Eastern Approaches...

This week I find myself in the cosy confines of the local Conservative club in Thetford town centre. Like most such places, it is not really political in any sense that most would understand as political, and certainly the clientèle are a very mixed bunch indeed, seemingly of all affiliations and persuasions. What is very pleasant is that the place is cosy and rather warm. Outside it is the last day of April and the temperature is 4C with a wind chill factor that makes it feel more like zero. Also, they do a decent cup of coffee for a very generous £1.05.
As it has been a few weeks since my last flaneurial blog I felt it was time that I actually sat in front of the oddly intimidating keyboard once more and created something of a counterbalance to my observations of life in the US. Many, many moons ago now, when I was a relatively young and carefree flaneur, I also had the good fortune to visit several countries behind what used to be known as the Iron Curtain. The first taste of life on the other side was Bulgaria; it proved pleasant enough but the realisation that although myself and my travelling companion readily acquired large amounts of the local currency, those Lev were incredible difficult to actually get rid of. Beyond a few random leather goods there was literally nothing of any value or interest to purchase. The best that could be said of the shops was that they were functional...just. In the city of Varna on the Black Sea there seemed to be little or nothing occurring whatsoever.
Before we left for Bulgaria we were assured by the Bulgarian tourist agency that we could enjoy a rate of exchange 1.5 times the norm. This we naturally took advantage of, only to find on arrival

in the country that locals were prepared to give 4 or even 6 times the rate on the street. Interestingly, the most active of those engaged in such unofficial bureau de change activities wore the blue of the local police force. That was an early lesson in the joys of Socialist societies.

A couple of years later I actually found myself on a tour of the Soviet Union itself. I believe Cernenko was in power at the time, one of a series of leaders so old that no sooner had they assumed the reigns of the Supreme Soviet than they promptly dropped dead. In some ways it was symbolic of the system itself; even to my inexperienced eye it was clear that it was dying on its feet.

The first city we visited was Moscow. By this stage of my life I already had a fair amount of travelling experience and had been to about 25 capital cities previously. Moscow was far and away the most boring, lifeless and oppressive place I had ever been to in my life. Dour, cowered people, shortages almost everywhere and a general feeling of alienation, a society ill at ease with itself.

I had been told to visit GUM, Moscow's equivalent to Harrods according to our guide. On arriving there I found a dingy three storey building just off of Red Square. The goods were incredibly shoddy, but when a shipment of shoes arrived at one of the departments people were almost fighting each other to get in first. Looking at said shoes I found them to be of poor quality and style, little more than utilitarian at best.

Red Square proved a little challenging in its own right. Down the centre there were lines marked on the road that indicated where the official cars could drive into the Kremlin. It had a small zebra crossing about 80 metres from the gate. As there were no cars in sight, just tourists milling around, I started to cross over the painted lines only to be greeted with the sound of a shrill whistle. I looked around and saw a policeman in a rather impressive fur hat blowing furiously in my direction. I gestured to him indicating that there was nothing to be concerned about, not a vehicle anywhere to be seen, but his response was to put his hand upon his gun holster and indicate that I was only to cross at the designated crossing. As the days went by in Russia, I was to discover this strict adherence to such petty rules was all part of the apparatus in the Soviet Union of the time.

A few days later we flew down to Tbilisi in Georgia in an ancient Tupolev tu-154. From a height of 35,000 feet we looked down on an endless expanse of wheat as far as the eye could see on both sides of the aircraft. Oddly though, very few roads were visible. I had read before heading out on the trip that yet again that year the USSR had been forced to buy huge amounts of wheat from the US because of a shortage at home. I could not help but wonder exactly what kind of economic system could so badly mismanage its obvious and plentiful resources.

After about an hour I felt the call of nature. Looking back down the aircraft I noticed that the toilets at the rear were already occupied so I headed towards the front of the plane. About three quarters of the way along the cabin was split by a red velvet curtain. Pulling this back I was quite surprised to see several rows of very large and cosy seats, a well-stuffed magazine rack, tinkling drinks trolley and four or five flunkies. Quickly, our courier jumped up and snatched the curtain from my hand. Surprised, I asked her the obvious question:

“I thought there was no first class on Russia planes?”

She responded:

“It's not first class, it's for party members!”

Kinda said it all really...

The city of Tbilisi in Georgia was, at the time, part of an early experiment that the Soviet government were running in allowing the local farmers and manufacturers to simply sell their produce and goods without government interference. The experiment had been going for about a year but the effect was like chalk and cheese in comparison to Moscow. Fresh and healthy produce in abundance everywhere and a wonderfully vibrant atmosphere to the city in complete contrast to the utter deadness of Moscow.

Up to that stage of my life I had been very much a man of the left. As a child I had admired the likes of Che Guevera and Fidel Castro, and loved all things to do with the old USSR. My father had been a strong union man and that attitude had very much affected me as a boy. Now though, seeing the reality of life in the Soviet Union, the cold hand of centralised control, the repressive regime, the general dowdiness of everything from the flats to the clothes, the poorly designed cars and austere metro sans advertising except for the glories of the Communist Party, it was slowly beginning to dawn on me just how awful applied Socialism actually was in practice.

I went from the joys of Tbilisi, with its limited market reforms, back into Russia at Sochi. The location was pleasant enough but it became very noticeable that those of us who dared to venture out on our own had company whether we liked it or not. Often that company was 50 yards or so away but you couldn't help but notice the same faces kept turning up again and again. My courier was almost pleading with me at one stage to stay with the group. At a guess, she herself was probably under some pressure for losing control of her Western charges.

The trip ended in Leningrad (renamed St Petersburg once again now). Although a much more beautiful city than Moscow, with some gorgeous architecture, it still suffered from the same paranoia. I had spent a few weeks learning some basic Russian before I left but found that people were very unwilling to be seen spending any time at all with any of the group. Eventually, in a café cum bar in central Leningrad, I did manage a short conversation with a somewhat drunk middle aged man. He confirmed what had been my suspicion. Just being seen with the likes of a Western tourist could mean trouble for you or your family, so the wise thing was to look the other way and pretend that you had heard and seen nothing.

Hmm, this piece seems to be running on a lot longer than intended, yet it feels as if I have left so much of these experiences out. Suffice it to say that within those few weeks in the old Soviet Union the first seeds of doubt were sown. I had started the trip really quite naive about the nature of such collective systems. When I set out it had seemed clear to a young and idealistic traveller where the political future should lie. In that sense it was something of a coming of age, of the realisation that all was not right in the Socialist garden. At the time I had no idea why; the answer to that was to take another two decades, but the first inklings of the underlying reality were beginning to be realised.

Back in the Conservative club life goes on much as it ever did, that comfortable continuity that seems so complacent yet is the very glue that holds a society together. We all imagine as youngsters, much as I did, that what is needed is the bold, the new, the iconoclastic, but the reality is that much of what makes a tolerable society is in the institutions, habits and attitudes of a people. Those deep cultural roots that make Europe and its culture such a beacon to the World. The historian Michael Woods put it beautifully when he spoke of 'The habit of civilisation'.

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.

Too many cooks ....or too many crooks?

Today, after a week of temperatures just below 40C, I have chosen to arise early and and write at the small, informal coffee hut attached to the Morning Baan guest house in Kanchanaburi. I have been staying in a small cottage at the side of the guest house for the past few weeks. It is a tad expensive at £60 ($90) a month, plus bills. The bills in question normally come to about £3 a month but I manage to get by anyways. The coffee hut itself offers Nescafe instant, a local brand of decaffeinated coffee and yellow label tea, if one is so inclined, in a completely self-service format. They also supply marmalade and toast, both of which are as much appreciated by the ubiquitous ants as by the customers.

One of the reasons for choosing this particular location, apart from the obvious pecuniary advantages, is its all pervading quietness. The only disturbance experienced is the singing of the birds and the odd scattering of dried up leaves as a lizard runs full-pelt through the detritus, often on its hind legs.

It is a good place to sit and think, and a good place to write. Since publishing last week's effort, events concerning the Dhammakaya temple have become ever more dramatic with claims and counter-claims being bounced back and forth by those involved in the dispute. A former aid to Phra Dammachayo, Mano Laohavanich, has come forward and made scathing criticisms of some of the financial misdoings of the organisations and, in particular, of the leaders themselves. Having made such accusations, he says that he now fears for his life and has asked for appropriate protection. He may well have a point. The connections of Wat Dhammakaya are far-reaching within Thai society, including some high ranking civil and military figures.

Oddly, images from Dhammakaya services somehow remind me of the Neuremberg rallies of Germany in the 1930s, not sure why...

All such shenanigans seem a very long way indeed from anything Gautama Buddha propounded two and a half thousand or so years ago. Dhammakaya seems to be a very status and rank conscious organisation within which, at least according to its critics, position and status is more related by the ability of the devotee to pay for appropriate merit than it is by deeds, character or spiritual attainment. There is also much criticism of the type of 'Buddhism' being taught at Dhammakaya. Mostly, this concerns such things as the ignoring of even such basic Buddhist concepts as non-self (anatta), and the somewhat obsessively materialistic nature of Dhammakaya preachings (to say nothing of the lifestyles of some of those running the organisation).

Perhaps at this point it should be stated that the Thai Buddhists, even those of the Dhammakaya sect, are by no means unusual in this. It seems to be the fate of all human organisations to change, dilute and essentially corrupt whatever system of belief they were originally intending to promote. A couple of examples might suffice to clarify the point. There are many possible of course, this process seeming to be almost ubiquitous in human affairs.

Firstly, in the religious area, we could take the Christian church and the early influence of the Emperor Constantine. Due to political pressures at the time (around CE 325) it became necessary for the Roman empire to try to create a unified church rather than the endless disputes that fractured early Christianity. To this end, the conference of Nicea was called which established the notion of the divinity of Christ, stated which gospels were to be included in the Canon (and perhaps more importantly, which were to be left out), and imbued the nascent Roman church with much power.

Over the centuries since, many schisms have occurred within the church, usually as a result of devotees within perceiving the all too apparent corruption of the status quo and, as a reaction, choosing to establish another Christian order. Within an all too short a period of time though, the same process occurs, and the inevitable corruption sets in. Organisation, in and of itself, and perhaps by its very nature, seems to invariably lead to the misinterpretation, distortion and corruption of whatever message was originally intended to be communicated.

Essentially, if one looks at the history of Buddhism, Islam or any number of other religions, one will find much the same kind of process occurring. As we progress further and further from the source, it seems to be more or less inevitable that the underlying and pure message will become more and more contaminated. As stated last week, if one is interested in a given spiritual view then it seems wiser to go to the source rather than rely on any subsequent interpretations through churches, temples or any other body that involve self-interested men. I would recommend to anyone who is inclined towards such spiritual matters to go to the source, go to the writings or speeches of the originators of these spiritual systems, rather than rely on later interpretations by those within the system who may have had other things on their minds (power, money, influence, etc) than the spiritual advancement of people.

In politics, much the same sort of process occurs with a truly alarming regularity. For a very obvious example, I could cite my own recent visit to China, when it was all too readily apparent that whatever was going on there in the name of communism, it was about as far removed from anything that Marx or Engels would have advocated as one could get.

In the US and the UK in recent years, those inclined towards capitalism and idealistically recommending that 'market forces' be allowed to dictate circumstances suddenly found themselves asking for massive state intervention (policies much closer to socialism or even communism) when they themselves were threatened by a sudden deterioration in the financial situation.

One could go on citing examples almost indefinitely. The process of corruption and misinterpretation are very much the norm once an organisation such as a church, a movement or a party are formed; so much so in fact that I am hard put to think of an exception...

When such widespread and ubiquitous corruption is seen from religions to government, from the so-called forces of law and order to scientific bodies (supposedly ruled by logic but all too often dominated by the usual urges to power or to have influence) it seems small wonder that some give up hope that any such human organisation can ever be free of such urges.

Many people have been struck by such thoughts as these in the past, from the early days of the cynicism of Diogenes of Sinope (famous for barrel living...) and Crates of Thebes, to such relatively modern-day luminaries as Henry David Thoreau and Mikail Bakunin. Often, the response they have recommended comes under the general term of anarchism, a term often misused to imply a state of chaos, but which actually is more concerned with returning the power in organisations, particularly governments, back to the individuals and away from the centre.

Perhaps Thoreau put it most succinctly when he said: "That government is best which governs least". He added, as an afterthought, the clarification: "That government is best which governs not at all!"

Naturally, this attitude can (and maybe should) be applied to many other forms of human organisations, not just government.

Back outside the simple coffee house in the garden of the Morning Baan guesthouse, the sun is reaching its zenith and it is time to seek some kind of escape in a slightly more modern, and hopefully air-conditioned, establishment. Fortunately today, there is a slight breeze coming off the river, rendering the environment just about bearable. Tis a beautiful place, despite the presence of a few timber huts dotted here and there, one is very conscious of being in natural surroundings. It seems that wherever one goes in Kanchanaburi, wherever nature has been allowed to predominate it is invariably rather beautiful. The ugliness only comes when the humans start to interfere...