
disastrous invasion of Iraq” was wholly responsible for “the rise
of al-Qaeda and Isis”.
John Kerry, the secretary of state,
offered yet more confused causation by suggesting that January’s
mass murder of staff at the Charlie Hebdo magazine had, if not
“legitimacy”, then at least a “rationale” because the
magazine had made people “really angry”.
Let’s come off
the prescription medication. The world faces three distinct threats:
an epidemic of jihadist violence, most of it in the Middle East,
north Africa and south Asia; uncontrolled mass migration from these
places to Europe; and the emergence of a fifth column of Islamic
extremists within nearly all western societies, including America.
We must take care to distinguish each component.
The
jihadist epidemic is mostly happening outside the West. Of the 10
most bloody conflicts in the world since 2010, seven are in countries
that host Islamist groups (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). The total death toll due to armed
conflict in those countries between 2011 and 2014 is close to
280,000. In the same period, terrorism around the world has accounted
for an estimated 89,000 deaths, of which 80,000 can be attributed to
Islamist groups.
The violence is growing, perhaps exponentially. Last year alone, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, 32,658 people were killed by terrorism, compared with 18,111 in 2013.
The two most deadly terrorist groups were Boko Haram and Isis, which were responsible for half of all fatalities.
Nearly four in five attacks occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. But the plague of jihad extends as far as the Malian capital, Bamako, where Islamist gunmen took over a hotel on Friday.
The violence is growing, perhaps
exponentially. Last year alone, according to the Institute for
Economics and Peace, 32,658 people were killed by terrorism, compared
with 18,111 in 2013. Islamist gunmen took over a hotel on Friday.
Yes, what happened in Paris was horrific. But all the other
terrorist atrocities of the past two months were committed outside
Europe: in Nablus, Baghdad, Kabul, Ankara, Borno, Sinai, Beirut and
Yola.
There is clearly an urgent need to end the civil war in
Syria, the country suffering the worst violence. But let’s not kid
ourselves. Even if Obama recalled David Petraeus and Stanley
McChrystal to run a counterinsurgency campaign against Isis similar
to the one they ran against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and even if he put
Henry Kissinger in charge of a Syrian peace conference, the jihadist
epidemic would still infect a dozen other countries.
Threat No 2
is a wave of mass migration to Europe that has been triggered by the
Syrian crisis but is by no means exclusively Syrian or even Middle
Eastern. Data from the United Nations high commissioner for refugees
shows that Syria is one of 10 countries where recent conflict has led
to massive population displacement. Such statistics as we have on the
“country of origin” of asylum seekers in Germany show they come
not only from Syria but also from Albania, Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia
and Eritrea.
At present, continental Europe has almost no way
of controlling this influx, which grows larger with every passing
month. The 1951 refugee convention binds European Union member states
to accept refugees.
Although
the German government has now restored the Dublin regulation —
which stipulates that asylum seekers can claim asylum only in the
member state in which they entered the EU — in practice the entire
apparatus for assessing applications has collapsed, as has the hotly
contested scheme to redistribute asylum seekers between countries.
One
country after another is defecting from the Schengen system of
borderless internal travel, but border fences cannot be rebuilt
overnight. In any case, it is the external border that is the real
problem. The Schengen area has 6,000 miles of land borders and 27,000
miles of sea borders, across which about 220,000 people poured in
October alone.
Meanwhile,
Americans obsess about their 2,000-mile border with Mexico — even
though net flows across the border are now from the United States to
Mexico. Even if every single one of the newcomers to the EU
were an angel in human form, this would be a disaster, not least
because continental labour markets are notoriously bad at integrating
foreign-born workers. And no one should underestimate the domestic
political backlash.
The third
threat is again quite distinct from the other two, though it is not
wholly unrelated. That is the threat of a fifth column within western
societies of young Muslims who join or at least sympathise with
groups such as Isis.
The overwhelming majority are not refugees
from Syria or anywhere else. Many are the children or grandchildren
of an earlier wave of economic immigrants from former colonies. They
are EU citizens. The biographies of the Paris terrorists tell the
story.
What links the three threats is the fact that as many as
six of the terrorists spent time in Syria and at least two of them
were able to use the refugee route through Greece to return to France
undetected. This does not mean that the Syrian war or the immigration
crisis were necessary for the Paris attacks to happen. Young Muslims
are being radicalised all over the western world without going
anywhere near Syria.
Americans who think they will be safer
by excluding refugees are missing the point. The United States too
has its fifth columnists. The Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the
Boston marathon bombings, were little different from the Abdeslam
brothers. The ancient Greeks believed the gates of Hades were
guarded by a monstrous three-headed dog. Like Cerberus, the monster
we confront today has three heads: rampant jihadism, uncontrolled
mass migration and homegrown extremists. To defeat it we shall need
to keep our own heads very clear indeed.
Niall Ferguson is
Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard and the author of
Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (Penguin)
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