The partial release of the 'secret' files relating to the killing of President John F Kennedy activated one of the most bizarre recollections that I carry. I was at the time a student, and I cannot recall any other political figure until Donald H Trump who was so well-loathed by virtually the whole of my generation as was Kennedy. He was seen as the man who had carried the world to the brink of nuclear war to intimidate the Soviet Union into withdrawing its missiles from Cuba; an occasion that produced mass rallies of students of all political opinions [and of none] in passionate protest at the threat of nuclear annihilation. He proposed that the navies of all the US allies in NATO should be merged into a 'mixed manned force' under US command. He was supporting Cuban exiles in their attempts to destroy the infant Castro regime.
When Kennedy was alive, his record was seen as at least as highly blemished as Trump's is now: though no-one denied that he had a meritorious record of service in the US Navy in the Second World War; which had caused injuries to his back that meant he was in almost-constant pain.
The president's father had allegedly made his fortune in the illicit alcohol trade during prohibition, and was reputedly the keeper of notorious actresses. These equivocal items on his record did not prevent Joe Kennedy from becoming a major supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's campaign for the Presidency, which brought him the reward of being appointed Ambassador the the Court of St James'. As US Ambassador, Joe sent Roosevelt negative messages about Britain's determination and competence to wage war. He had intended that his eldest son, Joe Junior, should in due course become US President; but when Joe was killed in the war that ambition was passed to the second son, Jack. Old Joe could not hope himself to attain such an office, in view of his highly equivocal past.
The second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, got his second name from his maternal grandfather, 'Honey Fitz', a man who had allegedly descended deeper into the murky side of New England life than did Joe Kennedy.
The Democratic party machine duly delivered a Senate seat for young Jack, whose marriage did nothing to limit his sexual adventurism. His run for the presidency was well funded by friends and family and it was widely believed that his election was achieved by the questionable delivery of a package of Electoral College votes by Mayor Daly of Chicago who controlled Cook County, Illinois.
As president, Kennedy utterly failed to advance the cause of emancipation for the deeply-oppressed black community in the Unites States. Emancipation and integration became a major motif of the succeeding presidency of Lyndon B Johnson, Kennedy's vice president; who had previously been seen as a political machine-man in contrast to Kennedy's heavily-marketed charisma. In foreign policy Kennedy was an aggressive cold warrior, prepared to 'bear any burden and fight any foe' in the cause of his understanding of democracy; which he usually equated with American dominance. The US allies were expected to give him blanket endorsement, and this is what most riled the young in the UK.
Immediately on the announcement of the president's death, there was a surge of jubilation: young people rejoiced that the greatest risk to peace had been removed. Over the ensuing twenty-four hours, however, a very different mood was disseminated by the media; and the Kennedy legend as it is still handed down was being established. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a libidinous, middle-aged and significantly disabled man: by contrast, right from the day of his death, his legend was presented ruthlessly by his courtiers and disseminated by an obedient mass media; and that version was adopted by most subsequent historians. But those who remember the way in which the media succumbed to an 'official' interpretation of Kennedy's short tenure of office have retained a lifelong suspicion of how susceptible those media are, at key times, to manipulation by the state authorities in the so-say democracies.
It was soon revealed that the supposed 'climb down' by the Soviet boss, Khrushchev, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, was in fact the result of a compromise deal whereby the USA stood down planned missile silos in north-east Turkey - close to the Soviet border - as a quid pro quo for the Soviets' withdrawal of planned missile silos in Cuba, close to the United States mainland. The world then settled down to the prolongation of the cold war, and the USA became embroiled ever more deeply in the confrontation with communism that degenerated into the Vietnam war. The Europeans who had previously been coerced by Kennedy avoided direct involvement in a land war in Asia. Harold Wilson brushed off Lyndon Johnson's plea to send 'just one battalion of the Black Watch' to Vietnam, and the perceived threat of a US takeover of the British forces was removed. Australia and New Zealand did send men to Indo-China, which gained them the status of especially close US allies that they still enjoy.
Donald J Trump's 'America first' policies are reminiscent in some ways of Kennedy's. It is not easily conceivable that an assassin's bullet could make Trump a global hero; but an equally strange thing has happened; within living memory.
Showing posts with label Turkey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Turkey. Show all posts
Friday, 27 October 2017
Tuesday, 26 September 2017
The Kurds: An Inconvenient People
In parts of the northern regions of the country called Iraq there is a majority of people who consider themselves to be of a Kurdish ethnicity: as there are in a large swathe of Turkey and parts of other 'national' territories; not the least important being Syria. The vast majority of the Kurds were subjects of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, when that monarchy [like the Austro-Hungarian 'dual monarchy'] was dissolved.
In Europe the victorious allies imposed the Versailles Treaty on Germany, and the Trianon Treaty was supposed to resolve the territorial boundaries of the successor states to Austria and Hungary; including much-reduced 'rump' states called Hungary and Austria. The US President had published his ''Fourteen Points" during the war, setting out America's war aims: to which the British and the French subscribed, insofar as the postwar settlement of Europe was concerned. Prominent among these points was the 'principle of nationality': some groups who had been subject to Austria and Hungary had declared themselves to be separate nationalities and small armies [for example, cohorts of Czechs, Poles and Slovaks] had fought with the allies; or claimed to be ethnically related to the people of neighbouring states, as with Romanian-speaking subjects of Austria and Russia. All these claims came out at the peace conferences, and an attempt was made to accommodate them.
The distribution of people and languages in Europe did not easily lend itself to a process of drawing clear frontiers around the ethnic groups. Thus German speakers were allocated to France in Alsace and Lorraine, alongside French speakers, and to Poland and to the Czecoslovakia that was cobbled together after the great Slovak leader Stefanik was conveniently removed in an 'air accident'.
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were deposited in frontier areas of Slovakia and Romania. The great German port of Danzig was created a 'free city', the polyglot Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste was severed from its hinterland by its allocation to a sliver of Italian territory, and the German-speaking former capital of Hungary - Pressburg - was considered for free city status until it was designated the capital of Slovakia and given the newly-minted title of Bratislava.
Some of these territorial allocations - notably those in Czechoslovakia and Poland - were the trigger point for the Second World War; and hangover border issues still remain as with the Slovak-Hungarian minority. New ethnic mixes were created by Stalin, who rebuilt the USSR by moving millions of people so that Donetsk is an almost-entirely Russian-speaking city and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have large Russian-speaking minorities. Spain faces an urgent crisis over the much longer-running claims for independent sovereignty for Catalonia; and Scots nationalism is not dead. Rich Dubliners send their children to centres in the west of Ireland where they are expected to improve their pronunciation of a language that they are most unlikely to deploy in their careers; while the Ulster protestants are fiercely resisting demands for their province to adopt the formal bilinguality that prevails [at great cost] in the Irish Republic.
With so many loose ends quietly festering in Europe, there can be no surprise that similar problems exist elsewhere; as with Tibet, and with the Muslim minority who are currently in flight from Myanmar.
The Kurds have the misfortune to have had no advocate of significance in western capitals in 1919, when the majority of them were allocated to the newly-defined Turkish state and others were simply in the way of the mapmakers as the British and French arbitrarily delineated new states which defied both the aspirations of the Arabs who had fought with the 'allies' in the First World War and the interest of minority populations within those artificially designated states. After all, it was what the Europeans had done at the end of the nineteenth century in delineating their colonies in Africa: which led to the absurd situation of today, whereby the posit-independence states in Africa bear little or no relevance to the ethnicity of their populations. There is scant chance of Kenya electing a President Obote as long as the Kikuyu are the majority ethnic group.
The Kurds of northern Iraq provided tough and useful allies for the USA in the resolution of the mess that Bush II and Blair created in that country. Yesterday they voted to be a sovereign nation. That is utter anathema to Turkey. A festering sore that is ninety-eight years old is about to swell into a major international crisis. The Kurds surely have their rights; as do the rulers of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The times call for new thinking: the fraught political situation will not permit that to have any effect.
In Europe the victorious allies imposed the Versailles Treaty on Germany, and the Trianon Treaty was supposed to resolve the territorial boundaries of the successor states to Austria and Hungary; including much-reduced 'rump' states called Hungary and Austria. The US President had published his ''Fourteen Points" during the war, setting out America's war aims: to which the British and the French subscribed, insofar as the postwar settlement of Europe was concerned. Prominent among these points was the 'principle of nationality': some groups who had been subject to Austria and Hungary had declared themselves to be separate nationalities and small armies [for example, cohorts of Czechs, Poles and Slovaks] had fought with the allies; or claimed to be ethnically related to the people of neighbouring states, as with Romanian-speaking subjects of Austria and Russia. All these claims came out at the peace conferences, and an attempt was made to accommodate them.
The distribution of people and languages in Europe did not easily lend itself to a process of drawing clear frontiers around the ethnic groups. Thus German speakers were allocated to France in Alsace and Lorraine, alongside French speakers, and to Poland and to the Czecoslovakia that was cobbled together after the great Slovak leader Stefanik was conveniently removed in an 'air accident'.
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were deposited in frontier areas of Slovakia and Romania. The great German port of Danzig was created a 'free city', the polyglot Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste was severed from its hinterland by its allocation to a sliver of Italian territory, and the German-speaking former capital of Hungary - Pressburg - was considered for free city status until it was designated the capital of Slovakia and given the newly-minted title of Bratislava.
Some of these territorial allocations - notably those in Czechoslovakia and Poland - were the trigger point for the Second World War; and hangover border issues still remain as with the Slovak-Hungarian minority. New ethnic mixes were created by Stalin, who rebuilt the USSR by moving millions of people so that Donetsk is an almost-entirely Russian-speaking city and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have large Russian-speaking minorities. Spain faces an urgent crisis over the much longer-running claims for independent sovereignty for Catalonia; and Scots nationalism is not dead. Rich Dubliners send their children to centres in the west of Ireland where they are expected to improve their pronunciation of a language that they are most unlikely to deploy in their careers; while the Ulster protestants are fiercely resisting demands for their province to adopt the formal bilinguality that prevails [at great cost] in the Irish Republic.
With so many loose ends quietly festering in Europe, there can be no surprise that similar problems exist elsewhere; as with Tibet, and with the Muslim minority who are currently in flight from Myanmar.
The Kurds have the misfortune to have had no advocate of significance in western capitals in 1919, when the majority of them were allocated to the newly-defined Turkish state and others were simply in the way of the mapmakers as the British and French arbitrarily delineated new states which defied both the aspirations of the Arabs who had fought with the 'allies' in the First World War and the interest of minority populations within those artificially designated states. After all, it was what the Europeans had done at the end of the nineteenth century in delineating their colonies in Africa: which led to the absurd situation of today, whereby the posit-independence states in Africa bear little or no relevance to the ethnicity of their populations. There is scant chance of Kenya electing a President Obote as long as the Kikuyu are the majority ethnic group.
The Kurds of northern Iraq provided tough and useful allies for the USA in the resolution of the mess that Bush II and Blair created in that country. Yesterday they voted to be a sovereign nation. That is utter anathema to Turkey. A festering sore that is ninety-eight years old is about to swell into a major international crisis. The Kurds surely have their rights; as do the rulers of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The times call for new thinking: the fraught political situation will not permit that to have any effect.
Saturday, 5 August 2017
A Bad Week for Democracy
For anybody who retains a belief that democracy, though a very unsatisfactory way of structuring politics, is better than any known alternative, this has been another depressing week.
Rwanda has been through the form of holding an election. The only question at issue was whether the dictator would claim a 97% or a 98% majority: beyond that, the answer was unquestionable.
Venezuela was pushed further along the path towards consolidating the dictator's power, through the charade of a Constituent Assembly.
The President of Turkey demanded the right to appear in the show trials of the people who were allegedly involved in last year's coup, as an aggrieved party. No doubt, he will have his way.
Nick Timothy, formerly head of Mrs May's kitchen cabinet, has told the Torygraph that the Conservatives' disastrous election result was due to control of the campaign being seized by the party's electoral machine, leaving the original campaign [that would have been centred on Mrs May's reforming zeal] high and dry. Be that as it may, the Tories are in a terrible mess. This situation was highlighted by the Irish Prime Minister's speech in Queen's University, Belfast, yesterday in which - quite politely - he pointed out that the government of the UK has not shown a clear hand on any major matter of policy since the electoral disaster. This drift towards departure from the European Economic Area is accelerating, even though its calamitous effect on the economy is beyond doubt.
The egomaniac rhetoric emerging from the President of the United States continues unabated, as the problems confronting his government become more clear and the impotence of the world's strongest democracy is demonstrated.
In the face of that weakness, the boldness of the North Korean dictatorship in unabated. The regime has developed considerable capacity to disable computer systems anywhere in the world, as a second string to their strategy of global blackmail. As the first string, they will soon have nuclear-armed missiles capable of inflicting damage anywhere in China, in Japan, in Asiatic Russia and on the US West Coast. The unwillingness of China to put a stop to this [despite their country's front-line vulnerability] is incomprehensible to western democrats, but it could end up in massive ransom demands from Pyongyang. The ordinary people of North Korea have been starved and enslaved to enable to country to develop its extraordinary aggressive power: they could now be rewarded by the bounty that the American people have enjoyed being handed over at gunpoint to the North Koreans. Trump trumpets that it could not happen: I am not sure!
Rwanda has been through the form of holding an election. The only question at issue was whether the dictator would claim a 97% or a 98% majority: beyond that, the answer was unquestionable.
Venezuela was pushed further along the path towards consolidating the dictator's power, through the charade of a Constituent Assembly.
The President of Turkey demanded the right to appear in the show trials of the people who were allegedly involved in last year's coup, as an aggrieved party. No doubt, he will have his way.
Nick Timothy, formerly head of Mrs May's kitchen cabinet, has told the Torygraph that the Conservatives' disastrous election result was due to control of the campaign being seized by the party's electoral machine, leaving the original campaign [that would have been centred on Mrs May's reforming zeal] high and dry. Be that as it may, the Tories are in a terrible mess. This situation was highlighted by the Irish Prime Minister's speech in Queen's University, Belfast, yesterday in which - quite politely - he pointed out that the government of the UK has not shown a clear hand on any major matter of policy since the electoral disaster. This drift towards departure from the European Economic Area is accelerating, even though its calamitous effect on the economy is beyond doubt.
The egomaniac rhetoric emerging from the President of the United States continues unabated, as the problems confronting his government become more clear and the impotence of the world's strongest democracy is demonstrated.
In the face of that weakness, the boldness of the North Korean dictatorship in unabated. The regime has developed considerable capacity to disable computer systems anywhere in the world, as a second string to their strategy of global blackmail. As the first string, they will soon have nuclear-armed missiles capable of inflicting damage anywhere in China, in Japan, in Asiatic Russia and on the US West Coast. The unwillingness of China to put a stop to this [despite their country's front-line vulnerability] is incomprehensible to western democrats, but it could end up in massive ransom demands from Pyongyang. The ordinary people of North Korea have been starved and enslaved to enable to country to develop its extraordinary aggressive power: they could now be rewarded by the bounty that the American people have enjoyed being handed over at gunpoint to the North Koreans. Trump trumpets that it could not happen: I am not sure!
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