Mugabe's last birthday (please)

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Following on from Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe has turned 82. May he never reach 83.

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The government owned Zimbabwe Herald published a 16 page supplement congratulating him. A four day party is being held to celebrate it. You can read about it on the paper’s very slow website (you see there is no hard currency to pay for hosting it outside Zimbabwe).
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The Zimbabwe Herald said:
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“the whole nation joins the First Family in celebrating the life of the greatest hero ever to grace Zimbabwe and Africa.”

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However, as reported by the Daily Telegraph:
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“The National Oil Company of Zimbabwe, unable to import fuel for a year, said in its quarter-page birthday advertisement that it valued his "wisdom". The Zimbabwe National Water Authority, unable to supply clean drinking water to the capital Harare, congratulated his "legendary existence".”
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The forced takeover of farms, destruction of homes, rigging of elections and jail and torture of dissidents in Zimbabwe is well known and does not need repeating here, simply read the report The starvation in a country that once exports food is another legacy of Mugabe.
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However, one small reflection should be about those who supported him through the 80s and 90s – the ones who ignored the murderous record of ZANU, and who saw in Zimbabwe an optimistic “African democracy” – former ambassador Chris Laidlaw once wrote of this optimism, about a one-party state that was destroying property rights.

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Meanwhile, may Mugabe be captured, tortured and killed sometime in the near future - he deserves nothing less, and may his flunkies run like the vile rats that they are. However, if you want a taste of day to day life in Zimbabwe, try the blog of journalist Peta Thornycroft, reporting for the Daily Telegraph.

Khrushchev and Stalin

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Today is the day that Khrushchev made his famous “secret speech” on the last day of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, denouncing Stalin. The day that the human excrement called Stalinists were stunned, and either followed Khrushchev or refused and continued to follow their blood thirsty hero. Think about those who deny the crimes of Stalin's regime in the context of Holocaust denial today!
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The speech rejected Stalin’s personality cult as being contrary to Marxism-Leninism (Mao, Hoxha, Kim Il Sung and Ceausescu all ignored this), it spoke of Stalin’s oppression and murder of Communist party members and innocent civilians, and the forcible deportation of nationalities or any groups Stalin feared.
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Around 2.9 million were deported under the rule of Stalin, as he shifted populations around from borders or regions that he thought might just be disloyal. However, this is nothing compared to the culture of fear and mass murder, directly through executions and sending dissidents to Siberia to die in gulags, and indirectly through ruinous policies that starved millions. He ignored warnings of the coming Nazi Germany invasion, costing millions of military and civilians lives in the siege of Leningrad. He had policies such as summarily executing soldiers if they retreated without orders and terrorising the families of those who did. The hero status he gained from World War 2 was unearned – the cost of Stalin’s regime is estimated at around 20-30 million people.
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Stalin was responsible for the invasion and occupation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the forced communisation of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, and east Germany. He was responsible for the blockade of Berlin after the war, and for instituting communist rule in the northern half of Korea, putting Kim Il Sung into power and encouraging him to start the Korean War in 1950. He refused US offers of help to rebuild eastern Europe through the Marshal Plan, and because of the implementation of Stalinist economics, is responsible for eastern Europe today being a generation behind in GDP terms from western Europe.
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He was one of the most avid warmongerers of the 20th century.
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Stalin put enormous effort into making Soviet scientists develop nuclear weapons, as he was convinced of the inevitability of armed conflict with the west, Berlin and Korea were his two attempts. He strongly supported Mao Tse Tung, and rejected Tito of Yugoslavia, for taking a softer line by allowing small business and private property to exist.
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Khrushchev repudiated the inevitability of armed conflict as he believed that the “superiority” of the Soviet system would win out over capitalism by example, and revolution would happen abroad because people would want it.
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Khrushchev’s speech had two impacts:
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- It destroyed the personality cult of Stalin in the USSR and most of its eastern European allies. Czechoslovakia even destroyed an enormous monument to Stalin in 1962 after pouring a fortune of national GDP into it. The level of repression eased, summary executions became less common, but the apparatus of Soviet terror remained; and

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- It precipitated the Sino-Soviet split. Mao was close to Stalin and did not believe in peaceful co-existence and believe it was important to support revolution abroad, and to remain in conflict with the capitalist world. This split continued through till Gorbachev led the final years of the USSR. It saw border skirmishes between the USSR and China in the 1960s, China developing nuclear weapons on its own, aimed at the USSR and much endless rhetoric from China about the Soviet “revisionists”, and from the USSR about the Chinese “ultra-leftists”.
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Of course, there was a time when Stalin was much loved in the West - Time magazine made Stalin man of the year twice (1939 and 1942)! The repudiation of Stalin also had one very convenient effect for communists – they blamed the extremes and repression on Stalin, not Lenin. This ignores the apparatus of terror and culture of murder and deportation that Lenin instigated. Lenin was no angel, he expanded labour camps and engaged in deportation and mass executions – but he is still the pinup boy of the left. The difference between Lenin and Stalin is one of scale, and it was natural that Stalin follow from Lenin.
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Of course, Khrushchev did not mark the end of Soviet totalitarianism. The USSR suppressed the popular uprising against the Stalinist regime in Hungary in November 1956. Dissidents were still arrested, imprisoned and sometimes executed – simply the hysterical mass expulsions and extermination of groups had ended. He precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, and because he withdrew, was deposed, replaced by Brezhnev and placed under house arrest. The USSR until Gorbachev reformed it in the late 1980s was still a state of terror, where you dare not challenge the power or decisions of the Party, and where you didn’t complain or talk about things you shouldn’t.

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Today is a day to remember how lucky we all are that the USSR is gone. Stalin was the 20th century's second most murderous tyrant (after Mao), Khrushchev was not averse to spilling blood, just less thoroughly and more selectively, we can be glad that Khrushchev took one bold step to pull the USSR out of the sheer hell of Stalinism, and place it one step better than that, but that is all.

Highway hoo ha

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Today Transit will release its draft 10 year State Highway plan for 2006/07-2015/16 – and the media will make it an enormous deal, the one-time ACT supporting Kim Ruscoe already has (I know this because I overheard her saying so a few years ago), even though it really isn’t meant to be.
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The plan is a forecast, based only on the revenues and anticipated allocations of Land Transport New Zealand over the next ten years. It does not mean any project will or will not proceed – at all. Funding is NOT decided by Transit New Zealand, it is decided by Land Transport New Zealand (formerly Transfund), which most reporters in New Zealand can't grasp, even though every frigging year the process is the same, and has been since 1996 when it was changed by National!
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The process goes like this:
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- Transit every year prepares a draft State Highway Programme, a bidding document which outlines the projects and outputs it will seek funding for from Land Transport NZ in the following financial year. This is based on the priorities for the current year and indications of available funding provided by Land Transport NZ based on the latest forecasts of revenue from fuel tax, road user charges, motor vehicle registration/licensing fees and Crown account allocations. The draft is for consultation with the public and local authorities, largely on the priorities Transit has set and also because local authorities produce their own bidding documents for funding their local road networks (and for subsidising public transport).
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- The draft Programme consists of detail of the projects and outputs for the following financial year as the focus. However, to give context and to encourage Transit to plan and prepare for the ongoing maintenance and development of its network, it also prepares a plan for the following nine years as a forecast, to indicate what might be done under current policy and revenue settings.
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- Following consultation, Transit’s board takes this into account and agrees on a final State Highway Programme which is submitted to the board of Land Transport New Zealand. Land Transport NZ, along with the programmes of 86 local authorities, considers the latest revenue forecasts (this is May by now) and prioritises the expenditure across all those entities, and releases the National Land Transport Programme for 2006/2007. That programme determines the allocations by activity class (e.g. State Highway Construction) and the amounts for maintenance, public transport subsidies and bulk funding for projects (and the list of approved projects) that are worth less than $3.5 million each.
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- Transit simultaneously releases the final agreed State Highway Programme for 2006/2007, which INCLUDES a forecast for following years.
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- However, final approval for funding for any single project over $3.5 million still requires signoff by the Land Transport NZ Board following evaluation of the costs and benefits of the project.
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So what does this mean? Once it is released, it is a draft and when it is finalised it is still only an indicative programme.

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Ruscoe's interviewing her typewriter with claims like "The worst-hit site in the Wellington region is believed to be the planned Paekakariki interchange, a flyover to move traffic safely on and off State Highway 1. It was set down in a proposed western corridor plan for 2007, but Transit's forecast stated that the earliest start date would be 2015, a source said."

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Well Kim, read the CURRENT year's final plan and there was no year for the Paekakariki Interchange. The proposed western corridor plan is a consultation plan, and has not been approved, and was prepared based on forecasts that are now over 6 months old.

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Yes, there is probably a funding gap, although Transit theoretically should not develop a programme which is unfundable – that is the whole point of this sort of forward planning. The big issue is whether the amount of road construction underway now, which is at levels unprecedented for over 30 years, is entirely efficient. In many cases it is, but you have to ask yourself questions about why the new motorway north of Orewa is in a tunnel now, instead of the original design for a cutting, in order to reduce environmental impact - for a good $35 million?

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There are two big issues:

- Inflation of project costs (caused by increases in oil prices, increased construction margins because of the huge rampup in road spending in the last two years and greenplating/goldplating by Transit engineers blaming the Land Transport Management Act for requiring high standards of environmental and social mitigation);

- Decreasing petrol tax revenue (caused by reducing traffic growth and increasing efficiency of the petrol vehicle fleet - this doesn't effect road user charges revenue of course).

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The appropriate answer is for Transit to become a company and to run at a profit, and to shift funding from being bureaucratic to being Transit charging customers directly - like National once proposed. Then it could borrow to build roads, paid back from road user charging.

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You see, Telecom, Contact Energy and Air New Zealand don't decide the amount of money they spend on capital every year based on annual surplus cash flow, and just spend that - they borrow, to spread the cost of the new asset across its depreciated life. Road users, on the other hand, pay taxes now, which are spend to build roads, that future road users use (albeit most of them are current ones, but since the depreciated life of a highway cutting is over 50 years) and don't pay anything towards the capital of. The Auckland motorway network was paid for by past generations, and only maintained by current ones - but phone lines, power lines and aircraft are not funded that way. If they were, you'd get congested lines, old planes as Air NZ saves up for new ones and slow progress. Imagine if you could never borrow for a home, you'd have to save up for decades until you could buy it - cash - while chasing the price of property.

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- then Transit would be engaging in cost control, but also delivering what its customers wanted and charging them appropriately for it. In the absence of that, the funding system should be revamped to have a tighter focus on economic efficiency and to ensure that projects don't proceed if they have benefit/cost ratios that are very low - and there needs to be a bigger shift to user pays, which means, for now, moving more petrol tax revenue into roads - and looking more to direct user pays to replace petrol tax.

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By the way, if the SH20 Avondale extension was not built, all the other roads could be easily funded, because it is estimated to cost around $1.2 billion, which over five years sucks out $240 million a year - but if you borrow over 35 years, it would spread it out, even taking into account the cost of borrowing.

David Irving

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Not PC, No Right Turn and DPF have blogged on David Irving being imprisoned for denying the historical fact of the Holocaust. It is very simple, anyone denying the Holocaust is engaging in an exercise of intellectual fraud and almost certainly has an anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi agenda (although it astounds me that people who are anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi can’t explicitly defend something that their philosophy endorses). As No Right Turn has pointed out, there is little doubt that many in the Middle East will find his conviction hypocritical, though hypocrisy lies on both sides as we know from the vile antisemitic cartoons that appear in Arab papers.

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It notable that the Daily Telegraph reports that “Dr Romain, rabbi of Maidenhead Synagogue, said: "I welcome yet another public rebuff for David Irving's pseudo-historical views, although personally I prefer to treat him with disdain than with imprisonment."”

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Exactly. None of us have anything to fear of the likes of Irving or anyone who engages in absurd historical revisionism. If we apply this law universally, Noam Chomsky should have been jailed for denying the mass murder and starvation that occurred in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

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The challenge to free speech is to defend those that most offend you, most distress and whose views or publications you find the most vile – because you must.

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On one side of the spectrum lies Galileo Galilei in the 17th century, as the Roman Catholic Church found it offensive that he dare challenge Ecclesiastes 1:5 by declaring the Earth orbits around the Sun, not vice versa. He fought for the right to free speech because of science. On the other is Larry Flynt, a far from delightful man, who fought for the right to publish photos of naked women in explicit sexual positions – he fought for the right to free speech because these were adults wanting their images taken and adults wanting to see them. Both men at different times had many wanting to shut them down – both had the right to say as they said, David Irving as vile as his writings are, is in the same boat.

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The only way to respond to free speech you don’t like, is to use free speech itself to challenge it.

UPDATE: Removed reference to Japanese government attitude to Japanese colonial atrocities, see comments.

Kim Jong Il what a guy!

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Happy 65th birthday Kim Jong Il (last Thursday) - General Secretary of the Worker's Party of Korea and Leader (not "dear" anymore) of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Not that he needs it, with his legions of teenage girls specially selected to provide him with carnal relief, and his obscene kleptocratic wealth.

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Yes 65, not 64 as CNN claims. He is one of Vyatskoye's most successful sons - not Korea's. You see he was actually born in 1941 in the Soviet Union, and his birth year was altered in the mid 1970s so that it would coincide with his father Kim Il Sung’s birth year of 1912 so son would turn 40 and 50 and dad 70 and 80 in the same year.
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CNN reports on his feats, such as having a photographic memory that he can recall everything everyone in a cemetery did (possibly because he put them there). Although there are stories galore in his biographies about him literally walking on water and other such feats
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You can read more of the official North Korean version of Kim Jong Il’s exploits on the websites of the Korean Central News Agency and the DPRK publications. However it is far more fun to go to NK News, a searchable database of North Korean propaganda that includes a random insult generator and some fun searches of terms like “human scum” (which is used to describe anyone who fled North Korean from the gulags. You can see how vociferously nasty and funny North Korean propagandists are. My insult was:

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"You anti-socialist beast, your accusation against the DPRK is no more than barking at the moon!" ahhh memories.
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You can also look up New Zealand and see our own sycophantic scum licking the arse of this vile regime – although it could well only be Don Borrie (a man who has praised Kim Il Sung much as George Galloway has Saddam Hussein, and who thinks that there is a need to deal with historic hurt caused by our involvement in the Korean War!). Don't be surprised that Keith Locke cites Don here as a reliable source of news about North Korea, if it were 1938 I am sure Keith would be saying that it would be better to be nice to Mr Hitler.

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The UK has its own nearly illiterate sycophants of scum at this blog and site. Human scum THEY are, but fortunately their blogs and message boards are so quiet you can see the tumbleweeds.
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Did you know Whale Rider has been shown in North Korea?
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North Korea congratulated Helen Clark on her election and Winston Peters on becoming Foreign Minister (as is the normal diplomatic protocol).
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What I am waiting for is whatever gift that the New Zealand ambassador sends on Kim Jong Il's birthday, as is expected in Pyongyang.
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Kim Jong Il recently visited China and said in his speech:
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"Touring on this occasion various special economic zones making a great contribution to the socialist modernization drive with Chinese characteristics, we were more deeply moved by the Chinese people’s enterprising and persevering efforts and fruit borne by them.
In a word, our visit to the southern part convinced us once again that China has a rosier future thanks to the correct line and policies advanced by the Communist Party of China.
The astonishing changes that have taken place in the vast land of China have been possible because the CPC laid down a new line and policies that suit the specific conditions of the country"
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Yes comrade it is called capitalism - it suits your country too, look south of the DMZ - it's not too late to try it yourself, make it your birthday goal next year Kim Jong Il - if you do, you might even deserve a birthday present.

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By the way if you want one book to read about North Korea, it is Under The Loving Care Of The Fatherly Leader: North Korea And The Kim Dynasty by Bradley Martin (St. Martins (October, 2004)). Truly well researched and eye-opening insight, and I have read more books on North Korea than most.