Fun and Games with the Serbian Police

So, a few Decembers ago (2006), Tessa and I were returning to Montenegro when our flight was diverted from Belgrade to Nish, in southern Serbia, due to heavy fog. More than a few tales hang on that, but today's concerns the nine-hour taxi ride home in the middle of the night through Serbia and into Montenegro, across mountains on narrow two-lane roads through numerous little towns.

Usually, local cops leave diplomats alone on the highways - no upside, and your superiors may get upset that you were bothering someone who a) you can't ticket or arrest anyway; and b) has an in with the Minister of the Interior (equivalent to a US Attorney General). And since diplomats' cars have very distinctive diplomatic plates, ignorance ("I didn't know he was a diplomat") is no excuse.

Usually.

It's different when you are riding in an ordinary Ford Mondeo taxi.  And it's the middle of the night, And the traffic cops are bored out of their minds with no traffic to flag over (well, wave a "lollypop"* at).  But an ordinary taxi? Hey, cops don't need (to make up) a reason to stop a car in the Balkans (or most of Europe) - no Fourth Amendment.

So, we got waved over, asked for IDs:  the driver shows his license, and we pull out diplomatic passports, with entry stamps and residence visas. All is good, so after a couple of minutes, we're rolling.

And get stopped 20 minutes later, next small town, same drill.

And again 20 minutes after that. This time the cop (who I figure was let into the fun little game of "let's harass the American diplomat while pretending it's all coincidence" after a radio call from the previous stops) wants to see our luggage, "since the stamps say you just flew into Serbia from France, you must have luggage." Ok, says I, but I want to watch your search (to make sure the cop neither adds nor subtracts from what's there). He agrees.

Recall the taxi is Ford Mondeo, a mid-size hatchback I've never ridden in before (it's not sold in the US). It's about 1 am, we've been riding for about four hours in the taxi, we got up about 6 am the previous day - tired, and just want to go home to Podgorica. Not play games with bored Serbian cops in the cold alongside a highway somewhere near Raska (I think), not far from Kosovo.

I look into the hatch alongside the cop, pick my head up - and slam it into the edge of the hatch. Blood instantly pours off my scalp, onto to my face, into my eyes, cakes in my beard. (Scalp wounds LOOK nasty as heck.) The cop hears the thud, looks at me - even in the dim light of the street lamp, he goes pale. "Uh-oh. Even if I can defend the stop as random, I don't think I can defend injuring or killing a foreign diplomat. Not even an American." Or at least - "think of the paperwork!" The cop quickly - very quickly - lets us go.

And for the rest of the way to the border, another 90 minutes or so - not a single bored cop flags us over to lighten his night. And border immigration and customs waves us through, post-haste.

* See, e.g., http://italianintrigues.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-lollipop-guild.html

Book Review: The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

This was the second book I've read by British SF/Fantasy author Charlie Stross, the first being The Family Trade.  The Atrocity Archives has two stories, "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Concrete Jungle", both featuring darkside hacker Bob Howard and his (mis-)adventures in The Laundry, a super-secret UK agency struggling to hold back the Lovecraftian apocalypse.

The Atrocity Archives is a better effort by Stross than Family Trade, largely because the stories hang together better, and there are fewer moments where a discontinuity or mistake jarred me out of the text. Perhaps that's because Atrocity Archives posits multiple universes, not just two like Family Trade, and differences in larger policy and law can be ascribed to the central universe in the story not being this one. 

Stross notes that one of his inspirations, besides the obvious one of H.P. Lovecraft (and if you haven't read Lovecraft, you will be confused by  Atrocity Archives), is spy thriller master Len Deighton. The inspiration is clear; so clear, in fact, much as reading Lovecraft is a must before picking up this book, reading Deighton's spy fiction is a brief detour that I would highly recommend.

I have read a later Laundry story by Stross as well. His writing improves, in no small part because in the later story ("Equoid") Stross emphasizes the bureaucratic hurdles before his hero Bob Howard as much or more than the supernatural foe.  It is the humor that Stross brings out in the absurdity of bureaucratic business-as-usual while attending to the urgent business of throwing back the forces of darkness that sets The Laundry apart from the usual spy or horror tale.

Book Review: Doves and Diplomats: Foreign Offices and Peace Movements in Europe and America in the Twentieh Century, Soloman Wank, ed. Pub. 1978.

Doves and Diplomats collects 13 essays (introduction and twelve topical essays), nominally about  Foreign Offices and peace movements in Europe and America, from 1867 to 1975. Contrary to the title, only one essay (on American peace movements and the State Department in the 1920s) actually addresses the role of career diplomats; in the other essays, only the role of the political leadership in foreign offices is addressed, or the role of Foreign Offices is minimized or even ignored. The essays on European states and the U.S. are dissimilar, in that the European discussions focus almost exclusively on the roles of Radicals and Socialists in forming and leading peace movements. Such a focus on the Left leads to repeatedly attributing the failure of the peace movements to constrain military buildups, avoid war, and end hostilities, to a refusal by Radical and Socialist leaders to embrace confrontational stances against the government, and the Left's failure to enlist and co-opt the working class into such action (i.e., general strikes, refusal of military service, etc.)

The essays on America look at opposition to a possible war between Mexico and the US after Wilson landed troops in Vera Cruz in April 1914; the lack of influence upon the State Department from "popular" "internationalist" "peace reformers" in the 1920s, and the efforts of SANE and the Committee for NonViolent Action against nuclear testing and the Vietnam War.  The first sketches the wide variety and acceptance of peace movements in pre-global power America, only to dismiss them as having had no effect on Wilson's decision to not go to war with Mexico in 1914. (The essayist asserts Wilson did not want armed conflict when he landed troops, and was dismayed when deaths and other injuries ensued.) The second underscores the relative lack on influence of public organizations on closed governmental bodies like the State Department. While noting the objections of senior State officials to the 1924 Foreign Service Act, which opened the Service to those without family ties, wealth, or Ivy League degrees, the essayist declined to address whether that reform had, then or later, made State more susceptible to public opinion. The third attributes notable success to the two organizations, but was not clear on how that success was obtained. It also saw a rosier future for the influence of SANE and organizations of its ilk upon future American policy that has occured over the past 35 years.

On the one hand, Doves and Diplomats did address, at least in part, my curiosity as to why the European Socialist parties rallied behind the nation-state at the outbreak of World War I, when the Second International was clearly on record calling for general strikes to oppose a capitalist war. Partially, it was the success of ruling classes and governments in all combatants to depict the various patrias as the wronged party, and the war as defensive. Most Radicals and Socialists (except the oxymoronic militant pacifists) supported wars in defense of the nation. Decisively, the Radicals and especially the Socialists bady over-estimated the attraction of their policies, particularly their more leftist policies, for the working class. The last essay on the UK notes that mismatch continued through the 1960s, with fluctutating support from Labour for nuclear disarmament.

On the other, little in Doves and Diplomats is useful to a 21st century peace advocate, looking to avoid the mistakes of past movements and raise political and governmental support for arms control, arms reduction, smaller defense budgets, and ultimately disarmament.  

Book Review: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross.

Incomplete. Simply put, this novel, the first in a series by UK SF author Charles Stross, is incomplete, in two senses. First, it simply ends after 300 pages, with no resolution of any plot elements. Some  research reveals that Stross asked his publisher to split The Merchant Princes trilogy into six books. So the book just stops, mid-story.

The "Family" " Trades" in a particular high-value item (which I'll call "Substance A"). The author again leaves his book incomplete by utterly failing to explain how the Family obtains its supply of  Substance A in the first place. The omission is all the more curious as Stross has the Family rejecting trade in another high-value item as there is no feasible way to obtain it - yet, the same obstacles (and more besides) should also be in the way of the Family getting Substance A as well. Sure, this is a fantasy or SF novel - but the Ferengi of ST:DS9 had an explanation for their trading business. Even Cyrano Jones had a back story for the tribbles.

Skipping over some minor factual and continuity quibbles - I still wonder why there were four pages of what appears to be another story all-together around page 200. In the old days, I'd guess it was a publisher's mistake - it really HAD stuck four pages of somebody else's manuscript into the text. Now? No clue. It is as if Tolkein broke away from The Two Towers for four pages from an Agatha Christie novel. Meanwhile, the protagonist's first challenge is merely discarded after she meets up with the "Family", even though the two challenges could have been played off each other.

The blurb compares Stross to Roger Zelazny, H. Beam Piper and Philip Jose Farmer. If you haven't read those authors, read them instead of this. If you have ... don't let the comparison get your hopes up.