Monthly Archives: February 2006

by | 18 February 2006 · 10:13 pm

China Needs to Get Rich Before It Gets Too Old

Bloomberg News columnist Andy Mukherjee explains why China needs to get rich before it gets too old.

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) — Helen Qiao, an economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Hong Kong, posed an interesting question this week: “Will China grow old before getting rich?”

Qiao’s research shows that China’s dependency ratio — the number of people too young and too old to work divided by the working-age population — will start rising at the end of this decade and approach 50 percent in 2030, from less than 40 percent at present, making China as gray as Japan was last year.

By 2050, every 10 Chinese workers in the age group of 15 to 64 will support a total of seven younger and older people — a dependency ratio of 70 percent.

An aging society may be an inevitable part of demographic transition, though “what makes China’s case unique is that the sharp rise in dependency ratio will arrive earlier in terms of per capita income level relative to other countries,” Qiao says in her report.

In 2030, China’s annual per capita income will be a little more than $11,000 measured in current prices, compared with almost $36,000 in Japan last year, according to Goldman Sachs’s estimates. South Korea’s dependency ratio will approach 50 percent in 2025, with its citizens earning $52,000 a year.

Does it matter if China gets old before it gets rich? It does, for a number of reasons. First, economic growth rates taper off with aging: It’s difficult for a developing nation to get rich after its population has already grown old.

via RealClearPolitics

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by | 18 February 2006 · 9:23 am

Deep Thoughts: Cheney vs. Quail

Finally, a blogger (a karate fan, not a gun nut) gives the Cheneying of Whittington the deeply thoughtful analysis it deserves.

Gun Controllers can now add “vice presidents” to the list of people who should not be allowed to purchase or maintain a firearm. The list already includes convicted felons, so it isn’t exactly a stretch to add politicians. If I were president, I wouldn’t want my vice president to be armed, I can tell you that. It conjures up catchy business-sounding phrases such as “Accelerated Line of Succession.” I imagine we can expect to see the Bush Administration starting to take a closer look at Cheney’s roadmap for the administration. Now that Cheney has demonstrated how dangerous he can be, the White House staff is probably on edge….

I take some comfort in knowing that not only is The Left going to be laughing at Dick Cheney’s little hunting accident, so are the quail. So, Democrats can take comfort from the fact that a lot of quail will be registering as Democrats this year. Especially since picture ID’s being required at the voting booth is getting nowhere fast, quail should have no trouble voting using a touch screen. The results we get in our elections will probably be little different than they are today….

I guess what is most amazing about the entire incident is that Cheney didn’t have a heart attack when he realized that he had shot his friend, embarrassed the White House, damaged the gun rights movement, and caused over a billion quail to become registered Democrats. His ticker must be in better shape than we thought.

via PhotoDude

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by | 17 February 2006 · 8:23 pm

TNR on the Cartoon Intifada in Lebanon

The latest issue of The New Republic shatters another common illusion about the cartoon offensive.

For the Western news media, always eager to revisit Lebanon’s bloody 15-year civil war, the Muslim rampage through a Christian neighborhood in Beirut on February 5 was a disappointment. A mob of predominantly Sunni Muslims threw stones at a Maronite Catholic church–a desecration most militias refrained from even during the civil war–and yet Beirut’s Christians turned the other cheek. A peaceful counterdemonstration that night felt like a Cedar Revolution class reunion: Young men and women milled around chanting desultory slogans, then went home. By nightfall, what was assumed to be a ham-handed Syrian attempt to stir up sectarian trouble in Lebanon had fizzled. “We will not fall in the trap,” proclaimed Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. “Our national unity is stronger than Syrian destruction.”

The cartoon intifada–as the sometimes violent protests over a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed have come to be known–has been portrayed in the Western press as an epic struggle between West and East, Christendom and Islam. The image of angry, stone-throwing Muslims assaulting the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh fit right into that clash-of-civilizations paradigm.

But, as the world tuned in to watch a classic Christian-Muslim image from Lebanon’s last war, it missed another picture: mainstream Sunni clerics frantically trying to hold back a bandana-wearing, brick-throwing Sunni mob that no longer respects their clerical robes. “I asked those troublemakers, ‘What do the people who live in Ashrafiyeh have to do with the people who published those blasphemous cartoons about our Prophet?'” lamented one Sunni cleric from Dar Al Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Sunni spiritual authority. “I asked them, ‘Why were those men destroying cars and public property? Why did they throw rocks at a church, which is a house of God?’ Those people were not true Muslims. They had other agendas.”

In Lebanon and Syria, the cartoon jihad is not a battle between West and East. It’s a struggle by mainstream Sunnis to contain a growing network of radical Islamists. The Sunnis who burned Beirut’s Danish Embassy weren’t there to defend their Prophet from Lurpak butter or an obscure Danish newspaper. They weren’t even there, really, to assault Christians. They came to Ashrafiyeh–from Lebanon’s northern Islamist pockets, its Palestinian camps, and from neighboring Syria–to teach the mainstream Sunni establishment a lesson. Most of all, they were there to send a message to Saad Hariri, the Saudi- and U.S.-backed figurehead of Lebanon’s current parliamentary majority and the ostensible leader of Lebanon’s Sunni community. The message was this: You cannot control us. What’s frightening is that they might be right.

In a war between the Tolerant and the Intolerant, the Intolerant always have the tactical advantage–and never have as many enemy sympathizers in their midst. Fortunately, their tactical advantage can translate into strategic weakness, as their violent persecution of heretics alienates more and more potential allies.

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by | 17 February 2006 · 7:48 pm

T. G. Ash on Malaysia’s Multiculturalism

Timothy Garton Ash, who did yeoman work reporting from Eastern Europe before and during its escape from the Soviet Empire, files a now-trademark world-weary report in the Guardian from Malaysia, headlined I respect your articles of faith – will you respect mine?

Measured by the standards of the Middle East, indeed of most majority Muslim states, Malaysia is an exemplar of interfaith coexistence.

As the maritime trading crossroads of south-east Asia, it has for centuries been a place where all of what Europeans have called “the east” has met – Indians, Chinese and Japanese, as well as the native peoples. Its population became even more diverse under the aegis, at once repressive and transforming, of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonialists. (From the window of the National History Museum, which is housed in a building where John Major once worked as a banker, you still peer down on a somewhat melancholy cricket pitch.) This place was globalised well before anyone talked of globalisation.

Look a little closer, however; talk to Malaysians from the minority faiths as well as critical observers within the Muslim community, and the picture becomes more muddy – as befits a city whose name means “muddy confluence”. For a start, the communities coexist rather than co-mingle. I’m told there is relatively little intermarriage. This is no melting-pot. “We live and let live,” says the Buddhist businessman of Sri Lankan origin. Apart from anything else, the different groups’ religious prescriptions often prevent them eating each other’s food.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with such peaceful coexistence. The same was true of another often-lauded exemplar of multiculturalism, Sarajevo, before the second world war, and it is probably true of parts of London and New York today. Only advancing secularism (as in Sarajevo under the communist regime led by Marshal Tito) or farreaching assimilation (as has been traditional in France and America) produces the deeper mixing. But retaining separate communities does mean that politics remain group-based and there is always the potential for violent conflict to erupt, as happened here in 1969, if one group feels strongly disadvantaged.

In Malaysia, all communities are equal but some are more equal than others. Although the National Front coalition, which has been in power since 1957, includes Chinese and Indian parties, the Muslim Malay majority is dominant. While the Chinese still have a predominant position in the business community, there is affirmative action for the Muslim Malays, and other “indigenous” groups, in access to higher education, jobs in the civil service, government contracts and housing. Inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict is avoided not by the systematic balancing mechanisms of a liberal democracy, with fully representative politics, free media and independent courts, but by a semi-democratic, semiauthoritarian balancing act, with a distinct tilt towards the Malay Muslim side. The day I arrived, the government announced the indefinite suspension of the Sarawak Tribune newspaper, which published one of the Danish cartoons. It also made it an offence for anyone to publish, import, produce, circulate or even possess copies of the caricatures….

You may say: what right have I, as a westerner, a guest and a descendant of British colonialists to boot, to point these things out? Indeed, the religion with which I grew up teaches that one should start by criticising one’s own faults rather than those of others. That seems to me a good principle. So my first responsibility is to look at the way my own communities – Oxford, Britain, the EU, the west – treat their own minorities, not least their Muslim minorities. We have plenty of discrimination and double standards of our own.

Does that disqualify me from commenting on other countries’ shortcomings? I think not, especially when what I’m doing is reporting criticisms made to me by Malaysians, people who do not feel they can speak entirely freely in their own country and who would not be published if they did. In fact, I believe that as a writer with access to free media I have a duty to speak up for those who cannot speak freely for themselves. That’s my strongly held belief, and I trust that political leaders of other faiths, including Islam, will respect my beliefs. Then we can have a productive interfaith dialogue.

via RealClearPolitics

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by | 16 February 2006 · 9:19 pm

Why Asian Muslims Didn’t Explode

Karim Raslan writes in the International Herald Tribune about differences within both the Muslim and the Western worlds.

The extensive violence and ugly rhetoric we are seeing broadcast from elsewhere in the Muslim world point to differences between the Arab-Muslim heartland and the Indo-Malay periphery.

Yes, we are part of the extended family of believers, the ummah. We cannot help but feel some sense of solidarity with our co-religionists in Damascus, Tehran or Cairo. But the explosiveness of the Arab street doesn’t translate, somehow, to the tropics.

Many of us have a growing suspicion that we are culturally different from our Arabic- and Urdu-speaking brethren, perhaps more tolerant and less emotional.

I am reminded of how uncomfortable I felt last year when traveling through Saudi Arabia, surrounded by a people I found disquietingly alien.

For all we share as Muslims, we Southeast Asians don’t really know what it’s like to inhabit the cultures or politics of the Middle East.

Nor is the West a unitary culture. Europe’s fervent secularism reminds me that the nation of the Great Satan, with its crowded churches and Sunday preachers who fill sports stadiums, is actually more like my world than Europe is.

Since Sept. 11, I’ve accepted certain verities that now I have come to question. Europe was supposed to be the neutral bastion of moderation in the face of a belligerent America. But in fact that Europe is godless and alone.

via Middle East Transparent

UPDATE: Malaysian blogger the _earthinc offers a much better take on the cartoon offensive that doesn’t appeal to cultural (or “tropical”) values. (After all, the English word amok was borrowed from Malay, not Arabic.)

When I first heard that a Danish media published caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (tag) last year, to be honest, being a Muslim myself, I was slightly irritated. Though it’s an act of free speech, the Danish media abused its rights. That was that and I didn’t expect it to balloon up unnecessarily. I didn’t expect it because I don’t think it’s rational for such issue to take a center stage in world politics. Apparently, I have overestimated the Muslim world’s sensibility. Muslim Malaysians on the contrary are acting coolly. Comparing Malaysians’ response against Arabs and Indonesians’ reaction on it, I can’t help but feel proud to be a Malaysian.

In my opinion, what’s happening in the Muslim world is a gross overreaction followed by impossible demand. The side at fault is the rightwing newspaper Jyllands-Posten, not the Danish government. Moreover, the Danish government has no right to censor the newspaper. Nobody should but that’s another matter altogether. Hence, the Danish government has no reason to apologize….

The ability to discern between the government and a private entity is not lost on Malaysians, unlike Arabic countries and Indonesia. In fact, I think, Malaysia is the only Muslim-majority country that is not blaming the Danish government for a private entity’s doing. I might be wrong but it seems like so.

To all Muslims out there, seriously, be sensible. The first thing to do is to realize that it’s a rightwing paper that started this, not Denmark the country. Differentiate the two and then comprehend that the Danish government can’t censor that paper. Blaming and targeting the Danish government and its people for things that they didn’t do only complicates the matter at hand and bring about a much unneeded clash of culture.

So Denmark, I stand by thee. But definitely not by Jyllands-Posten.

via LaputanLogic

UPDATE 2: The culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten explains in a Washington Post op-ed what has been happening in Denmark since the publication of the cartoons.

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people’s beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue — in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern secular democracy. A network of moderate Muslims committed to the constitution has been established, and the anti-immigration People’s Party called on its members to differentiate between radical and moderate Muslims, i.e. between Muslims propagating sharia law and Muslims accepting the rule of secular law. The Muslim face of Denmark has changed, and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate between “them” and “us,” but between those committed to democracy in Denmark and those who are not.

via Peaktalk

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by | 16 February 2006 · 6:16 pm

On Trying to Reach H&R Block’s Tech Support

I’ve been a little bogged down lately trying to complete my taxes for 2005 before heading off for Japan again in March. This is my second year of using H&R Block’s TaxCut after more than a decade of TurboTax, whose customer service has got progressively worse after it was taken over by Intuit. (I’m not talking about either tax advice or tech support. They couldn’t even manage to deliver their product to me the last two years before I dropped them.)

Well, after I recently took advantage of TaxCut’s online tax advisors, who came back with useful advice, I tried to give a little feedback to their tech support, which seems to reside behind an impenetrable phalanx of automated responses. Here’s the record of my attempts to get feedback to their tech support.

Joel to onlinetaxesfeedback@hrblock.com:

I posted a tax question to your online tax advisor. The textbox into which I typed by questions stripped all punctuation from my sentences and didn’t allow me to navigate with up and down arrows (only left and right). Later, when I entered by payment information, the Address box only allowed [14 characters]; I can’t imagine that many people have addresses short enough to fit in that box.

I trust that you handle numbers better than text input, but at this point I’m not very hopeful that I will get any useful text back in reply to my request for tax advice. If I get back an autogenerated reply, I am not likely to use your tax advisor again, nor to recommend it to anyone else.

Online Taxes Feedback to Joel:

Thanks for your feedback. We take customer comments very seriously and use them to continually improve our products. Thanks for taking a moment to share your thoughts.

Your message won’t reach technical support. If you need immediate assistance with your taxes or have a question about a product, click here to sign in to your account. Or, copy and paste this URL into the address bar of your browser: http://www.hrblock.com/customer_support/online.html. You can search the Help Center or click the Contact Us link at the top of the page to contact technical support by phone, e-mail or chat.

Thanks for using H&R Block.

Joel to onlinetaxesfeedback@hrblock.com:

I see. You make it absolutely impossible for customer feedback to get to your technical support. When I login, I just get shoved through to tax advisor screens, well past the Contact Us. When I filled out the message box at Customer Support, I got an automated reply from clarify@fin.hrblock.com. No wonder your online interface sucks. The main reason I switched to TaxCut from TurboTax was for the same kind of incompetent handling of customers.

Online Taxes Feedback to Joel:

Thanks for your feedback. We take customer comments very seriously and use them to continually improve our products. Thanks for taking a moment to share your thoughts.

Your message won’t reach technical support. If you need immediate assistance with your taxes or have a question about a product, click here to sign in to your account. Or, copy and paste this URL into the address bar of your browser: http://www.hrblock.com/customer_support/online.html. You can search the Help Center or click the Contact Us link at the top of the page to contact technical support by phone, e-mail or chat.

Thanks for using H&R Block.

Joel to clarify@fin.hrblock.com:

I posted a tax question to your online tax advisor. The textbox into which I typed by questions stripped all punctuation from my sentences and didn’t allow me to navigate with up and down arrows (only left and right). Later, when I entered by payment information, the Address box only allowed [14 characters]; I can’t imagine that many people have addresses short enough to fit in that box. I trust that you handle numbers better than text input, but at this point I’m not very hopeful that I will get any useful text back in reply to my request for tax advice. If I get back an autogenerated reply, I am not likely to use your tax advisor again, nor to recommend it to anyone else.

clarify@fin.hrblock.com to Joel:

Thank you for contacting H&R Block.

An H&R Block tax professional will be happy to assist you with your tax-related questions. With H&R Block’s Satisfaction Guarantee, you can try us out risk free.

To locate a tax professional in your area, click on http://www.hrblock.com/universal/office_locator.html

If you prefer, tax help is available online for an affordable fee. To get the right answers to your tough questions, go to http://www.hrblock.com/taxes/doing_my_taxes/products/advisor.html

Should you have any future questions we would be happy to assist you. Please contact us at 1-800-HRBLOCK (1-800-472-5625) to speak with a Customer Support Specialist.

The Client Relations Team
H&R Block

===============================================
Please do not reply directly to this e-mail address (do not use your e-mail ‘reply’ button). If additional help on this or any other subject is required, assistance is available via the Internet by going to http://www.hrblock.com.

Thank you for your inquiry.

Okay, then. Just keep your crappy online interface.

UPDATE: Reader Justin in DC describes even worse problems with H&R Block’s total incompetence online and complete resistance to customer feedback. Are they hiring too many ex-employees of the IRS?

Found this on google, wanted to add that I totally agree how UNBELIVEABLY BUSH LEAGE HRBlock and their website really is.

I made the HUGE mistake of using it, rather than Intuit in 2003 for a return. I now have a problem where I need to access that old filing. I could not remember my password, and their ‘system’ to reset it reuqires you enter your Username, Social, and Birthdate to check against your filing. It then attempt to hit your credit card to ‘confirm’ your ID.

The problem is the credit card MUST be the same one one you used origingally with HRBlock. I have the card, but expired in 2005 before I moved. Their ‘form’ doesn’t have 2005 even available in the year drop down, and if I use a current card I am told it does not match their records.

So basically if you move, there is LITERALLY no way to reset your password and get to YOUR finical info.

I did try to call on the phone and wade through the 40 automated menus and finally got to a customer Rep.

She didn’t seem to have a clue, and walked through the form because ‘I might be entering information correctly’. Once she understood what the problem was she asked me to hold, and after 5min I was greeted with the DIAL TONE.

I called back, and got a guy, who although didn’t hang up on me wasn’t any help. I have the HRBlock original registration emails, the email with my transaciton code and order id from HRBlock, any other info they want (I offered to fax birth certificate, anyting!) and was told too bad and “thats just the way it is”

I did inform the clown there, that their ‘inteface’ is retarded and designed with some VERY significant holes in it. He didn’t agree, and I just thanked him for not hanging up with me and left it at that.

AVOID HR BLOCK (online at least) ALL ALL COSTS!!!!!!
Justin in DC | 04.28.06 – 4:39 pm | #

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by | 15 February 2006 · 6:20 pm

Burma: The Next Iran?

Oh, great. Slate has just published an article by Ian Bremmer entitled “Is Burma the Next Iran?” And it’s not talking about an explosion of blogging by Burmese young people.

The United States and its European allies worry that if they simply accept a nuclear Iran, other states will be encouraged to pursue nuclear ambitions of their own. But that ship may already have sailed. As the world watches the twists and turns of Iran’s path toward the Security Council, the military regime in Burma may be quietly selling its energy resources to finance the acquisition of nuclear technology….

Burma’s generals, known in state-controlled media as the State Peace and Development Council, routinely harass and imprison opposition activists. Citizens have been used as slave labor. The junta’s security police have been known to strafe demonstrators with gunfire. In December, an Asian human rights group issued a 124-page report on the Burmese government’s “brutal and systematic” torture of political prisoners.

To deepen the country’s isolation, last November the generals began to move Burma’s capital from the southern coastal city of Rangoon to the mountain stronghold of Pyinmana, deep in the country’s interior. Perhaps the regime’s oft-stated fear of a U.S. invasion prompted the retreat from the coast. That would explain press reports that the junta has surrounded its new capital with land mines. Perhaps the regime is even more afraid of the ethnically diverse and impoverished students of Rangoon. We can’t look for answers to the United Nations’ envoy to Burma. He resigned in January after failing for nearly two years to gain entry into the country….

Just as Iran’s energy wealth frustrates U.S. and European efforts to sanction Tehran, foreign competition for gas contracts will obstruct international attempts to pressure Burma toward democratic reform. China has profited time and again by forging commercial deals with states that are the objects of international scorn, and other energy-dependent Asian countries (India and South Korea, in particular) don’t want China to monopolize Burma’s energy reserves. These states and others will continue to chase energy deals there, including agreements to build the infrastructure needed to pipe gas or petroleum directly to their consumers and industries. Even the United States and European Union have resisted pressure to ban all investment in the country—so energy firms Unocal and Total can join in the scramble.

The Burmese junta knows when it approves these deals that it’s giving its Asian neighbors an important stake in the regime’s survival. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, is an especially useful provider of diplomatic cover. Energy revenues also help finance the domestic repression that keeps the opposition in check and the generals in charge….

Another reason Burma matters for regional stability is that it adds to the growing list of irritants in U.S. relations with China. Burma provides China with the use of a military base on the Indian Ocean. Sino-Burmese trade grew by more than 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 to more than $1.1 billion. Late last year, China outmaneuvered India for an agreement to buy 6.5 trillion cubic feet of gas. As China’s dependence on Burma’s energy grows, we can expect Beijing to help the junta resist international pressure—just as they have done for authoritarian regimes in Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. (China has invested around $300 million in Zimbabwe in return for mining concessions and direct supply of gold, diamonds, chrome, bauxite, and possibly uranium.) That will only add to Washington’s diplomatic frustrations.

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by | 14 February 2006 · 10:12 pm

Kunimoto Takeharu’s Bluegrass Shamisen

Hiroshima-based blogger Wide Island profiles Kunimoto Takeharu.

Yesterday I posted a picture of my daughter playing with her mother’s sanshin, a banjo-like Okinawan instrument that is the direct ancestor of the Japanese shamisen. I thought I’d post today about the shamisen player Kunimoto Takeharu and his foray into bluegrass, a style of music I vastly prefer (and I realize I’m in the minority here) to pop, J or otherwise.

Kunimoto was born in Chiba Prefecture. Both parents were practitioners of a form of storytelling called roukyoku. Unlike the older and better-known art of rakugo comic storytelling, in traditional roukyoku narrative is combined with singing, and the storyteller performs standing, accompanied by a concealed shamisen player. There is an improvisational element as well, and the same piece may be dramatically different from one performance to the next. Roukyoku was widely popular at the height of radio, but like many older arts has lost a great deal of its audience in recent decades.

There’s more. And the picture he refers to really is quite charming.

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Filed under Appalachia, Japan, music, U.S.

by | 14 February 2006 · 9:58 pm

Muninn’s Recent Japan Travelogue

Catching up on my favorite Asia blog reading, I came across Muninn’s post from two weeks ago recounting a few wonderful anecdotes about his latest trip to Japan to present a paper at a conference. It starts off with his encounter with a Swedish-speaking customs official who tests out how similar Norwegian is.

This time, the inspector look at my passport, smiled, and said, “Hei!” I thought he was speaking to me in English and that I was thus being greeted with an exclamation of some kind. I looked around to see what he might be trying to bring my attention to. He then said, “Can I say … Hei!” Then I realized: He is saying “Hei” in Norwegian – that is “Hello.” He said, “In Swedish I can say Hei! Can I say Hei! in Norwegian?” I said, “Yes, it is the same in Norwegian.”

My immigration officer went about continuing to process my visa and after a few seconds he looked up and said, “Norwegian and Swedish is all the same right?” I replied, “Umm…ya Danish, Swedish, Norwegian are all very close, think of it as something like Osaka dialect and Tohoku dialect.”

A few more stamps got issued and mysterious commands entered into his computer as he went back to looking like the stern mechanical immigration officer I have come to expect. Then, suddenly, he asked, “Can I say, ‘Jeg elsker deg.’” I felt a bit weird, looked around to see if there were any laughing Scandinavians nearby but smiled and said, “Yup, in Norwegian ‘I love you’ is also ‘Jeg elsker deg.”

At the conference he attended, one speaker indulged in some uncontested fantasies about Asian values.

Some of these concerns can be seen in the content of the conference’s final talk. At the end of the conference, Iwate University president and former Waseda professor Taniguchi Makoto gave a speech about Asian community in English. I was the only non-Asian at the talk (or at the conference for that matter) and couldn’t help noting the irony that English was the necessary choice of language given that some of the guests from Thailand and Mongolia didn’t speak Japanese (they were also the only participants not to make their presentations in Japanese). Taniguchi speaks fantastic English and his eloquent presentation fit his Cambridge education and long years of experience working for Japan’s foreign ministry, the UN, as deputy head of the OECD, and elsewhere. After an interesting analysis of Japan’s recent failures in negotiations related to the formation of “an Asian community” (indeed, he argued that after losing control of the movement, the foreign ministry is actively trying to torpedo all attempts to make anything meaningful out of the concept), he launched a critique of “Western values”. In passages that remind me of the confidence of the bubble period Japan or Asian leaders before its humbling economic crisis, Taniguchi suggested to the audience that Asia should take pride in its own values and take a more critical stance towards the West.

He offered two pieces of evidence for the inferiority of Western values. He recounted a story of when he was criticized by colleagues in France for having dined with his own chauffeur, thus violating the aristocratic separation of classes. His second anecdote lamented the inhumane behavior of New York City police officers he witnessed rudely expelling the homeless sleeping in Grand Central Station. The message was clear: Asian values have a higher degree of compassion and are less class conscious. The problem, of course, is that this is absolute nonsense. I have indeed accompanied Chinese company managers when they have dined and socialized happily with their chauffeurs in Beijing, but I have also seen Korean executives treat their chauffeurs as barely human slaves on the streets of Seoul. And as for compassion towards the homeless, it is interesting to note that one of Japan’s leading headline stories today (January 31st) is about violent clashes between Japanese police and homeless being evicted from a park in Osaka; their blue tarp tents being torn down.

There’s lots more. Read the whole thing.

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by | 14 February 2006 · 5:13 pm

A Chechen View of the Cartoon Offensive

David MacDuff’s well-informed blog A Step At A Time keeps a close watch on events affecting Chechnya and Chechens abroad. From the Russian-language Chechen Society website, he translates posts a portion of an intriguing interview with Musayev Ilias, Copenhagen spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ICR).

– How are your relations with the Danish government?

– They are definitely good and friendly. If they were not so, I do not think that we could have the possibility to lead such a way of life as we do now. The Danish government practically helps us in all kinds of conflicts with Russian authorities by supporting the Chechen community here.

– I am sure that you have heard about the scandal of the published Muhammad drawings in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. What is the position of the Chechen community on this issue?

– Definitely, we consider the drawings to be scandalous but I think there is one very interesting point in this story: I realized Jyllands-Posten’s editor of culture is married to the daughter of a FSB [formerly KGB] general. And he had been working in Moscow as Jyllands-Posten’s correspondent. I suppose that this scandal is nothing else than another regular provocation of the Russian Special Services. Why did they do this? That’s another question. We all know very well that Russian authorities for a long time have been trying to close the North Caucasus’ door for western humanitarian organisations, which have a good experience of supporting the Chechen population and also collected a large data archive about war crimes permitted in Chechnya. Of course, they do not want this information to be used by international human rights prosecutors. And the present situation with the Danish Refugee Council is not surprising. Of course the official position of our government in exile is that we would like the Danish Refugee Council to remain in Chechnya. Ramzan Kadirov, the prime minister of Chechnya, only has a 3rd grade education, and he is only a Kremlin mafia’s puppet. He never had his own opinion. And he cannot do such kind of steps without the Kremlin’s special edict. Also it is a possibility for FSB to create in Denmark the same massive phobia that we have now in Russia. It is the same dirty business, they only changed the picture of the public enemy. If in Russia it is Chechens blasting Russian buildings, in America and, now in Denmark , it is warlike Muslims burning the Danish flag. Using their own agent in Jyllands-Posten, they felicitously prepared the world for the 3rd World War. War between two civilisations – East against West. And I do not really think that Russia will take sides in such a war.

If this has any measure of validity, Putin’s FSBocracy may have decided that turnabout’s fair play. This time it’s Russia’s turn to play the nonaligned Third World role while the Islamists take over the role of the Third International in trying to overthrow bourgeois Western society–and impose a totalitarian war-footing on their compatriots until they achieve that goal. Putin can play one side against the other, just as much of the Muslim world did during the Cold War, when every frontline client state enriched its thugocracy and enfeebled its civil society in the process.

In any case, it’s more than your run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post notes how stark the difference is between Putin’s policy toward Hamas and his policy toward the Chechens. (via PeakTalk)

Stratfor has also weighed in on Russian’s new game. A Step At A Time has the whole thing. Here’s a small chunk.

Russia’s willingness to speak to Hamas creates a new dynamic in the Muslim world. Syria and Iran are seeking “great power” support against the United States. Indeed, we could expect an evolution in which the Iraqi government also would be looking for counterweights to American power. By inviting Hamas and possibly opening a channel between Hamas and the Israelis, Russia is positioning itself to become a mediator in other disputes, and to walk away with relationships that the United States has been unable to manage.

Given the robustness of Russia’s arms industry, which is much more vital and advanced than is generally understood, the Russians could return to their role as arms provider to the region and patron of governments that are hostile to the United States. The situation from 1955 to 1990 was a much more natural geopolitical dynamic than the current situation, in which Russia is really not present in the region. Russia is a natural player in the Middle East.

Remember also that Hamas is very close to Saudi Arabia, with which Russia has an intensely competitive relationship in the energy markets. And then there is Chechnya. The Russians have long charged that “Wahhabi” influence was behind the Chechen insurgency as well as insurgencies in Central Asia. In the Russian mind, “Wahhabi” is practically a code word for “Islamist militants,” including al Qaeda. The Russians also feel that, while the Americans have forced the Saudis to provide intelligence on al Qaeda, they have not elicited similar aid on the issue of the Chechens. In other words, Moscow perceives the United States not only as having neglected to help Russia on Chechnya, but as actually hindering it.

The Russians badly want to bring the Chechen rebellion under control without allowing Chechnya to secede. They believe that the Chechen insurgents, and particularly the internationalized jihadist faction among them, would not survive if outside support dried up. They believe that the United States is not displeased to see the Chechen war bleeding Russia, and that Washington has discouraged Saudi collaboration with Moscow. All things considered, this is probably true. In reaching out to Hamas, Russia is also reaching out to the Saudis. The Saudis cannot control the Chechens, but they may have some means of determining the level of operations the Chechens are able to maintain.

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