Saturday, March 24, 2007
300
Dear readers, do any of you indulge in historical strategy games, like Age of Emipes or Rise of Nations? If you do, you'll recall that such games typically have a victory option called Wonder, whereby you can win the game non-militarily by building and maintaining cultural or scientific achievements which ensure the immortality of your civilization.
I thought about this as I watched 300, which is a retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae. You'd never want to play for the Wonder victory option if you were Spartan. Every Western imperialistic civilization from the ancient Romans to the modern Americans has had a big hard-on over Sparta, the legendary warrior society. Yet, despite that the Spartans dominated much of Greece for various periods, all we know of the them comes to us from other people. The Spartans themselves have given us nothing. No poetry, no history, no sculpture, no architecture, no science. As a civilization, they barely existed.
The plot, in brief, for those of us who have forgotten our Greek history lessons: in 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes I sent a massive invasion force against Greece, but suffered gigantic losses and was critically delayed because a tiny force of Greeks, led by 300 Spartans under King Leonidas, held them off at the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylae ("Hot Gates"). Sparta had not sent its full army against the Persians due to political machinations at home which were resolved too late to help the valiant Leonidas and his men.
If you are looking for a good history lesson, look elsewhere. As director Zack Snyder eloquently put it "this is an opera, not a documentary."
This is a movie that is trying to convey a message, and so it should be judged on that message.
The movie frantically tries to deliver the pro-Republican, post-9/11 message that freedom comes at a cost, namely the cost of eternal vigilance and defence. This is a perfectly good message which I don't dispute in the slightest.
However, the film ignores (except, perhaps, by inadvertent implication) the much more important message that we can easily destroy freedom by trying too hard to defend it. As in everything, balance is key. The Spartans were so preoccupied with military defence that everything in their society was enslaved to it. Even slightly deformed infants were summarily killed. Children, in the name of "training" were subjected to every imaginable form of physical and mental abuse. The economy was a proto-communist one in which every aspect of society existed for the sole purpose of feeding the war machine.
And this is a civilization held up as an example of "defending freedom"?
But of course it is easy for us to understand such hypocrisy, since we live with it. We live in a society in which the secret police have the right and ability to monitor the lives of every citizen and to arrest and hold people without charges or a trial for extended periods, all in the name of "defending freedom".
Most likely, everything that America is doing in the modern day "Persian War" (i.e. Iraq) is every bit as justified as the actions of King Leonidas in the ancient one. But, in a free society, this should never be assumed and should perpetually be questioned. Further, anyone who tries to shout down such questions in the name of patriotism is really no patriot at all.
The central question of our age is: How much of our freedom are we willing to sacrifice for our security? We must never stop asking that question.
This movie, for all of its pretentions, provides no answers, only more of the same slogans we have heard over and over again during the past four years.
posted by The Propagandist @ 10:53 AM,
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Friday, February 02, 2007
Ostrich Mentality
In a couple of other places, I've written largely sympathetic pieces about the plight of aboriginal people in North America. But, as I promised over in Mentok land, I have a variety of opinions certain to offend nearly everyone on this and other topics.
Today, I'd like to tie in my view of the history of aboriginal North Americans with the current "debate" over climate change. I put debate in quotes because, when 90 per cent of the world's climate scientists have a particular view of the subject, there really is no debate, yet my colleagues in right-wing politics continue to embarrass themselves by clinging to the minority of nut-jobs and corrupt scientists-for-hire who still doubt the existence and causes of climate change. Their behaviour is consistent with some of the richest and most wonderful human traditions of self-destructive idiocy.
First, let me start by making a radical statement that may shock and astound some of you: aboriginal North Americans are human beings.
Ever since we Europeans first encountered them, we have tended, in spite of our many acts of cruelty towards them, to glamourize native people. Today, it is considered politically incorrect to talk about "noble savages", yet modern left-wing attitudes towards natives precisely mirror this sentimental 18th Century literary view of them. Natives in our culture are consistently depicted as being somehow genetically more intuitive, more spiritual, closer to nature and inherently wiser than other people. They are, in short, depicted as some sort of race of ecological saints.
This is, of course, a big pile of bullshit. Native North Americans, like all other humans, have consistently displayed the qualities of cruelty, greed, short-sightedness and stupidity that are the hallmarks of our species.
Much of what has happened to aboriginals has been due to the cruelty and greed of Europeans. Much, but not all. A significant chunk of the sad history of native North Americans was due to their own flaws as a culture.
Three hundred and fifty: That's a number I like to emphasize in examining the history of North America. We Europeans first encountered this continent in 1492. But the wholesale invasion of North America did not begin until the mid-19th Century. Up until that point, Europeans in North America were largely content to huddle around a few clusters of coastal trading colonies.
So the native people of this continent had 350 years to get ready for invasion. It was, after all, pretty obvious that was the direction things were headed. Yet throughout that time they did almost nothing to prepare themselves.
Yes, they learned to use horses and rifles. They did more than just learn to use them, they mastered the arts of horsemanship and cavalry warfare, far exceeding European abilities.
But what else? Heavy artilery? Naval warfare? Writing? Metallurgy, so they could make their own guns and knives instead of having to trade or steal them? Likewise, chemistry, to make their own gunpowder? Mining? Design and construction of fortifications? Diplomacy (wouldn't the Austrians, Turks or Napoleonic French have been interested in a second-front ally)?
No, none of it. Those things and a list of a million other useful things the natives might have picked up during their 350 years of lead-time were completely ignored. In geopolitics as in science, nature abhors a vacuum. Finally, their stubborn weakness made them too much of an easy, tempting target. This certainly doesn't absolve Europeans of their horrendous cruelty, but it does spread the blame around a bit.
The obvious question is, Why? Why did they stubbornly refuse to adapt to an iminent threat?
Well, part of it was that they were horribly racist. Most native peoples did not view Europeans as being truly human. In fact, many of the native tribe names translate out to mean "the real people." Europeans were known as "white ghosts", semi-demonic creatures sent to vex the "real people" for not being adequately pious. A centuries-long religious movement, known as the "Ghost Dance", sprung up in native societies, based on the notion that if enough "real people" did a particular dance, performed a particular ceremony, the evil "white ghosts" would simply vanish.
This partly explains their aversion to learning European technology. Why would you want to copy the ways of these sub-human monsters? (This attitude, shamefully, persists among modern native people who, in spite of every inducement, still have abysmally low levels of enrollment in engineering, medicine or other scientific professions, in part because these fields are still viewed by some natives as being too "colonial.")
But racism is only part of the explanation for aboriginal North American's phenomenal short-sightedness. In my view, another major aspect of this tragedy is the universal human propensity for willful blindness in the face of incremental change. It is always easier for people to deny trends and pretend that nothing has changed. By the time it becomes obvious that things have changed, it is too late to do anything, so once again it is just easier to continue to rationalize away the problem.
Can't you just imagine the debates amongst native leaders a couple of hundred years ago?
"There goes Chief Lone Thunder on again with this irresponsible talk about the European problem. Certainly, European settlement exists, but there is no evidence that we can do anything about it. European settlement has not changed for as long as anyone can remember. Any talk of an iminent invasion is just a theory. Lone Thunder would like to see us radically change our economy and our way of life, in the process throwing hundreds of braves in the buffalo industry out of work, all over some half-baked theory."
And so you see how this relates to the current climate change "debate." We will rationalize ourselves into the grave if we allow our worst natures to take over.
Ultimately, the human creature is part ostrich, too often content to hide from problems rather than confront them.
On the other hand, the human race is not completely defined by pettiness and stupidity. We can do great things, god-like things when we set our minds to it. The Pyramids took generations to build. Mining industries often operate on 50 year planning cycles. Numerous international planning bodies effectively regulate and manage vast complex river systems. My own province Saskatchewan went from being a quasi-desert to a lush agricultural area in the space of 20 years through the construction of a vast artificial lake. We went to the moon back when the most complex computational device available was the slide rule.
There are so many examples of humans amazing ourselves when we put our minds to it. Whether it's through adaptation or mitigation, it sure would be nice if we could take the high road rather than the low road on climate change.
Then again, maybe if we all just did a dance, the whole problem would just go away.
posted by The Propagandist @ 11:14 AM,
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Sunday, October 15, 2006
Professionalism
Suppose you needed some work done on your house and you needed an engineer. After checking around for a good one, you ended up landing on a guy who sounded like the ultimate engineer:
Both his father and grandfather before him were engineers. So were his brothers. His mother, while not an engineer, was a math professor. In high school, he had volunteered many weekends and holidays to work building Habitat for Humanity houses so he could learn hands on about structural engineering. In college, he graduated top of his class and went on to get his PhD before launching a successful structural engineering career.
So, would you look at this guy and say "Oh, I don't want that guy. He's never done anything but engineering his whole life. He's never had a real job. Where's his real world experience?"
Yet people do exactly that in the political realm. Any suggestion that a candidate is a "professional politician" is enough to elicit broad sneers from supporters and opponents alike.
OK, I have a bias. I worked in paid professional politics for over 15 years. So nothing bothers me quite so much as people looking down their noses at electoral politicians who have a lot of experience in the political world.
After all, in Canada and Britain, diplomats are usually professionals. Union negotiators are often professionals. Lawyers are professionals. Yet the art and science of balancing competing public needs is somehow a task we think is best left to amateurs.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think every politician should be a long-time political hack. Given the diversity of things a political caucus has to deal with, there is plenty of room for university professors, business owners, educators, doctors and as well as regular, salt-of-the-earth men and women of the people. Governments and oppositions need all those perspectives to function well.
But none of this should suggest that long-time experience in politics should somehow be a disqualification from office. On the contrary, the job of being a political representative requires skill and practice. Most candidates who come from other backgrounds don't have those skills at first. They frequently screw things up in the beginning by trying to reinvent the wheel or else they become completely dependent on their paid staff who do have the experience to know what they're doing.
Wouldn't it be better to elect a representative who actually knew what he was doing and could handle the job from Day One?
Some of the finest, most technically perfect politicians I've ever encountered have been from the "boy wonder / girl wonder" category. Young people, often fresh out of college who have worked on a dozen campaigns in their short lives and whose only work experience may have been working as a politician's constituency assistant, often have a better, more intutitive grasp of what it takes to be a good representative than 50 year old "pillar of the community" types.
The kid wonder types, if they were paying attention in the other campaigns they worked on, don't need to be told about the importance of old-school door-knocking (older candidates often lack the physical energy to go out and meet a zillion people). They don't need to be told about the importance of building a personal network in the constituency and listening to it. Perhaps most importantly, the young turks have a better eye for hiring competent staff; after all, they were probably doing those jobs themselves recently.
Another crucial aspect to the quality of such candidates is that they have no option but to do a good job. The 50 year old guy can say "oh well, I can always go back to selling real estate if this doesn't work out." The 25 year old politician, on the other hand, is staring at the prospect of a stint at McDonalds if he screws up his political career.
It's like raising up a racing hound or training an elite Olympic athelete. Get 'em young and don't let them think about anything else.
So the next time a baby-faced political candidate runs in your area, don't write him off. By voting for a candidate like that you may be making an investment in the best political representative you've ever had.
posted by The Propagandist @ 10:39 AM,
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Sunday, September 24, 2006
Columbus
One of the great examples of historical propaganda is Christopher Columbus. The often-told hero-story of Columbus is one of my pet peeves. I'm always surprised at how tenaciously people cling to the Columbus myths. I've had people get downright mad at me for debunking the Columbus story.
The conventional story of Columbus portrays him as a visionary who courageously stood up to the forces of ignorance. The traditional telling of the story usually involves either the Spanish royals and/or the crew believing the world is flat and therefore scoffing at Columbus's plan to sail the opposite direction around the world to India. The whole thing is delivered as a moral tale about believing in yourself even if everyone else thinks you are wrong.
As nice as the moral lesson is, the real story of Columbus is rather different. For starters (and I can't believe how difficult it is to convince people of this), people in the 15th century did not believe the world is flat. Few people in human history have ever believed that. The medieval symbol of royal power was the globe, which explicitly symbolized the world. Seafarers in particular have never believed the world is flat, because when you see a ship come over the horizon, you see the mast first and then the rest of the ship rises into view, which is obviously due to the fact that the Earth is curved.
So why did poor old Columbus have such a hard time convincing the Spanish court of his plan to sail the other direction to India? It had nothing to do with shape and everything to do with size. The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in the 3rd Century BC had ACCURATELY calculated the circumference of the Earth. Let me say that again: ACCURATELY. Other mathematicians after him had confirmed the ACCURACY of his calculations. In Columbus's time, the Vatican had officially endorsed these ACCURATE calculations of the Earth's size and everyone in nautical circles accepted them.
...Everyone, that is, except Christopher Columbus, who believed in a bunch of conspiracy-theory, wingnut calculations that FALSELY showed the Earth to be 40 per cent smaller than it ACTUALLY is.
So, put yourself in the headspace of the Spaniards, who knew the true size of the Earth, as they listened to Columbus's pitch. Imagine the globe if the Americas weren't there (since no one, especially Columbus, knew they were). Imagine sailing a rickety wooden boat from Spain non-stop across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans to India with nowhere inbetween to stop for supplies. Would you invest money in a scheme like that? Would you risk your life to slow starvation by signing up as a crew member on an expedition like that? Not bloody likely.
If things had gone exactly as Columbus had planned them, there is no doubt he would have died at sea. Lucky for him, he bumped into a continent he didn't know was there before he could starve to death.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real story of Columbus. It is not a story of an enlightened visionary standing up against the ignorant masses. It is a story of an ignorant loon standing up to the well-informed masses.
The great moral lessons of the Columbus story are that sometimes sheer dumb luck will win out over the best information in the world and sometimes the greatest discoveries come to us from total lunatics.
posted by The Propagandist @ 3:26 PM,
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Saturday, September 16, 2006
Teal Conservatives
A few weeks ago, I found myself doing a strange thing: I watched Preston Manning being interviewed by David Suzuki on the CBC.
First of all, I don't like the CBC. Second of all, I really don't like David Suzuki. Finally, since I'm an old-line PC Tory, I haven't previously liked Preston Manning either, although I'm starting to warm up to the guy by small degrees.
The show was a discussion of the environmental effects of the Alberta oilsands development. Manning was preaching a new breed of politics - teal politics, he dubbed it. Blue and green, conservatives with environmental concerns.
I found the show, subtly, very funny because you can almost see Suzuki's head about to explode as he tries to compute this thoroughly unfamiliar situation. The guy is usually such an unabashed propagandist and he is used to having guests do nothing but feed his hysterical rhetoric. But here he had to deal with Manning, a conservative who was agreeing with him on environmental policy but who wasn't afraid to challenge Suzuki's political rhetoric. Suzuki clearly didn't quite know how to handle this.
Despite the noodle-twisting aspects of the show, I must admit I like this notion of teal conservatives and I think it will be a growing trend. Conservatives are, first and foremost, supposed to be about prudence and long-term thinking, but we certainly haven't acted that way with regard to the environment over the last 20 or so years.
Instead, conservatives around the world have reflexively taken the approach of hiding our heads in the sand over these issues. We are always very quick to believe the first piece of propaganda (like Michael Crichton's State of Fear) that allows us a little more time to deny reality.
I used to be in that headspace, but I write articles for an engineers' journal. Engineers are very cautious, small-c conservative types as scientists go. They are responsible for bridges staying standing and water systems staying unpolluted, so they don't jump on bandwagons or make any sort of radical change overnight.
A few years ago, I was assigned to do a story that would feature engineers on both sides of the climate change issue. Trouble was, I couldn't find engineers on either side. I found them all in the middle. Every researcher I talked to said that climate change was definitely happening, that at least part of it was due to natural causes, that human activity may or may not have contributed to it, that there was probably very little humans could do to mitigate the change and that we needed to get started right now to adapt to climate change.
Of course, then as now, both the Right and the Left were saying and doing things that were completely counterproductive. Right-wingers were burying their heads in the sand and shouting "Garbage science! Garbage science!" whenever the topic of climate change came up. The Left, on the other hand, played the heavy, pulled out every guilt tactic about humanity's polluting ways and proposed all sorts of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that were politically, economically and scientifically not feasible.
On climate change, I firmly believe, on the basis of what my engineer friends tell me, that our only realistic response is adaptation not mitigation. But that doesn't mean we should ignore greenhouse gases. They cause a range of other problems, most notably acid rain. Some may recall that Brian Mulroney went toe-to-toe with the US to get continental air quality standards to help prevent acid rain in Eastern Canada. Now the scourge has reared its head again in Western Canada, thanks to those f**king filthy, horrific, crime-against-humanity oilsands developments in Alberta.
But don't bother telling this to today's conservatives, 'cause all they will do is holler "Garbage science!" at the top of their little ostrich lungs.
In keeping with the theme of this blog, I think the main problem is propaganda. The Right is conditioned to view the environment as a soft, "pinko" topic and therefore close their minds to it. We need to change the message. Bad environmental policy is, first of all, bad long term planning. If you owned a business and decided to save money by not hiring a janitorial service, you might have higher margins for awhile, but eventually you would lose money as your customers started avoiding your filthy stinking mess. Also, it's a public health issue. If somebody pissed in the civic water supply, the proper conservative tough law-and-order response would be to throw the hoodlum in jail. Shouldn't that logic carry through on a larger scale?
OK, let the abuse begin. I bet any money both my left and right wing friends will hate this piece ;-)
posted by The Propagandist @ 8:51 AM,
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Friday, September 15, 2006
V of Vindictive
This might seem like a movie review, but it's really an opinion.
I saw some bits from V for Vendetta on TV recently. I like that movie. In fact, I like pretty much everything from Alan Moore, paranoid old lefty though he may be.
But there was one bit in the film I didn't like. When they walked through the history of how Britain came to dictatorship, the evil, shrivelled, heartless Chancellor Sutler is ominously described as having been a member of "the Conservative Party." The tone in which this was said conveyed the sense of "oh, well, yes then he would be a dictator then, wouldn't he, being a conservative and all."
OK, I admit I'm a Tory - an old-line, moderate, PC Tory, but a Tory nonetheless. But that's not why this pisses me off. What I find most aggravating is that it displays such ignorance of history.
The story depicts the British dictatorship as being of the mass-party type of regime. In other words, the dictatorship started as a popular movement and continues to depend on the support of a party organization to maintain broad-ranging control over the population.
Well, hate to break it to ya kids, but those sorts of regimes have always flown the flag of left-wing ideology (even if they didn't always live up by it).
What about the Nazis, you say? Do you mean the National Socialist German Workers Party?
What about the Italian fascists? Mussolini was originally a member of the Socialist Party and his defining slogan of fascism - "everything inside the state, nothing outside the state" - is hardly something one could imagine coming out of the mouth of George Bush, Margaret Thatcher or Stephen Harper.
Then, of course, there are all the various and sundry out-and-out Communist and Third World nationalist regimes that cut a bloody path across the 20th Century.
This isn't to say there haven't been right-wing dictatorships in modern times, but most of those (e.g. the Pinochet regime in Chile) were not the highly-oppressive mass-party type but rather tended to be military coups whose resulting regimes were relatively short-lived.
The bigger point is that the Left has no business getting an attitude about repression and dictatorship. The fact is that most of the horror and atrocity of the last century was committed by people who at least pretended to be left wing.
The Right to be sure has its own faults, but its evils by comparison are smaller. More numerous perhaps, but smaller.
The long and short is that if a dictatorship really did emerge in modern Britain, it wouldn't come from the Tory party. It would come from the Labour Party. Or maybe the Greens.
posted by The Propagandist @ 9:34 AM,
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Monday, September 11, 2006
The Wheel
It just never stops.
Sometimes I wish I could throw a giant wrench into that wheel and make it stop. The Wheel of Lies. The Wheel of Illusion.
But of course I can't do that, not only because it's impossible and but also because I probably wouldn't do it if I had the chance.
I'm a professional propaganda writer. I used to be all about political propaganda. I still do that a bit, but now I've branched off into commercial propaganda, aka magazine writing. Peppy, up-beat, feel-good pieces about the subject of your choice. A dash of wit, a little aliteration and voila! the most boring, stupid or tragic aspects of human life become suitable fodder for passing time pleasantly in the doctor's office.
It all wears me down. Not the work. The work is fun. The concept horrifies me. When I think of the generations upon generations of deceptions, heaping up like silt, I want to retreat to a Buddhist monastery and never come out.
In Buddhism, we talk about a concept called the samsara, the eternal, self-perpetuating cycle of human delusion and suffering. I know it well.
Take my political work. Political parties in western democracies would like us to believe that their ideologies are deep, thoughtful analyses of the problems of the human condition. After 20 years of cranking out their crap, I've learned otherwise. All publicly communicated political "thought" can be summed up in one word: reaction.
A party in opposition engages in basic marketing strategies. They seek to condition voters to believe that everything their opponents are doing in government is fundamentally wrong, demonically wrong and that things would be better if only we did the opposite of what the government is doing. They rationalize, to themselves above all others, that these changes are necessary, but really they are aimed solely at creating a distinction in the minds of the voters.
I remember well the words of a former colleague, a spin-doctor for an opposition party, on hearing of some tragic event the government could not handle.
"It's worse than we hoped!" he beamed.
Of course, the governing party developed their "ideas" in reaction to the policies of the previous party in government. That previous government reacted to the one before that. And so on. The snake eats its own tail.
Look at the old British party nicknames, Tories and Whigs. Mountains of political literature have been piled up to extol or condemn both parties and their successors. How did it all start? Both terms originally meant "cattle thief", which was pretty much the worst thing you could call somebody in Stuart England. Variations on the theme of "you asshole!", in other words.
Lost in time, the whole business started as an insult contest that just kinda got out of hand. What I write for my political clients is not more intelligent or mature than the ancient British name calling. It's just longer. Which is lucky for me because I mostly get paid by the word.
posted by The Propagandist @ 4:26 PM,
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