Ukraine Is a Fork in the Road.

Posted on February 26, 2022 by jsh54

We can disagree about the details—even important ones—of economic policy. Still, there is a more basic question: do you think that the open world economy and the free market economy of the “West” is better than the state-controlled systems of Russia and China?
Recent times have been a lamentable period for democratic government. Still, do you think that the clown show of Western democracy is better than the Ice Capades of the Russian and Chinese dictatorships?
Are we out against two systems or are we out against two leaders (Putin and Zi)?
Nobody wants the Russian invasion of Ukraine to turn into a shooting war for the West, let alone a nuclear war. So we need to assess the quantity and quality of our military forces if we want to deter further aggression.
Both the United States and the “West” more generally have a bunch of problems. Foreign policy and military policy aren’t the only policies. It would be useful to try to solve the most important problems. Shouting and accusations will accompany any such effort. That’s probably one of the important problems.
As I write, it appears that a stand-up comedian is striving to be a stand-up guy. So might we all.

Lovers Quarrel.

Posted on July 8, 2021 by jsh54

Historians have often examined the tempestuous relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union.[1] The broad outlines of the story are well known. They alternate between amity and enmity. Long before Germany had become a “nation,” the region exerted a powerful cultural influence on Russia. Russia, Prussia, and the Austrian Empire battled over the “bloodlands” between them in the 18^th Century. Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of a united Germany, built his foreign policy on managing the conflict between Russia and the Austrian Empire to avoid war. After his fall from power in 1890, German leaders succumbed to the “spell of power.” Their plan for war, the Schlieffen Plan, aimed to destroy Russia and France as major European powers. German war aims against Russia in the First World War culminated in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which largely accomplished the pre-war ambitions. These gains were lost when the Western powers defeated Germany on the battlefield later in the year. The Allies imposed a harsh, if just, peace on Germany. It became an outcast, whose chief visible aim lay in restoring respectability. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik seizure of power, their abandonment of their allies in the separate peace at Brest-Litovsk, their repudiation of pre-war debts, and their attempts to export revolution to other countries made the Soviet Union a pariah country.

The two outcasts found a community of interest in evading international restrictions in order to revive their power. From 1922 to 1932, the German military and the Soviets cooperated on weapons development and military training. The democratic Weimar Republic chose not to know about this relationship. Initially, the German aims were short-term. Many military leaders fantasized that it would be possible to renew the lost war within a few years.[2] To this end, they encouraged right-wing paramilitary groups like the Nazis.

The renewed war in the West did not come, but—in the crisis of the Depression—the Nazis arrived in power. Adolf Hitler, the anti-Soviet German dictator, ruptured relations with the Soviet Union. Increasingly, the two countries became at daggers drawn. In 1935, the Soviet Union formed an alliance with France; in 1936 Germany formed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy and Japan; from 1936 through 1938, Germany and the Soviet Union waged a proxy war in Spain. Some Westerners hoped for a deeper engagement with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Others hoped that Hitler’s ferocious hostility to the Soviet Union would lead him into a bloody war of exhaustion in the East that would remove the need for the West to fight.

Suddenly, in August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty that left them free to carve up Eastern Europe. Hitler later chose to attack Western Europe and then, in June 1941, the Soviet Union. Even in 1941, many Germans regretted this rejection of Russia.

[1] John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (1938), and “Twenty Years of Russo-German Relations: 1919-1939” Foreign Affairs Vol. 25, #1, pp. 23-43; Hans W. Gatzke, “Russo-German military collaboration during the Weimar Republic,” American Historical Review, Vol. 63, #3 (1958), pp. 565-597; Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany (1965); Gerhard Weinberg, Germany and the Soviet Union 1939-1941 (1972); Barbara Jelavich, St. Petersburg and Moscow: tsarist and Soviet foreign policy, 1814-1974 (1974); Harvey L. Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 1926-1944 (1984); Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933-41 (1995); Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Pariahs, partners, predators: German-Soviet relations, 1922-1941 (1997); Ian Johnson, Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War (2015).

[2] From 1890 to 1945 Germany’s leaders repeatedly failed to adjust aspirations to resources. Disasters followed.

Durable Dictatorship.

Posted on June 24, 2021 by jsh54

One way of understanding why the 1930s and 1940s were so terrible is to look at the 1920s. In the aftermath of the First World War, two European governments fell to revolutionary regimes. The Tsarist, and then the Provisional governments fell to revolution from the left, Bolshevism. The liberal constitutional Italian government fell to revolution from the right, Fascism. In both cases, however, the revolutionary movements were stopped short of their radical hopes. Powerful constituencies were willing to tolerate some change, but rejected anything that harmed their own interests.

In the case of Russia, the peasantry formed the main stumbling block. They controlled the food supply, they formed the majority of the population, and they had gained possession of both their own land and that of the aristocracy. Communism threatened private property, their private property. So Lenin settled for the “New Economic Policy”: private property in land, private commerce in food, and government control of urban industry and international trade. There things stood until the arrival of Stalin.

In the case of Italy, multiple “old elites” formed the stumbling block. The aristocracy dominated the military and the bureaucracy, the monarchy remained an important focus of loyalty, and big business and big agriculture controlled the economy. They wanted the Socialo-Communist left and the unions destroyed, but they wouldn’t tolerate anything that threatened their power. So Mussolini settled for the trappings of dictatorial power for himself and jobs for his followers.

In the 1930s Stalin and Hitler exploited changed conditions to carry through real revolutions. For Stalin, it was the death of Lenin and the disputed succession that followed, coupled with the legacy of debates on the best path forward to an actually Communist Russia. This allowed him to play off factions within Bolshevism while mobilizing the intense enthusiasm of younger Communists. For Hitler, it was the immense shock of the Great Depression to the society and politics of the Weimar Republic, followed by the commanding needs of mobilization for war. In both cases, all the old barriers to sweeping change were destroyed.

These examples may have value in understanding why some authoritarian regimes survive while others fail.[1] One theory holds that dictatorships born out of revolution endure because the revolution destroys the old institutions, eliminating both enemies and anyone who could provide an alternative; and because the revolutionary movement packs the institutions of power with fanatics committed to maintaining the new order. This theory may explain why Communist Cuba, Communist North Korea, Communist China, and Islamist Iran all remain standing many decades after their creation.

One thing not sufficiently emphasized by this analysis is the role of terror. Right to the end of their lives, Hitler and Stalin commanded police forces that had deeply penetrated the nightmares of their subject people. Fear compelled compliance.

Why then did these supreme examples perish? Hitler lost a war Germany couldn’t win. The Soviet Union’s rulers lost their nerve at a critical moment in 1989. Those lessons may have been lost on Western observers. They aren’t likely to have been lost on current dictators.

[1] Max Fisher, “How Iran’s Government Has Endured in the Face of Instability,” NYT, 21 June 2021.

Advice from a Guy Who Knows a Lot.

Posted on January 1, 2021 by jsh54

Seen in a somewhat historical longer perspective than one gets in the daily media, Donald Trump’s four years as president aren’t quite the anomaly that they seem. In terms of foreign policy, the Trump administration identified the key problems, but came up with some wrong solutions.[1] The duty of the Biden administration will be to recognize where their predecessors saw the target, then figure out better ways of hitting it. Robert M. Gates stands above the partisan fray, possesses deep knowledge of American foreign relations and of the instruments of those relation, and has exhibited a sense of patriotic duty that should command respect.[2] While he has discreetly avoided making a direct statement on the Trump administration, he has some good advice for the Biden administration.[3]

First, Trump was right: the “friends and allies” don’t pull their weight. The Trump solution was to deride them and walk away. The Biden administration should apply serious pressure on burden-sharing. It also needs to pressure Germany over its own deal with Russia over energy supplies. It also needs to pressure Turkey over its purchase of a Russian air-defense system and its meddling in Libya. The United States needs to nudge NATO countries like Turkey, Hungary, and Poland back toward democratic norms.

Second, Trump was right: many international organizations are messed up. The Nineteenth Century British radical John Bright described the Empire as “a gigantic system of out-relief for the aristocracy.” The same judgement applies to international organizations and the European and Europeanized elites of the former colonial countries who staff those organizations. The Trump solution was to denounce them and walk away. The Biden administration should apply serious pressure on reform. The Biden administration also needs to make a serious effort to keep China from gaining a leadership role in all these organizations, because they will just manipulate these organizations to advance China’s national interests.

Third, Trump was right: the existing instruments of American diplomacy and “soft power” don’t work well in the new international environment. The Trump solution was to ignore those instruments, leaving hundreds of patronage positions empty and relying on personal loyalists to deal with foreign leaders or by seeking direct personal contact. The State Department has been in decline as the leader of American foreign policy since the Kennedy Administration. The Defense Department, the intelligence community, and—off and on—the National Security Council have all shouldered it aside. The US lacks the economic resources to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. America’s “strategic communications” are pathetic. Just adding one more spending category to the wish-list of money to be raised by making the One Percent pay their “fair share” won’t be enough. In every case, government partnerships with the private sector offers a better approach.

What if we have entered a post-Cold War era in which American leadership isn’t wanted?

[1] Even that isn’t all that anomalous. The George W. Bush Administration identified the correct problem in Muslim countries. They are victims of long-term developments, rather than of brief experiences of Western imperialism. The Bush Administration then came up with a disastrously wrong solution: knock over Saddam Hussein, declare democracy, put up some big box stores, and leave.

[2] On Gates, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gates

[3] Robert M. Gates, “How to Meet Our Global Commitments,” NYT, 21 December 2000.

Hidden History.

Posted on November 16, 2020 by jsh54

Robert Harris is the author of a series of historical-fiction thrillers.

Munich (2017). The 1938 conference between German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, French prime minister Edouard Daladier, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain marked the high point of Appeasement. While both Hitler and Chamberlain believed in what they were doing, other people on both sides had their doubts. Some of these people, British anti-appeasers and German anti-Nazis, tried to undermine their own leaders. Could knowledge of German plots to topple Hitler be communicated to the British? Could British anti-appeasers use this knowledge to shift Chamberlain toward a harder line? Would a harder line by the British provide an excuse to overthrow Hitler before he could set fire to the whole world?

Enigma (1995). One secret of the Second World War was British victory in breaking the code system, called “Enigma,” used by the German military for all radio communications. This allowed the British to read all enemy radio traffic, but with occasional, nerve-racking interruptions. A second, less well-preserved, secret of the Second World War was the Russian massacre in 1940 of thousands of captured Polish army officers. The mass graves were discovered by the German invaders in 1943.[1] Harris supposes that an Anglo-Polish cryptographer discovers the truth. Revealing it could wreck the Russo-British alliance.

V2 (2020). As the Second World War turned decisively against Germany, Hitler unleashed “vengeance weapons” created by advanced science. First, the V-1 “flying bombs,” then the V-2 ballistic missiles began to rain down on allied cities. Is there any way—technological or human—to halt the attacks? The question racks both an Allied intelligence officer and a German scientist tormented by his own deal with the Devil.

Fatherland (1992). Long after Nazi victory in the “last European war,” a German homicide detective discovers the Holocaust. Here Harris is thinking-through the implications of a German victory: a “united” Europe is dominated by Germany; the Soviet Union has been thrust back away from Europe; American “appeasers” (Joseph P. Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh) now head the government of the United States; and the Holocaust has been kept so completely secret that thought about the Jews never enter anyone’s noggin. Now, on the eve of a Hitler-Kennedy summit meeting, the truth starts to leak.

Harris is fascinated by the hidden parts of historical events. Knowledge of the German resistance to Hitler only came out after the war and then in dribbles; the Nazis meant for the Holocaust to remain hidden from history and all but one copy of the minutes from the Wannsee Conference were destroyed; at Nuremberg, the Katyn Wood massacre was blamed on the Germans; and the Enigma story remained secret until 1974.[2] In dramatizing these events, Harris restates a basic lesson of history. It didn’t have to be this way. People create History by the decisions they make and the actions they take.

He also leaves the reader wondering “What else is still hidden?”

[1] For another fictional take on the Katyn Wood discovery, see Philip Kerr, A Man without Breath (2013).

[2] See Peter Hoffmann, The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945 (1977); F.W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (1974); Allen Paul, Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Polish Massacre (1991)..

Crisis of Democracy.

Posted on November 4, 2020 by jsh54

One way of telling the history of the Twentieth Century is to describe the Triumph of Democracy. In 1900, only11 countries that could be described as political democracies: they granted all adult male citizens the right to vote and they applied the same laws to all citizens.[1] The “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy” only somewhat advanced their cause: by 1920, there were 20 democracies and many of them had granted women the vote. The interwar crisis and the Second World War centered on the defeat of aggressive tyrannies. Thereafter, however, democracy advanced by leaps and bounds. Western colonial empires were dismantled. Democracy expanded its meaning from the purely political to social democracy, and legal protections for civil rights were greatly extended. The Cold War ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. By 2003, there were 86 democracies in a world of 190-odd countries.[2]

Rather than continuing its advance, however, democracy has been in retreat since the mid-2000s.[3] Where democracy continues to exist, “democratic norms and institutions” are being hollowed-out. What has caused democracy to fall into disrepute? What has caused dictators and would-be dictators to gain a new credibility?

The crisis arises both from specific personalities and from larger and more long-term systemic changes. On the level of personalities, one can point to the interaction of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Many of the successes for democratization owed at least something to American government backing for democratic movements and institutions from the of Jimmy Carter’s administration through the Reagan-Bush era. Donald Trump’s administration has largely abandoned the “bully pulpit” on behalf of democracy in the shit-holes of the world. A host of minor-league wannabe-tyrants draw inspiration from Chinese and Russian aggression.

On the level of systems, two different sorts of problems exist. On the one hand. regularly-held elections in which citizens choose their own leaders are not enough to make a country democratic. Real, living democracy requires also a widely accepted “liberal” mindset. It requires independent institutions like courts, business, media, and non-governmental associations. Finally, it requires institutions of government (from the civil bureaucracy to the military to the intelligence services) that serve the nation, rather than any individual leader. These are the “democratic norms and institutions” that are being hollowed around the world.

On the other hand, all of these ills arise from the interaction of sclerotic political systems with increasingly indifferent citizens. Here it becomes difficult to solve the chicken-or-the-egg problem. Do frozen-up political systems foster citizen alienation? Does they shift citizens into wavering between solving their own problems through ad hoc means or hoping for a strong-man who can burst the dam? Does citizen alienation and indifference allow political systems to congeal around dead issues, rather the forcing them to address live issues?

Neither answer holds much promise for revived democracy.

[1] This bald definition invites enough qualifications to make your head spin. For example, women didn’t have the vote; many representative governments hedged-in responsive government to serve an anti-democratic distrust of “the mob”; and democracies ruled over-seas empires in an undemocratic fashion.

[2] Larry Diamond, “The Global Crisis of Democracy,” WSJ, 18-19 May 2019.

[3] That is, it began during the years of the Obama-Biden administration.

My Weekly Reader 30 October 2020.

Posted on October 30, 2020 by jsh54

The Twentieth Century might well be called “The Century of Monsters.” Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong wielded absolute power over great states.[1] They used that power to murderous ends from a combination of ideological fervor and personal pathology. Hitler and now Stalin have been the subjects of an abundant biographies, each one seeking to understand what they did and why they did it.

Ronald Suny, an experienced and admired historian of the Soviet Union has added a first installment on his own biography of Stalin.[2] It covers the years from Stalin’s 1878 birth in a remote backwater of the Tsarist Empire to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The isolated, inhuman, psychopathic dictator is hard to recognize in his greener days. Yes, he had a drunken, violent father. He also had a loving mother. Yes, he grew up in poverty and a society where the central government disdained his peripheral culture. So did many Europeans.

In another time and place, perhaps he would have been something different.[3] But he was born into a Russian Empire facing grave difficulties under bad leadership. The Tsar-Liberator Alexander II had ended serfdom on terms disadvantageous to the freed people; he had sought to reform the law courts; he had begun the process of teaching Russians how to govern themselves at the lowest levels. For all of these reforms he had been much hated and finally murdered. His successors had embarked on a rapid industrialization that filled cities with unhappy toilers and a growing middle class. However, the rulers had clamped down on reforms while mercilessly hunting dissenters and fostering anti-Semitism. Defeat by Japan in 1905 wrenched political concessions from Tsar Nicholas II. He soon repented this weakness.

Stalin came of age politically in this seething cauldron of unrest. He encountered Marxism during a brief passage through a seminary run on much the same lines as the Russian state. He encountered Lenin in books well before he met the man who led the extreme faction of Russia’s fragmented Marxist movement. For Lenin, Stalin organized strikes (which often turned violent), robbed banks, and did time in Siberian prison camps. For himself, Stalin schemed against other Bolsheviks closer to the center of power.[4] It became a life-long trait.

The First World War created a final crisis for the Tsarist regime. Calling up millions of peasants for military service (along with their draft animals) created a terrible food crisis in 1915 and 1916. Incompetent management of both the war and the economic mobilization to support it cost the government the last shreds of credibility with the mass of Russians.

Stalin played only a mid-rank role in the Revolution that followed. Food riots broke out in the capital city, Saint Petersburg, in February 1917. These triggered a revolt against the whole regime that flashed across the empire. The first victors were the established political parties: conventional bourgeois liberal parties and the moderate wing of the Social Democratic party. The Bolsheviks found their real base of power for the subsequent October Revolution in the industrial workers. Only then would Lenin—and Stalin—be on the road to dictatorship.

[1] Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini sought absolute power, but resistance from powerful forces in their own countries clapped a stopper on their tricks before they could reach the heights of their successors.

[2] Ronald G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (2020). Reviewed by Joshua Rubinstein, WSJ, 29 October 2020.

[3] Although it is hard to say what else he might have been. A book reviewer? “Eugen Onegin. BAM! BAM!”

[4] There has long been a suspicion that he worked as a police agent to thin out the competition.

Default Setting II.

Posted on June 24, 2019 by jsh54

Between 1775 and 1825, the revolts against the British and Spanish Empires in the Americas created a host of new nations. In the minds of European leaders, formal “empire” sold at a deep discount. However, the “empire of free trade” arose as a far more appealing idea. If non-European countries would pursue Western economic[1] and legal[2] policies, then you could get the same benefits of empire without the costs and heartbreak. The Western capital generated by industrialization could then safely flow toward the economic development of the rest of the world.[3] All would benefit.

The world of international investment brimmed with challenging opportunities in the later Nineteenth Century: Latin America, the United States, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and China for example. However, a willingness to fulfill commitments to Western economic and legal doctrines in exchange for Western investment varied from society to society.

Russia came late to industrialization and wanted to hurry the process forward. Russia possessed rich natural resources, but its primitive agriculture generated little wealth. Where to find the capital for rapid industrialization? Two solutions offered themselves. Either the country could borrow from rich foreign lenders or the peasantry could be squeezed very hard. Fearful of peasant unrest, Russian leaders sensibly opted for foreign borrowing.

Foreign lenders could discern positive and negative features in Russian borrowers. On the plus side were two essential factors. Russia’s gigantic territory housed vast amounts of minerals and other natural resources. In the middle of the century, the Tsar Alexander II had shoved through a series of “Great Reforms” intended to begin the modernization of Russia. Those reforms had not yet taken full hold, but they provided a foundation for further progress. On the negative side the “Great Reforms” had compounded the turmoil inside Russia. Rapid industrialization would intensify the strains. Then, Russia remained an absolute monarchy. After the death of Alexander II, the quality of leadership declined markedly.

Between 1890 and 1920 political considerations, rather than purely economic ones, exerted a growing influence over foreign investments in Russia. First, seeking escape from the diplomatic isolation into which it had been forced by Bismarck’s diplomacy, the French government encouraged lending to the Tsarist regime. This lending supported the eventual Franco-Russian alliance that surprised and alarmed German statesmen. Second, during the First World War, the French and British tried to prop up their tottering ally by ample credit. Third, the Bolshevik regime repudiated the Russian external debt.[4] The Bolsheviks understood the Red default as a stroke against global capitalism. It would—and, in France, did—gravely weaken the middle class savers who formed a vital support for bourgeois democracy.

At the same time, default contributed to making Soviet Russia an international pariah. Within a decade, the Soviets turned to the alternative strategy of squeezing assets out of the peasantry. As late Nineteenth Century leaders had foreseen, the human cost would be terrible.

[1] Raise no barriers to imports and exports; pursue “sound” money.

[2] Practice Western notions of the rule of law, especially the sanctity of contracts.

[3] See, David Landes, Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (1958).

[4] See: Hassan Malik, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution, 1892-1922 (2018).

Cyprus 15 May 2019.

Posted on May 16, 2019 by jsh54

In 1453, Constantinople—the capital of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire—fell to the Ottoman Turks. The Turks already had conquered most of mainland Greece, so all that remained was to conquer the outlying islands. Cyprus fell in 1571 and Crete followed in 1669. As part of their pacification of Cyprus, the Ottomans resettled about 30,000 Turks on the island. From the heights of their power, the Ottomans went into a long, slow, and humiliating decline. Barbarism and incompetence became the hallmarks of their rule. “Inter-communal” hostilities sank deep roots. Turks and Greeks hated each other. In 1878, Britain got the island away from the Ottomans.

During the 1950s–when the “Empire on which the sun never sets” was having gin and tonic in the back garden as dusk advanced—Greeks and Turks on Cyprus began to strike at each other and at the British. Both Greece and Turkey coveted the soon-to-be-independent island. So, blood stained the Fifties and Sixties in Cyprus.[1] Then the conflict heated up again in the 1970ss and 1980s. Vendetta became a cultural value and killers became respected men.

You wouldn’t recognize modern Cyprus. Tourism, banking, and maritime shipping are the pillars supporting its economy. The country has pulled in an estimated 60,000 workers from South East Asia. They come from the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India. They aren’t “crazy rich Asians.” Mostly they are poor women from counties that haven’t yet caught the tide of Capitalist progress. Old ways die hard. Sometimes the old intersects the new.

Mary Rose Tiburcio (c.1980-2018) grew up in the Philippines. She got married and had a child, but her marriage did not work out. Like many other Filipinas, Tiburcio moved to Cyprus along with her young daughter. Most come to work as domestic help: maids and cleaning women, and waitresses. Lonely and over-loaded with cares, she joined an on-line dating site.

In May 2018, both went missing. Well, no big deal: the Cypriot police have 80 unsolved missing person cases that run back as far as 1990. Perhaps they just left Cyprus for work on a cruise ship or went to some other country in search of better work.

Then, in mid-April 2019, a German tourist saw something unusual and notified the police. The police found Tiburcio’s body in a flooded mine-shaft. They also found another body, that of Arian Palanas Lozano (1990-2018). Then they found more bodies in a lake.

The police back-tracked through Ms. Tiburcio’s internet connections. One name that popped up an awful lot of times was that of a 35 year-old Army captain. He was questioned and eventually confessed to seven murders. No one thinks that that toll will stop there. As a result of his confession, police found the body of a Nepalese woman buried on a military firing-range.[2]

This sad case illustrates some of the features of contemporary globalization. Even among the rapidly-developing economies of South Asia, many people—especially women—get left out. Huge numbers of people—many of them women from less developed areas–migrate in search of a better life. Whether legal or illegal migrants, they perform essential, menial tasks and are prey to many kinds of abuse. Finally, the “sending” countries have neither the means nor the inclination to protect their citizens abroad. They are in the wind.

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypriot_intercommunal_violence.

[2] “Cyprus in Shock After a String of Killings,” NYT, 28 April 2019; Megan Specia, “Authorities in Cyprus Face Reckoning After Migrant Workers’ Killings,” NYT, 3 May 2019.

Brexit 27 March 2019.

Posted on March 27, 2019 by jsh54

OK, the whole Scottish Independence referendum gag left a lot of the English and Welsh bent out of shape. Started seeing a lot of Cross of Saint George flags in place of the Union [of 1717] Jack. I wonder what role all of this nationalist reaction played in the “Leave” vote on Brexit?

Really bad idea, not least because it will not stand for very long. The vote was old people against young people. So, soon enough, the old people will auger-in and the young people will want to re-apply to the EUwww!

Doesn’t mean that the old people don’t have a real grievance. The EU is run by “Eurocrats,” not by democratically-elected politicians. OK, democracy is flawed and lame. Still, it’s democracy.

OK, let/push Norn Iron inna independence, boyo. NI’s population is 1.87 million people. Southern Iron’s population is 4.78 million people. (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the population of Slovenia is 2 million people and change!) Historically, the two societies have hated each other. However, “Home Rule” no longer means “Rome Rule” as it did for most of the period of Irish nationalism. Good thing, too. I suppose that you can thank the Catholic Church–and all its departures from our normative behavior–for that. The Easter Accords haven’t worked out perfectly by any means, but there have been twenty years of relative peace and prosperity within the context of the European Union. Anyway, if the Republic were to make some kind of generous offer to Northern Ireland, then perhaps Northern Ireland would respond. In a big hurry. This would end the whole “back-stop” issue. Perhaps, Eire really doesn’t want 26 + 6 = 32. Integration would be fast and complicated. Maybe better to just take a deep breath and let it cook. While the most democratic society in Europe comes apart at the seams. Leave everyone with the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the Poles.

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