Roger Mayne

Following my post below, here is a photograph by Roger Mayne taken in 1956:

"I got past them, thank God I got past them, and then I heard this voice, 'take our photo Mister!'. So, of course, immediately I turned around and photographed the group, because I mean I wasn't going to miss a chance like that and I realised that they weren't sinister. They were actually being quite friendly. So I went in quite close amongst the group and got quite a lot more photographs quite close to them."

Two things worth reading about Iraq

Two very different pieces about the Iraq war that are both a cut above. Eliot Weinberger is impassioned in What I Heard About Iraq from the London Review of Books.

In the Financial Times Carne Davis writes:

"I was, from 1998 to 2002, the British “expert” on Iraq for the UK delegation to the UN Security Council, responsible for policy on both weapons inspections and sanctions against Iraq. My experience in those years and what happened subsequently is in part why I recently resigned from the Foreign Office."

Now read on.

Suburban dreams

Thanks to Conscientious I have discovered Beth Yarnelle Edwards' images of the contemporary, suburban domestic sphere. These are wonderful, intimate photographs that turn the mundane and familiar into something exotic and important. One could imagine these pictures showing up on the covers of sociology and psychology books for years to come - much like Roger Mayne's photographs of Southam Street did in the 1960s. Although unlike Mayne's images, one is often left wondering how they were contrived . Of course, the shifting gaze from outside to inside is also interesting.

Max Weber and Auschwitz

"In organisational ideology, readiness for such an extreme self-sacrifice is articulated as a moral virtue; indeed, as the moral virtue destined to put paid to all other moral demands. The selfless observance of the moral virtue is then represented, in Weber's famous words, as the honour of the civil servant; 'The honour of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order seems wrong to him and if, despite the civil servant's remonstrances, the authority insists on the order'. This kind of behaviour means, for a civil servant, 'moral discipline and self-denial in the highest sense'. Through honour, discipline is substituted for moral responsibility. The delegitimation of all but inner-organisational rules as the source and guarantee of propriety, and thus denial of the authority of private conscience, become now the highest moral virtue." (Zygmunt Bauman Modernity and the Holocaust)

The Drowned and the Saved

"... I too entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day; actually the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas? I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in my hand, I was waiting to file past the 'commission' that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it." (Auschwitz Survivor Primo Levi)

Barney Greenman

Today I remember Barnett 'Barney' Greenman, born on March 17 1940; gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later.

Muslim Council of Britain

The Muslim Council of Britain's decision not to attend Auschwitz commemoration events has rightly come in for criticism.

Normblog tells us:

"Musselmanner (Moslems) was Auschwitz slang for people near death from starvation and privation... The exact derivation of the phrase is not known, but it was common to all concentration camps."

George Edward Chamberlain

I was really touched by this.

30 years of Race & Class

Two really good posts by At Any Street Corner here and here on the thirtieth aniversary edition of the journal Race and Class.

The great imperialism revival (3)

Two miss-the-point letters in the Guardian today in response to Paul Gilroy's article on Harry, Nazis and Empire (discussed in an earlier post). Historian John MacKenzie writes:

"Something odd is happening in American academia these days (Why Harry's disoriented about empire, January 18), explained in terms of denial. Despite being critical of the British experience and having no truck with Harry's fancy-dress set, I find Paul Gilroy's views absurd. There is absolutely no evidence to connect British attitudes towards Nazism with their own guilt about empire nor is there the moral equivalence which Gilroy implies.

"Throughout the imperial period, there was always an exceptionally healthy scepticism about empire, not to say fierce criticism of its methods, among British politicians, in the press, and within missionary, humanitarian and academic lobbies. So far as the specific case of Kenya and Mau Mau is concerned, contemporary anxiety about British methods was always present. In any case, the Mau Mau fighters killed very many more Africans than they did whites and the result of the British realisation of error was decolonisation not only in Kenya, but ultimately in the rest of east and central Africa.

"By contrast, criticism of the effects of US imperialism in Chile, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq has been strikingly muted. Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, not to mention the scandal of the domestic adherence to the death penalty (placing the US in a club with China and Iran), produce so little in the way of press, political or academic critiques that Bush and his administration are re-elected. Gilroy and the rest of the group known as the post-colonialists are as severe a case of denial as you could find."

OK except:
1) Paul Gilroy is British
2) I can think of no contemporary thinker on race issues who has written more (and more seriously) about fascism and the Holocaust - i.e. the last person who would want to get into a colonialism v Nazism pissing contest

MacKenzie could be forgiven for not knowing the above but why did the Guardian bother to print his letter? I must also say that the suggestions that firstly British imperialism was OK because lots of people at home were 'anxious' about it and that secondly nobody criticises US imperialism are both spectacularly wide of the mark. Many Brits are in denial about the history of British foreign policy and a focus on those beastly yanks can just be another way of perpetuating this. Who taught the Americans how to suppress the peasantry of South Vietnam? Ans: British military advisors fresh from Malaya.

Hadi Saleh 1949-2005

Normblog rightly highlights the Guardian obituary of Communist and Trade Unionist Hadi Saleh recently killed by insurgents in Iraq (see previous post). Abdullah Muhsin writes:

"Hadi Saleh's commitment to trade unionism was a vital feature of his vision for a democratic, peaceful and federal Iraq, which would unite all Iraqis, regardless of their background, ethnicity or religion. For him, trade unions would be the key to achieving such unity. Thus he championed workers' rights to organise and to strike to achieve decent jobs, pay and working conditions: the basic building blocks of strong, non-sectarian trade unionism. Such a strategy remains the only way to defeat the IMF shock therapy and trans-national economic occupation, which has been imposed undemocratically on Iraqis by the occupying powers.

"However, his commitment to independent trade unionism was also linked to his determination to end the occupation of our country and to rebuild civil society."

Cafe culture

Hi readers it's new happy, whacky Dave here.

I'm probably the last to discover this but I really enjoyed Russell Davies' tribute to egg, bacon, chips and beans.

The truth hurts ...

Importance gets a namecheck from the admirable pas au-delà as part of a list of new blogs but there is a sting in the tail:

" ...do the blogs have the new year blues a bit? Come on now, lighten up you spoiled brats."

Point taken.

The great imperialism revival (2)

I liked Paul Gilroy's article in today's Guardian on Prince Harry attending a 'Colonists and Natives' fancy dress party in a Nazi uniform. Extract:

"Prince Harry's indiscretions have been seen in the context of the Auschwitz anniversary and the failure of his elite education. His youth, his ignorance, poor parenting and a hatred of political correctness have all been offered in mitigation.

These explanations are insufficient. To leave interpretation of his conduct on that level would be to miss an opportunity to understand something fundamental about the cultural life of a post-colonial country that has never dealt with the consequences of its loss of empire.

Harry's behaviour, rather than just being part of the sub-culture of a group of toffs, raises mainstream themes. The telling mix of Nazis and colonial fantasy provides an insight into the core of the two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup mentality. That nihilistic outlook dictates that conflicts against Hitler and Hitlerism remain imaginatively close while Britain's many wars of decolonisation - particularly in Africa, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden - are to be actively forgotten.

Standing firm against Nazis comforts Brits by making them feel righteous and perennially innocent. Being forced to reckon with the ongoing consequences of imperial crimes makes them uncomfortable in equal measure. "

Read part 1 of the great imperialism revival here.

Manchester United are the Jews of English football

Possibly according to Normblog.

The biological and the social

Eric Hobsbawm's defence of objective historical knowledge reproduced in Saurday's Guardian has rightly been highlighted across the blogsphere (too many links to mention). It is well worth reading in full. What struck me, however, was the way he chose to ground his claim:

"While postmodernists have denied the possibility of historical understanding, developments in the natural sciences have put an evolutionary history of humanity firmly back on the agenda.

"Firstly, DNA analysis has established a firmer chronology of the spread of the species from its original African origin throughout the world, before the appearance of written sources. This has both established the astonishing brevity of human history and eliminated the reductionist solution of neo-Darwinian socio-biology.

"The changes in human life in past 10,000 years, let alone the past 10 generations, are too great to be explained by a wholly Darwinian mechanism of evolution via genes. They amount to the accelerating inheritance of acquired characteristics by cultural and not genetic mechanisms.

"In short, the DNA revolution calls for a specific, historical, method of studying the evolution of the human species. It also provides us with a rational framework for a world history. History is the continuance of the biological evolution of homo sapiens by other means.

"Secondly, the new evolutionary biology eliminates the distinction between history and the natural sciences and bypasses the bogus debates on whether history is or is not a science.

"Thirdly, it returns us to the basic approach to human evolution adopted by prehistorians, which is to study the modes of interaction between our species and its environment and its growing control over it.

Hobsbawm's take on the state of population genetics and the new biology is simplistic but the willingness of a figure like this to use biological knowledge in this way is striking.Those searching for other examples of the new biologism do not have to look far. The same edition of the Guardian contains a review by Steven Rose of The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton. Rose writes:

"His agenda becomes more transparent as the book proceeds. First, he must once more topple Freud from his pedestal. Not merely were his ideas about the tripartite division of the self between ego, id and superego crude, and his reductive approach to the interpretation of dreams often bathetic, but he wasn't even really original (Claxton unearths a variety of intellectual precursors, from Schopenhauer onwards).

"Then comes the dénouement. Modern neuroscience can, it seems, as tidily explain "the unconscious" as it can consciousness. Goodbye demons; goodbye the analyst's couch. It is really all about the way in which different regions of the brain, especially the massive frontal lobe, are integrated, so that each region can either activate or inactivate others. "The brain," he concludes, "actually produces two kinds of thing: physical effects and mental experiences."

Also in the same edition is Jonathon Porritt's review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond. Porritt writes:

"In Collapse, Jared Diamond uses that elemental power of nature as his background, but fills his foreground with an astonishing cavalcade of different peoples and cultures from across the planet. They are linked by Diamond's inquiry into what caused some of these societies (such as the Mayan civilisation or the people of Easter Island) to collapse, while others facing similar challenges managed to survive.

"He admits to having started out on this inquiry assuming it would prove to be straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise. In other words, serial ecocide. It turned out to be a lot more complex, with several equally influential factors involved, such as climate change, the presence of hostile neighbours, any involvement in trade, and a host of different response mechanisms on the part of those facing potential collapse. Each collapse or near-collapse throws up a different balance of those key factors.

Toy Story

I have given up trying to post any pictures from Michael Wood's work on the toy industry so you'll have to look here

Thanks to Conscientious.

The great imperialism revival (1)

I'm grateful to Lenin's Tomb for highighting this from Saturday's Daily Mail:

"Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history, Gordon Brown has declared. The Chancellor called for the "great British values" - freedom, tolerance, civic duty - to be admired as some of our most successful exports.

"He used a visit to one of Britain's former East African colonies and one of the strongholds of the campaign against 'white imperialism' to make an unabashed pitch for a return to patriotism.

Brown is quoted thus:

'We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.

'And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.

'Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.'

Perhaps this should be read alongside a discussion of British policy in Kenya in the 1950s from today's Observer. Highlights include over a thousand people hanged and 160,000 detained in camps.

Make love not war

Saturday's Sun reports:

" A SEX bomb to make enemy soldiers turn GAY and romp with each other was planned by US Government scientists.
Experts plotted the bizarre chemical weapon as an alternative to deadly nuclear devices, newly declassified documents reveal.

They hoped the tactic, proposed in 1994 when Bill Clinton was President, would distract the enemy from military duties so their troops could attack.

The team at US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, aimed to use hormones called pheromones, which attract other humans.

The report said: "Provoking homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a distasteful but completely non-lethal blow to morale."

Wrapping up on 'Are Muslims Hated?'

Kenan Malik's programme 'Are Muslims Hated?' (discussed below here, here and here) did not engender as much public debate as I thought it would. Malik's Guardian article did prompt this response from Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain.

There was an interesting post from www.perfect.co.uk that links the programme to Malik's other recent activity. Anyone wishing to understand the development of Malik's thinking might wish to look at this and this critique of multiculturalism.

For opinions on Malik's programme from an unscientific sample of British Muslims see PakPassion.net - Unofficial Pakistan Cricket Message Board!

MindMapping

Interesting and useful post on MindMaps from Russell Davies.

Through the attached comments, I learn of the role of similar diagrams in the 'Conspiracy' Art of Mark Lombardi.

Survivors of Auschwitz

Two snippets from Stephen Moss' interviews with Auschwitz survivors in today's Guardian. Moss begins his piece on Leon Greenman thus:

" The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman's large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don't tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon."

Barbara Stimler on retelling her story in London schools:

"When I speak to the children, I ask myself, 'Do they believe me?' Because sometimes I don't believe it myself."

Hadi Saleh

The brutal killing of Iraqi trade unionist Hadi Saleh by insurgents, its use in an open letter to the Stop the War Coalition from Labour Friends of Iraq, and its discussion in recent columns by Nick Cohen in the Observer column and Johann Hari in The Independant have rightly received considerable attention in the blogsphere.

But in the rush to condemn those Nick Cohen terms 'the cowards of the Left' have opponents of the Iraq war been misrepresented? See typically robust response from Dead Man Left and response from The Stop the War Coalition here, here and here.

Perhaps not such a cut and dried dispute of principle as it has been represented.

Yet more on Malik

A good response to Malik's debunking of Islamophobia in Dead Man Left.

At Any Street Corner is more supportive, quoting an interesting interview with anthropologist Adam Kuper discussing the confused ways in which notions of cultural difference are used in public discourse. When I was a callow PhD student in the 1980s Kuper fell asleep not once but twice during a paper I was giving so he is obviously a man of sound judgement.

More Kenan Malik

Kenan Mailk's programme on 'Are Muslims Hated' is on tonight. Article in the Guardian yesterday. Extract:

"Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants us to believe that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia - a morbid fear and hatred of Islam and of Muslims. Former Home Office minister John Denham has warned of the 'cancer of Islamophobia' infecting the nation. The veteran anti-racist Richard Stone, a consultant to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, suggests that Islamophobia is 'a challenge to us all'. The director of public prosecutions has worried that the war on terror is 'alienating whole communities' in this country.

I'm the kind of person you might expect to join this chorus. I've been an anti-racist all my life. I opposed the war on Iraq. I think that Britain's anti-terror laws are an affront to democracy. But I also think that Islamophobia is a myth - at least in the way that most people conceive of it. There is clearly ignorance and fear of Islam in this country. Muslims do get harassed and attacked because of their faith. Yet I believe that the hatred and abuse of Muslims is being exaggerated to suit politicians' needs and silence the critics of Islam. "

See also Malik's earlier critique of the value of 'diversity'.

NS article

Here reproduced large extracts from the New Statesman article mentioned in yesterday's posts:

"''Always have at least one treat to look forward to. Ideally you should have one mini-treat each day, a slightly bigger one every week and a bumper one each year. People with low self-esteem rarely treat themselves enough."

So writes Gael Lindenfield, "the UK's number-one confidence expert", in the 51st of the 365 day-by-day tips that make up her bestselling Self-Esteem Bible. Contained in this nugget of advice is the key to a whole new way of looking at the British economy.

Not many people realise this (not even the British Retail Consortium, whose spokeswoman had never heard of the idea until I put it to her), but self-esteem is one of Britain's fastest-growing industries, worth at least £15bn a year and possibly as much as £30bn, compared with £8bn for the whole of what remains of British agriculture.

Products, therapies, lifestyle advisers, magazines, books and television programmes aimed at boosting self-esteem and "well-being" have become big business in themselves, not least because boosting self-esteem is now heralded as a catalyst for improved productivity in every other business sector. People with high self-esteem, it is said, are more likely to enjoy their jobs, accept challenging targets, resist stress and cope with negative events, so selling self-esteem is more than just a good wheeze for those who claim to be able to package and sell it. It is like prescribing Viagra for the whole of Britain's productive economy.

The social theorist we have to thank for this perception is Andy Westwood of the Work Foundation, whose recently published paper Me, Myself and Work (sponsored, significantly, by the Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association) sets out to examine why self-esteem is so important in our working lives today. In doing so, he provides some startling statistics. A survey of Yellow Pages directories since 1992 indicates a widespread decline in traditional shops and trades, but a 5,000 per cent increase in the number of aromatherapists. Roughly six million people in Britain pay a subscription to a private health club (though how often they visit them is another matter) and one British woman in five has attended a Weight Watchers class.


Clearly there is something going on in consumer markets, and it might be a response to a national epidemic of low self-esteem. Or it may be something much simpler: people have more money and time to spare for luxuries, and can overcome the guilt associated with luxuries by being persuaded that it helps address an inadequacy they did not realise was there in the first place.

A recent research exercise by Bridgepoint, the private equity firm, points out that while personal spending on food and clothing has remained relatively stable since 1978, spending on "leisure services" has more than tripled, partly because consumers no longer see any point in saving. As to how that leisure spend is allocated, focus groups say they are less interested in lifestyle brands and more interested in bargains (on eBay, for example) or treats: but the treat they value most is nothing more complicated than a bit of peace and quiet in the midst of their increasingly busy lives.

Meanwhile, more from Gael Lindenfield. Eighty-three: buy yourself a small book of motivational quotations. Ninety-nine: think of yourself as a product for sale. One hundred and seventeen: like celebrities, transform your appearance regularly. And finally, if Christmas shopping is getting you down, 119: imagine that you have three weeks to live."

The business of self-esteem

The new year edition of the New Statesman picked 'Self-Esteem' as one of the key themes of 2005. Useful article which points to the rise of commercial services designed at dealing with the 'problem' of low self-esteem. Sadly only seems to be accessible electonically to subscribers. But then again it could just be me, I'm pretty useless at this ....

USA no longer a top ten economy

The conservative low tax, low regulation Heritage Foundation no longer ranks the US in the world top ten of the 'freest economies'.

Although its score remains unchanged from last year, and it is still classified as free, the United States - now in a tie for 12th place with Switzerland - has been 'treading water'," according to the editors, "and hence has been surpassed by countries willing to open their economies still further."

Britain came 7th!

Are Muslims Hated?

Thanks to AsiansinMedia.org I learn of Kenan Malik's programme due to air on Channel 4 on January 8th which asks 'are Muslims hated'? According to Mailik:

Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants to convince us that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia. But is this the reality or is hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians' ends and to silence critics of Islam?

Malik always has something interesting to say so I await the programme and the debate that will no doubt follow with interest.

For an alternative tale on Islamaphobia see The Runnymede Trust.

Fundamentalism begins at home

Only just picked up on this article by Josie Appleton on the French sociologist Oliver Roy and his book In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. Roy argues that the politicisation of Islam including extreme militant Islam emerges not out of tradition or the Koran but is a by-product of modernisation and westernisation. Neofundamentalism is linked to developments such as individualisation, notions of self-development and self-expression, lifestyle and to identity politics. Here is a taste:

Neofundamentalists act in the name of a global ummah (community), but this is entirely an invention of their imagination. Roy writes that: 'Neofundamentalism provides an alternative group identity that does not impinge upon the individual life of the believer, precisely because such a community is imagined and has no real social basis.' Islamic militants tend to see both politics and community ties as a bit grubby, a distraction from the pure religious project of developing the self. The fact that radicals have made no attempt to win adherents at Mecca, Roy argues in his book, shows that they have 'no interest in the real ummah'.

See an interview with Roy in Religioscope. See also reviews in The Guardian, RUSI-Review, ICSAA, and The Economist.

More on Susan Sontag

Great post from At Any Street Corner that pays tribute to Susan Sontag and even manages to provide insight into the dynamics of current horrors.

At Any Street Corner writes: "I have just re-read parts of Sontag's Regarding The Pain Of Others which seems to speak directly to the catastrophe that has unfolded in Asia and the visual reporting of it. Near the end she has a ferocious passage in which she excoriates those "citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk'' who ''will do anything to keep themselves from being moved" by disaster or pain. Surely she speaks of a profound truth when she says that photographs - like those we have seen recently - "haunt us" and also help to form part of a narrative of understanding and, ultimately, of solidarity. And then she has this to say of the impudence of the postmodern obsession of pain as spectacle:


To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment .... It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain ... consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."

Can governments be charitable?

2nd of January and already I am struggling with my resolution not to rise to the blogging bait...

A posting on Samizdata asserts that governments can never be charitable as 'money received from a nation-state cannot be charity as the money is not freely given, whereas willingly donated private funds are true charity.'

This got me thinking. What if responses to the Iraq crisis had been on the same scale and basis as the effort to help following the Tsunami? i.e. Western governments only 'donnate' substantial sums to the cause following largescale personal subscriptions from their citizens. Perhaps the assault on Fallujah should only have taken place provided NGOs could raise the finance through appeals to the public. Actually put like that it sounds a positive development...

Susan Sontag 1933-2004

I thought it worth reproducing in full the paragraphs from the New Yorker that Susan Sontag wrote in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Centre outrage.

'The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.'

Happy new blog?

There has been a lengthy hiatus since my last entry. This has been in part due to my traditional pre-Christmas virus followed by lots of enjoyable socialising. I have to admit, however, to a little reluctance to get back into the blogging routine. There are quite a few questions going around my head about why I am blogging and if I am being honest these are also linked to mixed feeling about the tone, purpose and cumulative effect of the some of the other blogs I read.

So for the next few weeks at least I resolve to do two (quite possibly contradictory) things:
1) Sharpen the focus of the blog which was always intended to be about the psycho-social and the political.
2) Reflect more on the experience of blogging.