In 1816, the American Republic began to emerge from the turmoil of the War of 1812, a war that the United States effectively lost though because of the Battle of New Orleans, which actually came after the peace treaty had been signed, Americans somehow think they won the war. The British burnt Washington to the ground. James Madison had to flee for his life. The US invasion of Canada ended in a hasty retreat. New England threatened succession. And political disputes between North and South over tariffs and slavery were growing ever more bitter.

The truth is that American elections from 1796 through the Jacksonian Republic were hotly contested. There were no parties in the modern sense. In 1816, the first US political party was still a decade away. But there were factions. Even before the ratification of the US Constitution and the election of George Washington, Americans were divided over the power and role of the Federal government. Two camps arose, the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton and the Anti-Federalists led by Thomas Jefferson. George Washington largely sided with Hamilton and during the early part of the Republic, the Federalist “party” was ascedant. In 1796, John Adams won the Presidency over Thomas Jefferson and he followed Washington’s policies even if he and Hamilton did not exactly see things the same way.

Politics was a bitter cup of tea during the early Republic far more bitter than they are now. It serves to remind you that Adams and Jefferson would not speak to each other for over a decade such was their feud. And in 1800, Aaron Burr would kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel over a political dispute. Politics was not as genteel as Americans today imagine it. In fact, people would cross the street so as to not speak with their political opponents. It even divided families. In 1806, two cousins both members of the House from Viriginia fought a duel over a salt tax.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

The cave paintings, that is. Via the Independent,

“Unesco, the world cultural body, has threatened to humiliate France by placing the Lascaux caves – known as the “Sistine Chapel of prehistory” – on its list of endangered sites of universal importance.

The Unesco world heritage committee, meeting this week in Quebec, has given the French government six months to report on the success of its efforts to save the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne from an ugly, and potentially destructive, invasion of grey and black fungi.

At the same time, a scientific committee appointed by the French government has conceded that an elaborate treatment with a new fungicide in January failed to stop the mould advancing through one part of the caves.

An independent pressure group of scientists and historians claims that up to half of the startlingly beautiful, 17,000-year-old images of bison, horses, wild cattle and ibex are now threatened by the fungal invasion – the second of its kind in eight years.”

The caves have been closed since 1963. One only visits a replica of the real thing, precisely to avoid decay and damaging of the paintings.

Why is that particularly embarrassing? Because, of course, France is very proud of its cultural heritage and Lascaux is an incredible monument of human (pre)history. More than that, it would be that the UNESCO does not consider the French authorities competent enough to take care of the site and therefore, would take over.

“Officials from the French government’s department of historic monuments and experts from all over the world have been quarrelling for years over the best way to preserve the Lascaux paintings. Some experts have accused the French authorities of a series of blunders, including a change in the air-conditioning system in 2000, the use of high-powered lights in the caves and allowing too many “special” visits.

An independent body, the International Committee for the Protection of Lascaux, infuriated Paris by asking Unesco to intervene last September. Laurence Léauté-Beasley, president of the committee, was jubilant yesterday. “The requirements placed upon France [by Unesco] are significant and strong,” she said. “France will now have to answer to the world community for actions they have taken in the past and will take in the future. Lascaux’s management must now operate in a spirit of transparency.”"

Maintaining the caves is a complex business: the air quality and the amount of light have to be carefully controlled and any variation is liable to damage the paintings. However, one can only hope that environment control technology has improved enough to be able to preserve the 600 or so paintings.

The caves were discovered by chance in 1940 and are thought to have been painted by hunters and gatherers by crushing minerals to create red, ochre, brown and black paints, around 17,000 to 15,000 years ago.

“After a visit to the caves, the Cubist artist Pablo Picasso declared: “We have invented nothing.”"

All the more reason to preserve this incredible heritage.

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I am not religious and people who have conversations with a god are, in my view, a tad delusional. Private faiths I can handle, whatever gets you through your day, but when you’re a public figure and you starting tell me that god said this and that to you, I am going to think that you are, well, crazy. Hearing voices is not a sign of sanity (even in the wizarding world according to Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series).

My favourite God said this to me story is from 1898 and the pious William McKinley. At the end of the Spanish-American War, McKinley had a problem, what to do with all the Spanish territory the US Navy had now occupied most especially the Philippines. And so he prayed all night we are told. And in the morning God said this to the fair but historically misguided William McKinley:

Keep the Philippines. Make Christians out of those heathens.

That’s a funny thing for a Christian God to say because the Spanish had been in the Philippines since 1565 and over the next 332 years made the Philippines the only Christian nation in Asia. McKinkley followed God’s less than sage advice and annexed the Philippines, Palau, Guam and the Marianas. They are still Catholic and unless God doesn’t think Catholics are Christians, this story shows that people who talk to God and where God talks back are, well, a tad delusional.

From the New York Times:

Asked about her rosary, she called it, in humor, “an error.” She said she remembered her father saying the rosary, but could not remember exactly how it worked, how many times she was supposed to pray to the Virgin Mary. “So I thought, in case it’s not 10, maybe 15,” she said, fingering the rosary’s 15 buttons, taken from a jacket the guerrillas had provided her.

God is personal to her, she said. “I know that I talk to him, and that he responds.” People dismiss the miraculous, she said, and “prefer talking about coincidences,” but “what I think about miracles is that it happens all the time to everybody.”

It’s five sets of ten Ave Marias with a Padre Nuestro in between each one. There’s an Acto de Fe at the beginning and the start. There are also Gloria a Ti Señor after the first three Ave Marias of the first set and after the last Ave Maria of the other sets before the Padre Nuestros. I still keep my grandmother’s rosary with me on my nightstand along with my my 1931 edition of the Origin of Species. The latter is my bible, the former is my memory of my grandmother whom I adore to no end. She taught me how to say the rosary, how to tied my shoes, to swim, to walk, and so much else. And never did she ever tell me that God had spoken to her and said this or that. It was really more about leading a righteous moral life.

Faith is a private matter, believe what you want but please don’t come preaching to me about miracles as some act of God or some perverse notion that it was God’s will for McKinley to annex the Philippines or have you suffer in the jungles of the Guaviare for over six years.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via Le Monde, everybody hates tax havens but they do not exist at the margins of the global financial system. If anything, they are an integral part of it and every year, billions of dollars land there. They are an integral part of the infrastructure of international finances.

What circulates through tax havens? Clean and dirty money (proceeds from illegal activities that end up there for purposes of money-laundering), tax-evasion money. Tax havens were allowed to prosper by all the economic powers, but now, they are worried because they have realized that these havens make funding terrorism easier and more discreet. In the past months, we also discovered that these place facilitate tax fraud on a grand scale, as the case of Liechtenstein where more than a thousand Western people deposited their funds. So, it is not really a surprise that this topic has come up at the G8 meeting.
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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via Le Nouvel Observateur, this is a welcome, albeit belated, development. Switzerland will return approximately $12 million, which is only a fraction of all the money that Jean-Claude Duvalier and his family embezzled from their country, Haiti. Duvalier has been enjoying a nice retirement on the French Riviera since he went into exile in 1986 (life must be hard there, compared to the chaos he left behind).

The funds that Switzerland will return to Haiti were placed in Swiss banks before Duvalier and his entourage left the country. They have the remaining three months to contest the restitution. Haitian authorities estimate that Duvalier embezzled more than $100 million, mostly through stealing profits from state enterprises that were supposed to go to funding social programs. Instead, the money would find its way to Swiss bank accounts.

Duvalier no longer has access to the money deposited in Switzerland since 2002. Haiti started procedures to get the money back in 1986, but the request was only completed last May.

The best source on the history of violence in Haiti is the Encyclopdia of Mass Violence. Of course, the Duvalier regime (1957-1986), in particular under Jean-Claude Duvalier - “Baby Doc” - was a brutal and murderous dictatorship, following in his father’s - Francois Duvalier, “Papa Doc” - footsteps. Papa Doc is the one who created the infamous Tontons Macoutes.

Political and economic stability have not yet been established in Haiti and it would be nice if the returned funds were used for the collective good of a population that badly needs it.

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Today marks the sesquicentennial of the first public debate on the topic of evolution at the Linnean Society of London. It was an event planned in haste and set off by a letter received by Charles Darwin on 18 June 1858. The letter came from Ambon in the Ternate, a group of islands known as the Moluccas, between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea. Writing to Darwin was a young English ornithologist named Alfred Russel Wallace who had been collecting specimens throughout the Malay Archipelago. Wallace would collect over 125,000 different specimens, over 80,000 of them beetles alone. Over a thousand of them were new to science. More importantly, Wallace noticed a distinction between the fauna of islands closer to the Asian mainland and those closer to Australia, the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.

Recovering from a bout with malaria in 1858, Wallace took the time to write to Darwin about his observations.

The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?

Darwin read Wallace’s maunscript with alarm for he had sat on his ideas (he had discussed them with others but had never set them to paper) on natural selection since his return on the Beagle in 1841. It is thus in the fortnight between 18 June and 1 July, 1858 that Darwin wrote a quick paper that together with the Wallace manuscript were presented to the Linnean Society of London.

For the next year and half, Darwin would write feverishly and in November 1859, The Origen of Species would be published. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book ever written.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky… Huh? How does the comparison apply?

“Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.

Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East.”

What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq).
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Now, Charles here and Tony Karon have had their fun with the Euro 2008 soccer championship, but, now let me put an end to this with the obligatory bad news (since we didn’t have hooliganism this time, I had to find something else!).

But thanks to Le Monde, we hear that Georg Aschner, 95, Croatian citizen living in Austria, is actually Milivoj Asner, a wanted Nazi war criminal since 2004 after he fled from Croatia. He was spotted by a journalist from the British Sun at the games involving Croatia.

Asner has been living with his wife in Klagenburt (Austria) since 2006. There is an Interpol international warrant against him and Croatia has repeatedly asked Austria for his extradition. However, the Austrian courts have ruled that Asner is not in good enough health to be extradited (I guess he’s healthy enough to attend soccer games but not to be tried for his crimes).

Asner was the Croatian chief of Oustacha (pro-nazi) police during WWII and he is accused of being responsible for the deportation of hundreds of Croatian Jews and Gypsies. He is listed in fourth position of most wanted nazi war criminals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Asner’s deportation is still unlikely though, as a medical report published today, declared him senile.

How ironic that it’s his nationalism / patriotism that got him busted.

Photo Credit: The Sun.

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This is the strange case of English public school boys from the fields of Eton on to the halls of Sandhurst and careers in the SAS (Special Air Service Regiment, the special forces of the British Armed Forces) who then become mercenaries and attempt to overthrow a government in 2004. And this is a story about oil.

If you have never heard of La Guinea Ecuatorial, or Equatorial Guinea, you are not alone. It’s one of the most obscure of Africa’s 50 plus nations. To begin with, Equatorial Guinea is one of two former Spanish colonies in Africa, the other being Spanish Sahara, now occupied by Morocco. Equatorial Guinea is small and composed of two parts. Rio Muni is a sliver of land tucked between Cameroon and Gabon. The other part of Equatorial Guinea is five inhabitated islands in the Bight of Biafra. Combined the country is about the size of Maryland. Some have called it the “most wretched place on Earth.”

The country became independent in 1968 after 190 years of Spanish rule. For its entire 40 year history, only two men have served as President and they both rank as two of the most tyrannical despots on a continent where despots have been the norm. Francisco Macías Nguema was the first President of the Equatorial Guinea ruling from independence until his overthrow on August 3, 1979. During this time, Macías Nguema developed a cult of personality (he declared himself a living god) and his supporters turned over any perceived opposition to Macías Nguema to the security forces with reckless abandon. The country came to be known as the “Dachau of Africa.” By the time of the coup, 600,000 Equatorial Guineans, or 50% of the population, had fled the country. And approximately 50,000 Equatorial Guineans were in jail at the time of coup, not to mention an estimated 100,000 dead or missing. In 1979, Equatorial Guinea had only a third of the population it had had in 1968.

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In article by Jon Lee Anderson and entitled Fidel’s Heir: The Rising Influence of Hugo Chávez, The New Yorker looks at the President of Venezuela. I’ll pick some quick lines and offer thoughts.

Bolívar is Chávez’s political muse; Chávez quotes and invokes him constantly, and is unabashed about his desire to resuscitate Bolívar’s dream of a united Latin America.

I have often asked myself why Simón Bolívar is Hugo Chávez’s “political muse”? It is an odd choice. Bolívar did dream of a United States of Latin America stretching from Patagonia to well California since at that time California was part of Mexico and while Bolívar was an mediocre general who had one brillant move that undid Spanish rule over most of South America, the truth is that Bolívar was an authoritarian despot who was largely divorced from the political thought of the Enlightenment though he did pay lip service to Jean-Jacques Rousseau but in practice he ruled as a dictator. He envisioned a hereditary Senate and strong central government with a strong chief executive. It was Bolívar’s heavy hand in squashing political liberties that led to the breakup of the Republic of New Granada, the short-lived union of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela that ended in 1830. Both Colombia and Ecuador look to different men as the founders of each country. In Colombia, it’s Francisco Paula de Santander and in Ecuador, it’s José Antonio de Sucre. And certainly I would find it hard that Simón Bolívar would approve of Chávez’s socialism. And as a Colombian, I have ZERO interest in any Latin American super-state. Greater economic ties most certainly but such notions of a state running from Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego are utopic and certainly I would not sign up for one with Chávez at the helm.

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