UK plc

Thinking

2009-02-03T18:10:00.001Z

"Not knowing how to think true more than one sort of opinion is like never leaving the street one was born in."

- Richard Hollingdale, "Introduction" to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols/The Ant-Christ

A new motto

2008-12-11T19:19:00.002Z

"I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again." (Nietzsche, The Gay Science 381)

Inequality

2008-09-11T12:48:00.003+01:00

"‘I generally define well-off’, says Obama’s website, ‘as people who are making $250,000 a year or more’. Which means that people making, say, $225,000 (who are in the 97th percentile of American incomes) are middle class; and that they deserve to be taxed in the same way as those in the 50th percentile, making $49,000. The headline of the website on which this appears is ‘I’m Asking You to Believe’. But asking the 40 per cent of Americans who live on under $42,000 to believe that they belong to the same middle class as the approximately 15 per cent who make $100,000–$250,000 may be asking too much...
"The point, then, is that the nomination of Obama is great news for American liberals, who love equality when it comes to race and gender, but are not so keen when it comes to money. Liberals are the people who believe that American universities and colleges have become more open because, although they are increasingly and almost exclusively populated by rich kids, more of these today are rich kids of colour. (Obama’s popularity on college campuses is no accident—he is diversity’s pin-up.)"

Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Diversity" New Left Review 52 (Jul/Aug 2008) pp. 35, 36.

The idea of history and the modern subject

2008-09-08T19:33:00.003+01:00

"There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] (London: Penguin, 1994) p. 166.

Managers

2008-08-21T18:34:00.002+01:00

Last Week's (August 14th) Times Higher Education carried an opinion column from two business managers. In it can be found the voice of the most destructive tendencies within British universities today. A clearer example of the problems they face is hard to imagine. I am trying to shape my rage into a letter to the magazine's editors, but it is difficult to be clear and concise when so angry. For now I will simply reproduce the article.

-----------------------------------

Times Higher Education, 14 August 2008, p. 24

Generation Y is wired up and ready for action so what's the problem

Graham Manville and Gill Schiel outline the challenges institutions face harnessing the potential of this new whirlpool of talent.
Generation Y is storming through our universities and is about to storm the workplace.
As many baby boomers head towards retirement, Generation Y - those born between 1979 and 1995 - is taking the stage. Potentially this group could form up to 40 per cent of the workforce by 2014.
They are talented. They know they are talented. This is a generation with skill sets and attitudes geared for a fast-changing world. Marketers forecast that they will have a huge economic and social impact in the coming years. Those organisations that can manage and retain them will perform best.
Research conducted in a leading global investment bank supports the published findings of both academics and practitioners: Generation Y is "connected". Its members are technically savvy in a Web 2.0 environment.
(A gritty view of what today's students really think is given on the YouTube video, A Vision of Students Today, featured last week in Times Higher Education. You can see it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o)
Generation Y has grown up in a culture of positive affirmation. These rising stars value education and want educational qualifications. They are ambitious and confident. Managed well, they can significantly improve the performance of an organisation. All good so far?
The downside is that their career expectations often race ahead of their current abilities. Generation Y members are impatient to get ahead. They want rapid progression - and it cannot come soon enough. They expect recognition. They yearn for international travel irrespective of the business case. But the stark reality is that they lack the influencing skills of office realpolitik.
Managers find that this generation needs lots of feedback and guided supervision. Firms report Generation Y's members are career agile. They neither expect nor desire a job for life. It is common to find a trail of past jobs on a CV reflecting less than five years of experience. This creates real challenges for recruitment and retention.
In management theory, products and business units showing great promise are either "stars" or "problem children".
Both have huge potential, but one is a risky option. The authors believe that members of Generation Y mirror this theory. The traits exhibited by Generation Y in the workplace are paralleled in higher education. We believe higher education institutions face two main challenges.
The first relates to developing and adapting curriculums to harness Generation Y's potential. This group has come of age in a 24/7, "on demand" personalised environment. We now witness higher education institutions offering a more personalised education using Web 2.0 technologies. This provides the institutions with a double bonus - lower- cost education plus apparently giving the students what they want. Is skinny latte, bagel and podcast "to go" the order of the day? This seems attractive to a demographic that wants to live life to the max, multitask and still enjoy the trappings of a "student experience".
Face-to-face teaching is still critically important. But it needs to be optimised to address the second challenge: finding the solution to Generation Y's underdeveloped soft skills.
Using learning interventions such as Socratic questioning and coaching could help foster a deeper learning style and facilitate self-development. In short, the academic needs to be a critical friend to the student and sometimes redefine and manage expectations. Many academics are familiar with anecdotal evidence of some students wanting a 2:1 degree but not an education, which is a recipe for rote learning.
The challenge for higher education is not to side-step this need. Gaining short-term approval from students may indicate success, but it does not address the real issue. Students need to be prepared for the real world.
Of course straight talk is easier said than done. National Student Survey feedback influences league-table position and tutor feedback reinforces or undermines staff morale. But by not taking the long view, we run the risk of taking our eye off the real prize. The result could be a polarised Generation Y workforce of high-fliers and high-maintenance candidates.
Increased economic uncertainty means employers can be more selective. They will want to pick the "stars". Many Generation Ys will need a reality check to avoid the "problem child" label.
Graham Manville is a senior fellow at the University of Southampton and a management consultant. Gill Schiel was a senior human resources manager with 15 years' experience in a global investment bank. She is now a mature student at Bournemouth University, studying psychology.

Russia Day

2008-06-14T08:32:00.002+01:00

Thursday was Russia Day - a holiday to celebrate Russia's independence. We went to Peterhof. Here is the Grand Cascade:

There are lots of wicked fountains:

The 'Northern Star' ensemble (run by my host family) was performing:

And so were some men with pipes:

Chemical

2008-06-14T08:27:00.003+01:00

Across from the Tekhnologicheskii Institut,

there is a statue of Mendeleev:

And a mural of his periodic table:

Pioneers' square and its sculptures

2008-06-14T08:11:00.007+01:00

Here is Pioneer square (the Pioneers were the younger version of the Komsomol - a sort of Communist cub scouts - for those aged 8 to 13) and some it its weird and wonderful sculptures...
(click to enlarge; about 2MB each).

from afar

2008-06-13T08:30:00.002+01:00

There are photographs ready. But all my internet time is taken up with dealing with the insanity of the ESRC.
Only time to wonder at the death-throes of habeas corpus, which David Davis is unlikely to succeed in reviving, in my humble opinion, although perhaps we shall see. I'm a few hours to early to see whether Irish voters have killed the EU constitution. The analysts say that if they have voted 'no', then Gordon (or whoever) will likely be forced in to holding a referendum in the UK. Which would be a welcome oasis of something resembling 'democracy' in the midst of the present desert.
Meanwhile, I've realized that (historiographically,) my research project ultimately revolves around the French revolution... clearly my fault for temporarily forgetting that EVERYTHING revolves around the French revolution... details, perhaps, when I have more time.

More Russia

2008-06-05T11:06:00.002+01:00

The only thing I forgot to bring with me here was a watch. Since I don't use my phone here, and didn't bring the charger, I need something to wake me up in the morning. So I went looking for one... the cheapest digital watch with an alarm which I could find, on a market, was 100 roubles. It's a 'talking' one that tells you the time (in Russian, occasionally incorrectly) when you press a button on the front. The alarm sound is like a cock crowing "cockadoodledooo". It's fantastic.

Yesterday I was at the opening of a small exhibition of Impressionist paintings which Christie's have brought over in advance of an auction. A couple of wicked Magritte pieces were included, which apparently were the bargain items at only half a million quid each.

For considerably less money than that, I've procured tickets for Uncle Vania, The Cherry Orchard, and Tchaikovsky's opera of Evgenii Onegin.

Back in the CIS

2008-06-02T07:53:00.005+01:00

I've managed to get here without missing my flight, or my connection, or losing my luggage, or forgetting anything really essential.
When I got to the apartment and started talking to my host, she asked me if I had forgotten how to speak Russian. I blame any deterioration on having to do exams recently. She says I will 'quickly remember' though...let's hope so.
The weather is a bit miserable, and it will rain today and tomorrow, but then we should be getting some sunshine.
I'm hoping to see Chekhov's 'Uncle Vania' and one of Chaikovskii's operas of 'Evgenii Onegin' and 'The Queen of Spades,' which are currently playing. I'll have to see what I can get tickets for.
There is also a (presumably Russian-language) adaption of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess... which I think I might avoid.

New photographs - including of one of the strangest sculptures I've ever seen - will appear...

Evidence? Who needs it?

2008-04-17T13:05:00.002+01:00

"You will be all too aware of the importance we must now place on acting quickly – often in the very early stages of investigations and before evidence has been gathered – to disrupt terrorist activities. This is the rationale for the additional legal powers your senior officers have requested and which I am now taking through Parliament."
- Jacqui Smith explaining to police chiefs yesterday why she is trying to obtain powers for terrorist suspects to be detained without being charged for up to six weeks. (My emphasis). Nearly enough to make you wish you had a constitution.

From Russia

2008-04-09T13:48:00.002+01:00

Quietness on the blogging front is due mainly to a lack of illustrations stemming from the fact that I managed to leave my camera in London (rushing as I was out of the house when I realized that as of 1am the morning I left, we were now in BST, so it was an hour later than I had thought). Photographic evidence will have to wait, but I have been enjoying the following:
-A fancy-dress Vivaldi concert - 'a virtual journey to Venice' - featuring a string quartet decked out in period costume (including wigs and masks and such).
-Spotting an American "scholar" playing Solitaire on his laptop in the newspaper library.
-Peter the Great's bizarre collection of deformed things in jars, supposedly created in order to educate people about the natural and physical (as opposed to supernatural and spiritual) causes of deformity, along with some stuff collected by an enthusiastic anatomy popularizer with a passion, and prodigious talent, for embalming. (If it sounds like the plot of a weird East European arthouse film... well it's not far off).
-Restaurants where firearms and personal stereos are considered approximately equal as inappropriate accessories.
-An unsurprisingly uncontroversial Olypmic torch procession on Saturday, in which the Russians rather ingeniously (one might say, rather characteristically) totally ignored anything to do with China and Tibet, and made it in to a celebration of Russian national pride. Well, why not? At the same time, I'm rather impressed with what was achieved in London and Paris - not least by the magnificently successful efforts of Paris' municipal officials to embarrass the Chinese in a symbolically, rather than physically, violent protest of hanging a banner from the town hall, forcing the procession to be cut short.

A photo of me at fancy-dress Vivaldi (although not in fancy dress) is forthcoming...

And now back to the mountain of material about cholera which is my official purpose for being here...

Wikipedia policy

2008-04-01T14:31:00.002+01:00

"I like Wikipedia and often find it better than other encyclopedias. My colleagues say that is because I am trained to judge, but students aren't yet and can't be trusted with it. I say, they read all sorts of stuff all the time, they listen to talk radio, why should this be off limits?

I don't let people cite *any* encyclopedias as ultimate sources of truth, so the university's specific prohibition against citing Wikipedia in theses and dissertations doesn't affect me or my students. Encyclopedias are, however, great first reference sources. That includes Wikipedia, I have found."

- Professor Zero

Precisely correct. The other day someone asked me what 'hegemony' was. I gave an answer, which on reflection I thought was too vague, so I thought I should go and look it up. I nearly went straight to wikipedia, then, fearing that what it had to offer would be too tendentious and thrown in to confusion by arguments among Cultural Studies undergraduates, resolved to go and find a dictionary of political thought. I found two, though neither of them were much good (Roger Scruton's excellent handbook was nowhere to be found) and both carried appalling definitions of hegemony. So (surprisingly enough) did a dictionary of Marxism. So I dug out the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, only to be disappointed again (in this case, this otherwise first-rate reference work was showing its age - a lot has happened in the last 40 years as far as hegemony goes). After all that I went on wikipedia after all, and got a definition which was a long way from perfect, but a lot better than any of the others I had found in 'respectable' publications.

Politics

2008-03-27T12:42:00.002Z

"there is no point coming into politics if you wait for people to say, "This is popular" and say, "Well, I do it for you." The only reason to come into politics is to say, "This is where the world needs to be, follow me." Politics is a platform and you use it to educate. I think she was completely mad, but Thatcher never for a moment stopped educating. What she came out with was complete rubbish, but she used the position to ram home all these awful little middle England reactionary views, and never stopped. She always said it's a battle of ideas every minute of the day. She said, "This is what I want to do, now find me a way of presenting it, so we carry the public with us." That's the approach here."

- Ken Livingstone

Classically...

2008-03-09T15:57:00.001Z

"Satiate your soul with Plutarch and when you believe in his heroes dare at the same time to believe in yourself."
- Nietzsche

Ads by Google, or, from one thing to another

2008-02-27T23:54:00.008Z

In the latest issue of The Nation, Jochen Hellbeck reviews Lynne Viola's recent book, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements and Orlando Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. All to the good. In the present climate, many among the chattering classes seem to want 'to know something' about Russia (in the same way, and for the same reasons as five years ago they wanted 'to know something' about Islam), and all three of these writers have produced sophisticated but accessible studies of Stalinism, which offer such interested audiences something they won't find in tendentious biographies of Putin. (Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin is particularly good.)
Anyway, a few paragraphs in to this review, I was interrupted by an advert in the middle of the text. Nothing new there, but this appeared to be a 'targeted' advert based on the keywords in the text. Except, of course, that it wasn't very well targeted at all. After "Her book, The Unknown Gulag, is an indictment of the utopian folly and criminal neglect of Soviet officials, and a moving account of human suffering." you get: "RussianEuro.com - Find your Russian Beauty Today! Browse Photos Now!" with an image of a youthful, scantly clad, smiling blonde. A litte unsettling to say the least. But these targeted ads, in their illogical associative sense, reveal something useful. On a day when The Independent has devoted its front page to melting polar ice caps, if you look, you are likely to find an advert for £10 plane flights inside. Maybe more than one. But it doesn't often seem very strange. There is a process of neutralization going on which is far more insidious than anything the copy editors could consciously plan. The senses are dulled; separations are made. None of this need be intentional: the 'forms' reproduce themselves simply by virtue of the fact that they work. If layouts become increasingly based on crass keyword associations, it might just jog us back in to some recognition of just what is going on when we consume news media. Maybe Google Ads will eat itself. Maybe we will be forced to confront what our news media do, and what we would have them do if we had any say in the matter. Maybe we will be forced into a situation in which we must decide what we actually want from media. Maybe we will decide that we no longer wish to be passive objects whose attention is for sale (to advertisers, by media companies). Or maybe we will allow the folly to be rebuilt on an even grander scale. Which is it to be?

Oral exams

2008-02-05T21:42:00.000Z

"Answer the questions in full, expand, communicate. Look at us, smile, pretend that you are happy to tell us your story: remember Russian saying: “soldat spit, sluzhba idet”. Time passes as you speak, so - using not the most elegant English expression - DO NOT SHUT UP!!!"

--Advice for oral exams (and life in general) from Svetlana.

Meyerhold - neat, in some respects

2008-01-29T15:30:00.000Z

"When I first visited Chekhov, I was surprised to see a completely bare table in his room. There were a few sheets of paper, an inkwell, and that was all. I even thought that perhaps the table was going to be laid for dinner, and, being shy, I hastily said that I had already dined. But apparently the Chekhovs had also dined; the empty table was essential for his work, as it helped him to concentrate."

...

"Read more! Read unceasingly! Read! Read with a pencil in your hand. Make extracts. Leave lists in your books of all the passages that have caught your attention. This is essential. All the books in my library contain lists like that and are annotated. For instance, I have read all of Wagner in German. Everybody knows him as a composer and a librettist, but besides that he also wrote ten volumes of the most interesting articles. I have studied them all. In those volumes you can find the lists I have made and you will immediately understand what interests me. Have no respect for the margins of books. Write all over them. A book which I have written in is ten times more valuable to me than a new one."

- Vsevolod Meyerhold, as related by A. Gladkov in Novy Mir, 1961 (8).

Research

2008-01-18T14:05:00.000Z

"There are three kinds of research: that which tells us something we already knew, that which tells us something we didn't know, and that which blows the entire field out of the water. Which are you doing?"

- David d'Avray.

Benazir Bhutto

2008-01-03T23:30:00.000Z

Graham Usher has been the best journalist writing in English about the crisis in Pakistan for the last 6 months (in almost every issue of Al-Ahram Weekly). Sharp analysis of the present situation in his latest dispatch.

Christmassey?

2007-12-17T19:39:00.001Z

"Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness: after six days of work, he rests for all eternity."
- Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy [1880]

Comte

2007-12-06T20:59:00.000Z

"Above all he grasped the central issue of all philosophy - the distinction between words (or thoughts) that are about words, and words (or thoughts) that are about things, and thereby helped to lay the foundation of what is best and most illuminating in modern empiricism."

- Isaiah Berlin on Auguste Comte

Role models

2007-11-21T01:47:00.000Z

“I did far too much when I was young...As a student I sometimes studied all night, I always had a bucket of cold water under the table; if I noticed that I wanted to fall asleep, I put my feet in it, and then I felt fresh again....”

(Apparently) from Nietzsche.

Fun on Amazon

2007-11-19T12:41:00.000Z

Amazon.com gives you recommendations based on your browsing history. Today, there are two books in my browsing history: Angela Brintlinger (ed.) Madness and the Mad in Russian History and Culture; and Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia.
So far, so dull, right? But what does Amazon.com recommend on the basis of me having looked up these two books? "Clergy Priest costume" - at a mere $20, or better still, "One Bad Habit: Sexy and Fun Womens Nun Costume".
I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why both of these are only available in Small.

Thursday quotation

2007-11-08T14:18:00.001Z

“the ‘topicality’ of the eighteenth century, as we see it, is made up of words (often punishable) spoken by people of no, or little, importance in the heated environment of the public sphere – or the public square. Novelists, of course, delight in the liveliness of such words and the buried dramas and tiny renunciations which they help to reveal; novelists, of course, aspire to communicate that ‘living substance’ through an art of dialogue which will in no way falsify it. Theirs is a noble task; we shall leave them to it. Historians, meanwhile, have to cleave words so as to extract their meaning; their desire is above all to give a name to the thing of no importance, the ordinary everyday word which falls apart as soon as spoken, but pushes in between two morsels of time which were formerly indivisible. It is the space thus created which is ‘topical’. It is those words which we are trying to speak. ‘He claimed that he was pursued by the vulgar words (sordida verba) and that he had to speak them…’”
-- Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth Century France (1994) p. ix

The Tuesday quotation

2007-11-06T21:59:00.000Z

“Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.”
- Marx & Engels, The German Ideology.

Mission statements

2007-10-14T00:24:00.000+01:00

I am trying to put together a proposal for a PhD. This means thinking about what I think I ought to be doing, what the whole enterprise of history, even academia as a whole consists of. As I develop answers to these questions, I wonder if I am pre-emptively ducking the real problem. The horrible realization that quickly dawns on graduate students is that the primary activity of undergraduate work - criticizing others - is a lot easier than actually producing work yourself. This produces massive amounts of self-doubt, even amongst the most arrogant. After all this time wondering why so many intellectuals go so far wrong (they cannot all simply be stupid or lazy) you ultimately begin to wonder whether you might end up as one of the 'bad guys', producing stupid, unreflective, unreadable work that will make readers cringe at the gaping holes in your argument and the awkwardness of your over-edited prose.

Foucault seems to offer an answer: since it is obviously easier to criticize than to do it yourself, then stick to criticism. "My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual."

Doesn't he make it sound so appealing? So edified? So defensible? But a nagging doubt remains. Does all this mean we have given up on representing the past? Are we happy to abandon that project as flawed or hopeless? Doesn't this kind of attitude involve some kind of fundamental denial of all the problems connected with the (un)knowability of the past that give history all its meaning? Can one go looking for the freedom people do not know they have when we are hardly any closer to understanding what it means to be free? Or maybe the answer is the opposite. Maybe it is necessary to go looking for the freedom people do not know they have in order to find out what it means to be free.

Or maybe what is needed is enough humility to understand that a single work will never uncover what it means to be free, but it could form part of a whole that goes somewhere useful. And after all, perhaps the critical approach makes the humble nature of such work a little easier to swallow - when you have as many people angry with you as Foucault did (and still has), you must be doing something right. And perhaps it is necessary to focus on process as much as result. "If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?" Constantly delaying a sense of satisfaction or achievement to an unspecified, and always advancing, future point (submission/acceptance/publication) is what really drives graduate students mad. We are all here to learn, after all - can't it be pleasure enough to reach an understanding of a concept, or better, to catch a glimpse of that enigmatic freedom that the idealistic among us see beneath the most dreadful oppression. (The question of why those who insist on the centrality of freedom to be grasped appear so obsessed with concentrated power and unfreedom will have to wait for another day).

Transformers

2007-10-12T14:32:00.000+01:00

“To use his own films’ demotic, there’s something retarded about his [Bay’s] career-long commitment to cutting his best footage to the point of incomprehensibility.” Henry K. Miller, review of Michael Bay’s 'Transformers' in Sight & Sound 17.9 (September 2007) p. 81.

Election

2007-09-23T15:56:00.000+01:00

On today's 'The World This Weekend' on Radio 4, they interviewed a local Labour party chairman attending the Bournemouth conference about speculation about Brown calling an election. He said that the party ought to get the election out of the way, so that they could turn their attention to a badly needed internal party debate about policy and future direction. Brown's strategy is clear enough: use briefing to fuel speculation about an early election, but refuse to rule anything out. He is unlikely to string it along until Spring 2009, but if he can keep it up until the end of next Spring, he largely averts the threat of the most politically damaging outcome - a genuine debate within the party about policy. It can't happen while there is speculation about an election around the corner, and it can't happen in the months leading up to an election (ie from about next summer).
Which all goes to demonstrate (again) that elections in the New Labour era are nothing but functions of internal party conflicts, in which the despised public are invited to express their opinion on a meaningless question.

Modernity

2007-09-13T16:28:00.000+01:00

Nearly term-time again, so I might have some 'serious' things to write about in addition to what I find in the supermarket (although I have my fears that what I find in the supermarket is a lot more serious than what I find in the library).
An ill-thought out suggestion resting on colossal over-generalization and over-simplification follows. Any comments on why I haven't the first clue what I'm talking about graciously received.

Anyone who wants to start talking about "modernity" needs to start thinking at least as far back as the 12th century or so and start making comparisons. A certain scepticism toward claims for the "universality" or the eternal or fundamental nature of certain social institutions (nation, marriage, the body) which has tended to focus on the formation (or 'construction') of certain kinds of knowledge about these things in the 18th and 19th centuries, has reached its reductio ad absurdum. To read a lot of modern history, you'd think that nothing like the ideas of 'individual' or 'society' existed in Europe before 1750. But of course, these ideas did not just appear out of a vacuum, and if we want to understand what underlies them, we need to look a bit deeper at their development. There are the faintest indications that a few historians might be beginning to realize that 'modernity' is more like a gradual process of accommodation than a cataclysmic epistemic rupture (even if its intellectual history is characterized by 'discontinuities' on a smaller scale a la early Foucault.) These strange, paradoxical accommodations within which modernity formed its own (dis)enchantments need to be probed a lot deeper if we want to understand our situation.

Another disappointed radical conservative

2007-09-12T12:17:00.000+01:00

"Schmitt wants here to remove from politics, especially international politics but also internal politics of an ideological kind, any possibility of justifying one's action on the basis of a claim to universal moral principles. He does so because he fears that in such a framework all claims to good will recognize no limits to their reach. And, thus, this century will see 'wars for the domination of the earth' (the phrase is Nietzsche's in Ecce Homo), that is, wars to determine once and for all what is good for all, wars with no outcome except an end to politics and the elimination of all difference."
- Tracy Strong, "Introduction" to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1996)

Uncanny.

2007-09-11T18:21:00.000+01:00

There was a new toilet roll on special offer in Sainsburys so I thought I'd stock up. On the packet there is a photo of a small child in a suit who looks like a young Ian Hislop. The toilet roll is manufactured in Dunstable, where I was born. Click for bigger.

ecoconsumers

2007-08-18T08:55:00.000+01:00

"When you cancel your paper [telephone] bill and go paper-free, BT will purchase a native sapling to plant on your behalf in one of the Woodland Trust's protected woods."

Having switched to online billing, they sent me a (paper) letter to tell me this.

Pictures

2007-07-31T15:22:00.007+01:00

At last I have managed to upload some pictures. Hurray!
Click for bigger versions, but be warned - they are 2-3 MBs each.

The gigantic war memorial on Moskovskaia Prospekt commemorating the seige of Leningrad (constructed by volunteers). Note also the 21-story apartment blocks either side.

'Samson and the Lion' - the centrepiece of Peterhof's 'Grand Cascade'. Celebrates Russia's victory over Sweden in 1730:

Palace Square (as seen from an open window of the Hermitage):

Lenin Statue (around Moscovskaia Square)

Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood:

That took ages. More soon.

hmmm

2007-07-28T14:43:00.000+01:00

Reading Russian newspapers from 100 years ago is hard, repetitive and rather dull. Who'd have thought?

This is rather better.

Half way point

2007-07-22T17:26:00.000+01:00

3 weeks down and 3 to go.
On Wednesday we made our first visit to the Hermitage, which - if possible - is even bigger than I remember. And now it is occupying another building (the General Staff, on the other side of Palace Square from the Winter Palace) which we did not even go in to. Our (Russian) student cards get us free access but we still had to queue up outside with the tourists for half an hour... lucky it wasn't raining.
Very strange to come to Russia to see such a huge collection of iconic West European art (nearly all the serious Russian collections are held by the Russian Museum, although those are frequently lent out for exhibition in the West to make money). Still, very well worth it. And always good to be revisit the insane opulence of the Imperial court.
Found a nice nugget in one of the guide books: there is nothing attaching the 600-tonne Alexander column in Palace Square to its base. It just sits on top of it.

Yesterday we walked around Vasilevsky Island, which is nice and quiet in places, has a gigantic cemetery, and still has many Soviet emblems etc on the outsides of buildings. A nice change from the slightly insane city centre, and some fantastic abandoned factories and crumbling apartment blocks. Picures... well, one day.

Now that the Makhno miniseries has finished, there's no longer much on television. Last night, we had the choice of: Evita with Russian subtitles; a dubbed version of 'Zeus and Roxanne' (which appears to be a inter-species love story of some sort), and Russian versiuons of 'Big Brother', 'Who wants to tbe a Millionaire' or 'Wheel of Fortune.' Happily, the latter are hilarious, with people breaking in to song at every opportunity for no apparent reason. Well, it's better than 'Casualty'.

Overheard in St Petersburg

2007-07-19T12:50:00.000+01:00

'What does she come out with when she HASN'T been thinking?'

American girl in the internet cafe:
"I told Josh [on Facebook] that I miss him more than a fat cat on a diet misses twinkies... it took me a while to come up with something really witty to say."

Meanwhile, the owners of the internet cafe have just started watching a Russian-dubbed version of The Big Lebowski. Fantastic!

exhaustedly

2007-07-13T16:54:00.000+01:00

On Wednesday we visited the Museum of Political History on the Petrograd Side. This is housed in a building where Lenin installed himself between April and July 1917. Its most famous exhibit is a recreation of Lenin's office there.
I have to admit to being a little bored by the museum in general - much of it consists of documents and photographs about various figures which have been reproduced, with more detail and context, in books. But there are some very interesting exhibits, and the collection of materials relating to 'everyday life' (from an example of the kind of leather jackets revolutionaries wore in the early 20s to a recretion of a 1980s living room with a figure sitting reading the critical journal 'Ogonyok') were well worth the visit.
We have nearly exhausted ourselves with sightseeing, although we have seen only a fraction of the city's attractions - and have as yet no plans for the weekend except for some badly needed revision of Russian grammar, which is currently causing us endless problems. (As RL said the other day, we are now getting to the stage with the Russian where our eyes are being opened to how much we do not know. This kind of Socratic ignorance is proving something of a dent to confidence.. but we are getting there). In term of sightseeing, I am still desperate to go and see what remains of the Bosheviks' "Museum of Atheism "... more on that later.
Swan lake was good, except for a great deal of flash photography, and lots of clapping at the wrong time - both of which seemed to be the responsibility of the inordinate number of French people in the audience. On that, no comment.

On a happy note, I found a DVD of one of my favourite Russian films (Alexei Balabanov's 'Brother') in a supermarket for 100 roubles (2 quid), which was very nice.

Lugovoi

2007-07-12T12:44:00.000+01:00

Well... events of the last couple of days are not altogether encouraging in terms of Anglo-Russian relations. Moscow has asserted that it will not extradite Andrei Lugovoi, because Russia's constitution prevents citizens' extradition. The Foreign Office refuse to consider Moscow's offer to try Lugovoi in Russia and "is expected to announce a tough response as early as next week" this morning's FT reports. “you can expect something to be announced to parliament very soon,” says "one Whitehall insider.
"Analysts said a return to the Cold War tactic of diplomatic expulsions was one option likely to be being considered, alongside visa bans on certain law and order officials, or withdrawing cooperation in areas such as education, social affairs or counter-terrorism information."

This is not encouraging for those of us who rely on such cooperation. In certain areas - like access to archives - there has been a dramatic decline in accessibility to Western researchers since 2000, and this kind of antagonism is only going to make the situation worse. It is a curious irony: if the government listened more carefully to the kind of political science research carried out with the money it provides to the research councils and universities - the kind of research it is so ready to jeopardise with ill-considered threats and insinuations - it might realise that these kinds of tactics simply are not going to intimidate Putin's government.
This kind of thing is not helped by sloppy journalism. A story datelined today (for tomorrow's paper?) on Guardian online suggests:
"President Putin has angrily dismissed as "stupidity" Britain's request for Mr Lugovoi's extradition. The Kremlin has already waged a campaign of intimidation and harassment against Britain's ambassador in Moscow, Tony Brenton, carried out by activists from the Russian youth group Nashi. Pro-Kremlin protesters picketed the British embassy, jumped in front of the ambassador's car and heckled his speeches. The anti-UK campaign has spread to the British Council, which has been raided by tax officials wearing balaclavas, and was last month told to move out of its offices in the city of Yekaterinburg."
Well, this is a dodgy insinuation. Nashi (whose links with the Kremlin are dubious - it is certainly not true to suggest that it is simply an organ of the Kremlin) began its campaign against Tony Brenton after the latter attended an opposition conference in July 2006 - 5 months before the Litvinenko murder.

Time running out at the internet cafe and I have been distracted by having to write an email to the Guardian about the above innaccuracy. Tonight we are going to see Swan Lake at the Marinskii theatre. More news soon!

Touristy

2007-07-08T16:01:00.000+01:00

We have spent the weekend in museums. Yesterday, the Russian Museum (which exhibits Russian art from icons up to about 1950) and today the Ethnographic Museum (which was created as a display of the cultural diversity of the various peoples of the Soviet Union). Both museums are so overflowing with fantastic displays that they left us exhausted.
I have managed to procure a poster of Briullov's excellent 'The Last Days of Pompeii' (unfortunately, the picture below cannot do justice to this gigantic painting).

I have also found a shop selling old Soviet posters for a reasonable price (about 7 Pounds each) and will likely procure one. I will also go vodka shopping this week. Anyone who wants something brought back from Russia and hasn't told me so yet should get in touch. I can accomodate at least two or three further requests.
Finally, I am very excited that there is an ongoing mini-series about the life of Nestor Makhno on Russian TV. Makhno was the leader of a Ukranian peasant-anarchist movement in the Russian civil war, which I studied for my undergraduate dissertation a year ago. Very exciting. Unfortunately it is apparently a 12-part series, with one episode a week, and we are only here for 6. And our Russian skills are coming along so well that we can almost understand the newsreaders, who somehow talk at about 4 times the pace of anybody else.

Details

2007-07-06T16:02:00.000+01:00

Well... I have been asked for details, so here are a few.
Borat fans: the Russian for church is 'Храм' (pronounced 'khram')
Notable culinary discovery thus far: pancakes made out of fried shredded potato, stuffed with minced pork, and served with a mushroom and sour-cream sauce. Stupendous. Pirozhki (pastries stuffed with meat) are also excellent, but then we all knew that, didn't we?
Just how cheap is the beer? In the shops, around $1, or 50p, for a pint of decent Russian beer. In the bar, a bit more - about $1.50.
Pictures look impossible until I get back. But I have 100 so far, and there are still 5 weeks to go - so when they come, they will be many. :) I can, however, illustrate with pictures pilfered from elsewhere.
This week it has been sunny and hot, so that parks and the grounds of palaces are full of sunbathers. As I write, it has started raining properly for the first time. We have been taking advantage of the good weather, while it lasts, to wander around the city a bit and look at various churches and palaces. From the extremeley Russian Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood (so called because it was built on the site of the 1881 assasination of Tsar Alexander II)...

... to the quite deliberately Western St. Isaac's Cathedral, designed by the French architect Auguste de Monferrand.

This Saturday, Elton John will play an open-air concert in Palace Square (the square outside the Winter Palace/Hermitage).

There are also posters everywhere with a picture of some extremely decrepit looking Rolling Stones, who are also playing here soon, apparently.

Plans for the weekend include a trip to the Russian Museum (which has all the Russian stuff, while the Hermitage has mostly stuff stolen or bought from Europe). Happily, we have been issued with student cards, which give us reduced access to all museums and cathedrals, and free access to the Hermitage. It should also get me in to the Russian State Library, when I venture there, but alas, I haven't managed it yet.

"Paka" ('bye for now' / 'see you soon'!)

PS: for those who are interested, RL and I are reading 'Discipline and Punish' and having heated discussions about compulsion and consumption in capitalism. Oh yeah, and we are still learning some Russian too :)

Russia

2007-07-02T14:51:00.000+01:00

Well, we are here.
We spent the whole day yesterday walking around the Fontanka island (the central part of the city, where we are staying) and taking photos. We have bright sunshine, and it's very warm - fantastic. Everything in the city seems to be on a huge scale. Massive buildings (so big it's hard to take a photo that gets any detail but that the whole building fits in to), wide roads (where the drivers weave between traffic giving no indication) and the huge river Neva and its bridges. When we got here on Saturday night and began to walk around (at around 10.30 pm, when the sun is setting - it's properly dark by about 1am) there were runners finishing a marathon on the Nevskii Prospekt, and a large group of inebriated soldiers marching up and down in the Palace Square (outside the Winter Palace/Hermitage).
I've already taken a few good photos, but cannot yet find a way to upload them. It may have to wait until I return.
Each situtation of interaction leaves no option but to learn a bit more Russian. In at the deep end indeed, but there is already a lot of progress in the first 48 hours. I have yet to be tempted to really indulge in the dangerously cheap beer (perhaps over the weekend) but we have already had a nice mixture of food - the good, the bad and the ugly. So much to do, so little time, but we are having a lot of fun. Today we discovered that our student cards from the unviersity give us free access to the Hermitage (it normally costs around 20 pounds) so we may be spending a while there. I have yet to venture to the National Library of Russia for an interrogation about why I want to use it - apparently they speak little or no English.
The internet cafe timer is about to run out, so adios for now!

Khochu v Leningrad!

2007-06-29T20:54:00.001+01:00

Well, the day has finally come. Tomorrow we depart (me, A.K., and the Romanian Lacanian) for St. Petersburg, which means this blog turns in to a kind of travelogue, with the horrifying attendent possibility that somebody might actually read it. Well, I'm sure it'll pass.
Here is where we are going:

The Herzen Pedagogical University, in central St Petersburg, just off the Nevsky Prospekt.

The misguided suggestion, levelled by a few, that this was going to be some kind of holiday has been firmly put to bed by the fact that the Romanian Lacanian emailed me earlier today to find out which books I will be taking with me. Freud, Lacan and Foucault are on the agenda (so far), as well - those of you who enjoy chiding me for not reading enough literature will be pleased to hear - as 'Crime & Punishment'. I'm not expecting a moment's rest.

Next time... photographs (hopefully).

All packed?
"one 45 caliber automatic, two boxes of ammunition, four days concentrated emergency rations, one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills, one miniature combination Rooshan phrase book and Bible, one hundred dollars in rubles, one hundred dollars in gold, nine packs of chewing gum, one issue of prophylactics, three lipsticks, three pair of nylon stockings -- shoot, a fellah could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff...."

Bogeyman Putin

2007-06-13T20:03:00.000+01:00

Vladimir Putin is in some danger of becoming the new Saddam - the man everybody loves to hate. By now, academic commentary on Putin's authoritarianism fits a well-established mould, invoking a key series of events. A typical example is the summary with which Marie-Elisabeth Baudoin introduced a recent article in one of the field's leading journals:
"The takeover of NTV by Gazprom in 2001, the Yukos case and the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovskii in 2003, followed by the move to select governors by presidential appointment in 2004, are among the many indicators of a tightening of the authoritarian character of the Russian political regime since 2000." (Marie-Elisabeth Baudoin, "Is the Constitutional Court the last bastion in Russia against the threat of authoritarianism?" Europe-Asia Studies 58.5, July 2006). In the twelve months since the article was published, further examples have drawn considerable attention in the Western media: the assasinations of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko, violent breakups of democratic protests, including the arrest of leading opposition figures (most prominently, Garry Kasparov) combined with foreign policy moves which have been regarded as 'aggressive' at best by Western commentators: threats to cut off natural gas supplies to neighbouring states, plans for new oil and gas pipelines, the moves to push out foreign gas and oil companies in favour of Gazprom, the conduct of the row over the Estonian war memorial, and the casual (so far) dismissal of British requests for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi over the Litvinenko affair.
Criticism of the Putin regime is becoming something to which a good number of academics seem to be able to devote their lives, and the level of commitment which this has reached is exemplified by the warm reception of a recent book by John Dunlop which makes allegations about Russia's relations with Chechen extremists that would surely have been dismissed as outlandish had they been made a few years ago. Specifically, Dunlop suggests that Russian government agencies conspired with Chechen extremists to prevent the formation of a political settlement or ceasefire in 2002, and blocked any opportunity for meaningful negotiation during the 2004 Beslan siege. (John B. Dunlop, The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan Hostage Crises: A Critique of Russian Counter-terrorism. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006; See glowing reviews in Russian Review 66.2 (April 2007) pp. 346-347 and Europe-Asia Studies 59.1 (Jan 2007) pp. 163-168).
As tensions between Russia and Europe rise, the media has got in on the act, especially in the last 12 months. There appears to be a self-reinforcing consesus forming that Putin has formed a terror state, and is threatening Russia's future.
In the most recent issue of New Left Review, Vladimir Popov strikees a rare note of dissent, concluding that (by the economic and social indicators he was examining) "Russia is in better shape today than seven years ago, when Putin assumed power...Strengthening law and order is only possible under a centralized system. Without centralization, there is no chance at all of it happening;http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif unbounded chaos and lawlessness would rule." (Vladimir Popov, "Russia Redux?" New Left Review NS 44 (March/April 2007)
The point here is that Russia is stabilizing under Putin, and although there are a great many problems and dangers that go along with political centralization, it is important to identify those improvements that have been made. Most specifically, what is missing from too much of the recent commentary is recognition of the absolute calamity of the Yeltsin era, when an explosion of criminality (and semi-criminal profiteering) and economic collapse shook the country. It is necessary to ask why Putin is getting so much more criticism than Yeltsin ever did from Western governments and media. It is not too difficult to find the principle at work (which is close to universal). The criterion is not the welfare of Russia's citizens - which is, as usual, simply a pretext - but rather the 'interests' of Western governments - ie investment opportunities. It is Putin's refusal to play the neoliberal game of "open markets" that is the real cause for all of this criticism, and it is necessary that academics take this in to account. It is, of course, important that the abuses of Putin's government are documented, so that pressure might be exerted on it to curb them - and there are surely few better examples than in foreign policy, although the Chechnya situation continues to recieve much less attention thatn it deserves. But let us not be led in to the trap which would have us pining for the Yeltsin years - those who do so surely cannot expect to be taken seriously when they profess concern for the welfare of the Russian people. Putin is not by any means the only menace threatening Russia, and the academy has a grave responsibility to remember this.

In Lebanon

2007-05-28T17:29:00.001+01:00

Empty bullet cartridges litter a street that leads into the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al-Bared in the deadliest internal violence since Lebanon's 1975-90 Civil War. Story.

Gilliam's Brazil to be remade!

2007-05-05T16:47:00.000+01:00

The Queen to audition for the part of Ida Lowry.

Voters without a voice

2007-05-03T11:00:00.000+01:00

Repost of my thoughts on local elections published the last time around - 12 months ago. Very little seems to have changed.

Local elections take place in England on Thursday. Ostensibly, we are electing people to lead local councils. The fact is it doesn't matter much who is elected - the central government dictates what it wants most of the money spent on, so that local councils end up deliberating the most minor details (should X pub be allowed to open until 1am on Friday nights? Should we resurface the high street?...), powerless even to do anything much about astronomical council tax rates.
What then is the meaning of these elections? Today's FT carries a piece by James Blitz announcing that "Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, will launch on Tuesday a desperate bid to avert a serious setback for his Labour party in this Thursday’s local elections, seeking to draw a line under a week of disastrous news stories for the British government."
The news stories in question concern John Prescott's office romance and the thousand foreign criminals who were released instead of being considered for deportation, for which Home Secretary Charles Clarke ("an important cabinet ally [for Blair]" another FT story reminds us) has shouldered the blame.
It is surely no accident that the foreign-prisoner story broke when it did. Gordon Brown's allies have determined to make the local elections into an embarrassment for Blair and his allies, hoping to push him towards an early resignation. (On a slight tangent, we might wonder why the media become so astonished and outraged by foreign criminals reoffending, while British criminals' reoffending rates are unremarkable. In this week's Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins put it down to thinly disguised racism. Perhaps, but I think it has as much to do with Brown allies being able to generate a media controversy through intelligent briefing of the newspapers).

All clear enough, but what are Joe and Jo Public to do? Should they participate in this undemocratic charade, and allow the elections to become an instrument of a disagreement within the ruling party, or refuse to legitimise this nonsense, and be told by the media that low turn-out rates prove that Pop Idol is more important to people than politics? (Quite differently, politics matters to people, but the majority have freed themselves of the illusion that it happens in the House of Commons, or that elections have anything to do with it - an affliction which is increasingly confined to the wealthiest 20% of the population, and even many of them are beginning to wonder).

We need to develop an alternative means of political expression. The old modes are outdated, and have largely been hijacked by a vain few who will collude with anyone who stuffs their pockets and keeps the dream of celebrity alive for them. This is just as true of left politics, which has barely changed at all since 1789 in terms of the technology of popular expression, and in this country has suffered terribly at the hands of George Galloway's RESPECT Coalition, which drained the StopTheWar campaign of all its vitality. These stale forms need some rethinking if we are to regain the democracy and liberty which - in principle - our society holds so dear.

Joined-up editing

2007-04-28T10:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday: The Independent devotes its front page to congratulating itself that its "Campaign Against Waste" has generated an Early Day Motion signed by 112 MPs. "The Independent's campaign has exposed how scores of everyday products are over-packaged in wrappers, trays and cartons made from finite natural resources such as oil." (Martin Hickman, Independent, 28/04/07; see also leading article).

Today: The Independent comes wrapped in a plastic packet to ensure that the enclosed 'British Bird Song' CD (and let's face it - who could face being without a British Song Bird CD?) is safely secured.

androgyny

2007-04-24T19:26:00.000+01:00

Reasons not to go to nightclubs in Hertfordshire number 423: 'Geezer-birds'... and Jade Goody...

Violence on screen

2007-04-20T22:08:00.000+01:00

Tragedies such as the massacre in Virginia this week invite journalists and other media "commentators" to muster every bit of their breathtaking stupidity to offer an analysis of the events and what lies behind them. At the apogee of the idiotic kneejerk responses on this occasion is Gerald Kaufman MP, in a column in today's Daily Telegraph.
Among the profound observations: "Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, and his earlier Reservoir Dogs, which I personally flinched at viewing, are explicitly inspired by other films." Precisely who this ought to surprise is far from clear, certainly anyone who has seen an episode of The Simpsons will recognise the banality of the statement as utterly boneheaded. And if The Telegraph's readership are so detached from the rest of the world to have learned the lesson this way, they might at least recall Virgil's Aeneid from their school days.

While Chan Wook Park's Old Boy, and (even more baffling) John Woo's excremental Face/Off are Kaufman's major targets, he also tries to pin some of the blame of Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine. Now, since fictional feature films, even those as dull and undeveloped as the work of John Woo, deliberately employ some level of ambiguity as a stylistic device - something Kaufman makes clear he is unable to comprehend - we will focus on Moore's documentary, which does not. Michael Moore can be accused of a certain level of self-righteousness, but certainly not of a lack of clarity. He goes to great lengths in Bowling for Columbine to make his message as unambiguous as possible, and in this at least, he succeeds. So we are left with two possibilities: either Kaufman is unable to grasp the meaning of an extremely simple message, repeated many times in the course of a 2-hour documentary, or he has written a comment piece about films which for the most part he has not seen. In either case, he is not fit to remain in his job. If the first is true, and Kaufman is unable to grasp the message of a straightforward documentary, then he cannot be expected to assess the nuances of intricate legislation and represent his constituents' interests. If the second is true, and he is happy to hold forth on films he has not seen, we can only assume he is equally comfortable voting for laws he has not bothered to read.
Which brings us back to the subject matter of Moore's documentary. The major argument, repeated again and again, was that media sensationalism about violent and criminal activity generated a climate of fear which made violent crime more likely. One does not have to agree with the message, but real effort is required to fail to understand it. The scenes of violence, CCTV footage of the Columbine massacre, and description of the events featured in the film had all been taken from television news. The point was that they were presented in such a way that contributed to a climate of fear and social dislocation and isolation which increased the likelihood of further instances of this kind of atrocity. If Kaufman had understood this, he would be able to recognise that the scenes of violence and descriptions of the Columbine massacre were not original material. They were, in essence, redistributions of television news footage. Moore's critics have accused him of contextualising these in such a manner as to manipulate his audience's emotions - that is, to use them to reinforce the horrific nature of the crime, when originally they were contextualised in such a way as to dull the television audience's reaction, to desensitize them to the crime.
If Kaufman had seen the film and understood this, he would have realised that the material he identifies in Bowling for Columbine as inspiring the Virginia massacre was in fact television news footage, and if this footage did inspire Cho, Moore's film is only responsible as a redistributer of television news. It should also be clear enough that Moore's contextualisation of the same footage could not by any means increase the likelihood that it would inspire a similar killing. So if this footage is really to blame, then Kaufman's targets should be the television news media who produced and broadcast it in the first place. And this of course would generate a rather different argument.
To reiterate, if Kaufman is unable to see the contradictions inherent in his article, it is because he has not seen the films he wrote about, or because his ability to follow an argument is utterly appalling, or because he is willing to be utterly dishonest to exploit a tragedy to get an article in the newspaper. Whatever is the truth, his constituents ought to have no faith in him whatsoever.

Bacon sandwiches

2007-04-14T16:56:00.000+01:00

One of the stupider news stories of this week concerned Leeds university Department of Food Science research to produce a "formula" for the perfect bacon sandwich. The story was given prominent coverage on BBC radio, as well as appearing on BBC News Online, in 4 national papers (The Times, The Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Star) 4 local papers (including the high-circulation Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post) and numerous international outlets, including the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.
What the international papers had the decency to mention was where the money came from. The reseach was "commissioned by the Danish Bacon and Food Council, the British subsidiary of a Danish pig producers' organization" the New York Times reports (Alan Cowell, NYT, April 11 2007). The Stockport Express reports that an event for journalists was organized at Othello's Cafe Bar in Stockport, where the research was "put to the test."
So what we have is the manufacture of a 'news' story which cost the Danish Bacon and Food Council much less than the equivalent advertising space in the 20 or so publications where the story appeared. Big deal - the practice is common enough, most often appearing in the form of surveys commissioned by companies. And you might even say that a bit of additional research funding won't do Leeds' Department of Food Science much harm. But here's the problem: the government wants to stimulate this kind of "investment" in higher education and research from the "private sector" so that it can slash state funding and redirect the money to fill budget deficits resulting from PFI projects gone wrong, mismanagement of the public services, or the spiralling costs of the Olympic games. Academics justifiably complain about having a lack of resources. The danger is that if this trend continues, there will be research funding, but academics will be forced to conduct meaningless studies on trivial subjects, instead of doing something worthwhile. This is already a serious enough problem for science, which in certain sectors (like chemistry) is almost entirely reliant on private funding for research, but it is increasingly affecting other subjects too. The faith of the general public in the value of academic research is shaky enough already - if stories of this kind are the most frequent examples they hear of, this is hardly a surprise.
Seeing a story like this, academics are prone to dismiss it as the product of a news media structured in such a way as to produce trivialities to advance the interests of their parent companies and advertisers. But they should pay attention if they do not wish to join the club.

Black cinema?

2007-04-01T14:58:00.000+01:00

Someone gave me a gift voucher for HMV, so this afternoon I went to the big Oxford Street branch looking for a DVD to buy with it. I noticed that whoever is distributing The Exorcism of Emily Rose has some rather strange ideas about target markets. The only quote they had found for the box was: ‘Absolutely Bloody Terrifying’ – Nuts.
Stranger than this, however, was that in this particular store, a section has been created recently for “Black cinema.” I suppose that in the abstract, I can imagine some plausible argument in favour of this, but when it comes down to it, it seems less than sensible to take Hotel Rwanda, Boyz n the Hood and Little Man and put them together in a section of their own. But on a closer look, it gets even weirder: also in this section are 8 Mile (Eminem’s biopic by any other name), City of God (the one about gangs in Rio) and Sister Act, with Whoopi Goldberg. Tenuous in the extreme, or am I missing something?
Once again, I’d love to know what kind of ‘target market’ they had in mind…

Understanding Stalinism

2007-03-16T18:18:00.000Z

I have been thinking about turning this into an "academic blog," although I have been worrying that if I did, I would thus be confronted with my lack of interesting or meaningful things to say. I suppose that without an audience, this matters little in any case, and I can in fact meander along posting pretty much what I want. Freedom.

This week I've been reading Jochen Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin which is probably the most interesting book I've read on Soviet history in the last year. The main reason I wanted to write about it here is that it seems to me that this is the kind of book which people who are not historians but who want to know something about Stalinism ought to be reading. It is something of a shame that if you go into a (nonspecialist) bookshop or public library looking for books on the Stalin period that are not school or undergraduate textbooks, you will have the choice of buying a general history of the Soviet Union (these aren't bad on the whole), a biography of Stalin (these are also pretty good for what they are) and perhaps some kind of social history (Sheila Fitzpatrick's 'Everyday Stalinism' would be an example on the better side). It seems to me that Hellbeck's book offers an insight into the individual experience of life under Stalin which is unparalleled. This is slightly different from the approach of Catriona Kelly in 'Comrade Pavlick' which is more an interrogation of a famous case and how it played out in an effort to give an insight into Stalinist society. The difference with Hellbeck's book is that he is able to integrate the story of individuals into the story of the whole society in a rather different way - to show that for at least a considerable number of people living in the 1930s Soviet Union, the struggle to make sense of their lives became inextricable from the revolution - the struggle to reach consciousness permeated (it it did not necessarily consume) every element of their lives. And this kind of study gives a much better idea of what it was like for people to live in such a society than yet another investigation of the regime's arbitrariness or the pervasive presence of the NKVD.
In terms of interrogating 'modern subjectivity,' in the Soviet context, the book makes a genuine leap forward, opening up questions which simply have never been asked by historians of this period. In the process, Hellbeck has produced what I believe is one of the most readable and engaging histories of the 1930s published in recent years. It deserves to find a readership far beyond university history departments, and replace books like Sebag-Montefiore's "Stalin: in the court of the Red Tsar" and Anne Appelbaum's "Gulag" as the texts to which people turn when they decide they'd like to know something about Stalinism. (I pick on these two not because they are bad books - they are both ok, in fact - but because they have been extremely popular in recent years). I hope paperback publication is not far off.

Inland Empire

2007-03-10T10:13:00.000Z

David Lynch's new film Inland Empire is a totally unique piece of film-making. Much has been made in reviews and media coverage of the switch to filming on Digital Video instead of on film, but it is difficult to gain any appreciation of the effect of this without actually seeing the film itself - the way Lynch has used these DV cameras has produced a totally new cinematic experience. The self-referentiality of the film (on the surface, it's a film about the production of a film) is only one of the elements served by the employment of DV. Perhaps more important is the possibility of fluid, unstable, often fuzzy and unfocused shots (particularly close-ups) which seem to me to be able to imitate the human gaze in a manner which has never been achieved on film, or with the bulky cameras needed to shoot on film. It also destabilises the image sufficiently to make leaps into abstract imagery seem natural - as a result, it is not only the appearance of unexpected, abstract imagery which can unsettle the viewer, but (because of the blurring of the boundaries) the entire film.
Lynch is not the first to use digital videos to generate visual abstraction in film (video artists have been doing it for years), but I have never seen it done is such a sustained and coherent (and thus, affecting) way. What is unique and original about Inland Empire is that it is not something which should be playing on a loop in an art gallery - it is cinema, but not cinema as I have ever seen it.
Finally, Laura Dern's performance is absolutely phenomenal - a plurality of roles, with blurred boundaries between them, playing into one another, which she plays so convincingly that it totally conceals how demanding the film must have been.

On opening night at the only West End cinema which is showing the film (the Odeon Covent Garden, who have happily placed it in their biggest screen - which was 3/4 full - this is important, as on a smaller screen the impact of the film would surely be greatly diminished) the mixture of reactions was on balance largely positive. In a 3 hour film, many will need a toilet break, so walkouts could potentially go unnoticed, but if there were any at all, it was very few. It was particularly heartening to see groups of teenagers of about 14 or 15 so excited about the film (although I seriously wonder about the 15 certificate for what is at times a deeply unsettling film). On the way out, expressions of bewilderment prevailed, but happily, few seemed to regret the experience for this reason. Hopefully the film will stick around for a while and enjoy some success. It is truly something which can only really be experienced in the cinema - where it is possible to be really drawn into the film. I have a feeling it is also necessary to surrender oneself to it completely in order to appreciate what is happening. Having said this, much of the second half of the film is extremely unsettling, with an intensity which may simply be too great for some to cope with (I began to imagine I was seeing things off-screen in my peripheral vision which were not there, and at times felt deeply uncomfortable, but unable to leave).

Inland Empire is a uniquely powerful piece of art, which should be approached with openness, and a willingness to accept that much of its beauty lies precisely in the unsettling confusion produced by narrative developments which make little or no logical sense. Each moment should be experienced for itself. Surrender yourself to the film, and it will give you a totally original experience.

Baudrillard

2007-03-08T00:09:00.000Z

Jean Baudrillard has died. The result is newspaper journalists trying to explain why he was important. I have a feeling he would have enjoyed this, I hope so at least. On a more serious level, these moments when the academic world collides with the media can be interesting, and a little bit unsettling. You would expect journalists, who ought at least to have spent 3 years at a half-decent university, to have at least SOME idea of what academics are doing (or trying to do). I wonder if obituaries of figures like Baudrillard, and similar pieces of journalism, were any better in the pre-Wikipedia universe.
The worst piece I have come across so far is, predictably enough, from The Guardian. Most newspaper journalists would be happy enough admitting they have no idea what Baudrillard was on about - but the Guardian seems to be exactly the sort of place to foster journalists who feel that people expect them to know about things like this, and try to live up to the expectation. The result: utter nonsense.
Edward Said died the week I began university, which I remember producing a strange feeling - aside from some sadness - that the previously rigid distinction between 'dead thinkers' (who did not exist, except for the traces they left behind) and 'living thinkers' (real human subjects, people with whom one can engage) had been totally disrupted.
I've always liked this snippet from a 1993 interview with Said, and it seems, in a sense, to be a nice way to remember these two:
A:"[The 1991 Gulf War] was a television war."
Q:"In Baudrillard's terms?"
A:"What did he say? Probably not."
Q:"Baudrillard said it was a hyper-real non-event"
A: "Good old Baudrillard! For that I think he should be sent there. WIth a toothbrush and a can of Evian or whatever it is he drinks."
(Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said ed. Gauri Viswanthan, 2001) p. 232.

On the front lines of the 'war on terror'

2006-11-12T14:27:00.000Z

Out of sight, out of mind. Graham Usher is in Peshawar.

Image and reality in Darfur

2006-09-18T10:00:00.000+01:00

If in doubt, follow the money.

From today's Independent:

World marches to save Darfur
With demonstrations in 40 countries yesterday, pressure is mounting on Sudan to allow in peacekeepers and end a conflict in which 300,000 people have died
By Steve Bloomfield
Published: 18 September 2006

Survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide marched through the streets of Kigali yesterday, calling for the world to take action to end the slaughter in Darfur. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of protesters in more than 40 countries around the world - many of whom wore blue hats to symbolise support for a United Nations peacekeeping force to enter the troubled Sudanese region.

More than 300,000 people are believed to have died and at least 2.5 million have lost their homes in what the United States and some humanitarian groups have labelled genocide.

Freddy Umutanguha, who survived the Rwandan genocide, said: "We survivors stand with the victims in Darfur. We know what it is like to lose our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. We know what it is like to lose everything and see all who are dearest to us destroyed."

In London, survivors of the Holocaust joined protesters outside the Sudanese embassy, while Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders delivered prayers for the people of Darfur to Downing Street.

The former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright addressed a rally in Central Park, New York, and demonstrations and rallies took place across Asia and Africa.

The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution two weeks ago to send 20,000 peacekeepers to Darfur to end the crisis. But the resolution requires Sudan's government to agree to the presence of UN troops, and so far Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, has refused.

Some 7,000 poorly equipped African Union troops are currently trying to keep a lid on the violence. But their mandate ends on 30 September and Sudan is unwilling to allow them to stay.

Speaking in Havana, at a meeting of non-aligned nations, Mr Bashir said: "We don't want the United Nations back to Sudan, no matter the conditions." He has likened a UN force in Darfur to "Western colonisation" and has vowed to personally lead the "jihad" against it.

Yesterday Tony Blair outlined a "carrot and stick" approach to persuading Sudan to allow in a UN force. The Prime Minister also wrote to leaders of EU nations and the EU president, Jose Manuel Barroso, calling for joint European action.

While it is unlikely that a UN force will be arriving in Darfur soon, diplomatic activity over the weekend and in the coming week is likely to lead to some action. The UN has passed a resolution calling for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Darfur, although like all 13 resolutions passed on Darfur it has not yet been enforced. One of the main tactics employed by Sudan is to bomb villages from the air before the Janjaweed, horse-borne militia, move in. Diplomats believe the no-fly zone could be introduced soon as a first step. France has jet fighters in neighbouring Chad which could enforce it.

Mr Blair and President George Bush have also been trying to persuade China, one of Sudan's strongest allies, to use its influence to change Mr Bashir's mind. China has lucrative oil ties to Sudan and, along with another country with economic links, Russia, refused to vote for the recent UN resolution to send in peacekeepers.

Western diplomats believe that China may throw its weight behind the call for a UN force. While Mr Bashir claims to be against a UN presence in his country, some 10,000 "blue helmets" are in south Sudan implementing a recently signed peace agreement between north and south. White UN Land Cruisers are a common site in Sudan's capital, Khartoum.

Mr Bashir has also argued that the push for a UN force in Darfur is coming mainly from the West. But Muslim groups were heavily involved in yesterday's "Day for Darfur" and more demonstrations and events took place in Africa than in Europe.

Brendan Cox, director of Crisis Action, said: "What you saw was the coming together of Muslims, Christians and Jews with a very clear single message. The situation is on the edge - we are looking into the abyss. The international community has to live up to its responsibilities."

From today's FT:

HEADLINE: US moves stall to press Sudan on Darfur

BYLINE: Guy Dinmore in Washington

BODY:

Moves in Congress to put financial pressure on Sudan to stop the killings in Darfur have been stymied by a combination of big business interests and the Bush administration, according to supporters of legislation blocked in the Senate that would have endorsed decisions by US states to divest from companies involved in Sudan.

Tens of billions of dollars in equity are at stake, mostly of non-US companies and including two listed Chinese energy giants involved in Sudan's rapidly growing oil industry which fuels the military with arms and other supplies.

While giving rhetorical backing to anti-genocide protests staged around the world on Sunday, Democrats and Republicans admitted that a new watered down draft of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act was further evidence of US unwillingness as well as inability to take decisive action.

The draft put forward last week after long delays by Senator Richard Lugar, head of the foreign relations committee, took out controversial language known as "section 11" in the House equivalent that passed in April. This would have given a green light to a growing, celebrity-backed Sudan divestment campaign that has successfully targeted states, universities, pension and investment funds, persuading them to dump stock.

In June New Jersey became the first state to divest fully public funds from foreign companies linked to Sudan, selling $2.16bn of stock. Maine, Oregon, Illinois and Connecticut have also passed divestment legislation, as have many public and private universities with billions of dollars in endowments.

"Section 11 was critical," said Jason Miller, national policy director of the Sudan Divestment Task Force which is co-ordinating the campaign. His group pushes for divestment targeted not at all companies in Sudan but those deemed to be directly helping the government, through the oil industry which accounts for over half of state revenues and some telecommunications companies that have directly assisted the military.

On the other side, the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), a US business lobby group representing major industries, is fighting the campaign and has sued the state of Illinois.

Bill Reinsch, president of the NFTC, lobbied Congress. He told the FT that the principle was simple "the president of the United States runs foreign policy; the mayor of Berkeley does not".

The NFTC also complains that lists of target companies are drawn up by unaccountable private interest groups. He said some of the US companies listed had been exempt from existing US sanctions to do business with Sudan usually in the south where rebel groups recently signed a peace accord with Khartoum. Others had nothing to do with Sudan, he said.

It is not clear whether Mr Lugar's draft will get through the committee, though there is a sense that so much time has been wasted that something is better than nothing. The sudden arrival of the draft caught many by surprise and it is still being studied. No one contacted by the FT could explain why support for a "no fly zone" over Darfur had apparently been dropped as well.

The State Department declined to make an official comment on the issue.

One administration official questioned whether the legislation would make any difference. He said there was little the US could do on its own, its military was stuck and exhausted in Iraq, China was refusing to co-operate and Nato was tied up in Afghanistan.

To that list, analysts said, should be added US reluctance to make Darfur a priority in its difficult relationship with China, Sudan's oil wealth, and a still close intelligence relationship between Washington and Khartoum in the war on terror.

Companies affected by the divestment campaign include: PetroChina, Sinopec, ABB, Alstom, Siemens, Schlumberger, Tatneft of Russia, Italy's Finmeccanica, Weir Group of the UK, and Shell.

Joined-up government

2006-08-11T17:31:00.000+01:00

On page 18 of yesterday's Independent was a story reporting a speech given by John Reid on Wednesday, in which he attacked the "politicians, judges and liberal commentators" who have the temerity to cast a critical eye over the government's so-called 'anti-terrorism measures.' Rather than explaining how government policy reduces the threat of terrorism, Dr. Reid appealed to the scale of the threat, falling back on the standard vacuous warnings which characterise the political discourse of anti-terrorism in this country - it represents 'the greatest threat to Britain since the Second World War.'
As yesterday's events illustrate, the scale of the threat is serious indeed; there is very little discussion to be had about this. So the question turns to what needs to be done to stop it. A glance at the morning's news might suggest that the government's anti-terror strategy is basically working if they successfully foiled a plot of this scale, and this will certainly be the line which the government tries to pursue in the coming weeks, probably with a view to presenting the ludicrous ID-card scheme as a necessary tool in stopping terrorism.
As reports on last night's Newnight made clear, however, the information came from Pakistani intelligence - who do a great deal of the leg work in the 'war on terror.' The truth about the government's anti-terror strategy is that it is as incoherent and counter-productive as the rest of New Labour's policy-making. Endless extensions on the capacity of the police to arrest, detain, or perhaps even shoot 'suspected terrorists' leads to clumsy policy which exacerbates the impression of a war on Islam, alienating young Muslims and making UK-based terror plots more likely. We are forced to rely on Pakistani intelligence to save us from the mess our own government has created. That this can be morphed in to an argument to support the government's "anti-terrorism" programme suggests we are not paying enough attention to the details.

More Lebanon

2006-07-29T10:12:00.000+01:00

Narjis Faqih, 3, above, a Shia, was in a three-car convoy fleeing the south Lebanon village of Aytaroun on July 19 when it was attacked by two jets. Five members of her family died, including her father. She has not uttered a word since. Her grandmother, Khadija Awada, says the last sound Narjis made was a cry to her father who was sitting in front of her as a sheet of flame ripped through the car. Now she sits motionless, never taking her eyes off her mother, Lena Mostafa, 29, who lies seriously injured in the next bed. The grandmother says: “How can I tell her that she’ll never see her Dad again?” Everything they owned was incinerated. The hospital has given her toys, but she won’t touch them.

-The Times, 28th July.

UK plc

2006-07-25T23:14:00.000+01:00

"One senior Israeli official told The Times that Dr Rice’s visit would provide a distraction from the humanitarian situation in Lebanon, while the protracted nature of her tour gave Israel another week to continue its military operations."

--Philip Webster, The Times, 25 July.

Lebanon

2006-07-22T00:25:00.001+01:00

A mass grave in Tyre

South Beirut

Neglect

2006-06-29T20:12:00.000+01:00

Pressing matters and having to work for a living (only for a while) have left me neglecting the blog. Don't suppose anyone noticed. Anyway... I've been reading The Times a lot recently, because that's the paper they get at work.
This is quite irritating.
This is quite interesting.
This is a little surprising.

For "insight" I guess y'all have to wait a bit longer.

The threat of anti-terrorism

2006-06-04T13:35:00.000+01:00

On Friday morning, a man was shot in a raid on an East London house. By this morning, a reasonable picture of what happened is beginning to form; the Sunday Times story reports:
"Scotland Yard sources said that the “specific intelligence” which had led to the raid suggested that a single bomb overlaid with cyanide was being prepared at the address in Forest Gate...
Scotland Yard said yesterday that despite intensive searches of the terraced house in Lansdown Road, Forest Gate, nothing of substance had been found, raising the suspicion that at least some of the intelligence that led to the raid was inaccurate.
A 23-year-old man, named locally as Abdul Kahar Kalam, was shot in the shoulder when a Scotland Yard marksman fired a single shot during the pre-dawn operation.
According to his solicitor, Kate Roxburgh, police did not issue a warning before he was shot as he stumbled onto the staircase in his pyjamas.
“He wasn’t asked to freeze, given any warning and didn’t know the people in his house were police officers until after he was shot,” she said. “He is lucky still to be alive.”"

The issue is very quickly beginning to transcend "civil liberties;" the right not to be shot by the police seems to be eroding - particularly if you have the misfortune of not being White. It seems unlikely that the killing of Jean-Charles de Menezes can be put down merely to bad intelligence, although the IPCC will not release its report until legal proceedings are complete - the CPS is considering legal charges against Sir Ian Blair, today's Observer reports.

The Sunday Times story appends:
"An official report into the July 7 bombings will say that the response of the emergency services was partly hampered by poor co-ordination, poor radio communication and insufficient resources.
The Greater London Authority inquiry will praise the individual heroism of emergency services workers and injured survivors who struggled to save critically injured victims. But it will say emergency plans were inadequate and response times were slower than acceptable.
The report will also say the emergency services were stretched to the limit by the suicide bombs that killed 56 people, including the four terrorists.
The fire service, in particular, is said to have been hampered by a shortage of engines as the scale of the attacks unfolded. Fire engines were said to have been immobilised when they were accidentally cordoned off as police secured the scenes of the three Tube bombings."

With such pervasive incompetence in administration, do we really want to trust the police to use the shoot-without-warning policy wisely? Incidentally, it looks as though the latest incident was another big mistake if the reports are accurate. The procedures of "Operation Kratos" call for firearms officers to aim at the head, and shoot without warning, specifically to prevent suicide bombers from detonating explosives - this was the operational procedure which led to the killing of De Menezes. Yesterday's Guardian reports:
"Scotland Yard said officers involved in yesterday's raid were operating under regular rules for firearms incidents, rather than the Kratos tactics which allow them to shoot dead suspected suicide bombers without the need to issue a warning...
Official firearms policy says officers should shoot to incapacitate suspects, and aim at the upper body because it provides a large target and offers the best chance of shutting down the central nervous system."
If Abdul Kalam was not suspected of being within reach of whatever explosive devices he was supposed to have had in his home - but rather wandering downstairs in his pyjamas - and if he needed only to be "incapacitated" rather than killed, then why was he not warned before being shot? Again, operational confusion is a possibility, which would fit well with the picture of dire incompetence which has formed around the police's anti-terror measures in the last year.
The government will not consider redrafting legislation on these matters, appealing for 1967 and 1984 pieces of legislation which call for "such force as is reasonable in the circumstances to effect an arrest or to prevent crime" here at cols. 274-275 and here at col. 1760W- an utterly ludicrous position given that the Prime Minister is constantly defending his attempts to undermine civil liberties with his appeal to the extraordinary nature of the threat of terrorism since 2001.

Calls for some oversight, or even some thought about this situation are sure to be rejected with appeals to national security. How far do allow our security to be threatened before we reject this nonsense?

How diplomacy works

2006-05-23T20:13:00.000+01:00

Being busy and out of London restricts me to reprinting interesting news articles I find. Here's one from tomorrow's FT:

Washington ‘hawks’ oppose EU3 incentives plan for Iran
>By Guy Dinmore in Washington and Daniel Dombey in London
>Published: May 23 2006 18:44 | Last updated: May 23 2006 18:44
>>

Opposition by US “hawks” led by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, is complicating efforts by the main European powers to put together an agreed package of incentives aimed at persuading Iran to suspend its nuclear fuel cycle programme, according to diplomats and analysts in Washington.

London is hosting on Wednesday political directors of the “EU3” of France, Germany and the UK, together with China, Russia and the US to look at the twin tools of incentives and sanctions.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, was said by one diplomat to have “gone out on a limb” in an attempt to back the EU3’s package of incentives but was facing resistance from Mr Cheney who is playing a more visible role in US foreign policy. Another diplomat said US internal divisions were holding up an agreement with the Europeans.

Some European diplomats believe that Washington will back the package – which includes guarantees for the construction of light-water reactors in Iran, promises of nuclear fuel and a new regional security forum – if Moscow endorses a tough chapter seven United Nations Security Council resolution that would require Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.

US officials would not comment on Washington’s internal debate. However, one official said the EU3 had only presented certain elements of the proposed package to the US, including the sale of a light-water nuclear reactor. The US did not respond, he added.

Ms Rice has denied reports that the EU3 asked the US to provide security assurances to Iran. Accusing Iran of being the “central banker of terrorism”, she made clear that such assurances were “not on the table”.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, has already rejected what the EU3 is reported to be offering. Diplomats are doubtful Iran will accept a deal that does not allow it to continue at least small-scale uranium enrichment. The US and EU3 have ruled that out.

Mr Cheney is said to oppose the notion of “rewarding bad behaviour” following Iran’s alleged breaches of its nuclear safeguards commitments. The hawks – who include John Bolton, the US envoy to the UN, and Bob Joseph, a senior arms control official – fear a repeat of a similar agreement reached with North Korea in 1994 which did not stop the communist regime from pursuing a secret weapons programme.

Ministers are still bruised from angry exchanges between Ms Rice and Sergei Lavrov in New York two weeks ago when the Russian foreign minister attacked US policy and condemned a tough speech directed at Moscow by Mr Cheney.

Margaret Beckett, the newly appointed UK foreign secretary, leaped to the defence of Nicholas Burns – the number three in the State Department – when Mr Lavrov targeted him, according to a western diplomat. Ministers should not attack civil servants, Ms Beckett is said to have responded.

An apology

2006-05-17T16:08:00.000+01:00

Just a quick apology to anyone who has been sitting on the edge of their seats for the last two weeks desperate for updates here. (Ha!). I've been doing exams, which have now finished. Hurray!
Seeing Hugo Chavez described as "anti-global" in the Financial Times (no less) this week has made me start thinking about the political language of global financial restructuring, and wondering whether we need to pitch the battle at the discursive level. More on this soon possibly... after I've been to see Radiohead. Hurray!

Rays of hope

2006-05-02T19:24:00.000+01:00

It's one of the sad paradoxes of social change - the most hopeful and progressive popular movements seem to arise only when alternatives to desperation, oppression and indignity have been exhausted. Thus the end of Tsarist autocracy in February 1917 was finally accomplished by a spontaneous popular movement, sparked by the brave women of Petrograd coming out for a rally on International Womens' Day, tired of spending hours queuing in the freezing cold for bread they might not get at the end of their 12-hour shifts in the factory. The German revolution was also a brief reaction to the horrors of the First World War and the shocking loss of life it involved.
Events hardly on the scale of the two above, and hardly a response to the cataclysms which provoked them, but following a similar dynamic, occurred on the streets of New York yesterday. In the face of a political firestorm over what should be done about them, the Latino community, and particularly those segments of it made up of recent immigrants, have begun to make their voices heard, Juan Gonzalez reports.
The debate is no doubt confused - as immigration debates tend to be, even in the US, the definitive immigrant society - and there is very little appreciation of the demographic dynamics at work. As Mike Davis' careful review of the data has shown, "While nativist hysteria has focused on supposedly ‘unrestricted’ immigration, the growth of the Latino population (32 million in 2000) is equally the consequence of higher fecundity in the context of larger, more successfully maintained two-parent families, especially amongst those of Mexican origin (two-thirds of all Latinos). Even if all immigration were terminated tomorrow, the dramatically younger Latino population (median age 26) would continue to increase rapidly at the statistical expense of ageing, non-Hispanic whites (median age 37)." (see text at note 6.)

It should be of concern that the president's answer is a massive, disenfranchised immigrant-gastarbeiter population (although it should equally be recognised that this already exists de facto to a certain extent, if not yet de jure).

Whether these movements represent a resurgent movement for racial equality, this time with a much greater focus on Latinos, or merely a temporary backlash to an extraordinarily (in political circles) hostile climate remains to be seen. Some are already attempting to recast these demands for basic rights as unAmerican particularism - which may itself add fuel to the fire. Where this all leads we shall have to see, but those who lament a loss of revolutionary consciousness perhaps ought to take note of the nature of the concerns of the new oppressed classes, and their intricate relation to capital relations. "You can't talk about globalized capital and exporting jobs and not talk about global human and labor rights for immigrant workers," Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday. "Immigrants aren't sending good jobs overseas, corporations are."

This (aside from a sensible, coherent plot, decent acting and a script) is what's missing from Hollywood's favourite film of last year.

Voters without a voice

2006-05-02T12:25:00.000+01:00

Local elections take place in England on Thursday. Ostensibly, we are electing people to lead local councils. The fact is it doesn't matter much who is elected - the central government dictates what it wants most of the money spent on, so that local councils end up deliberating the most minor details (should X pub be allowed to open until 1am on Friday nights? Should we resurface the high street?...), powerless even to do anything much about astronomical council tax rates.
What then is the meaning of these elections? Today's FT carries a piece by James Blitz announcing that "Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, will launch on Tuesday a desperate bid to avert a serious setback for his Labour party in this Thursday’s local elections, seeking to draw a line under a week of disastrous news stories for the British government."
The news stories in question concern John Prescott's office romance and the thousand foreign criminals who were released instead of being considered for deportation, for which Home Secretary Charles Clarke ("an important cabinet ally [for Blair]" another FT story reminds us) has shouldered the blame.
It is surely no accident that the foreign-prisoner story broke when it did. Gordon Brown's allies have determined to make the local elections into an embarrassment for Blair and his allies, hoping to push him towards an early resignation. (On a slight tangent, we might wonder why the media become so astonished and outraged by foreign criminals reoffending, while British criminals' reoffending rates are unremarkable. In this week's Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins put it down to thinly disguised racism. Perhaps, but I think it has as much to do with Brown allies being able to generate a media controversy through intelligent briefing of the newspapers).

All clear enough, but what are Joe and Jo Public to do? Should they participate in this undemocratic charade, and allow the elections to become an instrument of a disagreement within the ruling party, or refuse to legitimise this nonsense, and be told by the media that low turn-out rates prove that Pop Idol is more important to people than politics? (Quite differently, politics matters to people, but the majority have freed themselves of the illusion that it happens in the House of Commons, or that elections have anything to do with it - an affliction which is increasingly confined to the wealthiest 20% of the population, and even many of them are beginning to wonder).

We need to develop an alternative means of political expression. The old modes are outdated, and have largely been hijacked by a vain few who will collude with anyone who stuffs their pockets and keeps the dream of celebrity alive for them. This is just as true of left politics, which has barely changed at all since 1789 in terms of the technology of popular expression, and in this country has suffered terribly at the hands of George Galloway's RESPECT Coalition, which drained the StopTheWar campaign of all its vitality. These stale forms need some rethinking if we are to regain the democracy and liberty which - in principle - our society holds so dear.

Behind the (most recent) Iran crisis

2006-04-30T15:10:00.000+01:00

Tensions appear to be mounting over the issue of Iran's nuclear enrichment, as a reasonably decent analysis piece in today's New York Times illustrates.
But what underlies it? Who are the US's rivals to the East? Who really threatens American global dominance? Iran and the possibility of it producing nuclear power, or of funding the second intifada (which in fact can and does operate independently of any government's support)? Does it really ring true? Or is something else at work. Are Russia and Western Europe where the real danger lies? An article in yesterday's FT seems to give a good hint at why Iran is considered more of a threat to US dominance than a country which actually has nuclear weapons like North Korea:

'US seeks to limit Gazprom hold on Europe'
>By Guy Dinmore in Washington
>Published: April 28 2006 22:00; print issue of April 29 2006.

The Bush administration is seeking to curb Moscow’s influence in the Caucasus and central Asia and weaken Gazprom’s growing hold over gas supplies to Europe with an effort to promote new oil and gas corridors that would bypass Russia and exclude Iran.

US intentions were highlighted on Friday when President George W. Bush welcomed President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to the White House, stressing the importance of their security and energy relationship.

Next week’s visit to Kazakhstan by Dick Cheney, the vice president, is further evidence that the US wants to shore up ties with key partners in central Asia, having lost access to a major military base in Uzbekistan last year. The vice president will use the visit to press for closer energy ties between Kazakhstan and Europe.

But analysts are concerned that an overall hardening of US policy towards Moscow could drive Russia and Iran, which together hold nearly half the world’s gas reserves, into an energy-based alliance.

A senior financier told the Financial Times that Iran, which is competing with Gazprom to provide gas to the Caucasus, was considering a switch in policy by selling its gas to Russia through central Asia because the US was blocking its access to Europe and India.

Lack of investment by Gazprom, which supplies Europe with about a quarter of its gas, means that Russia will be increasingly reliant on buying gas from central Asia or Iran to help meet its subsidised domestic needs and export commitments. Cliff Kupchan, analyst with the Eurasia Group consultancy, said he had a different understanding: that Russia and Iran would co-ordinate their gas export policies, with Moscow selling to the west and Iran to the east.

The stage is set for a bidding war between Russia, China and western energy companies over central Asian oil and gas.

Deals are proceeding at a bewildering speed. Turkmenistan signed a framework deal in Beijing this month to sell gas to China, while Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan president, visited Moscow for an agreement to double the capacity of a major oil pipeline for exports to Russia.

But the US wants Kazakhstan to look in a different direction, with officials outlining their desire to see a gas pipeline from Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field across the Caspian, linking with Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz field and then heading west to Europe via Georgia rather than north through Russia.

“The market is not working,” said Matt Bryza, US deputy assistant secretary of state, noting that Gazprom buys central Asia gas for $55 per thousand cu m then sells it for double that in the Caucasus and for $265 to Turkey.

However, US officials dismissed suggestions that they were trying to “clip the wings” of Gazprom.

The US has to tread carefully as its oil majors are competing for participation in Gazprom’s Shtokman project under the Barents sea. The US has already started buying LNG provided by Gazprom.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

2006-04-26T00:20:00.000+01:00

Going by GMT, I have missed this by two minutes. But going by San Fransisco (Blogger) time, I have a few hours to spare.
Today is Holocaut Remembrance Day. (To clear up the confusion, the UK had had a Holocaust Memorial Day held on 27 January since 2001) A time for reflection, no doubt.

Perhaps some reading recommendations. I want to say, read "A Nation on Trial" by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn. This comprises two (scholarly) devastating critiques of Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's willing Executioners"

It would be a valid objection to suggest that engaging with Goldhagen in the first place is a terrible waste of time.

If one is of such an opinion, then two others are recommended. First, Norman Finkelstein's "The Holocaust Industry" and second, Richard J. Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich"
Both are magnificent pieces of work (in very different ways) which give a fascinating insight into one of the most remarkable events of our history. Both inspire reflection at the level which seems sadly to be missing from social affairs generally in our depressingly unreflective society.

On a quite different note, today I finally got hold of "NHS plc" by UCL Professor Allyson Pollock. So far, it looks like a wonderful account of healthcare as it stands - and its future - in the UK. Tony Blair wants his legacy as PM to be about reforming public services. Gordon Brown is convined the public sector cannot do anything efficiently. In this text lies the future of British politics - indeed, here lies the future of British society. A text far beyond the level of engagement one finds in newspapers, and thus badly needed, the analysis is likely to reveal much about the direction in which public services are heading.

Big Brother-in-Law is watching - a clarification on conspiracy

2006-04-21T20:31:00.000+01:00

Well, the internet being what it is, one never knows who might be reading. Perhaps I should get one of those site counters that were so popular back in the late 90s. Detailed comments are so rare that I usually get back to them immediately, but I've been rather busy dissertating so I haven't had a spare moment to respond.

Conspiracy theory is kind of an intereting concept in our language and culture inextricably wound up with urban legends writ large, and for some reason strongly suggestive of some of the stranger elements of middle American subculture, with Roswell, the moon landings and JFK among the most important markers. The history of the phenomenon is much wider, of course - variations on the theme of conspiratorial Jewish leaders being possibly the longest running example, at least in 'Western' culture. The tin-foil hat variety associated with postwar America seems to have been given a considerable boost by what - by most accounts - was a rather sloppy, unprobing US government report on the 9/11 attacks (although it must be said, the conspiracy theories long predate the report, with unsubstantiated rumours that almost no Jews turned up for work at the WTC that day appearing within a week of the events). In any case, conspiracy theories of the Roswell variety are becoming more popular again, with Charlie Sheen absolutely determined that something is definitely up with the US government's story on 9/11, and Spike Lee's forthcoming documentary on hurricane Katrina loaded with allegations from eye-witnesses that some levees in New Orleans were bombed.

The response of most reasonable people to tales like this is that whichever elements within the US government are supposed secretly to have perpetrated it surely do not have the wherewithall or co-ordination to pull off the job so cleanly. If the Pentagon could orchestrate the JFK cover-up in order to clear the way for escalation in Vietnam, why were they unable to save Nixon's neck from the (much less scandellous) Watergate controversy, which knocked the whole thing on the head?
It all just pieces together too nicely, most of the time, and politicians tend to be much more prone to bungling things, and then changing the subject than carrying out anything seriously seditious in secret.

So "conspiracy theory" becomes a nice label to attach to things which look a little too convenient (or just plainly unlikely) in order to discredit them without engaging with them. This isn't always a bad option: I've tried and tried to engage with the "9/11 truth" folks, but there's always more evidence from some "expert" or other whose credibility cannot easily be judged, so that the whole thing ends up seeming like too much of a waste of time for it to be worth getting to the bottom of.

What's important is to recognise the conceptual distinction between a conspiracy theory, and analysis about what we might, for the sake of brevity, describe as 'structure.'
The media provides a useful example, partly because it's been studied pretty well, and partly because it relates closely to the subject under discussion - advertising and branding. One way of studying the media is to examine the institutional structures, ask what one would expect them to produce, and then compare some evidence.
If we note that the primary consumers in the media industry are advertisers (see previous post), we can expect their interests to be paramount. If we note that the media is a concentrated industry, dominated by monopolistic, multi-national corporations, then we can expect that those making editorial decisions will have a world-view which does not seriously conflict with being in the top levels of management of such a company - if they did, how long would they last in their jobs? If we believe at least some of the public relations industry's own hype, we can appreciate how easy it is to set the news agenda by 'planting stories,' a common technique, used most extensively by government, who provide journalists with information about certain topics, and not others, depriving journalists of the required sources to write about other stories - you go with the piece that lets you include quotes from a government minister, not the one you can't substantiate.

This does not constitute a conspiracy theory, because there is no conspiracy at work. It is simply a matter of trying to detatch oneself from the situation for a moment, look at how the whole business is structured, and then come up with some guesses about what one would expect to find. Studies of these matters tend to confirm these expectations pretty well. Adopting an "ideal type" approach, deviations, exceptions, and examples which do not fit may dilute the explanatory power of the model, but do not discredit it, and are to be expected. In a rather more complicated and subjective procedure, "dissenting views" will often be found to fall within particular parameters, with an apparent range of views which in fact very rarely deviate from a rather narrow range gives the impression of a lively, questioning media.
An interesting example is the criticism of the Iraq war. This is hardly uncommon - but what are the bases? A comparison of the number of articles describing the war as misjudged, a failure, too costly, and impossible task versus those describing it as a war crime for which our leaders would be hanged if the prevailing standards of international law (set out at Nuremberg) were applied, hardly need be conducted. Conspiracy? Or rather what we would reasonably, sensibly expect from a media structured the way it is? Making the distinction has the advantage of opening an important debate, hardly reliant on obscure "experts," but which can be conducted on whatever level you like, using easily available resources.

*The basic ideas expressed here are set out (much more articulately) in a good introductory essay by Noam Chomsky, "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?" A slightly longer version of the same argument was given in a talk called "The Journalist from Mars" and fleshed out with examples in Edward Herman's book "Manufacturing Consent" and Chomsky's even denser 'Necessary Illusions"

Every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city...

2006-04-17T22:12:00.000+01:00

"You've got a conspiracy theory for everything, haven't you?" my brother-in-law asked me yesterday. It might seem that way to those who bear the brunt of my tirades about corporate profits, the interests of concentrated capital and the commodification of culture. But now and again, one finds an example which suggests that one's whole approach thus far has been far too conservative, underestimating the scope of what is involved.
A story in this week's Sunday Times is one such example. The messages underlying such a scheme are extreme versions of what is already pretty widely appreciated: Art is a commodity - that which cannot be marketed carries no value and is mere vanity for the artist. People are commodities, and employment constitutes ownership limited only by time (and perhaps not even by time) so that employers have the right to instruct employees to respond to their employers' whim - to dress as instructed, to eat and drink as instructed, even to conduct their personal hygeiene in such a way that these acts can be marketed. This is allowed to continue because surrounding the realm of culture in a capitalist society is a secret that cannot be mentioned - and could not be taken seriously if it was. The secret is that the "audience" are not the consumers. As with most spheres of life in our society, a product is being sold to a consumer, but the identities of these actors are confused. To clear up the confusion, it is necessary to do the instinctive thing: follow the money. MTV, the New York Times, and Yahoo! do not make (most of) their money from user subscription fees. They make it from advertisers. Advertisers are their major consumers. What, then, is the product being consumed? Our attention. Media outlets engage primarily in selling the "audience's" attention to advertising firms. For this reason, the content they produce is targeted to what advertisers want. And advertisers, who, to use the jargon of economists, distort consumer preferences for a living, want content that will attract their target markets - generally not simply the biggest audience share.

It's a simple enough model, and as it perpetuates itself, it begins to convince audiences that they are commodities, who might make themselves in to "people" if they were to become "famous." Perhaps this is why being famous is being democratised, in the sense that anyone can do it with a bit of good luck. People no longer want to be famous for doing something, but simply for existing. What does this tell us about our society? It suggests that the meaning has been stripped from everyday activities, and only when the mundane is projected on to the arena of celebrity does it become meaningful. Is it not as likely that young women will gossip about the pregnancy of Katie Holmes as they will about those of their friends?
It should come as no surprise that the arena which has been invaded most by these processes is that of the body, sex and love more generally. By appropriating our most private actions, and eroding that privacy, we are made to make the realm of celebrity and branding in to the place where our lives find meaning. If cleaning up menstrual discharge (Tampax etc.), masturbation (Loaded, or any other "men's magazine") and falling in love (the phenomenon of the "heart-throb") are made in to things which can be discussed ONLY within the realm of the brand, then the branding industry has appropriated the only space for the discussion of our most private activities. We are, in this way, forced to surrender the most intimate aspects of our lives to branding. Particularly the first two are matters that one generally does not discuss with others, and certainly not "in polite company," but which are unremarkable subjects to be discu.ssed - perhaps implicitly, but with little real concealment - in advertis and by branding. Objectors are told they are oppressing women if the effectiveness of tampons cannot be weighed in an unconcealed discussion - but who is really oppressing whom when the only place this discussion is allowed to take place is within adverts?

This is why Saatchi and Saatchi making a girl band to do what they want with has implications beyond rubbish music and one too many cola adverts. Branding is not something which interrupts our leisure time, appearing as irritating adverts fragmenting television programmes, or billboards we glance at when we have a spare moment to look around. It is much more invasive - it teaches us how to desire, and what to desire, and it forces us to participate in the process, but at the same time sets controls over the possible outcomes. It is a serious threat to what we understand as "freedom". Our hopes for a better future for humanity rest on understanding how these processes work in order that they might be challenged. A rather presumptuous, self-serving argument, one might suggest, but it seems to me that the role of intellectuals in such a process is starting to diminish considerably, and for this reason, I would rather urge everybody to consider and to engage, to reflect on their own lives and situations, than to send the tired message "we're trying to figure it out - when we have, we'll tell you the answers in words you can understand."

"a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"

2006-03-28T20:17:00.000+01:00

Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.
Mike Davis in New Orleans 6 months on.

Blair speech

2006-03-21T20:14:00.000Z

Tony Blair gave a lengthy speech today to defend his government's foreign policy over the last 9 years (full text, and commentary).
It left me more furious than I have been since the invasion was launched 3 years ago, and as those who had the misfortune of being around me at that time will readily tell you, that was pretty furious.
Instead of writing a long piece about it which no one will read, I wrote a short letter to the Guardian which perhaps many people will read, if they publish it. But they might not, so here it is:

Amidst Tony Blair's despicable misrepresentations and fabrications concerning his government's foreign policy record, (Matthew Tempest, "Blair sees Iraq as 'clash about civilisation,'" Guardian Unlimited, March 21) the question of democracy stands out. Blair is surely correct that "victory for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is a vital element" is crucial, but he is misleading about what stands in the way of such a victory. As the editors of the Financial Times noted one year ago, the elections then being held in Iraq took place only at the "insistence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them" ("Winds of change in the Middle East: Call for careful reflection about causes and not triumphalism," Financial Times March 5, 2005, p. 10). "Why does Iran meddle so furiously in the stability of Iraq?" Mr. Blair asks? A more pertinent question for him, and for us, is: why does Britain?

The Milošević question answered

2006-03-19T11:11:00.000Z

So were Serbs sad to see Milošević dead in the end? NYT suggests they were: "In Serbian Capital, Rites for Milosevic Draw Throng."

"One last embarrassment for Serbia"? Only journalists seem to consider themselves fit to judge. Most others have a bit more humility (see previous posts on the NYT and Milošević's obituaries).

I nominate Barton Fink

2006-03-18T16:24:00.000Z

It's not often I shamelessly lift links from Metafilter, and I draw some affirmation from that fact in doing it this time:
The 100 most overlooked films of the 1990s? Some atrocities are included (although precisely which ones to categorise as 'atrocities' is a controversial matter, it would seem) but there are some films well worth seeking out. Glengarry Glen Ross may be most deserving in the sense that almost no one seems to have heard of it, but it's very good (although perhaps a little harrowing in its accuracy for those of us who know what cold-calling sales feels like).

Major developments

2006-03-16T23:32:00.000Z

For those interested in the direction and development of US foreign policy, Thursday was an extremely eventful day.
The White House published an updated National Security Strategy, which 'declares that American-led diplomacy to halt Iran's program to enrich nuclear fuel "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided,"' the New York Times reports.
More significantly perhaps, in a clause not mentioned in the NYT report, the document reaffirms the doctrine of preventative strike: "duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage."
'Transparency' also seems to be a watchword. The report stresses that 'rogue states' must be open and transparent about the development of military programmes, particularly where nuclear materials are involved. Also today, Condaleeza Rice expressed some concern about China's announcement that its military budget was to increase: she "underscored America’s concerns about the rapid development of China, urging Beijing to open up its economy and be “transparent” about the reasons for its military build-up, and acknowledged that the US-China relationship faced some “difficult issues”. Ms Rice said: “I heard that there is going to be a 14 per cent increase in the Chinese defence budget. That’s a lot. China should undertake to be transparent about what their military build-up means.”"

Also today, NYT reports, "The American military announced today that it had begun its largest air assault since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while Iraqi legislators convened the long-awaited first session of the new Parliament in the capital, even in the absence of any agreement to form a full government."
Meanwhile, the US has now recognised the need at least to consult Iran over the question of Iraq's future, although how seriously this can be taken on the same day Condaleeza Rice stepped up rhetoric against Iran, calling it "a central banker to terrorism" (FT) remains to be seen.

In an interview with the FT, Pakistan's foreign minister said that a civil nuclear deal between the US and India would precipitate the collapse of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty: “The whole Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty will unravel. It’s only a matter of time before other countries will act in the same way. Nuclear weapons are the currency of power and many countries would like to use it. Once this goes through the NPT will be finished. It’s not just Iran and North Korea. Brazil, Argentina and Pakistan will all think differently.”

A quick glance over tomorrow's international pages makes for an extremely restless night. It hardly need be emphasised that all of these developments look set to exacerbate what are currently the most serious threats to the survival of the human race over the next century.

More nonsense.

2006-03-12T21:42:00.000Z

It's unusual for the BBC to mess up this badly, but at the moment (9.30pm on Sunday) they are linking to 2 stories about reaction to Milošević's death.

Matt Prodger in Belgrade, "Few Serb Tears for Milosevic" (update of 12:32GMT Sunday):

"Sunday morning in Belgrade was cold, bleak and wet.

It was a typical winter's day, with very little to distinguish it from any other.

The most famous leader of the former Yugoslavia may have just died, but there is little to suggest his passing will be much missed here.

There is no outpouring of grief, no protests, no tears.

The only sign that something had happened was a gathering of die-hard loyalists outside the headquarters of his once all-powerful Socialist Party. They lit candles beside his portrait and scowled at the media."

Meanwhile, Nick Hawton in Sarajevo, "Milosevic death highlights divisions" (Update of 21.31 GMT):

In Belgrade, Serb nationalists mourned the death of their former champion and president. In Sarajevo, Muslims said how disappointed they were that Slobodan Milosevic had cheated justice.

I have a feeling Mr. Prodger just misjudged what he saw.

Throw your books in the bin

2006-03-12T14:29:00.000Z

Slobodan Milosevic's death has stimulated quite a bit of media coverage, and the tone is pretty much what one would expect, along the same lines as most of what has been printed since 1991, with Milosevic and the Serbs the main aggressors in the terrible wars in former-Yugoslavia. No surprises there.
The New York Times reports, however, that we need no longer bother agonising over the origins of these tragic conflicts in Yugoslavia's demise - it has found the answer. Forget the legacy of the Second World War and its impact on how people percieved their nation and ethnic or religious group and its place within Yugoslavia after 1945. Forget the badly planned economy and the uneven development which reached crisis point after international loans dried up at the end of the 70's. Forget the almost wilfully unworkable system of governing Tito designed to follow his death. Forget demagogues who directed these tensions towards ethnic and religious-based hatred, and don't bother wondering how much their success reflected antagonism which people felt, but did not act on for the most part, until they came to power.
Forget it all, the questions are unnecessary and unenlightening; they merely confuse the issue (deliberately?) complicating what ought to be a simple narrative of determined villains and their helpless, passive victims.
Why? Because it was all one man: "In effect, Mr. Milosevic destroyed the delicate balance of the Yugoslavia he professed to defend." He's responsible; he manipulated everybody and brought down the structure of Yugoslavia, making sure violent and chaotic destruction, which he could use to consolidate his grip on neat-autocratic power, were the inevitable results.
No questions need be asked, no history explored, no social or economic tensions analysed. The journalists have figured it out while the academics have been crafting straw men to fish for the red herrings they mistakenly believe to need destroying.
"Mr. Milosevic's overriding myth of Serbian suffering" was the tool he used in his "single-minded pursuit of power," Roger Cohen, the international affairs polymath who authored this nonsense, reveals.
And surely, to dissent from this hurriedly-written, unthinking nonsense (yesterday Cohen was wondering whether South Africa's last decade of reconciliation provides a model fo Iraq's future - Times Select, sorry) is to sympathise with, or apologise for Milosevic and his terrible crimes. Those of us who care about understanding the world - in all its capacity for unimaginable evil, as well as its potential for astonishing good - must reject this manner of looking at the world absolutely each time we are asked to make such a false choice ("if you aren't with us, you're against us"), which we are, all too often, by a media determined to simplify everything, creating a simple narrative (dictated) that calls for no reflection on our history, or our society.
The question of why Yugoslavia collapsed in to such terrible violence and ethnic hatred is central to understanding the role the idea of the nation has played in the last two centuries of world history, and a decent answer could tell us an enormous amount about ourselves, our society, our prospects and the potential for a better future. We cannot let the New York Times (or other outlets who systematically do the same) persuade us that the question does not exist.

New Blog

2006-03-12T14:28:00.000Z

You may all be interested to know that I have created a new blog, located at overheardatucl.blogspot.com
Contributions are most welcome.

And the winner is...

2006-03-09T15:55:00.000Z

"An artless, dated and manipulative morality tale on the evils of the sprawling metropolis, shot with a long lens from behind the bars of a gated seaside community." A thoroughly suitable assessment of the recipient of this year's "Best Picture" award.

Maybe the Americans are on to something

2006-03-06T16:41:00.000Z

I was thinking about having a treble on Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Good job I can't remember how you fill out a betting slip... (Crash won best pic)

The things you find on message boards...

2006-03-05T17:59:00.000Z

Things have taken rather a light-hearted turn round these parts recently - I haven't noticed much of interest lately, although I did notice this detailed report on the current situation in the DRC (sadly, things look as bad as ever, and as per usual, we're partly responsible; skimmers might want to jump straight to the bottom of the page for some photographs). I'll also interject briefly on Tessa Jowell - she was in trouble already, but surely leaving your husband, and immediately telling the newspapers how angry you are that he betrayed you is unlikely to inspire much sympathy.

Anyway, back to the superficial:
All of you wannabe zombie-film directors out there take note: for all the disgusting sound effects your film will surely require, stocking up on plenty of fruit and veg is your best bet. An expert in the field advises (I particularly like his recommendations for appeasing your significant other when the messy aural gore-fest is over):

"Fruits and vegetables can get you almost any kind of body damage sounds you need. Melons are good for stabbing. They also make a nice "cracking" sound when you pull one apart. Brains, anyone? Coconut hulls are great for skull impact/crushing elements. Several stalks of fresh celery snapped at once will give you a nice bone break, and peeling the strings off of the outside makes a good skin peeling effect. For a blood dribble, or to add general juiciness to anything, wet a rag almost to the point of dripping, then give it a good quick squeeze. A head of cabbage or lettuce will give you all kinds of sounds. Stab it, rip it open, take a long chunk and twist it, etc. Just make sure all of your produce is fresh and cold. Hmmm.. maybe try freezing it first! Just experiment, have fun, make a mess. The wife will think you've gone over the edge, so make her a nice salad when you're done."

The best they can do?

2006-03-04T10:53:00.000Z

In May, the University of Pennsylvania celebrates its 250th anniversary. UPenn has quite a list of famous alumni, including Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Ezra Pound and five Nobel laureates.
Events like 250th anniversaries merit celebrity speakers, and they've managed to book.... Jodie Foster. Not that I have beef with Jodie Foster in particular, it just seems slightly bizarro...

George Clooney's latest...

2006-03-01T13:58:00.000Z

I saw 'Goodnight and Good Luck' at the weekend. I ought to cut it some slack I suppose, because political thrillers are extremely difficult to do well.
Shooting in Black & White isn't only a gimmick, it does help to set the film in period, and so works perfectly well - although I see no reason to fawn over that decision in itself.
The main problem the film has it that it meanders along from one scene to the next, quickly running out of energy, so that the decidedly anti-climactic ending to what is hardly a lengthy piece comes as something of a relief. Dialogue is used to drive the narrative forward, but is rarely engaging (with the single exception of Murrow's interview with Liberace, which makes genuine humour out of a joke which one might think has little life left in it). This is partly because so much of the film consists of Murrow's on-air newscasts and House Committee meetings (both with their own particular styles of dreariness) or otherwise of office banter which takes more cues from the fast-paced but vacuous dialogue of 'The West Wing' than from far snappier near-contemporary 'Double Indemnity.'
So without much of a plot to reveal - because come on, who is going to go and see this film who doesn't know what McCarthy and McCarthyism are - (there is only one major sub-plot, to which there is little substance, so that, wisely perhaps, it is not explored in any depth) and without any engaging dialogue, the film leaves itself with very little to do but to have Murrow (played as extremely virtuous and self-important) preach about journalism's integrity and the importance of maintaining freedom at home whilst fighting for it abroad. Hints towards the situation in the US today are extremely thingly veiled, giving the film a polemical twist which can only invite scrutiny of the political values it expounds.
So here it is: The Cold War wasn't about fighting Communism, ever, it was about control of resources, as the most sober conservative analysts emphasise (on this point, the work of Melvyn Leffler is valuable); being in the IWW did not make one a communist, certainly not a Stalinist activist (this is the impression the film leaves); attempts by government to undermine the freedom of its people are the norm, not the exception, and the US is no different in this respect from anywhere else; it is the responsibility of the people to scrutinise the actions of its government and to challenge what it finds objectionable - NOT of an elite caste of journalists, who are institutionally incapable of carrying out such work in a serious way, a point central to what the film is attempting to say, but one which it makes no effort to address.
Goodnight and Good Luck isn't a terrible film, but little about it stands out.

"New" Labour

2006-02-24T18:35:00.000Z

To my immense surprise, I just heard Tony Blair on the radio summing up the primary characteristic of the last 9 years of government: "We spend without asking how effective is the spending." This is precisely "New" Labour's major innovation - they have done truly remarkable work in systematising the waste of fortunes in money and resources, with PFI initiatives leading the way.
I makes one wonder just how brazen Blair and New Labour will become about what they're up to before people stop voting for them. This government was defined in its first 5 years or so by "spin" (or so, at least, the journalists had it). In the last 4, it seems to have been more a realisation that they can do what they like because no one is going to ask serious questions about it.

His right to say it...

2006-02-20T19:28:00.000Z

David Irving has been found guilty of denying the Nazi Holocaust in Austria, and has been sentenced to 3 years in prison. I've never been much interested in Irving personally, and am in no position to judge the value of his work in general (although I note with interest that a historian like Prof. Ian Kershaw at Sheffield, one of the leading experts on the Third Reich, and someone who has no doubt that Hitler took a decision to launch a campaign of extermination against Europe's Jews and directed his military staff to carry it out, is willing to cite Irving's work as evidence in the course of his celebrated biography of Hitler) but the point of principle about freedom of speech should be clear - not least as this comes just as the Danish cartoon controversy is dying down. Will the newspaper editors so outraged that anybody could suggest that offensive cartoons of Mohammed should not be published all come out against academic censorship? Those attempting to hide their hypocrisy are going to have a seriously hard time...
Perhaps I should be a little wary of defending Irving's right to publish/proclaim racist nonsense - the "news" that Chomsky defended the right of Robert Faurisson (a French academic accused of Holocaust denial) to print what he liked still appears fresh and shocking in certain quarters, even though it is 25 years old. Perhaps if I ever make a career out of writing, or history (or both!) it will all come back to haunt me...
Nevertheless, the point of principle should be clear enough: either we favour free speech or we don't. Free speech only for those who say 'acceptable' things is precisely the sort of "value" which upheld the power of the genocidal Nazi regime.

At the movies

2006-02-16T20:48:00.000Z

"A Cock and Bull Story" is a wonderful comedy, but best avoided if you don't know what irony is. 10/10

"Cache" ("Hidden") is one of the best thrillers I have ever seen, featuring some stunningly beautiful photography but best avoided if you don't like leaving the cinema thinking through the implications of what you've just seen, and desperate to see the film again. 10/10

"Brokeback Mountain" is excellent for precisely none of the reasons the gushing reviews give, but for plenty of others. In much the same way as Pulp Fiction, the cinema-literate will find plenty (some suttle, some not so suttle) of new takes on old themes to enjoy. The cinema-illiterate will likely appreciate a distinctly palatable love story (four words I don't string together very often!). It deserves Oscars less than films like Hidden, The Beat that My Heart Skipped, A History of Violence or Wolf Creek (or even Batman Begins for that matter) but certainly a lot more than Crash. 9/10.

Voting

2006-02-16T20:36:00.000Z

Yes, in a parliamentary "democracy," people are not really qualified to vote on issues that affect their lives and general wellbeing - so someone else has to do it for us, those good old MPs. And the leftiest of the lefy Labour "rebels" have really distinguished themselves this week by.... falling in to line with precisely the sorts of things they claim to dislike most about Blair's "New" Labour programme. Rowan Atkinson's (and the House of Lords'... but who listens to the House of Lords? Celebrity is our nobility!) efforts to defend freedom of speech (specifically, to stop "glorifying terror" being criminialised) have been thwarted by a second vote which affirmed that it should be criminalised. Some pedantic person might trawl through what the Foreign Office and Mr. Blair (or his successor-in-training) have to say about, say Palestine, Iraq, Indonesia, or other places where state-sponsored terrorism abounds - I'm confident some glorification could be found; any mention of the invasion of Afghanistan by "the coalition" is sure to be pretty glorified...

You now can't smoke whilst eating your dinner in public... probably not unwise all in all, but how many people smoke during dinner? (I fear some pubs, including a very nice one in St. Albans will be rendered unprofitable if they are faced with a choice between stopping serving food and banning smoking). Perhaps one could blame smokers for never sticking to the 'designated non-smoking areas' they have in a lot of pubs. I'm pretty ambivalent about it really - all you need to keep workers safe is decent ventilation. The argument that says "why should we tax-paying non-smokers pay to treat lung cancer that people knew they were going to get by smoking" is a bit silly though - you don't have to run very far with it to find a long list of people the NHS "shouldn't have" to treat because they were basically being negligent: people who get heart disease from an unhealthy diet, people who drive to fast and crash their cars (or even: people negligent enough to use a form of transport as unsafe as the car) people who play rugby? And so on...

Worst of all though, on Monday the MPs voted in favour of the introduction of these wretched biometric ID cards, which will essentially be: an enormous amount of free money for whichever private company (probably Capita) wins the contract to make them; the cost (and, doubtless, the risk - this is the key distinguishing feature of PFI, simple to understand but systematically concealed) will be socialised on a highly regressive basis (ie everyone has to pay the same, no matter how rich they are) instead of being funded by tax, a massive increase in the capcity for government surveillance to diminish the possibility of privacy (and, surely, freedom). Let us be clear, terrorism has not a thing to do with it, and the Home Secretary so keen on their introduction has admitted that if every British citizen had had one of these ID cards, it would have done NOTHING to prevent the callous murders of July the 7th.

Whatever one may think of these decisions in isolation, it is surely difficult to defend the claim that democracy and freedom (the two watchwords of the 'war on terror' which increasingly seems to define the present era) can be served by bowing to the wisdom of political leaders - these things must be claimed at the popular level, before the opportunity to save the world from "ultimate doom" has passed. (The threat of "Ultimate doom" isn't me being over-dramatic, but a fear which writers in Daedalus, the rather conservative and reserved journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences judge to be a very real possibility for the near future, which will surely be guaranteed if we as citizens can successfully be convinced of the most powerful deception of our time: that the idea that people make their own history is false. It is for this reason that, contrary to what someone said to me the other day, history is not 'optional' - it is necessary, at least for those who count a better future among their concerns.)

Still up to their old tricks...

2006-02-08T19:55:00.000Z

When George Monbiot sticks to what he's best at, he can produce exemplary journalism. This week's subject: revelations about efforts of tobacco firms in the mid-90s to get some pro-smoking articles in the media, hiding behind the facade of a weird sort of revisionist science group called 'Arise.' Cracking stuff.

"Opposition"

2006-02-07T13:27:00.000Z

In case anyone thought I was being a bit extreme in yesterday's post in my criticism of the intellectual opposition to the Bush clique, there's a long essay by Thomas Powers in the forthcoming (Feb. 23) issue of the New York Review which provides an excellent illustration of the kind of thing I mean. It begins "The challenges posed to American democracy by secrecy and by unchecked presidential power are the two great themes running through the history of the Iraq war..."

Budget priorities

2006-02-06T21:02:00.000Z

The US budget seems to get a bit more scrutiny than the British one, which is perhaps why there's usually little attempt to disguise where the spending priorities lie. It doesn't require close analysis. The first paragraph of what will be the FT's front-page story on it tomorrow lays out the key elements:
"The White House on Monday put national security at the centre of its budget priorities, proposing increases in defence and homeland security while calling for $65bn in cuts in areas such as health insurance for the elderly and long-term entitlement reform."
The other coverage gives some interesting comparison figures. The tax cuts implemented in the first term - some of which are temporary that the administration wants to make permanent - are estimated at costing $100bn or so per year (very conservative estimate - see ibid.) It's worth bearing in mind that those cuts overwhelmingly affected the top 2% of earners.
The biggest cuts will be made to Medicare - the programme that provides a little relief to those on the sharp edge of what may be the most inefficient healthcare system in the world - which will lose $36bn (ibid.) The military budget rises to $439bn but that figure does not include "requests for $9.3bn to maintain the US nuclear arsenal or $50bn in emergency spending to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House last week asked for an additional $70bn in emergency spending for the fiscal year 2006." This brings "the total cost of the war [on terror] since 2001 to $443bn."
A mass of figures, but the main point is that the gigantic defence spending dwarves the cuts to welfare and health programmes, but these stingy cuts will have serious effects on America's most vulnerable and needy citizens (the elderly, single parents, the ill/disabled, inner-city African-Americans and other minority groups - Lord help those unfortunate enough to be a combination of these things).
"National priorities" require "tightening our belts elsewhere" the director fo the Office of Management and Budget Joshua Bolten asserts. Clearly, the safety and well-being of the American people in no way constitute a "priority" for the administration.

The institutionalised disparities and attempts to ensure that the dispensable elements in American society become disengaged from civil and political life create constraints on freedom and democracy that far outweigh the abuses that so outrage the "left-liberal" intelligentsia (at the moment, matters of principle like domestic spying and other 'civil liberties'). Too many who lamented Bush's re-election and the decline of Democratic politics are living in a bubble where politics is something detatched from their everyday experience, and matters of democratic principle matter more than then health or welfare policies. Little wonder, then, that as disillusioned New Englanders wonder "What's the matter with Kansas?," those on the receiving end of the Republicans worst excesses at home, who ought to form a base of political support for those presenting themselves as an "alternative" to this reactionary government, feel as though these people and the political programmes they pursue are no more relevant to them or representative of their interests than those of the Republicans.
If prospects look dim for those who care about the future of America, it is less because a group of reactionaries have taken the reigns and led the country down a dangerous, potentially disastrous path (although they have) and more because their political opponents have been completely unable to formulate an alternative that will address the major concerns of what ought to be their core constituency.
There are sources of hope for the future, but you'd have a hard time finding them among the Democrats.

Holocaust Memorial Day

2006-01-26T17:32:00.000Z

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.

My suggested reading to commemorate the occasion:

Mike Davis, "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World"

Also looking very interesting an pertinent is a new book from Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, "Darfur: A Short History of a Long War"

Of course, I'm not suggesting that there's no point studying the Nazi Holocaust - or commemorating it; I'm saying if you don't think more generally about how any why mass murder happens, and how it can be stopped, on a day like this, then not much has been achieved. Given that most people have a pretty decent idea of what happened in wartime Germany and Poland, I believe attention could more profitably be spent on other matters.

How the UN works

2006-01-26T12:06:00.000Z

Today's FT carries 2 stories that reveal a lot about how "international consensus" is constructed and how legitimacy to act in a manner of their choosing is created by the world's most powerful states. Robert Zoellick, US Deputy Secretary of State was pleased to be able to speak on behalf of China's government (obviously, they are unable to say it for themselves) on the matter of Iran:
"China has emphasised its support for international efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear programme in talks with the US, Robert Zoellick, the US Deputy Secretary of State said on Wednesday...Mr Zoellick said he had argued in Beijing that China’s interests in maintaining the flow of oil and gas from Iran would be served by helping ensure that Tehran did not develop nuclear weapons...“If you are concerned about energy security … one might conclude that developing a nuclear capability in a sensitive political region which is the heart of the world’s energy resources would be extremely dangerous,” Mr Zoellick said."
"Zoellick says China shares international view on Iran" Richard McGregor, FT, 26/01/06.

And if that isn't brazen enough, the US ambassador to India apparently sees no reason to disguise his threats to Dehli:
"Washington on Wednesday raised the stakes in the confrontation over Iran when it warned India that Delhi’s own nuclear deal with the US could be ditched if the Indian government did not vote to refer Tehran to the United Nations Security Council...
In comments reported by the Press Trust of India news agency, David Mulford, US ambassador to India, said that if India decided not to vote against Iran, the US-India deal on nuclear energy co-operation would “die”. He added: “The effect on members of the US Congress with regard to the civil nuclear initiative will be devastating.”"
Daniel Dombey in Brussels, Roula Khalaf in Tehran and Arkady Ostrovsky in Moscow, "Washington warns Delhi over UN vote on Iran," FT 26/01/06.

Comment seems unnecessary.

Panda Propaganda

2006-01-08T13:30:00.000Z

From Saturday's Financial Times:

China gift of pandas ‘an insult’ to Taiwan
By Mure Dickie in Beijing and Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: January 6 2006 19:10 | Last updated: January 6 2006 19:10

China’s “panda diplomacy” threatened to backfire on Friday after its offer to rival Taiwan of two pandas provoked outrage in the island’s government.

Officials in Taipei accused Beijing of “disrespect” and “pro-unification political warfare” after it announced it would give Taiwan a pair of pandas.

For a year, Beijing has downplayed its threat to use force to back its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, instead launching policy initiatives intended to appeal to Taiwanese opinion.

Such moves are usually double-edged. The proffered pandas, for example, support China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan because Beijing no longer gives the animals to foreign countries.

The pair, chosen from a pool of 23 candidates, were selected for their cuteness, character and compatibility after a series of genetic tests and trial marriages, Beijing officials said.

But while the Chinese and Taiwanese media indulged in an orgy of coverage, with revelations of the panda’s hobbies, star signs and favourite foods, Taipei reacted with anger.

Joseph Wu, chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan’s cabinet-level China policy body, attacked the mainland propaganda as political warfare.

“They unilaterally announce the pandas will be sent over here in June, without having discussed the matter with Taiwan’s government . . . That is very disrespectful,” Mr Wu said.

However, many Taiwanese are charmed by the cuddly creatures and opposition parties that support reunification with China have attacked the government as obstinately obstructionist.

King Kong

2006-01-05T22:55:00.000Z

Well I finally saw it today, and it was truly excellent. Not only a wonderful, gripping adventure in itself, but a truly encouraging piece of work. I did have some doubts about Naomi Watts at times, but in the end I think she pulled off an extraordinarily difficult role extremely well (the vague bewilderment she displays throughout Mulholland Drive was quite fitting to play a woman who has a giant gorilla gradually falling in love with her). Jack Black was an inspired piece of casting, and as has been repeated ad nauseam, Andy Serkis is simply magnificent as Kong.
Jackson had few qualms about piling on the CGI in the central hour of the film, but the results were truly breathtaking, and although it is too often over-done these days, in this case it was definitely money well spent. These sequences would have been impressive in isolation, but what really give them their power is the effort that had been put in to the rest of the film. Jackson has the power to tell an epic adventure story in a way puts many blockbuster directors of recent years to shame. King Kong lasts 187 minutes, but feels more like 100. The first part of the film is not simply 'setting up' the action sequences that follow, it is engaging the audience, giving the action meaning, and thus enhancing the visual spectacle. This is what the lazy, unimaginitive 'blockbusters' of the 1990s simply never achieved - the boring, ludicrous premise of Jurassic Park; the convoluted, unengaging love-story of Titanic; the culmination of all this with Saving Private Ryan which simply does away with an introduction and jumps straight in to the action, with the 'story' presented for what it is - an empty afterthought. Jackson's recognition of the importance of properly engaging the audience probably comes from his love of horror - what seperates truly gripping horror from dull, flat slasher films is the emotional attatchment formed with the characters before the action begins. Jackson realises that truly great action adventure epics needn't be merely expensive exploitation films (and this is what Spielberg has been doing at least since circa Jurassic park) but can be truly great cinematic stories.
It seems to me that King Kong represents an attempt to return to what cinema was really always supposed to be about: great stories that everyone can enjoy. It is a massive challenge to those who claim that blockbusters are necessarily an unintelligent, uninteresting, over-commercialised waste of money that carry no meaning and appeal to the lowest common denominator of violence and tension. It also disproves the argument that large audiences can only be gained with sex and unnecessary violence, of which there is almost none here. Most importantly I think, it is a challenge to directors and producers who are content to spend their huge budgets producing lazy, unimaginative, CGI-saturated films with no meaningful plot. There is plainly no excuse when you're working with a decent story (if you don't have a decent story, you should find one before carrying on with the film).
One reason cinema was important and interesting in its initial development was that it was a cultural medium which could transcend the elitism that plagued (most) theatre at that time. It provided the possibility of a cultural experience which just about everyone could enjoy. There is an extent to which this importance is diminished with the ubiquity of television, but it is not total - the best things shown on TV are still films anyway. This is why it is such an insult, as well as a disappointment, when the films that enjoy the greatest publicity and are given the biggest budgets are so lazy, so insulting to their audience by failing to make an imaginitive effort to tell a story, or make an interesting statement.
This, incidentally, is why the fawning over 'Crash' (2004) is such a disappointment to me. This self-important morality-tale that fails even to hint at the complexities it claims to explore is lauded universally merely because 'making a statement' of any kind is such a rarity in Hollywood these days. (To clarify, I am not suggesting that racial tension in Los Angeles is not an important or interesting question, or that cinema should not deal with it; I am saying that this issue is of such importance, such interest and such complexity that this arrogant over-simplification
of the issues cannot be taken seriously.) It looks more like a sick form of cinematic 'therapy' designed to make aspirational middle-class viewers (of any ethnic background) feel as though they have 'dealt with' these issues merely by sitting through this two hour film. This is similar to the widespread notion that one +must+ watch Schindler's List, and those who do not are irresponsibly failing to confront the horror of, and disrespecting the memory of The Holocaust. In reality, it is very rare to find that those who are so desperate for people to respect The Holocaust in this manner have bothered to interrogate the history at all - try asking them about the people who wrote (what nearly everyone agrees is) the best work on the subject, Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning, and you will nearly always be confronted with blank stares. Of course, Schindler's List is a substitute (albeit an embarrassingly weak one) for confronting the industrial, inhuman horror of that period of history. In the same way, Crash is a weak substitute for confronting the intertwined issues of racial tension, urban decay and social alienation that make Los Angeles such a tragic and fascinating example of the (post?) modern city.

Films of the year then...
King Kong
A History of Violence
The Beat that My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arrete)
Wolf Creek
Sin City

There are probably some I have forgotten too. But those five were all very good in their own particular ways. Batman Begins is the other very good film of the year, but narrowly misses out on the top 5.

A dangerous enterprise

2005-12-27T23:08:00.000Z

I'm going to take something of a liberty, and engage in the risky activity of trying to predict the future. I think the next few months in Israel and Palestine could be decisive. Ariel Sharon had a minor stroke last week, and his health is a matter of discussion in Israel with elections expected in the next few months (here, for example). He will have heart surgery in the next few days.
Today's Independent reports: "Mr Sharon's government has invited tenders for 228 new houses in the West Bank settlements of Beitar Illit and Efrat in a move condemned as "political opportunism" by Peace Now. Ironically, the move came at the same time as the leak of part of the programme of Mr Sharon's new party, Kadima, backing a return to the internationally agreed road-map, which explicitly rules out such settlement expansion."
Meanwhile, those still harbouring the illusion that Israel have "given back" Gaza to the Palestinians should note the story in today's New York Times which notes that "The Israelis and Palestinians are trading fire almost daily across Gaza's border, and Israel's defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, has ordered the military to prepare an operation to keep Palestinians out of the northern part of the territory...the most likely scenario would involve helicopters and other aircraft patrolling the skies of northern Gaza."
And as I noted in my post of the 16th, the younger members of Fatah are likely to split off and possibly join Hamas. The Independent story reports that in this (likely) scenario, "A poll by An-Najar University in Nablus suggests that Hamas would be the biggest single party, at 31 per cent, if the Fatah list remains split."

Taking all of this together, the prospects for Israelis and Palestinians who wish to avert the present catastrophic and deadly course are not good. The primary body of political expression for the Palestinians is likely to become the increasingly popular Hamas. This could result in a situation analagous to that of Lebanon, where the lack of opportunity for peaceful democratic expression produces violent frustration, and the dominant Hizb'ullah recieve little external recognition, exacerbating the situation and re-inforcing Hizb'ullah's grip and the appeal of violence. This is unlikely to ameliorate the situation in the West Bank, where the process of 'Politicide', that is the destruction of Palestine as a viable social and political entity (an updated paperback edition of this magnificent, honest and startling introduction is due in June) continues unabated.

A point made frequently by decent commentators on the conflict, but rarely by major media outlets, and often under-appreciated by many people who are only casually familiar with the recent history of the struggle, and thus worth repeating here, is that Israel's settlement expansion in the West Bank is clearly and deliberately designed to fragment the West Bank socially, politically and economically in order to make the construction of a viable Palestinian state impossible. Realising that the pressure for final-status negotiations is higher than ever. the Israelis are building frantically in order to accelerate this process.

Three major factors will determine how the conflict develops in the next few months, and are likely to have a major bearing on its course over the next few years:
1) Whether the Palestinians choose violent or peaceful resistance to Israel's continuing expansion. This may amount to the option between excalating the hopeless second Intifada, which has significantly contributed to the popularity of Sharon in Israel, and seriously diminished sympathy for the Palestinian plight internationally (particularly in the most crucial place - the USA), or backing Mahmoud Abbas's Arafat-like attempt to give Israel just about anything (including giving up Palestinian statehood) in return for a 'peace deal' that may not even be honoured.
2) Ariel Sharon: At the moment, Sharon looks like about the only politician in Israel who will be able to resolve the conflict for good. This is because by harnessing the votes of the marginalised Sephardic (that is - crudely - those not of European origin) Jews, particularly the recent immigrants, and building support for a limited withdrawl from the West Bank, he has found a means of reconciling the desire for peace articulated by groups like Peace Now, and the expansionist-Zionist desires, keen to consolidate Israel's hold on the territory of 'historic Israel' articulated by groups like Likud and Shas.
3) Most importantly, it's up to us. Israel's continued expansion in to the West Bank, with the resultant fragmentation of Palestinian comunities, is only possible because Western countries permit it - as most people realise, the USA is all-important - but Europe is important too, and the recent leaked EU report on Israeli settlement, concluding that it was destroying Palestine as a cultural and political entity, has been a major contributory factor in forcing the Israelis to realise that pressure for a final-status deal is building, and thus moving them to begin frantic building in the West Bank. With a bit more activism in Europe, perhaps sufficient pressure could be brought to bear to force Israel to halt settlement activity in the West Bank. This could open the way for the implementation of the Geneva Accords, or something like them, which look like the best current option for a just settlement for both sides.
The Geneva Accords can still provide a good deal of hope for those who wish to see an end to brutality and inhumanity on both sides of this terrible conflict, but for the reasons outlined above, they will become irrelevant soon if Israel's continuing West Bank expansion is not seriously challenged. Freezing settlement activity is a vital step in moving towards a just solution to this conflict - but we must never let it become the ultimate end, which should never shift from being a just solution for both sides (the US government, especially Condaleeza Rice and the State Department, for example, appear to view a freeze on settlement as an end in itself, a position that can quickyl deteriorate in to the intractable conflicts which have not ceased since 1967.)
If the Geneva Accords - quite possibly the last serious hope for a just solution to this terrible conflict - are to be implemented, it will require a good deal of awareness in Europe and North America of exactly what is going on in Israel/Palestine, and a determination to ensure that Israel ceases settlement and is forced in to a serious consideration of this proposal, which the attitude of the US government has so far allowed it to dismiss. It's all up to us to pressure our political leaders to make this a serious and pressing issue - and time is really of the essence. But understanding the issues is fundamental. For this reason, I suggest that it is not merely a virtue, but indeed a duty to keep a very close eye on the (English-language) website of Israel's leading daily newspaper, Ha'aretz, for the next few months. Not only is history in the making, but if we only opened our eyes, we would realise that we have the chance to make it. Will we be able to look back on the first half of 2006 feeling sure that we lived up to our responsibilities?

Fair Trade

2005-12-21T10:40:00.000Z

Careful readers will have noted that Shruti asked me for my thoughts on fair trade in a comment to the last post. In case anyone else is interested, here is a clipped version of my response:

'Fair trade' is a somewhat indistinct term. The people who sell 'fair trade' tee/coffee/chocolate etc. usually imply that 'fair' means that suppliers of goods are guaranteed a price that will give them a decent standard of living. But this is quite a subjective judgment, and although it might be very beneficial to a few producers, it is unlikely to draw any country out of poverty, because programmes like these in themselves have little impact on things like health and education, industrial infrastructure and so on that are needed to stimulate real and sustained growth in a whole economy.
When 'fair trade' campaigners (Oxfam etc.) are lobbying governments, they're talking about something a bit different - motly, they are calling for trade liberalization, which means ending the system by which more powerful countries protect their own industries while insisting that less powerful countries abolish any kind of protection for theirs. Now here is where I believe the Oxfam etc. campaigns stumble: they really misunderstand why the system of global trade that has emerged in the last 30-40 years is so destructive. The usual implication is that poor countries are stuck in poverty because they have surplus rice/cotton/steel/whatever 'dumped' on them (ie sold to them at below the amount it costs producers in those countries to produce the stuff) while they are prevented from exporting to richer countries by various trade barriers like tarrifs. There is no doubt that this process can cause serious and grave problems for some producers in poor countries, especially if they have been intensively producing one thing (eg coffee) that they find they cannot shift, and so are stuck with no means of income until next year's harvest. But I don't think that this is where the really serious problems lie.
In the last 30-40 years, speculative trade in foreign currency has created a high degree of destabilisation in the global economy. This has made possible the 'currency attacks' that can throw an economy into turmoil in a matter of hours should investors 'lose confidence' in government policy. There was an article from the Financial Times in April 1992 by the BBC World Service's economics correspondant on the nature of the 'de facto world government' administering the 'new imperial age.'
Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in a paper called The Relative Impact of Trade Liberalization on Developing Countries ( http://www.cepr.net/publications/trade_2002_06_12.htm ) have argued that the large amounts of foreign currency holdings which poor countries maintain to safeguard against speculative 'attacks' on their currencies are a greater inhibitor of investment than rich countries' protection of their commodities. They argue that the major obstacle to development, however, is the system of patent rights being implemented, which stifle innovation in the fastest growing industries - as well as having an atrocious effect on mortality by making essential medicines unaffordable for all but a tiny minority.
In a paper about a year ago with David Rosnick ("Poor Numbers: The impact of Trade Liberalization on World Poverty" http://www.cepr.net/publications/trade_2004_11.htm ) they suggested that the projections about the benefits to poor countries of liberalization have been considerably overestimated.

In short, the issues seem more complex than campaigners like Oxfam seem to suggest, and the emerging structures of the global financial system, which is certainly not 'free' and actually has very little to do with 'trade,' need to be properly addressed before serious suggestions on how to solve these crises can be made.

In my opinion, the most urgent matter is the question of pharmaceutical patent rights, which stop producers in poor countries from coming up with cheap ways to make essential drugs, making these drugs unaffordable to most people in the developing world. The human toll is probably incalculable, but a UN Human Development Report a few years ago estimated that 30000 children worldwide were dying from preventible causes (ie hunger and disease that could be cured with the right medicine) every single day.

The following might also be of interest: Vandana Shiva, "Trade Liberalisation is Not Development"

I'm still alive!

2005-12-16T11:11:00.000Z

Wow... I've deprived you, loyal readers, of my venom for more than 2 weeks.... you poor things.

Having been pretty busy, I havn't kept too close an eye on the news - in particular, I think the Israel-Palestine question will be worth paying close attention to. I just noticed something of some interest glancing at Ha'aretz though - they're carrying an AP story about a CNN report suggesting that Iraqi forces captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but let him go because they didn't recognise him. This hasn't registered with US or UK outlets (yet) which are all focusing on the elections.
It also seems that the younger members of Fatah have decided to leave and join up with Hamas. This is an indication that Mahmoud Abbas is not going to be able to dupe the Palestinians into signing away the last shreds of their claim to statehood in the manner that Yasir Arafat did over Oslo - they've learned a lesson it seems, and in the absence of any real kind of political representation, the only option they see open to them is violence. This is unlikely to trouble the Israeli government, who are holding out for as long as possible on a final settlement, and in the meantime building frantically in the West Bank to establish as many strategically placed settlements as possible so that the route of the seperation wall can ensure that the Israelis get as much territory as possible, while the Palestinian population centres are fragmented (or cantonised). The process of 'Politicide' - as described by Baruch Kimmerling in the best book I have read about the Israel-Palestine conflict - continues.

Hoping to see King Kong in the next few days...

Aids

2005-12-01T00:11:00.000Z

Thursday is World AIDS awareness day. If you can, buy an AIDS Awareness Day Ribbon. If you can't - or even if you can - visit FoTAC and consider making a donation. They get money to people on the ground in South Africa, providing treatment to AIDS sufferers who need it, but can't afford it. Tragically, these number in the hundreds of thousands. Only real awareness can stop AIDS becoming a 21st century pandemic of cataclysmic proportions. Eastenders storylines may make it seem as though the battle is won - it really isn't. Even in the world's richest and freest society, treatment is not affordable for all those who need it (I won't detail the testimony behind this assertion, but the scenario is not difficult to imagine). The question before us is whether to face the crisis before or after it gets out of control. Can we afford to fail?