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The unmasking of the overrated Martin Selmayr
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Friday, 29 December, 2017 • 0 Comments
This is deft and devastating: "The Selmayrs are by origin Bavarians, who have always seen themselves as European rather than Germans — except during the Third Reich." That pause there is masterful and it's the work of Daniel Johnson in the current issue of Standpoint magazine.
Martin Selmayr is the latest scion of this ancient family to make news and he bears the capital title of "HEAD OF CABINET" in what the Brussels bubble calls "President Juncker's team". The admiration of the young bureaucrat ends at the English Channel, however. Selmayr has few friends in London as he is "blamed for a series of malicious leaks during the Brexit negotiations, ranging from unflattering remarks about Theresa May's appearance to preparatiosn for the fall of her government," notes Daniel Johnson, who sees him as a combination of "gatekeeper, enforcer and eminence grise in a manner reminiscent of the Merovingian emperors of the Dark Ages, who were ruled by the mayors of the palace."
For Johnson, much of what makes the junior Selmayr what he has is and what he has become can be found in the 'journey' of Josef Selmayr, a truly opportunistic, amoral piece of work. Snippet:
"Martin's grandfather Josef was a professional soldier during the Weimar Republic and later rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht. He was imprisoned for war crimes in the Balkans, but only briefly. Josef Selmayr's experience made him useful in the Cold War and led to his rehabilitation: first as a member of the shadowy Gehlen Organisation, a CIA-funded group of former Nazi intelligence officers, then from 1955 to 1964 as the first director of MAD, the German Military Counterintelligence Service, with the rank of Brigadier. His career paralleled that of Kurt Waldheim, whose role in war crimes in the Balkans did not prevent him later becoming UN Secretary General and Austrian President."
Daniel Johnson points out that the Selmayrs are a family of public servants in an long-standing German tradition of an elite offering its skills for the development of an idealised sate. "Fatally, they conflated the Nazi state with the rule of law." To make amends for this blot on the copybook, as it were, Martin Selmayr "has always seen Europe as a source of redemption from Hitler's toxic legacy."
For these people, Britain was, and Brexit now is, the nemesis. It threatens their vision of Utopia and no amount of Utopian Europe, with its killing fields, bloodlands and mass barbarism, can deter them. The Project must be completed.
Assange, Snowden and Putin walk into a bar
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Thursday, 9 March, 2017 • 3 Comments
First thing: Assange and Snowden and working with Putin. Second thing: Don't believe what you read in the papers, especially regarding the WikiLeaks claims that the CIA can intercept encrypted WhatsApp and Signal messages. It can't. If you have a secure device, then WhatsApp and Signal are secure. If your device is insecure, nothing is secure. As Robert Graham of Errata Security puts it:
The CIA didn't remotely hack a TV. The docs are clear that they can update the software running on the TV using a USB drive. There's no evidence of them doing so remotely over the Internet. If you aren't afraid of the CIA breaking in an installing a listening device, then you should't be afraid of the CIA installing listening software.
The CIA didn't defeat Signal/WhatsApp encryption. The CIA has some exploits for Android/iPhone. If they can get on your phone, then of course they can record audio and screenshots. Technically, this bypasses/defeats encryption — but such phrases used by Wikileaks are highly misleading, since nothing related to Signal/WhatsApp is happening. What's happening is the CIA is bypassing/defeating the phone. Sometimes. If they've got an exploit for it, or can trick you into installing their software.
Bottom line: Assange and Snowden are Russian agents. Bonus joke: Snowden and Putin and a dog walk into a bar in Moscow:
"Ow!"
Storytelling the year 2035
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Wednesday, 25 January, 2017 • 0 Comments
Did anyone ask the "experts" 10 or 20 years ago to predict who'd be inaugurated as US President in 2017? We know what the pollsters said on 8 November and we know how that turned out. Still, there's an insatiable demand for a glimpse of the future, no matter how far-fetched, and there's a tidy industry devoted to churning out the visions. Consider two new studies: the National Intelligence Council's "Global Trends: Paradox of Progress" and the Atlantic Council's "Global Risks 2035: The Search for the New Normal." Both look at the year 2035.
Each of them offers a somewhat similar views of a world in which the United States is more insular, while China, Russia and Iran have become more aggressive regional powers. Technology continues to innovate but economic growth is uneven. In 2035, people are flooding from the land into megacities of 10 million or more, growing the number of such metropolises from 30 now to 41 in 2030.
For its scenarios, the Atlantic Council presents a variety of fictional situations written in part by August Cole, author of Ghost Fleet, a near-future military thriller published last year about an America-China conflict in the Pacific. Cole drew upon the Atlantic Council's The Art of the Future Project, which uses fictional depictions of the future "to inform official perspectives on emerging international security issues." Example: "Fingers on the Scale," a short story by Mike Matson about an app that allows parents to boost their children's academic achievements, and which is on the homescreen of all rulers of despotic nations. To prevent nasty countries from developing the intellectual calibre of their elites, however, the CIA steps in to limit the abilities of the despots' offspring. Langley saves the West again!
The future is always just around the corner, which means lots of people in Washington and Brussels can now make a nice living creating infographics about what might come after the present. August Cole is saying, though, that storytelling can be just as useful as trend-line graphs for forecasting. And, if those don't satisfy, there are the stars. In the 1980s, the Reagan White House turned to Joan Quigley for astrological advice.
Putin, perfidy and pastry
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Saturday, 23 April, 2016 • 2 Comments
There are many compelling reasons to read Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews. Perfidy is one. The villainy of Russia under Putin is well documented by non-Russian media, but it acquires a new pungency in a fiction that mirrors fact. Snippet:
"What fuelled the Kremlin kleptocracy, what motivated it, was not to bring back the Soviet Union, nor to reinstall the worldwide dread generated by the Red Army, nor to formulate a foreign policy based on national security requirements. In Russia today, everything happened to maintain the nadzirateli, the overseers, to protect their power, to continue looting the country's patrimony."
The characters in Palace of Treason ping-pong around the world — from Paris to Moscow to Athens to Vienna to Washington — as they attempt to steal secrets and outdo each other in a deadly game of influence zones, encompassing Europe and the Middle East. All of this activity demands feeding and Jason Matthews has come up with a novel touch: each chapter ends with a short recipe for one of the delicacies consumed by the protagonists. When an Iranian nuclear scientist is caught in a honey trip, he's served shirini keshmeshi: Persian pastries dotted with raisins. "Jamshedi goggled at the cakes. Here he was, sitting with a blackmailing Russian intelligence officer, spilling his country's secrets, and this prostitute was serving him the confection of this childhood."
Palace of Treason recipe for shirini keshmeshi: "Thoroughly mix flour, sugar, melted butter, vegetable oil and eggs. Add saffron diluted in warm water, small raisins, and vanilla extract. Blend well. Put dollops of dough on a parchment paper-lined sheet pan and bake in a medium oven until golden brown."
An American Spy
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Tuesday, 18 June, 2013 • 0 Comments
With all this talk of the NSA and its activities, espionage has stormed back onto the front pages. Perfect time to publish a spy novel set in China, the USA and Germany, one should think, and cometh the hour, cometh the man in the form of Olen Steinhauer. That surname suggests another Nordic star but Steinhauer was born in Baltimore and attended the University of Texas, Austin. He now lives in Budapest and he's bidding to be the new John le Carré. Given the quality of An American Spy, he's got a great hand of cards.
And better again, Steinhauer has got a great sense of the Zeitgeist because he's peopled An American Spy with characters such as Comrade Colonel Xin Zhu, the corpulent head of the Expedition Agency within Beijing's Sixth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security. He's had 33 CIA agents killed across the world in a breathtaking act of liquidation, but he's got to watch his back because Wu Liang and his associate, Yang Qing-Nian, of the Supervision and Liaison Committee, a branch of the Central Committee's Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, are not fans. Xin Zhu speaks:
"It wasn't just revenge, you know. Everyone thinks that's what it was — the committee, you, probably even the Americans. Revenge factored into it, but it was also a practical decision. That's something I'll have to explain on Monday morning. By eradicating one of their secret departments, we have sent a serious message to the Americans, the same message we want to send with the Olympic Games. That we are the primary force in the world. We are a nation that has suffered long enough — that's the past. The present is this: We are a superpower of unfathomable riches, and we will not stand for interference, particularly from a country on the other side of the planet that still refers to itself as the world's only superpower."
Yes, it's only fiction but le Carré's fiction was infused with fact and there's a lot in An American Spy to suggest that Steinhauer intimately understands the nexus of global strategy and dirty deeds, too. His portrayal of Zhu is measured and menacing and the useful idiots who marched in Hong Kong at the weekend in solidarity with Edward Snowden would do will to read An American Spy. There are no paradises upon this earth.
The new blind spot
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Monday, 11 March, 2013 • 0 Comments
According to the Oxford Dictionary, one of the definitions of blind spot is "an area in which a person lacks understanding or impartiality". The noun served as the title for the fifth episode of the first season of Homeland, which was originally broadcast on 30 October 2011. Storyline: The lone survivor of the al-Qaeda group that held Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) for eight years is captured and the CIA operatives Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) are assigned to interrogate him. At one point, Saul says to the captive:
"So, you're a religious man and a torturer. What are you? A Catholic?"
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Thursday, 14 February, 2013 • 0 Comments
And the Best Actress Oscar goes to Jessica Chastain for her performance in Zero Dark Thirty as a CIA agent ferociously fixated on finding the courier bringing messages to Osama bin Laden's lair. The director-writer team of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal have made an enthralling chronicle of the hunt that ended in Pakistan on […]
The cat's away and Der Spiegel will play
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Tuesday, 8 January, 2013 • 0 Comments
When it comes to mendacity in media, no one does it better than the German weekly, Der Spiegel. The popular magazine is a case-study in agitprop but it outdid itself as 2012 ended with the publication of an premature online obituary for the 41st President of the United States, George HW Bush. The author was […]
The Guardian tries its hand at Syrian satire
Eamonn Fitzgerald • Thursday, 9 August, 2012
It's been a while since Rainy Day has read Seamus Milne, the Guardian-based apologist for everything from jihad to communism. This week, he tried his hand at satire by laying the blame for the Syrian slaughter firmly at the doorstep of the West. In doing so, he pushed all the buttons beloved of the left: […]