Eyjafjallajökull
June 4, 2012
June 4, 2012
The driver of an armored personnel carrier that rammed through student lines, injuring many, lies dead after being beaten by students who set his vehicle on fire during an army attack on Tiananmen Square
June 4, 2012
Living without Your Name
My friend’s wife was accepted to a PhD program at McGill University in Montreal. They decided to move to Canada with their two children at about the same time that I was offered a fellowship at Princeton and decided to move with my family to New Jersey for a year. Hoping to rent out our apartments while we’re away, we both posted ads on the most popular website in Israel. I received about five calls a day and found a tenant within a couple of weeks. My friend received only three calls in four weeks, and none of the people who called came to look at his flat.
A few days ago he removed his ad from the website and posted a new one, only this time he changed his name from Hussein to Rami. Rami is an ethnically indeterminate name – it can be either Jewish or Palestinian – but there are no Jews called Hussein. Within three days ‘Rami’ received about thirty phone calls, and six people came to look at the flat. He expects to sign a lease with one of them tomorrow. In Israel, if you are a Palestinian and want to rent a flat, at times, to misquote Arthur Miller, you have to live without your name.
(Source: lrb.co.uk)
June 4, 2012
February 14, 1963 — see The Complete Peanuts 1963-1966
June 3, 2012
Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?
In 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union were military allies. By the end of 1941, after the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union and Japan the United States, Moscow in effect had traded Berlin for Washington. By 1949, the alliances had switched again, with the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany together in NATO, facing off against the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, including the smaller German Democratic Republic. During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets. Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but the some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.
We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.
We see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other. Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in 1944 after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them. In Stalin’s Gulag some 516,543 people died between 1941 and 1943, sentenced by the Soviets to labor, but deprived of food by the German invasion.
Were these people victims of Stalin or of Hitler? Or both?
(Source: nybooks.com)
June 3, 2012
Toleration and the Future of Europe
Like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire was anything but a monoreligious state. Both states were based upon a political logic that is no longer possible to follow. Monarchs made durable arrangements with leaders of the various religions practiced in their realms: the Ottoman sultan left Christian matters largely in the hands of the Orthodox Church, whose patriarchs were more powerful under the Ottomans than they had been under Byzantium. Greeks were the traders and the financiers of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman armies, like the Polish ones, were multiconfessional. Although we might think of the Ottoman Empire as Asian in origin, in fact its history begins with Balkan conquests, and most of its Balkan subjects never converted to Islam. These kinds of early modern arrangements, where a weak central state in effect confers authority to local elites in exchange for the ability to tax and wage war, are often regarded as models of toleration.
The creation of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Max Weber and Ernst Gellner quite rightly saw, involved the attempt by leaders of states to circumvent or abolish religious and other intermediaries, so that the relation between the state and the individual could be direct, and so that taxes and soldiers could be raised without compromises with local authorities. States that could not solve this problem, such as Poland and the Ottoman Empire, did not survive.
Even if we wished to revive this tradition, no modern Western state could accept early modern levels of dependence on local elites, and few if any religious communities in the West are cohesive and obedient enough to endure rule by their elders. The tradition of cooperation with local religious communities continues, of course, but in Europe it is subordinate to the relationship between citizen and state. The problem for modern states is to reconcile state power and social diversity. One twentieth-century solution, exemplified by Nazi Germany, was to attempt to build state power by eliminating the diversity.
Most European states are little concerned today with raising armies, but they are concerned with levying taxes to fund pensions. The functioning of the European welfare state depends upon the labor and indeed the civic good will of immigrants—which in Europe often means Muslim immigrants. These religious minorities cannot be ruled in the early modern way, and they will not, whatever Breivik and those like him imagine, be eliminated in the twentieth-century way. To preserve functioning states adaptable to unpredictable cultural novelty is one of the great challenges of our century. Norway, like much of Europe today, has witnessed the rise of a populist right, one that threatens to supplant the conservative traditions of Christian democracy. Although these various European parties are quite different one from the other, they are alike in denying the basic reality that Europe’s tomorrow depends upon how immigrants and their children experience Europe today.
(Source: nybooks.com)
June 3, 2012
The Royal Rorschach Blot
As few will want reminding, her majesty has now sat for sixty years. You can go far in life by failing to die, as this the queen has so far managed to do. The point is not quite that, as the Prince of Wales and others comment, the queen never changes. It’s more that she is like nothing on earth, and it seems people like nothing more than nothing.
The queen ‘represents’ the nation by being quite unlike anyone in it. Nobody – not even Brian Sewell – speaks the Queen’s English as she does. And no one else dresses like her, either. Some time in the 1960s she seems to have decided that her outer garment of choice should be modelled on the uniform of a Soviet tank commander around the time of the Kursk offensive, and since then has rarely been seen without some version of this coat, bespoke-tailored but obliterating all bodily contours, in shades of cornflower, crushed rose and phlegm.
So it’s the very bugger-allness of the queen, her Rorschach-blot quality, that has proven her great strength. She does manage something approaching animation when one of her racehorses wins or a corgi whelps, but these are but fleeting ripples on the waters of somnolence. Her nullity oils projective identification across the divide of wealth, breeding and influence, with the sovereign as both royal and ordinary. By contrast, on the surviving evidence, the only other diamond jubilant in the monarchy’s history, Queen Victoria, always looked as if she’d just sat on a thistle, and nobody thought they were just like her. Subjects adore the idols they deserve. Or as Nietzsche put it, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.
(Source: lrb.co.uk)
June 3, 2012
Mothers Beware!
One particular issue has seized Badinter’s attention: “The irony of this history is that it was precisely at the point that Western women finally rid themselves of patriarchy that they acquired a new master in the home.” She means the breast-fed baby, symbol of women’s oppression. Advocacy of breast-feeding seems to her much more freighted with oppressive significance than it may to many Americans; breast-feeding is now the norm for infant feeding in the US—where some 73.9 percent of mothers do it—and a number of developed countries except France, where it seems to be viewed as mildly disgusting, an aversion that may partly be inherited from the aristocrats of the eighteenth century when suckling your own infant was a practice associated with the lower classes (as the reader will remember from her first shocked reading of Rousseau where he abandons his newborns to orphanages and wet nurses and rarely sees them again). There’s also a widespread belief that nursing spoils your breasts. One book on comparative health attitudes gives the interesting statistic that while American plastic surgeons do twice as many breast augmentations as in France, the French have many more breast reductions.
“French mothers balk at playing the role expected of them, and successive governments over the last thirty years have dragged their feet in bringing the country into line with the WHO requirements” that see breast-feeding as desirable. She says this proudly of her countrywomen and is fearful they may be softening on the issue. Badinter criticizes stepped-up efforts to make the French more pro-lactation, and she questions claims that breast-feeding is beneficial, an issue one had thought more or less beyond dispute—though she remains skeptical.
Much of her attack is focused on the La Leche League, which many American mothers will remember from their day in the maternity hospital as a band of earnest, helpful women you could ask about nipple salves, and whom Badinter with some reason thinks of as proto-Nazi opponents of female freedom, practically a cult, now bent on depriving poor African women of the benefits of modern infant formula.
(Source: nybooks.com)
June 3, 2012
Beyond the Blitz
Beevor departs from standard narratives by opening his story not with the invasion of Poland but with a battle in east Asia to which Europeans paid little attention in the summer of 1939: the crushing Soviet victory over Japanese forces at Khalkin Gol on the Mongolian border. This unusual perspective enables Beevor to throw immediate light on the geopolitics of the European and Pacific wars.
Defeat at Khalkin Gol influenced Japan’s decision not to pursue war in northern Asia against the Soviet Union but, instead, to attack the European colonies of south-east Asia as well as US naval power in the Pacific. This brought the US into the war, more or less guaranteeing an Allied victory, and meant that, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he could not count on the Japanese tying up Soviet forces on a second front in the Far East.
Beevor shows an original touch by drawing attention to little-known but revealing episodes such as a Luftwaffe raid on the Italian port of Bari in December 1943. This attack sank an Allied ship, the SS John Harvey, which was carrying 1,350 tons of mustard gas bombs. It was an ultra-secret cargo, not to be unloaded unless the Germans resorted to chemical warfare. Allied censors prevented war reporters from mentioning not just the mustard gas but even the raid itself in their dispatches.
As it happens, the Nazis were guilty of biological warfare in that they delayed the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula by reintroducing the malaria-carrying breed of mosquito into the Pontine marshes, south of Rome, that Mussolini had drained in the 1930s. After the reverses of Stalingrad, north Africa and Sicily, Hitler was resolved that the war should end either in his total victory or total destruction.
The Pacific war was hardly less barbaric, as Beevor demonstrates in two chapters that draw on the pioneering studies of Japanese historians such as Toshiyuki Tanaka, professor of war crimes at Hiroshima City University. “Japanese officers and soldiers resorted to cannibalism and not just of enemy corpses … In New Guinea they killed, butchered and ate local people and slave labourers, as well as a number of Australian and American prisoners of war, whom they referred to as ‘white pigs’,” he writes.
Japan’s armed forces practised cannibalism not only because they suffered intolerable hunger but because it was “a systematic and organised military strategy”. However, the Allies suppressed the depravity, refusing to raise it at the 1946 Tokyo war crimes tribunal because it was too upsetting for the victims’ families.
(Source: ft.com)
June 3, 2012
The art of travel
From the earliest days of printing, maps were collectable. One of England’s leading map addicts was John Dee, the man Elizabeth I referred to as “my philosopher”. Dee owned a valuable collection of maps and geographical instruments that included at least one of Mercator’s globes. To Dee and his courtier friends, maps made it possible to weigh the global balance of power; to “vewe the large dominion of the Turke: the wide Empire of the Moschovite: the litle morsell of ground, where Christendome is certainly knowen”. Dee took particular interest in voyages of exploration to “farre landes” and his map collection made it possible for him to “understand of other mens travailes”. Maps were also symbols of prestige and humanist learning. Collectors such as Dee used them to “beautifie their Halls, Parlers, Chambers, Galeries, Studies, or Libraries”. In Elizabethan London, it was cool to “liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth, Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes”.
(Source: ft.com)
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