Helen

One feels rather sorry for European public intellectuals (a concept developed by the egregious Jürgen Habermas). It is so difficult to create a European idea, particularly if you do not want to discuss the one aspect of European history that may be said to have united that unruly Continent, at least ideologically: Christianity.

European history has few unifying factors and European countries have few interests in common, that they do not share with other countries as well. The European “idea”, such as it is, can be described vaguely as the idea of the West that has been spluttering since the Battle of Marathon. But the European Union wants to have a European idea that is all its own and has nothing to do with the West, defined by David Gress as “From Plato to Nato”.

Alas, in the rapidly approaching post-NATO world, the European public intellectuals as well as the European politicians are trying to define their idea in opposition to the rest of the West, in particular, in opposition to the United States. How that can possibly make Europe strong is anybody’s guess.

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What a jolly chap was Ebenezer Scrooge even before his conversion by the ghost of Jacob Marley and attendant spirits. He would not have been allowed on the Teachernet website that had been developed by the UK Department of Education as a resource for teachers. Its purpose is to assist teachers in their attempts to make Christmas a happy and wondrous experience for their little charges. So what sort of advice did the website (now withdrawn, according to the DoE) give?

Well, apparently it is vital that children do not get scared by Father Christmas. If a school was planning a visit by Santa Claus (I am delighted to hear that there are still non-pc schools that plan such things) teachers must make sure that fearful children are near an exit. The same planning is to apply to pantomime visits.

In itself that is not such a terrible advice. Some young children do get scared, though not by the ho-ho-ing Father Christmas so much as by the villains in the pantomime. In fact, very young children are not really a suitable audience for pantomimes with hissing villains. But surely, that is something teachers and parents can work out for themselves. Apparently not.

The rest of the advice was a little more specific and, according to some, completely off the wall. It seems teachers were to discourage children from sending cards to their fellow pupils because that wastes paper.

Head teachers were advised to hold school assemblies with the theme of “the aftermath of Christmas” in which children were to act out the opening of presents and advent calendars (which should all have been opened by Christmas Eve anyway, but perhaps the creators of Teachernet don’t know it) and throwing the paper on the floor to highlight the waste of paper at Christmas.

Teachers were to discourage children from giving wrapped presents and encourage them to give “experience” presents such as breakfast in bed for their parents. What kind of a mind describes breakfast in bed as an “experience present”? Not to mention the fact that if we are talking about really young children, breakfast in bed may not be a particularly peaceful experience for the harassed parents.

The truth is that most parents treasure presents and cards that their young offspring create for them. My bookshelves are still covered with drawings and creations given to me by my daughter at a young age. Like most mothers I would not swap those daubs for anything in the world. But what makes them special is the creativity and the desire to give behind them. To reduce it all to an avoidance of paper wastage presupposes a mind that is akin to that of the White Witch’s in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, under whose rule it was always winter and never Christmas. And, of course, now that I think of it, those drawings and paper boxes and models would be discouraged by the rules on Teachernet as well. After all, it is all a waste of paper.

And for entertainment? Well, non-competitive games, of course. All shall have prizes and “pass the parcel” is to be outlawed as it could cause anxieties in children who did not win.

The Department came under a good deal of criticism from parents’ groups and the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, in response to which it said “wasn’t me, sir”, and removed the advice, muttering that this was not government policy (do they have a policy on Christmas?) and, anyway, they were not responsible for the content of the website they hosted.

Meanwhile, in another burst of Christmas jollity, it has emerged that the UK banks do not recognize the British Forces Post Office (BFPO), the address used by soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan as being legitimate under recently introduced anti-fraud rules. And that, in turn, means that the soldiers cannot order presents on the internet to send home to their families. Which is, of course, just what the anti-fraud rules were introduced for.

Questions have been asked in Parliament and Apacs, the UK banking association has promised to correct the rules. Unfortunately, they added, it is unlikely to be before Christmas.

Bah humbug does not really do any of this justice.

Lest we forget.

My earlier posting about the internet, its present arrangements and the UN’s attemtpt to seize control of it generated a certain amount of discussion (and that’s putting it politely). So, it may be useful to have a look at what might be motivating one of the proponents of the move to “take the internet away from one country, the United States, and give it to the world”, Iran.

The mullahs and the new president, who is busy purging all opponents, reversing the few liberalizing measures and threatening Israel with extinction, have a problem on their hands. It is called the internet, more specifically the blogosphere, which is enthusiastically used by all the dissidents.

According to Rachel Hoff, a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute,

“Iranian dissidents are increasingly penning blogs to voice criticism of the Islamic Republic and to push for freedom and democracy. With an estimated 100,000 active Iranian blogs, Persian is now tied with French as the second most common blogging language after English.”

This puts the British reluctance to take blogs seriously into a perspective and not a particularly pleasant one, at that.

The Iranian bloggers are in constant danger. They are arrested, imprisoned, tortured, just beaten up in their homes. And yet they continue to blog, to send messages to the world about their country.

“Blogging has revolutionized dissent in Iran. By providing private citizens a public voice, blogs may be the most powerful tool in the dissidents’ arsenal. As an Iranian blogger known as Saena wrote, “Weblogs are one weapon that even the Islamic Republic cannot beat.” As the cases of Arash Sigarchi and other imprisoned bloggers show, though, the Iranian regime is trying to crush these new outlets of democratic dissent. Throughout the Middle East, the race is on between journalists opening new websites and regimes such as the Islamic Republic trying to censor cyberspace.”

Ms Hoff castigates the White House and the State Department for not speaking out in support of the bloggers, who need western help in the same way as the Soviet dissidents did before 1991 and the Chinese ones do now. She is right, of course. But what about Europe, including Britain? We not only refuse to voice any support – we line up with the oppressors as they try to impose their control on the internet.

Happy Thanksgiving to all from this side of the pond.

Cross-posted (mostly) from EUReferendum.

The outcome of the Internet Governance summit in Tunis was a compromise. Luckily for all users of the net, it was a compromise that left the management and administration of the Domain Name System in the hands of ICANN. This organization, though non-profit-making, international in its board and staff, and not heavy-handed in its control, seems to have acquired the aspect of the devil incarnate as far as the opposition to “American control of the net” is concerned.

The agreement in Tunis calls on the UN to establish an Internet Governance Forum next year. One hundred countries have signed up to the agreement and expect the Forum eventually to yield some kind of an international bureaucracy to plague the net users, whether they be big business or individual bloggers.

So far, the forum, according to the agreement,

“would have no oversight function and would not replace existing arrangements, mechanisms, institutions and organizations”.

Furthermore, the new forum

“would have no involvement in day-to-day or technical operations of the Internet”.

This, as the Wall Street Journal Europe points out, is a victory for the American negotiators, supported as they were by certain allies, such as Canada and Australia. Britain, alas, as a member of the EU, who negotiated on our behalf, was on the side of the unholy alliance of tranzi regulators and tyrannical dictators, such as the Iranian mullahs, the Chinese party gerontocracy and, among others, President Mugabe. A truly wonderful line-up.

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