Chris Bertram

bq. It is the fashion, as much in France as in Britain, to focus on Bernard-Henri Levy’s celebrity lifestyle and friends, his designer clothes, his “sumptuous” apartment in Paris, his palace in Marrakech, his celebrity, his beautiful girlfriends, even the immortal headline to an article about him which began “God is dead but my hair is perfect” – and so endlessly on, because neither country (how different from the US) can tolerate anyone who is simultaneously too clever, too successful and too good-looking.

The author of these words? “A.C. Grayling”:http://www.acgrayling.com/ in the “Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2d3cef2e-7dc4-11da-8ef9-0000779e2340.html (behind a subscription firewall).

“Birgit Nilsson”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgit_Nilsson , the Swedish soprano famous, among other things, for her Brünnhilde in Solti’s pathbreaking Decca Ring cycle and her Isolde on Boehm’s Tristan, is dead at the age of 87. Her recordings speak for themselves, but there are also plenty of nice anectotes in the obits. From the “New York Times”:http://tinyurl.com/deo5r :

bq. After a disagreement with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, Ms. Nilsson was asked if she thought Ms. Sutherland’s famous bouffant hairdo was real. She answered: “I don’t know. I haven’t pulled it yet.” After the tenor Franco Corelli was said to have bitten her neck in an onstage quarrel over held notes, Ms. Nilsson canceled performances complaining that she had rabies.

The NYT obit has some MP3s (including one of the Liebestod from Tristan). See also the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1980878,00.html and the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102475.html .

Bob Dylan, “1963”:http://bobdylan.com/songs/withgod.html :

bq. In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

The Vatican “2006”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1981591_1,00.html :

bq. JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars. The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan”.

The online journal Democratiya has an interview with Kanan Makiya. Now Makiya is a smart guy who did much to expose the brutal nature of the Baathist regime in Iraq, so he deserves our respect. Nevertheless, I have to take issue with his narrative about “the left” according to which there was once a body of people who stood for universal values who then became seduced (around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union) by various kinds of relativism and postmodernism. Moreover this intellectual collapse into “relativism” explains, according to Makiya, that same left’s unwillingness to support the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam.

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Just to say, that the new “Google video search”:http://video.google.com/ (and the associated Google Video Player) is fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the search results for “Liverpool” (gets you Sky highlights of the comeback against Milan) , “Steven Gerrard” (his 10 best goals) , and “England” (which got me the Channel 4 report of Ashes victory and Owen’s hat-trick against Germany). I had a bit less success in other categories, but I did find a clip of Buddy Miller playing a festival somewhere. (Obviously, Irish people, Welshmen, Australians, Chelsea fans and people taking an interest in so-called “American sports” would derive more pleasure from other clips.)

Over at Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum has “an interesting post on the difference that blogging, and the internet more generally, has made to legal scholarship”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/archives/2006_01_01_lsolum_archive.html#113683990156732487 . Key points include the speed of dissemination, the bypassing of the gatekeepers that have traditionally mediated between legal scholars and the wider world, and the globalization of legal debate. Larry also has a few words about blogging and how it might affect your career as an academic lawyer (including some cautionary words for the untenured). Go take a look.

I was intruiged by some throwaway comments by David Boucher at the Oxford Political Thought Conference last week, concerning Robert Blakey, author of perhaps the first history of political thought to be written in English, the two-volume History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times which devotes 11 pages to Milton and one-and-a-half to Hobbes. Blakey was brought up to be a furrier and worked in the trade, was a Cobbetite Radical and newspaper editor, Mayor of Morpeth, novelist, philosopher of mind, logician, autobiographer, and academic. He was sacked from his Chair at Queen’s Belfast for “neglect of duty” and awarded a Gold Medal by King Leopold of the Belgians, but was best known to his contemporaries as an expert on angling under the pseudonym “Palmer Hackle”. Fuller details are “here at via Roger Hawkins at Morpathia”:http://www.morpethnet.co.uk/entertain/antiquarian/local_worthies.htm#1.%20ROBERT%20BLAKEY . We shall not see his like again!

There’s been much discussion in both the mainstream media “and the blogosphere”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_12_25-2005_12_31.shtml#1135724598 about the possibility of an attack on Iran by either or both the Israel and the United States in order pre-emptively to destroy any Iranian nuclear weapons capacity. As is well-known, the “United States National Security Strategy”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html contains the following doctrine:

bq. The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

Given the more or less open preparation for an attack on Iran, it is hard to see how such a doctrine could not now be invoked by Iran to justify a pre-emptive strike against Israel (or, indeed, against the United States). I wonder how far the bloggers who are advocating (or pre-emptively justifying) an Israeli attack on Iran would be willing to concede the legitimacy of such anticipatory self-defence by Iran? My own view is that such an attack on Israel would be criminal, but I’m not sure that the hawks could consistently agree with me about that. Indeed, given the supposed _imminence_ of an Israeli/US attack on Iran — as compared to the more long-term and speculative threat Israel faces from Iran — Iranian pre-emption looks more justifiable ( at least, _by traditional just-war criteria_ ) than an Israeli attack on Iran.

Following the publication of a “BBC list of the 10 worst Britons of all time”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4560716.stm , there’s now a meme going round “listing nominations for the 10 worst Americans of all time”:http://www.allthingsbeautiful.com/all_things_beautiful/2005/12/a_challenge_to_.html . The propensity of “conservative” blog commenters to include Jane Fonda, MLK, or Paul Robeson on their lists is somewhat worrying … Still, nominations for either Britons or Americans are welcome in comments below. My own personal nomination for the worst American of all time would be the person most responsible for the TV series Friends. There should be a special place in hell reserved for that individual. (via “Lawyers, Guns and Money”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/12/10-worst-americans.html , where Robert Farley has a sensible list ).

Lenin’s Tomb has “some interesting material”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/12/foreign-office-tries-to-censor-craig.html concerning the attempts of the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, to expose the British government’s complicity with torture in that country. Worth a read.

UPDATE: There is more, and in more legible form, over at “perfect.co.uk”:http://www.perfect.co.uk/2005/12/documents-the-government-doesnt-want-you-to-see .

Does the United States have an empire? That question seems to generate a certain amount of serious and not-so serious debate in the blogosphere and media. Blogger Adloyada, for example, “gets seriously upset”:http://adloyada.typepad.com/adloyada/2005/12/today_programme_1.html with historian Linda Colley, writing huffily of Colley:

bq. For example, she represents the USA as self-evidently an imperial and imperialist power.

But the terms of the argument that Adloyada and Colley both accept seem to me to be seriously misleading since they centre on such questions as whether an informal network of client and subordinate states constitutes an empire or not. But there’s an obvious and much more straightforward way of answering in the affirmative, and that’s to hold the United States to the same standards that people (including Colley) use when dealing with other countries. And here I’m thinking of Russia and China.

Just to take the latter for a start, here’s Colley, “in the course of her article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1669433,00.html :

bq. Some variants and examples of empire have proved powerful and durable. China, for example, is essentially a land-based empire, forged over the centuries by conquest and migration, which has managed to reposition itself as a nation state.

And how about Russia? The boundaries of Imperial Russia in, say, 1904 were rather larger than they were under Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century due to a progressive expansion, subjugation of native peoples, colonization of new territories by ethnic Russians, and so forth.

I guess readers will see where I’m going with this: if the expansion of China and Russia via a process of subjugation of native peoples and colonial settlement is a bona fide instance of empire and imperialism then so must be the expansion of the United States across the North American continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. It too involved the subjugation of native peoples and the projection of settlers and the eventual incorporation of the newly colonized territory within the expanding state. Of course, a little bit of selective amnesia and pretence can avoid the acknowledgement that, just like Britain and France, American too was a classically imperial power, just one that, in the end, was more successful.

This doesn’t sit well with a certain American self-image: one that sees the United States as somehow different from other powers, as not, historically, imperialist or colonialist at all. And that isn’t an image that is restricted to the right, it also occupies the thoughts of American liberals who believe that there is a danger of the US becoming something that, historically, it wasn’t and thereby somehow betraying its original ideals. But like their opponents, those liberals have bought into a myth. If China and Russia both were and are imperial powers, then, by exactly the same token, so was and is the US.

I’ve just finished reading Neil Gordon’s “The Company You Keep”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142004529/junius-20 which I’ve enjoyed and been stimulated by as much as any work of fiction I’ve read in the past year (I’ve barely put it down in the last two days). I won’t post plot spoilers here, but the central drama revolves around a former member of the “Weather Underground”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathermen whose elaborate new identity comes apart in 1996, thereby risking both prison and the loss of his seven-year-old daughter. There are plenty of implausible coincidences in the plot, but Gordon manages to make the whole believable. The central literary conceit of the book is that it is presented as a series of emails from the main protagonists to the seventeen-year-old daughter ten years later. And those emails so do not read like any email anyone has ever written! The main theme of the book is about how trust in friends is more important than abstract principle. Questionable, perhaps, but Gordon puts the case persuasively. There’s also a lot of the spy thriller about the book, and plenty of revolutionary tradecraft that took me back to reading Victor Serge’s “What Every Revolutionary Should Know About State Repression”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm and to the whole mystique of the “professional revolutionary” as once cultivated by the groupuscules. (Though it isn’t mentioned in the book, Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” seemed to play in my head as the appropriate sountrack as I read, together with a few others from Blood on the Tracks.)

I’d love to give every Crooked Timber contributor and reader a copy of this book for Christmas, but I’m afraid you’ll have to buy your own.

Presumably aiming for a universal classification, the producers of “Dr Who: The Beginning”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000C6EMTC/junius-21 boxed set of DVDs bleeped out some bad language, with perverse consequences:

bq. Basically, it was a mistake by the BBFC. We had bleeped the word “bastard” in one of the comedy sketches and they believed that what they could hear was an inadequately bleeped “fucker”. They can’t reverse decisions, even if the error is theirs ….

An ‘inadequately bleeped “fucker”‘ gets you a 12 rating, apparently. (via “GagWatch”:http://www.pulpmovies.com/gagwatch/2005/12/no-obligation-to-accuracy/ )

Much of the blogosphere, including this bit, is getting excited about the US government’s surveillance of its citizens and whether Bush has acted outside the law. I have to say, though, that what we British have to put up with exceeds the worst imaginings of the most paranoid US libertarian. The latest plan, “as summarized in the Independent”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article334686.ece :

bq. Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

bq. Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

Read the whole scary thing, notice that MI5 will have access to all the data, and wonder whether the information will be used to expose the extramarital affairs of inconvenient politicians, or similar.