A new bestseller in China, Currency Wars, published by a unit of the state-owned CITIC Group presents an elaborate conspiracy theory centred on the Rothschilds. The details can be read elsewhere - much of it will be familiar to those of us forced to trawl the lower reaches of the internet.

Any conspiracy theory that mentions the famous European-Jewish banking dynasty touches a raw nerve in the West, given its guilt over the complicity of a chunk of Europe in the attempted murder of a whole ethnic community, let alone the Roma, gays and as many Slavs as the German Army of the East could cope with. Cynically, some might even consider Chinese interest in this material (which is typically more associated with right-wing Japanese visions of the universe) as a pitch for emerging market hearts and minds, especially in the Middle East.

In fact, it appears that the Chinese have simply latched on to an existing conspiracy theory that we suspect they partly believe themselves without fully understanding why Westerners get so edgy about it. The worst that might be said is that 'conservative' policy-makers in Beijing thought that it might be quite useful to have author Mr. Song Hongbing's theories in the political marketplace to influence a domestic debate.

In our view, the propaganda war between East and West is in danger of getting out of hand but the West cannot whine too much. Nonsense from China is an understandable reaction to a great deal of similar nonsense that has emanated from Western (largely Israeli, French and Anglo-Saxon) ‘black operations’ over recent years – something about reaping and sowing is in order here but 'nuff said. In fact, Jewish reaction in the UK is mature. The (European) Jewish community recognizes that the Chinese in no way intend anti-semitism (unlike many Japanese versions of the myth) and that the Chinese admire Jewish acumen. Song Hongbing is explicit on this matter according to Wednesday's Financial Times report.

Closer analysis suggests that the book is important because it arrives at a point of tension within some serious economic policy debates inside China. There is a powerful higher-level lobby for opening up China to the global economy.  Throughout the emerging world, technically-trained elites are trying to integrate their countries into the global economy but are finding it hard to bring mid-level policy-makers and 'conservatives' along with them. Traditional nationalist sentiment, here as elsewhere, sees US pressure, in this case to float the renminbi and open up the financial system, as just another form of ‘looting’. The Western drive for political and economic liberalization is coming up against often legitimate national suspicions of the motives for reform.  It is for the West to let these countries work out for themselves where the benefit to them of global integration actually lies and if a 'nonsense' conspiracy theory contributes to bringing that debate into the open, then why not?  The Diana conspiracy theory brought into the open serious concerns about social modernisation in the UK in the late 1990s without causing the fall of a Monarchy that is now stronger than ever.

The author (basically a Chinese-American geek without formal historical training) seems to have put some web conspiracy material into a plausible framework. His work appeals to a widespread need for narratives that explain what is going on in the world where otherwise there is silence. Conspiracy theories fill gaps in official information and public education.

Professional history should be treated with caution.  The ‘evidence’ is not always what it appears to be and silences are meaningful too. Historians can be more or less fact-based mythmakers. That silences can be meaningful is a little too Zen-like for Oxbridge-trained minds to comprehend. The conservative English school represented by Andrew Roberts and others is 'good history' but it also presents a narrative with a purpose, a set of judgements about what it is important to write about, that has contributed to the formation of this generation's ideology as much as anything Marxist did to that of the 1960s. 

The post-modern attitude to truth easily moves from a situation based on narratives that conform to what facts are available to ones in which the gaps between facts are not ignored but are filled with increasingly imaginative surmise. At this stage, the balance between evidence and interpretation shifts. If the market does not need a new narrative, the narrative stays lurking in the lower swamps of the internet. If it does, then it gets integrated into a text (as author Song Hongbing has done with Currency Wars), published and distributed as ‘a truth’.

We should not get too scandalized or po-faced about this. There are cases where the narrative is an outrageous lie – the narrative of Holocaust Denial is the most obvious example of this and deeply hurtful to the victims of German national socialism.  Similarly, Japanese historiography has been wilfully neglectful of crimes against the Chinese people: but then so, until the last decade, has British about mass bombing and the conduct of Allied troops in Germany in 1945/1946. A new invented narrative might be regarded as a form of art that tells us some cultural truth that concentrates minds on the deeper stresses and strains in a society. For example, much of the conservative British school’s writing represents an ideology of Atlantic superiority and a repeated assertion of the vileness of other systems – with an often wilful refusal to engage with uncomfortable issues surrounding British conduct outside its heartland.

More could be written on this and we may return to the matter on another occasion – but Currency Wars should be seen not as an occasion for panic (as the sensible low key reaction of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has shown) but as an opportunity to ask questions about why this particular vision of the world is important at this time, how it may impact on serious policy debate (probably marginally) and how mass narratives are now constructed out of the internet instead of by often equally ideologically-committed professionals working in libraries.

The West very badly needs a victory in the war for democracy. Current protests in Burma seem to offer a chance to capture at least one rogue state but, lately, the Western drive for democracy has been contained more than it contains. Think of the recent record. Stalemate in Lebanon and the Ukraine. Stasis in Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Syria and North Korea. In Iraq, democracy is hanging on by the skin of its teeth.  Pakistan is going through a time of troubles. Most of North Africa is reversing itself into authoritarianism. 

It is not that democracy itself has gone into reverse since 2003, only that lines have been drawn. The West seems not to have the resources to push the boundary much further. Minor retreats seem more likely than major victories. The clever money knows that Burma is partly a Chinese client state and that Beijing, not Washington, will have the most influence on how much liberation is tolerable in Rangoon.  

Two global camps are now emerging around very different visions of economic development (liberal capitalist and national-authoritarian).  They are far from internally coherent. Europeans and other sympathisers of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy are more than secretly embarrassed by American-Israeli adventurism, but there is good reason to believe that China finds small national-socialist and national-communist states like Burma and North Korea to be equally troublesome.  

A whole range of countries wobble on the boundary between the camps. Some, like Ethiopia and Egypt, are clearly more aligned to the West yet they refuse to fit into the model assigned to them by Western NGOs. Others, like Syria and the Central Asian Republics, flirt with the West periodically only to retreat to the protection of their traditional patrons in a crisis. A very few, such as Pakistan, are being destabilised precisely because neither camp can quite decide which is more important, country stability or participation in their grand strategic objectives.

It is too easy to put this down to a loss of moral high ground arising out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or the burst bubble of American military power within Iraq. This assessment suits Western liberals because it allows them the hope that all will be well once the Bush Administration has been disposed off. This is quite probably stuff and nonsense! All the players know that the US can still blast most countries into the stone age but that it is politically constrained from doing so. These constraints are now independent of whoever happens to be President. 

Freedom House added grist to the political mill this week by issuing its own claims about the retreat of democracy. It noted the Chinese approach to economic development without political liberalization as the mood of the moment. In Asia, recent coups in Thailand and Bangla Desh make a ‘win’ in Burma fairly imperative. US-style democracy is looking very ragged across the world. But , if this is so, why should it be? Here are six simple reasons ...

First, most populations want or need economic development second only to stability and a lot more than 'freedom'. ‘Trickle-down’ is just not working quickly enough. It requires someone to trickle. To make the system work requires not only big men' but a technocratic middle class that is Westernised in aspiration, led by smooth-talking besuited MBAs and professionals who speak English with an American accent. Such a new class with links to the international market begs for a nationalist back-lash simply by existing. We saw it emerge personally in Russia in '92. We also see this phenomenon wherever the technical skill-sets required for economic liberalism result in the hiring of 'exiles', educated in the West, who create resentment in the 'old country'. The result is that a countervailing and highly intelligent siloviki-class emerges that is very eager to prove that native minds are sharper.

Second, the democratic socialist alternative to classical liberalism has been completely subsumed under the category of liberal internationalism. Conservative paternalism has also been killed off by global markets.  No moderate space is left between rampant globalised capital and state power.  It becomes logical for some communities to choose state power where a conflict arises.

Third, the link between democracy and peace (an important factor in many ex-communist states) has been broken under the current US Administration.  This is not just a matter of disgust at Iraq but a wider preparedness of democracies to use military force for allegedly humanitarian ends, a process originating with Kosovo in 1998 but reaching its vicious apogee in Gaza, Helmand Province and in countless unrecorded actions across the Sahel.  The West appears to be a destabilising force to those not included in its counsels.

Fourth, Western-style democracy is now associated with direct subversion against the national interest or as fig-leaf for the maintenance of power by old elites and new business interests (the classic 'bazaar'). The 'colour revolutions' certainly required significant infusions of cash by 'big men' or the support of networks of privately funded NGOs who appeared (whether truly or not) to be doing the bidding of the State Department.  The wealthy, unfairly insofar as most are not interested in politics, have come to be seen as potential manipulators of democracy and their purpose as solely to open up markets and hand over national resources to their cronies.

Fifth, although there are very serious human rights abuses in the non-democratic world, the Guantanamo experience and the conduct of the war on terror has lost the West its moral high ground.  It has made the two systems equivalent. In other words, thuggery is something both sides do.  The difference between good and evil is no longer as clear cut as it was in the ideological struggles of the 1940s where mass bombing of cities by one side (ours) could still be seen as (just) morally superior to a regime that used genocide as an end in itself.  Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the numbers actually killed by their decisions would appear (so far) to be substantially less than those who have died as a result of decisions by Messrs Bush and Blair.

Sixth, democracy is associated with a new wave of private capitalist incursion into energy-rich countries which is far too easily linked to imperialism. Although the West looks on sovereign funds with concern, the 'East' finds it difficult to disentangle large private corporations from their Governments.

For these reasons (important to them if not to us), democracy has not been looking so ‘hot’ lately.

We should also not underestimate internal Western cynicism about its own political class. Although democracy is not under threat in the West, largely because it is ‘locked in', this is partly because the majority of Westerners share Churchill’s view that it is the least worst option. 

But the ‘least worst’ option for us is not necessarily the ‘least worst’ option in those countries that are seeking rapid and stable economic development on a poor capital and technical skills base. Freedom House notes the durability of the Chinese model in this context. It also gives us a hint as to why international relations will continue to be fraught.

The group generally most targeted in these ‘economic’ states by their governments are journalists, academics and intellectuals. This sub-class, mostly liberal from Riyadh to Harare and back again, speaks most easily to its equivalents in the West. It is classically cosmopolitan. The global class interest of this relatively tiny group, but one with strong shared values, can and will sustain a formidable lobby in favour of a particular universalist ideal of liberty - and it will receive Western backing. Prime Minister Brown has, for example, been swift to back the Burmese protesters and to condemn Mugabe. In this, he is in tune with British intellectual opinion.

This class also tends to demand freedoms for 'out' groups (like gays) who challenge the instinctive conservative habits of communities that are going through the trauma of rapid modernisation. Type-cases in the UK include Peter Tatchell, the undoubtedly physically brave Australian-British gay activist, or the hardened but aging '68 left-liberals whose history was that of the fight against Pinochet and apartheid but who now find themselves challenging nationalist dictators like Mugabe and who refuse to be seduced by the anti-imperialism of Ahmedinejad or Chavez.

This is a new form of sub-class war in the making. It increases international tension through the pressure of NGOs and Western lobbies on Western governments, it moves the erstwhile centre-left into opposition to the new rising powers and it unintentionally encourages repression of this same class within the emerging world as de facto ‘subversives’.

It also suggests the strengthening within the West of another trend that we have noticed. This is the growing Californian-style association of anarcho-libertarian market, environmentalist and libertarian-left thinking. Old-style left-liberals have a real problem coping with the phenomenon of Governor Schwarzenneger. This Republican is now closer to their concerns than any 'really existing' Communist or third world revolutionary. So we may now expect a ‘perfect storm’ around the Chinese hosting of the Olympics next year - a political dictatorship is holding a global event in a polluted city. Wow! San Francisco meets Beijing in a knock-out ideological struggle where Right and Left seem to have reversed polarities.

Freedom House is both correct and extremist in its definitions of democracy. There are signs of new forms of community consultation, decentralization and other forms of political organization that are not necessarily liberal but have democratic characteristics  There is a major debate on 'deliberative' democracy in Chinese policy circles, though more in private than in public. Iran, Venezuela and Russia are democracies of sorts. Islamist democracy (as in Turkey) challenges Western support for some conveniently pro-Western secularist dictatorships and offers a model that might yet be taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood.

These ‘democratic’ experiments are not liberal or liberal-capitalist. They are excessively flexible about the rule of law and the separation of powers. Yet, in these states, it is also hard for a private interest (like a Berlusconi, a Thaksin or a Murdoch) to buy its way into power or influence because the State plays such a strong countervailing role. The political price for this is that, just as Western freedom can help guarantee the ability of single or combined accumulations of capital to seize effective control of the political process, a nationalist determination to stop this happening can result in a proportionate loss of freedom, allegedly to ensure the ability of the State to resist external subversion that might result in the seizure of national assets for private interest. We worked in Russia in '92 and we saw some of these thefts under our very eyes so the anxiety is not entirely specious.

The Chinese way is one type of adaptation to global reality. The Russian version is an act of resistance from a people not yet ready to be globalised. Iranian resistance is seen (from within) as the protection of a distinctive culture from apparently universalist principles that might enhance minority and women's rights but would also, in practice, hand national assets over to foreign oil interests. A similar motivation of nationalist resistance to the theory of ‘trickle down’ inspires Chavez.

The hardening of these two systems, liberal capitalist and 'resistance', are logical responses to the actions of one another. Both are defining their borders and turning into camps. History is with the West if global prosperity increases - and with the 'resistance' if growth falters.  Neither can be regarded, as some would have it, as intrinsically good or evil. They are just different - and very, very complex.

http://www.tppr.co.uk

Today, the Prime Minister, after 90 days of minor turmoils but with his predecessor forgotten like a bad dream, gives his first key note speech as Leader to the Labour Party Conference.

Nick Robinson, the BBC's Political Correspondent, has been smiling, so he says on Radio 4 this morning. The Prime Minister is avoiding talk of a 'snap election' but it is his advisers and associates who are spinning like a top. They are saying, always unattributably, that the new man is minded to seek a mandate for his programme of work rather than be bound by a Manifesto largely engineered by his rival.

The age of spin is still not over. What you read in the newspapers is still largely managed even if journalists like Nick Robinson are increasingly prepared, with a 'smile', to indicate how the stage tricks are performed. The politically interested class is wise to the trickery but the masses are still being entertained by the political Houdinis of our day.

The question is - what sources are there for the outsider to find out what is really going on? There is, of course, no real way of knowing anything except by being there, on the inside. Even then, most of those who claim to be on the inside are not. Analysts are always grasping at the straws that are handed out to them by the media or from the greedy hands of lobbyists who are only on the edge of the inside. But at least the lobbyists have seen the machinery operating. Journalists are often still in the audience.

Here is the moment to pay tribute to Ann Black, an elected (and there are damn few of those) member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, who promised when she was first elected ten or so years ago to report back to Party members on NEC Meetings. She has kept that promise - often despite considerable pressure from the bureaucracy of the Party and those politicians who find her 'living in truth' to be inconvenient. 

An early accusation was that her reports 'helped the Tories'. This is the sort of Stalinist-think that brought the Party (as opposed to the Government) to the depressed and dire straights that culminated in the long drawn out and miserable process of getting rid of its last Leader and a membership tally way below the levels of long term sustainability. But Ann Black is never going to lose the Party an Election. If Party recovery is under way now, it has nothing to do with the bureaucrats, only a little to do with the politicians and something to do with the elected wing of the NEC just hanging on in there, despite every criticism and provocation.

Her web site will give you an archive of 'personal notes' on the NEC Meetings from November 2000 and on Policy Forum Meetings from July 1999. She has had to learn a few lessons on the way.  For example, that journalists can be weasels and deliberately misinterpret what she writes to make a 'story'. The danger was that the 'weasels' and the politicians would engage in a 'de facto' alliance to suppress this source because - you guessed it - it allegedly helped the 'Tory enemy'. 

With great courage (since the levels of unpleasantness and obstruction of which party bureaucrats can be capable has to be experienced to be believed) and not a little wisdom, she adapted but she refused to die. She just took a little more care in drafting, learning from experience in her dealings with the Press.  She still did not censor except on truly confidential and financial matters. This task might be regarded as burdensome (she has also maintained an important role within the trades union movement) yet she made that promise and she has kept it. Maybe this is what discomfits some in the professional political class. Her reward, however, has been repeated re-election - which is all that really counts in politics.

So, having praised her, what do her latest notes from September 18th tell us?  Something like 3,000 Labour members have these but they are not yet on the website. Again, a lesson learned - let the spin doctors do their bit, let the journalists tell their tale but let Party members know the truth first.  Yes, let the Barnum & Bailey's Media Circus move on to the next town. You'll have to wait or join her Party.

She has played fair by us so I am going to play fair by her. Not too many leaks on the detail - just some 'mood music'. What I can tell you is that the Prime Minister is confident, intent on re-connecting with the people and that the tone of the meetings seems very different from the meetings of his predecessor when you got the impression that Blair wanted a platform to assert his world-vision and then have the meeting concluded as quickly as possible.

It is not all smooth sailing.  Party members, especially those who lived through the mayhem of the 1980s, are not a little bitter about Brown's recent courtesy to Margaret Thatcher and his appointment of Digby Jones as Minister of Trade - but you get the impression that the Prime Minister is confident that he can stand up at an election and show Labour members and voters that his Government may be courteous to conservatives but that it is not Conservative.

The most interesting change is the relatively small attention paid to foreign policy.  Of 16 paragraphs, the equivalent of only one was spent on international issues. The boycott of the Europe-Africa Summit if Mugabe is present was a passing bone thrown to the liberal internationalists who dominated the last Government - pure gesturalism in our opinion.  It also saves the Prime Minister from one of those utterly boring and wasteful Summit trips that are such a distraction from real Government. The real meat of Brown's foreign policy - the economic regeneration model exemplified by the Brown-Cunliffe report on Palestine - was not discussed.

In that paragraph in the 'personal notes' - and, yes, I am 'leaking' now - Iraq is placed in the past as a 'mistake' with Muslim voters ready to 'come home' (and, no, this does not mean that a headline is justified that says 'Brown calls Iraq a Mistake' because that is not what the Report said), diplomatic options are still preferred to military in regard to Iran, missile defence is dismissed as largely based in Eastern Europe with no reason to change defence dispositions in the UK and the Prime Minister was prepared to meet human rights delegations. This last is interesting because international trades unionists are mounting a major campaign on behalf of their counterparts in Colombia which allegedly has the highest death rate for worker-activists in the world. 

As for the EU Referendum, there was no sign that the NEC was interested in backing those calling for one - both Tories and Labour proponents were being called 'opportunistic'. Labour Party members tend, like Liberal Democrats, to be pro-EU, although there are signs of some shifts in this respect. The rising Compass Left is not yet really represented on the NEC.

Above all, the emphasis is on getting Britain right. The majority of the discussion was about the Government's social programme, the rise of xenophobia and internal party affairs. At one point, it is noted that more building workers die in accidents than British soldiers in Iraq. There is perhaps a complicity here between an exhausted Party and a new Prime Minister in leaving international relations to the State and allow a new concentration on economic stability and social progress.  It suggests a Government with a strong domestic political interest in avoiding foreign adventures and in finding a language that distances without alienating the US. In return for not being the aggressor overseas, the Government wants the Party to trust it more. The current likelihood is that it will.

So, thank you, Ann. Now let us hope that those who use your resource, use it responsibly and that the other main parties come to be equally transparent about their inner workings both to their members and the general public.

[Expression of Interest.  The author is a very passive member of the Labour Party, largely for historical and tribal reasons. He holds no party office. This membership does not affect his judgement in these postings and he is quite prepared to be challenged on bias. In 1996, he was the Co-Ordinator of the CLGF that enabled the election of a number of grassroots candidates to the National Executive Committee but he ceased his association with the grouping no later than 2000. Ann Black has no responsibility for any comments made in this posting and was not consulted in advance. TPPR has received no material that has not been supplied on equal terms to other Party members.]