Abusing history

"History will be kind to me," Churchill famously proclaimed "because I intend to write it." And he did. And it was. Perhaps this was inevitable.
"The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence will pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?" A J Muste asked in 1941. Perhaps, given the outcome of the Second World War, the victorious powers would never look upon it in a manner that allows us to draw any useful lessons from it.
But sixty years later, it seems to me that it simply will not do to accept defeat on this matter. Moving past Churchill is no easy task, and neither it seems is properly taking responsibility for launching the world in to the nuclear age (the punditry that marked the 60th aniversary of the nuclear bombs was marked by a stubborn refusal to admit an ounce of regret).
Nevertheless, we should surely be doing an awful lot better than this.

"David Cameron will liken the growth of militant Islamic terrorism to the rise of the Nazis in a speech today attempting to establish his leadership credentials as tough on foreign policy" reports The Independent today.

It doesnt really concern me that David Cameron is saying these kinds of things. It concerns me that his political strategists believe it will find approving audiences, and that they might be right.

What is Enlightenment?

You might well ask, Immanuel...
The right of free speech (in Voltaire's universal sense) has been relegated to the realm of idle abstraction, because 'Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the "rules of the game are changing".' So that's that. Our dear leader has spoken, and that is all that is needed. The era of Enlightenment is over. Welcome to the new Age of Terror.

Enviromation

Perhaps I've been watching too much of The Day Today... but it's very hard to believe this isn't a piss-take:

Sunday Times, 21st August 2005.
Queen bores hole to heat palace

Lois Rogers, Social Affairs Editor
THE Queen is planning to create an underground network to extract heat from the earth’s natural warmth and cut energy bills at Buckingham Palace.

She has inspired a fashion among the super-rich for drilling boreholes at their properties as the latest "green" status symbol.

more...

The responsibility of intellectuals

One might say that the fact that Norman Tebbit has crawled out from whatever hole he was hiding in to mutter a few words about Islam that could so easily have been scripted by Kilroy does not deserve very much attention. "The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years." It is rather too easy, I think, to attribute views like this to plain ignorance. Of course, it is profoundly ignorant, but the expression of this sort of view is only possible when widely-respected "intellectuals" work hard to back them up with some "evidence." In the case of the "backward" nature of Islam, Bernard Lewis has done a lot to make this sort of nonsense sound more respectable.
Now, in one sense, serious people should not allow themselves to be detained by such idiotic arguments (whether Lewis dresses them up with impressive-sounding words, or Norman Tebbit expresses them in something that barely constitutes a sentence). But in another, it's important not to allow views like those of Lewis to become popularised without being challenged. Social scientists need to take their tasks seriously in order to avoid either being made "irrelevant" by ideologues of reaction (New Labour, the neoconservatives etc.) or being subordinated to the sort of populist rubbish (Lewis) that makes the climate right for idiots like Tebbit to sound vaguely reasonable when they come out with such trash.

#51 - Chinatown

I have spent too many hours yesterday and today playing a game I just found called Blackshift. It's free, it's fun, it's very fiendish, and you have to think about it a bit (but its still fun!) You don't need to be able to aim a gun to enjoy it. And you get infinite lives, so if you're rubbish, you can just keep trying to get past the same bit without having to start all over again. It's also dangerously addictive, so think about whether you have a lot of time to spare before you get going. There are 100 levels, apparently. I'm on level 10. Happily, it remembers what level you're on automatically. It's slightly geeky, and very good fun.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Tim Burton remaking Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp playnig Willy Wonka - it was always going to be good. But let's not forget the particular brand of weirdness Gene Wilder brought to the same role in Mel Stuart's 1971 adaption. Too many people who saw that film as young children have forgotten just how fantastically odd it was at moments ("We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams" and so on). The first half of the film, before we see Wonka or the factory, was plainly rubbish, though.
Burton makes significant improvements on Stuart's film where he is able to (mostly, in the first part), but there are areas in which little that's new can be done.
The opening sequence is a stunning example of Burton's visual imagination. The exploration of Charlie's Dickensian poverty is very well done - although somewhat troubling, as it never quite gets resolved, but more on that later - and Charlie's parents are played very competently by Noah Taylor and Helena Bonham Carter (who STILL looks a good decade younger than her years). The search for the golden ticket is not mesmerising, but wisely, it's all over and done with reasonably quickly.
The factory itself looks largely as it ought to, but in many respects, it has simply been lifted from the 1971 film. The entirely-edible room with the chocolate river looks almost exactly the same. On the other hand, there are remarkably strange and imaginative moments - a room full of squirrels silently shelling walnuts; a cow being lashed with whips by oompa loompas (to make whipped cream, of course).
The most striking change is Wonka, who bears a very close and odd resemblance to Michael Jackson. We get a lengthy exploration of Wonka's relationship with his father - a stern dentist, who never allowed him to eat sweets. The family plays a dominant role in the whole film - with Charlie refusing to leave his own family to live in the factory. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but Steven Spielberg has made exploration of the family (and especially the family in crisis) a very difficult subject to explore in film without descending in to sentimentality.
The character of Charlie is stripped of all its complexity by the decision not to have he and his grandfather disobeying instructions in the factory and going to the top of the room with the bubbles (in the 1971 film, they have to burp their way down - brilliant). Instead, Charile loves his family, never misbehaves - in short, is perfect. Fine, but not very interesting.
It's been far too long since I read the book to remember how it deals with such issues, but I found the film's treatment of poverty and capitalism extremely unsatisfying. Charlie's father (seen reading books whenever he is at home) is made redundant when his factory buys a machine that can do his work, but eventually re-employed to maintain that very machine. What are we to make of Wonka, a reclusive millionaire, who has captured an army of coca-slaves to make his chocolate for him? It all seems rather unsatisfactory - especially given the attention given to Charlie's crushing poverty at the start of the film. But perhaps I'm expecting rather too much from a childrens' film. Or perhaps I've simply missed the real point which is that in the real world, there are no neat and simple answers to these kinds of questions.
The film is extremely enjoyable - of perhaps a little too long for very young kids - but for me, Charlie ought to be flawed (and thus a lot easier to engage with), Wonka ought to be weird in a Gene Wilder sort of way, not a Michael Jackson sort of way, which in the end is just disturbing, and it would be better if we did not get too caught up in all this stuff about families, as it does not really go anywhere in the end (Wonka re-finds his father at the end, gives him an awkward hug, and that's all we see of it). Neither film is perfect, but it seems that both are able to make up for the weaknesses of the other. I wonder if some clever editing could merge them in to one perfect film.

The home front

It has been nearly a month since the last time I wrote anything here about anything other than terrorism. I'm not going to break the mould today, though, despite no dramatic developments in the last few days. It's worth standing back and taking stock of what has happened, especially with respect to the Brazilian man who was shot by police at Stockwell tube station. "Senior police sources have confirmed that the officers involved in the operation that led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian would not have needed to shout a warning before firing," the Sunday Times reported on Sunday. The same piece summarised the available evidence about the killing, including the stark contradictions between the initial accounts given by the police, and what the CCTV footage revealed. It's worth quoting at length:

"When the shooting at Stockwell Underground station was first confirmed, a senior police source told reporters, off the record, that they had killed one of the would-be suicide bombers who was on the run after the failed July 21 bombings. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said that the shooting was "directly linked" to the terrorist operation.

The man, according to the police, was suspect because of his "clothing and behaviour". He had been followed from a house that had been under surveillance. When he was challenged at Stockwell, he ignored instructions and ran. He had vaulted over the ticket barrier and was wearing a dark bulky jacket that could disguise a bomb.

One witness had de Menezes as an Asian with a beard and wires coming out of his torso. The truth is more mundane. De Menezes, an electrician, was travelling to north London to fix a fire alarm.

He was not wearing what witnesses called a "black bomber jacket", but a denim jacket. It was about 17C and his clothing would not have been out of the ordinary.

He did not vault a ticket barrier, as claimed. He used a travelcard to pass through the station in the normal way. His family believes that he may have started to run simply because he heard the train pulling in — something Londoners do every day. Indeed, a train was at the platform when he got there."

What will become of the inquiry, only time will tell. What seems clear is that if the shoot-to-kill policy is to continue, the guidelines surrounding it are going to have to be tightened up, and intelligence improved. About this killing, many mysteries remain - including: if this man was suspected of carrying a bomb with him, why was he allowed to travel on the bus under police surveillance. If not, why was he killed? My fear is that another attack, or some other events will distract peoples attention away from these important questions.

London is starting to look and feel "normal" again now, but many people I have spoken to seem quite certain that more attacks will be seen soon.

In today's FT, Jack Straw is quoting as saying "Gaza withdrawal is a “fantastic opportunity for the Palestinians. It’s more likely than not to work – and if it doesn’t, the Palestinians know they can kiss goodbye to a separate state.”"

Hmmm... then I suppose the Palestinians can "kiss goodbye" their "seperate" state, and submit to Israeli occupation as Israel expands in to the West Bank. More terror in the Middle East. More terror in London.