Last night's documentary on Mary Robinson got me thinking - how many other 'global' Irish citizens are there, resepcted the world over, who we can be proud of without reserve?
One. Two. Three.
Any more?
Monday, December 8, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
Contextualising Mugabe
I've had a strange thing with the London Review of Books for many years now. Enthralling when its very good, it can pretty disgusting when bad, which is generally when they want to cause a stir. Last summer I resubscribed on the strength of a particular fine piece on Yeats by Michael Wood, but I knew there would come a time when I would read something quite stupid and think - let's get that money back.
Mahmood Mamdani today kindly furnishes such an instance. His piece on Zimbabwe is bizarrely distorted, and places the preponderance of blame for the country's collapse on - surprise! - the West. Its opening bars should give a flavour of the full tune:
You know where its going from here folks - clearly conventional Western wisdom must be stood on its head. And while Mamdani musters an awful amount of effort in the attempt, it ends up an evasive and shoddy piece. Consider his take on the (illegal) land seizures that are widely accepted to have precipitated the catastrophe:
"Transfer of property" is putting a bit mildly. And here he is on the stolen elections of 2002:
I think we can agree that "widespread allegations" is made to do a lot of work there. That serial brutality - beating, murder, rape, looting - was loosed on large sections of the population in 2002, as in 2008, is somehow difficult to say without hesitation and hedging. And I'm confused as to how its "clear" that Mugabe's support went up when Mamdani admits that fraud was rampant. I would've thought that widespread vote-rigging would actually obscure the intention of the voters.
But then, faced with with election fraud that quite obviously deferred the will of Zimbabwean voters, Mamdani grows coy, and elides any real reference to last Spring's elections, in which the violence and thuggery, while certainly widespread, worked itself up into something more than mere "allegations", and in which the prize was more transparently stolen by Mugabe and his fetid circle. Its worth nothing though, how thorough discussion of the most significant event in Zimbabwe's recent history could be missing from a piece that purports to be a serious survey of the country's situatio.
Mamdani's conclusion is also interesting for what it omits: "The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse." Well, no: I would have thought that the main argument is about a tyrannical ruler leading his people into ruin, and then employing massive violence and fruad to tenaciously maintain his bony grip on power. Mamdani has been guilty of positing stupid equivalences before, but this "one group accuses the other" business won't wash unless he's prepared to finish the sentence with "and one side clearly is not only authoritarian and intolerant but also guilty of horrific brutality". Otherwise, he's making a fool of himself, and a mockery of serious discussion on Zimbabwe.
All in all, this is a disgraceful performance that never should have been published in a respected learned journal. It seems strikingly foolish to publish such a crass apologia when Zimbabwe is facing down another public health emergency (where, it might be added, the West are prime movers in bring relief). But its the regrettable habit of the LRB to publish articles that are knowingly "controversial" - that is, pieces that are deliberately at odds with common sense and informed opinion on a range of issues. They're like an attention-starved child - "look at meeeee!". There is a time and a place for controversy. But on an issue like this, the people of Zimbabwe - and the readers of the LRB - deserved better.
Mahmood Mamdani today kindly furnishes such an instance. His piece on Zimbabwe is bizarrely distorted, and places the preponderance of blame for the country's collapse on - surprise! - the West. Its opening bars should give a flavour of the full tune:
It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.
You know where its going from here folks - clearly conventional Western wisdom must be stood on its head. And while Mamdani musters an awful amount of effort in the attempt, it ends up an evasive and shoddy piece. Consider his take on the (illegal) land seizures that are widely accepted to have precipitated the catastrophe:
Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic – if not political – terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.
"Transfer of property" is putting a bit mildly. And here he is on the stolen elections of 2002:
Despite the EU’s imposition of sanctions in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2002, Mugabe polled 56.2 per cent of the vote against Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC’s 42 per cent. There were widespread allegations of Zanu-PF violence and last-minute gerrymandering, with polling stations in urban areas – Tsvangirai’s electoral base – closing early and extra stations being set up in rural areas, where Mugabe’s support was assured. Nonetheless, it was clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher than in the pre-fast-track elections of 2000.
I think we can agree that "widespread allegations" is made to do a lot of work there. That serial brutality - beating, murder, rape, looting - was loosed on large sections of the population in 2002, as in 2008, is somehow difficult to say without hesitation and hedging. And I'm confused as to how its "clear" that Mugabe's support went up when Mamdani admits that fraud was rampant. I would've thought that widespread vote-rigging would actually obscure the intention of the voters.
But then, faced with with election fraud that quite obviously deferred the will of Zimbabwean voters, Mamdani grows coy, and elides any real reference to last Spring's elections, in which the violence and thuggery, while certainly widespread, worked itself up into something more than mere "allegations", and in which the prize was more transparently stolen by Mugabe and his fetid circle. Its worth nothing though, how thorough discussion of the most significant event in Zimbabwe's recent history could be missing from a piece that purports to be a serious survey of the country's situatio.
Mamdani's conclusion is also interesting for what it omits: "The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse." Well, no: I would have thought that the main argument is about a tyrannical ruler leading his people into ruin, and then employing massive violence and fruad to tenaciously maintain his bony grip on power. Mamdani has been guilty of positing stupid equivalences before, but this "one group accuses the other" business won't wash unless he's prepared to finish the sentence with "and one side clearly is not only authoritarian and intolerant but also guilty of horrific brutality". Otherwise, he's making a fool of himself, and a mockery of serious discussion on Zimbabwe.
All in all, this is a disgraceful performance that never should have been published in a respected learned journal. It seems strikingly foolish to publish such a crass apologia when Zimbabwe is facing down another public health emergency (where, it might be added, the West are prime movers in bring relief). But its the regrettable habit of the LRB to publish articles that are knowingly "controversial" - that is, pieces that are deliberately at odds with common sense and informed opinion on a range of issues. They're like an attention-starved child - "look at meeeee!". There is a time and a place for controversy. But on an issue like this, the people of Zimbabwe - and the readers of the LRB - deserved better.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Clinton Redux
Feels a little bit churlish to note, but the gaggle of idiots crowing about how Obama would capsize the Irish economy would probably ease up if Obama puts Clinton at State.
All reservations aside, I'd expect a Hillary stopover/gladhanding 1990s-style if it actually happened. Which'd be nostalgiarama here in Dublin.
All reservations aside, I'd expect a Hillary stopover/gladhanding 1990s-style if it actually happened. Which'd be nostalgiarama here in Dublin.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Exit for Bertie
I wanted to say something smart and relevant a few days ago about Bertie's announcement of depature but nothing good came - I'm still a bit confused and unconvinced that the 'Ahern era' is indeed at a close. He came to power just as I was beginning to take cognisance of my political surroundings, and has been there for all of my adult life. So while the world went from technology bubble to 9/11 to Iraq to Climate Change, there has always been Bertie - immovable, the set stock pattern of Irish political life.
A few words about his virtues. Certain tricky things can only be worked out by people who are consummate, pre-programmed politicians - the ever-friendly, glad-handing, back-slapping whats-the-craic-lads types, people who are at base shallow and cynical, but who know that the price of power is eternal smiling vigilance in the face of the wary voter. Bertie Ahern was such a man - "ruthless, cunning, devious" when he needed to be, but, out in the world, a smily-wavy man, a joker, hand permanently extended to greet the next potential Fianna Fail supporter. Nobody likes this person - the fakery and fronting - but everybody falls for him. And, more than likely, the majority of people vote for him.
We don't go to such people for vision or purpose or inspirational leadership. We don't quote their speeches, or ape their habits, or consider them prime movers in world-historical terms. But these are exactly the kinds of people who can figure out how to finangle a knotty situation and bring intractable problems to resolution. Someone needs to coax and charm and wheel and deal, to lard the gears with effulgent flattery. Someone also needs to be persistent, dogged, unrelenting - as if outside Tolka Park on a Friday night, shaking hands and making nice in the cold, going after every last vote, enquiring after grannies and hip-operations and housing lists. Certain problems need time and effort and an unhealthy barrage of manpower.
Bertie Ahern was that sort of politician, and the stalemate in the North was that kind of problem. He didn't do it alone, by any means, but his contribution may just have been the decisive nudge from the South to keep things rolling, to make sure problems were ironed out (or properly ignored), to ensure people were kept cordial and smiling and - above all - working toward some kind of final settlement. What was wrought by the Belfast Agreement was not perfect in any sense, but it reflected the efforts of the man who helped raise it - an ill-formed, wholly-functional, overly-pragmatic edifice, designed not for beauty but for work. And work it did. It is to Ahern's endless credit that the edifice still stands today, and that it has set the boundaries for a stable and lasting peace in the six counties.
The flipside of all this is, of course, the dispiriting, enervating, utterly-defeating way that politics in Ireland has continued to be practiced. Ahern represents all that is febrile and frightful about our public life - the Galway tent, the narrow vision, the lack of commitment to the public good, the disregard of the most cursory ethical standards, the lack of proper policy goals, the extraordinary incompetence in spending public money, the shame and shallowness of it all. And all of this was lacquered over by a thin film of diversion and deceit, an unwillingness to be forthright and honest about matters large and small. Only yesterday did he completely invert the actual import of events when he went after the Mahon Tribunal as "low lives" for their "harsh treatment" of Grainne Carruth. That such a claim was bizarrely at odds with the readily-available facts at hand, it was remarkable that no journalist present didn't muster the requisite courage and say - "Hang on you fraud, you were the one who lied and forced an innocent woman to take the stand!"
Much of this was, of course, of a piece with the reigning political culture within Fianna Fail, stretching back to the salad days of Chief Haughey and his myriad accounts. In a way, Ahern never really emerged from the Boss's shadow, and forever represented a throwback to a meaner, less scrupulous, less honest politics (we'll see if Cowen, whose heritage is that of a different FF wing, can banish Haughey's crooked atmosphere for good). That Bertie has presided over great economic growth is without dispute, and his early management of our fiscal affairs proved very smart indeed. But in the run-up to the 2002 election, prudence and thoughtfulness were thrown out the window, and all serious management of the way we spend public money seemed to go elsewhere entirely. In the last seven years, Fianna Fail have not been responsible stewards of our finances. As a result, we are left now with a steadily-cooling, over-exposed economy, a faltering property market, a serious dearth in competitiveness, and dim prospects ahead. Infrastructure was not properly invested in - not was education - and this could cause Ireland severe problems in the short term.
All of this without mentioning the manner of Ahern's ignoble exit - forced out to divert concern about his financial records away from the Government. He does not appear to anyone as spectacularly corrupt on the Haughey scale, but, as has been long established by the tribunal, he breached the public trust on several occassions, and in serious ways. As his evidence grew more contradictory and less convincing, leaving was only one way to salvage the reputation that he had so assiduously cultivated - Bertie the plain man of the people, a simple son of Dublin. This wasn't an act - my dad saw him in Fagin's the night before he gave his notice - but it was an affectation that grew more and more implausible, as records emerged showing that his varied accounts runneth over with friendly, unexplained cash donations, at a time in Irish life when most people (my parents included) had to get a Credit Union loan for an oven.
We will have to await the tribunal's no doubt Tolstoyan report to get the full picture on Bertie's finances. But it is not an altogether harsh judgment to say that Bertie's legacy may be viewed as one massive achievement in the North, an early, competent manager of the boom, but marred by a series of significant failures - in health, education, and transport. His triple-electoral success bestows upon him the historic imprimatur of the Irish people and he was, above all, an unrivalled politician, an expert on doing what politicians need to do more than anything - get votes. History may, in the end, judge us more severely than it judges him. But, as Adlai Stevenson once quipped - "In a democracy, people usually get the leaders they deserve."
A few words about his virtues. Certain tricky things can only be worked out by people who are consummate, pre-programmed politicians - the ever-friendly, glad-handing, back-slapping whats-the-craic-lads types, people who are at base shallow and cynical, but who know that the price of power is eternal smiling vigilance in the face of the wary voter. Bertie Ahern was such a man - "ruthless, cunning, devious" when he needed to be, but, out in the world, a smily-wavy man, a joker, hand permanently extended to greet the next potential Fianna Fail supporter. Nobody likes this person - the fakery and fronting - but everybody falls for him. And, more than likely, the majority of people vote for him.
We don't go to such people for vision or purpose or inspirational leadership. We don't quote their speeches, or ape their habits, or consider them prime movers in world-historical terms. But these are exactly the kinds of people who can figure out how to finangle a knotty situation and bring intractable problems to resolution. Someone needs to coax and charm and wheel and deal, to lard the gears with effulgent flattery. Someone also needs to be persistent, dogged, unrelenting - as if outside Tolka Park on a Friday night, shaking hands and making nice in the cold, going after every last vote, enquiring after grannies and hip-operations and housing lists. Certain problems need time and effort and an unhealthy barrage of manpower.
Bertie Ahern was that sort of politician, and the stalemate in the North was that kind of problem. He didn't do it alone, by any means, but his contribution may just have been the decisive nudge from the South to keep things rolling, to make sure problems were ironed out (or properly ignored), to ensure people were kept cordial and smiling and - above all - working toward some kind of final settlement. What was wrought by the Belfast Agreement was not perfect in any sense, but it reflected the efforts of the man who helped raise it - an ill-formed, wholly-functional, overly-pragmatic edifice, designed not for beauty but for work. And work it did. It is to Ahern's endless credit that the edifice still stands today, and that it has set the boundaries for a stable and lasting peace in the six counties.
The flipside of all this is, of course, the dispiriting, enervating, utterly-defeating way that politics in Ireland has continued to be practiced. Ahern represents all that is febrile and frightful about our public life - the Galway tent, the narrow vision, the lack of commitment to the public good, the disregard of the most cursory ethical standards, the lack of proper policy goals, the extraordinary incompetence in spending public money, the shame and shallowness of it all. And all of this was lacquered over by a thin film of diversion and deceit, an unwillingness to be forthright and honest about matters large and small. Only yesterday did he completely invert the actual import of events when he went after the Mahon Tribunal as "low lives" for their "harsh treatment" of Grainne Carruth. That such a claim was bizarrely at odds with the readily-available facts at hand, it was remarkable that no journalist present didn't muster the requisite courage and say - "Hang on you fraud, you were the one who lied and forced an innocent woman to take the stand!"
Much of this was, of course, of a piece with the reigning political culture within Fianna Fail, stretching back to the salad days of Chief Haughey and his myriad accounts. In a way, Ahern never really emerged from the Boss's shadow, and forever represented a throwback to a meaner, less scrupulous, less honest politics (we'll see if Cowen, whose heritage is that of a different FF wing, can banish Haughey's crooked atmosphere for good). That Bertie has presided over great economic growth is without dispute, and his early management of our fiscal affairs proved very smart indeed. But in the run-up to the 2002 election, prudence and thoughtfulness were thrown out the window, and all serious management of the way we spend public money seemed to go elsewhere entirely. In the last seven years, Fianna Fail have not been responsible stewards of our finances. As a result, we are left now with a steadily-cooling, over-exposed economy, a faltering property market, a serious dearth in competitiveness, and dim prospects ahead. Infrastructure was not properly invested in - not was education - and this could cause Ireland severe problems in the short term.
All of this without mentioning the manner of Ahern's ignoble exit - forced out to divert concern about his financial records away from the Government. He does not appear to anyone as spectacularly corrupt on the Haughey scale, but, as has been long established by the tribunal, he breached the public trust on several occassions, and in serious ways. As his evidence grew more contradictory and less convincing, leaving was only one way to salvage the reputation that he had so assiduously cultivated - Bertie the plain man of the people, a simple son of Dublin. This wasn't an act - my dad saw him in Fagin's the night before he gave his notice - but it was an affectation that grew more and more implausible, as records emerged showing that his varied accounts runneth over with friendly, unexplained cash donations, at a time in Irish life when most people (my parents included) had to get a Credit Union loan for an oven.
We will have to await the tribunal's no doubt Tolstoyan report to get the full picture on Bertie's finances. But it is not an altogether harsh judgment to say that Bertie's legacy may be viewed as one massive achievement in the North, an early, competent manager of the boom, but marred by a series of significant failures - in health, education, and transport. His triple-electoral success bestows upon him the historic imprimatur of the Irish people and he was, above all, an unrivalled politician, an expert on doing what politicians need to do more than anything - get votes. History may, in the end, judge us more severely than it judges him. But, as Adlai Stevenson once quipped - "In a democracy, people usually get the leaders they deserve."
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