Irish Political News

New York Times --

2 Irish Billionaires Clash Over Publisher’s Course

in which it is said of Tony O'Reilly--

He moved from rugby to dairy in the early 1960s when he became chief executive of the Irish Dairy Board, a co-operative of Irish farms, and then joined H.J. Heinz to become the first nonfamily member to run the business.

Well he did "join" H.J. Heinz in a package deal, as economic historian Cormac O'Grada politely explains --

Erin Foods ... specialise in lines such as packaged soup and processed vegetables ... [Mickey Joe] Costello resigned in 1966 and his successor, the youthful Tony O'Reilly set up a trading partnership with the H.J. Heinz Co. in 1967.

So Tony did a deal in which Heinz got access to Erin Foods' advanced food processing techniques, developed at taxpayer expense -- and then jumped over to Heinz himself.

Later on, the NYT explains the feud with Denis O'Brien --

The bad blood between the two began when Mr. O’Reilly, the former chief executive of Heinz, beat Mr. O’Brien in a battle for control of Irish telecommunications company Eircom Group in 2001. Mr. O’Brien did not take it lightly that someone who had joined the bidding contest after him and had less experience in telecommunications beat him to the punch.

No. The bad blood dates to when O'Reilly was in one of the losing consortia for the bid on Ireland's second mobile telephone licence, won by O'Brien. There is an O'Reilly grudge going back to that award and the non-Fianna Fail government which oversaw it -- a grudge that has had a major impact on Irish politics since then with his newspapers in effect campaigning against the 1994-97 coalition and doing major ball carrying duty for Taoiseach Bertie Ahern regarding his own much investigated but poorly understood financial dealings.

Incidentally, in that 2003 Eircom deal that O'Reilly won, the Irish public got fleeced.

The trouble with disputes between rich people is that you might have to pick one of them to cheer for. It's a clear choice in this case.

The New York Times is giving Nicholson Baker's book, Human Smoke, the star treatment. Two reviews -- one very negative, one very positive, the latter by Irish writer Colm Toibin. A profile of the author. A free excerpt of the book. The headline on Toibin's review, Their Vilest Hour, accurately captures the deeply anti-Churchill message of the book. And of course, there's plenty to be against. For example, the bits of Churchill that Jonah Goldberg glossed over when looking for evidence of 1920s Liberal Fascism --

Winston Churchill visited Rome. "I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini's gentle and simple bearing, and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers," Churchill said in a press statement. Italian fascism, he said, had demonstrated that there was a way to combat subversive forces; it had provided the "necessary antidote to the Russian virus."

"If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism," Churchill told the Romans. It was January 20, 1927.

But anyway, the main business of the book is as Toibin says --

an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified

and in particular the effectiveness of the bombing of cities. Baker says it didn't even achieve its stated purpose, let alone meet any moral standard:

the bombing served to kill and maim the civilian population, yet the survivors did not blame the Nazi leaders, who used the bombing as a further excuse to inflict suffering on the Jewish population, claiming, for example, that evictions of Jews were “justified on the grounds that Aryans whose houses were destroyed by bombing needed a place to live.”

But one could turn that around and note the implied pathology of the wartime German population -- that just about any event could be used to rationalize the Holocaust.

And there's another issue. Before there was the large scale allied bombing of German cities, there was the war in the east with the invasions of Poland and then the USSR. Battles in which the Nazis initially had little opposition. And still they set about killing everybody. Jewish people first of course, but Slavs didn't rank highly for Nazi Germany either. Hitler's Germany was evil. The Allies were not, at least not intrinsically. The pacifists had no answer for how to save the non-German eastern European population.

UPDATE: A conversation with the author on the website of Haverford College.

Dick Cheney, with Israeli president Shimon Peres today --

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I want to thank you, Mr. President, for welcoming me back again to Israel. I remember when we first met many years ago, when you were Defense Minister --

PRESIDENT PERES: Both of us.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Both of us, yes. This was before I was defense minister. This was Rumsfeld's first time as defense minister.

A reminder of the deep roots of the Iraq fiasco. The photo is Cheney with Gerald Ford and Don Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was Ford's Chief of Staff. Rummy was later moved to the defence position and Cheney took his Chief of Staff job, which is when he first met Peres.

It'll take someone who knows Polish language and politics to sort it out, but in its report on how Polish president Lech Kaczynski used this picture of Drogheda man Brendan Fay (left) at his Canadian wedding to argue against the Lisbon treaty, the New York Times says --

The Polish president also showed a map of pre-World War II Poland, linking his anti-gay oratory to historic Polish anxieties about German encroachment.

But wasn't the president arguing, separately from the gay marriage issue, that the Lisbon treaty could allow Germans who owned property in what is now western Poland to initiate legal claims for the property on the basis that it was part of Germany before 1945? Maybe Kaczynski's speech was weird enough to have linked the two issues, but it read like they were completely different arguments.

... that the Blarney Stone might be a load of blarney.

... that the Blarney Stone might be a load of blarney.

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RTE -- US Border Patrol officials say they have arrested a man who escaped from the Maze prison in 1983. He was arrested at a border checkpoint in southern Texas on Monday night. The US Border Patrol have refused to name him but said he is awaiting deportation.

Border Patrol official Oscar Soldana said the man produced an out-of-date immigration document at the Sarita checkpoint near Brownsville. He said the man was identified through fingerprinting.

Question for straight-talking maverick John McCain: since this shows that the US Border Patrol is doing a good job of catching terrorist suspects at the Mexican border, doesn't that mean that the rest of the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill can now go ahead, in which he case he should answer Anderson Cooper's question* last night about whether he would vote for his own bill if it came up again?

UPDATE: Here's Wikipedia's listing of the 1983 Jailbreak participants. While only two remain unaccounted for, the Border Control might conceivably have stopped any of them given their records.

*It began as Janet Hook's question

FINAL UPDATE: The detained escapee is Paul Brennan, who while technically on-the-run was not one of the never-accounted-for persons, and the British government had stopped pursuing his extradition in 2003.

With all the controversy about South Carolina's use of the confederate battle flag on state grounds, shouldn't the rightwingers be more worked up about the classic Islamic imagery that was lurking behind every candidate last night, courtesy of the state's official flag?

bonus link to Jonah's appearance on The Daily Show

In today's Liberal Fascism moment, Jonah Goldberg says --

For many socialists and progressives, socialism was racism and racism was socialism. Nazism was socialism for a race. The Nazi view was uglier and more extreme than anyone else's, but it was not philosophically so distinct from the views of many progressives in America and socialists in Britain ... An excerpt from the book:

[quote] Just as socialist economics was a specialization within the larger Progressive avocation, eugenics was a closely related specialty. Eugenic arguments and economic arguments tracked each other, complemented each other, and, at times, melted into each other.

Sidney Webb, the father of Fabian socialism and still among the most revered British intellectuals, laid it out fairly clearly. “No consistent eugenicist,” he explained, “can be a ‘Laissez Faire’ individualist [that is, a conservative] unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!” The fact that the “wrong” people were outbreeding the “right” ones would put Britain on the path of “national deterioration” or, “as an alternative,” result “in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.” [end quote]

Using the miracle of Google, one comes across this post by Duncan Money explaining the context for the Webb quote: widespread concerns about Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. And yes, such sentiments did merge with "theories" of prominent statisticians of the day (remember the "proof" that we would all end up the same height?) to produce some weird pronouncements.

But -- what do we expect given the circumstances? All of today's concerns about immigrants depressing wages and integration of a different religion magnified many-fold, and all in the context of what was then the UK's "Irish Question". Yet the UK never got to the point of putting all Irish people in concentration camps.

So Goldberg's classification is that any left-wing figure of the day who had concerns about immigration was a fascist, and different only in degree and not type from the Nazis. But because right-wing anti-immigrants aren't socialist, they're not fascist. Got it?

Jonah Goldberg, explaining some of the material in Liberal Fascism --

nationalism and socialism are almost always synonymous terms. Hugo Chavez is a nationalist who is nationalizing his country's industry. Or you could say he's a socialist who is socializing his country's industry. The two words are interchangeable: socialized medicine is nationalized medicine.

So socializing = nationalizing. National Socialism. Nazi. Geddit?

More seriously, Goldberg still won't explain why he has classified Mussolini as being on the left when Mussolini did such a good job of preserving Italy's institutions -- the monarchy and the Church -- under his rule.

Expecting that George Bush's visit to Israel would feature a dogwhistle "gaffe" in which Jerusalem would be formally treated as the capital city (which no country recognises until the city's final status is resolved), the first press release from his trip is intriguingly titled --

President Bush Arrives in Jerusalem
Ben Gurion International Airport
Tel Aviv, Israel

Which leaves open the possibility that they've up with some trickery whereby when one arrives in Tel Aviv, the officially recognised capital, it's actually an arrival in Jerusalem.

From Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism --

... Fascism was born of a "fascist moment" in Western civilization, when a coalition of intellectuals going by various labels—progressive, communist, socialist, and so forth—believed the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image. God was long dead, and it was long overdue for men to take His place. Mussolini, a lifelong socialist intellectual, was a warrior in this crusade, and his Fascism—a doctrine he created from the same intellectual material Lenin and Trotsky had built their movements with—was a grand leap into the era of "experimentation" that would sweep aside old dogmas and usher in a new age.

Missing from the chapter from which this passage comes, and thus likely intrinsic to the book's selective reading of history, is any notion of how conservative (in the institution-preserving sense) Mussolini was. We all think of Mussolini's title as Il Duce. But technically he was just the Prime Minister of Italy, because Italy was a Kingdom during his entire reign. Would Hitler have tolerated a 2nd power centre, even if only a titular one? Of course not.

And it was as the Kingdom of Italy under Prime Minister Mussolini that that the Lateran treaty was concluded, guaranteeing the status of the Vatican. For someone looking to sweep away "traditional religion", Mussolini was tolerant of it. Again we know from history that Hitler behaved very differently.

If the argument is that American liberalism has elements of fascist ascendancy, isn't there an obligation to be a tad more careful about the distinction between Italian fascism (itself a product of Catholic alarm about communism) and its much nastier central European cousins? It certainly would have been nice if the New York Times, seeing fit to give a decent review to the book, had fleshed out such issues.