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It's been twenty years since my firm belief in a better way of life was vindicated. 17th November was the beginning of the end of an era shaped by collectivism, brutality and industrialised inhumanity. I have written about my experiences of communism on Samizdata before. Today I'll use someone else's words to describe the wasteland communism leaves behind.

In 1992, Peter Saint-Andre has written a disturbing, brilliant and accurate description of what communism does to the soul:

...the hunger that I found most disturbing was not of the body but of the soul. [...] The socialist state cared nothing for the life of the individual, and this was driven home in innumerable ways.

Yet the overall effect was not merely physical -- it was a deeply spiritual degradation. It is difficult to put that degradation into words. To me, the most striking sign of it was what I called "Eastern eyes". I could see and feel the resignation, the defeat, the despair, in the eyes of people I knew. It was an all-too-rare occurrence to come upon a person with some spark of life in his or her eyes (the only exceptions were the children, who had yet to have the life beaten out of them). If it is true that the eyes are windows onto the soul, then the Czech soul under socialism went through life all but dead.

It is tough for me to come up with something to say 20 years on that is not tinged with bitterness and disappointment and if not for the significant anniversary, I would have left this memory unturned. Despite the amazing change 1989 and its aftermath brought to my life I feel no closure over the past and a sense of proportion in the way the fall of communism has been 'handled'. Today we should be looking back at the last 20 years counting the many communists who died in prison or are still rotting there... I can only hope that future generations will revisit the past and will have far lower tolerance of collectivism and totalitarianism. It may be a futile hope as today's teenagers have little knowledge of the world my generation grew up and my parents lived in. And so I am bitter and disappointed that people can say the word "communism" without spitting.

I am also bitter and disappointed because those who opposed communism have not won. It is still with us, in the idiotic juxtapositions of Nazism and communism, or socialism and free-market, used by those who aspire to communism and justify it by positing Nazism as the greater evil. It still raises its ugly head in those who despise free-markets and attempt to put a human mask on socialism by pointing out 'failures' of capitalism. Rather hard as socialism, like all totalitarianisms, has no face. It is the ultimate denigration of humanity, destruction of individuality, and subjugation of human beings to the vast merciless machine of control and power.

Communism is still with us in China and North Korea. One befriended by the West, the other frowned upon... but neither is ever challenged because of the oppression of its people, and only when it manages to 'inconvenience' the rest of the world. Once it falls, it will be horrifying and beyond belief to examine the monstrosities committed by the communists in the light of day. Again, I can only hope that the world will be shamed and aghast at letting this happen for so long. Until then, we only have testimonials such as this: Undercover in the Secret State

I am grateful to those who remember, struggle to understand and explain communism, and especially to those who have managed to capture something of the nature of the beast. Here are the ones I found. Please feel free to share yours.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression - the reference book of the communist evil with a tag line "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit"

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

The Lives Of Others captures the paranoia and danger of an Orwellian world where everyone is monitored and, unusually for such world, shows impact of the individual as making a difference. Here is my review.

Burnt By The Sun (Unaveni slnkom) from a sunny day to Stalin's terror... One of the most powerful films I have seen for a long time. Possibly ever.

No End (Bez konca) - a complex, subtle and haunting film set in Poland 1981.

Repentance (Pokayanie) - for the more surreal amongst us. The first 'anti-stalinism' film I have ever seen and will never forget. I remember sitting through the entire credits at the end, stunned and shaken. For context, this was screened in Czecho-Slovakia, publicly, in a cinema in 1987!

The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Terror in the 1930s - from the book review:

It is impossible, of course, to undo the tyrant's crimes. But one of the tasks writers have set themselves, in the last 50 years, is at least to preserve the memory of the dead, and so to resist the tyrant's historical arrogance.

The book's opening paragraph makes the history come the full circle, back to the suffering of the individual:

The dead cannot speak. Can one retrieve their voices? Death under I.V. Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953, has been written about but the dead themselves remain elusive because their voices have been lost to us. The present book is an attempt to recover the voices of those executed under Stalin.

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The following is an account of a visit to Chernobyl I made over the summer. However, first an only slightly related personal plea, if anyone in our wonderful techie readership has expertise in the electrical systems of Hitachi hard drives, or knows a business with specific expertise in data recovery from such drives, could you please read this and get back to me. I would stress that expertise is more important than location: if you are or know someone really good in Taipei or Fresno, that is still greatly helpful.

In 1986 I was in my final year of high school in Australia. The Cold War was still in force, and although some liberalisation had occurred in the Soviet Union, it felt like part of the natural order of things. The USSR was dark, strange, mysterious, and seemingly eternal. There was a wall down the middle of Europe, and nothing was more stark than the two sides of that wall. In April that year, workers at a nuclear power plant in Sweden detected excessively high levels of radiation. After briefly panicking about their own reactor, they realised that the radiation levels were higher outside than inside the building, and that the radiation was coming from somewhere else. Within a few days we knew that there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Over the years, we have learned more about what happened, and the word "Chernobyl" has entered the world vocabulary, at times as a general word denoting a terrible catastrophe or destruction. We learned of firemen sacrificing their lives to contain the disaster, of evacuations of cities, and eventually of a strange forbidden zone that reflected the times and earned a place in certain kinds of popular culture. Even culture that preceded it sometimes now seems to have a strange sense of being about it.

I am not usually one for organised tours, but there are places where one has no other alternative. Sometimes one needs the expertise of a local, and sometimes there are places in which one is simply not permitted to go other than on an organised tour. The so called Zone of Alienation around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is such a place.

In any event, in June I visited Kiev (*) in the Ukraine. I have been pushing further east into the former communist countries on my travels in recent times, and going to the Ukraine was an obvious next step. I have still not been to Russia - the amount of nonsense that one must go through to simply get a Russian visa rather puts me off - but the Ukraine is now in an interestingly semi-westernised state where one can get there on discount airlines and most westerners no longer require a visa, but which is outside the EU and NATO. Democracy and what middle class that exists is relatiely fragile, and one still can encounter Soviet style bureaucracy. Businesses from further west tread cautiously.

However, my main reason for going was that I wanted to see that mysterious forbidden zone.

A number of tour organisations advertise tours of Chernobyl. They have a slightly odd way of quoting prices - basically, they quote the total cost for the tour party, rather than for individuals. The implication is that there are only a few tours, and they do not get enough people to fill them up every day. This seems a slightly strange way to encourage demand, as I was perfectly willing to pay the $180 per person for part of a group, but not the $600+ for a tour by myself. However, I sent an e-mail to one of the tour companies giving several days on which I could come, and asking whether it was possible to join an existing group on one of those days. I received an e-mail back straight away confirming a convenient date, and after paying some money (through a local Ukrainian online payment service that seemed rather more encrypted than I would encounter further west) and sending my passport number in order that the Ukrainian government could issue a permit for me to visit Chernobyl, everything was organised. At least, it was organised if I could reconcile the (Latin) address to meet with the (Cyrillic) street signs and maps. The evening before the tour, I walked to what I believed was the correct location, and found a travel agency, but no sign of the company I had sent money to or any indication that here was where tours of Chernobyl started. Clearly, Chernobyl tourism was not that well developed, and was run by people without offices in central Kiev.

However, no problem. When I returned in the morning I was greeted by someone named Sergei, and I discovered that there were about nine people going to Chernobyl that day. I paid the balance of the fee (in Ukrainian currency, quoted at a surprisingly fair exchange rate charged from the USD fee quoted) and introduced myself to the other passengers. One of them was Czech, another was Polish, and the remainder were Finns. I asked one of them if they were traveling together, but no: they had mostly signed up for the tour independently. I didn't ask why Finns in particular were touring Chernobyl. The simple reason was that Helsinki simply was not that far, but I allowed my mind to imagine the Finns coming to see what their forefathers had fought so hard to avoid being forced to join.

Soon, we were on the road. Chernobyl is close to the border with Belarus, a little over 100km north of Kiev. When the power plant was first planned, there were proposals to build it only 25km from central Kiev - almost in the suburbs of the city. However, although the glorious system of socialism meant that accidents were not possible, the Soviet Academy of Sciences had none the less had second thoughts, and the location of the plant had been moved 100km away.

As we drove north, Sergei told us various things about the tour. ("This is Mikhail. He's our driver. He doesn't speak any English but he's a nice guy") Some history of the disaster, one or two pieces of which were clearly folklore rather than fact. (When the disaster had occurred, humans had been unable to detect the radiation, but animals had some primeval sense of such things and had fled). Instructions that we should be careful and not hurt ourselves on any broken glass or any other detritus in the forbidden zone, for if such things happened then they might not be able to conduct such tours again in the future. Warnings that we should not take any photographs of the fences or security detail around Chernobyl. Taking photographs of the site itself would be fine, but the security around it was forbidden. Bureaucrats and officials are the same everywhere.

After an hour or so, we were at the outer boundary of the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This originally consisted of a circle 30km in radius around the site of the accident. It has been adjusted in places and is no longer an exact circle: contamination is very uneven and the boundary has been adjusted in various places to reflect this. The 30km zone crosses the border between Ukraine and Belarus, and there is a separate zone controlled by Belorussian authorities on the other side of the border. To enter the 30km zone, one must go through a checkpoint, and present one's passport to the Ukrainian border guards who monitor the zone. The check was reasonably thorough: my name was checked off a list and I was compared with the picture on my passport. Whether there was some actual reason for this check or it is just some lingering post-Soviet bureaucratic, thing, I have no idea. I can understand a desire to keep people out who are not explicitly on a tour, but the point of establishing much more than that I am genuinely a foreign tourist rather escapes me.

I was not permitted to take photographs of the checkpoint, but it looked just the same as any other military checkpoint anywhere else. The last time I went through such a checkpoint was when I visited the world's other most famous forbidden zone, the one between the Koreas. The buildings had the same built of corrugated iron quality. The fences looked the same. The soldiers looked the same. They wore different uniforms and had different ethnicity, but the "world weary military" quality overrode any such considerations.

And what is this place called? Well, the Ukrainian name is Зона відчуження Чорнобильської, which Google's language tools translate as "Chernobyl Exclusion Zone". The most common full name in English is the Zone of Alienation, although in conversation I never heard anyone refer to it as anything other than "The Zone".

In any event, we were soon enough through the checkpoint. As we drove through the zone, we were told of the so called "samosely", people who moved back into the zone after the evacuation of 1986. After the disaster the people who lived close to the reactor were quickly evacuated. They were not told the full details of what had happened, and in order that they would leave quickly and not spend too much time collecting their possessions, they were told that they would only have to leave their homes for a few days. This led to complications - a large group of people who really had nowhere to go. In the places they were taken, they were not especially welcome. Children were mocked and rejected for being "contaminated", and adults received similar, perhaps less overt prejudice. This led to a substantial number of people - low tens of thousands in number - returning illegally to the Chernobyl zone. In the years since, and despite various attempts from the Ukrainian government to evict them some of these people have always stayed. In recent years the Ukrainian authorities have come to tolerate and regularise this situation. People living in the zone are provided with electricity, and a doctor is sent round to provide necessary medical care.

The number of such people has dwindled and is now relatively small - of the order of 400 people, the youngest of who are apparently in their late 40s. Approximately half of the samosely live in Chernobyl. As drove towards the town, a couple of gaps in the trees were pointed out, through which the frames of derelict buildings could be seen. Occasionally, it was pointed out that people lived there. "They don't like visitors".

I can imagine.

Soon, though, we were in Chernobyl town.

Chernobyl is an ancient town, dating from at least as early as the 12th century. A century ago it was a major centre of Hasidic Judaism and the vast bulk of its population was Jewish, and later it gained a substantial Polish population. The 20th century was particularly terrible for such people in this part of Europe. The Poles were deported to Kazakhstan during Stalin's purges of the 1930s, and almost of of its Jews died in the Holocaust. In 1986 the town had a population of approximately fourteen thousand Ukrainians.

When the site was chosen for Ukraine's first nuclear power plant in the 1960s, Chernobyl was the closest town, from which the power plant got its unofficial name. Officially it was the Vladimir I Lenin Nuclear Power Plant. However, the town was not close enough or large enough to house the workers for the power plant, and new, closer cities were created for this. Approximately 120,000 people in total lived in what is now the forbidden zone. The town is in the outer zone in an area of this zone, in an area of relatively low contamination, making it a convenient place for administrative personnel and watch staff to be stationed. People who work in the zone are not allowed to spend long continuous times inside it, but such a location is none the less convenient. In addition, approximately half of the people living illegally in the zone live in Chernobyl.

That said, Chernobyl looks nothing like an ordinary Ukrainian town. Tasks such as cutting grass and painting buildings are not tasks that it is worth going into the zone to do in any serious way, so the town is relatively dilapidated, run down, and overgrown, even the exteriors of buildings that are occupied. And a few hundred people now occupy a town that was once occupied by fourteen thousand, so the bulk of the town is the same green overgrown remains of buildings that one finds throughout the zone. Those administrative functions that take place in the zone exist in the sort of functional prefabricated buildings that long standing but supposedly temporary military operations work out of everywhere.

Terrible events spawn bureaucracies with long names. This is a basic law of the universe

We were taken into one of the prefabricated buildings, sat down, and briefed. We were joined by someone who was described as "a former power plant worker", whose name we may not have been told. He greeted Sergei warmly. He was wearing fatigues, and spoke no English. He may or may not have actually been a former power plant worker, but his bearing now was "soldier". He was clearly our official minder on the trip. After being briefed, we were asked to sign a disclaimer, basically stating that we would not hold the Ukrainian government responsible for any accidents, subsequent illnesses, experiences in which we grew extra limbs or heads, or anything at all that might or might not have occurred as a consequence of our tour. Once again, the feeling and procedure was utterly identical to what had happened in that other zone in Korea. The disclaimers even seemed to be printed in the same 1960s font on the same low grade recycled paper. The one difference was that in Korea, we each signed a disclaimer on a different piece of paper that was given to us as a souvenir at the end of the tour. In Chernobyl, we all signed the back of the same piece of paper, that was retained. Clearly, the tourist aspects of forbidden zone tourism were not quite as well developed here. Give them time.

Once again like the Korean DMZ, Chernobyl is famed in certain circles as an instance of an "involuntary park": a place where wildlife can thrive without human activity. We saw little animal life on the tour, although there was certainly evidence of its presence. There were a large number of cats in Chernobyl town, however. This was covered in the briefing. "Don't touch them. They have rabies". I didn't touch them.

After the briefing, it was time to proceed. First stop was the memorial to the firemen who were the first men on the scene of the accident in the early hours of 26 April 1986. Nobody knew what had occurred, but the reactor building caught fire. As was their job, these men arrived on the scene and put the fire out. Over the next few days, they died. Brave men.

The plaque on the memorial translates approximately as "They saved the world". An exaggeration, one thinks, although they undoubtedly did save many lives. As I said, brave men.

Before we reached the power station itself, we got a brief look at the "Chernobyl 2" array in the distance. Although the Chernobyl reactors were of a design that was optimised for the production of Plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons as well as for the production of electricity and as such probably did have Cold War relevance, the plant was not secret, closed, or inaccessible. On the contrary, it was a showcase, and was presented as a model "Atoms for peace" project, in which the superior Soviet system provided for its people. However, there was a genuine Cold War installation nearby, the huge Duga-3 over the horizon radar array that was responsible for the "Russian Woodpecker" signal that was well known to shortwave radio operators in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1986 this was a sensitive site and very secretive in operation. It contained an underground bunker designed to survive a nuclear attack and provide power and resources for survival for as much as ten years after. As such, it had all the general creepiness that we associate with the Cold War. When people were evacuated in 1986, nobody knew what had happened. It was believed by many for some time that the evacuation had something to do with this Cold War station of unknown function, and that saying it had to do with the power plant was perhaps a cover-up. This radar array has long been closed, but it still looks weird in the distance.

In the Chernobyl zone, some places look like they were abandoned before the dawn of time. And yet, at the same time, other places look like they were left at the end of a day's work, and that the people who left them will return and continue the job tomorrow. If tools were taken out of a closet and not returned, then they may still be sitting there on a table, untouched. And if a nuclear reactor was half built and the crane was placed in the correct place to lift part of a wall tomorrow, it is still there.

Chernobyl was intended to have ten reactors in all, and to be the largest power station in the world, providing power for much of Eastern Europe. At the time of the accident, four were operating. The disaster occurred in the newest of these, reactor number four. Reactors five and six were under construction at the time, and these were the first that we approached.

Reactors five and six are frozen in time. They are construction sites of buildings that are half complete. The cranes on top seem in the middle of a job. Even if a construction job is abandoned, cranes are not normally left suspended about them, as cranes are valuable and useful elsewhere. Here, though, the cranes are radioactive and dangerous, so nobody has been near them in more than 20 years.

For us, though, the radiation level was getting higher, and it was demonstrated that it was significantly higher in the soil and vegetation than inside the bus.

In the distance, though, were reactors one through four. Reactors one and two were closest. We stopped some distance from them, next to one of the canals that brought the immense amounts of water necessary for a power station complex of this magnitude from the nearby Pripyat river. We stood on a bridge across the canal and looked at the large number of fish swimming in the water below. Jokes were made about how a few would be caught so we could eat them for lunch.

We looked at reactors one and two. These were the oldest reactors, and (like reactor three) they continued operating for some years after the disaster at reactor four. A huge amount of capital had been invested in them, and Ukraine needed the electricity. So they ran, reaching the end of their useful lives in 1996. Reactor four was shut down in 2000, before reaching the end of its useful life, under pressure from the US government, amongst others, principally because the sentence "The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is still operating" was enough to give panic attacks to half the world.

The most important thing to notice is that these reactors contain no enclosing protective domes as nuclear plants typically do in the west. When an American reactor at Three Mile Island had a partial meltdown in 1979, the radioactivity was successfully sealed from the atmosphere, and the disaster was fully contained. Soviet reactors were built with less resources and with safety much less in mind, so no domes.

Next to reactors one and two was a truly immense electrical power distribution system. When they said this was a huge power plant, they weren't kidding.

We drove around the reactor complex, to reactors three and four. We were not permitted to take photographs of the military fence, but were assured that we would get a close view of the reactor a litle further on.

Which we certainly did. We were brought to a viewing area next to a memorial, no more than a couple of hundred metres from the remains of reactor four.

This is it. This is the remains of the worst nuclear disaster in history. This is the site of what is somehow one of the more iconic places of the events of the time I have lived in. When that event happened, I wouldn't have imagined I would get so close a mere two decades later, and I am not sure if the nuclear disaster or the Soviet Union was the more forbidding thing.

We spent some time near the remains of the reactor: simply looking at it; reading the words on the monument; taking one another's photographs in front of it; looking at readings on Geiger counters that were not especially dangerous in the short term, but you wouldn't want to spend weeks there.

Unfortunately, the photograph of me in front of reactor number four is just about the worst photograph of me ever taken, and even with my legendary lack of vanity about my own appearance, I will not embed it in this page. This is a shame, given there will probably never be another photograph of me in such an extraordinary place.

Shortly after the accident, reactor number four looked like this:

Shortly after the accident, it was enclosed in a structure called the sarcophagus. Information is vague about the subsequent health of the people who built it. However, it was not particularly strong, and additional construction and strengthening work has taken place in recent years to prevent it from collapsing. It still looks nothing like how you would imagine a western nuclear power plant to be, before of after an accident.

There was not terribly much to be said. We just stood for a time and looked. There was, however, more to see. Most particularly the city of Pripyat.

As I have recounted, Chernobyl was the nearest town to the site of the power station when the station was planned. However, it was not nearly big enough or close enough to house the approximately fifty thousand workers necessary to built and operate the plant. In any event, the power plant was a Soviet model project, and it needed a Soviet model city close to it to support it. Pripyat was built, named after the local river.

When the accident occurred,the level of contamination was highly variable depending on direction. A fair bit went in the direction of Pripyat, and to get there we had to cross the directly downwind path of contamination. We were told that we were about to visit the most radioactive place on the whole trip. Geiger counters were brought out, and we watched the numbers double, triple, and quadruple, to a level far higher than we had seen near the reactor itself. Out the window we could see overgrown grass fields. It was clear nobody stopped here for trivial reasons. We drove through. It was clearly not a place for a roadside picnic.

Soon, though, we were in Pripyat. In some ways it was like the other, smaller towns we had visited. Buildings were overgrown with vegetation, but there was still some structure to the vegetation. Avenues through the trees were still there, and could be passed through with some effort.

The buildings were taller than in the other towns. I have visited a few Soviet and other Warsaw pact towns in my time, and this had clearly been a nice one, as they went. The people who lived in it were once no doubt proud of it, and proud of what they did.

Our first stop was a school. Here, more dramatically that anywhere else on the trip, we were exposed to the combination of lengthy decay and rapid abandonment. Pripyat is interesting in the same way that Pompeii is interesting. An outpost of an ancient and otherwise destroyed culture was suddenly abandoned there, and is preserved for modern view. Pripyat is mostly residential buildings, and these have apparently been fairly comprehensively looted. However, schools are of little interest to looters. However, they are of great interest to anthropologists, because as New Labour and Barack Obama know well, they are amongst the chief centers of indoctrination.

Although the school contained a lot of broken glass and fallen over bookshelves and broken walls, it also contained a remarkable amount of preserved life. Books that could still be read. Blackboards that could still be read. Chemistry tables. And more Soviet stuff. Ideological lectures. Portraits of Lenin. Portraits of good Soviet citizens standing in front of the factories.

We were taken to a room in which English language classes had taken place, and there was lots of surviving teaching materials. I have never encountered a set of school or government provided foreign language learning materials in my life that did not attempt to simultaneously teach an ideological agenda, and those of the Soviet Union were somewhat predictable, talking about the US and UK from a class viewpoint, and painting the United States as a nation of warmongers intent on creating a world holocaust.

Next we were taken to a room full of gas masks and protective clothing, images of guns, tanks and aircraft, and a place where safety drills and precautions were taught.

This had nothing to do with the fact that we were only a few kilometres from the worst nuclear accident in history - this was the classroom where children were taught military skills in order to perform their assigned role in the third world war. The proximity to the catastrophe made it profoundly creepy however.

In truth, the whole school was perhaps the oddest place on the whole excursion. I wandered around it for a time, lost in thought - sufficiently so that I failed to notice that the rest of my party had left the school. After a time, our official guide and minder - the gentleman in fatigues - came back into the school and gestured that I should return to the bus, where I found the rest of the party waiting for me.

Next stop was a sports centre. Huge indoor pools with diving board - basketball courts. The emphasis seemed to be on Olympic sports. Not surprising, given the history of the USSR. Once again, these had once been fine facilities. A model town. Atoms for peace. Superior athletes being created by a superior system.

Then we went to an abandoned amusement park. The decrepit Ferris Wheel is perhaps the iconic image of Pripyat in its many pop-cultural references. There is no health and safety crap here, although one perhaps wishes there had been a little more to apply to the people running the power plant in 1986. Somebody from another tour party visiting at the same time climbed halfway up it to pose for a photograph.

The amusement park surrounding the wheel is quite large. (Once again, model town). Dodgem cars. Rotors.

A small boat shaped seat from one of the other rides, sitting on the pavement.

>

Photographs of the same place taken by other people five, or even ten years ago show the same boat sitting in the same place. One can imagine few other places on earth where such a thing would remain in the same place, untouched, for so long. Once again, the sense of Pompeii.

There was one final desination before leaving Pripyat. We went into one of the larger and more structurally sound buildings - a civic structure of some kind. Perhaps a hotel. Perhaps a municipal or office building. We went up a few flights of steps onto the roof. There was fine view of Pripyat, and, more importantly, the nuclear power plant in the distance. Sergei let his imagination run away with him a little more, explaining that nobody really knew what was going on inside the power plant. Perhaps another reaction would occur, and another disaster - even a nuclear explosion. Some things work better in computer games than reality, but the weirdness of the place does give a sense that anything is possible. He expressed his thoughts about how the whole idea of nuclear power was questionable. I didn't really agree - the Chernobyl accident was caused by appalling safety standards and horrible design, other sources of energy aren't necessarily safe, and I am more inclined to blame the Soviet Union than nuclear power per se - but I had to concede he had a certain justification for feeling this way. In the Ukraine, nuclear power had led to something terrible. And looking at Pripyat and the Chernobyl plant was profoundly unsettling. This is a deeply unnerving place. For people who are inclined to nightmares about the 20th century, this is one of the exhibits.

However, the tour was more or less over. We returned to our bus, and drove back to the town of Chernobyl. We returned to the building where we had signed our disclaimers earlier. Here we put our hands on a small radiation detector to determine if we were more or less clean, and entered a dining room. I asked Sergei what would have happened if I had not been clean, and his answer was "Not very much". We were served an excellent and quite leisurely Ukrainian meal of about five courses. Probably half of the people in the room were tourists, and the other half were guides, military people of different kinds, and people who had other business in the Zone. The mood in the room was quite warm and jovial. People in the middle of a day's work were enjoying a good lunch. Human nature is universal, and the weirdness of the place and of the jobs did not change this. No attempt was made to sell us anything, which makes me thing, once again, that this is a relatively immature tourist market.

Lunch over, we headed south. At the edge of the Zone, where we had had to present our passports on the way in, we were required to disembark from our bus to once again be checked for radiation. This time, we had to enter a fully body detector. As it happened, I was the only member of our party who triggered the radiation detector. I tend to think the rest of the party were almost pleased that someone had triggered it so that they could see the consequences.

Up and at them

On the other hand, I was Radioactive Man, and I was perhaps personally less pleased. However, as Sergei had told me earlier, not a great deal happened, I walked back outside, and some blokes in uniform washed my shoes. After that, I once again entered the radiation detector, and this time I did not set it off and I was allowed to leave The Zone.

We then drove back to Kiev. On the bus back, the Czech member of the touring party told me about his stop in Odessa on the way up, and urged me to go there on the one full day I had left in the Ukraine. It would be easy enough. I could get the overnight train, then spend the day in Odessa, and then get the overnight train back. My thought in response to this was that I am not as young as I used to be. Just finishing his commentary, Sergei told us about his future hopes for expanding his tour company. Apparently he was just about to gain approval to run tours to an abandoned Intercontinental Balistic Missile silo south of Kiev. The USSR has left interesting and horrifying ruins.

Another for next time, perhaps.

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Here is a story about a woman, who recently died at the great age of 98. She helped send thousands of young Jewish people to safety in WW2. This is an amazing story. Her tale needs to be more widely known. RIP.

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Tom Palmer on the late, Marxist philosopher, G.A. Cohen, who died a few days ago:

Millions had to die so that Cohen and his rich friends could enjoy "a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism". Words almost fail me. But not entirely. He should have spent his life begging forgiveness from all of the people who suffered from his pro-Soviet (he spent a good bit of his youth as a Soviet propagandist, which was essentially a family enterprise) and pro-Communist activities. He was no different than any old National Socialist who might have regretted that National Socialism wasn't nationally socialist enough, but who enjoyed the “mental space” it created to construct fantasies of an ideal life.

They say it is wrong to speak ill of the dead, or at least, recently deceased. But given the enormity of the evil associated with Soviet Russia - the millions killed, starved to death and generally immiserated - that I consider it to be a moral failing not to call out those who chose to look the other way, or make excuses, for what that regime represented, and what it did. G.A. Cohen was more honest that some Marxists/egalitarians in at least recognising the force of the classical liberal critique of his views; he did, for example, appreciate that the Lockean idea of Man as a "self owner" and the associated right to pursue the acquisition of property was a serious challenge to collectivism. But in the end he brushed it aside. I did not realise that Cohen was an apologist for the Soviet Empire in the way that Palmer describes. That came as quite a shock.

By the way, G.A. Cohen's arguments are nicely and civilly dissected by Jan Narveson's splendid book, The Libertarian Idea. And Tom Palmer's own book looks also to be well worth checking out.

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Over a year ago, when parts of the UK were inundated by floods, I remember the Spectator's Rod Liddle moan that one reason why the water was running off the ground and into the rivers so much faster was because of all the additional immigrants crowding into the UK at the time. (Yes, really). It was a nonsense argument: much of the worst flooding was in places like Gloucestershire rather than in London, the former hardly being a hotbed of immigration. But hey, if you are in the business of defending zero-sum economics and the "lump of labour fallacy", not to mention hold a general dislike of foreigners messing up the view, any stick will do.

It turns out that tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of immigrants want to go back to their country of origin because of the changing economic landscape, and may do so. So Rod and his other worriers can sleep easy. Britain is now able to breathe free (sarcasm alert).

On a side-note, I'd add that with a recession now occuring, dislike of "foreigners" taking "our jobs" is going to become an even more toxic political issue, particularly where among the low-paid, arrivals from abroad do depress wage rates, if only in the short run. But then one should consider the shocking fact that during the boom years, immigrants were taking half of the new job vacancies in the UK, despite there being a large amount of unemployment among the indigenous population, a terrible indictment of the tax and welfare system's destruction of work incentives.

(43)

A question that occurred to me in some of the recent jousting on the Samizdata comment threads about Russia's annexation of parts of Georgia was this: what other countries might get in the cross-hairs? It seems to me that there could be a real risk that Ukraine and the Baltic states like Latvia - many of which have Russian-speaking populations living among them - might "provoke" poor old put-upon Russia to send in the tanks. Questions:

What, if anything, will the NATO powers do about it?

What should such powers do?

Is the risk serious anyway?

(16)

Yesterday in the British Press, much was made of the Soviet, sorry, Russian threat to nuke Poland if it hosted American, sorry, NATO defensive missile systems.

THREAT TO NUKE POLAND... well, really? What the Ruskies are saying is not "if you allow these systems on your soil, we will nuke you", but rather "in the event of a war between NATO and Russia, we will attack military targets in Poland, which is a NATO member".

Well no shit? This is hardly a revelation. Yet to read many of the article headlines you would think it was a clear and present danger, which it clearly ain't. Move along, not much to see here.

That said, clearly what the Russian general said is a crude attempt to intimidate Poland, albeit politically and not actually by making a threat of imminent action. Also predictably it has stiffened already deep hostility to Russia across Central Europe. Good, it is probably exactly what Europe needed.

(72)

Earlier this afternoon Perry and I had a lengthy editorial telephone discussion on the subject of Georgia. While we agreed broadly there was one area in which we had intense debate until I finally figured out how we were talking past each other.

The question is, how the hell did US intelligence assets miss the Russian Black Sea fleet movements? How did they miss the massive transport job of the troops and their logistical tail? They did not just materialize in position. It takes time and planning to make such moves. I will leave the detail of that to Perry as he seems to have been thinking about it in great detail.

My take is there is a limited amount of time available on the black satellites. The manpower and resources have been re-targeted on the Middle East. Orbits have been shifted to give maximal coverage in those areas of interest and experienced personnel have moved to 'where the action is'.

This is not to say Russia is being ignored. It is however a very big place and I am going to guess that the time between scanning particular areas has greatly lengthened. Russian troop movements are mainly rail based and with enough eyeballs and Cold War era periodic coverage one might hope to pick up changes in traffic patterns and notice "something is going on". But... this requires a certain periodicity in coverage. Changes in static positions like silos and strategic air bases are much easier to pick up even with occasional coverage. Dynamic changes, such as train and road movements are a different story. You have to have a satellite taking pictures at just the right time or often enough to pick up a signal just by chance.

This is what took Perry and I awhile to meet minds on: I have been thinking of this issue as a communications/information theory problem. How often do you have to sample an area to notice a change in the density of train traffic? I would posit it would have to be several times a week at the very least if the spike in traffic was huge and extended; if the spike were smaller and flatter you would need to sample daily or multiple times daily. You would have to do it at night and through clouds as well if you were to get a statistical value high enough to ring alarm bells. It is an issue of sampling rate versus the highest detectable signal frequency, pure and simple.

I doubt they have even been scanning large areas of Russia more than a few times a week (I suspect much less often) except in areas of nuclear strategic interest. They could easily miss large troop movements in a part of Russia which is not of great national interest to the United States.

Let the discussion begin. There is a lot of meat on this bone!

(6)

As if an answer to my suggestion to document the communist history in Eastern Europe through the lives and eyes of individuals, the PLOTKI, an on-line and print magazine about culture and society in Central and Eastern Europe, invites contributions to a project Changes from Below:

The project “Changes From Below“ aims to collect pieces of research which highlight personal stories behind movements against ‘‘communist’’ dictatorship in Central and Eastern Europe.

... Whilst historical investigation on resistance to ‘communist’ rule often focuses on historical ‘grand events’ such uprisings as Prague Spring 1968, Hungarian Autumn 1956, 17 June 1953 in GDR or Poland in the 80's, Plotki wants to research the smaller stories, personal experiences and the rumours which slipped through the historical sieve and serve them up via various artistic means such as writing, photography, graphics, film or audio. We are thinking about the Orange Alternative in Poland who attended illegal meetings of dwarfs, and were arresting for handing out tampons to women; the spontaneous 'community supported agriculture' networks that evolved during Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania, and that kept urban people alive by illegally supplying them with food; or Czechoslovakia’s Society for Happier Contemporary Times; or the diversity of ecological movements as the Umweltbibliothek (an environment documentation centre) in East Berlin, Ekoglasnost in Bulgaria or groups of people concerned with ecological damage in Bohemia; or factory self-management in Yugoslavia; or the protestant churches resistance in GDR; or the countless other inspirational, exciting and quirky forms of resistance which once inhabited the region.

Great stuff and worthwhile effort, no doubt. Just one minor gripe - what's with the quotation marks/inverted commas around the word communist?!

(36)

In one of the most beautiful avenues of Budapest, Andrássy Road, is a museum dedicated to the two 20th century horrors, Nazism and Communism. House of Terror (Terror Háza) does not differentiate between the two toxic ideologies. After all, they are the same thing with different packaging – one in black, the other in red. That they hate and fought each other is not evidence to the contrary, merely evidence of territorial in-fighting.

In winter of 1944, when the Hungarian Nazis came to power, hundreds of people were tortured in the basement of the house in 60 Andrássy street. In 1945 Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Army. One of the first tasks of the Hungarian communists arriving with the Soviet tanks was to take possession of the location. The building was occupied by their secret police, the PRO, which was later renamed ÁVO, subsequently ÁVH (names for political police). The entire country came to dread the terrorist organisation. The ÁVH officers serving at 60 Andrássy Road were the masters of life and death. Detainees were horribly tortured or killed. The walls of the cellars beneath the buildings were broken down and transformed into a prison.

After the end of communism in Hungary, 60 Andrássy Road has become a shrine, the effigy of terror and the victims' memorial. At least in Hungary they recognised that the 'past must be acknowledged'. The exhibition is a visual feast, both in the artefacts displayed and in the symbolism of their arrangement. The rooms have themes and objects in them are meant to create an atmosphere as well as communicate facts. Alas, the visual beauty conjures an image of a retro nightmare - distant and unreal it masks the brutality and dull reality of communist terror.

There is an exquisitely designed hall dedicated to Soviet forced-labour and slave camps. There are reminiscences, photographs and the display cases contain relics, the original paraphernalia used by the people detained by the Soviets and taken to gulags. And yet, it does not squeeze your heart and make you sick to your stomach. The muted light and the droning voice of the audio guide fail to convey the tragedy. By trying to describe the suffering of many thousands, they miss the opportunity to make us feel the suffering of one, to put ourselves in their place, imagine our lives being arbitrarily and brutally torn apart. And to remember that this did not happen in some kind of parallel universe, that this is history next door.

I wanted to know the people whose meagre possessions I was looking at in the display cases. Their names, stories, family, circumstances, fates. I believe that the best and only way to understand Communism and Nazism is through the lives of individuals who were affected by it not through a historical methodology or chronological exposition.

And so we need to be told about their neighbours reporting and spying on them, children betraying parents, we need to hear the tales of endurance, mercy and resistance that no historical narrative can capture. We document history in such impersonal terms and yet there is nothing more powerful then actions of a man. We look for overarching explanations but historical causality without human beings and their behaviour leaves the patterns of history indistinct, lacking in colour and texture.

Everyday life is as important to understanding of what happens as are historical milestones. It might help people realise how little it takes for the society to find itself in a grasp of a toxic ideology and how gradual the decline can be, how unnoticed the erosion of freedom, dignity and moral strength.

If I had the time and resources, I would gather the human details about communism, not just the historical facts, and create a place where others can 're-live' the individual tales. I would try to explain what it took to survive and resist. I would address the connection between totalitarianism and bureaucracy - why is it that an already unhinged and all powerful regime is so obsessed with record-taking, papers and stamps, correct documentation...? I would point at the need inherent in any totalitarian ideology for an external enemy, and by extension its internal allies. I would expose the mundane and ridiculous reasons for which people were sent to prison, torture and death. I would throw light on the 'little helpers' without whom no authoritarian regime can succeed – the nosy neighbour, ambitious boss, jealous colleague, petty family member... and at the 'silent majority' who by 'minding their business' and 'just getting on with their lives' lend credence to the ravings of the power-mad ruling class. I would examine propaganda, not through the posters, broadcasts and mass demonstrations but through the eyes of children growing up under the barrage of idiotic but effective brainwashing.

And finally, I would bring up the horrors of arrest, detention, interrogations, beatings and torture, imprisonment and executions, hiding in history's basement and cellars. Both the victims and the interrogators. Who were the people who carried out the daily atrocities? What and how did they believe? Where are they now? Did they go back home to their families at the end of the day, having broken a few more bodies and spirits? Did they do this out of fear? Or were they merely sadists gravitating to the communism sanctioned violence towards their fellow human beings? I would name them and publicly decry their deeds, spell out their participation. The Nazis got that treatment but when will such judgement be upon the Communists? Why is the hammer and sickle not abhorred the same way the swastika is? After all, it has brought evil to many more people...

Failing that, here are the pictures from the House of Terror in Budapest. The museum is an excellent reminder of what happened in just one dreaded house. And to think that there were many more.

The photos were taken despite the ban on photography in the museum. I did play along and kept my camera away until I came across a quote that sums up the deranged mindset of a communist ideologue. I wanted to make a note of it to look it up later and the fastest way was taking a photo. After the first furtive but successful attempt, it was impossible to resist taking more pictures.

Here is the quote* that goes to the heart of implementation of communism - and any other totalitarian ideology. It eradicated any notion of individual responsibility and therefore freedom, autonomy, rights and justice. And that is the essence of terror.

We do not look for evidence, we do not attempt to uncover acts or agitation against the Soviets. The first question we ask is: where are you from, how were you raised, what was your profession? These questions determine the fate of the defendant. This is the essence of the red terror. - M.J. Lacisz, Chief of ÁVO, the Hungarian political police.

*Credit for the translation goes to Zoltán Módly. The Hungarian version: "Nem keresünk bizonyítékokat, tanúkat, nem akarunk szovjetellenes tetteket vagy agitációt leleplezni. Az első kérdés, ami minket érdekel: honnan származol, milyen volt a neveltetésed, mi volt a foglalkozásod? Ezek a kérdések döntenek a vádlott sorsáról. Ez a vörös terror lényege."

(4)

Along with these fine people, I will be one of the speakers at the Libertarian International conference in Warsaw on June 28-29. I will be speaking about how government regulation of radio spectrum flows through into such things as excessive roaming charges on your mobile phone, and leads to absurd states of affairs such as having a continent wide 3G mobile broadband network that is too expensive for anyone travelling outside their own country to actually use. This is course creates a vicious circle in which regulators feel they have to correct "market failures". I will be addressing the question of how much regulation (if any) is necessary in the first place.

It would be splendid to see any readers who feel like joining us at the conference and in Warsaw and an associated trip to Krakow on the following days. I know from experience that Warsaw is a fun and stimulating city, and I promise to mount an expedition to seek out vodka in bars with far too much chrome on Saturday night with anyone who cares to join me.

(17)

Today is 17th November, the day when the Velvet Revolution began 18 years ago. Since then there have been years when I did not 'commemorate' the event and there were years when I did. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting Eastern Europe and despite the trickle of bandwidth available where I was staying, I found myself watching old clips from the communist era on YouTube. The most surreal was not the absurdity of their content, the ridiculous gravitas of the communist propaganda but the memory of this rubbish being taken seriously and accepted as the norm.

I have written about 17th November 1989 already and what it meant to me. This year I prefer to share some images, which as usual, speak a thousand words. To those, let me add music and words of Karel Kryl whose songs used to be a constant companion in the years before the revolution. I was old enough to understand his bitter humour and lyrical cynicism. There is nothing soft or simple about Kryl's songs, they are hard hitting, harsh and without hope.

When armies of Warsaw Pact occupied Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 to suppress the democratization movement of Prague Spring, Karel Kryl released album Bratříčku zavírej vrátka (Close the Gate, Little Brother), full of songs describing his disgust over the occupation, life under the communist rule, and rude inhumanity and stupidity of the regime. The album was released in early 1969 and was banned and removed from shelves shortly thereafter. This work became an icon of the anti-communist movement for years to come — when he returned from exile in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, almost every little child in Czechoslovakia knew the lyrics of these songs by heart.

One of his most famous songs has been superimposed on video clips of the two historical events in Czechoslovakia - August 1968 and November 1989.

[Quick and dirty translation]
Little brother, don't sob, it is not a banshee
Don't be frightened, it is only soldiers,
Who arrived in sharp-edged metal caravans

It rains and it is getting dark
This night will not be short
The wolf has a yen for the lamb
Little brother, do close the gate!
Please close the gate!

(13)

In between getting depressed about the way things are going back in London, it is worth thinking about things that have improved in the last couple of decades. This city, with its beautiful Art Nouveau architecture (much of it designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of Sergei) was part of the Soviet Union a mere 20 years ago, with all the bleakness and tyranny that this implied. Today, it is modern and that is in the past, although still occasionally visible in the distance.

I can fly here from London for not much more than £50 return. Rather more importantly, Latvians are free to fly to London for not much more than £50 ($100 US) return, and free to live and work in the UK, and many other places.

The beer here is excellent, and the coffee not quite so excellent (a northern European thing in both cases, I think). One can sit outdoors in beer garden in the evening, listening to live music, drinking beer, and watching a TV news channel that the proprietors of the bar have provided for patrons. It is like being in many other places, other than that the languages and channels are different. Even in Germany one often seems to find oneself watching Sky News or CNN in English. Not so much here.

Here, despite the similarity of the stories, there is still some sense that there is a bear in the room. On the other hand, watching a Chelsea game with commentary in Russian seems perfectly right, somehow, so I suppose the invasion has gone both ways.

(Click for larger versions of the above photographs).

Correction: When I first posted this I wrote "Art Deco" when I meant "Art Nouveau". Also I misspelled Mikhail Eisenstein's name. Apologies. Must get more sleep.

(39)

The next time the Russian airforce tries to test the UK air defences (which seem to be working fine), perhaps the boys in grey-blue should paint a big sign on the side of the Typhoon fighters saying this: "The way to Harvey Nichols' jewellery department and Chelsea FC is that way, chaps".

Seriously, what the expletives deleted does Putin think he is trying to prove, exactly? It is not as if one of those "Bear" aircraft are state-of-the-art. Ironically, there has been a lot of criticism about the expense of the Eurofighter project - justifiably - but at least the RAF have a superb fighter. Let us hope they do not have to remind the Russians of what an outstanding force the RAF still is.

(30)

Evidence that East German borders guards had a clear 'license to kill' anyone who tried to cross the country borders. By the way, I just love how the BBC uses the communist term 'defectors'. So leaving a totalitarian, communist hell-hole counts as 'defection'? WTF?

But I digress.

Border guards in East Germany during the Cold War were given clear orders to shoot at attempted defectors, including children, a senior official says.

The seven-page document dated 1 October 1973, was found last week in an archive in the eastern city of Magdeburg, among the papers of an East German border guard.

I am sure it was not the only document in existence. At least there is some tangible evidence now. It reads:

Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of.

This has not come as a surprise to me. What was a surprise is this has not been officially known, confirmed, understood before. It is as if the societies that went through (and were complicit in) the communist ordeal are reluctant to confront the full horrors, the corruption and destruction that were at their core for decades.

I whole heartedly agree with Marianne Birthler, director of the government office that now manages Stasi archives, when she says.

We have a long way to go in reckoning with the past.

Barely started, I would add.

On a related note this is my reaction to the movie The Lives of Others when I saw it not too long ago.

(8)

Three weeks ago it was a long weekend in the UK, and on Monday afternoon I therefore somehow found myself wandering fairly aimlessly around the centre of Szczecin in Poland. After contemplating for a little while that one of the major differences between communism in Poland and East Germany was that in Poland churches were rebuilt lovingly, whereas in East Germany they were dynamited for ideological reasons, and just thinking about how many ghosts there are in sites of ferocious battles between the Wehrmacht and the Red army, I found myself staring at these advertisements on a wall.

Not speaking Polish myself, I was entirely baffled by what this was saying or why, other than whatever it was having a certain amount of latent Anglophilia in it. Therefore I just took the photo and walked on.

Last night, while having a few beers in a pleasant London bar with a fellow Samizdatista, I took the opportunity of asking a Polish waitress what it meant. She looked at it for a moment, paused, and said "That is very weird...... They sell vintage clothing....weird", poured my beer into my glass, and walked off.

In truth that only enhanced the mystery. Further questions arise. What exactly does it say on the front of the bus? Do the proprieters of this business use mod fashion to express the essense of London's street fraternity culture? I need to know Perhaps the readership can help?.

(28)

In Poland a court has ruled that the governments attempts at de-communisation are unconstitutional.

The law required some 700,000 people, including school directors and board members of public companies, to submit statements declaring any contact they had had with the communist secret services.

The court rejected key aspects of the law including the requirement for journalists to submit declarations. [...] "A state based on the rule of law should not fulfill a craving for revenge instead of fulfilling justice," he said. "Screening must not be used for meting out punishment."

But surely justice cannot be served by allowing the communist era and above all, the role of the people who made it all possible, to vanish down the memory hole. If people did despicable things during the communist era, why should they escape punishment? I cannot imagine a German court being allowed to stop the process of de-nazification in German, so why tolerate something similar in Poland in the aftermath of communism?

Forgiveness can not come before repentance and a lot of people have yet to repent. I wonder if there are any senior judges who might have an embarrassing file on their communist era activities that they would rather not see the light of day? Just wondering.

(10)

I thought this is one of the cases where technology is nothing but good news...

German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.

Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.

Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps

Until I read the final paragraph.

Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany's tax authorities.

But then, it is never the technology that is at fault, but people and the uses they put it to...

No matter, I am very pleased to hear that there is some work somewhere being done on the past of former communist countries.

via Dropsafe

(20)

I am writing this in an airport bar in Prague, where I am having a beer before flying back to London after a weekend away. I will probably write most of the post on the flight home, but it probably will not get posted until I am back in London tomorrow( and this is indeed what has happened. MJ )

This is my second trip to Prague. I was first here in 1992. That trip also involved (amongst other places) Warsaw and Budapest. I had not been back to any of these places again until this year, when I have been back to both Warsaw and Prague. Both Poland and the Czech Republic are much easier places to visit than in 1992 in the sense that I do not need a visa to visit either country, there are lots of ATMs from which I can obtain money, there is less bureaucracy, there are western branded shops on the high street, there are Starbucks clones (although not yet Starbucks itself). In 1992 there were none of these things and travel was harder (I was also in my early 20s and a much less experienced traveller, so my perception may be distorted). However, although Poland and the Czech Republic are now both members of the European Union, the cities both lack the shining new Metro systems, motorways of poorer countries (Spain and Portugal, particularly) that have been dipping in the cohesion fund for longer. Infrastructure works in both places, but it is more spartan.

In 1992, Warsaw felt rather bleak and Prague felt to be a glorious gothic fairytale of a city that had been left behind by the world but which was perhaps catching up. (Budapest was the first city I had been to with a strong Ottoman character about it, and the dominance of the buildings on the high hills overlooking the Danube from the Buda side was and no doubt still is very striking). This year I rather liked Warsaw - it has the feel of a place where business is being done. Prague is still a glorious gothic fairytale of a city, there is lots of good music to listen to, the beer is very good and very inexpensive. The food options are much more diverse than they were 14 years ago. Since the invention of the euro gutted the Dutch money changing industry, the strip between the Charles Bridge and the Old Square in Prague seems to have taken over from that between Centraal Station and Dam Square in Amsterdam as the leading venue in Europe for dodgy money changers and slightly dubious pizza restaurants (the 'Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments' seems very old Amsterdam, too).

However, Prague seems to now be perhaps a little too obvious a destination for the more trendy sorts of tourist. People who are seen at the Netherlands Architecture Institute or the Oslo School of Design, and drink in bars with lots of black and chrome and 45 different kinds of vodka (and wear a fair amount of black, but probably only about the right amount to be in keeping with the chrome) tend not to be seen here. It seems more now to be a destination for Anglophone backpackers and American students from universities outside the Ivy League. It is a backpacker destination. It has not moved as far up the tourism food chain that I had hoped it might.

And, alas, I feel I am being a little unkind. I have, in truth had a bad experience today, which has to do with the way in which the tourist ecosystem in Prague has evolved to take advantage of the people who have visited.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I travel a lot. (I will eventually explain what I did in Denmark last weekend. Honest). I generally know what I am doing in a foreign city. I like to believe I am fairly defensive and steet smart, and as I am also a relatively large and scruffy male who at least thinks he does not look prosperous, I have seldom had anyone try to rob me, or otherwise hassle me.

In fact, the only time anyone previously tried to rob me was in Prague in 1992. I started the trip by myself, but by the time I was leaving Prague I found myself in the company of a girl from Brisbane in her early twenties and a slightly mad television journalist from Los Angeles. The three of us went to a railway station in the evening in order to catch the overnight train to Budapest. As we were about to get into the train, a group of loudly talking people crowded around and towards us. My wallet was foolishly in my back trousers pocket, but I was smart enough to respond by immediately putting my hand on it. I discovered that there was another hand on it, trying to pick my pocket. Once the thief realised I was on to him, he rapidly withdrew, but his friends did not. I should have yelled thief at that point, but I am shy and unassertive, so I did not. I few seconds later, I did hear a yell, as the American TV journalist realised that his bag had been unzipped and a hand was in it. He yelled loudly, and the thieves withdrew. Although they tried to rob us, looking back I am struck by what amateurs the pickpockets were in 1992. We were pretty naive too, but still they failed to rob us.

Since then, I have always put my valuables in my front pockets, and I do continue to look a little scruffy, which I have believed meant I was perhaps not an obvious target. Alas, though, this afternoon the thieves figured me out and robbed me anyway. This time they were good at it.

Compare what happened in 1992 with what happened this afternoon. I got on a train of the (non-extended since 1992) Prague Metro with the (different) girl from Brisbane in her early twenties with who I was travelling. (Go figure). She was ahead of me, and she walked into the centre of the carriage and sat down, I tried to follow, but there was a large burly central European man in front of me. I attempted to get past him, but he moved slightly when I did so that he was still in front of me. We came into contact. I couldn't get past, but he did it in such a way that it was hard to be sure that he was deliberately obstructing me. As I did so, another man came into contact with me from behind. I almost felt bad. Clearly I had stopped unexpectedly due to being unable to get past the first man and he had collided with me. There were two other large men on my sides. I felt almost embarassed, but I was trapped between them and could not join my friend further in the carriage.

Something felt wrong, but it was hard to pin down exactly what. I put my hands on my pockets. My wallet was still there. I looked carefully at my rucksack. It was still closed, and my laptop was still in it. The two really important things were still in my possession. My Blackberry and phone were still in my pockets. However, my left pocket felt oddly light. My attention was clearly on my possessions from this point. Something felt wrong, but I was left alone. The men got off at the next station. My friend and I got off at the station after. I told her that something had felt wrong on the train. She said that she had thought it odd that I had not sat down next to her. I had told her that I had been physically prevented from doing so, but I was really not sure what had happened.

I guess I was in denial about being robbed, so I could not think of anything missing. However, an hour later I tried to take out my camera to take a photograph and I realised I did not have it. So the pickpockets got my camera, presumably by managing to grab the wrist strap and pull it out (it was a Fuji Finepix Z1, a terrific little camera about the size of a cigarette packet which fits very easily into a pocket, but which is consequently also very easy to ease out of a pocket). The camera was worth about $400, and although I have travel insurance the excess is such that it is probably not worth my making a claim. None the less I went to the police and reported the crime, simply because I believe incidents like this should show up in the crime statistics. The police were sympathetic and helpful and recorded the crime as a crime. They even said they would check the CCTV in the train station, but they clearly didn't expect to be able to do anything about it. They said that it was very unlikely that they would catch the thief, but that if they did they might conceivably ask me to return to Prague to testify. I told them that I realised that this was very unlikely, but that I would be delighted to do so if it happened.

So my clear record of having not been robbed when travelling is gone. In truth, I suspect I am a more obvious target than was once the case. I wear more expensive clothes than I used to (although I sometimes wear them badly and wear them until they wear out). And I carry a lot of electronics with me, which leads to my pockets bulging a little at times.

And in truth I do not visit this kind of tourist destination much any more. There is crime in other places I have visited recently, but it is not of the 'professional thieves preying on tourists' type. So perhaps I was a little careless. Only a little, but still careless. And these thieves were very good at it. They knew exactly how and why to stand in order to physically confine me to a small portion of the train carriage without my realising it, and then they managed to rob me without my realising it. Whereas the thieves in 1992 were amateurs, these ones were good at it. In the last 14 years they have been able to learn their trade.

And let us be blunt. It is the fault of the local law enforcement agencies for allowing them to learn it. If you want to catch professional theives, it can be done by placing obvious targets on the trains and seeing what happens. Regular patrols mean thieves stay away. If thieves know there is a regular plain clothes police presence on the trains, robberies become less likely. And of course, when thieves are caught (as professional ones are from time to time) they need to be locked up for a very long time. Some of these things probably are done in Prague, but not enough. In tourist cities where the rule of law is poor, civil society is weak, and consequenty tne police are bad at their jobs (eg Rome) pickpockets are rampant, but in cities where the police are better and civil society and the rule of law is strong (Zurich, say) they are much less so.

Of course, things could have been much worse. I could have lost my wallet, which would have been a disaster given all the credit cards, money, and documents in it. I could have lost my laptop, which would have been much more expensive (although I do at least have backups of the data). I could have lost my passport, which would have made getting home a pain, and I would have then had to have gone through an annoying rigmarole with the Home Office in order to get my British residency properly recorded in the new one.

As it is, I can easily afford a replacement camera. I will order one over the internet and I will have it by the end of the week. I even have most of my photographs of Prague, as I remembered my card reader this week and some of my photographs had already been uploaded to my laptop. So in terms of affecting my life, the impact is minimal. I am even convincing myself quite reasonably that I had a good weekend. Most Czechs I met were friendly, and also perfectly honest. A hotel receptionist went to some trouble to make sure that we were paid a small refund that we were owed, even though we would likely have walked out without querying the bill.

But the fact remains that being the victim of a crime really sucks. I have made a lot of visits to foreign cities in my life. Pickpockets have to my knowledge only come after me twice in all that time. And both of them happened in the same city, that I have visited only twice in my life. And that does not speak well of the city in question.

(6)

I think that this building (the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral in Tallinn) is every bit as assertively a statement that the Russians are in charge as is the Palace of Culture in Warsaw I wrote about earlier this year. It comes from a different Russian era (the Cathedral is a Czarist structure, completed in 1900), but I think the motives for building the two structures were not too different . Certainly the Cathedral is in every bit as prominent a location as the Palace of Culture - it is on the top of the Toompea hill in Tallin's Old Town, directly opposite Tallin castle (now the Estonian national parliament). Certainly, also, it is every but as architecturally out of character from the historical city, which in style is a typical Baltic Hanseatic League city, although the people of the city are clearly very proud of the medieval town hall

It is only six years since I was last in Tallinn, but the city certainly seems to have come a long way since then. At that point the Old Town was beautiful, but the rest of the city felt grimy when I left it. No longer. It's not a terribly large city (half a million?) and it is not as frenetic as some larger cities, but it has the air of a place becoming, well, comfortable. Modern office buildings going up. Suburban tracts of nice, large houses being built on the waterfront to the west of town. That kind of thing. There are lots of Soviet housing estates between the old centre and the nice suburbs, but in truth I have seen worse in London. And Paris. And Amsterdam. It is difficult to believe that this was part of the Soviet Union only fifteen years ago. But it was.

And it was certainly a nice touch to be able to talk to friends in Australia using a software product that was developed here. The computer markets of China are full of people attempting to sell you cheap Skype handsets. However, Tallinn gave us Skype itself. That is worth more.

(0)

Now that the protests are no longer anticipating the overthrow of the Lukashnko government in a display of 'people power', the mainstream media moves elsewhere. The narrative of the post-Soviet dictator in Belarus is an uncomfortable fit with the comforting delusions of the West. The latest project to promote civil society is the radio station funded by the EU, the USA and the Czech Republic, broadcasting out of Warsaw. It has a mixture of healthy cultural programming and news, broadcast over a number of media: AM, FM and the internet. However the name, European Radio for Belarus, can only have been dreamt up by the Commission. One suspects that any popularity will be achieved despite its title, not because of it. Its more ferocious counterparts, Radio Svoboda/Radio Free Europe, campaign more directly for democracy.

European Radio for Belarus, is despite its name, not a foreign station broadcasting into Belarus. Rather, it is a Belarusian station just temporarily coordinating its operations in Warsaw. There is also an office in Minsk and correspondents all over Belarus. Operating since February 2006, European Radio for Belarus is funded by the United States and Czech governments, and the European Commission.

We have been asked frequently by other journalists, that are you like Radio Svoboda, Radio Free Europe which said that when democracy comes, it closes the next day. And we say that it is not our goal. We are doing vice versa, we hope that when changes come, we can return there and work as a professional, attractive radio station with balanced information and education content which would be really recognisable by people in Belarus. I think this is the main difference of our project and other pro-democracy projects around Belarus.

Just to remember that this is another day in Belarus: Anatoly Lebedko, opposition leader of the Belarussian United Civil Party was detained whilst attending an unofficial protest on the seventh anniversary of former Interior Minister Yury Zakharenko's disappearance; and graffiti artist Artur Finkevich was imprisoned for two years hard labour, after writing "We want a change".

Lukashenko is the enemy of change, improvement and progress: all of these trends will end his reign, or force him to fundamentally adapt to new ways. Now that there are more windows on the world, the yearning for change amongst those who can only spectate becomes ever more desperate.

(9)

The Ukraine is not exactly famed for its high standards of probity and decency in the field of business, as this article suggests. It was certainly a bit of an eye-opener to see this failed, disgraced British cabinet minister, Stephen Byers, on the slate to opine at a conference all about the marvellous business opportunities out in that country. Great. The man who confiscated the assets of Railtrack shareholders - in retrospect a key point signalling the true intent of New Labour towards investors - is considered worthy to share his thoughts about encouraging enterprise in the Ukraine. Riiiight.

Perhaps in a fairer spirit, though, there may be a good case to make for economic opportunities in that country, and I could not help noticing that the organising firm of the conference goes by the moniker Adam Smith (no relation, it seems, to the Adam Smith Institute). It does strike me as mighty odd that a character like Byers should be prime billing at such an event, though. The citizens of that nation surely deserve better.

(5)

As expected, the electoral results from Belarus were a load of cobblers. Now the unexpected protests have started, with an estimated 5,000 brave protestors supporting the opposition candidate, Milinkevich, and declaring the elction null and void.

Thousands of protesters thronged the main square of the Belarusian capital on Sunday in defiance of a government ban, refusing to recognize a presidential vote that appeared all but certain to give the iron-fisted incumbent a third term.

The crowd hooted when a large video screen broadcast a live statement from the Central Election Commission chief, who announced results that showed President Alexander Lukashenko headed toward overwhelming victory in Sunday's vote.

The protesters chanted "Long Live Belarus!" and the name of the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich. Some waved a national flag that Lukashenko banned in favor of a Soviet-style replacement, while others waved European Union flags. Milinkevich arrived at Oktyabrskaya square later.

These are the results from the election thief:

The elections chief, Lidia Yermoshina, said Lukashenko had won 89 percent of the vote, according to returns from nearly one-fifth of polling districts. The results virtually guaranteed a third term for the authoritarian leader who has ruled the republic since 1994.

"Lukashenko cannot have won 80 percent!" he said, referring to exit polls conducted by two groups the opposition says are loyal to the government and released just hours after voting began that projected he would win more than 80 percent of the vote.

"Cannot! Cannot! Cannot!" the crowd chanted.

Let us remember that Lukashenko has no qualms about viewing all of these protestors as terrorists. Russia will stand idly by, with the satisfied smile of Reynaud, and the EU will wring its hands, a pity it isn't its own bloody neck!

However, I am quite pessimistic about the outcome. Lukashenko has the support of stagnation amongst the majority of the population. Only those whose future hopes have vanished under this regime will be in the square tonight.

Now we wait for Lukashenko's move...frostbite or tanks?

(43)

Whenever I write about something touching on my experience of communism, I get a few kind commenters encouraging me to share more of it. I rarely do so, as busy life takes over. Still, today I managed to post an article on my other blog, Media Influencer, that I felt was perhaps not coherent enough or too personal for Samizdata.net. For those interested, follow the bananas...

(10)

I am travelling in Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the moment and internet access is rather hard to find. This all too brief internet lifeline is a welcome fix to help alleviate my OWLS (On-line Withdrawal Lamentation Syndrome). Horror is a foreign keyboard.

But at least the locals in the deepest rural Moravia are helping me get over the internet withdrawal shakes by stuffing me full of splendid pastries, for which this part of the world is rightly famed.

Interesting glimpses of the recent communist past abound but are becoming less visible by the year.

Remember a time before the internet? Hard to believe, I know! My hosts used this to listen to broadcasts from the West.

I am with the original samizdat people from whom I took so much inspiration and the reason I came up with the name for this blog.

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Today is the 16th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution or of the day when it all 'officially' started on Friday 17th November, 1989 at a demonstration in Prague. (There was one in Bratislava the day before but did not get initially much recognition.)

It was the death of a student, beaten by the Secret Police (or not so secret police), at the Prague demonstration that day that has pushed the students and actors across the country to articulate political demands, go on strike and start protesting in the streets daily. The theories behind this 'final straw' are many and varied - some argue the murdered 'student' was an agent provocateur who meant to start the ball rolling and enabled the powers-to-be orchestrate a peaceful, if not just, demise of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Time will tell the real story, I am here to remember mine.

At the time, 17th of November 1989 did not feel any special - there were some demonstrations before and usually were thinly spread around various anniversaries of dissident occassions. There was no indication that this is to be any different. With a flurry of activity from the dissidents, barely reported by the media and as usual, with more details broadcast by the heavily jammed Voice of America or Radio Free Europe.

I was then a teenager, with a twist - I knew that I had no control over my future and that I faced two choices only. In order to blend in, accept the evil around me in exchange for a semblance of a 'normal' life. Or follow in my parents' footsteps and forsake all that is considered good and rewarding in a healthy society, such as higher education, travel, even family and potentially freedom. I may have been very young but, alas, not young enough to be blind to the full horrors of such life. After all I had seen those around me living with similar decisions. As it happens, that choice was not real - having been part of the dissident movement, I was weighted, marked and tagged as the enemy of the state. I belonged to the dark forces undermining the society - a phrase so beloved of the communist media.

I remember the nervous elation of the 'now or never' moment, as we walked to the main square to meet thousands of others who felt the same. It was a powerful sensation to be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people knowing that they are there for the same reason - an experience unprecedented in a fractured and diseased society under communism.

It was not until Monday, 27th of November, when the two-hour general strike took place, that we were sure that tanks will not be rolled out to face us. This was not without reason as on November 23rd the army declared its readiness. To do exactly what, we dared not speculate. At demonstrations between the two dates the list of those supporting the General strike was read out. There was a sense of profound relief when workers from a factory appeared on that list. We knew then that the communists had lost the propaganda war and a loud cheer reverberated across the square.

But the fight was not truly over until December 10th, when the first federal government since 1948 was appointed that did not have the Communist majority. We went to the streets once more, most of us looking for and looking forward to the sensation of true solidarity that had already started to fade. And the rest is history...

I find that my memories lack the nostalgia compulsory for any survivor of such social and political upheavals. My life has certainly changed beyond recognition as a result of the 1989 events, nevertheless I find it very hard to get dewy-eyed about my 'revolutionary credentials'. I do treasure the experience of seeing thousands upon thousands of individuals come together in a collective action that has changed the world around them. That was genuine no matter whether it was sparked off by manipulation or whether what followed in the aftermath was far less heroic.

(11)

This is a picture of front page of a benign 'cousin' of the infamous Pravda (or more like a foundling on the same porch). It is a local paper that covers the small area of the Old Town of Bratislava, thoroughly local, post-communist, and reflecting the concerns of the local populace. Did I mention that it was local? The headline reads:

Two Bratislava districts (equivalent of local councils) have raised average wage above 25,000 [crowns].

What struck me was the active tense of that sentence � as if the local government had any control over what wages people get paid. I am told that the current Prime Minister was going around the country on a bicycle during the election campaign promising to double wages for everyone or words to that effect. Nothing extra-ordinary for a politician but people were actually disappointed after election when the wages did not double. When challenged he pointed at the fact that the wages did go up but nobody was fooled because they knew damn well that the cost increased as well. This did not seem to occur to them when the guy was making the promises though.

There seems to be the perception that the government still somehow doles out the wages as well as fiddles the cost of everything. Well, they sort of do but not in a good way. I also note the difference between the West and the post-communist East � people in the former talk in terms of rising cost of living and price inflation, people here think of terms of size of salary. I think it reflects the difference in mentality � it is thinking of how much you have rather then how much you can do�

(32)

The convincing win by the anti-leftist coalition in Poland's elections would seem to be one in the eye for the statist left.

However the perils of the left/right labels are on prominent display here: Civic Platform Party is clearly on the side of the angels in most ways, being pro-market, pro-privatisation and generally in favour of liberty and a smaller state (though sadly they seem to think the €uro is actually a good idea).

Yet the senior partner in the winning team, the Law and Justice Party are really old style paleo-conservative statists, comparable to various European Christian Democrat parties. Although the Law and Justice Party are perhaps a bit more reactionary and stasis oriented than most Christian Democrats (and as a result no great fans of free-markets), at least that right-stasis orientation gives them a healthy euro-scepticism.

It will be interesting to see how this coalition manages to square its various circles or even holds together at all.

(19)

The Ukraine faces a choice between living in Vladamir Putin's shadow or living under the shadow of more locally sourced rascals. Yes, I wish the protestors well in their attempt to prevent Russia's pet poodle Viktor Yanukovych from stealing an election but in truth I do not know enough about the alternatives to Yanukovych to get any real enthusiasm for what is going on.

The fact that anti-government people have a tendency to 'disappear' in the Ukraine is cause enough to want to see the end of Yanukovych and his supporting but the notion that 'democracy' is possibly being subverted is not any real cause for excitement to me per se, given that any alternative to Yanukovych (and the pretty strange Leonid Kuchma) will no doubt use democratic processes to turn the Ukraine into just another highly regulated EU-satellite 'aid crack' addicted state.

So sure, good luck guys, just try to make sure you are not changing Moscow's iron handcuffs for locally made ones with a velvet lining imported from Brussels.

(7)

My recent posting on Slovakia contained a scoop and I missed it. The leader of the Slovak governing party's campaign for the European elections tomorrow is former ice hockey player Peter Stastny.

I knew the name (one of the few names in ice hockey I ever knew of), but failed to connect it to the poster boy of the Slovak Democratic Coalition.

From the comments to my last posting, my description of SKDU as conservative-libertarian is controversial. Considering that the new Libertarian Party candidate in the USA was selected because he campaigns on sticking to the Founding Fathers' intentions (nationalized Post Office and all), I stand by my description for now.

What is amusing is the contrast between the Slovak and the Austrian election: the posters in Austria oppose reform, the Slovaks put a celebrity on the poster and bring in massive tax reforms in the right direction. American show-biz versus Austrian corporatism. I know which I prefer.

[Thanks to Tim Evans at CNE for providing the tip-off about Peter Stasny.]

(10)

I recently gave a presentation in Bratislava, Slovakia, on the evils of 'competition policy' and the 'entry and exit costs' economic model, which is little more than an excuse for more business-killing government intervention.

My first trip there in 1991 had been as economic and political adviser to that country's Prime Minister when Slovakia was part of the Czech & Slovak Federal Republic (1989-1992). In those days, talking about a single tax band, a competitive advantage of Slovakia compared with Germany, why an independent Slovakia would actally reform better than under Prague tutelage and so forth was often like trying to explain Switzerland to a Pol Pot survivor.

The first photo that I took in 1991 was of the Iron Curtain seen from the Austrian side, a forest of trees leading up to the jagged line of a forest of rotting concrete.

This time on the way back I took a coach from Bratislava to Vienna airport. The following photos show the turnaround.

Slovakia�s ruling coalition: conservatives and libertarians
(photo taken at Bratislava bus station)



This Slovak election poster for the EU parliament
seems to get the message. (Sorry about the
quality but I snapped it out of a coach window
on a bend, outskirts of Bratislava)



Austrian Social Democrats know what they stand for:
No privatisation!
(dotted all over the Austrian countryside North of Vienna)

(21)

Over at the excellent libertarian group weblog, Cattalarchy, there is a fine and thoughtful collection of articles, which was published a few days ago, to mark the May Day parades of old socialists with a wide-ranging broadside against what communism has wrought. I urge folk to fire up some coffee and take time out to read them all.

With all that fine material in mind, I was stunned to read a screed in the latest edition of The Spectator by ultra-rightwinger Peter Hitchens. As well as saying some decidedly uncomplimentary things about former South African President and anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela, a topic to which I may return later, Hitchens also bemoans what he claims has been the lack of any real improvement of life in countries which have been released from communism.

Really? Have there been no improvements at all? I mean, for a start, surely a declared Christian like Hitchens should be glad that fellow believers are no longer persecuted as they were in the old days of Communism. The Gulag is no longer in operation. Members of the KGB no longer drag you off in the middle of the night. And yes, key parts of the economies of those nations are not just recovering, but offering some of the tastiest investment opportunities in the world today, as this article illustrates.

There is a priceless passage in which Hitchens even refers to the elderly generation in the former Eastern bloc who miss the good old days of guaranteed jobs, even if that era came with bread queues, bureaucracy and compulsory military service. That's the spirit! None of this messy and vulgar capitalist nonsense, with all that bothersome choice, and ugly advertising, noisy department stores and red light districts.

I honestly do not know what to make of folk like Hitchens and whether he has any coherent political philosophy at all apart from a desire to shock what he thinks is the received wisdom (not always a bad or dishonourable urge, mind). A few weeks back he wrote a superb article shredding the case for state identity cards, of the kind that any libertarian would be proud to write. Yet a few issues later we get a gloomy piece almost pining the days when half of Europe was run by the communist empire of the Soviets.

Weird.

(5)

One of the reasons for slightly less output on this august blog is that two of the editors and the inimitable Gabriel Syme were off meeting other sinister Illuminati in Prague for a fine Czech beer or six.

No prize for guessing where the Illuminati meet in Prague

Prague, like Bratislava, is known for its splendours...

Hot... steamed in fact

One of the upsides of the dire weather was that many of the usually crowded tourist attractions were almost deserted.

We meet one of the leading central European bloggers, Tomas Kohl (on the right)...

Tomas sinks some fine Czech Pilsner with Adriana and Gabriel Syme

Tomas told us the best place in Prague to see its famous chicks...

More Prague chicks

Prague is a city in which the splendours of Western Civilisation pretty much kick you in the teeth...

We found a design we really liked for the new Samizdata.net HQ's front door...

The locals know a thing or two about about what makes life great...

... and a thing or two about what makes life suck...

Which perhaps explains the Czech sense of humour...

(9)

There is an article in the Telegraph titled Slovakian troops sent in to stop gypsy riots that reports what is happening but makes no comment on what seems to me the key underlying reason it is happening:

Thousands of police backed by 2,000 soldiers in the ghetto towns of eastern Slovakia appeared to have temporarily ended attacks by mobs forcing their way into food shops. Near 100 per cent unemployment has brought thousands of Roma gypsies out on the streets

[...]

Demonstrators in one town gathered peacefully, shouting: "We want to eat." Others said their families were starving since the cuts [ in state unemployment benefits], meant to prepare the country for European Union entry, were implemented on Jan 1.

Tibor Tutak, 39, said: "We know stealing isn't a solution but I cannot let my children go hungry. What has happened so far is nothing compared with what will happen if the government doesn't do anything."

Roma leaders threatened further trouble unless the Bratislava government rescinded dramatic welfare reductions which have halved the incomes of many families. Unemployment among some gypsy communities is close to 100 per cent.

It is regrettable for anyone to go hungry but for 100% unemployment to prevail amongst significant sections of the gypsy community in Slovakia, that is not bad luck or economic vagaries, it is a lifestyle choice. What is more, what Tibor Tutak is actually saying is that he dislikes having to do the stealing himself, given that he and his community had gotten used to having the state do it for them. The fact is no one owes anyone else a living by right at their expense, particularly not if they decline to participate in the economy as anything other than parasites. The forceful official Slovak response seem entirely appropriate to me and I hope they do not even consider allowing themselves to be shook down for larger the 'welfare' payments.

No one is forced to live in a gypsy community in this day and age... yes, I know some people will bring up the infamous walls built Czech authorities after years of complains by local people. These were designed specifically to keep gypsies away from the rest of the community in a town near Ostrava a few years ago, but that was hardly an enforced ghetto in the traditional European sense of the word, as there were no laws compelling gypsies not to live elsewhere.

I also realise gypsy communities are on the receiving end of considerable prejudice and discrimination, though it needs to be said that not all of the reasons for the wider community's hostility towards them are baseless. The gypsies are a separate cultural group and are certainly entitled to live according to their ways... provided these ways are not based on theft, be it directly or via the state and therein lies the issue at the heart of what is happening now in the Slovak Republic. Let me give the last word to Czech blogger Tomas Kohl who writes what the Telegraph article conspicuously did not:

These people are not victims of reforms. They haven't been wronged by the government today, but when the State decided it's a good idea to subsidize people for not doing anything and punish them when they moved a finger, it's like giving away dope, making everyone addicted, then halving the supply.

Is there an easy way out? No. Yeah, I could say just abolish the idea of Caring Government, and it has certain utopian appeal I like, yet there is no political force there that would be capable of doing just that. Unless they send in an infantry regiment, the unrests can continue for a long time, until the underclass moves west, to countries where they still give lunches away for free.

(11)

For some years, I have preferred to take my holidays around the Baltic (herewith classified as Eastern Europe, because it is north east of the British Isles and the Finns come from the Urals anyway). Larking about in the Nordic and Baltic countries always includes a visit to the local museum concerning the Second World War and the Resistance. These museums often give a snapshot of the the way these countries view themselves, their place in the world and their history.

The most disappointing museum that I ever came across was in Helsinki, Finland. Their military museum, near the Lutheran Cathedral, included an exhibition covering the Finnish contribution to the Second World War which finished at the end of the Winter War. The wartime alliance with Germany from 1941, which one could view as a necessary defence against Stalinism on the grounds that my enemy's enemy is my friend was excised from their exhibition. This was the state of play in 2000 and I haven't been back to the museum since, so they may have extended the scope since but the omission at that time was rather surprising.

Sweden and Estonia did not appear to have any specialised museums on this subject. Sweden does not need one, due to its policy of neutrality, and Estonia had a room with inscribed pebbles and rusting armour that doubled as a centre for folklore. For me, Tallinn was more rewarding for curries and beautiful women than for museums. However, the City museum that I missed in Tallinn does cater for the history of the Estonian resistance against Nazi and Soviet oppression.

Denmark was objective and attempted to provide a social history of occupation rather than a celebration of resistance. It always astonished me, once I had gone to the museum, that Denmark held a unique democratic election under Nazi occupation in 1943. They smuggled their Jews to Sweden whilst attempting to maintain the norms of a liberal democratic state under military occupation. Denmark also had an active resistance movement and sited their museum in the gracious environs of the Churchillparken. I do not think they succeeded in protecting their country from Nazism but who are we to say that such an endeavour was not a moral response under these extreme circumstances.

The two countries that most impressed me were Latvia and Norway.

Latvia has faced its history without any qualms. There are museums on its military history and on the Gulag. Both are well worth visiting. For me, the devastation that was wreaked on Riga only became clear after visiting this museum with its exhibitions on how the city was fought over three times: first the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again. More telling to me was the honesty with which the Latvians faced up to their own role in joining the SS and co-operating in the liquidation of the Jews. My family never faced anything like this because they were British and, therefore, this reflection is alien to me.

As for Norway, I have never seen Germans move around a museum so rapidly. If you wish to define a people that love freedom, look no further than Norway. The Resistance Museum starts by telling you how Britain is the last beacon of liberty in a barbarous continent. I was hooked. The Norwegian sacrifices during the Second World War are second to none. Their resistance, their merchant navy and their armed forces probably contributed more than the French. If any country should have been given a sector in Germany to occupy after 1945, it was Norway.

This is an anecdotal survey and I am sure there are errors and omissions. However, it provides a flavour of how countries exhibit their past and indicates that they are aware war and occupation have shaped their history. If you are ever in these countries, visit these museums.

(12)

Having returned to the land of hope and glory after almost two weeks of hectic holiday season and a limited access to internet, I have the need to blog of things I have seen.

I spent Christmas in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. After such splendid reviews of the town here on Samizdata.net, I was wondering whether it would live up to his impressions during the cold winter days. The Christmas markets in the centre of town, a tradition established in 1993, have a certain magic that increases with copious quantities of hot mead and wine.

The crowds are impressive, with density matching that of any western shopping experience. There are many international brands present, many a multinational appearing in the 'small town with big potential'. The most impressive sight, probably because most unexpected, was the vista alongside a new road by-pass relieving the centre of Bratislava of heavy traffic. The road is lined with enormous warehouses, hypermarkets, showrooms for car makers such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Nissan, Audi, Jeep, Chrysler, there is Fuji Film and Coca-Cola. Driving along you could be in any western country. In the centre of town I have seen designer shops frequented mostly by the rich even in the West. I believe I caught a glimpse of Bang and Olufsen. Whatever you think of the brand, it is a huge leap for the design-conscious of Bratislava.

This all is very good and a superficial visitor might conclude that Bratislava represents a successful marriage of the charm of a small provincial city with a multinational presence and that Bratislava benefits from its proximity to Vienna without being reduced to a charmless suburb of its larger and more internationally renowned neighbour. Perhaps I should leave it at that and spread the good word without digging underneath the surface. Unfortunately, I stayed there long enough to encounter what lies beneath or, as we Samizdatistas would say, in the metacontext.

What I found is that the whole edifice rests on very shaky foundations. I have two reasons for such a strong statement. One is cultural and the other legal. The first means that although individuals in former communist countries are entrepreneurial in ways that make western businessmen look as adventurous as bank clerks, there is very little of what in the West we understand by 'commercial culture' underpinning the markets. I suppose in Hayekian terms, this would be similar to the concept of "the extended order" - the impersonal relationships that allow culture and trade to flourish among strangers.

People set up their own companies or take over former state businesses without understanding where their livelihood is coming from - the markets, i.e. the customers. They are mostly after the status of a 'businessman' and of owning a business, without appreciating that the entire point of their existence is to meet a portion of market demand, that is, attract customers. Business seems to revolve around those who own them and their company's business processes, such as they are, are designed to suit them, not the customer who seems to be almost an after-thought. Although there certainly are companies in the West that fit the above description, at the same time there is also an explicit understanding in the western business culture about what drives the markets. It is also a matter of degree and the proportion of the businesses that behave in the 'non-commercial' way.

One of my favourite examples can be found in a major department store in central Bratislava. The ground floor is arranged in a manner identical to a standard Western department store - cosmetics and perfumes. It is full of the leading brands exactly as in most western department stores. The decor and arrangement is indistinguishable. However, that is where the similarity ends. The service is non-existent - the shop assistants, if their attention can be attracted, are either unpleasant or overbearing, trying to force the overpriced goods on you. (In my experience most western goods are on average 1/3 more expensive that in the West. How any of the locals can afford to buy them on a regular basis given the average monthly wage of around £220 ($395) is a mystery I have not been able to solve.)

The bit that got to me most was the fact that the display and sample items were all tied to the counter with a wire! This was presumably to stop customers from stealing them and undoubtedly the managers saw this as a neat solution to the problem of disappearing sample bottles of expensive perfume and to erosion of their profit margins.

It would have been difficult to explain to the store managers that this is an unacceptable treatment of customers since it amounts to treating every customer as a potential thief. It would have been impossible to explain that it matters that they are not treated as such and that good will generated by a company is as important as the tangible product and service is sells. And it certainly would not make any sense to them if there were told that selling cosmetics and perfumes is about selling experience, impression and generally impressing a positive association on to the customer. Hence the emphasis on packaging, advertising, expensive poster campaigns etc, etc, etc.

This is because communism succeeded in one thing - it made the countries under its yoke truly materialist. Things and object take on a far greater importance if you can barely afford them and have to work very long and hard to purchase them in the first place. Under such conditions they loom far more in such people's lives then in a consumerist society that treats most products as disposable.

Marxism also managed to make its 'theory of labour' pervasive in the business metacontext or culture. Service and experience do not count in market transactions as they cannot be measured and therefore priced. By the same token human labour does not count for much either. Your time is not economically valuable and so service industry was non-existent under communism. It is now emerging under the influence of Western businesses but it does have a long way to go.

The second issue I have is with the legal framework. There seems to be very little reliance on the contract between transacting sides. The market exchanges do not seem to be underpinned by strong contracts, i.e. the contracts are there but when things go wrong, their effective enforcement is almost non-existent. It takes about 5 years to get a court hearing, which makes the legal redress irrelevant. This in turn, means there is very little legal experience in handling business disputes with law-making severely lagging behind. Legal infrastructure is increasingly influenced by the EU requirements, which is no foundation for a thriving free market. The inadequate legal provisions affect the labour market and employment relations that further undermine development of a sound commercial culture.

Now there is time for a disclaimer. I wrote the above paragraphs on the basis of my own impressions and knowledge. I know that there are individual businesses in Slovakia that are doing 'everything right'. I know that there are many reasons why the situation is the way it is - such as the fact that Slovakia is more influenced by the Austrian and continental business practices that are rather different from the Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial culture. The intention is not to be negative about Slovakia and its economic development. The regular readers may recall that I cheered the Slovak government's decision to introduce 19% flat tax rate.

I am also not saying that Slovakia and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe are doomed because they fail to exhibit certain features that I consider crucial for economic development. What I am describing is the current situation as I see it in the context of my understanding of what makes free markets and free trade work - individual freedom, property rights, legal framework with effective contract enforcement and generating trust between strangers for complex market transactions. To my eyes the capitalism in Slovakia had all the trappings of the western sort. But without sound institutions and legal infrastructure supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of individuals in such countries, it will be a rather cardboard prosperity.

(26)

Last week the Slovak Republic passed a tax reform law introducing a flat tax rate at 19 percent for income and value added tax (VAT) with effect from January 2004. The Finance Ministrer, Ivan Miklos, hopes that such a vast reform will spur further economic growth and attract more investments.

Tax reform, and tax rates at the lowest possible level for everyone is an important motivation to attract investors. It is a strong and positive signal for the inflow of foreign investments.

Flat tax, the abolishment of taxation on dividends, and profit shares that are included in the tax reform is the correct way of supporting those who want to invest. This is a fair, horizontal aid from the state that sets the same conditions for everyone.

It seems that the Slovaks have done their homework and the Finance Ministry proposes the reform arguing that the flat tax or a tax similar to this one has been introduced in 33 countries, GDP growth in these countries is two times higher than in others and quoting examples of effective unified tax in New Zealand, Estonia and Hong Kong.

Apart from changes in income taxes and VAT, the reform will abolish gift tax and inheritance tax by the end of 2003 and introduce a flat 3-percent real estate transfer tax in 2004 with a chance to abolish it later on. In my book these qualify as glimpses of common sense, as exhibited in the statement of Peter Papanek, the spokesman for the finance minister:

Those taxes represented multiple taxation of property that was already taxed once.

An article in the Slovak Spectator explains that for corporations this means a lower income tax compared to the current rate of 25 percent. Individuals, nowadays taxed progressively within the range of 10 - 38 percent (the percentage increases with higher incomes), will all pay the same tax rate. Two current rates of VAT, a reduced one at 14 percent and a standard one at 20 percent, will be unified from the beginning of next year at 19 percent.

This is all interesting and very good news for Slovakia indeed. Now if they only got their social security payments and national health contributions in order... Nevertheless, the country is certainly moving in the right direction and it is probably worth keeping on one's radar.

via Teekay's Coffeeshop

And Slovak babes are not bad either

(14)

Tomas at Teekay's Coffeeshop has an excellent post on how the Czech police decided to go after the oldest profession and benefit from register all hookers in a special database. The software for this essential exercise was provided by the UN.

After raiding 475 nightclubs past weekend in a well-meant effort to combat organized slavery, the Secretary of Interior Mr Gross (nomen omen) came up with this idea that prostitutes are to be monitored. The official goal is to find out about the movement of prostitutes within the EU.

Police will enter the data about anyone who looks like a hooker, after checking and recording data on your citizen ID card (it's mandatory to bear it at all times). Main source of data will be nightclubs and bars of certain sorts, but the police isn't limited to these venues only.

Central European babes are not known for their coy dress sense

Apparently, it is enough for a girl to wear something 'crazy' for her to end up in the National Hooker Registry. And there is no recourse, just as there are no rules, no checks, no appeal. Tomas concludes:

The next step will be regulated legalization: with all of them registered and monitored, the State will make a liberal gesture and allow some prostitution. Carefully controlled, with price limits, annual re-registration, you name it. Of course, it will also be much easier to monitor the customers of such services, and that could come in handy, too, right?

I think he may be on to something there...

(8)

Whilst sitting in a café surrounded by all of Bratislava's Central European splendours and pondering how to get my treasures back to London...

...I could not but notice how all that history has interesting effects on the local arts...

Of course there are many local inspirations, not just the historical ones...

We decided to just try and take my new prized possession, my dragon, on the aeroplane with us. The artist obligingly packed it up in a most expert manner and we just took it with us as luggage, praying that it did not get crushed on the bus to Vienna or smashed into matchsticks by the baggage handlers...

...Arriving back in London , we took a cab home and were welcomed by a very liberty-friendly message en-route...

Finally back home, we unpacked the new love of my life and is was... perfect!

Nice to be back but I shall certainly visit Bratislava again ... for the artworks of course

(8)

Continuing my tales of Bratislava...

One of the things I very much enjoyed was the food. Although a short visit of only a few days does not give my views much authority, I have to say that both the home cooked meals and restaurant victuals were really rather good. One restaurant in particular was so good that I would have to say it would make my top ten must-eat-at places anywhere I have been... and all modesty aside I am extremely well travelled. This splendid place is called Café Zichy (formerly known by the name 'Harmonia'). The venison in plum sauce with puréed chestnut was sublime. I was also introduced to the splendours of Demänovka, the excellent local firewater. The service at the Zichy was informative and agreeable without being intrusive: the place is a mandatory visit when in Bratislava!

Another thing that caught my eye...

...is that if you pay attention, you can find interesting and idiosyncratic art all over the place. Some of it very modern and some of it very old indeed...

But as I have mentioned before, Bratislava is filled with the sort of distractions that can make a person miss such details...

During my meandering around the cobbled streets, I encountered the first dragon I saw in Bratislava: a rather fine golden dragon which happens to be the mark of a pharmacy...

...and although I did not know it yet, it was the first indication I was about to fall madly in love, but more about that later

Whenever I visit a new city, I always pay attention to the graffiti and political posters as I always believe it is worth seeing what 'the others' are saying. When I was passing though Vienna airport a few days earlier the only graffiti I saw was 'EU NEIN' engraved on the flusher in the men's room...

Compared to Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the other part of the Slavic world in which I have considerable experience), Bratislava has much less of a problem with graffiti or flyposting. It was mildy interesting therefore that in Slovakia the only political posters I saw were for a rather incoherent group of 'anarchists' and a nameless call (in English) to 'smash the reds'...

Warning sign number one... these 'anarchists' are waving their flags on May Day.

There may have been other political posters but the distractions on the streets of Bratislava are many and varied...

I saw an interesting sign of the transformations going on in Slovakia when I visited a carpet warehouse with my hostess, the mother of my travelling companion. The warehouse was until quite recently the Factory of MDZ (Medzinarodny Den Zien, or International Women's Day)... an old style communist industrial collective. I was much amused to see that under its new capitalist management, it was advertising Astroturf, a quintessentially American product.

During our meanderings, we wandered past a rather typical gated Austro-Hungarian era courtyard and noticed a small sign directing us to something called 'Gallery F7'. Being curious by nature, we went in and found at the far end, an exhibition of the work of an artist called Jozef Borovka... and that is where I well and truly fell in love.

Borovka's work was just fantastic. He is an extremely talented Slovak artist working in wood, stone, oil and pen and I would have happily walked off with almost every item that was on exhibit. As it happened, that day was the last day of the show and so we contacted the artist and arranged to purchase several of his works. The first we acquired was a superb and whimsical bison made of 5 kg (11 lbs) of stone with antlers made from a coat hook, the second was a pen and ink drawing of a rural house in the Slovak countryside, the third was a female torso in mahogany on a large brass base...

...and the last piece was a table... but, oh, what a table! This was the true object of my undying affections: the finest Dragon in Bratislava.

However seeing as we were flying on Air Berlin, which is El Cheapo No Frills Cattle Class Airlines personified, actually getting a honking great cherry wood, mahogany, glass and brass table that was very fragile back to London was rather a major problem. We explored shipping it back via DHL but that proved to be prohibitive on the grounds of price, so we retired to the many and wonderful cafés of Bratislava to ponder what to do and admire the passing parade...

More to follow...

(18)

Following some rather personally difficult times, I was recently whisked off to foreign parts by a friend who decided I very badly needed to get out of London for a while to get my head together. And so, a day after a funeral and one of the worst days of my life here in London, I found myself on an Air Berlin BAe-146 aeroplane heading, indirectly, for Bratislava, the capital city of the Slovak Republic.

Due to the hasty nature of the flying arrangements, my friend and I travelled via Mönchengladbach (that's near Düsseldorf, in Germany). As it happens, that 30 minute stop-over allowed me to see something to delight any aviation enthusiast... an airworthy Junkers 52!

From Germany we headed to Vienna, where we were picked up by my traveling companion's mother and thence a short drive across the Austrian border to Bratislava.

Although I was very keen on getting a break from my surroundings, given that my friend had never really described Bratislava fondly (having grown up under communism does have that effect), I must say I did not have very high expectations, given the grey and bleak preamble I had received (I suspect my colleague is in no danger of being offered a job by the Slovak Tourist Agency).

Blimey... I was really in for a surprise!

Although surrounded by the expected outer layer of ghastly public housing (but then are any major cities on the west not similarly blighted?), Bratislava's inner city is simply gorgeous.

The inner city is almost entirely unspoiled by the pox of post war modern architecture, yet it far from being a moribund museum: it positively pulsates with life and exuberance.

On my first evening, I saw one of the old main streets lined with sidewalk cafés, bars and restaurants, with a bright laser beaming overhead, originating from one of the old city wall's bastions, striking a modern artwork suspended on a wire high above at the far end of the street from the bastion and being thus deflected down another street where it ended on yet another glittering suspended artwork.

But it quickly became apparent to me that there is more to this little gem on the Danube than splendiferous architecture. I had always thought that Amsterdam and Zagreb were locked in mortal combat to see which had the most beautiful women per square kilometer but now I realize that those two august cities were just battling it out for second place. I do not think I have ever seen as many extraordinarily attractive young ladies in my life. Bratislava is, to use the technical term, seething with babes.

Bratislava is pretty much the place that puts the central in Central Europe and thus to say it has 'a lot of history' would be rather like describing Mt. Everest as 'rather large': true but misleading. Bratislava is super-saturated with history. On many regular houses one finds plaques commemorating events or people. I was delighted to see that a generation of communism failed to erase the memory of those Slovaks who went west rather than east to fight fascism, and did so with their Czech brethren in the British RAF.

But amidst the endless barrage of historical morsels to take in were the similarly endless procession of...

The sheers scope and sweep of Bratislava's history does make it hard to absorb. Fortunately the city is fairly visitor friendly, with some nice little museums and fairly un-sanitised sights to clamber over.

There seems no shortage of people who want to keep the city's history alive and some rather entertaining rascals seemed to take delight in noisily marching though the city's cobbled streets with their drums and strange local bagpipes, bawling bawdy songs and firing off matchlock guns and thereby making the alarmed tourists spill their Café Lattes over their chinos

The Slovaks take queue-jumping at the cash machines very seriously

And then there are the other distractions...

The locals were friendly (other than one old woman who worked at Bratislava Castle and who clearly had not noticed that Communism had collapsed and the capitalist customer is not the enemy anymore) but one must remember that the Lesser Carpathians are not all that far away, which does mean that you do occasionally run into vampires

Fortunately the locals are very willing to share their expertise in dealing with such matters and they showed me a 'quick-and-dirty' way to ensure the safe completion of one's meal without getting bitten on the neck.

More to follow...

(8)

On BBC Radio 4's Today Programme (on Monday's show - if my memory serves) there was a story about the destruction of the forests of Eastern Europe.

The BBC journalist would refer to forests in country after country and talk about how the trees were "illegally cut down" and the timber "illegally imported into Western European countries".

I noticed something about the BBC man's remarks. In each Eastern European country he discussed he talked about the 'national parks' or the 'national forests' - never once did he talk about privately owned forests being destroyed.

Whether forests are owned by old aristocratic families or by private companies (as in the State of Maine) there is no question of them being destroyed for a quick buck - ownership (as opposed to licences, or 'rights to' or other nonsense), brings concern for the long term.

Of course the BBC man did not notice this - he just claimed that 'things' would be improved when the Eastern European nations joined the European Union and there were even more regulations than there are now.

(8)

Citizens of the Czech Republic, about to vote in the referendum on their country's entry into the EU, were shocked to find in their inboxes yesterday an email from their Prime Minister. Is this e-politics? They do not think so and they certainly are not impressed. The Prime Minister spamming, er, addressing the nation.

A Czech blogger comments on AcidLog:

I don't know who thought up the campaign, but I know that if a commercial product were marketed this way, the company would be doomed.

He also provides the text of the email. Judge for yourselves:

Dear citizens,

The moment of a serious decision is close, which should be made by each of us confidently and independently. It is a decision that is beyond the boundaries of the everyday political disputes and squabbling. We are deciding the future of our country for decades. Those who say that the decision we make this Friday and Saturday is a 'draft' one are wrong. This is not the case. The referendum is binding and the result will determine whether the Czech Republic enters the European Union or whether it will chose a long period of isolation. Every one of us has experienced a moment in his life when an opportunity was missed and it never came back.

Vladimir Spidla
Prime Minister

Although the blogger intents to vote yes, he lists a number of arguments used by the anti-EU campaigners: the EU's murky financial management, scandals regarding selection of agencies (presumably refering to allocation of EU contracts), the idiotic pseudo-documentaries on TV insulting the viewers' intelligence, the scandal with real EU citizens (perhaps some local affair), leaflets full of newspeak and arguments notable by their absence and concert by one of the divas of Czech pop.

Despite the obvious sarcasm, it seems that the level of anti-EU campaigning in the 'New Europe' is pitifully inadequate. They have a lot to overcome as the EU propaganda gives a powerful incentive to the average Czech citizen. Tomas Kohl explains:

People from UK or abroad know little about the quality and range of arguments presented here to convince the public to say Yes. Instead of focusing on heavy issues like economic and monetary policy, questions about sovereignty, foreign relations, the government plays the game of nonsense issues and tries to lure us with sweet promises of a better tomorrow.

Following are the main selling points of the ongoing pro-EU propaganda, paid by taxpayers:

The borders will disappear, people will be able to travel freely
We'll be able to study in EU countries for free
We'll be able to work anywhere in the EU
We'll get a large chunk of money from Brussels
More security

Tomas's appeal to the British is touching:

I just pray the Brits won't accept that damn Constitution that is coming their way. Britain has been the most prominent power player holding Europhile madmen from doing the worst things for some time. If they lose, we can elect conservative party in 2006 and it won't matter anymore. Guys, wake up!

Yeah, let's wake up and do something... It might be a good idea to notice the countries that we know so little about and care even less. After all they did come out in support of the Anglosphere, incurring the wrath of Chirac in the process and jeopardizing the candies he was graciously considering handing out to them. The civil societies there are still very fragile and without a heavy-weight ally they stand no chance against the EU Federasts.

Another Czech blogger sums up his thoughts on the issue in a graphic succinctly named "Entry to the EU".

(11)

Instapundit links to this UPI report:

WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.

"In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an 'appropriate and serious review' of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times," Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.

Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the "confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty's award," Nynka wrote.

The utter falsehood of Duranty's claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine - a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others - has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented - and potentially immensely embarrassing - procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.

The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the "Harvest of Sorrow" by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.

One of the lesser lies now circulating about the Cold War, Communism and all that is that because it is now history, we should all forget about it.

So, in an attempt to spread interest in this important issue by trivialising it, I have a question. Walter Duranty � Jimmy Duranty. What if any is the connection between these two persons?

Jimmy Duranty was the bloke who sang that song that they used at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, right? And in one of my all time favourite movies ever, What's Up, Doc?, Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand sing a song called "You're The Top" or some such thing, and during their version of this, reference is made to "The Great Duranty". Walter, yes? Or is that Jimmy? If it's Walter, it shows how the lie has reverberated down the decades, but is it?

It's not that I'm opposed to writing serious prose about murderous famines and about the scumbags in the West who concoct and print lies about how these murderous famines aren't murderous famines at all and then spend another seventy years lying about all their earlier lies - merely that joking around is one of the ways you draw attention to such things.

(52)

I'll bet that the EUnuchs are beside themselves with glee now that they have managed to co-opt the Pope:

Just three weeks before the EU membership referendum in Poland, Pope John Paul II has recommended that his compatriots join the European Union.

Sure to be seen as a benediction by many in Poland. Does the Pontiff not realise that the EU is the work of the Devil?

(6)

Matthew Maly writes in with a remarkable tale of malfeasance and cover-up from stretching from the Ukraine & Russia to the corridors of power in the United States

Four years ago, I alerted the US Department of Defense about $20M grossly mismanaged and/or stolen from Defense Enterprise Fund (DEF), a US-financed program to convert the former Russian producers of weapons of mass destruction (anthrax, nuclear, etc). A Department of Defense Audit proved the theft, but the guilty American managers were not even reprimanded.

When Vector Plant of Novossibirsk, the Soviet Army's prime facility for producing militarized anthrax and smallpox spores, asked for just $1M to convert itself - DEF did not have the money. When DEF COO was purchasing his private apartment in Moscow, DEF had a million dollars to finance it.

Just recently, I caused Defense Threat Reduction Agency to lower the number former Soviet WMD scientists said to be converted by DEF to peaceful pursuits from 3370 to 1250, a 66% reduction! But the real figure is no more than 200 scientists, not a good result for a $67M program.

A more complete description is here. For the full story, please go here and then click on "DEF".

After my letter of concern, I was immediately blacklisted for US-financed assistance jobs in the NIS which was a professional and financial catastrophe for me. I am extremely frustrated that there has been four (!) intentionally inconclusive investigations of DEF, each refusing to look into my allegations. The Pentagon admits that the money is gone and that a $67M program is dead, victim of gross mismanagement, they do not disprove my letter, but they do not remove my name from the blacklist either.

Matthew Maly

(9)

As an anti-statist, free market capitalist libertarian, I am often 'accused' of being on the political right. Yet as so many libertarians will tell you, many of my ilk refuse to accept the statist left/right axis as having any relevance to us. One only has to listen to a pro-immigration libertarian such as myself and then listen to most Tories in the UK/Republicans in the USA to see an issue which shows the differences.

We often find that neo-conservatives agree with libertarian antipathy to Marxist and Keynesian state centred economics and the wealth & liberty destroying regulatory state. Yet to think that advocating laissez-faire makes us 'right wing' is to misunderstand just how large the cultural and philosophical gulf is between most true (i.e. capitalist) libertarians and most conservatives. Conservatives are about conserving, they are about continuity above all else... however libertarians are about liberty, conserving it where it can be found but also tearing down whatever impeeds it, regardless of whose sacred cows get gored in the process. We may wish to conserve what is objectively good but otherwise we are as Promethean as the Marxist left.

In the Daily Telegraph article Britain risks huge influx of east Europe migrants by Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, we see loaded language even in the title: 'risk'. How about calling the article:

'Britain opens doors to those formerly oppressed by Communism'

or maybe:

'Britain steals a march on Continental Europe in grab for east European labour'

But no. The thrust of the article is that only the wonderful Tories want to 'protect us' from the Eastern Hordes.

Ministers said that allowing migrant workers from these countries into Britain at the earliest opportunity would help the economy. But Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, challenged the Government to explain why it had not made use of the transitional arrangements. "We live in a small and crowded island," he said. "Why does the Government consider it appropriate not to have transitional controls when other EU countries have imposed them."

Well it just so happens that the Telegraph article I am quoting from actually links to an article here on Samizdata.net from the Telegraph external links sidebar (cheers, guys!) called Why do people think that Britain is overcrowded? It really is not overcrowded and the idea we are somehow not going to be able to assimilate other Europeans is laughable. Oliver Letwin does not really care about providing the British economy with high initiative eastern European workers and entrepreneurs, he is just concerned with playing politics and attacking anything the dismal Blair government does, even when it is entirely correct.

(5)

Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something - anything - just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday's Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:

Poland and the EU

From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson

Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.

Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.

Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.

Yours etc,

RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.

December 3.

It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.

(2)

I am back from Slovakia now, and had a lovely time thanks. On my final weekend, while football related mayhem reigned in Bratislava, I took a trip northwards to the Czech countryside. I was shown several fine churches, but the most intriguing item of my stay did not involve any sightseeing trips, at any rate not by me. It concerned, rather, one of my host's first cousins, a man called Karel Krautgartner.

Krautgartner was Czecho-Slovakia's answer to Benny Goodman, that is to say a hugely accomplished jazzman who could also more than hold his own in the classical repertoire, on clarinet, saxophone and all related instruments. My host played me a videotape of a Czech TV documentary recently shown to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Krautgartner's death. He looked like a James Bond villain, and played sublimely. He didn't seem to have been a huge creative musical force. But he was a great band leader and organiser, who inserted successive jazz innovations from America into Czech musical life, and who added middle-European technical polish and discipline to everything he touched.

Krautgartner was only about sixty when he died, of cancer of the colon, in West Germany. He had emigrated there on account of his unwillingness, following the suppression of the Prague Spring of the late nineteen sixties in which he had played a prominent part, to become a Soviet stooge. Concerning Krautgartner's death my host told me a fascinating and terrible story, which was not mentioned in the documentary, but which my host had learned through being personally acquainted with many of the personalities involved.

Somewhere in the Urals, during the nineteen fifties, a nuclear bomb went off by mistake in a research laboratory, devastating the entire surrounding region, with, as you can imagine, appalling loss of life.

The USSR, being the USSR, decided a few years later, in the early sixties, to start repopulating the area, and damn the consequences in terms of human disease, which were appalling too. The USSR was no lover of jazz, but it was willing to use jazz for its own higher purposes, such as to add a dash of glamour to an otherwise wholly dreadful human environment where it nevertheless wanted people to live, and so various showbiz acts were despatched to the area, including a jazz band lead by Karel Krautgartner. And, according to my host, Krautgartner wasn't the only one to die at about the age of sixty, of cancer. They all did. That's right. The entire band later died prematurely of cancer. And this after a visit lasting hardly more than a few days.

Now I don't understand the technicalities of thermo-nuclear pollution, but it seems that it is not something that is evenly spread. It concentrates itself in particular places where it finds it particularly easy to hang around, and as a result there was one happy exception to the collective, delayed death sentence that the band later found itself condemned to.

One of the band members took a more, let us say, American jazzman's view of his responsibilities, and passed on the sight-seeing aspect of the trip, choosing instead to stay stuck in his hotel room consuming a continuous supply of cigarettes and alcohol. As a result he lived about a decade longer than the others.

I love that. A man's life is prolonged by his addiction to alcohol and nicotine. True, he eventually died of throat cancer brought on by smoking too much, but even so: hurrah!! Smoking And Drinking Can Sometimes Seriously Protect Your Health.

I treasure this story, because it seems to me to sum up, in a way that is downright artistic, the whole multi-faceted achievement that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics � its obsession with punching militarily above its weight, its proneness to huge accidents; its indifference to human life, including human lives appropriated from far away countries; its hatred of everything popular and western but its willingness to succumb to such things for its own over-ridingly vile purposes; the spectacular poisoning of the environment, far, far beyond the worst of the petty pollutions committed by Western corporate capitalism; the way that the most intelligent thing to do if you got swallowed up in it was to get blind drunk; and the way that it all eventually collapsed amidst a hurricane of plummeting life-expectancy statistics. It's all there. (Only the arctic death camps are missing, but they've been well covered by others.) And I treasure being a Samizdatan and having somewhere to put the story.

What I don't know is how well known it already is. My host reckoned this hadn't been written about before, not with regard to these particular musicians anyway. But there must be a mass of reportage of the explosion itself and general surrounding miseries, especially now that the USSR's successor government has finally admitted that the thing did happen. Samizdata readers are pretty hot on the technicalities of weaponry, so maybe there'll be some good comments and the story will grow somewhat. I hope so. It's important to keep reminding ourselves what a good thing it was that the Cold War was won, mostly without severe explosions, by Civilisation rather than by its opponents.

(Come to think of it, fellow Samizdatan Dale Amon knows about weapons and about this kind of music, the way I know about neither. I wonder what he may have to tell us.)

(6)

What with the England - Slovakia football match last Saturday and Brian Micklethwait's visit to Bratislava, it has been an unusual period of publicity for the small country wedged between its better known Central European neighbours - the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.

In his post What EU means to Slovakia Brian waxed lyrical about the sophistication of the Slovak high-school students and their ability to transcend the limitations of their environment. They managed to turn Brian's perception of himself up-side down:

For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world's true sophisticates.

Then we get the news of racist abuse aimed at two black players in the England team during the European Championship in Slovakia last Saturday¹. Emile Heskey, along with Ashley Cole, says he was subjected to the worst racist abuse he has experienced in his career.

"We heard the racist stuff because it just wasn't in one section of the stadium, it was virtually the whole ground... To hear it in this day and age is shocking and you would have thought that people might have moved on from that sort of thing by now."

Quite. So what is Slovakia really like? A country of which we know little and care even less, it hasn't yet found any symbolic associations that gets small, and big, nations through the day - Switzerland has cheese and cuckoo clocks, Scotland has whisky and tartan, Czech Republic has beer and Prague, Russia has vodka and chaos etc.

The truth is that Slovakia is neither a hidden gem of sophistication a là Brian's post nor a den of primitive and dangerous louts. It is a country suffering from the effects of long-term isolation under communism and a history of neglect and bashing by its bigger and 'superior' neighbours. The symptoms are standard and predictable - a severe inferiority complex coupled with an outrageously inflated sense of importance. So, a single conversation can contain scathing criticism of all things Slovak, from politics to your next door neighbours, as well as a vociferous defence of the Slovak ways as the best, never admitting that there may be something better outside your immediate world and interpreting behaviour of the outside world as if Slovakia was its focal concern. The result of such an autistic worldview is usually a breeding ground for conspiracy theories...

Makes sense, if you ask me. The racist abuse hurled at the England players is based on the same fear of the unknown, fear of the 'different' that could undermine one's ill-fitting but comfortable understanding of the world, like a tight but well-worn shoe. In Slovakia this fear goes hand in hand with the desperate need to feel superior to someone and so any reason, however 'out-dated' or primitive, will do.

But while I may have some understanding for the Slovak struggle for identity, I do have a problem with the Slovak media and its approach to the incident. I haven't had a chance to find out what 'ordinary people' think but no doubt Brian will be happy to share his first-hand experience, given half the chance.

In what is to be the first ever fisking of Slovak news, I will quote from an article by Pravda, a mainstream newspaper in Slovakia:

"This type of abuse will probably never stop. I have experienced racism since I played in the under 21s" said Heskey calmly to the British media.

Calmly, my foot. And even so, how does Heskey's 'calm' make the behaviour of the crowd less primitive?!

However, Beckham was not hiding his disgust of the Slovak fans' behaviour in the stadium Slovan in Bratislava: "Problems with our fans is one thing but the most significant moment was the racist behaviour towards our players. We tried to ignore it but it simply wasn't possible to screen it out completely."

As if Beckham's glossing over the England football fans, who indeed were causing trouble, and his insistence that the behaviour of the Slovak fans was worse, disqualifies him as biased and renders his judgement irrelevant. How subtle!

And finally:

A classic definition was attempted by the England coach Eriksson: "This should not be possible in the year 2002. It was horrendous and shouldn't have happened."

Yes, bring on the sarcasm and screw unbiased and unloaded reporting!

It is the reaction of those whose identity and sense of worth is built on emotional rather than rational grounds and Slovakia certainly does not have the monopoly on this phenomenon, which can be found in any society. The difference is in the significance and effectiveness of the historical straws at which the society in question can clutch. Hence the well-known obsession of the English with World War II, the anti-German banter being a source of instant and cheap superiority to any English football hooligan.

To be fair, this kind of knee-jerk reaction is not confined to the simple or provincial mindsets, it is rife amongst the 'sophisticated' western socialist commentators, journalists, politicians, intellectuals etc., obviously, its manifestations far more 'civilised' than the racist booing of the Slovak football crowd.

The socialist beliefs and rhetoric of the 'chattering classes' act as a psychological salve, soothing their champagne-soaked consciences as well as making them feel virtuous about defending the poor of this world. Overflowing with 'noble' sentiment and love of the humankind, they truly hate us - the heartless capitalists thriving on child labour, the cold-hearted free marketeers spurning the warm cocoon of the state love, the beastly gun-wielding hawks supporting military action against our enemies, so obviously evil and warped for we disagree with them! The old "Workers of the world unite!" has been replaced with "Do not think, emote!" And to hell with those who make them confront the results and consequences of their idiotarian mental processes. There is always room for a new definition of the 'class enemy'!

¹ = I am not concerned about the force used by the Slovak police against violent England football fans set on making trouble since that is the only way to deal with them. Also, I do not think shooting of two England fans outside a bar in Bratislava demonstrates anything but more stringent, albeit not entirely PC, attitudes towards security. They were shot by private security guards...

(3)

Posted from Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Yesterday and the day before, I did a couple of talks in the local high school, with my friend the teacher supplying not so much translation as translatory clarification as and when needed, because my audience had a pretty reasonable understanding�- and this is the whole point of what I'm about to write - of English. I spoke about the British attitude towards the EU, and explained why the Euro-debate has become steadily more fierce.

One of the reasons for�this fierceness is that the Internet has made the idea of participating in the�Anglosphere more appealing, and the idea of a unified Europe corresponding less appealing, to the British. But yesterday morning, before I embarked upon this bit of my talk, I asked how many of my audience had themselves used the Internet during the previous week. Most hands went up. Then I asked: how many of you used only the Slovak language? All hands went down. All of them. Not only that, there was a distinct murmer of disapproval that I should even ask such a question. Only use Slovak internet sites? What a bizarre idea.

What this interchange illustrates is that the Internet means something�rather different�to�us language-phobic Anglos compared to how people like these educated young Slovaks experience it. In Britain, physical travel is easy, but learning other languages is an unfamiliar drudgery. We�can travel, physically, but don't need to travel linguistically, so to speak. Not everyone�speaks our language, but enough do to make our monolinguistic attitude reasonable, if often impolite.

But for Slovaks it's the other way around. Learning another language is relatively easy, and an obvious thing for any educated person to do, starting with English. Travelling is hard, because so expensive, and because the obvious place to go, to Western Europe, is made so difficult for them. So the Internet is for them, for now, their escape to the big wide world. To use only Slovak on it would be to behave like those idiot British tourists who turn up in Timbuktoo and sulk if they can't get fish and chips. The Internet, for us Anglos, is a different way to divide the world. For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world's true sophisticates.

I also�sensed a very different attitude here, and especially among these young, bright Slovaks, towards the EU. For them, the EU is indeed a threat to Slovakia. Their worry is that Slovakia will become a small colony in a large empire.��But what the EU means to them personally, or could mean, or they hope could mean -�and asking about this�produced another huge show of hands -�is the chance of people like them to seek their fortunes elsewhere than in little old Slovakia. Instead of making do with crummy au pair jobs, they might soon be able to go West and make real lives for themselves, in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London. The EU, for them, is the hope of freedom.

Russia, by the way, is absolutely not seen as a problem for these people. The idea that Slovakia might be joining the EU as some kind of long-range defence policy, in case Russia ever gets strong again, was dismissed with contempt.

Slovakia is, I understand, on the latest EU list of countries�who are due to be engulfed in 2006, or some such year. I just hope that things for these young people turn out the way they hope, and that they haven't been swindled.

You can also see, however, why older Slovaks might rationally dread the EU, as the great vacuum cleaner that will suck the brightest and best of their children out of their country and leave the place a tired old dormitory country for impoverished oldies, visited only by vastly rich tourists, who then proceed to rebuild Slovakia as a tourist country instead of a real country.

(3)

Posted from Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Here at the only Internet cafe in Bratislava that I can find, I am struggling with a crazy Eastern European keyboard and what are for me the difficulties of using�yahoo. It's an arkward combination, not made�anz easier bz the fact that whenever I tzpe z I get y and whenever I tzpe y I get z. So it comes out as zahoo unless I concentrate verz carefullz.

But enough of trivia. I got to Bratislava last Friday and leave next Monday, and so far it's been great. I have lucked into a classical music festival, the initials for the Slovak title of which are BHS. So when I went to the concert on Saturday, I thought, oh no, they�ve done a truly tacky sponsorship deal. But all was well.

The concert however was dull, I thought.��The solo pianist, Ivan Moravec, is world-renowned, but frankly he made his two pieces, the Franck Variations for Piano and Orchestra and the Ravel Concerto, sound to me like run-throughs. Maybe it was me. Maybe it is that he looks like a waiter. Whatever, everyone else seemed happy.

But then on Sunday, there was Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the Czech Philharmonic in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. It was sold out of course, but I went along anyway, and a Japanese gent sold me a ticket, for the Slovak equivalent of about £6 sterling ($9 US). Unbelievable. As was the performance. For once all the flim-flam of classical musical ovations - a loud a pretentious 'bravo' as soon as the last chord went silent, vast gobs of flowers for the lady solo singers and even for the gentleman conductor, constant returns to the platform for more applause, rhythmic applause - all seemed entirely appropriate.

Ashkenazy is a tiny man, but his conducting both made the absolute most of each passing musical moment and made�the piece as a whole - and what a�whole it is - all hang together. He has the ability that all the best conductors have of being able to flap his stick arm about like a madman, while keeping not just his torso but also his other arm absolutely immobile. So the flapping arm dealt with the here and now, while the rest of him made sure that the 'paragraphing' of the music, so to speak, still made sense. The only problems were the ensemble of the trumpet section, which wouldn't do if they ever try to turn the evening into a CD, and�the coughing of the audience, ditto times five. The trumpets were otherwise excellent, and their occasional fluffs mattered to me not at all, but the coughing made�me think murder. But,�the vital silence that�happens just before the chorus starts to sing in the final movement was, against�all the odds, truly silent. When the choral singing did get underway, it was magnificent.

The�hall of the Slovak Philharmonic�is really too small for the tremendous din that went on inside it that night, but for me this only added to the impact. No way could I play this piece as loudly on my CD machine, because the neighbours would have me expelled mid-way into the�first movement.��Concerts�in such halls are often marred by traffic noises, but this�was a concert�I can imagine having seriously threatened the concentration of passing motorists.��It's a�huge piece, with no holding back, especially in the first and last movements. Mahler is out to�borrow the very voice of God. So all in all, it was the complete and perfect opposite of the night before, and a memory to treasure for a lifetime.

What has all that to do with the usual pre-occupations of Samizdatistas, such as the ongoing War on Terrorism? Well put it this way:�it's what is being defended.

(5)

Is it right, on the day when most minds (certainly the minds of most Samizdata readers) are focussed on a war that is very much in progress, to think also about an earlier one, the Cold one, the one that ended, approximately speaking, around 1990? I hope so. Like everyone I have my "what I was doing", my "how I heard about it" and my "how I felt as I watched it" stories concerning today's recollections of a year ago. (Someone rang me. I was at my desk. I didn't like it.) But, rightly or wrongly, appropriately or inappropriately, I choose also to ruminate today upon events from an earlier time. (And besides, I cannot possibly do better than Perry's photos, or David's inspired "root causes of American anger" posting of last Sunday.)

So anyway, in the latest issue (October 2002) of Gramophone, there's a letter concerning the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877-1960), from Professor William Lee Pryor of the University of Houston. Here's this letter in full (but with apologies for the absence of Hungarian accents):

In his review of some orchestral music by Dohnanyi (June, page 44), David Gutman writes, 'I wonder how many readers are still bothered by the bizarre trajectory of the pianist composer's wartime career.' This is no doubt a veiled allusion to false charges brought against this greatly maligned musician during the Second World War. I knew Dohnanyi well and would like to respond.

Prior to this event, Dohnanyi was the most important figure in the musical life of Hungary. He was not only a world famous pianist, composer, conductor and teacher, but was also head of the Franz Liszt Music Academy, the music director and chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the head of music for the Hungarian Radio, and a member of Parliament. Inevitably, second-rate musicians blamed him when they failed to succeed as they wished. A man who had gained such prominence is bound to acquire many enemies and they became his detractors once he fled Hungary during the Russian invasion. They said he was a Nazi, anti-semitic and anti-Communist. Only the latter was correct. It seems to be forgotten that he also left Hungary during the brief Communist regime of Bela Kun in 1919. Before the Soviet Union's takeover in the Second World War, he, along with the other members of Parliament, singed an anti-communist document. The new government never forgave him for that.

He was not a Nazi sympathiser and never belonged to any political faction. Nor was he anti-semitic. The facts are that when they wanted him to purge the orchestras of its Jewish players, he disbanded the group altogether. But the rumours of his anti-semitism would persist and follow him for the rest of his life.

Happily, Jews have been among Dohnanyi's chief defenders. Edward Kilenyi, who had studied with Dohnanyi in Budapest, was a major in US Army Intelligence during the war and he conducted an official, extensive examination of the various charges brought against his old teacher. The result was a complete exoneration for Dohnanyi. The leading Jewish-Hungarian composer of the perio, Leo Weiner, wrote a letter from Budapest in which he repudiated the anti-semitic charges against his former colleague and this was published in The New York Times. Sadly however, some people always want to believe the worst.

You get the sense that Weiner's letter defending him wasn't the first Dohnanyi related stuff in the New York Times, don't you?

I tell you at once that, although I know nothing else about this business other than what I learned from Professor Pryor's letter, I find the story he tells entirely convincing. I quote the letter in full because, first, so far as I could tell from the Gramophone website, no direct link either to it, or for that matter to the David Gutman review, is possible (although I'd love to be corrected about that).

And second, I quote the letter in full because I liked it, and liked especially that Pryor didn't just defend Dohnanyi against the false accusations of Nazism and anti-semitism, but proclaimed him truly as the courageous anti-communist that he clearly was. This is (a) clearly true and important and excellent and good to remember, and (b) it also explains why all the lies were told. He wasn't a Nazi. He wasn't an anti-semite. But because he was anti-communist, the communists said that he was a Nazi and that he was an anti-semite. That�s what communists did, and through the sheer momentum of these things, they still do. Four decades after Dohnanyi's death, the din of the enormous communist lie machine still echoes and still continues to spread lies.

I wonder what, if anything, David Gutman will have to say for himself in later issues of Gramophone. Was he merely yet another innocent victim of the communist lie machine, in that he merely, unknowingly, allowed the mud ("bizarre trajectory") to stick to Dohnanyi, or was he doing his nasty little bit deliberately to refresh the mud, so to speak?

I realise that communism did far nastier things to far more people than merely tell a lifetime of lies about Ernst von Dohnanyi. But it's all part of that huge and horrible story.

This latest war looks like being a long and complicated one also, with lots of cold spells. I wonder how many other good people will likewise find themselves, through a combination of envy and ideologically motivated malevolence making use of such envy, being denounced as bad, merely because they too happened to live in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(3)

The Blogger Bash is tonight, so I got myself in the party mood this morning by reading how David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky had responded to Adriana's griefometer posting.

He tried it on Soviet Communism, but deliberately took it all a bit seriously and tastefully, ignoring for example how very uncute lots of the victims of Soviet Communism were.

Now, this griefometer is just a silly game, isn't it? A bit sick perhaps? Well, consider this: 100 million killed over 80 years is about 3,422 per day. Or one "World Trade Centre". Every day for 80 years.

What's really sick is that the communists' ideological soulmates infest almost every academic institution in the western world. And I am still waiting for them to apologise.

Have a nice weekend.

Although Prague has been hit hard by the worst flooding of the Vltava in a century, at least there has been some good news for the despondent staff at Prague's zoo. After having been forced to put down several highly prized large animals when it became clear they could not be moved to higher ground in time to avoid drowning, returning zoo employees were astonished to discover Slavek, an 18 year old hippo, waiting for them on the second floor of a zoo building in an exceedingly bad mood.

Don't just stand there gawping, feed me, damn it!

It seems that Estonia is well on the way to becoming a shining example of robust capitalist virtues... and high tax Finland is concerned it will turn into a tax haven (article will only be available on-line for a short time for non-Baltic Times subscribers).

In Finland, corporate income tax is 29 percent while in Estonia it is 26 percent and there is no tax on reinvested corporate profits. The personal income tax rate is progressive in Finland and may reach up to 60 percent; in Estonia it is set at 26 percent.
[...]
"Estonia certainly wants to preserve the comparatively low taxation level for a long time," Kallas said. "I suggest other countries move toward decreasing taxes rather than pressuring others to increase theirs."
[...]
But it is hard for Finland to decrease the tax rate while trying to uphold a social-welfare system, he said, and so it is difficult for the country to compete internationally on low tax levels. He suggested that the EU set tax standards to avoid harmful competition between member states.
[...]
Viialained said that taxation was an internal matter for Estonia, but EU negotiators should have considered the issue more carefully.
[...]
"When Estonia is a member of the same union, then the common internal market is not totally (the country's) own business any more," he said. "That is why I hope Estonians understand our criticism.

Of course they understand EU criticism, a simpleton could understand it! The political classes in places like Finland (and France and Germany) do not want the owners of capital to have access to less kleptocratic taxation within the EU as that would endanger the system of pork barrel and kick backs they depend on for their perks. Oh if only more former communist nations would follow Estonia's brave example and turn their back on the toxic social democratic model of the European Union.

I have read Perry's link to the checkered history of the UPA with great interest (see previous Samizdata.net article). There is much students of the period miss simply because of the vastness of the Eastern Front and the greater perceived relevance to our own history of the Western.

Most striking in the Weisenthal Centre's brief history of the hatreds, treacheries and double-dealings of the period and area is how well it is brought to life in the guise of real people in Harry Turtledove's wonderful alternate history series, "World War". I won't spoil any of it for those who have not read the books, other than to say he puts human faces and motives to the many players of that vast historical drama of the twentieth century.

I highly recommend the books to anyone and particularly to those interested in WWII. Not for the history itself - it is an alternate reality - but to get inside the heads of the people behind the facts.

No one is a monster in their own mind - and sometimes not even in their own time.

Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who opposed both the Nazis and the Red Army (whom they regarded as occupying Russians) from 1942 until they were largely crushed by the communists in 1953, are to be accorded the same rights as former Red Army veterans by the Ukrainian government. It is interesting that the Russian government regards this as an affront even after all these years, calling the UPA 'bandits' for having the audacity to defend the Ukraine against all comers.

However although the UPA opposed both the Soviets and Nazis, they were also implicated in the mass murder of Poles and Jews and do not really fit comfortably into the 'clearly-the-good-guys' category, a fact surprisingly absent from several reports on the recent hostile reaction by the Russian government to the Ukrainian decision to grant surviving UPA veterans full military pensions.

I have gone straight from the buzz of London to the grey nostalgia of Prague and am now sitting in an internet cafe named appropriately Globe. I can hear English being spoken as this is a favourite place for the English-speaking ex-pats and my inner Anglospherometer is telling me that it's time to blog. I have been in Prague for two days now and given that this place is in a different world in terms of mentality and time, please take the following comments as potentially confused ramblings of a travelling blogger...

In the short time I have been here I have managed to cover a multitude of activities - checked out (no pun intended) what is new in Prague since my last visit two years ago, visited a monstrous museum of modern art (previously communist archives, the building, not the pictures, obviously...), had a blazing row about nationalism and political discourse in the Mittel Europa and managed to send two Jehovah's witnesses on their way amicably and within twenty seconds! I am particularly proud of the last one...

I have been thinking about the best way of debating in a place like Central Europe where a Western style of discourse does not create the expected responses. Roll on the popularisation of shared meta-contextual discourse...! The usual evolution of an argument from a thesis through antithesis to a synthesis, does certaintly not apply here. A statement is made, often categorically, so a thesis is born. However, presenting an anti-thesis is dangerous as the aforementioned blazing rows are certain to ensue....What is needed is some kind of validation of the grains of truths carefully exctracted from the original statement. This is interesting (and frustrating) but I think it springs from the need of the Central Europeans to assert their intellectual identity by having it first recognised by their debating opponents. Then, perhaps, room for sneaking an anti-thesis in is created, en route to a wonderful and all encompassing synthesis, providing ample justification for gallons of lovely alcohol to be consumed. As a second thought, who needs shared meta-context when you have alcohol?

On my wanderings through Prague I have been walking along Wenceslas Square, the main square where the 1989 demonstrations of the 'Velvet Revolution' took place. I noticed that some shops are hiring people to walk around holding large placards to advertise their wares. This is a familiar sight in the West, especially in Oxford street, the main shopping street in London and I have often looked upon these as another sign of 'unbridled' capitalism. Here the locals tell me in a voice dripping with moral satisfaction that such advertising is going to be banned soon as it insults the human dignity. Mindful of my debating experience in this place, I meekly pointed out that perhaps these people may be quite content to earn some money by an activity that does not involve much effort and that by banning it, they will be deprived of the opportunity to have their human dignity offended at a price they are prepared to be paid... As expected I did not get far but I have acted as the lone voice of free market and capitalism. Today, I have seen a girl reading a book whilst at the same time holding a large sign advertising an Irish Pub... So much for insulted human dignity!

I have another three days to go and depending on my ability to access the internet and my mental stability, I may blog again. If not, once in London I will no doubt find plenty to write about privacy and security, computers, markets and other far less nostalgic topics.

The sterile environment I refer to is the mind of Jaroslaw Kalinowski, the leader of the Polish Peasants Party, junior partner in the ruling centre-left coalition currently de-structuring Poland's economy. Yet much to my delight he is calling for the complete abolition of the EU agricultural subsidies that suck up 80% of the EU's stolen budget.

Naturally this is not because these barely reformed socialists have suddenly become converts to real world economics but because they are starting to realise that they are going to be wiped out by subsidized Western EU agriculture and if the primitive and inefficient Polish farmers cannot get the same subsidies, they it is better to eliminate them for everyone in order to level the playing field where far lower Polish labour costs can off-set the large and highly mechanised Western European farms advantages even without subsidies.

Of course as that is such a utterly rational course of action, there is no chance whatsoever that the EU will adopt it. If not even the USA can bring itself to treat farmers like everyone else I suppose the whole world is doomed to eventually vanish under a mountain of unwanted food that is paradoxically over-produced and yet over-priced to the consumer. Madness.

See how eager people are to demand that they have a right to your money? Polish farmers are upset because they are not going to get to steal tax money from the rest of Europe the moment they join the European Union. They will have to wait until 2013 to join the undead legions of European subsidy vampires.

Poland�s agriculture minister Jaroslav Kalinowske has declared "It is about ensuring guarantees for an equal partnership for Polish garniture. If we don�t all play under the same rules then our farmers will vote against European Union membership," reports the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten.

Yes! It would be wonderful if that happened and Poland did not sign away its future. Of course if the farmers do indeed scupper Polish EU membership, they will be doing so for all the wrong reasons but as anyone who has lived through a war will tell you, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Whilst nothing the EU does ever surprises me, it often amazes me that even in the USA the farmers can rob the rest of the country not only in terms of subsidies but in terms of artificially inflated prices. How can the 'left' who claim to have the interests of the common people at heart accept that food should be made more expensive by government action? For rich and bourgeoise people, the cost of food as a proportion of their wealth is utterly trivial. Yet for the poor, that is obviously not the case and so various forms of state assistance becomes important to avoid going short of food. In a democratic nation or super-nation, this naturally produces a dependent class who will always vote for the people who provide that state assistance, even though in reality those self same people are actually the ones responsible for the food being so expensive in the first place. The vampire bites and produces a mindless legion of bloodsucking followers.

About this funny vampire picture: I think I might have gone out with this guy a few years ago. I find this on Communist Vampires website that Perry mentioned in earlier posting.

I read Perry de Havilland and David Carr writing in Samizdata how Britain must resist the EU and defend its civil liberties against Blair's rapid elimination of traditional constitutional common laws. Yet at least some of the UK media also realises this and there is surely a possibility to fight the tide of creeping repression and backdoor Euro socialism. But if a powerful and rich country like Britain, with long traditions of freedom, has found itself in a situation with enemies of liberty within and without, what chance does the Czech Republic have against Brussels? What chance Poland? What chance Hungary?

When these countries join the EU, they will find their advantages of low labour costs are quickly legislated away in the interests of French and German Trade Unions, and they will be left to compete with the Western Europeans but with antiquated infrastructures and underdeveloped services. Worst of all, they will have their developing culture of liberty that started growing post-Communism, smothered in socialist inspired EU 'directives'.

And I see many people in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia who just cannot wait to be swallowed alive by these same people. No sooner do they finish slaughtering each other so that they can have self-determination for their respective societies, than they are cueing up to surrender everything they have won at such a terrible cost...and to who? To a bunch of smarmy Eurocrats in cheap suits who promise the same thing as Natalie Solent wrote about regarding Africa.

The EU will seduce the political class with 'largess' and make them good little 'subsidy slaves'. It makes me despair how we will ever see proper capitalist systems develop to provide us with lasting liberty and a decent standard of living, if even Britain has ended up where it is now. The economy of just Greater London is considerably larger than all of former Yugoslavia...what chance do small Slavic societies have of ever developing a wealthy capitalist order once we are under the influence of that increasingly authoritarian bureaucratic nightmare in Brussels?