Brother No. 2 ...

 

'Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.'

George Santayana

Another day in the pleasant and surprisingly cosmopolitan Siem Reap, another visit to the Helen Guesthouse and Cafe. It is a few blocks from where I am staying but worth the trip for the generous continental breakfast served there. I have made this something of a habit over the last week and have much enjoyed both the food and the pleasant ambience of the place. So far, this reflects my experience of Cambodia and Cambodians in general; they seem invariably polite, gentle and friendly. So strange that here, of all places, such an awful catastrophe took place not forty years ago.
My original intention in coming to this place was to enjoy several days surveying the massively impressive Angkor Wat, but in practice I have become more and more fascinated with the nature of the tragedy that took place in this land in the 1970s than the more ancient history of the Angkor civilization. The obvious thought, given the nature of the people, is that if such a thing can happen here it can happen essentially anywhere. Mankind can be cruel and violent, but the extremes that they will go to in the name of an ideal, in this case Marxism, are truly shocking. Any individual is capable of some very dark acts, but genocide on this scale needs organisation and a rationale, at least of sorts.
Strangely, many of those who perpetrated these crimes escaped punishment for years. Most actually died before having to face any kind of court. Perhaps the most famous besides Pol Pot himself, the notorious Nuon Chea, otherwise known as Brother No. 2, was only recently convicted (in 2014) for his crimes against humanity. He is still alive today, having been given a life sentence at the end of the trial. I personally have always been against capital punishment, but such people as Nuon Chea make me question my own judgement on the matter.

Until near the very end of his trial he was both in denial about his guilt and seemingly unrepentant, saying that the actions he took were for the good of his country. Watching videos of the man giving interviews in the years before the trial, one gets the impression of someone who, even now, feels the ends justified the means. One question dealt with the killing of innocent people, which clearly happened countless times during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and his response seemed to imply that it was OK to kill any number of people who may be innocent as long as you were sure to eliminate a possible threat amongst them.

Chea denied his links to actual killings until evidence emerged of his very direct involvement with the infamous S21 prison in the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The building formerly known as Tuol Svay Pray High School was co-opted by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and became a centre for the interrogation, torture  and elimination of those who the Khmer Rouge considered to be a threat. As the chaos of their economic mismanagement became more and more apparent (unbelievably, they actually chose to follow Mao’s model from ‘The Great Leap Forward’ - something that had already lead to millions of deaths and mass starvation), they looked for the explanation in paranoid fantasies about saboteurs, agents of the KGB and CIA and, finally, defectors from within the ranks of the Khmer Rouge itself.
There were, alas, painfully few eye witness accounts to go on. Of the thousands of people who were sent to S21 only a handful survived (7 out of 12,000 according to one estimate). Oft times, people were picked up on the flimsiest of suspicions. These people were then tortured and interrogated. Reading a transcript from a survivor, the interrogation seemed to consist of the interrogator making an accusation that the bemused and confused prisoner was a spy working for the CIA or the KGB and being tortured in the most crude way until he not only confessed but also named everyone he knew as co-conspirators in the plot. These people were then picked up and the same process repeated.

It didn’t matter to the Khmer Rouge if those named were children, they still tortured and murdered them much the same as anyone else. The images that survive of frightened and confused kids taken before their execution are harrowing to this day. Even the babies of accused mother’s were summarily executed. The extent and depth of evil perpetrated under the Marxist Khmer Rouge and their banal ideology is hard to believe.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/correspondent/transcripts/1874949.txt

When one hears the likes of Pol Pot or Nuon Chea elucidating their ideology one is struck by its similarities not only to the communism of Mao Tse Tung that had brought such calamity to China but also to the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler. There was a large element of racism added to the underlying communism and this proved a particularly toxic mix. They hated the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the native Cham muslims and basically, any foreigner or foreign influence. An odd corrolary to this is that Brother No.2 himself was actually at least a quarter Chinese. This is strikingly similar to the oft stated possibility that Hitler himself was part Jewish.
For such stark and ongoing evil to exist it really seems to take an idealist, one that believes that the utopian ends justifies the inhumane means. National Socialist Hitler dreamed of a Reich that would last a thousand years, Mao Tse Tung and Lenin thought they were guiding their countries down the road to a not too distant Marixist utopia, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea dreamed of an agrarian communist Cambodia free of outside influence. They all were responsible for some of the worst genocides experienced by man in the whole of human history. The lesson is to beware of the true believers, the idealists, those convinced of the desirability of their dream and perhaps particularly those who wish to shape society to what they feel it should be. All such systems involve coercion and force eventually, no matter how ‘good’ the leaders seem to appear beforehand, how righteous, how filled with passion to impove society.
They are the really dangerous ones.

Back at Helen’s the day has become a lot warmer now as I sit here contemplating just how terrible such people can be. If we are honest, I think we all have to acknowledge that each of us is capable of doing terrible things. Individuals do commit such acts all the time, but for evil on a such a vast scale as that produced in Cambodia, in China, in Russia and in Germany it takes a state and usually a state with an idealistic vision of how society, and the people within that society, should be.
Usually, when I write these blogs I do so with a certain amount of pleasure. The process of sitting in a cafe contemplating, researching and writing is almost always a pleasant one. With this particular blog the feeling is a whole lot more negative. There was much I didn’t include as the details are just too awful, too unpleasant, even too shocking to want to expose my readers to. At the end of the process I just felt angry, angry for what had happened, angry that people still advocate similar systems, angry that the whole thing could happen again.
One final thought that struck me: given the history of communism and the number of times it has lead to such abject behaviour and awful atrocities, one would have thought that by now the symbol of the hammer and sickle should be held in the same low regard as the swastika - it is hard to see why we should differentiate between these two totalitarian and violent systems given their very similar results.
Enough now, time to go out into the sunshine once more and forget, just for the time being at least, that there are still people gullible enough to want to repeat such historical mistakes and who thereby risk repeating the same mistakes in the future.

Heaven protect us from idealists!

Purification...

"Death is the solution to all problems - no man, no problem."
Joseph Stalin

Today I find myself enjoying the somewhat noisy pleasures of the Bon Cafe in Phnom Penh. The cafe itself is rather pleasant; the staff friendly; the Americano and home-made soda good; the building, French Colonial, interesting. The noise comes from more sources than I care to name, a hodge-podge of kids, drills, motorbikes and aircraft taking off at the nearby airport. Still, despite all this, I admit to being rather fond of the place. It has an old-world charm that was sadly lacking from the Cafe Amazon chain I visited earlier today.
Two days in Cambodia and the abiding impression so far is of a failing economy with little or no infrastructure to speak of. The intention is to fly down to Siem Reap next Saturday where, hopefully, the influx of tourist money will have created a more comfortable lifestyle for the locals. One cannot help but wonder if this country has ever recovered from the Communist revolution of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. As with most Communist revolutions, it led to repression, economic failure and genocide, perhaps it has the distinction though of achieving these in somewhat less time than its rivals for the prize.

Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, managed to oversee the elimination of some 200,000 people whilst a million more starved due to his economic policies. Reports say that he particularly held a strong dislike for ‘intellectuals’ (again a common problem for Communist systems it seems, could it be that the intelligensia of a country are that big a threat to those in charge of such states?). Weirdly,  Pol Pot even went so far as advocating the killing of people who wore glasses at one stage, this on the rather feeble grounds that it proved they must have read too many books!
Once he established the ‘Democratic Republic of Kampuchea’ Pol Pot decided that history needed to start again and declared year zero before ‘purifying’ society. What this meant in practice is getting rid of anyone he even vaguely disapproved of. This was rather a long list: anyone following a religion, city dwellers, foreigners, the aforementioned ‘intellectuals’, etc.
(Odd how Communist despots seem so fond of  including such words as ‘Democratic’ and ‘Republic’ into the names of their country, usually when democratic is one thing they are not and some after effectively assuming King-like hereditary powers, such as the Kim family in North Korea)

All businesses were closed, schools and universities shut down, the mail and the phone system halted, health care stopped and any foreign economic or medical assistance prohibited. One can imagine the chaos that immediately ensued. Phnom Penh in particular suffered when the entire population was forced to leave for labour camps where they were to be ‘re-educated’ (The Communists do seem to have a particularly chilling knack when it comes to creation of euphemisms, do they not? Purifying and re-education are impressive for their creativity yet chilling for their reality).
Much to China’s ongoing shame in these matters, they were one of the few countries to offer support to Pol Pot. This continued even after they were well aware of what was going on on the ground.
Personally, seeing the state of the streets around me, I cannot help but wonder if this country has ever really recovered from those terrible times four decades ago. As the Soviets and the Communists in China discovered, if you eliminate the talented, the intelligent and the qualified from common affairs you eliminate much of what keeps a country civilised. In all three cases mass starvation and economic chaos followed.
On the positive side (!), one has to admit that a certain degree of the cherished ‘equality’ (another euphemism!) was achieved. The people were equally starving, equally suffering, equally terrified. I think I prefer a little old-fashioned inequality myself.

Friends ask me why, over the last few years, I have made a journey from being broadly left-wing in outlook to being virulently against such system. In a word: travel. Go and see these systems first hand, or at least the results of them. Read up on the realities of the atrocities, the brutality, the smothering of the individuals within these ill-begotten places but, most of all, visit them if you can. Any notion of the righteousness of Communist or left-wing dogma in general will soon be left far behind as the bitter reality is revealed in all its naked horror.
Back in the cafe I find myself alone as the light starts to fade. Sometimes the writing of these things takes a while as one searches for inspiration. Sometimes they write themselves. This has been one of the latter. The boy who served me originally smiles down patiently at me. The people here seem quite remarkably freindly, despite the horrors of their recent past and the suffering of today. One cannot help but like them.

No Marx out of ten....

"If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist."

Karl Marx

My last week in China, at least for the foreseeable future, and it seems to be an unhappy combination of cold, frequent wet spells and poor air quality. It can be very beautiful here at times, certainly there are many really quite incredible and visually stunning places to visit which can be a wonderful experience if... if the local area is not continuously swathed in a thick and sickly cloud of smog. I was told recently that the city of Zuzhou is an interesting place to see. I spent five days there two years ago and in the whole time was not able to see more than a couple of hundred metres. China could and should be beautiful, but they really need to get their act together as far as pollution goes or fewer and fewer people will want to come (not to mention the effects on the resident population).
I am back in the Cochan today, for the simple reason of the enforcement of the smoking ban in this particular establishment. Tis bad enough that one has to spend every moment of one’s outdoor existence breathing in the smog, not to wish to add to that sad state of affairs by inhaling in the more or less ubiquitous cigarette smoke in the cafes and restaurants here in China.
To be fair, in the five years I have been coming back to China, much progress has been made in many areas. The infrastructure constantly improves, the standard of driving, although awful by any objective standard, is considerably better than when I first came, the generally cleanliness of facilities just keeps getting improving year on year. On pollution though, despite the odd proclamation of intent by the Government, the reality is that it is still as bad as ever, if not worse.
Economically though, it has to be admitted, things are going well. In fact, it would seem evident that they have been going well for something like forty years now. The key event that seems to have allowed this progress to be made was the demise of the much admired Mao Tse Tung and the re-arising of Deng Xiao Ping. With Mao out of the way, Deng was free to turn his back on the truly awful failed economics of Marxism and embrace the dynamism of the free market.
The various Marxist experiments of the Maoists had wreaked huge havoc upon China for nigh on thirty years before Deng took control. True, there was a certain equality but, as some wit put it, though Capitalism may lead to an uneven distribution of wealth, Socialism tends to lead to an even distribution of poverty!

For some strange reason, in a time when dead white men are much decried, especially in the universities of the US and the UK, one dead white man remains sacrosanct. Karl Marx and his political and economic prognostications have arguably been responsible for more death and destruction, more violence and totalitarianism, than any other thought system that the human race has so far produced. Yet, very oddly, he seems to be the one thinker that remains almost immune to criticism, despite the results of his thinking and despite his own, rather sordid personal example (To give just one instance: he routinely cheated on his wife and managed to foster his own illegitimate offspring via coupling with the housemaid on his hapless friend, Friedrich Engels).

Marx’ predictions in relation to the rise of the proletariat invariably proved mistaken. Any revolutions that took place were invariably lead by intellectuals or other members of the bourgeoisie. The historical overhaul of Capitalism never took place (although, of course, history never ends whilst we still have a human race to experience and record it). The free markets, far from collapsing, went on to take over the World.
Also the notion of centralised control of prices and wages has proven to be horrendously flawed, implying as it does the threat of force. It stands in opposition to Adam Smith's ideas about the free market, as expressed in The Wealth Of Nations, where all transactions are essentially a negotiation between a buyer and a seller. If the two do not agree that the price is right for them then they do not transact - in this sense it is an expression of the freedom of choice of the two parties involved and would seem, in that way as least, a far pleasanter way to conduct human affairs and commerce than the coercion inherent within Marxism.

Marx’ racism is also, rather strangely, completely overlooked. For example, he referred to the half Creole husband of his niece as “a gorilla offspring.” Although of rabbinical descent himself, he was also an anti-semite of fearsome proportions. He even wrote a book with the blatant title World without Jews. Some even consider it to be the precedent for another eminent’s anti-semite contribution; ‘Mein Kampf’. (Rather oddly, it has been advanced that Hitler himself may also have had Jewish ancestry). He seems to have considered Asians to have been something of a sub-culture too, being, in his view, incapable of proper development without the assistance of European imperialism. The list goes on and on, but these few examples should suffice.

Marx’s views on slavery in the US also seem rather abhorrent from today’s perspective. A direct quote is perhaps the best way to demonstrate this point: “Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world and you will have anarchy, the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”
All very strange, but really hardly surprising considering just how much Marx managed to get wrong in his analysis and approach to a political and economic philosophy. With some justification, many have criticised Marxism as essentially envy dressed up in fine rhetoric. Although perhaps not completely fair, there is at least some merit to this view. His notion that all property should, essentially, belong to ‘the state’ is perhaps one of the clearest indications of the attitude. Again I quote, this time from the communist manifesto co-authored by Marx in 1844: “The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.”
Exactly what gives the Marxist state the right to own the property of private individuals is another matter. When such approaches have been tried, such as in Soviet Russia and Communist China, great suffering ensued in the first stages, transferring property from the capable to the incapable, followed by huge economic mismanagement of the transferred resources in the second, usually leading to mass starvation.

One could go on and on with this stuff, the list of Marxian unpleasantness is long and damning, but the examples I have given up to now should be clear enough. Karl Heinrich Marx was not a pleasant man, either in his political philosophy or in his private life. The attitudes he possessed to women, racial groups, slavery and even people themselves were pretty abhorrent at the time; with the benefit of hindsight (the kind of mayhem that we now know his views lead to) they are even more so.
Tis strange indeed, that such an obnoxious and odious figure should somehow retain a hero’s status to left-wing thinkers who purport to have a strong distaste for racism, misogyny and slavery but, que sera...at times the World will live in does seem to be both mad and, unfortunately, getter madder by the day!
Oh well, twas a nice rant while it lasted. Time to wrap up in scarf and wooly hat and once more brave the endless pollution of the streets of Dongguan. Hopefully, if all goes well, maybe a somewhat less intense rant will follow from the warmer climes of Cambodia next week.

Needham or not...

Dongguan had been almost relentlessly warm for the past few weeks but, since Saturday, we have suffered something of a change of fortune with a veritable deluge of rain hitting us accompanied by temperataures not far above freezing. Today I am sitting as deeply into Cochan Cafe as I can manage but, unfortunately, the local habit of leaving the main doors open to encourage customers means that the interior is, to put it mildly, chilly. At least this is one of the few cafes in Dongguan that actually does enforce the law of smoking, so one doesn’t have to deal with that particular unpleasantness as well. Obeying laws seems to be quite optional here in China, if the obeyance thereof is likely to cost the owner of the business a few customers then it is very unlikely to be enforced. In the case of smoking, the authorities made quite a song and dance about their new regulations last year, proclaiming to all and sundry how they wanted to promote healthier lifestyle habits here, but as ever here, presentation is one thing, enforcement quite another.
My mind has been somewhat occupied of late by the ‘Needham Question’, something that was brought to my attention a few weeks back by a friend of mine in Kanchanaburi. Joseph Needham, originally a biochemist, became both a sinologist and also something of a sinophile. His initial interest in China was sparked after embarking on an affair with a young Chinese scientist in Cambridge in the late 30s. She made him aware of some of the many remarkable discoveries and inventions of Chinese science up to the 18th century. China’s culture had been one of, if not the leading culture for several centuries. As Needham illustrated in his opus magnus on the subject many (the massive and unfinsihed 25 volume ‘Science and Civilisation in China’), many developments in science and mathematics had their genesis in China. Needham certainly had a point and he was by no means backwards in coming forward to make that point, writing and travelling endlessly in pursuit of his calling. Many other scholars felt that although there was much validity to what he said, he also developed the tendency to credit almost all major developments to China (much to the approval of his lover, no doubt). Basically, he over-egged it.
The Needham Problem essentially addresses the question of why this influence stopped and the culture essentially ossified (at least as far as scientific development was concerned) to the point where the younger but more energised cultures of Europe both overtook China and eventually left it far behind.
Many answers have been posited, some more credible than others. The stultifying effect of Confuscianism for example, wherein social stability is prized about all else. The nature of the Chinese state which laid great emphasis on continuity and had little need for innovation. The exam system for bureaucrats which held rote learning in high esteem but, again, did not particularly value original work. The remnants of the latter can still be seen in the Chinese education system of today. It is very good at turning out individuals who pass exams, but unfortunately not quite as good at creating pupils who actually understand their subjects. In regards to the latter, it is not an uncommon experience to come across people with degrees in English in China, who yet seem almost incapable of even the simplest of discussions using that language.

Another, somewhat more imaginative answer, is that regarding the development of glass in Europe. The theory runs that because the Europeans loved wine they developed glass to a much higher degree which eventually lead on to the development of optics, scientific instruments and, last but not least, spectacles. This latter innovation thus enabled a greatly increased creative lifespan for the European intellectual as opposed to their Chinese counterpart whose culture, favouring tea over wine, had merely developed porcelain. An interesting theory...

Interestingly, and rather oddly, after consulting 20 odd sites on the internet addressing this question, none of them seem to have posited the possibility of what would seem a very obvious contributing factor. The industrial revolution that started in the UK and spread throughout Europe created the need for a better educated workforce, at least to a basic level. To make this possible, a certain democratization of education was required in order to have sufficient people capable of working within the new paradigm. This increasing access to education created a much wider pool of potential scientists, mathematicians and engineers that had hitherto been the case.
This same process would not have been possible to the same extent in China due to one very simple but very fundamental factor: the cumbersome nature of the Chinese writing system. Mandarin Chinese is often described as a very difficult language to learn, perhaps even the most difficult. Personally, I think that spoken Chinese is no more challenging than any number of other languages, despite the difficulties connected to the use of tones. The grammatical structures within the language are of themselves far simpler than French, English or German. Many outsiders successfully manage to learn to speak the language but few, even after many years of study, get anywhere near close to being able to read, let alone write, in Mandarin.

Even Western academics who have studied the language for a decade will still have difficulties reading even the most basic novel or newspaper article in Chinese. There is no shame in this as the Chinese people themselves suffer under a similar yoke. Though the Chinese government claim a literacy rate of around 95% (interestingly similar to Western European countries and the US) this is only achieved by setting a standard that is so low as to be bordering on the absurd. Recognition of characters for example, is considered enough of a qualification even if the ability to recreate these characters is completely lacking. I have met several seemingly bright people here who are completely unable to read official documents and have to rely on friends to interpret for them.
Now, interestingly, if the results of IQ testing is to be believed, the average Chinese person is a tad more intelligent than his Western counterpart. Yet real literacy rates here in China are stubbornly low. I conducted some interesting experiments (highly unscientific, of course) myself of late just to see how difficult the written system was even for educated Chinese people. I worked with a couple of undergraduates, giving them a list of reasonably common words. Their immediate reaction was to pick up their mobile phones and enter the pinyin! When told that this was not allowed they looked just a tad flummoxed and, somewhat abashed, had to admit that they could not write the words from memory. One of the words used was ‘sneeze’. Now imagine in the West having people educated to undergraduate level who struggle with reproducing such a simple word; it would be simply unbelievable unless that person was unlucky enough to be severely dyslexic.
Another aspect of this historically is that in the times we are referring to the Chinese script was actually several orders of magnitude more difficult than it is today. Most of the scholars time was taken up by their attempts to simply master enough words to pass various administrative exams.
So, my contention is that the problem for China in regards to the Needham Paradox (it has many names!) was not so much in the culture or the underlying capabilities of the populace but simply due to the almost impossible task of democratizing education when the pupils are faced with such a gargantuan task as simply learning the written system in the first place.
Several years ago I took a trip to Russia. It was a relatively late booking so I had barely two and a half weeks to get a little Russian under my belt before I left. It took me roughly 36 hours to learn the phonetics of the cyrillic script and with it the ability to understand simple signs. More recently, a friend and I also decided to learn the Greek alphabet just for the hell of it. This process took a couple of days. Now, compare that to getting even a basic understanding of the Chinese written system...years, or even decades are required to reach a similar level.

This has proven to be quite a long piece and I am completing it in C Store, a cafe a few hundred metres from Cochan. As I look to my right I see a sign written in Chinese script, symbolically and in English. It says: no smoking. Beneath it, a young man of about twenty years of age, puffs away happily...

Reductio ad Absurdum...

“The truth is a terrible thing, but not compared to falsehood.”
Jordan Peterson

Back in my favourite C Store this morning and enjoying temperatures in the mid 20s C. I would normally say that I was also enjoying the coffee, but this particular cup tastes a tad sour for some strange reason, a fact pointed out by several other customers. The lass behind the counter seems a little perplexed, she has the lid off of the coffee machine and is looking into it....
It’s been an intersting week or so. I have, via a VPN, had access to several sites that would normally be difficult to get here in China. During various discussions of late a certain problem has arisen again and again. In these debates, I have found myself somewhat surprised at being accused of being ‘right wing’ by those who identify with the left, particular the UK’s Labour Party, but also called ‘left wing’ by those who identify with the right, again in the UK those who would consider themselves Convservatives Party voters.
The issues were, in turn: transgenderism, austerity, people attempting to ‘work the system’ on council estates and trickle down economics. Apparently, at least according to those who responded to me, I am either a left wing loony or a right wing pig, at one and the same time it seems (to myself, I seem like a relatively gentle soul with an interest in the social movements of his times).
Firtsly, let me deal with each of these issues, albeit rather simplisticly as none of them are the point that I actually intend to address. I hope my readers will forgive my bluntness here. Countless books and articles have been written on each and it is not my intention to actually debate them today.
Transgenderism - doesn’t actually exist. No male with XY chromozones has ever transitioned into a female and, indeed, can ever actually do so. The same can be said of XX females ‘identifying’ as men. This is simply because it is impossible for one sex to ‘transition’ into the other. Attempting to maintain anything else is, how can I put it, absurd given the biological evidence.

Austerity - has been a failure everywhere it has been tried. It constricts economies and ensures that money is not allowed to flow through the system. It is almost a guaranteed way to bring on a recession. The UK government’s version hasn’t worked in Britain. The EU’s version hasn’t worked in Spain, Portugal, Italy or Greece.

Council Estates - I lived on one for twenty years and my experience mirrors most other people’s. Whilst the vast majority of people were perfectly decent members of society, there was also a sizeable chunk who were anything but, doing anything and everything they could to ‘game’ the system. Denial doesn’t make such reprobates disappear.

Trickle Down Economics - this sacred cow of the right has been a failure everywhere it has been attempted. The notion is that of stacked champagne glasses; when you fill the top glass the overflow trickles down into the other glasses below it. That’s the theory anyway. In practice, as the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby noted, all that tends to actually happen is that the top glass grows bigger until it crushes all the glasses below it.

These issues are just examples of an underlying problem. that problem being the identification of oneself with a political party or movement, or even with seeing oneself as left wing or right. When this happens it seems that many people seem to feel the need to align themselves with all the postions taken on that side of the debate no matter how absurd or obviously flawed they are. Within themselves, many Tories must know that trickle down economics has been a profound failure and is a deeply flawed model but feel the need to defend it because their particular ‘tribe’ hold that position.
It is hard to believe that any sane person who understands that cells have either XX or XY chromozones can serioiusly pretend that transgenderism actually exists...but they do. Or, perhaps to be more precise, they say that they do. It is hard to beleive that in their heart of hearts, as the saying goes, they do not recognise the simple reality that such a notion is physically impossible.

Perhaps what is needed is for sane and rational people, and even politicians, to move away from the identification with left and right, with Tory or Socialist, and start to look at what is sane, what is rational, what is responsible; in short, what actually works.
Here in China they suffered many years under the sad delusion that they were building a utopian communist society. It was a disaster from start to finish, with literally millions dying in these ill fated efforts. Fortunately, in the early eighties, they were lucky enough to have one Deng Xiao Ping at the helm. As he himself said: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black, so long as it catches mice!” He moved the country away from flawed ideologies and towards pragmatism (although one doubts if the Communist Party of China would actually agree out loud). Now China essentially has no political philosophy, left or right, but simply does what it perceives to work. Once the ideological nonsense was dropped, the resultant miracle here over the last thirty odd years has been truly stunning to witness.

So, in summary, my point is that perhaps we all need to mature beyond aligned party politics to a place where people are able to express blatant realities rather than feel pressured to keep up positions that, in reality, are untenable or even absurd. If it is not oxymoronic to say so, politics needs to become apoltical. Perhaps even, as political entities, we all need to grow up a bit?
Back in C Store, the very charming lass behind the counter has thoughtfully refilled my coffee cup with a freshly brewed concoction. It tastes a lot better than the last. We exchange friendly greetings through translation apps and go on to exchange views on the chaos taking place outside. Parking is a problem in Dongguan, too may cars and too few places, and it can be quite fascinating to simply gaze out of the window here and witness the ongoing disputes that seem to flare up every ten minutes or so. As ever, it is all very entertaining, but as with the issues outlined above, one can’t help but think that sometimes this is a very, very....mad World!

Too many letters...

"Truth is ever to to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

Isaac Newton

After having wondered a couple of miles upstream towards the Bridge over the River Kwai (as made famouse in the David Lean film of the same name), today I find myself enjoying the cool and pleasant environs of Miss Coffee, an establishment that according to the owner has been open only for a grand total of four days. Oft times, I take a pic of the coffee shops I frequent and use them as a heading. This time the roles have been reversed. Being one of her early customers, the charming lass who runs the place took a pic of yours truly for inclusion on her website. There is something of a fondness in many Eastern cultures of making an art form of the practice of enjoying liquid libations. Such pleasant distractions seem enough to stir the loins of many a bon viveur of the oriental variety. Much time and energy is devoted to lifting the experience out of the mundane and into the extraordinary. This attitude goes back a long way. Such ancient cultures as Japan and China spent much time perfecting the art of enjoying a beverage with many writers devoting whole volumes to the preparation, presentation and consumption of such refreshments.
The past few days here have seen both an increase in, and a change in the type of heat. The local weather is now soggily sticky and stifling, which tends to suck the energy from the body unless one is extremely careful to expend one’s physical resources economically. What this does mean though, is a great excuse to spend even more time in air-conditioned cafes indulging in online flaneurial activities. Observing the World and the changes its societies and cultures are going through is the very essence of the role of a flaneur. Hopefully at least, one can apply a relatively detached and objective attitude, indeed, this is the very essence of flaneurism (hmm...I think I just invented another ‘ism’, just what the World needs right now...).
One of the changes that has, for the most part at least, been a relatively positive development in recent years has been the general acceptance, at least in most of the first World, of people’s various tastes in sexual expression. The LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) movement was much needed to address a long standing intolerance, usually based on scripture from outdated religious movements, regarding people’s sexual preferences. The reasoning seemed to be that if some wandering semitic tribe or other didn’t approve of such things a few millenia back then we should endeavour to reinforce such antedeluvian prejudices for the rest of time. Many lives were seriously affected by such attitudes, especially when they were transcribed into law. Perhaps the most influential man of the 20th century, Alan Turing (the mathematician and codebroker whose seminal work lead to the development of computers, smart phones and all the other digital paraphenalia that affects each of our lives so fundamentally today), preferred men as sexual partners . For having this relatively common trait he was offered, by the British justice system of the time, the choice of prison time or chemical castration. He chose the latter, but it seems that the changes his body went through and the concurrent depression lead to his taking his own life.

The LGB community made a valid point and their contribution to the debate led to great changes to the legal standing of such folk throughout America, Europe and the Antipodes. Unfortunately, those demanding inclusivity then started to add ever more letters to original, perfectly clear, three. It has been interesting to watch this process which seems to have gone from the short and pithy original to the frankly absurd current state of affairs. To give a couple of examples, one version now reads LGBTQIAGNC, which apparently stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and gender-non-conforming. Another, even catchier version gives us LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA. In case you haven’t guessed already, this stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, curious, asexual, pansexual, gender-non-conforming, gender-fluid, non-binary, and androgynous... obviously.
(At times, it seems to me that to make sense of such acronyms one would need the memory of an elephant and the code breaking skills of Alan Turing himself!)
Where did it all go wrong? I would suggest that occurred from the moment the letter T was appended to the the LGB. Many of those within the community understand that this was a decidedly odd step to take. Up to that point the issue being addressed was that of sexual preferences. With the addition of the T though, a medical condition (body dysmorphia - or the belief that your body is other than it is) was included as if it is somehow part of the continuum.

In all but a tiny number of cases, all human beings have either XY or XX chromosomes. These are to be found in every cell of one’s body and define, at the most basic biological level, whether one is male or female. It is not a choice. It is not something that you can change on a daily basis. It is not a matter of societal roles, or some other such nonsense. It simply is. In the case of the male for example, no amount of estrogen or genital mutilation will change the basic fact that he is still a male. No matter what chemicals he takes, no matter what he chooses to wear, or what his stated preference - to use the pithy vernacular of my youth - a bloke in a dress is still a bloke in a dress.
For some reason, pointing out this all too obvious truth outrages some people, particularly those who have been exposed to the completely bogus academic field of ‘gender studies’. Groups representing these poor souls (Transgender people have a suicide rate at around 40% - an horrifically high number that has changed not a whit despite our more ‘enlightened’ times) have successfully pushed through legislation in several states in America and nationwide in Canada that forces people to use ‘preferred pronouns’. What this basically means is that a person can now be prosecuted for calling a man a man. These folk often accuse people who point out the absurdity of this situation of being ‘transphobic’. I would counter that those who insist on such spurious notions are, in point of fact, realityphobic.
By nature, and by practice, I am a libertarian. My belief is that as long as the activity doesn’t impinge on the choices of others, then people should be free to behave however they like. If a man wants to wear a dress, stockings and high heels it is of no concern to me. He can even pretend that he is a female in his own mind, that is again essentially his own affair. Where I would draw a line however, is in the insistence that I recognise his pretense as if it were reality. I may choose to use his preferred pronoun out of good manners, or even respect, but that is my choice, not his. To pass laws that tell me that I must say something that is quite contrary to the reality I perceive seems a very strange route for the legal system to go down.
A couple of hours have passed in these musings, and with it the worst of the days humidity. It is now time once more to sally forth in the direction of the slowly setting sun. It seems I am likely to leave this part of the World in the next few days, Northward bound for Guangzhou in China. That part of the World has its own charms (along with its own annoyances!), but I will miss the town of Kanchanaburi and several of the people I have got to know better whilst I have been here. Tis an oddly enigmatic little place, the whole town only having a population of around 30,000. The part I frequent is probably only a mere couple of thousand but...it has a an enigmatic quality of its own that somehow draws me back again and again. With some reservations, I really quite enjoy Thailand, but Kanchanaburi I actually love. Not completely sure why, but probably something to do with the unpretentious but charming nature of the place and the variety of characters that it draws to its generous bosom. Many, like me, come back year after year.
Long may it continue.

Lazy days...

Today, as sticky and as hot a day as one would wish to experience, I find myself in the slightly frayed-at-the-edges, albeit relaxed, environs of the Betty Boop Bar in Kanchanaburi. The place’s air conditioning seems to have been installed by someone who failed to understand the concept as the bar opens out directly onto the street, the opening being the entire width and height of the premises. It does ‘benefit’ from a plethora of fans though, doing what fans do in these conditions. Essentially, that consists of moving hot air from one part of the bar to another, in a very similar way to fan heated oven, with roughly the same effect. Pride of place is taken by an eight foot by four foot snooker table that the locals, as well as the expats, like to play pool on. As the table is essentially built for snooker, with the much smaller pockets that come with that game, the version of pool played here is very tactical in nature, multi ball breaks being fairly exceptional. Such amenities are at least free here though, as opposed to the slot style tables that are to be found in the UK.
In these conditions it is necessary to be somewhat economic in the way that one spends one’s energy; any drastic increase in output tends to mean that one is drenched in sweat in under a minute. As someone who both enjoys exercise and feels a need to indulge in such activity, it has become necessary for me to literally get up at the crack of dawn, just after 6 a.m., in order to do an hour’s juggling, yoga and planking. A couple of times in the last two weeks, due to slightly overindulging the previous night, I failed to start exercise until 7.30 a.m. This was a drastic mistake on my part and led to some unpleasant heat exhaustion like symptoms similar to those I suffered in Chiang Mai four years back. A certain amount of common sense is required and the pragmatism to understand the beneftits of laziness in an environment such as Thailand’s.
Oddly though, the enforced laziness that the environmennt here necessitates is, for this flaneur at least, often somewhat paradoxical in nature. Despite strolling around the place at the pace of a happily stoned two-toed sloth having an easy day, and spending much time imbibing an endless variety of fruit smoothies and other such hydrating concoctions, I seem somehow to get more done than I manage back in the UK. On my last trip to SE Asia I consumed innumerable books on finance and investing, wrote several articles, read half a dozen novels and spent much time investigating the possibility of a new book, even completing in draft form the first four chapters. All this whilst zig zagging back and forth between Guangzhou, Dongguan, Hainan Island and Thailand.
Even on the present trip I find myself studying the ever elusive Mandarin (it is actually getting better now - at last!), continuing my attempts to improve the schoolboy French I have had for years, reviving this blog, consuming George Orwell novels and researching a new idea for a novel, whilst on the physical side I manage an hour’s yoga and juggling at dawn most mornings. All this on top of some very pleasant social activities, enjoying in-depth conversations with several of the interestingly philosophical souls one finds in Kanchanaburi, and socialising for several hours each evening, which seems to mostly consist of playing pool with locals and ex-pats and watching the odd football match in the bars. This is, all in all, a fair amount of activity yet feels as if it is all done at such a leisurely pace that almost everything from the juggling to the conversations, from the French to the novel, feels like an easy-going indulgence.
I remember noticing this phenomena in another blog (Busy Doing Nothing) a couple of years or so back. Oft times, those who seem to be buzzing around like the proverbial blue-assed fly, flitting at ever increasing pace from one unfinished task to another at breakneck speed whilst driving themselves into a froth-mouthed frenzy, somehow seem to manage to be both forever short of time and remarkably unproductive. As ever fooled by the superficial, we often seem to confuse activity with productivity, the appearance of busy-ness with actually getting things done. P.G Wodehouse was famous for spending each morning in his Southern French villa leisurely writing on the verandah and the rest of the day indulging in the pleasant lifestyle that that particular part of the World offers. He did this for years, but left behind a remarkably large body of work that has easily endured the test of time in the decades since.

As I finish this blog sitting beside the River Kwai and gazing out across the slow flowing waters on yet another pleasant evening, I find myself once more appreciating the benefits of slowness, of taking one’s time, of savouring the flavour of one’s very existence. Often in modern culture it feels as if we are forever chasing, faster and faster, towards some potential future. Indeed, life itself is often framed in this way, a continuous quest to prepare ourselves for a part of life that is yet to come. It is all just imagination, of course. These futures scarcely ever come to pass, and even when they do they are often not at all as we had imagined them. The reality of marrying that dream girl, of getting that yearned for promotion, of buying that house is often really rather disappointing. Rather than forever projecting ourselves into such fantasies, perhaps it would be wiser to realise that there is but one time when we are truly alive, and that time is right now, in this moment
Live it well.