Chris Bertram

The New Statesman has “an excellent leader on the Ken Livingstone row”:http://www.newstatesman.com/nsleader.htm . 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”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=788 .

Reason Magazine “has a long piece attacking New Urbanism”:http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.st.crime.shtml 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”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2005/02/correcting_the_.html .

Tomorrow is the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. The other week I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003128.html W.G. Sebald’s “The Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 , 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”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,341239,00.html , a “piece on Victor Klemperer”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341147,00.html , and “an extract from Klemperer’s diary”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341230,00.html .

Blogger Joe Gordon, sacked by British bookselling chain Waterstone’s (see “an earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003101.html ) seems to have been offered “a better job by some nicer people”:http://www.woolamaloo.org.uk/2005/02/my-interstellar-journey-to-forbidden.htm . Splendid!

I’m one of the objects of denunciation in “an article by Louis Proyect on marxmail”:http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/FredHalliday.htm . 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]

Every so often the Guardian brings me up short. Today, for example, when “I read the following”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/racism/story/0,10795,1406216,00.html :

bq. Thirty years ago a book by a Grenadian writer about the number of black British children being sent to schools for the educationally subnormal caused outrage in the community. Here author Bernard Coard describes how the ‘ESN book’ came to be written and its relevance to today’s black children.

Now, whilst it is strictly irrelevant to the merits and demerits of his book, it seems to me to be remarkable that the Guardian fails to mention that this is the same “Bernard Coard”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Coard who led a Stalinist coup-d’etat against the Maurice Bishop, charismatic leader of the New Jewel Movement. Bishop and several other people were arrested on Coard’s orders and shot. This gave Ronald Reagan an excuse to invade the island. Coard was subsequently sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment, and Coard is still in gaol. A “Grenadian writer” ….

The multinational character of Crooked Timber means that there’s bound to be more than one view about who is going to win “Rugby Union’s Six Nations tournament”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/default.stm this time around. The smart money is on Ireland who have the best player in Brian O’Driscoll and home advantage against the stronger teams. I’ll be tuned into Wales v England this afternoon and there’s every chance of an upset this time. Unfortunately for Kieran and Henry (and for Brian who is an interested neutral) I shouldn’t think that a microsecond of this will get transmitted in North America.

I’ve not been posting much lately because I’ve been teaching new material, starting a new semester and also been assessing another department as an external panel member. Busy busy busy. Still, life goes on in the insterstices. One of the things I look forward to in my weekly schedule is driving my youngest son to his piano lesson because this co-incides with “Bob Harris Country”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/ on BBC Radio 2. I’d long have said that the one genre of music I just couldn’t listen to is country. But Bob Harris has always been one of my favourite DJs and I’ve just been sucked in by what is one of the best music programmes on the BBC, to the point where I’ve bought 5 Steve Earle cds in the last month. No doubt everyone else has been listening to Earle for years, but for me he’s a new discovery, a songwriter who managed to summon up a whole world in a few minutes. I confess to listening to the unbelievably poignant “Billy Austin” from his live “Just an American Boy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AOV39/junius-20 several times in a row.

The latest Prospect has “a nice piece on Durkheim”:http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6704 by Michael Prowse, arguing that we should take him seriously as a critic of free-market capitalism. I was, however, struck by this paragraph concerning Durkheim’s views on the advantages of marriage for men:

bq. Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.

No comment from me, except that it reminded me of a dialogue between Gabrielle and her boy-gardener lover during a recent episode of “Desperate Housewives”:http://abc.go.com/primetime/desperate/ . It went something like this:

bq. He: So why did you marry Carlos?

bq. She: Because he promised to give me everything I desired.

bq. He: And did he?

bq. She: Yes.

bq. He: So why aren’t you happy?

bq. She: It turns out I desired the wrong things.

Cue Aristotle stage left?

Having recently read W.G. Sebald’s “The History of Natural Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 , I found myself referring to Michael Walzer’s “Just and Unjust Wars”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465037054/junius-20 and his discussion of the “supreme emergency exception”. I was _slightly_ relieved by what I found there. Walzer doesn’t justify the bombings of Dresden (1945) or the firebombing of Hamburg (1943) but rather holds that Britain, with no other effective means of waging war against the appalling evil of Nazi Germany, and facing the threat of national annihilation, was only justified in the area bombing of German cities — in violation of the prohibition on attacking noncombatants — until early 1942. Nevertheless, what Walzer calls “the supreme emergency” exception is there, and the grounds for it are reasonably clear: necessity. The bombers were the only weapon available to leaders the continued independent existence of whose people was mortally jeopardized.

Surfing over to “a blog post by Oliver Kamm”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/livingstone_and.html , concerning our old friend Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, I find Walzer invoked as an authority against Qaradawi’s apologia for suicide bombing.

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The Goethe Institute has “a really nice animated site”:http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/pro/ring/splashgerman.htm on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is aimed at children, but it should appeal to anyone with an interest in the Ring. (English and German). There’s also much more on the Institute’s various web-projects “on this page”:http://www.goethe.de/dll/mat/fsl/prj/deindex.htm .

I’m about to start teaching a new course on global justice. The course starts by looking at some general theoretical issues around justice and then moves on to look at some recent attempts to extend thinking about justice to the global sphere. I’m also going to accompany this with a blog which will basically be an opportunity to point to relevant stuff elsewhere on the web as well as being a course noticeboard. The reading list is “here”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/%7Eplcdib/tj.html and the blog (currently empty) is “here”:http://rousseau.typepad.com/globaljustice/ .

Juan Cole “is arguing”:http://www.juancole.com/2005/01/third-baath-coup-if-as-i-have-argued.html that the Iraqi “resistance” is mainly composed of Baathist forces and that they have

bq. been systematically killing members of the new political class. This is visible at the provincial level. The governors of Diyala and Baghdad provinces have recently been killed. The killing and kidnapping of members of the provincial governing councils go virtually unremarked in the US press but are legion. A female member of the Salahuddin GC was kidnapped and killed recently. The police chiefs of many cities have been killed or kidnapped, or members of their family have, such that many more have just resigned, often along with dozens of their men. The US is powerless to stop this campaign of assassination.

This campaign also targets Iraqi trade unionists, and that’s why I’ve signed “the open letter circulated by Labour Friends of Iraq”:http://www.labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk/archives/000167.html to protest against the silence of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition in the face of events like the torture and murder of Hadi Saleh, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions on January 4. If you would also like to sign the open letter, contact info@labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk.

In the UK the Inspector of Schools “has been criticizing Islamic schools for failing to prepare their pupils adequately for life in a modern society”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/faithschools/story/0,13882,1392833,00.html . The message that has been foregrounded by the press has to do with “our coherence as a nation”, which I don’t think of as an appropriate educational goal, and to that extent some of his remarks are regrettable. But when he makes the point that such schools may be reducing the opportunities available to their charges, that’s a concern that all liberals ought to agree with. So there are real issues here, which those schools have to address if they are to be permitted to continue operating. How depressing, then, that various figures have popped up to accuse him of “Islamophobia”, which, in this context, is just a way of trying to wriggle out of answering some tough and legitimate questions about the education that they’re providing.