Chris Bertram

Mad Melanie Phillips has started using the subject-line “Weimar Broadcasting Corporation” for her rants against the BBC. I have to say, it sounds rather a good idea. How about these guys for a new board of governors:

bq. Weimar is one of the great cultural sites of Europe, since it was the home to such luminaries as Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder. It has been a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved to Weimar in the late 18th century. The tombs of Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche may be found in the city, as may the archives of Goethe and Schiller.

And we’d still be able to turn over to Channel 4 for Wifeswap …..

Regular CT readers will know that I'm a big fan of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat and that I was thrilled when it was released on DVD in the UK. The Heimat news page now announces that Heimat 2 (the sequel) will be out in May in the UK (and slightly earlier in parts of Europe). Fantastic!

The latest New Left Review has a piece by Perry Anderson on the thinking of Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio on global order and justice. Since I’m busy teaching Rawls’s Law of Peoples at the moment, I thought I’d give it a read. The article has all the classic Anderson hallmarks — the arrogant pronouncement of judgement from on high, the frequent lapses into Latin, a will to the most unsympathetic reading possible. Typically, Anderson is incapable of reading his targets in any other way that as providing pragmatic cover for the American hegemon. On the one hand he seems to adopt the stance of high principle against the unwitting tools of US power whose every argument is accounted for in terms of their personal history and psychology, but on the other it seems hard to know where the critical principles can be coming from since it is hard to see how, on Anderson’s world-view, principles can ever be anything other than the residue of power politics as false consciousness.

The central charge against Rawls and Habermas is that of providing left philosophical cover for Western intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In Rawls’s case, this is because Rawls argues in general terms that “outlaw states” which violate human rights and threaten their neighbours cannot claim immunity from intervention from liberal states. Does Anderson advance a counter-argument to the effect that the state sovereignty of such regimes is inviolable, or that considerations such as those adduced by Rawls are insufficiently weighty to over-ride such considerations? No, of course not. Anderson wouldn’t stoop to construct such an argument: for him, all that counts is the interest of powers.

Two examples which especially annoyed me of Anderson misresepresenting Rawls to his readers are below the fold, no doubt others could be found.
[click to continue…]

In my Locke in Modern English thread below, commenter Gordon writes in exasperation:

bq. Jeez, what next? Maybe a rap version?

A leading British political philosopher, whose identity I am sworn not to reveal, submits the following by email:

bq. Me and you’s equals on this earth.

A challenge to others to do better?

As various people have noted, the Observer has started a blog (or perhaps a “blog” ). Nick Cohen, darling of the pro-war lefties is, naturally, one of the contributors — and recommends his favourite blogs. Many of Cohen’s recent column’s have included fulminations against the “pseudo-left” , a term which designates those who take a different view to his own on such matters as Iraq and Sheikh Qaradawi. I’m always suspicious of people with the capacity the exhibit great moral indigation against imbeciles who are stupid or venal enough to espouse positions similar to those that they themselves have only just abandoned (John Gray is another good example). Unsporting it may be, but I’d like to take this opportunity to link to one of Cohen's columns on Afghanistan (a war that, btw, I supported). The tone of outraged moral superiority is the same, but was, at that time, directed against different targets. Plus ça change ….

bq. To understand political power correctly and derive it from its proper source, we must consider what state all men are naturally in. It is a state in which men are perfectly free to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and themselves, in any way they like, without asking anyone else’s permission – all this subject only to limits set by the law of nature. It is also a state of equality, in which no-one has more power and authority than anyone else; because it is simply obvious that creatures of the same species and status, all born to all the same advantages of nature and to the use of the same abilities, should also be equal ·in other ways·, with no-one being subjected to or subordinate to anyone else, unless ·God·, the lord and master of them all, were to declare clearly and explicitly his wish that some one person be raised above the others and given an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

The latest of Jonathan Bennett’s renderings of the classics of early modern philosophy into modern English is now out on the web: the Second Treatise of Government . In my experience it is a work that students find especially opaque in the original, much as I love the archaic language. (Sceptics might be interested to read Bennett's rationale for his project.)

I’ve just finished Günter Grass’s Crabwalk , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been much blogospheric concern recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, David Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

The ghastly Rod Liddle has a piece in the Spectator alleging that Tony Blair’s Labour Party has a strategy of pandering to anti-Semitic prejudice in order to win over Muslim voters. The piece contains such gems as “many psychoanalysts believe that the Left’s aversion to capitalism is simply a displaced loathing of Jews.” (Tony Blair’s Labour Party has an aversion to capitalism???!!!) Liddle’s usual sensitivity to the feelings of minorities is expressed in his recent Things I shouldn't say about black people in the Sunday Times, ably exposed by Matthew Turner . Melanie Phillips (about whom see also Chris Brooke here ) is now promoting the Labour anti-Semitism theory in the notorious FrontPage magazine.

Which is more likely (a) that New Labour strategists have decided on a campaign strategy on the lines delineated by Phillips and Liddle or (b) that someone else (perhaps some adviser to Tory Central Office?) has decided that an effective strategy for unsettling Labour politicians and putting them on the defensive is to fling around allegations of anti-Semitism?

[Small update: John Band makes the point that we shouldn’t let our disgust at the antics of the likes of Liddle and the Tory party blind us to the real problem of anti-semitism and recommends this piece by Johann Hari , a recommendation I endorse.]

Today’s Financial Times has a remarkable article about the Tulsa riot of 1921 — essentially a bout of ethnic cleansing — its disappearance from official memory for over fifty years and the long struggle of the survivors and their descendants for recognition and compensation:

bq. Historians call the firestorm that convulsed Tulsa from the evening of May 31 into the afternoon of June 1 the single worst event in the history of American race relations. To most Tulsans it is simply “the riot”. But the carnage had nothing in common with the mass protests of Chicago, Detroit and Newark in the 1960s or the urban violence that laid siege to Los Angeles in 1992 after the white police officers who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted. The 1921 Tulsa race riot owes its name to an older American tradition, to the days when white mobs, with the consent of local authorities, dared to rid themselves of their black neighbours. The endeavour was an opportunity “to run the Negro out of Tulsa”.

The whole thing is worth reading.

The New Statesman has an excellent leader on the Ken Livingstone row . Read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

bq. The demand for ritual recantation and punishment whenever someone expresses themselves “inappropriately” (itself a prissy, nannyish sort of word) has become an inhibition on free speech. A football manager loses his job when he “insults” disabled people; an editor’s career is endangered when his magazine “insults” Liverpudlians; a commentator is thrown off the airwaves when he “insults” tsunami victims with a feeble pun. The worst sin of all (and rightly so) is anti-Semitism; but to place Mr Livingstone’s remarks in that category is another example of trivialising the genuine article.

Indeed. The second part of the Statesman leader is about Michael Howard’s disgraceful pandering to the racists with his proposed “health checks” on migrants. Unfortunately this (and the recent competitive bidding by Tories and Labour alike for the xenophobic vote) doesn’t receive nearly as much attention from the “left” blogosphere — a point well made on John Band's blog .

Reason Magazine has a long piece attacking New Urbanism co-written by an architectural liaison officer with the West Yorkshire Police and someone from the Thoreau Institute. It would be tempting to suggest the Onionesque headline:

bq. Libertarians: “World would be better if designed by the police.”

Laurence Aurbach has a detailed rebuttal on the City Comforts site .

Tomorrow is the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. The other week I mentioned W.G. Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction , a work that addresses the horror of the Allied bombing raids and the inadequacy of the German postwar response to that horror. Today, of course, the bombing is being cynically used by German neo-Nazi groups who want to relativise or diminish Nazi crimes. The methodical slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others shouldn’t lead us to close our eyes to what happened in Dresden and in other German cities. What was done there was wrong, even though I, for one, would hesitate in blaming those who did it. Der Spiegel’s English site has an interview with historian Frederick Taylor , a piece on Victor Klemperer , and an extract from Klemperer's diary .

Blogger Joe Gordon, sacked by British bookselling chain Waterstone’s (see an earlier post ) seems to have been offered a better job by some nicer people . Splendid!

I’m one of the objects of denunciation in an article by Louis Proyect on marxmail . Proyect is disgusted with various former editors of the New Left Review who have supported “humanitarian intervention” here and there. It is certainly true that I did (and still do) support the intervention in Kosovo, but Proyect has much more specific allegations:

bq. In October 2000, the NLR asked Bertram to write an article on the anti-Milosevic revolt. However, editor Susan Watkins nixed the article since it implied political support for the forced absorption of Yugoslavia into Western European economic and political institutions.

The NLR never asked me to write such an article, I’ve never written such an article (asked or not), and so Susan Watkins couldn’t have “nixed” it. In fact, I’ve had no contact whatsoever with NLR since 1993. I don’t know whether the facts adduced by Proyect against other people in his piece are accurate ….

(Thanks to Henry for drawing my attention to this.)

[UPDATE: Proyect has now edited the piece so that Marko Attila Hoare is referred to as the author of the rejected NLR piece. I hope that’s correct]