Author Archives: jsh54

There will always be an England.

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“There’ll always be an England.”[1] You know why? ‘Cause it’s a country filled with strong-minded flakes, that’s why.

Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899-1971) had a German father and a British mother. She went up to Oxford to study history, then went to grad school there. Her dissertation flunked because it contradicted the argument of one of the readers and her supervisor didn’t have the “cojones” to fight for her. So she settled for tutoring Oxford undergraduates for half the year and travelling throughout Europe the rest of the year. She visited Weimar Berlin a lot, but also travelled throughout Europe. Wiskemann became an ardent critic of Nazi Germany, so the Nazis expelled her in 1936. During the Second World War, she worked for British Intelligence in Switzerland. Here she became the lover of Adam von Trott zu Solz, one of the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. When he left her to return to Germany, he accidentally left behind his gloves. Soon afterward, Von Trott was hanged. She kept the gloves as a momento. After the war she wrote books. When her eye-sight failed, she took her own life.[2]

Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) grew up in Germany and Italy in the Twenties and Thirties.   She got to know many British and French writers on the Riviera. Actually, she was German and only became British through education and a marriage of convenience with a gay British man who married her to prevent her from being sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis. (Her discovery that she was a lesbian after her first night with a clumsy, self-absorbed man is hilarious.) Later, she became a writer who reported on British criminal cases, wrote novels, a biography of her friend Alduous Huxley, and a couple of highly-deceptive memoirs.[3]

Patrick Leigh-Fermor (1915-2011) had no talent for coloring inside the lines. He managed to be expelled from a series of “progressive” schools in interwar Britain. Then he failed to gain entry to the British equivalent of West Point. One school report card described him as “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.” In December 1933 he set out to walk from Holland to Istanbul, Turkey. In January 1935 he arrived, having travelled on foot through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania. Later, he fought in a Greek civil war, then served as a British Commando in German-occupied Crete. After the war, he became a travel writer.[4]

Eric Newby (1919-2006) got a good education, but never went near a university. After a couple of years in advertising, he signed on as an apprentice seaman on the square-rigged grain clipper “Moshulu.”[5] In 1938-1939 he made the passage from Belfast to Australia to London in the “last grain race” before the outbreak of the Second World War. He joined the Commandos after the war started, got captured on a raid, escaped from the prison camp, met his future wife, got re-captured, spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Germany, went into the dress trade, got bored, went for a short walk in the Hindu Kush, and became a travel writer.[6]

[1] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qhLPWcm-0w

[2] See: The Europe I Saw (1968). Her description of a sailing trip along the Croatian coast led me and my wife to a similar adventure.

[3] See: Jigsaw (1989); Quicksands (2005)

[4] See: A Time of Gifts (1977); Between the Woods and the Water (1986); and see also W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), which recounts the 1944 kidnapping of the German commander of the Crete garrison by Leigh Fermor and Moss. You can’t make up this stuff. Or: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKW_9uUwa0

[5][5] Now a floating restaurant on the Philadelphia waterfront. “How are the mighty fallen.” 2 Samuel, 1: 27.

[6] See: The Last Grain Race (1956); A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958); Love and War in the Apennines (1971); and Learning the Ropes (1991).

Casablanca.

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Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. Germany took over Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939. Jews, Marxists, and liberals high-tailed it out of those countries (if they could). Soon, France was awash in refugees desperate to get to anywhere else. Murray Burnett (1910-1997), an American playwright with Jewish relatives in Europe, went over in 1938 to help them out. He picked up a lot of material that he turned into a couple of plays with his fellow writer and wife, Joan Allison (1901-1992).

Then war broke out in Europe. Germany conquered Poland (September 1939), then France and the Low Countries (May-July 1940), then the Balkans (May 1941), and then attacked Russia (June 1941). France set up an authoritarian, right-wing dictatorship and collaborated with Germany. That government was headquartered in the resort-town of Vichy, so people talked about “Vichy France” when referring to the country and its empire. The Japanese, already at war with China, started leaning hard on the British and the Dutch in the Far East. America didn’t want any part of these fights, but could it stay out?

One of the Burnett-Allison plays, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” didn’t get produced, but Irene Diamond, a Warner Brothers story editor was visiting New York in 1941 and she read the script. She persuaded producer Hal Wallis (1898-1946) to buy the movie rights in January 1942.   Hollywood had been leery of making anti-Nazi films while America was neutral. Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States (both December 1941) solved that problem. Wallis drove a rapid writing of the screen-play by the Epstein twins, Julius and Philip; hired Michael Curtiz (1886-1962) to direct; signed-up Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) to star; recruited a Who’s-Who of European refugee actors for the rest of the cast; and pushed through filming in June and July 1942, with an expected release day in May 1943. Then American troops invaded French North Africa and captured Casablanca. It was all over the news, so why waste the free advertising? The movie was rushed into theaters in November 1942. It turned into a slow-burning hit and won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.

What is the movie about? One way to see it is as a parable for America’s involvement with the world. The previous love affair in Paris of Rick and Ilsa stands for America’s war “to make the world safe for democracy” in 1917-1918. Ilsa’s mysterious betrayal of Rick stands for the many failings of the Versailles Treaty that ended that war—and set the stage for a new one. Rick playing the odds in his nightclub in Casablanca stands for American neutrality in a world on fire. Victor and Ilsa Lazlo, Captain Renault (the “poor corrupt policeman”), and “Major Strasser of the Third Reich” stand for a nuanced view of Europe: brave, passionate, amused and disabused, and brutally aggressive. Rick’s choice stands for America’s choice: to re-engage or remain disengaged. No choice comes without a cost.

Rick himself stands for a particular way that Americans used to think of themselves. Rick is an idealist who fought against the Italians in Ethiopia and the Nationalists in Spain. He’s also a tough guy and a worldly one. He’s practical and gets things done. He’s on the run from something in his past. Along the way, life has taught him a lot about the darker forms of human behavior. They don’t scare him. He can live in the world the way it is. Not a bad way to be.

The final scene takes place at an airport. The studio didn’t have any airliners available, so it had the props department build a model out of cardboard, then hired a bunch of midgets to play the ground-crew to make the plane look bigger. (I’m not making this up.)

Munich.

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In 1967 Israel lashed out against a gathering flock of vultures (Egypt, Syria, Jordan). In an astonishing triumph, this “Six Day War” put Israel in possession of the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights. It also put them in possession of a large population of Arabs and Palestinian refugees cast up by the agony of Israel’s initial creation in 1948. The problem became what to do with the conquered lands and people. Israel offered to “trade land for peace” with its neighbors. The neighbors showed little interest. Meanwhile, the Palestinians launched their own war on Israel through terrorism. In 1972, members of the “Black September” group kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. Most of the captors and all of their captives died in a botched rescue operation by the Germans.

In revenge, Israel launched “Operation Wrath of God.” In theory, the objective was to kill eleven of the “Black September” leaders who were responsible for Munich. The operation went on for years. It killed many more than eleven men. Eventually, the operation wound down.

In 1984, Yuval Aviv, one of the assassination team leaders who then was living in New York and no longer working for Israel’s intelligence agency, became the source for a book about the operation.[1] Soon afterward, HBO brought out a movie based on the book.[2] Then the story languished for almost twenty years.

Then, early in the 21st Century, Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the book and made his own version, “Munich.” Why did Spielberg want to re-make somebody else’s movie? There are a couple of possible answers.

On the one hand, Spielberg has made a bunch of historical movies that can be thought of as grouped in pairs. The pairs deliver different perspectives on the large historical subjects. Thus “The Empire of the Sun” (1987) and “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) consider the legacy of surviving traumatic events in the Second World War; “Amistad” (1997) and “Lincoln” (2012) deal with the fight against slavery, a problem which continues to haunt America; and “Schindler’s List” (1993) and “Munich” (2005) turn on the struggle for survival by Jews in a hostile world. In the case of the latter two movies, “Schindler’s List” made an argument for Israel as a Jewish refuge; “Munich” asked how Israel differed from other states.

On the other hand, maybe the movie isn’t about Israel at all. Maybe it’s about America. At the end of “Munich” the World Trade Center’s “Twin Towers” are visible in the backdrop. On 9/1101 Al Qaeda terrorists attacked sites in Washington and New York, most famously the WTC. The United States responded by invading Afghanistan in an effort to get Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden. Missing their punch, the Americans became bogged down in a long struggle that hasn’t yet ended.[3] Then, in 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq on the grounds that the country possessed a program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that contact had been alleged between al Qaeda and Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Here the Americans became embroiled in an even worse conflict than in Afghanistan.[4]

Where does vengeance lead? Does it lead to “justice” and “closure”? Does it lead to an open-ended conflict with an ever-rising death toll? Are we captives of our past experiences? Are we even conscious of how our views of the past shape our present actions and our future?

[1] George Jonas, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

[2] “Sword of Gideon” (1986, dir. Michael Anderson). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvemVhD_M3k

[3] See: “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012, dir. Kathryn Bigelow); “Lone Survivor” (2013, dir. Peter Berg).

[4] See: “Generation Kill” (2008, HBO); “The Hurt Locker” (2008, dir. Kathryn Bigelow); “Green Zone” (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass); “American Sniper” (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood).

The Secret History of Mother’s Day.

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Ann Reeves (1832-1905) was one hell of a mother. She was born in western Virginia, married a merchant named Granville Reeves, bore 11-13 children[1] and lost all but four of them to childhood diseases. These deaths got her interested in maternal health and public sanitation. In the nature of reform movements of the time, most of her efforts concentrated on “voluntaristic” education directed at local mothers. She proved to be tireless. During the Civil War and afterward, Ann Reeves clung to a strictly non-partisan stance that offended partisans, but eventually won wide respect. In 1868 she sponsored a “Mothers Friendship Day” in Taylor County, West Virginia to bring together the veterans and their families of the two sides in the “recent unpleasantness.”

Other people shared the general notion of celebrating mothers, even if they did not follow the same exact course. In 1870, the suffragette Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) published a “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that called on the women of the world to unite for peace. Subsequently, she campaigned for 2 June to be celebrated as Mother’s Day.” Her efforts bore no fruit.[2]

Anna Reeves’ surviving children migrated to Philadelphia, where they prospered. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis (1864-1948) spent two years at what would later become Mary Baldwin College, then went to Philadelphia to join her brothers. An intelligent, determined woman like her mother, Anna became the advertising editor for an insurance company. Despite the physical distance between mother and daughter, they remained in close contact through the now-lost skill of written correspondence. When her husband died in 1902 Ann Jarvis moved to Philadelphia herself. She spent her last days in the City of Brotherly Love. She died there on 8 May 1905.[3]

In 1908, on the third anniversary of her mother’s death, Anna Jarvis began a campaign to make Mother’s Day a national holiday. She chose the second Sunday in May as the date because it was the day on which her mother had died. She chose the white carnation as the day’s symbol because ti had been her mother’s favorite flower. She lobbied church groups, businesses, and all levels of government to this end. Her first convert was John Wanamaker, the master of the great Philadelphia department store. Wanamaker held a service in his store’s auditorium to coincide with a service held by Jarvis in her home town of Grafton, West Virginia. Fifteen thousand people attended. Soon the West Virginia legislature got on board. Other states followed. In May 1913 Congress passed a resolution calling on all government officials to wear a white carnation to celebrate Mother’s Day. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday.

Florists, candy-makers, and greeting-card publishers loved the new holiday.[4] (Later on, jewelers, restaurant owners, and spa-operators came to love it as well.) This appalled Anna Jarvis. She regarded greeting cards as a convenience for people too lazy to write a letter. She spent the rest of her life shoveling sand against the commercial tide. In 1948, just before her death, she was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace for publically protesting against the commercialization of Mother’s Day. Worn out and aging, she died in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on the day before Thanksgiving, 1948. She had never married, so Mother’s Day was her only child.

[1] Nineteenth Century Southern record-keeping being what it was.

[2] Even less than did her song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

[3] I am, by pure coincidence, writing this near Philadelphia on 8 May 2015.

[4] Later came Father’s Day and National Grandparent’s Day.

The Islamic Brigades II.

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In 2007, more than twenty men—most from the large Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis–went to join Al Shabab, the Somali Islamist militia. Federal authorities launched an investigation. They ended up prosecuting eight men as facilitators and recruiters.

In recent years, eight young men from the Norwegian town of Frederikstad have gone to Syria. Norwegian authorities have investigated the role of an Islamist group called Prophet’s Umma for its role in recruiting jihadis and facilitating their movement toward the battlefront.

Investigating the recruiters and facilitators is important to the fight against radical Islamism. So, too, is trying to understand why some people are open to recruitment. There aren’t any good answers here so far. Mostly, there are just some anecdotes about human beings. Can we learn anything from looking at them?

Two friends from the same neighborhood in Minneapolis; high-school drops outs; in minor trouble with the law; converts to Islam; and soldiers of jihad.[1]

Troy Kastigar (1981-2009) went from being a funny, energetic, boundary-testing kid to smoking weed, drinking, and failing his high-school classes.[2] He dropped out of high school, later got a G.E.D., and worked fitfully between bouts of unemployment. He went back to school to become an X-Ray tech, but he was told that it would be difficult for him to get a job in the field because of his criminal record. His friend, Doug McCain, also dropped out of high school, then had some run-ins with the law over drugs, moving violations, and theft.

In about 2004, both men converted to Islam. There is a large Somali community in Minneapolis, so Islam presented itself more prominently there than in many other American cities. After a while, they moved beyond Islam to Islamism. In November 2008, Kastigar went to Kenya. He said he was going to study the Koran. In fact, he soon crossed the border to join Al Shabab. He was killed fighting with the group in September 2009. In 2009, Doug McCain moved to San Diego. He had family out there, he worked in restaurants, and he took some classes at a community college. In 2014 he went to Syria. In August 2014 he was killed fighting with ISIS.

At least one other man from the same social circle also traveled to Syria. Abdirahmaan Muhumed, worked at the airport from November 2001 to May 2011. At different times he worked at refueling planes and on cleaning crews. Acquaintances had seen him as a more secular than a religious man. He worked out a lot and played basketball. Then he started to become exercised over the fighting in Gaza and in Libya. Muslim people suffering under assault from Western powers. Muslim or not, Muhumed drank—and to excess—on some occasions. Drinking just enflamed him all the more on the issues. He went to Syria and died in the same fight as did Doug McCain.

The little town of Frederickstad, Norway, is south of Oslo. It is a more diverse place than one might expect of a small town. The Muslim community is largely made up of Somali refugees, but there also are immigrants from Algeria, Pakistan, Kurdistan, and Chechnya.[3]

The Chaib family came from Algeria to Frederickstad. Their son Abdullah (1989-2012) grew into a popular figure in his school and neighborhood. His ability at soccer enhanced a general “cool guy” demeanor.   At some point and by some means, Abdullah Chaib became committed to jihad. A then-radical Norwegian Muslim who visited Frederikstad recalled Chaib as “a real fanatic…[who] talked about jihad all the time.” In November 2012 Abdullah Chaib went to Syria. In December 2012 he died fighting there.

Chaib’s death in battle set an example for some other boys in the town. Among them was Adu Edelbijev. His parents came to Norway from Chechnya in 2002. He attended the same school as Chaib and, like Chaib, was a good athlete. He didn’t feel estranged from Norway, but his hopes to join the army were foiled by bad eyesight. He began to take religion seriously. By 2013 he had begun to prepare to go to Syria. He left in August 2013. In November 2014, he died while fighting with ISIS near Kobani.

Rebecca Sanchez Hammer was a Filipina who came to Norway and married a Norwegian who later died. They had a son, Torlief Sanchez Hammer. A group of goofy dopers used Torlief Hammer’s basement as a place to bake their heads. For several years, the police regularly broke up their parties and confiscated their drugs and pipes.

When, before he left for Syria, Adu Edelbijev lectured Torlief Hammer about his bad habits, the boy listened. Hammer converted to Islam, took the new first name Abdul, and suddenly stopped using drugs. His run-ins with the police ended, but his satisfaction with life did not improve. “”I have no friends, no job, nothing,” he told his mother. This did not cause him to reject Islam however. It only deepened his commitment. In December 2013, the young man took the road to Syria.

The parents of Samiullah Khan (1991- ) came from Pakistan to Norway, but did not prosper. His father murdered someone, did a stretch in prison, then accidentally killed someone else while driving drunk. This background left Khan feeling marked and excluded by native Norwegians and Pakistani immigrants. He went to fight in Syria, was wounded, returned to Norway, and was arrested for belonging to a terrorist organization.

It is easy to write off these people as failures who made foolish—and fatal–decisions. But is it possible that there foolish and fatal decision reflected an aspiration for a more satisfying life than what the larger societies in which they lived could offer?

A friend of Kastigar and McLean argued that “They just wanted to be a part of something. They were just trying to find something that just accepted them for who they were.” A friend of Abdirahman said that “He always wanted to be a freedom fighter, he always wanted to be a hero,” recalled a friend.

“None of them ever even mentioned religion when we knew them,” recalled one policeman speaking about the group around Torlief Hammer. “The only thing they had in common is that they did not function in society. But they wanted to be able to do something, to be good at something.” Torlief Hammer told his mother that “he wanted to fix himself after too much disco, too many girlfriends and too much smoking.”

In March 1940, George Orwell published a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In it, Orwell argued that Hitler “has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”[4]

As the United States lugubriously embarks on the election campaign of 2016, will any of the candidates offer voters “struggle and self-sacrifice”? Or will they promise “ease, security and avoidance of pain”? That is an easy question to answer. But what if there are a lot of people who would never consider radical Islam, yet still feel some longing for something more ennobling than the next entitlement or the next tax cut?

[1] Jack Healy, “For Jihad Recruits, a Pipeline From Minnesota to Militancy,” NYT, 7 September 2014.

[2] I wondered if these were signs of Depression. His mother describes him as having had a “sadness and a darkness” move into his life.

[3] Andrew Higgins, “A Norway Town And Its Pipeline to Jihad in Syria,” NYT, 5 April 2015.

[4] http://genius.com/George-orwell-review-of-mein-kampf-annotated

Libya Again.

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Libya was always something of a make-believe country. It really consists of tribes. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi employed guile and violence to rule the country for over forty years.[1] In Spring 2011 there were uprisings against the established powers in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria.[2] The Obama administration imagined that a new “Springtime of the Peoples” had arrived. In Summer 2011, that “Arab Spring” reached Libya. The Libyan tyrant Qaddafi fought back and a blood-bath loomed. To forestall this (and an immense flight of refugees across the Mediterranean toward neighboring Italy[3]), in Fall 2011 an American-led coalition of NATO air forces bombed out of existence Qaddafi’s military forces. The rebels triumphed. Had there been any American–or British, or French, or even Italian–troops on the ground, they would have been welcomed with bouquets of flowers. However, there weren’t any foreign troops on the ground.

Instead, the Western powers wagered on a “national” government that represented no one. “We’re under no illusions,” said President Obama at the time. “Libya will travel a long and winding road to democracy.”[4] (In short, cue the “Wicked Witch of the East” in a burka.) Instead, the rebels were left to themselves to make the best of it. They made the worst of it. Regional and tribal militias proliferated, arming themselves from the huge stockpile of weapons that the Qaddafi regime had accumulated. In the West, “Libya Dawn” rallied the Islamists. Their gunmen seized control of the capital city, Tripoli.[5] In the East, “Dignity” rallied the anti-Islamists, many of them former supporters of the Qaddafi regime. Then the factions made contact with (or were pre-emptively contacted by) outside powers. Saudi Arabia and Egypt sought out “moderates.” Turkey and Qatar sought out “Islamists or “immoderates.” Some of them began to contact Al Qaeda or ISIS.[6] Currently, the country seems headed toward partition. Meanwhile, the gunmen demanded and got stipends from the government.[7] There is a nominal government, acceptable to the bureaucracies of the West, which has proposed a new constitution. The gun-men don’t seem too interested.

Increasingly, the struggle is about money. On the one hand, Libya has rich oil reserves.. the two sides have fought for control of the oil fields and of the oil ports. On the other hand, since the collapse of the regime, perhaps as many as a million Arab and African migrants to Europe have piled up in the coastal cities. They await the opportunity to embark and will pay whatever they can to buy passage.

President Obama recently has said that the intervening powers “underestimated” how much further resources would have to be committed to stabilizing Libya.[8] And how.

[1] “The collapse of Libya,” The Week, 1 May 2015.

[2] What lay at the root of this unrest? Stalled economic development. One serious consequence of this appeared in mass youth unemployment. Without an income, however, young people cannot get their own apartment and get married. Hence, sad to say, Cpl. Ray Person has a point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKZ1DlcmHMI

[3] In English Comp this is referred to as “irony.”

[4] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqu9qhBHWNs The President is a child of the Seventies.

[5] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJeA4fpXwM0

[6] The Islamists have taken to butchering foreign Christians who fall into their clutches. Since we are in a secular age, no one gives a rip about something that would have pitched William Gladstone over the edge.

[7] To be clear, I’m not saying that this is the solution to the problems facing graduate students at Ivy League universities.

[8] Similarly, his economists have said that they “underestimated” how much stimulus would be needed to get the country out of the Great Recession. That underestimation involved ignoring Paul Krugman and other economists who said that the stimulus needed to be twice as big and loaded into the first year, not spread over two years.

The owl and the pussycat 2.

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After Libya collapsed, power passed to the hands of various militia groups.[1] Politics soon merged with crime. Italian criminal organizations—the Mafia—struck a deal with many of the militia commanders to move people from Libya to Italy. Some 31 percent are refugees from the civil war in Syria. Some are refugees from Iraq, either from the earlier fighting following the American invasion or from the more recent disaster following the rise of ISIS. Most are “economic refugees” from the failed or failing states of Sahelian Africa. In 2014, about 170,000 illegal immigrants paid an estimated $170 million to reach Europe from Libya.

Responsibility for dealing with this problem fell first to the Italians. After 300 migrants drowned near the island of Lampedusa in October 2013, the Italian Navy and Coast Guard launched Operation “Mare Nostrum.”  Italian vessels collected about 140,000 migrants during 2014. The death toll fell from 300 in October 2013 to 56 in April 2014.

While this might be regarded as a remarkable humanitarian achievement, not everyone was best pleased. “Mare Nostrum” (“Our Sea”) cost almost $10 million a month at a time when Italy was trying to fend off recession and imposing a degree of budget austerity. Operation “Mare Nostrum” started to look like Operation “Tasse Nostrum” (“Our Taxes”). Northern Europeans weren’t happy with Italy serving as an open door for illegal immigrants. The Navy landed the immigrants in mainland Italy. Most of them then continued their search for better lives by heading for Northern Europe.[2] Britain argued that “Mare Nostrum” created a kind of insurance policy for the migrants: the boats might not be sea-worthy, but the captains could always hunt up a rescue ship soon after leaving port. Once they were “rescued,” the migrants were put ashore in a country that maintained no serious watch over their further movements. Inevitably, they flooded North. These arguments resonated with other EU countries. When the Italian government asked the European Union for financial assistance, the EU called on the Italians to stop giving the immigrants a free lift. “Mare Nostrum” ended with the return of winter weather to the Mediterranean.

In place of “Mare Nostrum,” the EU both strengthened its controls on land border and launched “Operation Triton.” “Triton” restricted the rescue zone of naval patrols to within 30 miles of the Italian coast. “Make it more dangerous. That’ll stop them.”   It didn’t.

By early 2015, perhaps as many as a million potential immigrants were waiting in Libya to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. In economic terms, Demand vastly outstrips Supply. There are critical shortages of vessels, crews, and competent captains. Older and smaller vessels are used, crewed by men working beyond their skill-level, and packed to the gun-whales with passengers. A ticket on one of these death traps has risen from $1,000 in 2014 to $2,000 today.

Over-loaded and under-ballasted vessels are top heavy. Even passenger movements can lead to a capsizing, but so can heavy seas or a collision with another vessel or taking on water. In the first four months of 2015, an estimated 1,750 people drowned from the sinking of boats carrying illegal immigrants from North Africa to Europe.

The appalling death-toll caused an up-roar and a belated response from the EU. Two realities present themselves. First, while an aging Europe needs immigrants, the cultural resistance to increased diversity is very strong. Second, the core problem here is the failure of many African states to provide security and prosperity to their citizens. Even taking the risks of crossing the Sahara, then crossing the Mediterranean seems preferable.

[1] “Europe’s migrant crisis,” The Week, 8 May 2015, p. 11.

[2] A further 45,000 reached Europe by other routes.

Some American Public Opinion in Spring 2015.

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Standardized testing has been all the rage among educational reformers for more than a decade.[1] Only 20 percent of Americans think that it has done more good than harm to the students or the schools; 49 percent think that it has done more harm than good; and 31 percent “don’t know.” However, “don’t know” isn’t one of the options on a standardized test. Would it count as a correct answer if it was an option?

Americans frequently “don’t know” where they stand on public issues, but that isn’t the case with gay marriage. Today 61 percent favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry.[2] Opposition to gay marriage rallies 35 percent. That leaves just 4 percent who don’t know.

Reading the statistics above can obscure, rather than clarify, where Americans stand on the issue. Liberal media and public figures heaped abuse on Indiana’s “religious freedom” law on the grounds that it permitted discrimination against gays. Polls revealed that 49 percent of Americans agreed with the law’s critics. However, 47 percent believed that wedding-related businesses should be able to refuse their services to gay couples. Naturally, the vast majority of the dissenters were Republicans (68 percent), but a third of Democrats (33 percent) also supported business’ “right to choose.”[3]

Support for capital punishment has been slipping in America in recent decades. In 1988, 78 percent favored the death penalty for murder. In 2015, 56 percent support the death penalty for murder. Slightly more of the nation, 60 percent, supports imposing the death penalty on Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber.[4] However, opposition to the death penalty is stronger among some groups than among other groups. Thus California juries are more willing to assign someone the death penalty than are California judges to allow the penalty to be carried out. Currently, there are 751 people on death row in California, but there have been no executions in almost ten years.[5] In a remarkable demonstration of core values, in early April 2015, 62 percent of Boston voters favored sentencing Dzhokar Tsarnaev to life in prison, rather than to death, if/when he was convicted for his part in the Boston Marathon bombing.[6]

The following is no new thing, but it has come to the attention of white America as a reasonable possibility. While 61 percent of all Americans express “great” or “fair” confidence in their local police, the number plummets to 36 percent among African-Americans.[7] That means that 39 percent don’t feel “great” or “fair” confidence in their local police. Who are these people? They can’t all be members of the ACLU. Since African-Americans make up about 11 percent of the population, that would suggest that 7-8 percent of the American population (the two-thirds of the 11 percent who are African-American) lack “great” or “fair” confidence in their local police. If 39 percent of Americans over-all lack “great” or “fair” confidence in their local police, then 31-32 percent of Caucasian, Asian, and Hispanic Americans also lack “great” or “fair” confidence in their local police. The crisis of confidence in local police reaches far beyond high school students rioting in Baltimore when they should be in study hall.

[1] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 3 April 2015, p. 15.

[2] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 8 May 2015, p. 17. Of course the phrasing of the statement allows for the comic possibility that many Americans think that gay men want to marry lesbians. “Marriage means one man and one woman.”   So that would be—you know—OK.

[3] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 17 April 2015, p. 17.

[4] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 1 May 2015, p. 17.

[5] The Week, 10 April 2015, p. 14.

[6] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 3 April 2015, p. 15.

[7] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 8 May 2015, p. 17.

Incarceration and decarceration.

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In the 1970s crime sharply increased in the United States. In the 1980s there came an epidemic of “crack” cocaine use. Americans legislatures and courts responded by “getting tough on crime.” Sentences for all sorts of crimes were increased and about half the states adopted “three strikes and you’re out” laws that could put people in prison for a very long time for a series of comparatively minor crimes.[1]

In 1980, there were 320,000 people in local, county, state, and federal lock-ups. Today there are about 2.4 million in prisons. (About 40 percent of them are African-American.) As a result, while Americans represent only five percent of the world’s population, Americans represent twenty-five percent of the world’s imprisoned population. (See: “The Senator from San Quentin,” October 2014.)

In theory, the “War on Drugs” isn’t responsible for most of the prisoners. Only 17 percent of the prisoners are there for purely drug crimes.[2] However, the “War on Drugs” led to a “War for the Corners” in many American cities. The “War for the Corners” then had other violent effects. One came in the up-arming of many neighborhoods where the drug trade is carried out. A second came in multiplying personal feuds and quarrels. If you put those latter two together, violence and danger increased. If you step-to a man today, you’re likely to get more than a broken nose. Try explaining to a hospital that you walked into a door in the dark when they’re digging 9-mm rounds out of you.

At the same time, all sorts of violence increased to alarming levels from the 1970s to the 1990s. Drug-related violence hardly accounted for all of this. I don’t yet have an explanation for this spike in violence. However, half of the prison population is made up of burglars, armed robbers, rapists, and other violent or career criminals. Moreover, the majority (60 percent) of people released from prison are back inside within three years for parole violation or new crimes. This suggests that there are a lot of habitually violent people among the rest of us in America. (See: “Legacies of the Violent Decades,” January 2015.)

Prisoners cost a lot of money. The monthly average in California prisons is $2,600 per prisoner. The total cost for American taxpayers is $80 billion a year. Inevitably, the public has begun to demand a cut in the cost of government in this area as in other areas. States and the Federal government are beginning to respond.

People—me, for example–like to heap ridicule on Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas and a one-time clown in the Republican presidential primary. However, Perry also got the state legislature to devote $241 million to paying for drug treatment alternatives to prison and expanded probation programs. The Texas prison population has decreased by three percent since 2010, while the crime rate has dropped by 18 percent. This suggests that it matters who you release or spare from prison. This is but one of a number of experiments in trying to reduce the size of the prison population. A bipartisan Smart Sentencing Act is making its way through Congress to cut the mandatory minimum sentences imposed by federal courts.

If someone wants to look for the dark cloud around this silver lining, they could consider a previous reform movement. Once upon a time, lots of mentally ill people were warehoused in awful state mental hospitals. Liberals pushed for out-patient care. Conservatives saw a way to cut spending. We got de-institutionalization and street-people living over heating grates.

[1] “Opening the prison door,” The Week, 24 April 2015, p. 11.

[2] Thus, a recent decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to release non-violent drug offenders in federal custody will reduce the prison population by 46,000 people or about 2 percent.

Doomed Nigeria?

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If you think about it, Nigeria is an artificial state. European statesmen drew the boundaries between British territory and French territory in the late 19th Century. In the mid-20th Century those colonial-era territories became independent within the boundaries drawn by later European statesmen. In Nigeria, there is oil in the south; there are dessicated grasslands in the north. The northern part of the country is poorer, the southern part of the country is richer (well, less poor). The north is predominantly Muslim, the south is predominantly Christian.[1] How could one forge a single “nation” out of such disparate materials?

Broadly speaking, they did not succeed at this task. Most post-colonial countries in West Africa are plagued by economic stagnation, bad government, and corruption. Citizens are disaffected, to put it mildly.

In 2010, Goodluckwiththat Jonathan, drawing the bulk of his votes from the south of the country, won election as president of Nigeria. Since then, per-capita income among Nigeria’s 170 million people has risen from $4,740 a year to $5,360 a year. That’s about a 12 percent rise. So, people should be dancing in the street. However, that rise in national income did not flow on anything approaching an equal basis. For one thing, the money tended to stick in the southern regions that produced oil. Hence, northern Nigeria profited but little. Incomes in the south are now twice those of the north.

This disparity may have helped fuel the Boko Haram insurgency. Boko Haram recruits around the tattered edges of Nigerian society, among poor people, among young people, and among poor young people with no prospect of landing a job. In 2009 and 2010, Boko Haram attacked a dozen places; in 2011, twice that; in 2012, more than 60 attacks; in 2013, more than 50 attacks; and in the first quarter of 2014, about forty attacks. In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 200 school girls from the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria.

The Nigerian government is riddled with corruption. Graft and the abuse of authority are endemic. It runs up and down through every level of society. In 2014 the head of Nigeria’s central bank announced the $21 billion in oil revenues had disappeared from the bank. President Jonathan fired him. Every interaction between a government official and a citizen involves a pay-off. It’s impossible to get through the airport without paying-off some official.[2]

What to do to encourage prosperity in the north? Northern Nigerians believe that President Jonathan’s government has starved them of their share of the national income. Spokesmen for people there urge infrastructure spending. The north lacks reliable electrical power and has a deficient road network. So, over the years the bonds between northern and southern Nigeria have frayed.

The insurgency threatens to spill over into neighboring countries like Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Benin. All of the neighboring countries are what amount to French protectorates. Hence, the French are insistent that Boko Haram be crushed. Radical Islamism has already troubled the French at home and abroad. The “Charlie Hebdo” massacre demonstrates the danger from home-grown Islamists, while the insurgency in Mali can be construed to constitute and Islamist threat in the territories of the old French empire.

Is Nigeria doomed to disintegrate, like the post-colonial states of the Middle East?

[1] Maia de la Baume and Alissa J. Rubin, “West African Nations Set Aside Their Old Suspicions to Combat Boko Haram,” NYT, 18 May 2014; Heidi Vogt and Patrick McGroarty, “Nigeria’s Divisions to Test Nation’s New Leader,” WSJ, 6 April 2015.

[2] See: “Dogs of War” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZbg5AdlO70