Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

March 23, 2007

  CUBA: WHAT IF HE COMES BACK?

  For anyone who knew the old Soviet Union, a visit to Cuba is always a trip down memory lane. From the ubiquitous revolutionary slogans and the absence of advertising to the cautious shorthand in conversation (stroking the chin means Fidel Castro) and the sour, fatalistic jokes, it is a Communist country of the classic era. But, this time, I kept thinking about an old Soviet joke that had not made it to Cuba (though I have now done my best to get it started there).

  A rising young apparatchik in the Soviet Communist Party, starting to enjoy the privileges that come to high officials of the regime, brings his peasant mother to Moscow from her distant, impoverished village and installs her in a grand apartment in the Arbat. His mother, instead of being delighted, just falls silent and looks worried. So he takes her to one of the special Party shops, a wonderland of Western consumer goods unavailable to ordinary Russians, and tells her to buy anything she wants. She buys only a kilo of oranges, and looks even more troubled.

  Desperate to please her, he takes her to dinner at the Praha, the grandest and most expensive restaurant in the capital, but by now, there’s no denying it. This display of privilege is not impressing her; it’s frightening her half to death. So her son finally asks her straight out: Isn’t she pleased with what he has accomplished? Isn’t she proud of him?

  “It’s wonderful, darling,” she replies. “But what will happen to us if the Communists come back?”

  The question in Cuba is: what will happen if Fidel comes back? It has been eight months since he fell gravely ill and handed the president’s powers over to his brother Raul, and the “transition” is complete. Fidel’s lengthy illness created the ideal circumstances for an orderly handover of power, and by the end of last year the new collective leadership was firmly in charge. Most people were quietly relieved that it was all over.

  It felt a bit strange no longer having Fidel on television all the time nagging and exhorting the population, a larger-than-life father figure, but, after forty-seven years of it most people were very tired of being treated like backward children. There was enormous respect for Fidel in Cuba, but there was also enormous weariness of him, combined with a great secret fear of what would happen when he finally went.

  Partly it was just fear of the unknown—80 percent of Cuba’s population have known no other leader—but it was also fear of chaos, because everybody knew that the United States would use Castro’s death to try to change the regime. As Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, said recently, Cuba has the same effect on the U.S. that the full moon has on a werewolf. Washington doubtless had all sorts of regime-change projects ready to launch as soon as the Old Man died.

  Even Cubans who don’t like Castro don’t want abrupt political collapse and perhaps great violence. Neither do they believe that life would necessarily be better for the people who live in Cuba now if all those Cuban refugees in Miami and all of their money suddenly flooded back. They’d just buy up the island and take over again. So a smooth transition to the next generation of the Communist leadership is better than the chaos that would have followed if Fidel had just died suddenly one day.

  The new leadership is collective, with brother Raul out front as chairman of the board. Its members are well known and respected by the Cuban public—people like Felipe Perez Roque, the foreign minister; Ricardo Alarcon, head of the National Assembly; Ricardo Lage, now in charge of energy; and Francisco Soberon, governor of the Central Bank—and they can expect a couple of years’ grace to show that they can grow the economy faster and give Cubans more freedom without destroying the welfare state that gives people free education and health care.

  Or rather, they did expect a couple of years’ grace—but then Fidel started to get better. He is still far from fit, but he is out of bed and on the phone, and the spectre looms that he might decide he is well enough to take over again.

  “[Fidel cannot participate in decision-making] the same way he did before because he has to dedicate a good part of his time to recuperating physically,” said Ricardo Alarcon last week. “To what extent he will go back to doing things the way he did, the way he is accustomed to, it’s up to him.” And it really is up to him. Fidel Castro so dominates modern Cuban history, and the reflex respect that all his colleagues feel towards him is so deep, that nobody would dare tell him he can’t take back supreme power.

  But it would be a disaster for the regime. Many Cubans revere Fidel, but few want him back in power, jerking them around again with his constant, arbitrary changes of policy. Moreover, the odds are very much against another smooth transition of power sometime in the future, when death finally does take Fidel. Miracles happen, but not with any regularity.

  26.

  MISCELLANY II

  It’s not having a billion speakers that decides which of the planet’s many tongues becomes the “world language.” What decides the issue is which language people choose when they are trying to communicate and neither speaks the other’s language.

  October 25, 2004

  A (MUCH RESENTED) WORLD LANGUAGE

  Predictably, the French were furious. A commission looking into the future of the French education system recommended last week that English, which it called “the language of international communication,” be made compulsory in French schools, and the usual suspects erupted in outrage. It would be the final surrender, an acceptance that English had replaced French as the international language, and they were damned if they would let it happen.

  Most of the world thought that this battle ended about fifty years ago, shortly after the Second World War, when America emerged as the new superpower and its language became the normal medium of communication in international business and diplomacy. English had been gaining ground on French since Britain replaced France as the reigning superpower over a century before, and the rise of the United States settled the issue. Except in France.

  It’s hard losing an advantage that your country has enjoyed for a long time, but the French went into denial about it. Some 97 percent of students in France study English at some point, but there is no official pressure to learn it well, and the French lag far behind their German, Italian and Spanish neighbours in their command of English. This impairs France’s international competitiveness and the commission was merely suggesting a remedy.

  Foolish commission. They should have known. Politicians and intellectuals queued up in the French media to denounce them as defeatist. The dominance of English is merely a transitory thing, they argued, and should not be pandered to. Typical was Jacques Myard, a member of parliament for the ruling Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement Party) who announced: “English is the most spoken language today, but that won’t last.” Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish would become increasingly important, he predicted, and the position of English would erode.

  It’s obvious why they like this prophecy so much. They all hope that the rise of these other languages and the relative decline in the importance of English will lead to a polyglot world where French would at least regain a position as one of the equal leading languages. (French has only seventy-five million native speakers in the developed world, but there is a huge additional reservoir of potential French-speakers in the former French colonies in Africa.)

  Is this just wishful thinking, or is it really the shape of the future? Size matters: no language has ever risen to become the regional or global lingua franca without having a lot of speakers and a powerful state behind it. But once a language has achieved that dominant position, it is such a useful device for international intercourse that it doesn’t necessarily fall into disuse when the power of its original speakers declines. A thousand years after the Roman Empire in the West was overrun by barbarians, educated Europeans still used Latin to communicate with one another.

  The United States does not face the fate of Rome, but it will bulk much less large in the world in fifty years’ time than it doe
s at the moment: other economies are growing much faster, especially in Asia. If there is more business to be done, many more foreigners will take the trouble to learn Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish—and Portuguese, Russian and Indonesian—than do so at the moment. But nobody is going to learn them all: everybody will still need a common language, and it will still be English.

  It helps that India, which is destined to be the most populous nation of all, already uses English as a lingua franca within its own borders to cope with the multiplicity of other official languages in the country. By 2050, when China will be the largest economy, the U.S. second and India third, two of the three most powerful countries in the world will be effectively English-speaking for international purposes. But this merely reinforces a phenomenon that has already gained huge momentum.

  Over the past twenty years, the switch to English as the first foreign language taught in schools has accelerated worldwide. In the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe it has replaced Russian and, in Russia itself, English is now obligatory in the schools. More recently it has been made compulsory in Chinese schools: it is now practically impossible to gain admission to a Chinese university without a decent command of English.

  To the intense irritation of the French, English has even become the de facto working language of the European Union, although only two out of twenty-five member states (Britain and Ireland) are mainly English-speaking. An avalanche has occurred, and avalanches are irreversible.

  A globalized world needs a common second language so that Peruvians can talk to Chinese and Hungarians can communicate with Ethiopians. It is an accident of history that the dominant global power was English-speaking at the time when this need became apparent, but the investment that hundreds of millions of people have already made in learning the language guarantees that this accident will have permanent results.

  But it does make the French very cross.

  The world capital of conspiracy theories used to be the Middle East, and the region was certainly awash in such theories after 9/11. Half a decade later, however, the United States itself was seething with equally bizarre theories, thanks to dedicated amateurs distributing their work on the Internet.

  Dealing with questions from sincere people who were taken in by these theories took up a lot of my time, mostly because such theories were only obviously nutty if you knew how the intelligence world actually worked. Eventually I wrote this column in response.

  March 8, 2007

  LOOSE SCREWS

  The 9/11 conspiracy theory is back, in a much more virulent form, and normally sane people are being taken in by it: I am getting half a dozen earnest emails every day telling me I must see a film called Loose Change. It has been around in various versions for almost two years, but it now seems to be gathering converts faster than ever.

  Well, I have seen it, and I concede that it is a much slicker, more professional product than other 9/11 conspiracy films, and therefore more seductive. But the argument is pure paranoid fantasy, and it is rotting people’s brains.

  There have always been two kinds of 9/11 conspiracy theories. The lesser version held that the Bush administration had advance intelligence of al-Qaeda’s plans but chose to ignore the warning because the attacks suited its purposes. The greater version insisted that there was no al-Qaeda involvement at all and that the attacks were carried out by the U.S. government itself, perhaps with Israeli help.

  Until recently, the greater conspiracy theory was largely confined to the Arab world, where many people are in complete denial about any Arab involvement in the atrocity. Few Americans took that version seriously, but many wondered whether the intelligence lapses had really been accidental. If you believe that they weren’t, then you have bought into the lesser conspiracy theory.

  Even this more modest conspiracy theory, in which the U.S. government learned of Osama bin Laden’s intentions but decided not to stop him, requires the complicity of some very senior people. If the information got into the system, then the people who would have known about it included the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (George Tenet and Louis Freeh), the national security adviser (Condoleezza Rice), the secretaries of defence and state (Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell), plus Vice-President Cheney and perhaps President Bush.

  Getting away with it also would have required the permanent silence (or silencing) of at least a dozen lower- and mid-level intelligence analysts in Washington. Intelligence like this only gains credibility within the system when there are multiple sources confirming it, so the people who saw the raw intelligence, collated it and passed it up the line would know that the senior people had received it. And the senior people would know that they knew.

  I don’t believe in the lesser conspiracy theory because I don’t think that Tenet, Rice, Powell and others would have deliberately allowed thousands of Americans to be killed like that. I don’t believe even Dick Cheney would have done that. And I note that there has been no inexplicable wave of sudden deaths among junior intelligence analysts in Washington.

  I do believe, however, that 9/11 served the purposes of the neoconservatives. They were already pressing to attack Iraq as part of a larger plan, dating back to the late 1990s, to relaunch Pax Americana and reestablish American hegemony in the twenty-first century world. I agree that they were adroit in seizing on 9/11 as a way of enlisting popular support for their project. But that’s all.

  As for the greater conspiracy theory, of which the movie Loose Change is the most prominent manifestation, it is just plain loony. Yet more and more people are falling for it in the West, where it was once the exclusive domain of people with counter-rotating eyeballs and poor personal hygiene. You cannot overstate the impact of a well-made film.

  Loose Change confidently asserts that the twin towers were brought down by carefully placed demolition charges, not by the fires ignited by the planes that hit them; that the Pentagon was struck by a cruise missile and not by a plane at all; and that the fourth “hijacked” plane, Flight 93, did not crash in a field in Pennsylvania but landed at Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a National Aeronatics and Space Administration building and never seen again.

  What about all the calls that the passengers on Flight 93 made on their phones? Their voices were cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and the calls to their relatives were faked. The FBI was in on it, the CIA was in on it, the U.S. Air Force was in on it (except, of course, those personnel who were killed at the Pentagon), and the North American Aerospace Defense Command was in on it (but they kept the Canadians in the organization out of the loop).

  The security companies guarding the World Trade Center were in on it, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in on it, the Federal Aviation Administration was in on it, NASA was in on it, and the Pentagon was in on it. At least ten thousand people were in on it. They had to be, or it couldn’t have worked. And, more than five years later, not one of them has talked.

  Nobody has got drunk and spilled their guts. Nobody has told their spouse, who then blabbed. Not one of these ten thousand guilty people has yielded to the temptation for instant fame and great wealth if only they blow the whistle on the greatest conspiracy in history. Even the Mafia code of silence is nothing compared to this.

  In normal times you wouldn’t waste breath arguing with people who fall for this kind of rubbish, but the makers of Loose Change claim that their film has already been seen by more than one hundred million people, and looking at my incoming email I believe them. This is a real problem, because by linking their fantasies about 9/11 to the Bush administration’s deliberate deception of the American people in order to gain support for the invasion of Iraq, the filmmakers bring discredit on the truth and the nonsense alike.

  You almost wonder if they are secretly working for the Bush administration.

  I didn’t put the next piece in the China section of this book because it’s not really about China, and I didn’t put it in the “col
onies” section because there isn’t one: almost all the world’s other colonies already have their independence. So it ends up in “Miscellany,” but that doesn’t mean that it’s a minor issue.

  All the world’s other colonial empires have had to let their colonies go, including the Soviet empire. Can the Chinese empire hold on to its colonies? That remains to be seen.

  July 14, 2009

  CHINA: TROUBLE IN THE COLONIES

  “The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise,” said Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdoğan last Friday. He was talking about the deaths of at least 184 people in the recent street violence in Xinjiang (also spelled Sinkiang), the huge province that occupies the northwestern corner of China.

  A majority of Xinjiang’s people are Uighurs. They are Muslims who speak a language closely related to Turkish, so Erdoğan’s comments were bound to appeal to his audience in Turkey. The Chinese government, predictably, condemned his charges as “irresponsible and groundless.” The Chinese government was right—but also terribly wrong.

  It wasn’t a genocide. The deaths of 184 people, for whatever reason, do not constitute a genocide. Moreover, as Erdoğan was claiming that there had been a genocide against the Uighurs, but three-quarters of the people killed in the riots were Han Chinese. “Genocide” is a word that should only be used very precisely, and Erdoğan owes Beijing an apology.

  There is no doubt that this violence started as an Uighur attack on Chinese immigrants. However, Beijing owes the Uighurs more than just an apology, for it is Chinese policy that drove them to such desperate measures.

  The Chinese authorities genuinely believe that the development they have brought to Xinjiang has been for the Uighurs’ own good, even if it has also brought huge numbers of Han Chinese immigrants to the province. But they are certainly not unhappy to see this frontier province, which was 90 percent Uighur and Muslim sixty years ago, become a place where most of the people are instinctively loyal Han Chinese.