Disobedience

Early in the crisis, a wise ex-colleague wrote to say that "Savers will pay for the mess. They are the only ones that have any money left."

That comment was relayed by Buttonwood in the Economist yesterday.

Aditya Chakrabortty also quotes the words of a friend:

A friend of mine has a mid-level job at the European Commission. Over the past few years, through Greece and Ireland and Portugal and Spain, he has kept up a resolutely chipper air. This weekend, as details of the Cyprus deal came out, he sent me this email: "Is this what the European financial system has come down to? A direct appropriation of savings because it cannot cure its systemic problems. It is not just the banks that are bankrupt. It is the whole bloody model that has run its course and we are in denial."

It was a bad idea too far. They hit savings, not income. They were punishing virtue with theft. The Cypriot Parliament looked out and saw their own angry citizens, then they scanned the horizon and saw Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland. And what else could they say, but 'no'.

Who knows what will happen next. The fear of contagion for the EU, especially after the Italian elections, is not economic. Instead, they must worry about how disobedience might become a habit now that a precedent has been set.

This is a long running saga, going way back into the 19th Century to the ideas of the people that I write about. There were contrasting views amongst reformers and radicals. On the one hand there was an eclectic bunch of mutualists, cooperators, radical liberals and democratic socialists. On the other sat the Fabianism of the Webbs with their belief in the benign rule of a technocratic elite. The Fabians had social science and rationality on their side. They were meritocratic elitists, managerialists one and all. The others believed in self-determination, liberty, devolution and democracy. In the struggle between coherence and the disparate messiness of the libertarian left, coherence won out. Later, the EU enshrined technocracy at its heart. It has one major flaw. What if the technocrats are idiots?

The democrats bit back today, not through the election of anti-political clowns, but through a simple act of denial. The consequences are uncertain, but we have just had a reminder that democracy is present only when people have the power to refuse.

The crisis returns

It is bad economics and bad politics. There was always a better option.

But let's be provocative. What can one say in favour of the Cypriot raid on bank deposits?

First, it is progressive. The rich pay the most. The very poor pay nothing, as they are usually too poor to save.

Second, what is the worse crime? Taking 7-10% of people's bank deposits or 50% of the incomes of the already poor?

Of course it isn't as simple as that. As a wealth tax it is inefficient. The wealthy will have much of their money in assets not cash and will be more than able to absorb the cost. It is more likely to hit older people. Small savers will often have scrimped and sacrificed to build up some reserves for later in life from already highly taxed incomes. They may have sold assets to fund their retirement or to support their children and grandchildren. To be denied the gratification that they had deferred is a harsh irony. Their inclusion, along with the wealthy, is unjust and quite possibly illegal. Deposits up to €100,000 are supposed to be guaranteed. As for the shares of equivalent value given in compensation, I don't think that many financial advisors would suggest selling at the moment.

But it isn't just that. Why else is there real anger? Certainly, there is the shock of hitting the one area of wealth that was seen to be immune. And we don't like retrospective taxation. It comes far too close to theft for anyone's liking. But then there is also a sense that thrift is virtuous. Taxing virtue is not moral, especially as it is done to recapitalise the banks broken by the immoral gamblers of the financial world. The feckless are to be repaid by the thrifty.

What this seems to show is that moral discourses are inescapable in economics. The attempt to render it a technical subject alone runs the risk of abject moral (and technical) failure. It is good to see that the 19th Century term, political economy, has made a comeback. It implicitly includes the human impact of policy in its calculations. The failure of the well-heeled technocrat is seeing poverty, unemployment, desperation and all the ills of austerity as technical indicators and not as real lives.

Of course, there have also been many trying to turn the crisis into a morality drama of the indolent south against the industrious north. This sophistry has been pervasive. But just as there are various competing policy options there are different moralities that should be at play too. There are alternatives. How about a sense that economics should be based on a sense of the implicit and equal worth of all people? Making the well being of all, rather than the protection of institutions, the first priority would have led to different policies. And they may well have proved more successful.

UPDATE:
Made in Germany.

And the risk of a run on the banks.

Truth and lies

In my last post I wrote about how John Stuart Mill saw truth emerging from the conflict of ideas. What he had in mind was doctrine and belief. I think he would be astounded to discover the battles that are now waged against empirically verified reality, something that he no doubt assumed would be accepted by all. If we are not to live in a fantasy world, the duty to contest in these cases is not a way of exploring truth, but of defending it against distortion and deliberate campaigns of disinformation.

Mill was a true Victorian liberal. He envisaged civilised debate between rational people and a respectful, thoughtful exchange of ideas. And in this spirit we should welcome this new film (and web site) on climate change denial.



Greedy Lying Bastards gets it about right.

In one sense that is a little unfair as many deniers are horribly sincere. But who dreamt up the misinformation that they believe and endlessly repeat? Someone had to distort and manipulate data and it had to be deliberate. When every single claim made has been subjected to rigorous scientific analysis and all, yes all, have been found to be utterly wrong, the expensively maintained communications machines that produce and endlessly repeat this guff must know it to be false.

Phil Plait gets it right writing about the "blatantly untrue, ... ridiculous and obviously false statement" that there has been no warming for the past sixteen years:

The difficulties in debunking blatant antireality are legion. You can make up any old nonsense and state it in a few seconds, but it takes much longer to show why it’s wrong and how things really are.

When financial interests team up with wishful thinking, we are in trouble. It is about time to drop polite respectability and call a lie precisely what it is.

In praise of free speech

I have been meaning to put up a review of Nick Cohen's polemic on free speech, You Can't Read This Book, for some time. With a brief hiatus at a hectic time, this is the moment for me to post some comments on the book. A regular reader of Cohen's journalism will be familiar with many of the examples he gives and the case studies with which he illustrates his main themes. These include religious extremism and the manufacture of offence, Britain's egregious libel laws, the suppression of free speech in the workplace and its contribution to the financial crash, as well as the ludicrous case of the prosecution of Paul Chambers for a joke tweet. Gathered together as part of a coherent whole, they tell a damning story. The book has garnered a big batch of complimentary reviews and quite rightly so. If you want an overview of the contents, go to those (or better still, actually read it), instead I want to highlight some broad points that particularly struck me.

There are four main strengths. First, the book is readable. If I were still teaching the modules on political thought that I used to deliver as part of our part-time degree programmes at Hull, it would be a set text. There is a premium to be placed on accessibility for getting people thinking about abstract political ideas and Cohen delivers. Secondly, he has no illusions that there is a technological fix for free speech. The Internet is just as potent a weapon for surveillance as it is for free expression. Cohen argues for the supremacy of politics over technology. Third, he includes the workplace as well as the public sphere, using the memorable phrase, "Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship." The damaging impact of managerialism is a worthy target of his scorn. But the final strength is down to his decision to avoid a conservative trap, political correctness.

There is a real reason why political correctness is not a free speech issue. Partly, this is because it is a form of institutional custom rather than criminal law, but the main point is that it falls into the category that Cohen takes from Mill, the one that sees him still argue for the prohibition of hate speech, that of preventing harm to others.

Political correctness, as it was termed by its enemies, is rooted in the recognition that language is an instrument of exclusion. The cries of 'it's political correctness gone mad' are expressions of resentment at the opening up of privileges to people drawn from outside establishment circles. Anne Norton put it beautifully in her demolition of Allan Bloom's prolonged whine, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom wishes to recover a world in which very ugly men – men who stutter and drip gravy on their shirts – become objects of desire. 

Though abused by zealots and, at times, made ridiculous by fools, political correctness is simply a form of etiquette that allows people to feel comfortable and to thrive in institutions that previously did everything in their power to exclude them, not least through sneering and demeaning language.

The most important point that Cohen makes, one that shouts out from the pages of his book, is that censorship is one of the most potent weapons that can be used by the powerful to secure their power. It is the foundation stone of tyranny. The first targets of the oppressor are the press, education and culture (read George Szirtes on Hungary for graphic examples of the far right in action). Not least of the evils that flow from censorship is that legal restrictions on free speech instantly create 'thought crimes,' making political opposition a criminal act. As a result, the fight for freedom of speech is central to the struggles of the oppressed. Anyone familiar with British labour history would be aware of the resistance to the Stamp Acts (aimed at preventing the working classes from reading the radical press by placing a tax [stamp] on newspapers to make them unaffordable), of the struggles of Richard Carlile against the laws of blasphemy and seditious libel, and of the free speech battles between socialists and the police over mass meetings in Trafalgar Square. Free speech was a central demand of the working class movement.

Yet there is a paradox in all this. Freedom of speech means allowing the expression of noxious views, of paranoid conspiracy thinking and of a whole range of lunacy. It is distorted by the inequitable ownership of the media and the power of wealthy interests. Yet, this is not an argument against the general principle of the right to free speech. Instead, we need to think more about another of Mill's utilitarian justifications.

Cohen uses Mill in making his argument, but concentrates on the harm principle. What interests me, and I have blogged on this before, is Mill's dialectical epistemology, the idea that truth can only emerge through free debate and that very same clash of ideas can prevent active belief from ossifying into dogma. So, he didn't just advocate the right to free speech, with its associated duty to ensure that it is respected, he argued for the necessity of challenge, a duty to contest. Though we may not criminalise the views of others, however obnoxious, we do not have to promote them, to stand by idly whilst they are expressed, nor wash our hands of our duty to actively oppose them. Tolerance does not mean passivity. And Cohen is certainly not passive. Instead he ends the book with a call for,

… a political commitment to expand the rights we possess to meet changing circumstances, and a determination to extend them to billions of people from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe who do not enjoy our good fortune.

And in writing this, he is standing in a long tradition of radicals who sought to challenge injustice and exploitation, as well as oppose the power of the oligarchs who would silence them.

In praise of the internet

Imagine the scene. It is the late 1950s. A small plump boy in grey shorts and too tight school blazer is standing alone, lost, in the playground of a new school. All around him the energetic games of the popular and included swirl noisily. Then, from out of the crowd, a tall boy steps forward. "Would you like to play?" It is from these moments of intrinsic kindness that friendships begin and lives are shaped.

Another boisterous boy is part of the crowd and we three band together, unknowing that friendship had in this case begun even earlier. Our mothers recognised each other at a school sports day and we learnt from them that we had been playmates as toddlers.

And as we grew through the anxieties and earnestness of adolescence and young adulthood, we still played. Sometimes we kicked a football around in the local park, at others the pleasures were more grown-up; drink, parties, girlfriends. But then we drifted, as most do. Adult life and ambitious dreams pulled us in different directions.  Slowly and inexorably, friendship became an island of memories slipping gently over the horizon.

I am tired of reading jeremiads about how the internet is fracturing human relations, leading to isolation and obsession, destroying our concentration spans, and so on - interminably. As a communications tool it is the best humanity has come up with yet. It places a research library on every desk. OK, it is also full of barking mad conspiracy theories, malign politics, masturbatory aids and cats - I'll give you that. Yet there is something special about it too.

A chance conversation elsewhere led to a number of searches and suddenly a whole network of friends has been re-established. It could not have happened without the internet. And then, some thirty or more years after we had last parted, the tall boy stepped forward from cyberspace and said, "would you like to play?". The gang of three, one now living in a different country, are meeting up this weekend. Three sixty-year old children, without the grey shorts but with the same noisy boisterousness, will be wallowing in beer, football and cringe-making nostalgia.

So, just for once, let's celebrate the internet and the way it can bring people together; perfect strangers and old friends. It is a richer world with it. And come on, you would have found another way of prevaricating if it wasn't there, wouldn't you?

In praise of muddle

The latest article from Paul Berman on what he sees as the third phase of the Arab Spring is worth reading, if only to reinforce the point that the main opponents of Islamist politics are Muslims.

So it is not true that, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood speaks for society as a whole. Nor does Islamist ideology, with its invocations of superstition and its exaltations of obedience, express the Egyptian “street.” Nor does the Brotherhood possess the canny ability to bend history to its will... Nor is it true that, in Tunisia, the reputedly more moderate version of the Brotherhood, Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party, has offered a sounder alternative ... A great many Tunisians have evidently had their fill... Nor is it true that radical Islamists, given the chance to rule on their own, can succeed in spreading their beliefs to the rest of society. On the contrary. Not in Mali, anyway.

Revolutions are usually confused, messy and pluralistic. The resulting power vacuum gives organised groups the opportunity to simplify the situation. The Islamic far right was well placed and tactically astute enough to mount a power grab. Now, if Berman is right, it faces another messy, pluralistic challenge.

This has confused sections or Western left/liberal opinion. In the wake of the end of the Cold War their greatest fear was of the 'tyranny' of American hegemony. Their polar opposites were the neo-conservatives who celebrated and sought to promote just such a hegemonic outcome as "the end of history." Both created a range of fantasy politics stretching from the "Clash of Civilisations," through a romanticised anti-imperialism, to the conspiracy theories of the "New World Order." And Islamists profited. Neatly sidestepping their theocratic authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism and barking mad world view, whilst engaging in ever more elaborate apologias, some of the left sought the comfort of a tidy bi-polar world by embracing radical Islam. And even today, Islamists can be assured of a good press in the house journals of the liberal/left. The world they have created is one where America (always bad) is confronted by anti-imperialists (always good). It is easy. You know which side you are on and every political conflict can be neatly placed in one drawer or the other.

There is one problem. Tidiness is not the human condition. When a large section of people, the very ones who have been neatly filed under the heading 'Muslim (good),' start saying 'we don't want these bastards to rule us,' this world view breaks down.

Instead, there are a range of political positions that welcome ambiguity and messiness. For instance, it is possible to be hugely critical of aspects of United States society and politics without seeing it as the ultimate evil. You don't have to be an advocate of American hegemony to argue that liberal democracy is far better than either fascism or the latest fad of murderously psychopathic theocracy. Nor do you have to be an imperialist neo-con to think that humanitarian intervention by the West is preferable to standing aside and watching systematic murder take place. Rather than a neat world, we should be looking for a moral one. Not in the sense of the 'morality' of social conformism and sexual repression. The morality I would advocate is that of human rights, of emancipation, of liberty. Torture is wrong, mass murder is wrong, vile punishments for non-crimes conjured from the fantasies of sex-obsessed theologies are wrong - the list goes on and on. Our guide is not a vision of an ordered world, but of conscience, an instinctive sense of what is right. Peter Kropotkin put it well, "A man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be a monster."

And there are monsters in this world. They need confronting and opposing. This leads us to make choices, to side with lesser evils, to kill to save other lives. We cannot escape difficult judgements through the application of neatness.

Aside from the unshakeable principle of moral clarity, maybe we should embrace pluralism, enjoy the muddled and infuriating complexity of human life, whilst dealing with the myriad of unpredictable problems that it throws up as people shape their own lives. After all, this is what we mean by liberty.

The fat of the land

Any fat person will tell you the same thing. It is perfectly possible to be fat and healthy. It is just as possible to be thin and ill. Morbid obesity is dangerous. There are some health problems associated with being overweight, just as there are with any number of physical and genetic dispositions. However, these are not automatic. Some people put on weight, others don't. The number of times I wanted to lurk with a sawn off shotgun outside a bone-thin, binge-eating colleague's office and demand that he hands over his metabolism are innumerable. Yes, psychological problems do produce eating disorders of all types. Dieting only works temporarily and however brutal one is with one's self, it seems to be impossible to shrink beyond a certain weight and it is ever harder to maintain it. And as you get older ... well, the phrase middle-aged spread wasn't conjured out of thin air. All the while, even a passing acquaintance with history would make you aware that this is nothing new. All this we know. We repeat it often. We are rarely believed.

What many thin people, politicians and journalists will tell you instead is that it is 'all your fault fatty'. So too will the vested interests in the vast diet industry. They make you feel bad, so that they (at a price) will make you feel good again. My advice is to cut out the middle man and just feel good anyway.

One of my interests is the 19th Century secular Freethought movement. It wasn't strictly atheist, though most activists were, it aimed to remove religious and superstitious forms of thinking, rather than belief. Obesity is a classic example. Fat is sin. Those who started out thin and became fat have fallen. Those of us who have always been amongst the stout carry the burden of original sin. Salvation is at hand though, but only if you embrace virtue and self-sacrifice. Saints and prophets preach at you to mend your gluttonous ways and follow the true path of abstinence. Those who shed the pounds ascend to glory, those whose flab hangs heavy are the damned. All I can say is, bollocks to that and pass the pies.

Tuesday's Guardian, prompted by the publication of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges report on obesity, was full of people seeking to lead us from our wicked ways. A sinner who has truly repented bore witness to the misery and degradation in which we wallow and tried to lead us to the promised land. Then, in the middle of the swamp of lunacy usually known as the comments section, there was a still, small voice of sanity. Charlotte Cooper wrote of the report's recommended actions:

These interventions are ineffective – or worse – because they treat "the obese" as an abstract, pathological population instead of a group of actual people who are part of the social fabric. They consider weight loss to be the ultimate remedy for every health and social problem associated with fatness, even though it is almost impossible to maintain in the long-term for most people, including those who have undergone surgical interventions. What is sad about this is that people tend to blame themselves when weight loss fails. 

Although they are well-meaning, AoMRC's proposals are not about health promotion, but contribute to a narrative of blame, punishment, prejudice, stigma and anti-fat scapegoating that is horribly familiar.

Amen.

Cooper goes on to suggest some deeply radical suggestions, like encouraging fat people to keep fit and healthy by being nice to them and offering them things to do that are pleasurable (sadly, the pub isn't on her list). Who would have thought of that? Bit of a soft option for the blighters, eh?

I followed her profile and discovered that Cooper blogs here. It is rather fun to read, even if it is slightly odd to find the male, heterosexual me included in aspects of queer feminist theory. So one Dr Fat now takes the opportunity to say to another, keep spreading the good word. Cheers.

Two

It is the second anniversary of the Libyan uprising. Here are two reports that are worth reading. Both record the anxieties, failings and uncertainties of the country emerging from the Gadaffi years. Both call for patience and hope that it will be given. Yet the theme is the same from the stories they tell. First, Chris Stevens writes:

Cab driver Ishmail Shebani has two flags on his taxi, the Libyan tricolour fluttering alongside the blue and yellow of the Amazigh, a Berber people in the western mountains who endured persecution under Gaddafi. The revolution, he says, means he can give Amazigh names to his children, something banned under Gaddafi. 

"I'll tell you why it's better now," he said. "I get Gaddafi guys in my cab complaining that they lost the revolution, and they don't mind being open about it. But if Gaddafi had won, the rebels would be too scared to complain out loud."

Then, Martin Rose tells us a tale of three desks to illustrate the post-revolutionary work of the British Council and observes:

The real energy of Libya today, though, is in the extraordinary feeling of elation and moral vigour that many of its people have about them. Another colleague said to me, “It’s not just that we’ve overthrown a dictatorship – we’ve wiped it out as though it had never been. No one talks about Gaddafi – and it’s a great pity so many of the books about the revolution seem really to be about him more than the tuwar who overthrew him, and what has happened since.”

In praise of enthusiasm

Finding the remains of Richard III in a car park has spawned the usual litany of jokes, resulted in journalists rapidly revisiting their school history and has produced the odd bit of sneering too. What struck me about this extraordinary discovery is that it marked the triumph of the obsessive amateur.

These obsessives come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes armed with an impregnable self-confidence in their own lack of expertise and a masterly command of massively detailed bollocks, they launch into the murky waters of conspiracy theory or climate change denial. But there are others who become formidable independent researchers and they can produce more interesting work than the stuff that gets churned out by the academic treadmill. History is a particularly fruitful area.

Working in adult education I learned to ignore the advice that was always being offered - 'there are loads of local history societies here, you should put on a local history course.' No you shouldn't. They will bomb. The members of these societies will enrol in droves and then all drop out within a week or two when they realise that they know far more than the tutor. And their approach is different too. They are less interested in the type of broader analysis that grabs an academic historian, instead they want to know about people and places. Local characters, landmark buildings, the lives of people working in local trades and industries, stately homes and workhouses, reminiscences of childhoods lived long ago are what inspire them to beaver away in archives, sometimes with remarkable results.

The 'King Richard was Innocent' brigade straddles both camps. The conspiracy they are trying to unravel is a Tudor one, but their research is formidable. And without them Richard's body would never have been found, even if it did disprove their theory that the King's spinal deformity was another example of Tudor mud slinging. However, they could not have done it without the work of professional archaeologists. This was a symbiosis of professional expertise and the research of enthusiasts.

My own research is mainly in the nineteenth century - the era of the enthusiastic amateur. Their writings are fun to read. And it makes me think that the absorption of research by the academy is not wholly beneficial. Above all, academic language can be a form of exclusivity; a private, inaccessible code - and incredibly dull. So the sheer enjoyment of watching academics working with a decidedly dotty amateur to produce spectacular results reinforces my general prejudices about the importance of popular education and the fact that we should value what those outside the system can offer.

Resurrection

If there is one book that I will never cease to recommend it is the wonderful study of working class self-education by Jonathan Rose with the somewhat awkward title of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. You will find in it the history of popular enthusiasm for literature and learning and the organisations it spawned. In time, these organisations formed the basis for our system of adult education, both inside and outside universities. Their incorporation into the state education system provided security of funding, nationwide access and public investment, until it began to be taken away again.

The thing is that when institutions closed and buildings were sold off, it was not just the public funding that was lost, but the legacy of centuries of private, voluntary contribution was also disposed of. It was an act of theft from previous generations. But the demand for adult education remains. People are still passionate about learning and so we are seeing a new system emerging in embryo. It is like being back in the late nineteenth century. The latest is the free university movement, where more enlightened institutions have allied with voluntary effort to begin to reproduce a new version of the old university extension movement.

This is greatly to be welcomed, but I hope I can be forgiven a churlish thought; wouldn't it have been better not to have done away with the original system in the first place?

Keeping fit

I liked this idea from a splendid new book by James C Scott:

One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality.  Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay 'in shape' so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is 'anarchist calisthenics'. Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it is only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you'll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you'll be ready.

And you don't even have to wear Lycra.

Collapse of this stout party

Here we go again. The nobly sympathetic Zoe Williams reports on a conference on obesity. She observed that inevitably:

The conventional narrative – that obesity is a combination of personal failure and societal booby-trapping, where we're nudged towards unhealthy eating and inactivity, and don't put up much of a fight – remains the starting point.

And so we plunge in to the pathological diagnoses of the inadequacies of the obese - "abuse, trauma, neglect" put in an appearance, as does depression and stigma. Other activities are suggested instead of eating: - "Five minutes of vigorous masturbation ... takes up 300 calories. It can replace a light meal." One expert ponders a deep paradox:

"The government spent millions on that obesity campaign, then wondered why it didn't work. But I don't think there is an information deficit," adds Buckroyd. Obese people know very well the mathematical discrepancies of their calorie usage. "But so many people are puzzled by their own behaviour."

And yet none of these dedicated puritans seem to have noticed something that is pretty obvious, especially judging by the profusion of cookery shows on TV. Eating and drinking are pleasurable. They are sensual, relaxing and sociable. The preparation of good food is creative and, at times, ruthlessly competitive. We have a love affair with food because it is incredibly loveable. Food is at the centre of our culture of hospitality, snacks and drinks are offered wherever we go. It makes us feel good, both to give and receive. We like it. Food is more than fuel for survival, it is the social glue that holds us together. Food is nice. Overdoing it carries the extra spice of sin, a very fine dish indeed.

Williams ends with a comforting statistic:

... obesity costs £5.1bn to the NHS. Malnutrition costs £7.3bn. 

And that is in a developed country. Feeding the world rather than encouraging people to knock a few pounds off or lose the odd sagging belly is what a genuine politics of food and health should be talking about.

Of course none of this actually deals with a question that recurs throughout history. Why when indulging in this cornucopia of pleasure do some put on weight whilst others don't? So perhaps us fatties need to be a bit cheeky and muscle in on a gay anthem, insisting that perhaps the reason for our rotundity is simply that we were born this way.

Fiction

What would George Orwell have made of 2013? Who knows, he's dead. Move on now ... oh no, we don't get away with it that easily. There's still a couple of thousand words to get through yet. Gawd.

More questions are raised. Lots of them. And then we play a new game.

Indeed, there's a better game to play with Orwell than "What would he be writing about were he alive?". It's called "What did he get right?". To be sure, Orwell said that what he wrote in his dystopian novels were warnings rather than predictions, but let's forget about that for a moment. 

In other words, let's ignore about what he actually wrote and make something up. So, if Nineteen Eighty-Four was a prediction, even if it wasn't, what did it get right? The answer's simple. Nothing. No? Of course not, you have a column to fill. And so we get a few examples of egregious practices and then more make believe.

We don't have public executions, you might retort. Yes, but given how much we like spectacle of others suffering, that might only be a matter of time – hangings downloadable to your funky new Google glasses.

"Might be only a matter of time," eh? Anything, just anything so that we can conclude:

Perhaps 2013 isn't so different from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I don't know about you, but I reckon I can tell them apart. A single (or even multiple) illiberality does not a totalitarianism make.

The problem with this type of writing is that it uses the work of a long dead author as a cypher for its own prejudices, in this case those of a rampant Guardianista, stamping them with the moral authority of the blessed Orwell.

So what about Orwell's novel itself? I have written before about it not being my favourite. But I think that we have to place it in its historical context. The fears it reflected were far more real then. Nazism had been defeated at horrendous cost, but Stalinism was triumphant. Of the two vastly destructive dystopias that had wreaked havoc, one, together with its apologists, remained, carrying with it the status of victor and ally. Orwell feared its attractions as a model to a ruling class.

If you want a companion piece to Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would suggest a book that would not instantly spring to mind.  Hayek's The Road to Serfdom may come from a different perspective, his classic liberalism was utterly different from Orwell's democratic socialism, but the impulse behind the two was the same. Hayek feared that central planning in a social democratic state would be in danger of replicating the very fascism that it had been employed to defeat:

...many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

Similarly, Orwell thought that the national security state and an increasingly threatened elite were perfectly capable of adopting Stalinism for their own purposes. Neither saw this as inevitable. Both wrote as a warning, sounding the alarm as to the possibility, calling for watchful and determined opposition to any moves in that direction. And they were both wrong.

It was much more understandable at the time they wrote, but their pessimism was unfounded. They had underestimated both the stability of liberal democracy and its openness to reform. We took a different road and live in far more liberal societies today than we did in the nineteen forties. That is not to be complacent about the injustices and inequities of our times, far from it. We should just remain grateful that these earlier literary warnings remain only as a device to allow privileged Guardian columnists to have what they desire most; membership of the oppressed without all the inconveniences of the real thing.

Artificial union

Michael Aylwin writes with excitement about those "masters of innovation", Saracens Rugby Union Club, installing a new artificial pitch. He continues,

What makes it all so intriguing is that no one has ever seen a proper game of rugby played on such a surface.

Leaving aside the question as to whether Union can be called "proper rugby", I would like to point out that Widnes Rugby League Club sucessfully installed an artificial pitch a year ago and has played a full season on it. 

Once again, Union plays catch up and the press fail to notice the real innovators. Then it is League. And in Widnes. In the North. They couldn't really be expected to know about it, could they?

Rent boys

What strikes me as interesting about today's penchant for austerity, particularly in the Eurozone, is the way it has united a range of classic liberal economists with Keynesians in opposition to it. Both agree from different premises that the policy is a dismal failure and there is a measure of consensus between them about the need to maintain demand in times of recession. Whilst recognising that sovereign debt is a real problem, they are clear that it cannot be reduced without a healthy, productive real economy. Thus, they focus their critique on the extraction of rent from the real economy and the damage it causes. Here are a couple of examples.

Aditya Chakrabortty, from the social democratic left, revives the work of Michał Kalecki and in doing so stresses the importance maintaining expenditure and investment in a recession. An equitable distribution of wealth is of particular importance for maintaining demand and a healthy economy, providing the resources for the erosion of sovereign debt levels. This is something that, as Will Hutton reports, even the IMF has woken up to. Austerity certainly redistributes wealth, only it does so inequitably, filling the pockets of the rent seekers. Earnings and benefits are squeezed, depressing consumption and damaging the wider economy. He concludes, "… austerity is just code for the transfer of wealth and power into ever fewer hands."

In a longer piece, rooted in economic history, Michael Hudson argues that the interests of a rent seeking class are embedded in an ideological hegemony, often justified by false historical analogies, that is shaping the political economy of European nations to the detriment of the wider economy. I won't repeat his full argument, the piece is worth reading in its entirety, but the following illustrates what I mean by the extent of the opposition consensus.

A political and ideological coup d’état is replacing democracy with financial oligarchy, transferring government power to banks and bondholders. The new policy is not for governments to tax the wealthy but to borrow from them – at interest, which is to be paid by taxing labor, consumers and industry all the more. To proceed down this path would reverse Europe’s Enlightenment and the past three centuries of economics. It is called classical economics – and even “free market economics” – but it is a travesty to impose this policy in the name of the patron saints of classical political economy. The Physiocrats, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Roscher, Friedrich List and Progressive Era reformers urged just the opposite path of what now is being taken, and indeed which the world seemed to be following until World War I and for a few decades after World War II.

So far, there is little sign of this counter argument having the slightest impact on our austeritian rulers. In the meantime there are consequences. Aristos Doxiadis and Manos Matsaganis have written a stimulating pamphlet on National Populism and Xenophobia in Greece, where they look at the interaction of the notion of Greek exceptionalism with the crisis to produce a nationalist populism that blames the crisis on a variety of external forces (including the bogeymen dreamt up in the wilder fantasies of conspiracy mongers) whilst absolving themselves from any responsibility. Of course, much of the responsibility for the crisis does lie outside Greece, as emphasised in the other pieces, but another dimension is the product of Greek governance, institutions and attitudes. The rise of populism is not happening only in Greece. UKIP is a comparatively mild example in this country, but is cut from the same cloth. A much more virulent version is to be found in Hungary and it is possible to argue that both German popular discourse and, more alarmingly, EU institutions seem to be more comfortable with a morality drama about the puritan north against the hedonistic south as an alternative to examining the real consequences of monetary union.

This nationalist populism could be a genuine threat to the European Union, one that it seems unwilling to recognise as it insulates itself from reality with the self-reinforcing dogma of austerity economics. What is certain is that the social stability offered by EU membership looks less secure as the undercurrent of violence, discussed here by Maria Margaronis, begins to seep from the margins. Doxiadis and Matsagianis stress the need for,

A growing economy providing good jobs, and a welfare state geared to the needs of the weakest. The most effective therapy of the underdog mentality is hope and economic security. Hope will not be created by Greeks alone: Greece’s European partners must help

It seems no nearer. But just as they call for reform, they also "…call on those who feed the paranoia and the illusions to consider the consequences." In short, their pamphlet calls for mental honesty and self-criticism at a time of increasingly deluded certainties. We can only hope that such sanity prevails.

Film news

The alternative version

A new season

Rugby League kicked off for me with the friendly this afternoon between Salford and Swinton. Salford now run out to Brian and Michael's saccharine song about L S Lowry. Lowry, of course, lived in Swinton. On Station Road. A few hundred yards from Swinton's old ground.

Salford are in dire financial straits. Swinton donated a large part of their share of the gate receipts to Salford for their survival fund. In return, Salford have nicked our artist.

The match ended in a win for Salford, 52-12. Oh well.

Miserables reflections

With all the hype surrounding the new film of the musical version of Les Miserables (I have seen neither) I thought it was about time to read the book over the holiday period.  It was a fine choice to make.  Les Miserables is a vast, compelling novel, contrived in places, relying on the strings of coincidence common to the 19th Century epic novel, which keep the main protagonists linked together throughout many years. It uses gripping, dramatic narrative and then gives the reader time to breathe by interjecting long sections of reflection on everything from the Battle of Waterloo to the use of slang, before the action begins again. Much of what follows will not make sense unless you are familiar with the work, but I wanted to pick out something that struck me about the book. I saw Hugo writing not simply as a radical liberal proponent of social justice, nor as a poetic celebrant of the progress initiated by the French Revolution, but as an ironist. Let me explain.

After I finished the book I thought of the main female character, Cosette, and couldn't help but think, "what a bubble-headed wuss." Sweet and loving - yes. But a feminist icon? No way. In one sense it was part of the success of her rescue from the exploitation and abuse of her early years, spent farmed out to the 'care' of the dreadful Thénardiers, that she had the prospect of an ordinary, cosy bourgeois existence married to Marius. Being simply nice and happy is a real achievement after that start in life, a testament to the love and protection given her by Jean Valjean. The only thing is that she is not the only woman who loved Marius. He had a choice that he never considered, Éponine.

Éponine was one of the Thénardier daughters. She had become a tough street kid (Hugo's best writing is about these abandoned children, they are the most vivid and real of his characters), cunning, ruthless and hard.  But that was tempered by a touch of selflessness and immense courage. She gives her life on the revolutionary barricade to save Marius, taking a bullet aimed at him, even if it was her subterfuge that led him into danger.

Éponine didn't stand a chance. Marius was already infatuated with Cosette and he was only a paper rebel. He would always return to bourgeois respectability and reconcile with his royalist family. This is what Cosette represented, an ideal bourgeois wife. Feminine, virginal, conventional and thoroughly girly. And so Hugo has Marius embracing respectability by marrying unknowingly the illegitimate daughter of a dead prostitute. And that is irony.


You find it too in the genuinely evil Mr Thénardier. The irony here is that he is pretty useless at villainy. His incompetence means that he keeps rescuing people for the worst reason and with the worst motives. He intends to betray them, but ends up saving them. The same applies to the police inspector Javert, often seen as another villain. Instead, he is an incorruptible servant of justice. His problem is that he is unthinking and sees no distinction between law, retribution and justice. The moment he sees that the application of law can be an act of injustice, his life falls apart.


If there is one theme that animates the novel it is the crime of the abuse and abandonment of children, made worse by a world that once it has condemned never forgives. Thus, Cosette is still a triumphant character, she has been redeemed and her redeemer is an ex-convict, devoted to virtue, who can never escape his past. The novel is not an exercise in moral relativism; good and evil exist. But it does argue against social convention and that you can find both in the least likely places. For example, the ironist Hugo shows that Thénardier's evil intent can result in unintended good, whilst Javert's virtue can lead to the horrors visited on a galley slave for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread when starving and penniless.


There are many other threads and devices running through this multi-layered book. Irony is only one of the tools that Hugo used to affirm the human value of the lowest without romanticising their vices, expose the callousness of class and to forcefully show that good can only thrive in a good society. Les Miserables is one of those overtly political novels that is subversive in the widest, and best, sense of the word.

Taxing issues

First, someone should give the "troika" of lenders to Greece a lesson in the price elasticity of demand. Hefty tax rises on heating oil have meant a 75-80% drop in sales, shivering Greeks and a nasty wood smoke smog over Athens. A rise in taxation has resulted in an estimated 400 million Euro fall in tax revenue. Genius.

The UK is playing with another brilliant idea, saving money by punishing fatties. Stay fat and you could lose benefits. Mind you, with the level of benefits these days food is a bit of a luxury. The suggestion is that:

Obese and other unhealthy people (please note the association; fat and healthy? Impossible!) could be monitored to check whether they are taking exercise and have their benefits cut if they fail to do so under proposals published on Thursday by a Conservative-run council and a local government thinktank. 

Westminster council and the Local Government Information Unit say new technologies such as smart cards could be used to track claimants' use of leisure centres, allowing local authorities to dock housing and council benefit payments from those who refuse to carry out exercise prescribed by their GP.

Bring back the treadmill for the poor, I say. And after that, introduce a girth tax or a corpulence charge. Us fatties are such a burden (and rather a heavy one at that).

Oh lord, please preserve us from the wisdom of our rulers.

Cheers

2013

The reason why

Michael Moynihan points out the obvious when discussing the latest round of conspiracist nonsense:

In the mid-1990s, during the infancy of the World Wide Web, a visit to my local university library demonstrated that the Internet would be both a great tool of liberation and a megaphone for the fantastically mad. That small bank of Internet-connected computer terminals was reliably occupied by a few student researchers and an army of honking, snorting, flaky-skinned cranks, furiously posting to Internet bulletin boards.

Then there are others who just like pictures of cats.

Seasonal nothings

The village is incredibly quiet at this time of year and Christmas Day broke with the sound of a few birds, dogs barking, cats shouting for food and now the buzzing of insects as a few sunny days have broken into the solid rain we have had and has woken them up. I have been particularly inactive due to a bad back. With so many jobs to do in the garden and the need to lug huge logs around for the fire, how did I do it? Reading.

Settling down on the sofa and engrossed, I failed to notice my bad position until the spasm hit. Ouch. My only excuse for such an unvirile fate is that the book is huge, a hardback edition of Les Miserables in a wonderfully vivid translation by Julie Rose. It is a vast, sprawling melodrama, interspersed with meditations on philosophy and history, all underpinned by a burning anger about injustice. My one surprise is how anyone could pick it up and think to themselves, "that would make a good musical."

Oh well, back to the roaring wood fire before being with friends tonight. Hope you have a peaceful or riotous time, whatever suits.

Hypocritically misleading

I suppose it was inevitable that someone in the Guardian would use the horrible Sandy Hook school massacre as a device to attack American foreign policy. Step forward George Monbiot.

The accusation is one of hypocrisy; that Obama reacts with grief and horror at the Connecticut murders, but not at the death of children in drone strikes in Pakistan. The trouble with hypocrisy is that it shows up inconsistency, but doesn't tell us much about the virtues or otherwise of the incidents themselves.

Monbiot admits that there is a difference in that American drones are not deliberately targeting children, although he calls the deaths "Obama's murders" as if they were, but he is right to say that the death of innocents is an almost certain consequence of the attacks. The problem is that he doesn't trouble himself too much with who the Americans are targeting, the various Pakistani Taliban groups. And they too kill children, not as an act of individual derangement, nor, to use that disgusting phrase, as 'collateral damage', but as a deliberate policy.

The attempted murder of MalalaYousafzai for the crime of campaigning for education for girls is the most celebrated example at the moment, but a quick Google search reveals a horrendous list. Here are a few headlines: Taliban kill six children in Dera; Pakistan school bus attack kills teacher and three children; The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Saturday for a blast that killed seven people, including three children, during a Shiite religious procession; A Taliban suicide bomber has struck a Shia Muslim procession near Pakistan's capital, killing 23 people ...; At least 62 people were wounded by the blast, including six police officers. Eight of the dead and wounded were children...; and as if that isn't enough children are trained as suicide bombers in a callous act of child abuse - Pakistani Taliban's indoctrinated child bombers.

This isn't a case of 'yes buttery' but a plea to see the event as a whole. American actions are actually aimed at killing child killers, yet in doing so they can miss their targets and kill children themselves. This is a real conflict with real consequences and real dilemmas. Monbiot's cheap emoting, "The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears," gets us nowhere, after all everyone mourns their own more deeply even if they are horror-struck by the deaths of others. No, the real debate is how to protect the children of Pakistan; how to prevent the murder of Shia and of children who demand education. And maybe drones are not the way, maybe the risks are too high. There has been a long strategic debate over the effectiveness of air warfare. But it has also to be admitted that the Taliban are not models of child protection and maybe there are no good options, only ones that aren't as bad as others. The very worst outcome would be a Taliban victory. To dress a conflict in the cloak of the moral certainty of the wickedness of one's own side whilst turning a blind eye to the crimes of our opponents does no good at all - not least for the children of Pakistan.

To Greece

I'm heading south for winter in a couple of days. A Christmas in Greece beckons. To get in the mood I have been listening to a CD given as a reward for a sumptuous summer barbecue. The recording is the setting of some of the poems of Nikos Kavvadias to music by Thanos Mikroutsikos, both famous in Greece but little known elsewhere (and certainly not by me). The music lets the poetry speak.

So, with many, many thanks to Konstantinos, here is the title track of the album, Ο Σταυρός του Νότου (The Southern Cross) with an English translation of Kavvadias' poem taken from here.

 

In the nor-wester the waves boiled;
we were both bent over the map.
You turned and told me how in March
you'd be in other latitudes.

A Chinese tatoo drawn on your chest;
however you burn it, it won't come off.
They said that you had loved her once
in a sudden fit of blackest fever.

Keeping watch by a barren cape
and the Southern Cross behind the braces.
You're holding coral worry-beads
and chewing bitter coffee beans.

I took a line on Alpha Centaurus
with the azimuth compass one night at sea.
You told me in a deathly voice:
"Beware of the stars of Southern skies".

Another time from that same sky
you took lessons for three whole months
with the captain's mulatto girl
in how to navigate at night.

In some shop in Nosy Be
you bought the knife - two shillings it cost -
right on the equator, exactly at noon;
it glittered like a lighthouse beam.

Down on the shores of Africa
for some years now you've been asleep.
You don't remember the lighthouse now
or the delicious Sunday sweet.

By request

I don't know why I do this. I should leave Israel/Palestine alone because I am tired. I am not alone. For some reason the conflict seems to have been elevated to the defining issue of our age, generating extraordinary passions. A commenter on a previous post, Dave Zeglen, asked for my opinions as to why. So once more I am going to take a deep breath and plunge into the murky waters. This time, I will be more personal. After all, how can I discuss it without saying what attracted me to the subject.

So how did I get into it? Rather unusually, I came to the conflict without an axe to grind. I knew little of it, but I had an uncle who had served in the British army in Palestine and who was always full of stories about his time there. He had many to tell, including the one about the award of the Dickin medal to his dogs who saved his life from a terrorist attack. When I was at university it seemed like a great idea to write on the end of the Mandate for my undergraduate dissertation. I discovered quite quickly that the Foreign Office archives at Kew were a better source than my uncle, but I was hooked. It was simply so interesting, so unique.

I then jumped at the chance to be a volunteer tutor, teaching English to Palestinians in the West Bank. It was an extraordinary experience, but though I developed a profound sympathy for the Palestinian case I was uneasy about some of the opinions I heard. The unease continued when I got back and went to a few meetings organised mainly by left groups. I was appalled at those who appeared to have adopted the Palestinian cause as their own, with scant regard for Palestinians themselves, and were trying to shoehorn it into an ideological box that made no sense and bore little relation to reality. At the same time I was reading some dreadful historical distortions by apologists for Israel, yet when I turned to accounts that were sympathetic to Palestinians they were equally twisted. The two historical discourses were mirror images, each trying to refute the validity of the experience of the other, sometimes denying things that I had seen with my own eyes. It was even more interesting, if perplexing, so I continued to read.

This was the point when I realised that history was being used as a weapon in a struggle, not as an intellectual inquiry. As a corrective, I attempted to pursue research into the British Mandate after World War II and the professor who was supervising it described the era beautifully in the context of the late 1940s as "a crisis of the second rank, but of the first noise." He felt that Bevin's attention was all on the bigger issue of creating NATO, thereby committing the USA to the defence of Western Europe rather than return to isolationism. Palestine was an intractable nuisance. My view was that, contrary to the propaganda lines being spun, the British had done their best to resolve the contradictions that they themselves had created, before a fit of pique and imperial exhaustion led them to refuse to police the UN partition plan that they opposed. The result was another example of the failure of non-intervention as the civil war took hold in the months before the declaration of independence launched the first Arab/Israeli war.

I never completed the research, though I think that I still hold to the view I held then. Instead, I did a taught Masters before changing tack away from international history and into intellectual history. Yet, the interest always remained, as did the "second rank, first noise" label. Clearly the conflict is of the first rank to the protagonists, where it dominates lives and provides far too many premature deaths, but why should it be so to those who are not intimately involved? And why the passion, sound and fury to the exclusion of all else?

I can think of a few reasons, compassion for the victims, the romantic echoes of all those religious studies classes at school, but these are not the main things. There are prosaic reasons such as the simple fact that it is so interesting, but many of the obsessives don't want to see the complexities and ambiguities. Then it is in many ways our crisis, part of the former British Empire, though also haunted by the dark shadows of European history. It is also a great one for the media. The place is so small that you can be reporting from the front line in the morning and be back in a five star hotel for the evening.

None of these really satisfy. Instead, we surely have to see its prominence as part of our troubled relationship with Jewish people. And where do we start with this? Perhaps from an unaccustomed place. There is a deep strand of philo-Semitism within British politics and ideas. Often romantic, influenced by the emphasis placed on the Old Testament by the Protestant Reformation, it attracted a range of prominent figures. Balfour is the obvious example, converted to Zionism through meeting Weizmann in Manchester during his 1906 election campaign. There were others, Lloyd-George certainly and, most notably, Churchill, recently honoured by a monument in Jerusalem. Yet the main philo-Semites were on the political left. Yes, the left. The establishment of a Jewish state was one of the great causes of the left and remained so until the 1960s. In my early years teaching in adult education I taught many of the elderly veterans of that period, people who remembered as children putting a halfpenny in the blue box on the mantlepiece to go towards the Jewish National Fund's purchase of land in Palestine, Labour activists who felt a deep solidarity with their fellow Jewish activists and even one who remembered that 1906 election and the joy in his Liberal household at the defeat of the Tory Balfour, a former Prime Minister. And then there were those whose Eastern European accents were not wholly obscured by Mancunian tones. They were the ones who got out, the survivors. They too were leftists, solid Labour voters every one.

It is hard to imagine now. Everything has changed. Part of this can be explained by an awareness of the displacement of the Palestinians and a growing sympathy with their plight. This was something the philo-Semites either ignored or wished away. Much too is down to the change in emphasis of the far left, turning away from the futility of revolution in the Western democracies and instead seeing the anti-colonial liberation movements as their new vanguard. This move has been beautifully captured by Paul Berman in his best book, Power and the Idealists. In turn, this has led to the expression of a romanticised Arabism, ignoring the deep authoritarianism and regressive politics of the existing Arab states. Perhaps the most astonishing by-product has been the embrace of the Islamist far right by the western far left. But again, this is not the only source of the current passions. Contiguous with philo-Semitism was the persistence of deep, cultural and historic anti-Semitism. It becomes easy to see Jews as an ultimate villain if this is your heritage. And this too penetrated the left.

I have come across anti-Semitic tropes over and over again in my research. The most common is the association of Jews with finance capitalism. This in turn feeds into the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy, of the hook-nosed puppeteer pulling the strings of the hapless politicians, of the cabals of plotters exploiting the workers. And even without considering the descent into the Nazi horrors, we have our own blood-stained history lurking in the background. This is not to say that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, far from it. Instead, the echoes of the past makes a demonisation of the Jewish state intellectually comfortable. There are those who are scrupulous about avoiding stereotypes and racist narratives, but this does not apply to the comments boxes of newspapers' web sites and popular blogs. There Zionism has become a hate word describing an evil that is unmistakably Jewish. Seeing the depth of this hatred is chilling. Would the sheer vehemence of opinions be the same if anti-Semitism had never existed? I doubt it.

And so we have a tendency to look on the conflict as one between heroes and villains of our own making, not between two peoples, each with their own nationalisms, in conflict over land. Nationalism can be an unlovely thing, but it can also be very necessary at times. If there are two people who need the right to national self-determination more than Israelis and Palestinians, I have yet to meet them. And this is what the two-state solution offers, not an end to the histories of these peoples, but a starting point. And who knows what will emerge as the years roll by and settled, democratic nations share cultural links, commercial transactions, environmental protection and trade union solidarities. Perhaps, one day people will look back at today and find the blood letting somehow inconceivable. But most of all, I hope that Jews and Arabs will cease to be heroes and villains in the eyes of the onlookers and simply become human beings, because therein lies the politics of sanity.

****

Finally, to the people who visit my comments boxes; argue away, but I won't join in. I am tired and am going off to Greece to think profound thoughts about the Eurozone crisis and my neighbour's goats. This has certainly been a discussion of the first noise in a scarcely read blog and I have had enough ... well, until the next time ... perhaps ...

The tyranny of analogy

Sometimes we are not the prisoners of history, but of the stories we tell about it. We take highly specific situations and try and understand them through historical analogies, many of which are neither appropriate or even good history. This is the theme of a long and stimulating piece on the Eurozone by Antony Beevor, who gives few conclusions but asks some interesting questions.

At the moment there is a cliché doing the rounds about the conditions in Greece comparing them to the Weimar Republic. Leaving aside the curious notion of looking for precedents in German rather than Greek history, it is a completely different situation, both domestically and internationally. The analogy is tempting because of the current political instability, deflationary economics and the rise of the far right, though at this stage in an economic crisis the Nazis were getting 37% of the vote, not Golden Dawn's 7%. This is not being complacent, the situation is indeed dire, it is just that it does not help to try and understand it by reference to the Second World War.

 I certainly do not agree with everything Beevor writes but this is spot on, "reinforcing failure through obstinacy has always tended to turn a crisis into a catastrophe." And continually referring back to World War II is a way of dealing with the wrong crisis, the one we had rather than the one that exists now.

Read all about it

Now for something completely different.

Losing the plot

Why does the Israel/Palestine conflict send everybody gaga? No other conflict generates quite as much sound and fury. The only thing to rival it for the sheer volume of posts is cats. I get lots of those too. The recent violence in Gaza resulted in my social media and news feeds being overwhelmed by more and more guff supporting one side or the other. Much of it was dismal. At the time of the last major action in Gaza, I wrote a post about the general fallacies to be found in commentaries on the crisis. Everything that I said then could have been repeated ten times over for the latest events - especially about misleading analogies.  Please don't put pictures of Hitler or swastikas on everything. It isn't clever and it isn't funny, just wrong.

This time round there was more. The first thing to say is that I wouldn't criticise comments from those who were actually involved in the events. If you are sitting under a projectile stuffed with high explosives, you have every good reason for hysteria and a very particular perspective. It is the cheerleaders standing on the sidelines that bother me. Both sides have them and they are destructive.

These are the three common fallacies that stood out:

1. The discussion of motives.  Never accept the ostensible reason for something when you can dream up another one. There are two types of fabrication, the Machiavellian and the atavistic.

The Machiavellis have a stock way of arguing. You know the sort of thing: "what this is really about is ..."  Now fill in the blanks to suit your particular outlook: elections, hegemony, revenge, land grabs, internal politics, etc, etc, and that is before we get to all the conspiracy stuff. Most of it is guesswork informed by prejudice. Unless you are knowledgeable, please stop it.

Atavistic commentators tend to attribute motives to the inherent and decidedly unpleasant characteristics of the side that they oppose. I got tired of seeing all Palestinians being conflated with Hamas, as if every Arab was a thuggish, far-right theocrat. But that was as nothing to the anti-Semitism. Sometimes it was chillingly overt, but much of the time it was unconscious. Yet unconscious anti-Semitism is not innocuous, far from it. By absorbing common anti-Semitic tropes and stereotypes people can produce a casual, unaware racism that can be pervasive and more dangerous than the ravings of a drooling bigot. So before you are tempted to comment anywhere, please read this excellent guide as to how to avoid it. Steve Bell could certainly have done with it.

Atavism is another way of expressing that reprehensible slogan, much beloved by terrorists through the ages, that "there are no innocents."

2. Moral agency. Most of the cheerleaders spent their time arguing for the innocence of their particular side, denying any responsibilities for their actions. "What choice did we have?" "We have a right to resist/respond." This is a way of dodging the real argument, which is not about whether, but how. The whole discussion should have been about the choice of options facing each protagonist. Once they have chosen a particular route then they know that there are consequences to that choice. That isn't to say that any specific choice may be wrong, merely that the responsibility for that choice and its consequences rests with the people who chose to follow that path.

3. Paranoia. I hate to think of the number of times I saw posts about incidents saying things like, "the mainstream media are not reporting any of this" at the same time as it was plastered all over the headlines and being shown as the main item on TV news. Another popular formula, usually accompanied by a YouTube clip, goes something like, "what they don't teach you in school." Sometimes they are right. They don't teach you that in schools because it is complete and absolute bollocks. I am rather in favour of that as a general educational policy. Sometimes though, they do teach it in schools, but they also include the awkward bits the clip missed out that gives the whole thing a different meaning.

The main way this pathology was expressed was through the constant accusations of media bias, particularly against the BBC - from both sides. There are two points to make here. Some reports were slanted and some downright poor. However, the problem lay with those individual reports, not necessarily with the output as a whole. People were inclined to cherry-pick the items that annoyed them and then use them to say that this 'proves' that the media are institutionally biased against one side or the other. They didn't tend to realise that to show bias of that nature, you have to establish a clear pattern or a consistent preponderance of one type of argument over another. That might be easy enough where the Guardian is concerned, but trickier for the BBC. Given the frequency with which both sides complained of some BBC reports, it seems that the main feature of their output was inconsistency. There is a really lazy argument that says that if you annoy both sides then you must have got it about right. It shows nothing of the sort. It can show that you have got everything incredibly wrong. However, in this case I thought this inconsistency tended to reflect two things. The first was the particular leanings or failings of the reporter, the second was the situation the report was compiled in. The perspective in Sderot will be very different from that in Gaza. What none of them showed was that they were out to get you.

The ceasefire resulted in a pause in the death and destruction. It also seemed to drain the energy of the cheerleaders and the internet subsided into a background hum of communication rather than the crescendo of commentary the violence provoked. And in the relative quiet, voices of sanity and expertise made themselves heard. Here are two, one from each side, not solely talking about the crimes of the other, but reflecting on the faults and dilemmas of their own sides. These exercises in mental honesty are the still, small voice of the solution, heard only in moments of calm. First is Michael Waltzer on Israel's paradox and, secondly from the Arab side, Nasser Weddady calls for "a new resistance movement – to resist being co-opted by Islamists and nationalists whose price for belonging requires betraying core human values." These should be read by everyone, especially the cheerleaders.

Absence makes ...

...the reader desperate for more pearls of wisdom from a fat man? Or perhaps go away, never to return. Anyway, the big gap in posting was due to the fact that I had to complete the manuscript for my book, Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early Twentieth Century Britain, which Bloomsbury are due to bring out in the Summer.

Of course, that was:

After completing it, I needed pleasure and to catch up on real life.  Finally, I can now turn my idle fancy towards a little light blogging.

I suppose the big news while I was away is that Greece has been saved!  The EU have finally agreed to release the funds for the bailout.  As far as I can see there are only two minor flaws to the package:
1. It won't work
2. It will make the situation worse

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Local pride

The website Pylon of the Month has given its award for September to a pylon between Milina and Argalasti in south west Pelion.  It is indeed a pylon of beauty.

Thanks to Kev

Perspective

Convincing proof of the existence of God - the Reverend Peter Mullen has seen the hand of the creator in an eclipse.

The sun is huge and ninety-three million miles away and the small moon is in our backyard, a mere quarter of a million miles away. Yet in an eclipse their discs precisely cover each other. Don’t therefore imagine that anyone designed it that way. It’s just a cosmic coincidence, isn’t it, Professor Dawkins?

He's an Anglican. I think he needs to take a lesson from a Catholic:

Delight

Driving back from teaching this afternoon with the car radio tuned automatically to Radio 4, the background speech became the foreground as this afternoon's play slowly drew me in. It was an end of life play. Sometimes, I find this genre buys its emotion cheaply. After all, however happy a life's story is, there is always a sad ending. We do not live for obliteration. But this one, about the last days of a composer, was well crafted and small snatches of exquisite music were used in the transitions between scenes. Was this fiction or based on the life of a real composer whose name I did not recognise?

And here is the joy of the modern, the great gift of technology. I went straight to the internet to discover that this was a real and neglected English composer, though of Irish descent and profoundly influenced by Ireland, E J Moeran. I had never heard of him. Within minutes I was listening to some of his music. Gorgeous. It is unfashionably lyrical for its time, but it doesn't have the sweetness of Finzi. There is complexity, darkness and tension, even as it ravishes. Serendipity sometimes brings gifts - and this is one that will last.

The play is available on iPlayer for the next seven days and here is his short piece, Lonely Waters, from 1931.

And for more, try his Violin Concerto here.

Droning on

Imran Kahn was a fine cricketer. Don't always expect the confidence needed to become a great sportsman to produce political wisdom. His pro-Taliban apologism makes me shudder, but his march against drone attacks has given him a positive hearing among Western leftists and brief problems with US immigration officials. So what about drones and the attacks aimed at the militants in Pakistan? This thoughtful piece from Pervez Hoodbhoy, representative of quite a few that are coming out of Pakistan at the moment, is worth reading in full. He writes:

A drone – of the kind discussed here – is a programmed killing machine. By definition it is self-propelled, semi-autonomous, and capable of negotiating difficult local environments. Remote handlers guide it towards an assigned target. A drone does not need to know why it must kill, only who and how. They have drenched Pakistan in blood, both of fighters and non-combatants. 

We know of the American drones, but he also talks of the Pakistani version:

Pakistan has many more drones than America. These are mullah-trained and mass-produced in madrassas and militant training camps. Their handlers are in Waziristan, not in Nevada. Like their aerial counterparts, they do not ask why they must kill. However, their targets lie among their own people, not in some distant country. Collateral damage does not matter.

And this is the problem with the moral outrage of moral people who recoil at the killing. If their anger is devoid of context and forgetful of consequence, if it focuses on one side to a conflict without looking at the other, it uses only half the world to describe the whole. Hoodbhoy asks the crucial question.

... who shall protect Pakistan’s population from religious militants, stop the daily dynamiting of girl’s schools and colleges, prevent human bombers from exploding themselves in mosques and markets, and end the slaughter of Shiites?

Who indeed? He tries to answer the question and concludes that, as part of a coordinated effort, "The use of aerial drones, terrible though it is, is a necessary evil."

It is an awful choice to have to make. However accurate the weapons, there is the certainty that innocent people will die. This is an inevitable consequence of a conscious decision. However, a drone attack may stop the deaths of unknown others elsewhere. Life and death becomes a random fate visited on people over which they have no control. It is easier to avoid the choice, to condemn the one and not the other, to hope the evil will pass. It is particularly easy if avoiding reality can be cloaked in moral righteousness. But there is no escape. If an undoubted evil is to be resisted, a choice has to be made. It is indeed awful; though utterly necessary.

The greatest game

First a reason for pride, once again Rugby League shows the way a sport can fight against prejudice:

Rugby League’s work in embracing inclusivity and tackling homophobia has been recognised by the RFL receiving the prestigious Stonewall Sports Award of the Year.

And secondly, they are now playing it in Greece. Check out the web site.

Absence

A week without the internet due to technical problems was a serious deprivation, extraordinarily so since I have lived most of my life without it. OK, I admit it. I am hooked.  So now, having switched the new router on a few minutes ago, I can return to action with the strangest news item of my missing week:

Jimmy Savile ... is said to have acted as a kind of marriage counsellor between Prince Charles and Diana.

 A single paedophile would seem to fit the bill for this sort of role perfectly. It was obviously a meeting of mutual dysfunctionality.

Sorry

It gets more bizarre by the minute. The latest is the strange and very public decision of the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, to write to apologise for his behaviour in class to his old school teacher. Private contrition may be touching, but it does little for the profile of an ambitious man.

Now, a teacher replies.

And here is my effort:

Fear

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

He was lucky. As my book deadline looms, I stare paralysed at the on-rushing date, growing ever larger, more terrifying, and making an ominous rumble rather than a pleasing whooshing sound. What do do? Get on with writing the bloody thing? Of course not. You find something on the Internet to while away many an hour in amusing prevarication. This one is today's joy: the Daily Mail-o-matic.

Part-time blues

Here is the most unsurprising bit of news about student enrolment in UK universities:

... part-time enrolments are down big time compared with last year, by as much as 30% at some universities. And the overall fall in part-time enrolments is likely to be larger than the fall for full-time students in England.

No shit Sherlock. If you close most of the departments of lifelong learning in the country, ones that specialised in part-time courses for adults and taught thousands of students, you might find the numbers dropping a tad.

Of course the reason lies in the impact of the new funding regime and its failure to see universities as anything other than recipients of young people preparing for work. This blindness was matched by institutions, with some honourable exceptions, undervaluing the contribution that part-time adult education made to their universities and to the cities and regions they operate in. The result is an increasingly orthodox sector when the economic crisis demands greater flexibility, just as smaller family budgets are going to squeeze the money available to fund learning. So the combination of reduced capacity with higher fees is a killer.

Ah, I hear the mantra being repeated:

For the first time, some new part-time university entrants can get student loans for their fees, and so will no longer have to pay up-front ... These reforms aim to encourage more people to study part-time and to stem the general decline in part-time higher education study. 

Well, as this report makes clear, only 30% of students will be eligible for loans and besides you have to look at what the loans are replacing. First, fees were often kept low and so the rise in fees is disproportionate, simply pricing many people out of the market even if they can get a loan. The second impact is on low income students who previously had their fees fully remitted and were eligible for small £500 loans to cover the expenses of part-time study. They now have to take a loan to repay full fees unless there is a good bursary scheme that might cover them. They don't pay anything up front, but they didn't have to previously and didn't acquire a debt.

When funding changed it did so without any questioning of the purpose of higher education or of the role a university should play. It is a mechanism without a philosophy. The sheer lack of imagination is staggering, but the loss to thousands of adult education students is incalculable.