normblog

Don't stop the music (updated)

From a piece in today's Times about the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra - the target of disruption by pro-Palestinian protesters last September in London - this excerpt (£):

Any player from the Israel Philharmonic is proud to tell you about their orchestra's courage in adversity. This is the band that played on during the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Lebanon War in 1982. During the Gulf War in 1991, as Scud missiles launched by Saddam Hussein rained down over Israel, the IPO's chief conductor Zubin Mehta (now conductor for life) gave a memorable concert in which the audience members donned gas marks rather than abandon the concert.

The impact of September's Prom at the Royal Albert Hall, however, when anti-Israel protesters disrupted the IPO's concert four times with satirical songs and shouted slogans - and, for the first time in the history of the Proms, the BBC took the concert off the air - may prove harder to erase. If Avi Shoshani, the secretary-general of the orchestra, is to be taken at face value, that Prom might turn out to be the IPO's final appearance in Britain.

"I don't think I really want to return the UK," Shoshani says, as we sit in the IPO's temporary home in the Port area of Tel Aviv and listen to the orchestra rehearsing for the night's 75th anniversary gala concert. "Why should I put my musicians in such an unpleasant situation? We want to make people happy - that's what music is all about - and if people behave in such an uncivilised way why should we be a part of that?

"I have nothing against demonstration," he continues. "But there is a way of doing it. The fact that you live in a democratic society that allows you [to] demonstrate doesn't mean you have the right to abuse people."

I have a certain amount of sympathy for what Shoshani says. Who wants to play music in front of a bunch of louts? Who wants to go where they're not wanted? By declining to play in venues where they're likely to be treated abusively, the Israel Philharmonic could be seen as turning the tables on the cultural boycotters. You don't want us playing there? We've got news for you: we have no desire to play in your presence.

On the other hand, if the orchestra no longer visits Britain, this will be claimed by the boycott movement as a cheap victory. Moreover, media reports of the disrupted performance suggest that the great majority of the audience wanted to hear the Israeli musicians playing and felt no indulgence towards the noisy protesters. It's surely better in these circumstances to continue visiting, while trying to obtain assurances that the organizers will be better prepared in future against those planning disruption. Avi Shoshani is also quoted as saying, 'Well, you only need ten to twenty people who are shouting at you and you get the feeling everybody is against you'. It's an understandable sentiment, but it's perhaps better to overcome it if in fact it's misplaced.

Update at 5.25 pm: But see, now, the clarification here:

The secretary general of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Avi Shoshani, has categorically denied that the IPO will not return to play in Britain, in the wake of the row over September's disrupted Proms concerts.

A report in today's Times suggested that the IPO was unlikely to play again in Britain. But Mr Shoshani insisted: "I did not say I did not want to come back to the UK. I did say that I did not want to put my musicians in such a situation again, where they were being abused and threatened..."

Shoshani goes on to explain, for the benefit of those who need an explanation, what the difference is between protesting against the visit of an Israeli orchestra and behaving like a bunch of thugs.

Wheatcraft

When there's a controversial political issue dividing people, which involves several moral principles, different assessments of the facts of a given situation and of the various probabilities attached to different possible courses of action, one way of thinking about how to come to a decision is that you make the best estimate you can after weighing up all the considerations in play and arrive at a judgement one way or another. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, however, has a better approach, suggested to him by something of Fintan O'Toole's. Wheatcroft's preferred alternative approach is based on the premise that there are unknown knowns. What are these? They are 'things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to "unknow."' He applies this theory to the war in Iraq:

Those of us who opposed the war may be asked to this day whether we knew what weaponry Iraq possessed, to which the answer is that of course we didn't. Nor, as it transpired, did President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

But that was the wrong question. It should have been not "what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?" but "Is Saddam Hussein's weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?" The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it [my emphasis - NG].

Then there was another unknown known: the likely consequences of an invasion...
.....
... All the calamities that followed the invasion were not only foreseeable, they were foreseen. And yet for Mr. Blair, as well as Washington, they were unknown knowns.

You see, all you have to do instead of trying to arrive at the best judgement you can in such situations is make sure not to unknow what is known by knowing others - those people whom I shall henceforth refer to as knowies. Since it is plain that those who disagree with the knowies aren't capable of making correct judgements by themselves, one must infer that the proper thing for them to do, according to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, is to follow the judgements of the knowies and set aside their own. Because the knowies know what is already-known, the rest of us ought to defer to them. Let us call this the New Vanguard Theory of Political Judgement.

But a little niggle in the corner of my mind prevents me from writing Q.E.D. beneath it. This niggle takes the form of the following question: can the knowies be relied upon to know the already-known in all cases? If not, how do we not-knowies know when to follow the knowies and when not to? Take the example of the very prominent knowie Simon Jenkins, his credentials on opposing the Iraq war as shiny as the light of the sun bouncing off a freshly cleaned window pane. Yet when it came to Nato's intervention in Libya, Jenkins seems to have got pretty much everything wrong, despite all his knowiness. Should we have followed other knowies than him when it came to Libya, and if so how are we to know which ones? How are we to know the already-known about which knowies sometimes err and which knowies never do?

Shucks, looks like we may be thrown back on the old business of having to make up our own minds. Looks like the New Vanguard Theory of Political Judgement may be flawed.

Knowledge and knowledge about the Holocaust

In this article for the Tablet Robert Zaretsky offers some reflections on the study of the Holocaust. I don't really care for the piece - there's something about its general stance and tone that I find offputting. Mainly this is because Zaretsky seems to have gone about his own Holocaust study and teaching with the idea that it was importantly about him as much as it was about it: see the paragraphs round the words, 'such expertise appealed to my sense of self-dramatization'. True, he puts this in the past tense, as a failing he has now got beyond, and that is to be welcomed. Still, it leaves a bad taste and has me on my guard with respect to other views he might hold on the subject.

Then - and this time in a lot of intellectual company - Zaretsky tells how he was formerly of the end-of-Enlightenment view, much associated with discussion of the Holocaust and expressed by him, among other ways, as follows:

[T]he great ark of Western history, rising on the vast wave created by the Renaissance and Reformation, the Industrial and French Revolutions, was bound to crash and smolder in the crematoria of Auschwitz... Progress? Enlightenment? Ha. I enjoyed the thought that I was pulling the philosophical rug out from beneath the feet of my students.

Even when formulated with more sobriety and depth than it is there - and as it has been, indeed, most formidably - I think this is an intellectually unwise and challengeable choice. Expressed in the flip way Zaretsky expresses it, it betokens, again, a shallowness of judgement that is less than impressive.

What I want to concentrate on, however, is the story with which Zaretsky begins his article and that led to some rethinking on his part. It contains an interesting point. The story is that after a lecture in which he had spoken about Primo Levi's observations, derived from his experience at Auschwitz, he (Zaretsky) was contradicted by a survivor in the audience who said that Levi didn't know what he was talking about. Zaretsky felt unable to argue with this survivor. How could he press his own book knowledge against the survivor's personal experience? I think that his reaction is easy to understand, for two reasons.

First, there's a reason of both psychology and tact. In the circumstances Zaretsky describes he is more or less bound to back off before what the survivor says. The man has undergone a terrible experience, one which most did not survive, and even though the same was true of Primo Levi, Zaretsky has no personal experience to set against his interlocutor's and claim as being of equivalent evidential or epistemological weight. In general, many kinds of knowledge come from direct experience, and this surely applies in the case of great suffering.

Second, it would be socially and humanly inept for Zaretsky to insist, against such experience, on the validity of what he knows from different sources, even if he has legitimate knowledge of that kind.

Yet this isn't all there is to be said on the issue. For the fact is that the detachment and access to wider evidence that the historian can claim yields types of knowledge which the survivor couldn't possibly have had simply through his or her experience. It is a point that is made somewhere by Primo Levi himself. A prisoner at Auschwitz didn't know, and couldn't know, about the whole camp system and its administrative development. The methods of the historian are indispensable, notwithstanding the authority of survivors as direct witnesses - and notwithstanding the ethics of conversation between survivors and others. Otherwise, we should have to conclude that the Holocaust will no longer be knowable at all once the survivors of it have died, that it wasn't a historical event susceptible of being studied by historians and other scholars. It is not a conclusion that can be rationally entertained

25 pairs of writers

It's not only New Year's Day, it's also a Sunday; could be it's raining where you are. And tomorrow's a Bank Holiday. So you may well be looking for a diversion. Why not get on with your answers to my BOXING DAY QUIZ?

You have until the end of tomorrow to submit them (and no need to be perfectionist about it: even without the full set, your entry may turn out to be the best of those sent in). There are, of course, prizes. But the main point is... just think of the honour.

Reading intentions for the year ahead

Round about now, end of old year/beginning of new, we are bombarded with lists of what people have read and loved, and of what they're looking forward to reading in the coming year. Equally, New Year's resolution-lists are full of expressions of intent concerning what the resolver is determined to do. By way of a change from all this, I give below 12 books - one for each month of the year - that I will not be reading in 2012.

In January I won't be reading Frederic Jameson's Representing Capital. I read it last year, and once was enough. Believe me - don't try it. (This is so, incidentally, even if you think Capital itself is a great work - as I do.)

In February I won't be reading Tolkien's The Hobbit. I just don't fancy it. Never have.

In March I won't be reading 30 Ways to Improve Your Golf, as I don't read books about golf.

In April I will certainly not be reading another novel by Anita Brookner - therefore Visitors; I've read a few by her and find I don't get on with them.

In May I won't be reading anything by Jonathan Steele, because it would be by Jonathan Steele.

In June I won't be reading The Magus by John Fowles. I read more than half of it many years ago and then gave up. I'm not inclined to have another go.

In July I'll skip reading Makeup: The Ultimate Guide by Rae Morris. I don't wear makeup, I'm 68, and it's a bit late to change my ways.

In August I won't be reading Beginning Postmodernism. There was a time I might have had a look, but in August I definitely still won't feel like it.

In September I will not read The Spellbinding Power of Palmistry, since palmistry isn't something I'm likely to be able to find time for then.

In October I will not be reading The Collected Journalism of Seumas Milne, because... Oh, there's no such book, you say. That's why, then.

In November I won't be reading Herman Van Rompuy's book of haiku. I just won't.

In December I won't be reading Crimes against humanity: Birth of a concept, because that's by me.

[Based on an idea of Kieran Healy's.]

A smiling 2012

I've told you once before, I'll tell you once again: Louis says it best. See what happens shortly after two minutes in and whether it doesn't lift your soul and bring a tear to your eye.

One of my resolutions for the coming year is to listen to more jazz. Happy New Year to you all.

A world in which human beings love one another

In his exceptionally interesting essay 'Can Socialists Be Happy?', George Orwell begins with some thoughts about Dickens and Christmas and goes on to discuss how unappealing visions of utopia and Heaven tend to be. This forms the main body of the essay and leads him towards the tentative conclusion, 'It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast.' The whole is well worth reading.

But I want to discuss something Orwell says much more briefly after arriving at the above conclusion. It's this:

I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness... The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.

Now, a world with more brotherly, and sisterly, love is certainly something to be desired (as, equally, is one with more happiness than has so far been possible); but I think Orwell was wrong, nonetheless, to characterize the central objective of socialism in the way he does here. The main objective of socialism is egalitarian justice, and while establishing it, should this be possible, would depend on a widespread change of attitudes, that is something else than universal love. I shall offer two reasons for disagreeing with Orwell's characterization.

First, universal brotherly and sisterly love is not a necessary condition of socialism. We know even from non-socialist experience that people don't have to love one another to accept that others than themselves have rights to be treated with dignity, have basic human rights that must not be violated, are entitled to freedom of speech and to vote and so forth. You don't have to be everyone's friend, much less feel towards them as a loved brother or sister, to recognize the universality of such entitlements. Socialism, therefore, is essentially about the principles, procedures and institutions that are to prevail and not about the generalizing of love.

Second, it is fortunate that this should be so, since on the basis of all that we currently know, the expectation of a love that has become universal is exorbitant. Most of us, I would be willing to bet, can think of people whom we certainly do not love, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the social and economic order; and in any large society that is remotely conceivable there will, for just about anyone, be large numbers of others whom they don't love, even if they harbour no feelings of animosity towards them. It might just be people that are distant from us, or who have values that we find unattractive or repellent, or who have behaved in ways with which we cannot reconcile ourselves.

I now consider two possible counter-arguments to what I've said - one for each of those two arguments.

It might be urged in Orwell's defence that it was the principle of social harmony that he was really getting at, rather than its emotional underpinning. Perhaps so. But it remains the case that the way he describes the 'real objective' of socialism is misleading. What socialists aim at is a set of institutions and relationships; the attitudes needed to sustain these need not be as demanding as brotherly and sisterly love.

And it might be urged, also, that though it is true that most of us do not currently love everyone, this doesn't necessarily mean that a new human type (who would emerge in the changed environment of a socialist society) could not love everyone. The short answer to that is: yeah, right. The longer answer is: we have no evidence from the long history of humankind that such a development is likely; rather the opposite. If you're willing to assume away the problems of interhuman friction, indifference, hostility, etc, simply on the basis that all of this might be changeable, why not just assume away every kind of problem that stands in the way of creating a better world, without the need of looking for practical solutions? How to coordinate multiple decisions and a mass of information compatibly with egalitarian social structures? Oh, we'll come up with something. How to reconcile equality of opportunity in the second and third (etc) generations with inequality of outcomes in the first and second? There's bound to be a way. And so on

On the basis of everything we know, love has its limits and they fall far short of embracing the totality of humankind. Socialists need objectives that look reachable in the light of some serious evidence.

A Dickens of a list

For some time now I've been wanting to know what the comparative lengths are of Dickens's novels. Your guess is as good as mine as to why I've been wanting to know this, but yesterday, thanks to @DickensDaily on Twitter, I was made aware of the ranking by word count that I reproduce below:

1. David Copperfield: 357,489
2. Dombey and Son: 357,484
3. Bleak House: 355,936
4. Little Dorrit: 339,870
5. Martin Chuzzlewit: 338,077
6. Our Mutual Friend: 327,727
7. Nicholas Nickleby: 323,722
8. The Pickwick Papers: 302,190
9. Barnaby Rudge: 255,229
10. The Old Curiosity Shop: 218,538
11. Great Expectations: 186,339
12. Oliver Twist: 158,631
13. A Tale of Two Cities: 137,000
14. Hard Times: 104,821
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: 96,178 (first 6 of 12 parts only)

In total that's 3,859,231 words. How far along am I on the journey I began in late 2007? I have still to read numbers 4, 5, 7 and 8 and won't bother with number 15; I've also read (not on this list) A Christmas Carol. By my calculations that means I'm just a shade off two thirds of the way.

Earthly matters

Mark Steel isn't as funny as he thinks he is. In fact, much of the time he isn't funny at all. Still, he writes a column for the Independent in which funny is what he tries to be, while at the same time mixing in a little bit o' politics. Because of that - the mixing in - he can be held to certain standards of accuracy, even if there's no holding him to any requirement of humour. Here's Steel on Christopher Hitchens:

Hitchens appears to have become obsessed with defying religion, so made himself one of the most enthusiastic supporters for a war he saw as being against the craziness of Islam. But the war wasn't about God or Allah, it was about more earthly matters, which the people conducting that war understood. And, as that war became predictably disastrous, they were grateful for whatever support they could find. And so a man dedicated to disproving GOD was praised in his death by the soppiest, sickliest, most, irrational, hypocritical Christian of them all. [Tony Blair, geddit? - NG]

You can say what you like about Hitchens - and many who disagreed with his politics have been doing just that since he died - but defying religion wasn't the only, or indeed the principal, motive he had in supporting the war in Iraq. Most prominent here was his opposition to the regime of a murderous tyrant, Saddam Hussein - an earthly matter indeed, if not a very funny one. Now, why would Mark Steel (and a spillion or so others on the left) be interested in eliding that fact?

Hugo, from C to deadly c

Hugo Chávez has a new hypothesis. It's not an accusation; he's just reflecting. In any case, he wonders whether his enemies to the North might have done something to induce cancer among Latin America's leaders. You remember who Hugo Chávez is, don't you? Of course you do - he's the hero of Camden.

Don't say 'sci fi'

While I'm in the country of usage, I want to return to an issue I aired on this blog seven and a half years ago. (Seven and a half years, would you believe! Why is it that blogging seems not to inhabit real time but some other kind of universe in which much of it seems like yesterday, or indeed all posts are simultaneous with each other and capable of being referenced 'sideways' as if from one page in a book to another? Anyway...) That was the issue of why the evidently better practice of calling science fiction 'SF' for short had to compete with the evidently worse practice of calling it 'sci fi' (ouch). At the time, I wrote about my preference in this matter as being a prejudice I had, which I couldn't really justify by argument; and my post on the subject produced some follow-up email correspondence which I duly posted as well.

Readers, I'm here to tell you that I've now thought of an argument in favour of my prejudice preference. 'Sci fi' is supposed to abbreviate 'science fiction', but it is spoken as if it rhymes with 'hi fi'. What kind of sense does that make? If I say 'in the circs', I wouldn't pronounce 'circs' to rhyme with, say, 'larks', so that it came out 'sarks'. If I say 'peeps', I don't rhyme it with 'hopes' and call them 'popes'. And so on, you get the picture. Accordingly, 'sci fi' ought to be said as if the second syllable was the beginning of the word 'fiction'. But no one says it like that. It would sound silly, as if it had been interrupted by a sponge suddenly being thrust into the mouth of the speaker. From now on I'll be urging this silly pronunciation upon all who say 'sci fye', in the hope of shaming them towards the more elegant 'SF'.

Blogs that are really posts

Resisting a linguistic usage that's already made some headway is mostly a waste of time, but I'm prompted by a tweet from my friend Damian to try and hold the line against referring to the posts that appear on a blog as being, themselves, 'blogs'. No. OK? Just no. It's a bad habit. I can surmise how it has come about: (1) 'blog', initially, a noun derived from 'weblog' and denoting these internet diaries or journals or whatever; (2) then, 'to blog', as the derivative verb for the activity of writing on a blog; and (3) then, further along, 'blogs', as the discrete products of the activity of blogging, those individual items that appear on the (larger) blog.

But it's confusing as well as horrid. We already have the word 'post' or 'blogpost'. To call a post a blog risks mixing people up. If I read a post on your... er... weblog and then tell you 'Good blog', am I praising that particular post or your website overall?

So there, it's not just a prejudice. It's a plea for preserving a useful distinction. It's like... You can use 'criteria' incorrectly as being a singular as well as plural form. But why do this when you already have the correct singular, 'criterion'? What will someone who says 'I don't agree with your criteria' be saying?

(This has been a post and not a blog. A blog is what it appears on.)

Noble but not righteous?

I follow that story about Italian rescuer Gino Bartali with one told by Eva Weisel in yesterday's New York Times. Weisel sets out the details of how she and her family were saved by 'an influential local man' and then reports on the effort, so far unsuccessful, to have him honoured by Yad Vashem:

During the horrors of the Holocaust, non-Jews saved many thousands of Jews from death and depravity at the hands of Germans and their allies. Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial museum, has recognized more than 23,000 of these brave men and women as "The Righteous Among the Nations." Our family's rescuer deserves to be among that number. And in his case, the impact of recognition would have powerful reverberations, striking a blow against Holocaust denial in a part of the world where such denial is widespread.

That is because my hometown is Mahdia, on the eastern shore of Tunisia, and our rescuer, Khaled Abdul Wahab, was an Arab Muslim. (He passed away in 1997.)

So far, however, Abdul Wahab has been denied the recognition he deserves. Nearly five years ago, in January 2007, the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem nominated him to be a "righteous," the first Arab ever to be formally considered for this honor. This nomination was based on witness testimony from my late sister, Anny Boukris. In March of that year, however, the official Commission for the Designation of the Righteous, a body presided over by a retired Israeli judge and created by Israeli law to decide who merits recognition as a "righteous," voted to reject the nomination. That decision was kept secret for two years.

In 2010, that same jurist, Justice Jacob Tuerkel, sent the Abdul Wahab file back to the commission for a second review. This time, the case was bolstered by two fresh testimonies - a video interview of my cousin Edmee Masliah, who was with me at the farm and now lives outside Paris, and a notarized letter I wrote recounting my own experience. Yad Vashem now had three firsthand accounts of the story. But to my complete dismay, the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous once again voted to reject the nomination. Abdul Wahab was a noble man, I was told by Yad Vashem, but his actions did not rise to the statutory level required to merit the "righteous" designation - that is, he didn't "risk his life" to save Jewish lives.

While that may be the wording of the law, I am told by experts that Abdul Wahab would not be the first rescuer of Jews not to have suffered physical harm, let alone life-threatening danger. Many in France who have won that designation were honored because they acted to save Jews without knowing for sure what fate would await them if they were caught. In addition, some of the famous diplomats honored as righteous were never arrested, injured or threatened with death for aiding Jews.

Not being a party to the deliberations of those who decided to withhold the award in the case of Khaled Abdul Wahab, of course I don't have the information they have, and can only go on what I've read here (though see also this earlier normblog post). On that basis, however, it appears to me that Eva Weisel has a point. The criteria for the Righteous Among The Nations award do include the running of some risk: 'Risk to the rescuer's life, liberty or position'. Yet, except where rescuers actually lost their lives or suffered incarceration or some other grave consequence for trying to save Jews from the Nazis, the inference that they took a significant risk must arise from the overall context as well as from the details of their particular rescue initiative. The very fact that someone acted to thwart a German attempt, during wartime, to round up Jewish families surely suggests they might have been incurring some danger by doing so. As Weisel indicates, there were rescuers in Europe who have been recognized as Righteous Among The Nations although the level of risk they took seems not to have been very high.

Naturally, those deciding on the award will not want to devalue it; but it is better in this matter to err on the side of recognition where the risk was low than on the side of withholding the award when it might be fully merited.

The dulcet tones of Hamas

As delivered by Ismail Haniyeh:

We say today, explicitly, so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine - all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah. We say with transparency and in a clear manner, that Palestinian reconciliation - and all sides must know this - cannot come at the expense of [our] principles, at the expense of the resistance. These principles are absolute and cannot be disputed: Palestine - all of Palestine - is from the sea to the river. We won't relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The involvement of Hamas at any stage with the interim objective of liberation of [only] Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem, does not replace its strategic view concerning Palestine and the land of Palestine.

You can see and hear him saying all that here. Next time you hear some Western leftist (verkrappt branch) mouthing off with the slogan 'from the river to the sea', all the while adding assurances about a secular-democratic state for Palestine, you might draw his or her attention to Haniyeh's words, 'expulsion of the invaders and usurpers from the blessed land of Palestine'.

Hoodwinked into war

I read a post on Comment is Free just before Christmas, and figured I'd leave it alone just then as I didn't want to do anything to interrupt the build-up towards peace and goodwill. The post is not of any great significance in any case, but I like it for the neat illustration it provides of a mindset in which, when it comes to issues of war and peace, the assumption is fixed in stone that there is only one viable point of view and that the writer is in possession of it and everyone else but the malign forces of government would share it with him were they not being duped by those malign forces.

The post in question is by George Chesterton, who laments what he calls 'the militarisation of popular culture'. He does begin by giving their due to our '[d]edicated servicemen and women', but after that it's simply assumed that they should not be or have been in Afghanistan:

[I]t is our fault we allowed our politicians to send them to conflicts that served little purpose other than to cling on to some amorphous notion of national power. Now the debate about why they are still dying - and killing - in Afghanistan has disappeared from public life. Instead, an acceptance that the military is an agent for good has become the norm...

Note 'served little purpose' and deprecation of the notion that the military might be an agent for good. Note also, in what follows, his thought that 'we are being chaperoned [my emphasis] down this path amid economic gloom' and that 'the public have been taught to love [mine again] those who fight but not to hate the fact that they are still fighting'. Finally, there's the conclusion, 'it is our responsibility to stop the government sending them out to die in the first place'. What, regardless?

Reading this piece, it isn't just that one might disagree with him on certain points - as I do. It's his self-contained certainty that there's nothing to weigh on the other side of the question, nothing at any rate that merits being registered in order to supply an answer to it. The guy doesn't mention that Britain first went into Afghanistan in response to the attacks of 9/11 and did so with considerable public support; that one consequence was the overthrow of Taliban rule in that country, which has had some benefits for its people; or (at the end) that sometimes going to war is justified and necessary. The whole thing is framed as if George Chesterton just knows the truth and everyone else would be with him in recognizing it had they not been mistaught and mischaperoned.

Righteous among the champions

This is a story that is worth spreading more widely. I wasn't aware of it myself until yesterday. Gino Bartali was a famous Italian cyclist; he won the Giro d'Italia three times and the Tour de France twice. But these weren't his only achievements. Described here as 'one of cycling's all-time greats', Bartali is being considered for the honour of Righteous Among The Nations - awarded by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem - for the part he played in rescuing Jews in danger during the Second World War. One of those testifying to his efforts is Giorgio Goldenberg, now 78, whose family was saved by being hidden in Bartali's cellar in Florence:

The cellar was very small... A door gave way onto a courtyard, but I couldn't go out because that would run the risk of me being seen by the tenants of the nearby apartment buildings. The four of us slept on a double bed. My father never went out, while my mother often went out with two flasks to get water from some well.

Bartali also took long training rides on behalf of an underground network that supported Italy's Jews. (Via.)

A regime 'entitled to use force'

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele, who is good at this sort of thing, turns in another of his soothing observations. He says about Syria:

Whether Assad can summon the determination to push for real reform in place of the dither and denial that have characterised his response to the protests so far is unclear. He is right when he says the state is entitled to use force against armed rebels, but wrong to portray all opposition to his regime as "terrorist".

Well, let's see. All states claim the right to use force to put down rebellion, but it is, equally, an old tradition of moral and political thought that a people has the right to resist oppression. You don't have to go to Marx; you can find this in John Locke. Once one knows the broad outlines of some given national situation, one is faced with a choice of which of the two rights to endorse - a state's to defend the order it upholds, or the right of the people to resist that state, as having forfeited its claims to legitimacy. It cannot be that both of these rights yield a morally valid entitlement simultaneously. So what's it to be, Jonty?

Steele appears to know some of what is alleged against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, referring to '[e]vidence of torture and executions of captives'. There is more about that here, in a report on testimonies lately given to Human Rights Watch (£):

In a series of first-hand accounts, soldiers and intelligence agents report being forced to open fire on unarmed protesters, often on the orders of most senior military leaders.

One soldier claimed to be present when President Assad, who is commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces, took part by conference call in a meeting between high-ranking military and intelligence commanders and protest organisers.

During the meeting, which was held in the city of Deraa in April, the President is alleged to have said: "What's going on over there? Get the situation under control by all means necessary." The phrase was widely understood to authorise the use of lethal force.
.....
Dozens of other accounts tell appalling tales of the killing of protesters and bystanders, arbitrary arrest, torture and execution, denial of medical assistance to the wounded and use of ambulances to arrest them and lethal repercussions of denying orders.

At a protest in Deraa, Brigadier General Ramadan Ramadan, head of the 35th Special Forces Regiment, is alleged to have given orders to soldiers to open fire on everything they saw.

"He said, 'Use heavy shooting. Nobody will ask you to explain,'" said one former member of the regiment, who gave his name as Amjad. "When somebody asked what we were supposed to shoot at, he said, 'At anything in front of you.' About 40 protesters were killed that day."
.....
On another occasion, Colonel Suheil Hassan, head of the operations branch of the notorious air force intelligence directorate, is said to have given direct orders to beat and torture detainees.

"He told us explicitly to beat people severely on the heads, and not worry about the consequences," said one of those who served under him and took part in the arrests and beatings of detainees. "We also used electric cattle prods. The order was communicated verbally, before we got dispatched."

See also the grim report here (£) - though you may prefer to spare yourself the details of 'the Kafkaesque nightmare of relentless and unanswerable interrogation, punctuated by bouts of intense violence, that awaits those unfortunate enough to be imprisoned in Assad's Syria'.

Emmylou's Hard Bargain

For the sake of completeness I should say something about Emmylou Harris's last album, Hard Bargain (2011). I can no longer write with the same enthusiasm that I once did with respect to the albums of her greatest period. Hard Bargain isn't bad - but it's no longer top Emmylou Harris. As I've said before, the voice isn't what it was. More of the songs on this album are by Emmylou herself than is usual. Though over the years she's written some very fine songs - 'Boulder To Birmingham', 'Prayer In Open D' - there's none to match them here. Among the best songs on Hard Bargain is her farewell to the late Kate McGarrigle.

Top track: Home Sweet Home. Runner-up: Darlin' Kate. Bubbling-under: The Ship On His Arm.

The 2011 Boxing Day literary quiz

For the fourth time I'm offering you a literary quiz the day after Christmas. This year there's a modification of the idea I used in 2009 and 2010. In questions 1 to 20 you're looking, as before, for the names of 20 pairs of writers linked by the fact that their last names begin with the same letter of the alphabet. Thus, for example, you might – though you don't - have the clue 'The old man disintegrated', to give you Ernest Hemingway and Michel Houellebecq. This time there are no questions for the letters q, u, v, x, y and z. From questions 21 to 25 the game changes, as I'll explain when I get there.

1. Disgraced on a black hill.
2. Love in a changed climate.
3. Mr Harding's route home.
4. Trilogy about a tiger in the wrong city.
5. The great Penelope.
6. An affinity for praxis.
7. A wide seafront in the West - quiet there.
8. Top room for Bertha.
9. The patient with green eyes.
10. An Edwardian jungle.
11. They're committed to their privileges.
12. Harry Hole, meet Mohun Biswas.
13. Gunther at noon.
14. A spare room in Knutsford.
15. Foucault invisible.
16. A prayer for her world mile record when journeying to the river, see!
17. Biggles came running.
18. The slaves of hunger.
19. The war between the Babbitts.
20. It's looking dark for Europa right now.

From the last five questions you need two writers each time, whose names do not begin with the same letter, but who are linked by a common word in a title of each of their novels. Thus you might – though you don't - have the clue 'A white lakeside hotel', to give you Anita Brookner and D.M. Thomas. What you actually have is...

21. At the seaside she's twice the writer he is.
22. He was shot on a beach; and he was attacked there with a kind of chisel.
23. That they may face the rising empire.
24. The road back from apocalypse brought on by tobacco.
25. A funny residential building but a bleak one.

Entries, please, by 2 January, with '2011 Boxing Day literary quiz' as the subject line of the email. The winner(s) will be drawn - as in 'out of a hat' - from all those entries deemed correct by the judges (me and WotN). Two book tokens worth £15.00 each to be won.

The normblog guide to soaps 14

When we were in Florence that time, we made a special trip (WotN and I) to the Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella on the recommendation of a friend. Imagine our disappointment on finding it closed. Then, learning some weeks ago that there's a branch of the Farmaceutica in London - on Piccadilly - Adèle dropped by there to pick up one of their soaps, and the one she brought home was the Sapone latte, Violetta (bottom right).

This is a soap with many charms as it waits in your bathroom, still in its handsome packet. It has an assertive, indeed one might even say vivacious, fragrance. However, I am bound to say that once you open it and apply it to your (com licença) body, it is rather ordinary. I don't know why. At first I thought this may be because the soap is old, having been produced as long ago as 1612; but Adèle explains that that's just the date when Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella set up in business. Perhaps it's because the water dilutes the fragrance. Anyway, I'm recommending it as an enhancement of the appeal of your bathroom, to which people will be drawn by the delicious smell of the Sapone latte, Violetta.

Happy Christmas to all my readers, and may you receive lots of lovely soaps.

[For links to the rest of the series go to the soap dish.]