Chris Bertram

Further to the interview with Patrick Cockburn I linked to the other day, he “now has an analysis of the Iraqi elections in the Independent”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article334476.ece . The religious parties are in the ascendant, women’s rights are being trampled, everyone is retreating the their ethnic and religious identities, and the break-up of the country is on the horizon.

The “Patrick Cockburn interview in the New Left Review”:http://www.newleftreview.net/Issue36.asp?Article=02 is remarkable and informative. Read it. A noteworthy feature is the way in which the interviewer (Tariq Ali? Susan Watkins?) tries to push a silly Sunni-“resistance”-as-national-liberation/Shia-as-collaborators line and is firmly and persistently rebuffed by Cockburn. (Via “Chris at the Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/blogger.html ).

“Pootergeek has a post”:http://www.pootergeek.com/?p=1908 on using “Google’s blogsearch”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch as an alternative to Technorati. For full instructions follow the link to his site, but meanwhile “here’s the search set up for Crooked Timber”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&filter=0&q=%22crooked+timber%22+-site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcrookedtimber.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs

I wasn’t going to post about “last night’s BBC Newsnight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4507010.stm (still watchable for a few hours) which staged a mock trial of allied conduct in the “war on terror”. Clive Stafford Smith, the advocate for the prosecution, was simply in a different class from his opponent John Cooper. Via “Oliver Kamm’s site”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/newsnight_on_tr.html I learn that William Shawcross was invited to take part in the programme and declined, apparently because the “trial” format would constitute a trivialization of serious issues. As Shawcross puts it:

bq. A ‘courtroom’ pastiche is a fashionable but frivolous conceit …. The allegations about “rendition” need a thorough investigation and merit the closest attention of Newsnight, but a ‘trial’ will do nothing in that regard.

But commenter Max Smith at DSPFW “reminds us”:http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot.com/2005/12/newsnight-on-trial.html that Shawcross had no such qualms two years ago when “he appeared”:http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-channels/channel-4/419783/ as an advocate in a similar televised “trial” on the war (on Channel 4). I’m sure that losing by 2 to 1 in that debate had no impact on his general view of the merits of such devices.

Update: Kamm has emailed me to say that “frivolous conceit” is a phrase of his making rather than Shawcross’s. Others seem to have also read the passage in Kamm’s post as a direct quotation rather than as Kamm summary of Shawcross’s communication with him. The basic point stands, presuming that Kamm’s summary accurately reflects Shawcross’s thinking.

Today it is “exactly two years”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/14/newsid_3985000/3985287.stm since the capture of Saddam Hussein. I’d have expected the insurgency to have calmed down a bit in the interim. It doesn’t seem to have happened.

It doesn’t shock me that Tookie Williams was refused clemency. It saddens me, as do all such executions, but it doesn’t shock me. I can even see things from Schwarzenegger’s point of view: the courts have had their say, the process has come to an end, and the state has determined what the penalty should be. It is difficult for an elected official to use his personal discretion at the last moment. But I “was shocked to read”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-analysis13dec13,0,4494420.story?coll=la-home-headlines , among Schwarzenegger’s justifications for his refusal, the following:

In addition to arguing that Williams’ continued claims of innocence should be counted against him, the governor made a point of quoting the dedication of Williams’ 1998 book “Life in Prison.”

In the dedication, Williams named 11 people, all of whom had been imprisoned or in custody. Among them were Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid leader; Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader assassinated in 1965; and Angela Davis, the black Marxist professor acquitted of murder charges in 1972.

Schwarzenegger and his aides focused on one name on the list — George Jackson, the author of “Soledad Brother,” a book about life in prison. Jackson was “gunned down on the upper yard at San Quentin Prison” on Aug. 21, 1971, in a “foiled escape attempt on a day of unparalleled violence in the prison that left three officers and three inmates dead,” Schwarzenegger said.

“The inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems,” the governor said.

I posted a while ago about the British government’s plans to criminalize statements “glorifying terrorism”. Here it seems that if it tipped the balance of Schwarzenegger’s decision, Williams’s dedication of a book to a controversial historical figure, may have cost him his life. A book dedication hardly amounts to an endorsement of all of a person’s attitudes and actions anyway. What can Schwarzenegger have been thinking in including this in his statement?

I see from the “BBC that Tookie Williams has been denied clemency”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4523098.stm . I have no opinion about whether he was guilty or not, nor do I know whether the various good works he has engaged in in prison were sincerely motivated. I am generally opposed to the death penalty, for a variety of familiar reasons. But I’m moved to post now, not to articulate those general reasons, but out of a sense of incredulity. The crimes for which Williams was convicted took place in 1979, when he was in his mid-20s. Even if I thought it was right to execute people for such crimes, I think I’d baulk at the idea of killing someone in his 50s for an act committed more than a quarter of a century ago. To do that is almost like executing another person.

I’d decided to self-impose a moratorium on commenting on the ramblings of the “pro-war left”, but I’m roused by a post on Normblog entitled “At variance with certain depictions”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/12/at_variance_wit.html in which Geras claims that “a new survey of Iraqi opinion”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/12_12_05_iraq_data.pdf (PDF) gives a more positive view of life there than we get from unspecified sources of whom he clearly disapproves. He specifically draws attention to a “vox pop”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/middle_east_views_from_iraq/html/1.stm section of “the BBC page”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4514414.stm where one ordinary Iraqi voices the opinion that:

bq. The US invasion was a really good thing and the presence of the US troops is really important now.

Now I’m sure that any selection of material by Geras was intended to be in line with the standards of balance and accuracy normally to be found on his site, but I fear he’s slipped up in failing to notice the responses to the following question:

bq. From today’s perspective and all things considered, was it absolutely right, somewhat right, somewhat wrong or absolutely wrong that US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in Spring 2003?

Today 50.3 per cent of Iraqis polled answered that the invasion was somewhat or absolutely wrong. That’s an increase from 39.1 per cent in “last year’s survey”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/15_03_04_iraqsurvey.pdf .

I went to see a production of Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”:http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss2/library/man_for_all_seasons.html in Bath last night. Martin Shaw was marvellous as More. I was surprised that I already knew much of the dialogue (certainly from “the Fred Zinnemann film”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0060665/ ). And there are many great moments such as the confrontation between More and Roper in Act 1 concerning the conflict between conscience, God’s law and the laws of England. I wondered, watching the play, whether anything had been mucked about with to make the performance more “topical”, and I was sure it must have been when the “Common Man” declaimed at the start of Act 2:

bq. Only an unhappy few were found to set themselves against the current of their times, and in so doing to court disaster. For we are dealing with an age less fastidious than our own. Imprisonment without trial, and even examination under torture, were common practice.

But no. Those lines are there in Bolt’s original.

In comments to Daniel’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/08/the-project-ooh-scary/ about the “Project”, commenter Sean Morris responds to the following remark by Daniel:

bq. Messing around with “Project” conspiracy theories about ethnic minorities is not a harmless hobby.

with the rhetorical question:

bq. Since when was a religion an ethnic minority?

To which the short answer is, in some cases, since forever. This rhetorical move is often made in blog debates by people who want to deny Muslims in European societies the kinds of protections that are afforded to some other groups. But it is a move without merit, since, depending on the social and cultural context, religion, like anything else, can function as the marker that denotes the insider-outsider boundary.

This gives me the excuse — which is the real function of the post — to reproduce a few lines from Howard Becker’s “Tricks of the Trade”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/041247.html on the definition of ethnic groups:

We would wonder, for instance, how to define the concept of “ethnic group.” How did we know if a group was one of those or not? [Everett C.] Hughes had identified our chronic mistake, in an essay he wrote on ethnic relations in Canada:

[click to continue…]

It is the “draw the World Cup today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4511110.stm (about 2030 gmt) so there’s an excuse for a soccer thread (like I need an excuse!). A couple of points worth noting:

— The USA is now the most fancied nation outside of Europe and Latin America, with odds of about 89-1 at betfair.

— The African representation is truly surprising: no Nigeria, no Cameroun, no South Africa. Of the African nations, Ivory Coast has the shortest odds (same as the US of A).

So who is going to win the damn thing? England clearly fancy themselves this time and look strong in every area except goalkeeper. The Germans have to stand a good chance on their home turf. France are over the hill. Spain never seem to perform.

I’m going for the *Netherlands* to win for the first time ever and thereby to stick it to “their historic enemies”:http://www.ajax-usa.com/desk/cheeseheads-vs-krauts-30-years-of-enmity.html on German home turf. And they’re good value too at around 13-1. Whether they’ll still look so good when we see which pool they’re drawn in is another matter.

Via a page devoted to Swedish dance bands of the 1970s, I happened upon “Eurobad 74”:http://www.omodern.com/Eurobad/euro.html “an exhibition of Europe’s worst interiors of 1974”. I have no idea what the horse is doing in #4, nor why the child is lifting the woman’s mini-skirt in #11, but it is indeed hard to imagine interiors much worse than these, even in 1974.

Never put off blogging something, or Matthew Turner will “beat you to it”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/11/on-edgware-road.html ! Last year Carol Gould wrote a “piece about an alleged epidemic”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/15/a-tsunami-of-anti-americanism-and-anti-semitism of anti-Americanism in Britain and the some of the “decent”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/15/does_she_exaggerate.php “left”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=456 linked to it enthusiastically (one describing the piece “as a breath of fresh air”:http://jonathanderbyshire.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/a_terrible_and_.html ). When I dared to suggest that it was a load of old tosh, the “decents cried foul”:http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_marxist-org-uk_archive.html#109789785031862374 . Will they, I wonder, continue to accord heroine status to Ms. Gould when they read “her latest hilarious effort”:http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=20295 . Some choice excerpts:

bq. Last week was the culmination of that poignant fortnight in which people all over the world wear a poppy in the lead-up to Remembrance Day. Nothing is more dramatic than seeing the sea of red flowers in the lapels of British men and women as they make their way to the office in the early-morning rush hour. … On British television, every presenter and anchor wears a poppy. In keeping with the motto of the British Legion—“Wear your poppy with pride”—every shopkeeper, publican, hotel manager and cabbie wears a poppy…. It was therefore all the more astonishing last week when I took a long walk along Edgware Road, the most densely Muslim section of London, and discovered that not one person was wearing a poppy.

…

bq. It is worth noting … that London Mayor Ken Livingstone is trying to institute an initiative to bring ethnic minorities into the taxi fleet, to tackle its almost exclusively white domain. Keeping in mind that Washington D.C. has one of the worst taxi systems in the world, in part because most drivers can barely speak English and do not know the meaning of the words “cordial” or “polite”, especially where female passengers are concerned, one prays the Livingstone initiative will be approached with caution.

…

bq. I walked and walked that evening, stopping in to every hookah café, every electrical shop and every hijab boutique. Not one person was wearing a poppy.

[One worries a little that since Gould’s piece is destined primarily for an American audience there will be readers who take her factual claims about British society at face value. Needless to say, lots of people do not wear poppies, there are many sights more dramatic than lots of people wearing poppies, and breaking the strangehold of white males over taxis is a good thing.]

Melanie Phillips:

bq. “The bogus child support agency”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001497.html

I think we can agree with Mel that only genuine children should be supported and that payments to these bogus ones should be cut off forthwith.