International

Hmm, I drove my sudan to work this morning. :) Looks like a transcript of a Congressional hearing came close to ruining the day for American and Sudanese government officials. Sometimes when you conduct secret nuclear tests in Sedan, it sounds like Sudan. What I’d like to know is what enterprising diplomat from Sudan came up with the idea of immediately blaming the U.S. for cancer cases from a nuclear test that didn’t happen there? I’m surprised that story didn’t get more play. ...

More North Korean stuff. This time, it’s a fascinating gallery of governmental propaganda art lionizing the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and the Great Mother, Kim Jeong-Sook. Link courtesy of Boing Boing, which points out the Norman Rockwell-ness of at least one of the pictures. ( Freedom of Speech is turned into Criticizing and Exposing Collaborators.)

I thought they had already announced that they had them? Maybe not.

This article has the overblown title of " The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing," and it’s the Hoover Institution on Marxism, but it’s still interesting. “The Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxism does provide a new global reformulation of the immiserization thesis. But the locus of this misery, the Third World, does not and cannot provide an adequate objective foundation for a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.” I would think an even larger problem is that there would be the need for an organized opposition representing and supported by the exploited, which is far more likely within a country than across the world. Is the identity of a global underclass really more powerful right now than so many religious, political, ethnic, and other identifications? ...

Oh, good. Our administration has protected Iraq, and by extension the world, from the danger of a small Islamic peacekeeping force under the command of the UN. I’m sure our troops are grateful to our government for saving them from a slightly increased likelihood for peace, free elections, and UN involvement. Yep, busy with such problems as this, it is no wonder the administration’s thought capacity has become so dangerously overextended. ...

You know, I can only laud the fact that Saddam Hussein is out of power, but for President Bush to say over and over again that the world is safer now that has happened is to ignore events such as the removal of Iraq’s nuclear weapons research facilities by parties unknown, while we’re nominally in charge.

A recent Spiked article has some interesting things to say about modern terrorist movements and their globalist, as opposed to nationalist, backgrounds. I don’t agree with the main thesis — that Western humanitarian intervention weakened the concept of state sovereignty so much that terrorist movements no longer have nationalist aims — because I don’t think the weakness of the state is a new thing. Internationalism has eroded state sovereignty for quite a long time, but a large part of the weaknesses of the state system are the same ones that it has had all along. (A reliance on national identity for legitimacy, for instance, makes it very hard to fill the entire world with brand-new states, which was the one of the effects of decolonization. Former colony space simply could not remain “empty” of states when the powers of the world were states themselves. After all, with whom do you set trade rules?) ...

I realize we’re in the middle of fighting Evil, one medium-sized country at a time, but growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I still have a healthy respect for the nuclear weapons issue. (You know, the one that says we’re glad they haven’t been used in a while and we know the probability of their being used approaches 1 every time another country develops them.) From what I recall, as late as 1994 a primary concern of our government was making sure nuclear weapons capability wasn’t spreading around. We didn’t do a great job, but hey, it worked somewhat well for fifty years or so. ...