To celebrate today’s primaries in Michigan, I hereby present presidential election open thread number two.
Author: William Bowe
William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.
View all posts by William Bowe
Do you think Glen the Germans would celebrate Hitler as a great man if he had died of a heart attack in January 1942?
Well ESJ it depends if they’d then won the Second World War i suppose, which they may have without such an incompetent military leader as Hitler was…if they won the war of course is my answer. But he was stupid to go south instead of capturing Leningrad and Moscow which would have devastated the Soviet leadership and then turn South…
Nothing like a nice sloping line from top left to lower right to inspire confidence, while everyone else in the field is lifting from lower left to top right is there?
http://www.pollster.com/08-FL-Rep-Pres-Primary.php
Yes I suspect you are right Glen, people dont hate leaders who start wars only leaders who lose them.
Its cynical but indeed correct, most Russians knew how brutal Stalin was but many still loved him for defeating the Nazis. Hence it is highly probably that while Hitler may have been disliked by some of his own people for the extent of the holocaust if he had won the war and defeated the Communists he’d have won just as much praise IMHO.
Clearly in the end to the victor goes the spoils…
Have you ever played Diplomacy Glen?
No but i have looked for the board game and the computer game but to no avail i do have Risk and Axis and Allies which are enjoyable now and again.
Diplomacy would be an interesting game to play especially against people like Centre and Adam oh and who could forget steve or our long departed pollbludger brother STROP lol!
Yes vale STROP, at the going down of the sun we shall remember him!
I’m reluctant to be drawn into the dreaded Middle East debate, but it should be pointed out that although there was indeed a majority of Arabs living in Mandate Palestine in 1947, most of them were not “Palestinians.” This is a made-up nationality which didn’t exist before the 1930s, although I don’t deny that it is a real nationality now. Under the Ottomans all the low-lying coastal areas of Palestine (ie most of what is now Israel) were virtually uninhabited, for the most part malarial swamp and sand dunes. The Arab population mostly lived in Galilee or around Jerulsalem. In 1815 Jaffa (now Tel Aviv) had 5,000 people, only half of them Arabs. If they had been asked to give a nationality they would have said “Ottoman,” “Arab” or maybe “Syrian.” (The Ottomans organised their empire by religion, not nationality.) Zionists began buying up land from absentee Ottoman landowners in the 1890s and settling Jewish colonists. This created farms, towns and industries, and the consequent work opportunities attracted Arab immigration from Syria, Egypt and elsewhere. The Jewish and Arab populations thus grew in tandem. The place name “Palestine” didn’t exist under the Ottomans. The area was part of the Villayet of Syria, divided into the Sanjaks of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre. When the British and French divided up the area in 1918, the British called their bit of Ottoman Syria “Palestine” because that was the name they remembered from Bible class. The resident Arabs thus became “Palestinians” by decision of the British, and gradually came to adopt this name. Both Arab and Jewish immigration accelerated in the 1920s. Thus by 1947 the population had grown greatly, but almost the whole population, Arab and Jewish, were immigrants or the children or grand-children of immigrants. Since neither community was willing to be subordinated to the other, the Partition Plan was a fair solution. Had the Arabs accepted it, they would have had a Palestinian State for the past 60 years, far larger than enything they are likely to get now.
The biggest surprise out of Michigan was that more people would vote for a Mormon millionaire over a Senior Citizen for President!
If you look at it is their no tainted candidate? I mean seriously not one of them can say they’ve led perfect lives professionally or personally and none are squeaky clean it appears that in the end it could be between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich. I actually hope Bloomberg Runs because it will help the moderate Republicans by taking off votes from Hillary or Obama….
Diplomacy is great. (I am referring to the board game).
Yes especially with a bunch of politics junkies like ourselves…
Glen @ 310,
You are right about Bloomberg. I think he would attract a couple of percent (basically people who have to vote against the party of Bush but are anti the Democratic nominee). Could be bad news for the Dems if he runs – a couple of percent hurts in close States.
Pearls before swine Adam.
If anyone’s fondness for strategy games extends beyond the beer-and-pretzels variety a la Diplomacy and Risk, allow me to add the Poll Bludger stamp of approval to the Australian Design Group’s outstanding World in Flames – a colossal global WW2 hex board game which is slowly being turned into a computer game. The beta version can be downloaded for $20 at the ADG website: it’s somewhat buggy at this stage, but more than enough to get you hooked. The long, long, long delayed full release is due in mid-year from the good people at Matrix Games.
Dyno, the thing about Bloomberg is that he has billions to spend on a campaign thus no campaign fund-raising needed and can say he’s beholden to no one. To my knowledge he’s formed an exploratory committee but i dont think he’ll commit until after Feb5 or even later depending on who gets it, if its a Hillary/Huckabee campaign he may indeed run id think. Even if he did get a few percent it could hurt in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and maybe New York if Rudy wins the nomination.
Yes, the mythology of the “oppressed Palestinians” has become so entrenched in the minds of the left that it can’t be erased. Ironically much of this mythology was created by Jews – such as Maxime Rodinson, the French Jewish Marxist (quelle trinité!) who wrote “Israel: A Colonial Settler State,” and Noam Chomsky etc etc who perpetuate this stuff endlessly into the minds of the petty intelligentsia.
Thanks for the link William.
Perhaps I should have said the mythology of the “disposessed Palestinians,” rather than the mythology of the “oppressed Palestinians”. I don’t deny that the current generation of Palestinians is suffering oppression, partly at the hands of the Israelis, but mainly at the hands of the Arab states, their own corrupt rulers and the gangsters of Hamas etc etc.
Funny how initially most of the Israeli j*ws were very ‘socialist’ indeed as many migrated from the Soviet Union and many from Eastern Europe who had a deep hatred for right wing nationalist parties but now Israel has a smattering of left wing parties and the Likud…
A solution to the Palestinian Question would not end the deep hatred of Israel by many extreme leftists or the extremist I*lamists its almost like they are born with a hatred of Israel despite the fact that if their ancestors had acted with some humility and decency they’d not only have their own independent State of 43% of the total area and have Jerusalem as a UN free city hmmm talk about a good deal they turned down. It gives me the red ass to say the J*ws stole peoples lands firstly they were there for thousands of years living with the Arabs they took more land after they were attacked in 48 because of the perilous position the 47 Partition plan made Israel into a virtually impossible state to defend against Egypt and Syria not to mention Jordan.
Those three countries were critical into collapsing the partition talks they too were greedy IMHO. As the years go on and on the 47 deal sounds bloody good too bad the best they can get is pre-67 if the Palestinians were smart they’d have taken the deal in 47 and anyway most of the reason the Israelis got more land was because of the Negev!
Wiki’s good for getting the nitty gritty details:
According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy,[137] the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94% were Arabs. In 1914 Palestine had a population of 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews.[138]
…and Palestine was the original Roman name, and was used subsequently until the Ottoman Empire when it was replaced. The Brits did a sensible thing to resurrect it.
I can remember reading about Jerusalem in the late 19th century as a place that did not have a lot of live Jews, but was a very popular place to go to die and get buried. Zionism changed all that, and the rest is history.
Yes, the mythology of the “oppressed Palestinians” has become so entrenched in the minds of the left that it can’t be erased.
I’m not sure that ‘mythology’ is the most precise descriptor. Gaza is regarded by many people as the world’s largest open-air prison. Palestinians share almost none of the rights, protections and entitlements of Jewish Israelis, and can find themselves subject to ‘targeted assasination’ and extrajudicial killing or imprisonment at any time.
Interestingly, the Israelis themselves don’t seem to have the same culture war nonsense that we have in Australia, or to an even greater extent in the US. Even the most far-right of Likudniks would not pretend that the brutalities of the Palestinian occupation are mere ‘mythology’ – their press is much more honest than ours.
The Jewish socialist tradition long precedes the Soviet Union. The ideas of the Labour Zionist movement go back to Moses Hess in the 1860s and the Zionist Workers party (ancestor of the Israeli Labour party) was founded by Ber Borochov and others in about 1900. The Bund (a Jewish trade union in Russia and Poland) was also very influential, since a steady stream of Bundists emigrated to Palestine.
Glen, I like to remember Hitler as a charred, severed penis sitting in a jar of formaldehyde on a shelf in some decrepit science lab on the outskirts of Moscow. how do you like to remember him?
Ah, here’s the reference:
In 1920, the League of Nations’ Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine stated that there were 700,000 people living in Palestine:
Of these 235,000 live in the larger towns, 465,000 in the smaller towns and villages. Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The minority are members of the Latin or of the Uniate Greek Catholic Church, or–a small number–are Protestants. The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000. Almost all have entered Palestine during the last 40 years. Prior to 1850 there were in the country only a handful of Jews. In the following 30 years a few hundreds came to Palestine. Most of them were animated by religious motives; they came to pray and to die in the Holy Land, and to be buried in its soil. After the persecutions in Russia forty years ago, the movement of the Jews to Palestine assumed larger proportions.[158]
By 1948, the population had risen to 1,900,000, of whom 68% were Arabs, and 32% were Jews (UNSCOP report, including bedouin).
THR, see my #319 in which I modified that expression. I don’t seek to deny the current sufferings of the Palestinians, just to put them in historical context.
If Gaza is a prison, it is the only prison which is run by its inmates, and run so badly that they are probably wishing by now the warders would come back.
True but the interesting thing is that this still is the case today, i mean look at Melbourne Ports case in point they traditionally back the ALP…i know this is stereotyping but i believe the ALP were smart getting Danby in for the seat.
323
TurningWorm
Well if it wasn’t for the Holocaust, subverting democracy, invading Western Europe and bombing Great Britain id say he’s not such a bad guy i must say i believe Stalin and Mao were far worse dictators of the 20thC than one nut Addy. And if you compared how many people they’d killed as a consequence of their actions. Personally we should have rearmed the Germans and liberated Eastern Europe the Baltic States and the Ukraine in 1945 like Patton wanted.
KB, none of that contradicts what I said earlier.
Clearly im glad TurningWorm that Hitler was stopped, i just think there were worse dictators than him but that does not in any way discount the crap he brought to the lives of millions in the 20thC….
KR you don’t quite grasp how much land the Arabs would have got plus Jerusalem as a Free City i mean for crying out loud how much land do you think the Arabs deserved????
Glen I live in Ports as you know and I know the Jewish community fairly well. There’s not much of the old socialist tradition left, but it does linger on here and there. Sholem Aleichem is the only surviving Bundist school in the world. But for Jews under 50 this is all ancient history and doesn’t influence their voting behaviour much. Danby wins Ports mainly because of Red St Kilda, although of course he does better in Caulfield that a non-Jewish Labor candidate would.
Adam, I never said it did. I was just trying to get the demographics in perspective.
Be interesting to know what the strength of the j*wish community is in numbers around the Caulfield area id say it would be substantial. Its like you said St Kilda and Albert Park that bring home the bacon for Labor in the seat.
Still at least our Federal Electorate is an interesting Microcosm considering the diversity of it.
Ports could arguably be the biggest J*wish community in the entire country.
A recent survey in the US suggested that, whilst US J#ws were far more ‘liberal’ than socialist, they were still a far cry from the neocons and Christian Zionist nutters waiting for the rapture:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/12/ajc_poll/index.html
In 1985 or 1986 when I was working in France I went for a few drinks with an expat South African colleague after work one day. After a little while we were joined by two men who were identified to me as Israeli tourists and who were obviously well known to my drinking companion.
After too many drinks, the talk turned to military experiences and I sat there dumbfounded as they all swapped reminiscences of atrocities they had seen and been involved in in the past. The Israelis in particular boasted of cold blooded sniping of passing Palestinians to break the boredom of sentry duty, and other similar acts. I thought they were drunken bulls**t artists, and complete boors to boot, and maybe they were.
The passing years and reading of reports of events in that sad region often make me think of that evening, and question my judgement of their honesty under the influence of drink.
I’m sure William is getting tired of monitoring a debate about the Palestinians. Let’s try to get the debate back within the ambit of a psephological blog, shall we? Most people, including most Israelis, accept that there won’t be a solution until Israel evacuates most of the West Bank and allows the creation of a Palestinian state there – although the collapse of Gaza into anarchy hasn’t been much of an advertisment for Palestinian self-rule. The problem has been that no Israeli government has been able to defy the militant minority of Israelis who want to hang on to the West Bank and create “Greater Israel” there. And why is this?
It’s because the dominant group in the Yishuv (the pre-statehood J*wish community in Palestine) were Germans. So when they came to adopt an electoral law in 1947, what did they do? They copied the system they were most familiar with, that of the Weimar Republic, despite the terrible consequences of that system (pure PR with no threshhold) in Germany. As a result Israel has never had a strong majority government able to make tough decisions. So basically I blame the current mess in the region on PR, which gives disproprtionate power to minorities.
Of the only two recent strong Israeli PMs, Rabin was assassinated and Sharon incapacitated. Eventually, however, an Israeli government will implement the Sharon Plan: finish the security wall, annex everything to the west of it, and withdraw unilaterally from the rest. The J*wish settlers east of the wall can either leave with the army or stay and take their chances with the Palestinians.
However this might:
McCarthy argues that there is no significant Arab immigration into mandatory Palestine:
From analyses of rates of increase of the Muslim population of the three Palestinian sanjaks, one can say with certainty that Muslim immigration after the 1870s was small. Had there been a large group of Muslim immigrants their numbers would have caused an unusual increase in the population and this would have appeared in the calculated rate of increase from one registration list to another… Such an increase would have been easily noticed; it was not there.[168]
The argument that Arab immigration somehow made up a large part of the Palestinian Arab population is thus statistically untenable. The vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs resident in 1947 were the sons and daughters of Arabs who were living in Palestine before modern Jewish immigration began. There is no reason to believe that they were not the sons and daughters of Arabs who had been in Palestine for many centuries.[169]
McCarthy also concludes that there was no significant internal migration to Jewish areas attributable to better economic conditions:
Some areas of Palestine did experience greater population growth than others, but the explanation for this is simple. Radical economic change was occurring all over the Mediterranean Basin at the time. Improved transportation, greater mercantile activity, and greater industry had increased the chances for employment in cities, especially coastal cities… Differential population increase was occurring all over the Eastern Mediterranean, not just in Palestine… The increase in Muslim population had little or nothing to do with Jewish immigration. In fact the province that experienced the greatest Jewish population growth (by .035 annually), Jerusalem Sanjak, was the province with the lowest rate of growth of Muslim population (.009).[170]
So Adam’s claim:
Thus by 1947 the population had grown greatly, but almost the whole population, Arab and Jewish, were immigrants or the children or grand-children of immigrants.
…may be open to academic scrutiny by demographers.
Adam’s right in saying that solutions/greivances re: old Israel-Palestine chestnut has little relevance to a psephological blog.
What’s interesting, however, is that, in a place like the US, for certain demographics and much of the media, this is a major issue.
It would almost be like Australians voting for a political party based on its position on Russia vs. Chechnya, or Croat vs Serb. Frankly, its bizarre.
334
THR Says
It’s the same story everywhere: the nutters out on the fringe get the most press, and in the US, completely misrepresent the majority view. (I think Adam’s argument is the same for Israel too, it’s the radical minority that sets the overall tone). When the neocon nutters in Washington ally with the Zionist fruitcakes, that’s when truly awful sh!t happens!
#306, Edward StJohn
ESJ – In my personal opinion poll your knowledge of Diplomacy (the game) has just given you a positive hit. Congratulations!
The elder Romney’s father went to Mexico, not to escape persecution of Mormons, but to escape persecution of polygamists- he belonged to a sect that refused to accept the Mormon churches’ repudiation of polygamy in the 1880s (a necessary precondition to obtaining statehood for Utah).
I just luv diplomacy 🙂
(think the longest game i played was a 3 day marathon)
though ive seen it cause the break-up of a few friendships 🙁
but never ever start with germany …..
Introduction of NVP(National Popular Vote) into law as alternative to Electoral College.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3457/dropping_out_of_electoral_college/
Adam @ 309
I have already posted two of Ben-Gurion’s statements that clearly show that any Palestinian state would not have been allowed to survived. There are many more from him and most of the other main actors, Golda Mier, etc. They were not some idle musings, but Zionist policy backed by military planning that began in the late 1920s/early 1930s, long before any Palestinian rejection of partition. Plans that were carried out virtually from the day of the UN partition vote. There is also no dispute that almost all the Arabs/Palestinians inhabitants would have been forced out to ensure complete J*wish control. Again, this was long standing policy backed by detailed planning.
As to the financial state of the two sides before partition. Again, I have already posted the remarks by Moshe Sharrat which show that most of the industry, commerce and farms were “major Arab assets”.
Glen,here’s one to brighten up your day!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/16/despite-open-field-giuli_n_81801.html
“How the Pentagon planted a false story” -re Iranian shipping incident.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA17Ak03.html
344
MayoFeral
Victors get to write the history as well as keep the spoils MF. Clearly there’s been massive revisionism about the Palestinians, even to the common perception that they did not really exist before WWI, so, well, you know, wha’t the big deal?
This is false, but apparently the lie is so well established that it is used by many to overlook the fact that there are a people virtually incarcerated, constatnly having their meagre remaining land encroached upon, treated like animals with daily constant humiliations and deprivations that are unspeakable.
This cannot be denied. So now, the people whose families were herded into ghettos and abused and killed, now do the same to another people. This is still a crime against humanity no matter who is doing it, and whatever the historical ‘excuses’ sprouted by anyone to somehow ‘prove’ the Arabs deserve this treatment, or that cluster bombing Lebanon is somehow ‘moral’.
What cannot be denied is that this conflict is massively one-sided militarily and the overwhelming force applied to the Palestinians produces endless misery and blowback. Each new generation of Palestinians can do little but hate the Israelis and this is not only not humane, but not ever going to bring peace to Israel.
346
Megan
Washington puts out a patently manufactured ‘incident’ with Iranians on the eve of Bush’s junkett to sell billions of dollars worth of missile equipment to the Saudis to protect them from the Iranians?
Nah, they wouldn’t do a thing like that, would they? I mean, come on, they really, truly, believed that Saddam had all those WMD!
It’s appalling that the world’s superpower behaves like a devious child and lies about it’s intentions with make-believe that’s so transparently false. Still, it works. Just look at Glen. Believes anything that Uncle Sam says like it’s the word of god! Such naivety, in a child it would be endearing.
Speaking of superpower, isn’t it ironic that while the US flounders around the ME in a clumsy attempt to shore up its control over this oil region into the future, the Chinese are quietly going around the world and signing up all the other smaller oil producers. One by one, softly softly.
Take ya pick: screamin’ hysterical Phillipino Monkey, or Softly, softly Chinese Monkey.
How many billions have the US sunk into Musharraf’s regime? And we now know that most of it has been siphoned off to purposes other than defeating the Taliban and its supporters along the border with Afghanistan.
Here is the result:
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a paramilitary fort in Sararogha, in the restive South Waziristan tribal region in north-west Pakistan on Tuesday, killing 22 soldiers and taking several others hostage in a nearly six-hour battle, government intelligence agency officials and local officials said Wednesday.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the attack, said that 600 to 700 militants had attacked the Sararogha fort, firing rockets and mortars in a region where local and foreign militants have battled the Pakistani military.
Fifteen soldiers belonging to the South Waziristan Scouts, an official paramilitary militia, died in the battle, one intelligence official said. Another local official said that the militants later beheaded at least seven other soldiers.
A spokesman for Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, an Islamic group that is sympathetic to the Taliban, said that it had carried out the attack and that it had killed 16 soldiers and captured 24, and that only two militants had been killed.
(NYTimes)
I think the Democrat candidates just might pick up on this blatant display of Musharraf’s duplicity and double dealing with the warlords of the region. It’s coming back to bite him on the bum.
KR, I’ll thank you not to call me a liar when I state historical facts which you find not to your taste. Before World War I the whole Arab world had been under Ottoman rule since the 16th century. Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, did not exist. There was an Egyptian national identity, but the Eastern Arabs variously identified themselves as Arabs, or as Muslims (or Christians), or as Ottoman subjects, but not by national identities which did not exist. “Palestine” did not exist either as an administrative unit or as a national identity. It was no more than a name from the Bible. As I said earlier, the Arabs living in what is now Israel/Palestine lived in the Ottoman Villayet of Damascus, and if they had a national identity beyond that of Arab or Ottoman it would have been Syrian. (To this day Syria has not quite renounced its territorial claim to all of Palestine and Jordan.) The current state system in the Middle East was created by the British and French after they partitioned the Ottoman Empire under the Sykes-Picot agreement. The British got Mesopotamia (where they created Iraq and Kuwait) and southern Syria, which they called Palestine, while the French got northern Syria. Later the British split Transjordan off from Palestine to create a state for their Hashemite clients to rule after they were expelled from Arabia by the Saudis. The French partitioned Syria to create a Christian-majority state in Lebanon. Et voila, the modern Middle East came into existence. Only then did the Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem, Nablus, Galilee etc discover that they were Palestinians. I don’t deny that the Palestinians have now developed a genuine national identity, just as have the Pakistanis, the Nigerians and numerous other nationalities which didn’t exist in 1914. But to say that there has always been a distinct or self-identified “Palestinian people” living in what is now Israel is totally ahistorical.