Davos Newbies

On the artists’ side

Dave Stewart and others are starting a pro-artists entertainment business (strange idea!).

“There is total corruption in the music industry — it’s like Enron. There’s a corporate front end, but at the back end there’s all this wheeling and dealing. It’s a rip-off. The amount of money we’ve made [as the Eurythmics] compared to the amount of money we’ve made for the people around us is minuscule. It happens to every artist. People say that Motown was a great label, but it was the greatest cotton field of all — loads of the artists got tiny royalties. Loads died without a gravestone, yet their songs have sold millions and millions.”

Oddly, given how well informed the Financial Times usually is, there is no mention of the new group’s attitude towards copyright and the Internet.

Good news

The announcement of tremendous arms reductions by Russia and the US is unadulterated good news. We’ve gone too long with a diet of depressing news lately.

The arms control agenda is hardly complete, however. Maybe the good sense on this pact will extend to chemical and biological weapons, one of the areas where the Bush administration has unilaterally pulled out of long-running negotiations.

Healthy pandemonium

Neil Ascherson has long been one of the most perceptive observers of Europe (read his Black Sea and witness someone who truly has panoptic vision). Here’s his take on Fortuyn and the others:

“The populists have a loose jumble of vengeful ideas. But 2002 is not 1932. Nobody thinks that capitalism is collapsing because of Germany’s first big strike in seven years; nobody thinks that democracy has failed because Le Pen gave France such a fright. The only chance for the new populism to stay the course is to produce sparkling, charismatic whistle-blowers as its leaders. In government, and they will often win shares in coalitions, they will be sullen and ineffective. In the end, they may be just what their arch-enemies need. The new populist destiny could be just to blow holes in the grey, smooth surface of power and restore healthy pandemonium to politics.”

Resist the sirens

Quentin Peel writes a balanced appraisal of Pim Fortuyn and the rise of the right in Europe. He echoes my view that immigration is both necessary and welcome in Europe, given the scale of impending demographic change.

“The only sensible answer for Europe’s leaders is to welcome immigration and seek to manage it, not to listen to the siren voices of the far right that would halt it. A free-for-all may be unmanageable, but ‘regulated openness’ should be the goal. In Rotterdam, Mr Fortuyn may have sounded plausible when he said the boat was full, but he was fundamentally wrong.”

Decide for yourself

My comment on Pim Fortuyn on Friday has spurred an interesting discussion. Adam Curry has helpfully provided a link to the LPF manifesto. Read it and decide for yourself Fortuyn’s politics.

How new?

“He argues that all universal computing systems are equivalent; no calculating machine can be more powerful, no computer more sophisticated than the cellular automaton Mr. Wolfram describes. This insight alone, he claims, ‘has vastly richer implications’ than ‘any single collection of laws in science’.” Stephen Wolfram doesn’t feel he needs to be modest. His book, A New Kind of Science, is intended to overturn a signficant amount of scientific thought.

I’m certainly not the one to judge the validity or otherwise of Wolfram’s arguments. But I did hear some odd, juicy tales about the book pre-publication. Wolfram only allowed a few, trusted souls to read the manuscript. Even they were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. Apparently his obsession with secrecy stems from being very appallingly treated over the copyright of a mathematical site he created for Mathematica users.

Fortuyn’s politics

Dave Winer has run Adam Curry’s Big Lie, a passionate response to the Fortuyn assassination.

Step away from the horror of the killing and look at Fortuyn’s declared policies: halt immigration, integrate existing immigrants, re-erect Dutch border controls, sack 25% of civil servants, reduce Dutch payments to the EU, end the system of consensus politics. This is idiosyncratic, reactionary politics. And however he dressed up his immigration policy, it appealed in part to some of the worst sentiments in the populace.

Not too worried

Two useful tonics to Euro-gloom today: Martin Woollacott in The Guardian and The Economist’s lead editorial.

Woollacott: “The difficulties of the moment are always special, but difficulties of national purpose are recurrent. The record shows them, together with solutions, inspired or otherwise, recoveries and new starts. It also shows one or two moments, when they did indeed presage terrible things. But there is nothing to suggest that the stumbling and fumbling evident now means that a political catastrophe for Europe is on the horizon.”

The Economist: “Europe has, indeed, had a shameful few weeks. It has problems galore. The frustration expressed against complacent and arrogant elites by the French who voted for Mr Le Pen or by the Dutch who may yet vote for Mr Fortuyn’s party is salutary. But Europe is far from irredeemable.”

A new dark age?

Is Europe entering the abyss? Martin Jacques, a perceptive analyst of political and social movement, reckons so. It’s curious that Martin’s gloomy perspective on Europe coincides with his friend Will Hutton’s relentlessly upbeat picture.

I acknowledge the many dark signs Martin identifies: the rise of the extreme right in many parts of Europe, the ineffectual response of the traditional left, the disturbing racist traditions. But his extrapolation into a new age of barbarism strikes me as verging on scaremongering.

I believe firmly that what was once called the silent majority — in a very different context — has no truck with racism and intolerance. Although one of the failures of Europe is the size of the have-nots, they remain a minority. For most Europeans (and Hutton is right on this), the current socioeconomic and political systems have delivered unprecedented affluence and opportunity. The political classes have been slow to articulate the systemic strengths, but the warning signals of Le Pen, Haider and others will not go unnoticed or unresponded to.

Incidentally, some writers I respect have written eloquent rebuttals of the description of the assassinated Pym Fortuyn as a fascist or a Dutch Le Pen. It’s true, Fortuyn wasn’t easy to pigeonhole. But the bulk of his social and political views do seem closely aligned with the radical, libertarian right (with the exception of his anti-immigration stance, which is dirigiste, rather than libertarian). That’s not the right of Le Pen or Haider, but it’s still a disturbing, anti-social democracy political viewpoint.

Fifty-three

I’d better get my skates on. I scraped a bare majority of the 100 greatest books of all time, according to a poll conducted by the Norwegian Book Clubs. They surveyed writers around the world, so the list isn’t as biased as some to western literature (although two-thirds of the titles are by Europeans).

I thought the contemporary selections didn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny, and it’s a sign of our times that Dostoevsky had more books selected (four) than any other author. On a personal level, I also thought it bizarre that Don Quixote was the top-ranked book, ahead of The Iliad. But it’s fun, and I’ve certainly found some titles that I’ll add to my reading list.