The Republic of Dissent

Words, deeds, and the post-Rushdie world

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kenan Malik who has a great book out titled From Fatwa to Jihad which is is one of the best of the year :

There is usually, in other words, no direct relationship between words and deeds. How people respond to words depends largely on the individuals themselves. They are responsible for interpreting the words and translating them into actions. Between words and deeds stands a human being, with a mind of his own, an ability to judge between right and wrong and a responsibility to face up to his own actions. It is not the words themselves that cause things to happen, but our estimation of the value and truth of those words. Free speech empowers the speaker. It also empowers the listener, placing a premium on his or her ability to weigh up the arguments and draw their own conclusions.
Most people would accept that there is a distinction between words and deeds and yet in the post-Rushdie world the law often acts as if there is no space between the two. ‘Words are deeds,’ Aesop wrote in his fable ‘Trumpeter Taken Prisoner’. And this is how it appears to the law. Muslim protestors who chant ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark’ or ‘Behead those who insult Islam’ may be moronic and offensive. But the idea that they are inciting murder is equally moronic and offensive to our intelligence. People do not respond to words like robots. They think and reason, and act upon their thoughts and reasoning. Bigots are, of course, influenced by bigoted talk. But it is the bigots who must bear responsibility for translating talk into action. In blurring the distinction between speech and action, incitement laws blur the idea of human agency and of moral responsibility.

Atheists' summer camp

I found this report in the Independent disturbing because it confirms my fear that atheism is becoming like a religion and that some atheists are becoming what they hate most, that is religious zealots.

Brand and the new politics

John Pilger has the best article I've read, so far, on the first 100 days of Obama as the POTUS. He talks about the Obama brand and what it means or rather seems to mean to Americans and to journalists:

The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.
No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.
Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion . . .” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

While watching Charlie Rose last night where his guests were commenting on the greatness of his performance during his latest prime time news conference, I realized that it is not just Obama who was to be a transformative president, it is also journalists who are so convinced that they are part of history that they are oblivious to the fact that they have become actors in the most shameful manner possible by refusing to simply be spectators or analysts, which is more troubling.The trouble with branding and the new politics is that it makes the lack of distance on the part of people who should be having it acceptable to them and tolerable to the public when the consensus is that the brand is great and that it makes the people feel great about themselves. As I've said before Obama as a brand is Coke Zero it has the great taste of coke and it doesn't make you fat even if it has no vitamins, for some people, too many people, the majority at the moemnt, it is all that matters. May be I'm missing something, but I'm expecting more from politics than performance and that calorie and fat-free words.

Our morality

I agree with Norman Geras on this:

It is important not to be a nation that tortures. But that is because of what torture is and what it does to people; it is because human beings have some rights from which there can be no derogation, not in any circumstances. It is because to torture is to violate a human right that is absolute and to violate a human being. For its own sake America - like every nation - should not want to be one that tortures, but the most fundamental reason for this is the violation of humanity that torture is. The nation that does it is degraded, but it is degraded through how others have been treated at its hands. While, for any 'us', it is about us, this is so because of what it does to some them.

Switching sides

I think the fact that Arlen Specter is switching from the  Republican party to the Democrat party in 2009 after remaining loyal during the Bush years, during the time when he would have had many reasons to switch sides or to become an independent confirms that politics is dead or rather that it is no longer about debate, but about solely power, image, story telling. How else is it possible to expect that a man who argues that his switch is about principle never loudly disagreed with Bush II especially when his administration was all-powerful and when dissenting meant hating America? The saddest thing is that Democrats and liberals are welcoming him with open arms without wondering what his defection means. Well thank god, I'm independent because nowadays,  the two american parties are in such a state of decay that they are useless.

Exceptions don't change the rule

Interesting article from Michelle Goldberg on Fuambai Ahmadu, a Sierra Leonean who defends female circumcision:

Fuambai Ahmadu, the American-born daughter of a Sierra Leonean family, wore knee-high leather boots under a stylish rust-colored skirt. A postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, she looked younger than her 40 years. Beside her was Grace Mose, regal in a red African tunic, matching skirt, and head wrap. Her perfect English was deeply accented by her native Kenya, where she had grown up in an Abagusii village in the country's southwest region. It was easy to imagine her as a champion of the line of midwives who have made their living cutting girls since the beginning of recorded history, women who are now being jailed in some countries for practicing a trade that once brought them money and pride.
But it wasn't that simple. Ahmadu, not Mose, is the high-profile defender of female circumcision and the role it can play in inducting African girls into their societies. "My sitting here is a perfect example that female initiation can have a place in a global society," she insisted. "I don't see that initiation is somehow an impediment to girls' development." Circumcision and all that it represents in her culture, she said, "is an important source of my social identity. It's what links me with my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts, my female ancestors. It celebrates our history, our connection."
As she spoke, Mose, a fervent campaigner against the practice, glared at her. Unruffled, Ahmadu continued, arguing that in Sierra Leone, "female circumcision is empowering." Toward the end of the debate, a Senegalese woman, incensed by Ahmadu, stood up and said, "I really feel very frustrated seeing an African sister defending female genital mutilation." A few people applauded. She herself, she said, had not been cut and saw the practice as indefensible. "There is one thing we have to clarify. We have used here the term 'female circumcision,' which is a term that I do not like at all. Because it puts together two things that are totally different. We [should] talk about female mutilation. Why? When we circumcise a boy, that is skin that is cut off. Now when a female is, I'll say, excised, that is the whole part that is taken out. That is completely different!"

Such cases are interesting, but irrelevant because exceptions don't make the rule. It is always possible to find people who oppose or agree with traditions, rituals, policies, which the majority of people affected consider unjust and barbaric. It would have been possible during slavery to find slaves oppose to abolition as it is now possible to find gays who oppose marriage, we only have to take the example of Zora Neale Hurston who oppose didn't segregation to be terrible for African to understand that it isn't a minority within a large of group of people asserts its individuality that it changes reality and the experience of a greater number of people. Besides the argument against female circumcision isn't really about whether it is good or bad, but about the fact that it should be a choice given to women when they become adult not one impose on little girls to force them to submit to received ideas and barbaric and misogynistic traditions.

Dangerous slippery slope

At the end of Margaret Wente in her op-ed in  the Globe and Mail makes the following point, which she seems to believe in her strongest an attempt to make an unshakable case on torture:

Maybe there would be a case for torture if it worked. But all the evidence points the other way. And even though many people (including Barack Obama) are understandably desperate to move on, I'm afraid the ghosts of Abu Ghraib won't be stilled until there is a thorough reckoning.

That is the mistake that the people against torture make by opening the door for torture by asserting implicitly or explicitly, as Wente in this case, that torture might be permissible if it worked. By doing this they make the focus of the debate the effectiveness of torture when the focus should be on the fact that torture is never acceptable especially when it is effective for the simple reason that a society cannot make exceptions for its use even on terrorists without corrupting its ideals and its soul.

Taking a stand

A different on Durban II from Agnes Callamard:

The Durban Review Conference itself was also characterised by a disturbing vacuum in such stewardship. The only head of government present was President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who caused a stir with his address to the conference on the first day. The majority of those participating sent delegations led by diplomats – rather than government heads – and undermined the importance of the cause to oppose racism.
The absence of so many heads of states also created the space for extremists to come forward and take centre stage. Ahmadinejad's speech caused headlines, not least because of the pre-organised walkout by European states at his first mention of the word "Israel". This was ineffective drama. The western delegations may have taken a stand against the Iranian president when they walked out. But they did not take a stand against antisemitism, racism, discrimination and intolerance.

Assuming that Callarmard is right, I wonder why no one even question why the UN should be involved in the fight against racism when it already has all the pain in the world to ensure peace on earth. Why do people assume that racism can be fought with conference and through state or state-like organizations?

Liberalism and Western supremacism

I don't know whether I like Terry Eagleton, but he does have an unique point of view, which forces me to pause especially when I disagree with him, which is at this point almost all the time.  In an op-ed in the Guardian (hat tip: Norman Geras), he makes the following point, which isn't illegitimate, but which in my view doesn't take the context into account because it is obsessed with a particular point of view, which is the idea that atheism is a problem for the West. Sugary excerpt:

If the test of liberalism is how it confronts its illiberal adversaries, some of the liberal intelligentsia seem to have fallen at the first hurdle. Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis's slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism.
The irony is clear. Some of our free literary spirits are defending liberal values in ways that threaten to undermine them. In this, they reflect the behaviour of western states. Liberals are supposed to value nuanced analysis and moral complexity, neither of which are apparent in the slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult. They are noted for their judicious discriminations, rather than the airy dismissal of all religion as so much garbage. There is also an honorable legacy of qualifying too-absolute judgments with an awareness of context: the genuine liberal is appalled by Islamist terrorism, but conscious of the national injury and humiliation that underlie it. None of the writers I have mentioned is remarkable for such balance. On the whole, they are more preoccupied with freedom of expression than freedom from imperial rule.

Pakistan and Chaos theory

The best article I've read this weekend is Madiha Tahir on Pakistan in the Columbia Journalism Review and the coverage that it receives in the American media. She makes the argument  that the American press's coverage of Pakistan is not only simplistic, but focused narrowly on everything that confirms its strong presumption that Pakistan is a failed state. Sugary excerpt:

In late March, Foreign Affairs produced a three-day roundtable called “What’s the Problem with Pakistan?” proceeding to discuss the country as though it were a psychiatric patient refusing its happy pills. “Unfortunately for Pakistan,” declared Ashley Tellis from the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, “the West is losing patience with its shortcomings—and while Pakistan may be slowly changing, the threats emerging from that country toward the rest of the world are increasing fast.” The real issue in—and indeed with—Pakistan is militancy.
(...) The ‘tick-tock boom’ has been around since as early as 1964, says University of Chicago historian and blogger Manan Ahmed, with the publication of Lawrence Ziring’s The Failure of Democracy in Pakistan. By the 1970s, Pakistan had been tagged a troubled state based on development indicators established at Harvard’s Institute for International Development, as well as its Center for Development Studies.
“That narrative slowly percolates from the social sciences into the humanities and politics and State Department folks and outside of academia,” says Ahmed. “They’ve been saying this stuff for forty to fifty years, and there’s been no attempt to rethink or reformulate that narrative.” For Washington, the story has provided rationalizations for supporting dictators, encouraging repressive tendencies in successive Pakistani governments, and, lately, killing Pakistanis with drones. ‘Pakistan is chaos,’ the strange logic goes, ‘and the US will contain that chaos through dictatorships and bombing.’
Reporters, too, have their own ends. The “Idiot’s Guide” is—again, perhaps unwittingly—truthful about this, advising, “Tick off the name of a Taliban leader or two and make a reference to North Waziristan, and you might be on your way to a lucrative lecture tour.” Indeed. Journalism is a business, and the story sells.

Oh Canada

Jeffrey Simpson deplores Canada's dependence of the United States, which is according to him is increasing without Canadians doing anything about it because they are blissfully unaware of it:

Canadians sometimes kid themselves about their dependence on the United States, asserting more latitude than facts warrant. Today, however, that dependence is great and growing, for better or worse.
In fields from border security to trade, from energy and the environment to Afghanistan, from economic recovery to university research, we Canadians are now following along or simply dependent on what happens in America. [...] Canada could have taken the lead in climate change within North America years ago but chose not to do so. As a result, it has nothing positive to offer the Obama administration, and so is waiting on events. That "clean energy dialogue" touted at the Obama-Harper summit was, and remains, eyewash.
Canadians are quite patriotic, and with good reason. We are also quite dependent, more than we enjoy telling ourselves, and we apparently have no ideas about how to reduce that dependence.

Canada's relationship with the US has more upsides for Ottawa than bad not only politically, bu also culturally. The question of dependence is an important one, but secondary as long as Canada continue to be the Us's number one trading partner.

Sense and sensibility

I agree with Paul Krugman on this:

The Bush administration was obviously — yes, obviously — telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did — and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.
I’ll never trust “sensible” opinion again. But for those who stayed “sensible” through the test, it’s a moment they’d like to see forgotten. That, I believe, is the real reason so many want to let torture and everything else go down the memory hole.

God is no longer on the West's side

Quote of the day  from the worth reading of Terry Eagleton on culture, religion, atheism, and civilization:

The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.(...)Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West-well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.

Conscience trumps competence

Richard Dowden argues that in Jacob Zuma's case the key question is the one of competence not of conscience. I disagree strongly with Dowden because his views on Zuma and South Africa are shaped by that  old, but resilient colonial notion that Africa is a land where everything including the air is so different from anywhere else that ethics and matters of conscience are trivial because the emphasis ought to be on prosperity and on civilizing the barbarians. Dowden's opinion is the product of  a passeist way of looking at African leaders by arguing that the most important thing is what they do in power not who they are as if it was possible to separate the two, as if a sleaze ball could govern without doing sleazy things and without being tempted to remake the country he governs in his image. What scares me about Zuma isn't his competence, but rather his judgment and his lack of conscience because I think it is more easily for countries, especially when they are African, to survive incompetent presidents, but it is harder to survive ideological presidents who don't have a conscience and who believe that it is their destiny not only to rule, but to do so without accountability. I think that conscience trumps competence especially in African politics, because those countries don't have strong enough political institutions and viable civil societies to overcome corrupt leaders without dire consequences on their countries.

Games and Ahmadinejad

Adrian Hamilton calls the walkout of the EU at Durban II during Ahmadinejad's speech childish and he even compares him to Sarkzoy:

Isn't it time western diplomats just grew up and stopped these infantile games over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? All that this play-acting over boycotting of conferences because of his presence and walking out because of his words achieves is to flatter his ego, boost his poll ratings at home and play into the hands of an Israel that is desperate to prove Iran the gravest threat to its existence.
True, Iran's President is not the world's most endearing character. Some of the things he says are certainly contentious. But he is far from the most offensive leader on the block at the moment. With Silvio Berlusconi sounding off about women and sex, and Nicolas Sarkozy sounding off about everything from the quality of his fellow leaders to the unsuitability of Muslims to join the civilised nations, and a Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, giving his views on gays, Europe could claim its fair share of premiers who should not be allowed out in public.

I agree that the walkout was childish but because it was predictable that Ahmadinejad was going to do what he did and that the most adult act would have been not to invite him or not to participate to the masquerade, which was Durban II. As to the comparison between Sarko and Ahmadinejad, it is laughable because there is still  an important distinction between clownesque behavior and despicable beliefs.

History, myths, victims, and the politics of commemoration

Sugary excerpt of the day from Isolde Charim's great article on the role that the memory of the Holocaust, victimhood play in Europe's view of its own history and on its attempt to unify itself:

(...) we are experiencing the formation of a new myth, one woven precisely from these narratives: national legends and tales of heroism are being replaced by those of one's own suffering and victimization. In this sense, texts such as the ones mentioned are performative: they contribute to the construction of the new myth. The moral equation of all victims of World War II has long since moved on from revisionism to common discourse that calls for the general recognition of suffering – be it that of the Germans as a result of the Allied bombing, or that of displaced persons. (...) In the days of the former Federal Republic of Germany, it was a matter of complete empathy with foreign victims. (...)Today, this "impossible empathy", this "unacceptable identification" (Diederich Diederichson), has shifted vehemently from foreign victims to the discovery of one's own victimhood. If today there is a "clash" of memories, then it is one of competing victim counts. It is fundamental that the new narrative, one supposed to bring about European unity and include the recognition of all victims, can only be attained through the dilution of the concept of victim to a general human concept overlooking a differentiation between victim and perpetrator.
In the West, this is being realized through the privatization of commemoration. Emotional history is rapidly taking up the entire space of memory. .

Power grab

Amira Elghawaby argues that women are just instruments in the struggle for power in Afghanistan and that Islam is just an excuse, she might be right, but the problem is that there are no easy solutions especially given that the emphasis is on security, terrorism, and not much else:

This latest conflict over women's roles and responsibilities isn't totally about Islam but about the age-old struggle over power - power that even Western men may sometimes want (or so suggests Whitney Casey, author of The Man Plan: Drive Men Wil d - Not Away, quoted above). Some men just don't want to see women "do everything," and this latest outrage in Afghanistan is about reminding everyone who's boss.
And just as this legislation is contrary to modern-day notions about women's roles and rights, it is also contrary to the spirit of Islam that it tries to co-opt. Believe it or not, Islam actually encourages positive relationships between husbands and wives, and aims to promote societies based on mutual co-operation and education of the sexes. It is this that can neutralize oppressive values, not a Western-imposed world view.

Atonement

Dorothy Rabinowitz goes overboard in her attempts to make the case that Obama blames America. She misses the opportunity to make the more simple and convincing argument that that Obama has decided for now to be in appearance not like Bush even though in substance it is another story.  The real question is what is going to happen when Obame faces the first political challenge of his administration, which requires him to be unpopular with the people who believes religiously that he was elected to atone for America's sins:

No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle.
None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.
The same can't be said for the large numbers of Americans who caught up with the details of the president's apology tour. Presidents have been transformed by office, and Mr. Obama may yet be one of them. But on the evidence so far, he has, as few presidents before him, much to transform. Or, at least, to understand.

Obama neither blames America nor does he want to weaken it with his current strategy, he is just trying to build a legacy as the one who restored its image after two terms of Bush II, the trouble is that it may not the right focus for a president in these times of uncertainty. I'm not sure that Obama is going to be able to deny the fact that Bush actually did certain things that Americans agreed with and that he may even have sooner or later to convince Americans that his way is better or that not everything Bush did was horrific. In short, I don't it is going to be possible to keep saying implictly or even explicitly Bush bad, America good without doing much else.

Effective torture

Marc Thiesse, a former Bush official, affirms in an op-ed in the Washington Post that torture worked:

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.
This is the secret to the program's success. And the Obama administration's decision to share this secret with the terrorists threatens our national security. Al-Qaeda will use this information and other details in the memos to train its operatives to resist questioning and withhold information on planned attacks.

In my opinion, the fact that the effectiveness of torture is even discussed shows that the US has lost the moral high ground. For the next few decades,  this issue will remain relevant not only in the United States, but  also in the world because the Bush administration opened the door and the Democrats let them do it by allowing the argument to be about whether torture can protect America from ruthless terrorists as if that was the main consideration, as if the central question was whether the end justify the means. The problem here is that the way the Obama administration released the torture memos, the arguments that it made to justify the release and its refusal to do more makes it possible for torture to become again an acceptable way to insure the security of Americans when it comes under attacked and feels that it has no other means to defend itself.

Forcing people to listen to atrocious music

A.N. Wilson has found religion again, and unfortunately, he wants to share his joy and his bewitchment with the rest of the world:

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I'm happy for Wilson. I just wish he would leave the people who don't care or who don't want to hear whatever he is hearing alone for after all that is the worst thing about the pious, especially when they are Christians, they are so in love with their bad music that they believe that everybody must hear it, love it and bow to it

This woman's work

The best post I've read all day is from Gitl Wallerstein-Braun on Judaism and Feminism. It is short, on point, and interests so no comments are necessary. Sugary excerpt:

As a busy mother of eight children, and a full-time carer of my elderly mother-in-law, a survivor of Auschwitz, I could not get used to the community. Neighbours, for decades, just gazed through me, as if I were made of thin air. There was no way or where to return. I realised that just to keep my thoughts positive, I must learn English and pursue education to make something of myself. Thus, I was lucky to find my way to the wonderful world of contemporary art.

Moral confusion and ambiguity

Norman Geras on Obama, the Torture memos, the politics, the legalities, and the morality of it all:

Worse still, Obama cites in defence of his decision a reason that has been discredited legally - namely that 'those who carried out their duties rel[ied] in good faith upon [the] legal advice' that was given to them, a version, surely, of acting on higher authority. But there is no higher authority that can legitimize the practice of torture. This is a crime under international law, as is all but universally recognized, and everyone may be expected to know that it is, irrespective of how they have been advised. Apart from the legal constraint, all people, everywhere, have a moral duty not to torture.
As regrettable as Obama's fudging of this issue - his failure, that is, to state forthrightly what is being sacrificed to the political goal of avoiding disunity - are the large numbers of liberal commentators who simply endorse what he did, as if it were to them the most routine matter. Of all people, Philippe Sands:

Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up.

No, that is not how 'real' responsibility is distributed. Those who order torture are indeed responsible; and so are those who torture. You'd expect Sands to know this.

I am not getting verklempt on this issue, but I have this unshakable sense that an opportunity was missed and there is a dangerous vacuum out there, which leads to the sad conclusion that a line was crossed on torture and that Obama and his administration have not shut the doors to all of this nonsense that in times of dangers for America, everything is permissible and the highest price to pay for corrupting America's ideals is simply public shame and disapprobation, which in these times last about a minute given modern society's attention deficit disorder.

Obama's foreign policy and Montesquieu

Daniel Drezner attempts to answer Clive Crook's interrogations about Obama's foreign policy by explaining the Obama's doctrine:

Looking at what Obama has done to date, I'd suggest that his foreign policy doctrine comes by way of Charles de Montesquieu -- crudely put, useless conflicts weaken necessary conflicts. 
To elaborate:  the United States suffers from an overextension of its foreign policy obligations.  With a weakened economy and a drop in U.S. standing, it is both costly and fruitless for the administration to continue policy conflicts that yield little beyond pleasing those invested in the policy status quo.
It looks like Obama and his foreign policy team have prioritized what issues they think are important -- righting the global economic ship, China, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, nuclear nonproliferation come to mind.  Those are the issues where the United States will stick to its preferred policy positions and be willing to accept no deal rather than a bad deal. 

Drezner has a narrow view of Montesquiieu's philosophy, which he uses to elevate/obscure the fact that according to his own view Obama's foreign policy is to put it simply and crudely about covering America's ass and his own. It isn't a bad foreign policy doctrine, but I wonder how long this approach is going to last for I know that events have a way of forcing presidents to do more internationally that they want to do.

American society and breasts

Nancy McDermott dissents against the American view that breastfeeding is best and that women who don't are not only bad mothers, but bad people; the one thing that bugs about the subject is the prevalent opinion that a woman's body doesn't belong to her and she should always do what is best for her child even if she doesn't want to or can't do it:

But the notion that ‘breast is best’ – and its implications for women’s role in the family and even society – goes unquestioned today. And it goes unquestioned because it is presented narrowly as a matter of science, as a proven ‘fact’ that cannot be challenged except by anti-science deniers or twisters of ‘the truth’. (...)
Most men and women today approach marriage and family life with an expectation of equal partnership and shared domestic responsibility. But the arrival of children has a drastic impact on the division of labour in the home and on women’s fortunes at work. This is not simply a matter of America’s pitiful employment policies, its miserly six weeks of maternity leave or the lack of affordable childcare; alongside these things, the pressure to breastfeed has become a new, apparently science-led way of making women accommodate to a more domestic role in their children’s early years.
Breastfeeding is the last biological link between women and their traditional role in the family; it is something only they can do. Whether it means being physically available to nurse or pumping milk while at work, it drastically tips the scale towards a situation in which women take on primary responsibility for domestic life in a way that is not totally different from in Friedan’s day. Unlike in the past, however, when it was assumed that women would stay at home and attitudes to breastfeeding were relatively relaxed, today the decision to nurse is imbued with moral significance.  After all, if the science is clear and breastfeeding is best, what does it say about women who choose not to breastfeed? What is wrong with them?

A pitiful waste

Harry's place has a report from the circus that has become Durban II. The only question that I have is why France chose to participate when its president made clear that he believes in morality not only in the economy, but also in foreign policy. What does it say about Sarkozy?  What was the point of Durban II?

The company you keep

Hummm, that's the only thing that comes to mind when I read the Telegraph's take on the UN conference on racism, which starts today in Geneva and which the US chose to boycott while France and Britain decide to attend. My view on the subject is that the thing is pointless, but I don't go as far as the Telegraph even though I get the point of view:

Durban II will be little more than a celebration of the alliance between anti-Western leftists and Islamists. Countries that take civil rights seriously are right to stay away.

My generation

Sandra Tsing Loh argues that my generation, the Xs are the most anxious and most fearful group in society, unfortunately, she isn't wrong, but I wonder if Xs are that different from older generations in feeling super-stress at the idea of taking control of a world, which they didn't make and of becoming their parents, that is the people who made the world the anxious that it is:

Sadly, though, rebellion is not the outlier stance it once was. Xs are no longer America’s free. By 2009, Xs are neither what Fussell called the “classless class” nor an “un­monied aristocracy” with the freedom of the Out-of-Sights, if without the bucks. (Note: tickets to Burning Man start at more than $200.) Today’s Xs do not “occupy the one social place in the U.S.A. where the ethic of buying and selling is not all-powerful.” Thanks to the economic rise, over the past three decades, of what Richard Florida (betraying a wee bit too much admiration) calls “the creative class,” Xs now rule the world. Or, as David Brooks wrote in Bobos in Paradise (Bobos is short for “bourgeois bohemians”): “Dumb good-looking people with great parents have been displaced by smart, ambitious, educated, and antiestablishment people with scuffed shoes.” Today’s Xs define themselves largely by what they consume. (...) X people offer jobs to those they recognize, by certain nuanced clues, as members of their creative tribe, which makes people fear that they might mistransmit a code—bringing us back to Fussell’s rubric of class being announced in clothing, lifestyle, and speech. What will best fire the small talk, and the resulting intimate connection, that invigorates the start of a pitch meeting? Mets cap? Cubs cap? Yankees cap? What if you went to UC Davis instead of Harvard—are you not as funny? What is the right note of irony to apply to your hip-hop speech, given that you are, in actuality, suburban, 33, and white? Oh, yes, the newfangled Xs now have not only the money, but also the anxiety. It’s easy to be banished from the land of affluent hipdom—especially now that the scratch that pays for all that hipness has been depleted. When I see those TV commercials of silverback Baby Boomers sprinting with vintage surfboards toward ever-higher-yielding money-market funds, I feel both Boomer derision and a gnawing dread that my own funds are not similarly accruing (and in fact they are not—but maybe, to offset the losses, Brian Grazer will option my book?). Although in Fussell’s day, the denizens of the middle class were the more piquant sufferers of “status panic,” today the most metaphysically fearful group is, in fact, the Xs.

Z as in Zuma and Zero

A couple of articles in the press on Jacob Zuma,which don't reassure me about the future of South Africa. In the Financial Times, Alec Russell writes the following:

If South Africa is lucky, a president Zuma will be a Ronald Reagan. He will make the country feel good about itself after the awkward questions – over Aids and race and crime – raised under Mbeki. Zuma has assiduously courted minorities, in particular Afrikaners, and his frankness about the troubles plaguing South Africa – and also the problems in ­Zimbabwe – is refreshing after the chilly intellectualism of Mbeki. He also will, he suggests, step down after five years.
(...) There is, however, a less reassuring scenario than that of a latterday Reagan: the growth of a Big Man personality cult designed to mask South Africa’s growing social and economic problems, against the backdrop of a government making ever grander promises, and a steady implosion of the ANC’s sense of purpose. Mbeki’s tenure ended in ignominy but it should not be forgotten that he bravely led the ANC away from many of its outdated statist economic views. Some fear Zuma will prove the puppet of his leftwing supporters. But the greatest danger under a president Zuma may be not of a sudden ideological lurch, but of a vacuum of leadership and authority. For all his charm, Zuma has the populist’s trait of sometimes saying what his audiences want to hear – at a time when the party and country desperately need a strong hand at the tiller.

The Wall Street Journal has an article, which is less interesting because it focuses on Zuma's attempt to build a trusting relationship with South African businesses, while ignoring more important questions about the man. I have a total aversion for Jacob Zuma and it is not just because I believe that he has a women's problem to say things with more finesse that he deserves, but also because he resembles all fake populist leaders not only in Africa, but in all parts of the world who are all too ready to flatter the people, and to follow their prejudices and their fears without ever thinking about the necessity to educate the public and to make tough decisions, which can hurt their political stature and future.

Nationality, travel, identity, and writing

Amit Chaudhuri on the new generation of "Indian Writers" and the consequences of exile on their writing:

How does travel shape and qualify writing and nationality (a common enough conundrum), especially when they take on this form - the transcontinental literary event; the book reading in a foreign location? And how do these writers cohere and relate to each other in our minds: what is it, besides the book fair and perhaps the place of birth on their passports or some long-standing enthusiasm, that makes K Satchidanandan and Tarun J Tejpal and Dalrymple all, in some sense, "Indian" writers? One thing we do know is that travel is not only about bringing your particular skills, wares, identity and lineage to a place, but being changed by, and learning from, the act of travelling and facing up to foreignness. In roughly the past 20 years India has changed from being a Nehruvian nation-state - an experiment and ideal in democracy - to a portable mode of existence, as well as a form of self-justification for a curious mixture of free-market opportunism and a slyly conservative provincialism. This means that Indians, as they travel, migrate and resettle, have increasingly begun to deflect the problem - and the rewards - of encountering foreignness, and strangeness, and the notion of "India" has helped them in (has, in fact, been crucial to) this deflection. The so-called Indian diaspora ceased, really, to want either to integrate with, or radically revise, the landscape they moved to in the 1980s and 90s (usually, the United States, succeeding the earlier wave of immigration to Britain); instead, they wished to conform silently and, simultaneously, to continue as themselves. This has led to a unique combination of acceptance and denial.

Accountability

Glenn Greenwald praises Obama's decision to release the torture memos, but criticizes his decision not to hold those responsible for them accountable :

The most criticism-worthy act that Obama engaged in yesterday was to affirm and perpetuate what is the single most-destructive premise in our political culture:  namely, that when high government officials get caught committing serious crimes, the responsible and constructive thing to do is demand immunity for them, while only those who are vindictive and divisive want political leaders to be held accountable for their crimes.  This is what Obama said in affirming that rotted premise:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. . . . But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

That passage, more than anything else, is the mindset that has destroyed the rule of law in the U.S. and spawned massive criminality in our elite class.  Accountability for crimes committed by political leaders (as opposed to ordinary Americans) is scorned as "retribution" and "laying blame for the past."  Those who believe that the rule of law should be applied to the powerful as well as to ordinary citizens are demonized as the "forces that divide us." 

Obama did the prudent thing, which may end up being the right thing. I can't believe that some were really expecting him to do anything else that what he did considering the repercussions of the other choice that he had and that Greenwald would have wanted him to take. Hey, guys, welcome to a warm and disappointing place called earth where politicians aren't superheroes and actually care about politics, their legacy, and the stability of the country during their time in offire as much, if not more than about the Truth and the Right thing, which are too often too absolute and get in the way of governing. I love it when change means more of the same or rather the same old stuff done in more funky manner.

Mean boy

Catherine Philip on Sarkozy and his need to gossip about other world leaders:

Nicolas Sarkozy has no such excuse. He's not some backroom operative, he's a head of state. He's meant to run a country. That has not stopped the arrival of a new - taller, more handsome and popular - president on the scene from turning him into the kind of bitchy little princess that would make Graham Norton gasp.
Barack Obama? “Not up to standard on decision-making and efficiency,” President Sarkozy whispers. “Never even ran a ministry.” It would be funny if it weren't so pathetically obvious. Mr Sarkozy is out to strip the new boy of his shine.
Or anyone else in the vicinity, apparently. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain? “Not very clever.” José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission? “Totally absent.” Even political loyalty counts for little. Angela Merkel, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Mr Sarkozy at the G20 on greater global financial regulation, was derided as jumping on the French bandwagon only after she realised how parlous was the state of German industry. Sarkozy is the original betrayer, smiling and simpering to your face with a concealed dagger ready to plunge into you when your back is turned.
There is one leader whom the “hyper-president” claims to admire: Silvio Berlusconi, despite his constant stream of gaffes. But Mr Berlusconi is a buffoon, not a bitch. Well might Mr Sarkozy aspire to his heights. If he had an ounce of Mr Berlusconi's boundless self-confidence, he would not need to sneak around like some pint-sized Iago dripping bile into ready ears.

I don't get it. Sarkozy is just being himself and the people who were singing his praise a year ago are now telling us that he is not up to the job. The sad truth in a world in love with Obama there can be no place and, more importantly, no love for Sarkozy. The good news for him is that adoration of political leaders especially when it is based on vacuity never lasts so in a couple of years, Obama will stop to be in vogue and Sarkozy will have the chance to amaze the same fools who rush in to fall in love.

The perils of normalcy

The Economist wonders why Sarkozy is unpopular at home. Here is a clue, when you get elected promising change and rupture you better deliver or at least produce astounding results or dreamy and appetizing images of greatness to be seen as Superman and not Clark Kent. The other problem with Sarkozy is that he got outsarkozysed by Obama.

The need for an audience

Excerpt from Graham Robb's review of the new Pléiade edition of Rimbaud works edited of André Guyaux and Aurélia Cervoni :

Guyaux is unusually sensitive to the poet’s unrebellious side. He precisely elucidates the outrageous obscenities of his poetry and prose, but he also reminds us that the schoolboy Rimbaud sent a congratulatory Latin ode to Napoleon III’s son on the occasion of his first Communion, and imagines his discomfiture when his classmates found out. He notes that Rimbaud failed to publish any work – apart from a few poems and the privately printed Une Saison en Enfer – not just because he was continually changing, or because of artistic integrity, but because “his early ambitions were not encouraged”. Like any writer, Rimbaud needed an audience, and many of his poems were written to please particular readers. “Angoisse”, in the Illuminations, mentions “les ambitions continuellement écrasées”, among which must be counted the fact that, by the time he gave up writing poems, at the age of twenty or thereabouts, he no longer had any readers who could understand him.

For some reason, I have never been a Rimbaldophile. I think it might be because unconsciously, I blame Rimbaud for limiting Verlaine's growth as a poet by driving him mad and making fear darkness so much after he shot him that he forced himself to repress the passion necessary to become a great poet.

Too many tales

Just one word: Ah! and a sentence: people love narratives when they like/love/adore the narrator.

Wonderland

Insightful but sad:

The quickest way to annoy white liberals in Washington is to speculate that Barack Obama was so electable because he is a stealth African-American. He is not the son of slaves, nor was he actively involved in the civil rights movement. As he explains in his first autobiography, he did not feel defined by his race during his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia by a white mother and grandparents. Only in adolescence did he realise that skin colour was an issue, prompting the voyage of discovery about what it would mean, which took him to be a ‘community organiser’ on the South Side of Chicago. White liberals would have you believe that a post-racial President means a post-racial America. And having been forced to deliver his impressive race speech during the campaign by the views of his ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama recently slapped down a reporter who raised the issue. But his Attorney General Eric Holder (the first African-American to hold the post) accused his country of ‘cowardice’ on the issue, pointing out that friends and colleagues at work seldom mix across ethnic lines out of hours.

Europeanizing America

When I read this sugary excerpt from Irwin Stelzer, I had to laugh: 

Obama’s critics have allowed themselves to be distracted by their distaste for his outsize budget deficits and massive interventions in the auto and financial services industries. Socialism, they say. Not a bit of it. Barack Obama did not tramp through the snows of Iowa and eat ethnic food to please the television cameras in order to end up personally guaranteeing Americans that he will have their tail pipes replaced if necessary. Or to fight with bankers about their compensation, or pick the hotels in which they would be permitted to entertain clients.
He did it to convert America into a social democracy on European lines. Smaller cars; more modest homes; faster trains; healthcare for all, managed by the government; an electric-supply system engineered according to government specifications; guaranteed college tuition with associated control over universities. And, necessarily, higher taxes — at first on ‘the rich’, then on the middle class, in a massive effort to transfer control of the nation’s income from those who earned it to government bureaucrats.
In short, Obama is taking very seriously his self-description as a ‘transformative’ president. Lincolnesque. Rooseveltian. His stimulus programme is important to him only because he must get the economy moving if he is to retain his political clout and win another term, by the end of which the government will be controlling an increasing portion of the nation’s output and wealth. After two terms, that will be a permanent change.

Although  I'm not a fan of Obama, I know that he doesn't want to Europeanize America, he doesn't know enough about Europe (which is regrettable) to have such a grand aspiration and to even have the conviction that there are things in Europe, which could be good for America. My problem with Obama is that he has decided to be great, without deciding his policies, what is negotiable and non-negotiable, but that still, he symbolizes change and an improvement over Clintonism when he is Clintonism with a multiracial face. This explains his pragmatism, and why he doesn't have a backbone. Obama's truest and most unshakable conviction may be the one that he has that he was born to be a great president of the United states. But what does it mean to be a great president of the United  States nowadays and most especially can you become great without beef but with solely glitz and symbolism?

Bursting the Postmodern bubble

André Glucksmann on the economic crisis:

What led to the current crisis was not so much a faulty financial technique that we might promise to control from now on, that is, but the general state of mind that allowed its unchecked use. Capitalism, we should have remembered, involves at once prudent regulation and the imprudent transgression of old rules, the sharing of risks and the audacity to risk more successfully than others. (...)The fantasy of omnipotence animated not only the trader but also those who let him go his way; not only the heads of financial institutions but also the political, academic, and media authorities who saw no problem with any of it. Indeed, the performative ideology—“It is true because we say it is”—has governed the Westernization of the planet since the end of the Cold War: because the enemy camp disintegrated, the future belonged to us, and all fundamental dangers vanished.
Postmodernism, which places itself “beyond good and evil,” beyond true and false, inhabits a cosmic bubble. It would be a good thing if fear of a universal crisis allowed us to burst the mental bubble of postmodernism—if it washed away the euphoria of our pious wishes and brought us once again to see straight.

The trouble with Glucksmann is that his obsession with morality and the idea that nihilism is the greatest ill of the twenty-first century has made him a true believer in absolute justice.  This ardent, not to say fanatical, belief has led him to support the Iraq war and Nicolas Sarkozy because he cannot stand the idea that policies aren't about truth and morality. I'm willing to bet that he is enamored withe Sarkozy's new central political goal which is to moralize capitalism.

Forgetting about history

Quote of the day from Walter Benn Michaels:

So maybe it’s time to forget about the Holocaust for a while and focus on the free market instead, to stop congratulating ourselves on being against genocide and to start questioning what it means to be for free trade.

The western cult of the clash

Great insights from the Guardian article on Wole Soyinka and his explanation of his inspiration for his play Death and the King's Horseman and its relevance today:

He resists the suggestion that Horseman is an essentially political play. In an introduction he wrote when it was first published, Soyinka issued a stern warning not to interpret it as a "clash of cultures" piece: "I find it necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar reductionist tendency." He still stands by this. "At the time," he says, "the tendency - in the theatre, the cinema and the novel - was to present everything that dealt with things outside western culture as being understandable only as a 'clash of cultures'. This covered everything, and it encouraged analytical laziness."
(...) It would be hard to argue that the western world in 2009 has shaken off the us-versus-them mentality which Soyinka objected to more than 30 years ago. At best, he says, it has evolved: "It has shifted from being the west versus the rest, to being the west versus the east, Christianity against Islam - as if there hadn't been periods of human history where the fusion of those cultures was absolutely fundamental." He acknowledges, though, that western society is less ignorant when it comes to Africa. There appears to be new interest in his work: the National's Horseman is one of two current revivals. The other, staged by the Oregon Shakespeare festival, has been playing since February to glowing reviews.
Intriguingly, Soyinka sees another possible reason for this renewed interest: the rise of suicide bombing in the Arab world. Like the ritual suicide of the horseman, he thinks suicide bombers confront western minds with something that is both terrifying and baffling. "The situations are totally different, but still there is that commitment to a final act," he says. "Maybe there is something about the proliferation of suicide bombers that, consciously or unconsciously, is making people ask questions of that defining moment."

As much as I respect Soyinka, I think that he is wrong and the us-versus-them mentality isn't Western, but universal and that it is amplified by the cult of difference and sacralization of blood, which is even more present in some African countries or rather African ethnic groups than in Western societies because it is seen as the only way to preserve an eroded and assailed identity. Soyinka is a way a prisoner of the colonial mindset, which I think reduces his landscape and blinds him to the fact that the West is a much a political and a cultural fiction as the Rest is.

Defending globalization

Stubborn facts:

[...] globalisation promotes peace through two channels: one from the increased advantage peace holds for bilateral trade interdependence and the other from a country’s integration into the global market, regardless of the size of trade with each trading partner. "Globalisation" has been one of the most salient features of the world economy over the past century. Emerging markets and developing countries continue to integrate into the global trading system. World trade has increased rapidly, particularly since World War II — from 18% of world GDP in 1950 to 52% in 2007. At the same time, the number of countries involved in world trade has also increased significantly. However, despite the increase in the number of country pairs between which conflict is possible, the probability of dyadic military conflicts has decreased.

Although globalization is about more than trade is capitalism, it is more important today than ever to remember that the only real debate is about what kind of globalization does the world want and that it is as erroneous and as ideological to argue that the current economic crisis show that globalization is an ill or is dead as it was in the eighties to declare that there was no alternative to neoliberal globalization.

A distinction without a difference

I'm wondering or rather I doubt that  Stephen Pollard's point about the difference between blogs and newspapers is still relevant or even true because I have to say that I believe that most journalists have become bloggers in an attempt to escape their conviction that blogs and the Internet will doom their profession and newspapers:

In the end, the difference between quality newspapers and even serious blogs is that your default reaction to a newspaper piece should be that it is true, whereas your default reaction to a blog post should be that it might be true, but it might equally well be a pack of lies. Rather like government smear campaigns.

New York in April

I have to say that I'm absolutely hating my first April in New York. The weather doesnt seem to be able to make up its mind about whether we are still in the winter or at the beginning of spring. Nevertheless, the great thing about New York is that even when it sucks, things are happening and when one loves movement as I do one just has to get over one's sour mood. I'm rereading the first volume of Beckett and I have to say that a part of me wonders if I should be reading them. I know that we live in a time when voyeurism is no longer a vice, but still, questions of privacy remain and of the intent of the writer remain unanswered.

Decentralization, deregulation and the information gap

Quote of the day from Richard Posner arguing the lack of reliable information coming from a centralized, unitary financial-intelligence apparatus made it impossible to anticipate the current economic crisis:

Most people, even most experts, were especially unlikely to be persuaded by prophets of doom in the absence of a machinery for aggregating and analyzing information bearing on large-scale economic risk. Little bits of knowledge about the shakiness of the U.S. and global financial systems were widely dispersed among the staffs of banks, other financial institutions, and regulatory bodies and among academic economists, financial consultants, accountants, actuaries, rating agencies, mortgage brokers, real-estate agents, and business journalists. There was no financial counterpart to the CIA to assemble an intelligible mosaic from the scattered pieces. Much of the relevant information was proprietary; investment banks, hedge funds, and other financial firms conceal information about business strategies that might help competitors, and they soft-pedal adverse information about the firm's prospects. Even the regulatory agencies lacked access to much crucial information about the financial system, because of limitations on their authority that were thought appropriate in an era of deregulation. Lacking authority to regulate new derivative securities such as credit-default swaps, financial regulators could not force disclosure of information that might have revealed how risky the financial system had become.

Mutual disdain and distrut

I agree with this:

Just as anti-Americanism serves a particular indispensable political purpose in Europe (and in Britain) as a bonding measure for the Left, so anti-Europeanism will come to have a valuable function for the Left in America. It will be Europe's fault if the dreams of the Obama administration cannot be fulfilled: if universal healthcare is not deliverable, it will be because the US has had to foot the entire bill of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan. If poverty and social deprivation cannot be cured, it will be because Europe left the Obama administration to go it alone on fiscal stimulus. On the other hand, if the White House strategies succeed in Afghanistan and on the economy, then Europe will have been proved wrong as well as useless. If he fails, it can be blamed on the Europeans. If he succeeds, he will have done so without their help. So what will be the point of talking to them as equals ever again?

At the root of the issue is the fact that neither America nor Europe have a deep knowledge of each other. or at leas that this knowledge is corrupted by either a superiority or an inferiority complex. Europe to America is an old continent made of countries, which it feels more or less distant to. To Europeans, America is a spoiled country, which still needs to grown up in spite of its power.

Democratization, values, and the whole nine yards

Things are getting more dangerous for women in Afghanistan, and thisalarming  reality leads me to wonder whether it is possible for the United States and the others to save the Afghans from themselves (thus making themselves susceptible to the charges of Western condescension and paternalism) and whether they should even attempt to remake a country to their image or to mold it according to their self-interests. The Financial Times had a great article last weekend on democratization in Arab countries; its central question was whether the West was getting in the way of reform in the Middle East. This sugary excerpt caught my attention because it sums the situation not only in Arabs countries, but in other countries where democratization may lead to something other than what are mistakenly called Western values:

Democracy, in this unpromising context, could open a long period of illiberal politics that may be inimical to stability. Yet the west’s only realistic choice is to foster, or at least not actively obstruct, the right of Arabs to decide their own future, in whatever form they wish. That form will be heavily influenced by Islamism. Yet the west should be able to see the similarities between Islamism (or Islamic revivalism) and 19th-century nationalism in Europe. Both started as a sort of forced march into the future and then they detoured in sinister and destructive ways: fascism then and the jihadi cult of death now. Any sane policy would be devoted to preventing the evolution of a lethal form of radical Islam, in no small part by finding space for a thoughtful Islamism to emerge.

The trouble with democratization is that it cause widespread chaos in certain regions of the world which are too important to the US and its allies to accept it or to wait patiently for things to improve on their own. In Afghanistan, it may soon become apparent that neither democratization nor stabilization can happen through nation building fostered by foreign powers.

Tax havens and financial protectionism

Interesting take from Eamonn Butler on tax havens and the sudden popular and populist wrath of politicians against them as scapegoat for the current financial crisis:

If you want to pay less tax – as about five billion of the world’s population doubtless do – you have two options. You can evade taxes, concealing your income from the authorities, which is, of course, illegal. Or you can avoid taxes, which is perfectly legal. You might simply claim the full deductions allowed by the tax authorities or maybe move your money into a place where taxes are lower.
It’s avoiders, not evaders, who are the tax havens’ staple customers. The image of drug money being washed through the Cayman Islands is the stuff of thrillers rather than reality. (...) Few honest people have qualms against clamping down on criminals. But despite all the Godfather-style spin, it’s actually the rest of us whom the politicians want to clamp down on. They figure – correctly – that if we remain at liberty to put our money in the Virgin Islands or some other place where taxes are lower, we are likely to do just that. And our ability to escape puts limits on just how much they can tax us.
This explains why even Gordon Brown is calling for curbs on tax havens, despite the fact that many of them, including the Channel Islands, are British dependencies. Other countries want even tougher sanctions.
It’s pure financial protectionism. The G20 leaders signed a communiqué praising free trade and deploring anticompetitive barriers in goods and services. That’s because leaders don’t make goods and services. But they do make taxes and are really keen to keep out the competition in that sector. They don’t mind us shopping around the world for the cheapest goods, but they certainly do mind us shopping around for the cheapest taxes.
They have only themselves to blame. It’s not just that governments seem unable to rein in their bureaucracies and keep their costs under control. It’s that they have made taxes so complicated.

Democracy, rape, and Afghanistan

Quote of the day from Mohammad Asif Mohseni, a top Afghan Cleric defending the Afghan rape law:

The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights. (...) In Shariah law, it states that a woman cannot go out without the permission of her husband.(...)It is essential for the woman to submit to the man's sexual desire. (...) If she is not sick, and if she does not have another problem, it is the right of a man to ask for sex and she should make herself ready for it. This is the right of a man.

This should make the nation building efforts fun in Afghanistan especially if it ends up creating a country that resembles parts of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.

Martin Amis, sex, and politics

The Independent has a portrait of Martin Amis, which put a halt to my desire to like more, but at least it reinforces my opinion that he has to be taken seriously, without being dismissed or attacked as an islamophobe:

 In the light of all this, perhaps his caricatures of appalling men were merely an accurate depiction of the essence of the male?
"I think so!" says Amis cheerily. "I was quoted by, I'm pleased to say, Germaine Greer, as saying that all men should be locked up until they're 28. Boot camp. That would knock some sense into them. We're terrible. We can't help it!" No wonder he now describes himself as a "gynocrat" who believes that the world would be better run by women. And no wonder his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is about the sexual revolution. "My view is that they got it the wrong way round," he says, "in that what they should have absolutely nailed down as their only objective is that men should do 50-50 in the home. Instead, they went Napoleonic."
Uh, huh? And how much does he do? Amis makes a face. "I do a lot of driving," he says in the end. "And, in fact," he adds, "men get even more devious than you know. Men are so corruptive that some awful document arises and you go up and sort of stand near your wife looking helpless."
Do you. So, less delegation of "awful documents" to the wife. More washing up. More pegs, in fact. Anything else? "Well, there's another thing," says Amis, "but it's grim. It's to do with little boys and little girls. If a girl says, 'I want to marry daddy,' as they all do at some time, everyone goes 'ah'. If a little boy says, 'I want to marry mummy,' then he wakes up in hospital. The special status of the dad," he says emphatically "has to go."
Right. It sounds as though Martin Amis on the sexual revolution might be at least as controversial as Martin Amis on Islam. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Eccentric is the word that springs to mind. A slightly peculiar extrapolation of the universal from what is clearly the particular. And this, from a man who rarely names a female intellectual influence.

Dark and corrupt America

Now that Americans have a cool, worldly, well read and fashionable president, I'm sure that people who as  Kishore Mahbubani is responsible for so much of the ills of the world will change their mind since it is possible to reset the past and to move forward:

(...) virtually all analysis by American intellectuals rests on the assumption that problems come from outside America and America provides only solutions. Yet the rest of the world can see clearly that American power has created many of the world’s major problems. American thinkers and policymakers cannot see this because they are engaged in an incestuous, ­self-­referential, and ­self-­congratulatory discourse. They have lost the ability to listen to other voices on the planet because they cannot conceive of the possibility that they are not already listening. But until they begin to open their ears, America’s problems with the world will ­con­tinue.
It will not be easy for America to change course, because many of its problems have deep structural causes. To an outsider, it is plain to see that structural failures have developed in America’s governance, in its social contract, and in its response to globalization. Many Americans still cannot see ­this.
When Americans are asked to identify what makes them proudest of their society, they inevitably point to its democratic character. And there can be no doubt that America has the most successful democracy in the world. Yet it may also have some of the most corrupt governance in the world. The reason more Americans are not aware of this is that most of the corruption is ­legal.

I made a bet with a friend that in four year, when Obama will be running for reelection, he won't be able to go anywhere without seeing wide protests against America and its corrupting behavior. The point is that in movies and in real life, people rarely like Goliaths because they always assume that it is keeping millions of David down to remain in power. For now, Obama is mostly considered to be as a man who is Black, half-African, partly raised in Indonesia, and who has Muslim family members, all of his differences make people assume that his policies will be different because they assume that they make see him the world as David not as Goliath and therefore he will act as they would act in they were on his position. I can't wait to see what will happen when people realize that being different is neither a political program nor a policy orientation. 

Questions of space

Worth noting take on The Kindly Ones, literary criticism, and writing from This Space (hat tip: Mark Thwaite)

The Kindly Ones is perhaps the first novel I have read and felt the need to write about before any hype kicked in. Had it been another, quieter publication, such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee or Thomas Glavinic's Night Work, then the review itself would have been enough. All three novels, however different and however removed from the vicious modernist circle familiar to this blog, prompted long attention because they opened a space making narrative possible, even necessary. Or, to put it another way, the space became palpable only through writing like this. Each review was an attempt to make this space clear and thereby to ease future readers into a different kind of reading than that practised elsewhere.
In Maximilien Aue's case, it is the space that, in crude terms, has opened between life and death. He becomes able to speak because he has escaped the vengeance of the Furies but can tell his story only under the threat of their return. Or perhaps the narrative is the vengeance itself and, by writing, Aue is trying to escape into life or death. Either way, the novel offers an example of how to write from within a particular predicament. Rather than falling into generic means, the form and dynamic of the narrative emerge from the particulars of the case. It is why The Kindly Ones moves between, among other forms, bureaucratic prose and dream-like reverie; not because it enables the author to display his mastery - though it does that too - but because it is necessary to the narrative. The Kindly Ones is, as Beckett said of Finnegans Wake, not about something, it is that something itself. It should be read accordingly.

It is interesting to reality that The Kindly Ones has become a novel, which in my opinion forces the reader to wonder what is the role of the reviewer and whether it is possible to write an insignificant, amoral, but acceptable and artful book about a great and almost divine subject. I agree is Littell's novel is the something rather than about something and what I sense is that that is what bothers reviewers because some somethings are too important, to  divine to be transcended when they are the subject-matter of a novel.