Archive 1986 – 2017

On Sunday Turkey will go to the polls to vote in a referendum. If passed it will give more legal rights to individuals, it will clip the power of the military and, most important, make possible an overhaul of the constitutional court and senior judiciary which have frequently blocked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s liberal initiatives. To win this closely fought referendum Erdogan must gather the support of the Kurds in the south east of the country. The Kurds are first in line to want to see reform of the military and a court system that often hit them below the belt during the “dirty war” of the 1990s. Last week Erdogan payed a visit to Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish neighbourhood. He promised to tear down the city prison once notorious for its torture. But over the last five years the government has appeared to break its...

On its submarines Britain has 48 nuclear warheads, each one eight times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. In other words, theoretically Prime Minister James Cameron could order the almost instant incineration of 384 large cities around the world. Barely anyone in parliament mentioned it, much less debated it in the many years Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in office. Not before its time the coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats appears to be gearing up for a decision, partly because the missiles are slowly but steadily wearing out and partly because many senior voices in the military in the post Cold War world would like to see the money spent on other, more immediately useful, weapons, transport. Many Conservative and Liberal Democrat members of parliament are doubtful about the value of an independent nuclear deterrent. Perhaps there is a window of opportunity for...

Six years ago after we had talked about all manner of jihadists for an hour – jihadists in Kashmir attacking India, jihadists in Afghanistan attacking America, jihadists infiltrating India and jihadists in Pakistan attempting to kill President Pervez Musharraf – I asked the American ambassador in Islamabad, “don’t you feel that you spend all your time just picking up the pieces for the wrongheaded policies when the West supported the jihadists as a tool against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan?” He sighed, nodded and replied, “That’s right”. Driving away from that conversation I was convinced more than ever that the various terrorist movements unleashed in this corner of the world over the last twenty years have their origins in the policies of Jimmy Carter, that most pacific of all post war American presidents who, prodded by his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, decided to undermine and repel the Soviet invasion...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 11, 2010 During the difficult years that preceded the British handover of Hong Kong to China the Chinese government’s intense antipathy to opium and the still fresh memories of the evil that eighteenth century buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong added an extra emotional charge to what, anyway, was a most complicated transition. Without opium there would have been no Hong Kong. The British only acquired it because of the Opium Wars, and the city’s early economic success was built on the opium trade. It was the British who fed the Chinese propensity for opium. Historians point out that the Chinese would have found it elsewhere, even grown some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown opium was the brand the Chinese smokers savoured and the British East India Company marketed it with commercial élan. Today the Chinese authorities regard opium as...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 5, 2010 The idea of human rights has been around since the thirteenth century. It gathered speed during and after the French and American revolutions. But it never gained general acceptance, despite the ringing words. Jefferson himself kept slaves. Karl Marx was a vociferous critic of “The Rights of Man”, the seminal French document. “They are nothing but the rights of egotistic man, of men separated from other men and the community and the rights of the restricted individual withdrawn into himself.” The cause seemed quiescent. Neither Stalin’s mass executions nor the persecution of the Jews in Germany re-ignited the cause. The dam of apathy was not breached until shortly after the commencement of the Second World War when the great science fiction writer H.G. Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) together with a few socialist friends, including A. A. Milne, the author of “Winnie the Pooh”,...

August 5, 2010 Jonathan Power The idea of human rights has been around since the thirteenth century. It gathered speed during and after the French and American revolutions. But it never gained general acceptance, despite the ringing words. Jefferson himself kept slaves. Karl Marx was a vociferous critic of “The Rights of Man”, the seminal French document. “They are nothing but the rights of egotistic man, of men separated from other men and the community and the rights of the restricted individual withdrawn into himself.” The cause seemed quiescent. Neither Stalin’s mass executions nor the persecution of the Jews in Germany re-ignited the cause. The dam of apathy was not breached until shortly after the commencement of the Second World War when the great science fiction writer H.G. Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) together with a few socialist friends, including A. A. Milne, the author of “Winnie the Pooh”,...

First published February 7th, 2005 In the literature the most used term for such conflicts is «war». War has been defined in various ways but most of the definitions have in common the description of war as an armed conflict with a certain number of deaths. Disagreements are more around the number and how to count the deaths than the much more interesting and important part of the definitions, namely the almost universal view that war is a form of conflict. I will argue below that war is NOT a conflict and that this misinterpretation has had serious consequences for the field. Most research on large-scale conflicts is focused on armed ones. Wars have been studied from a large number of perspectives since the first works in this field were published. This tradition, from pioneers such as Richardson and Wright, has dominated the majority of this particular field of research...

By Jonathan PowerJuly 28, 2010 We live in exciting times. I am not talking about the advances of medicine, science and engineering. Nor the growth of the internet, the mobile phone and the fact that Africa is the world’s fastest growing market for the latter. Nor…..I could go on. I’m talking about the dramatic drop in child mortality, the birth rate and the death rate in the poorest countries – a drop that appears to be accelerating. It is expected that more up-to-date figures to be published in a few years, will show an even more dramatic fall. Give thanks to all the energy and sweat that has been poured into the problem by local governments, the Bush administration’s program to fight AIDS and malaria, such organisations as the Bill and Linda Gates foundation, the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and countless smaller but effective NGOs. Today we...

By Jonathan PowerJuly 22, 2010 Not long ago Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security advisor, told me that the Ukraine “smells more like Europe” than does Russia and that the West should concentrate on bringing Ukraine into Western institutions- NATO and even the European Union. If I had had more time with Brzezinski I would have said that if it hadn’t been for Russian resolve, the Mongol and Tartar hordes would have conquered Moscow and quickly afterwards the rest of Russia. They would have turned Russia into an Islamic society that would have undermined the Christian civilization of both Russia and Europe. Likewise, the Christian-influenced West owes much of the preservation of its religious beliefs to the Constantinople-based Eastern Orthodox Church. Constantine, who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, moved the centre of the Church to Constantinople and it became the Byzantine Empire. When the Ottomans ravaged Constantinople in...

If the Jews of Israel want to go back to their memories of their war against the Arab nations after they had been attacked following the handover of the British in 1948; if they want to go back to the Holocaust; if they want to go back to the anti-Jewish violence, the first so-called “pogrom” in 1819 when the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt was ransacked; or to twelfth century England when began the libel that the Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover, then they should recall some equally important other events. What about the welcoming of the large numbers of Jews by the Moslem Turks when they were expelled from Spain in 1492? What about the long period up to the 12th century when Jews lived unpersecuted for the most part in Europe? What about the centuries up to the...

the Lateran Council condemned torture as cruel. From the fifteenth century onwards the common law of England (which is also the original common law of America) adamantly set its face against torture and the admission of evidence procured by torture. The judges who presided over these decisions pointed to the inherent unreliability of the evidence in confessions procured by torture since a person subjected to unbearable pain will say anything to get it stopped. Voltaire, who lived in London for three years, wrote of how he admired the English attitude. Nevertheless, the special Court of the Star Chamber could issue torture orders, but one of the very first acts of the Long Parliament in 1640 was to abolish this court and since then no torture warrant has been issued in England. In Prussia torture was abolished in 1740, in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1847. In 1791 the...

If Latin America disappeared into thin air tomorrow what would it be remembered for? Historically for the decimation by the Spanish Conquistadors of the great civilizations of the Incas and Aztecs, for the twentieth century plunder of the Amazon, for the worst income inequalities in the world, for the highest crime levels of contemporary society anywhere and for giving house room to the drug mafias.   And the pluses? – the near absence of major interstate wars and the concomitant achievement of relatively low expenditures on arms, its nuclear weapons free zone, the first of its kind (not including the one for Antarctica), its lack of institutionalised racism (although there is plenty of discrimination) and the non-existence in any period of  its history of Jim Crow laws, its outlawing of capital punishment long before the rest of the world got round to it, and now home to some of the...