tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43183756670514359372024-02-21T10:30:25.325+00:00Martin In The MarginsMartinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.comBlogger875125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-75872910836408492472021-10-26T15:54:00.001+01:002021-10-26T15:54:22.320+01:00Where's Martin now?<p> A reminder that the 'new' version of Martin In The Margins can now be found over at Wordpress:</p><p>http://www.martininthemargins.wordpress.com</p><p>See you there, I hope.</p>Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-38189770637772484072016-08-16T08:29:00.001+01:002021-10-26T15:47:52.243+01:00Change of addressMartin In The Margins now has a new home. This site will remain open as an archive.<br />
<br />
The new Martin In The Margins can be found <a href="https://martininthemargins.wordpress.com/">here</a>.<br />
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<br />Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-5285395894890655282016-05-02T17:20:00.004+01:002021-10-26T15:48:11.433+01:00On the moveThis blog will be moving to a new home soon. Watch this space for further information.Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-12492654351855179502015-08-16T19:49:00.000+01:002015-08-16T20:14:12.636+01:00The left-wing case against Corbyn: some links<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I’ve become increasingly disheartened and
frustrated at seeing friends and colleagues whom I like and respect falling for
Corbynmania. However, rather than launch into yet another pointless dispute on
Facebook or Twitter, I thought I’d put together a collection of some of the best
arguments I’ve read for not electing Corbyn as Labour leader, and direct people
here. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I’m no longer a Labour Party member, so I
don’t really have a horse in this race. But I do care about the state of
British politics, and I believe we need a credible and electable opposition
party – rather than one lost in nostalgia for discredited policies that sent the party into the political wilderness for a decade, or one
with a leader given to expressing solidarity with authoritarian and
anti-democratic movements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Since all of the authors cited below have
impeccable left-wing credentials, perhaps their arguments will have greater
power to persuade than mine. So here are links to four articles, with key
quotations from each:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span>First up, self-described ‘libertarian
democratic socialist’ <a href="http://libsoc.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/1.html?m=1">Paul Anderson</a>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Politicians’ records are open to scrutiny
as never before – and they are able to get away with platitudinous nonsense and
worse because the internet has created a populist noise that has made everyone
a valued player and has thereby simultaneously devalued expertise and nuance.
Corbyn’s record on foreign affairs is a case in point. The first thing to know
about him is that he’s a boilerplate leftist with a Chomskyite thicko’s take on
the world. American imperialism is the greatest evil in the world. Apartheid <i>was
</i>the second-greatest evil – forget about Soviet totalitarianism – but now
it’s Israel as US proxy in the Middle East. Nato expansion is the root of
Russia’s current authoritarianism. It was a bit of a mistake to get rid of
Gaddafi and at least Assad is secular and allows girls to go out in public.
And, er, that’s it.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-US">Next, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/07/hezbollah-s-man-in-london-the-improbable-rise-of-wild-eyed-jeremy-corbyn.html?via=mobile&source=twitter">Nick Cohen</a>, <i>Observer</i> columnist and
author of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whats-Left-Lost-Liberals-Their/dp/0007229704/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439750609&sr=1-1&keywords=nick+cohen">What’s Left</a></i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">The tribune of the left, the indomitable
defender of equality and decency, is also the greatest apologist for clerical
fascism in the British parliament.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">Corbyn indulges radical Islam, and by
extension all that comes with it: the subjugation of women; the judicial
murder of homosexuals in compliance with sharia law; the racism, most evident
in its anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; the denial of democratic rights, the
demand to create a global caliphate must bring; and the denial of religious
freedom the sharia-prescribed death penalties for blasphemy and apostasy do bring
with miserable regularity.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">Islamism is against everything the left
pretends to believe in. But in Britain and elsewhere, leftists rather than
conservatives are the first to defend it.</span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And here’s <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/james-bloodworth-left-wing-case-against-comrade-jeremy-corbyn-1513969">James Bloodworth</a>, editor of <a href="http://leftfootforward.org/"><i>Left Foot Forward</i></a>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The best case against Corbyn is not that he
is a wild-eyed socialist, but [… ] he is remarkably good at proffering
apologetics for dictatorship and tyranny. As well as Gaddafi, Corbyn has in
recent years championed/made excuses for Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez,
Russian gay-basher Vladimir Putin, the butcher of Bosnian Muslims Slobodan
Milosevic and the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.<br />
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">He has also worked for Iranian state
broadcaster Press TV (home of Holocaust deniers and other cranks) and has
referred to fascistic terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as his "friends".</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">[…]</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">The truth is that, however much a
Corbyn-led Labour party might claim to be standing up for the most vulnerable,
it will always and everywhere be willing to sacrifice the very people it ought
to stick up for – the world's democrats, secularists, Jews, gays and women – on
the ideological altar of anti-Americanism. This, as I will never tire of
pointing out, ought to make Corbyn persona non grata for any principled person
of the left.</span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, an open letter to Corbyn from <a href="http://leftfootforward.org/2015/06/an-open-letter-to-jeremy-corbyn/">Alan Johnson</a> (the <i><a href="http://fathomjournal.org/">Fathom</a></i> editor and professor of politics, not the MP):</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">You represent a clear alternative to the
suffocating consensus that says there is no alternative to neoliberalism: […]
But you won’t get my vote.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">You won’t get it because Labour’s best
traditions also include anti-fascism and internationalism while your support –
to me, inexplicable and shameful – for the fascistic and antisemitic
forces of Hezbollah and Hamas flies in the face of those traditions. In
particular, your full-throated cheer-leading for the vicious antisemitic
Islamist Raed Salah is a deal-breaker.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">[…]</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">And it isn’t just a problem with Salah, is
it? You <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJXR7zRftAk">said</a> it was
‘my pleasure and my honour’ to host ‘our friends from Hezbollah and our friends
from Hamas’ in the Commons.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">Really?</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">Why do you not care that the Hamas Charter <a href="http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/www.thejerusalemfund.org/carryover/documents/charter.html?chocaid=397">states</a>
that ‘Islam will obliterate Israel’ and enjoins all good Muslims to kill Jews,
whom it blames for all the wars and revolutions in classic antisemitic fashion?</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">[…]</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">I just do not understand how you can
support so unthinkingly those political forces which oppose to their dying
breath everything – literally, <i>everything</i> – the labour movement
has ever stood for: trade union rights, freedom of speech and organisation,
women’s equality, gay and lesbian rights, anti-racism, the enlightenment, and
reason.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">But as long as you do support those forces
you will not get my vote.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Also recommended: these insights from <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/gary-kent/without-realism-labour-will-achieve-nothing-but-opposition">Gary Kent</a>, <a href="http://thecentreleft.blogspot.com/2015/08/this-is-not-engagement-it-is-apologism.html">Rob Marchant</a> and <a href="https://thegerasites.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/the-diplomat-of-islington-north/">David Paxton</a>.</div>
Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-37199126412746410272015-04-01T18:21:00.000+01:002016-02-24T07:55:44.689+00:00Breaking my silence?<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">‘It's no use going back to yesterday, because
I was a different person then.' – Alice in Wonderland<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I’ve always felt an affinity with French-Moroccan
author Marcel Benabou, who wrote a book-length treatise on why he hadn’t
written more books: <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pourquoi-nai-%C3%A9crit-aucun-livres/dp/2021023435">Pourquoi je n'ai écrit aucun de mes livres</a></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.<i> </i>In the same spirit, this is a blog
post about why I haven’t written any blog posts recently – well, nowhere near
as many as I used to write (only 20 posts in the past three years, whereas in 2009 alone I wrote more than 200).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">My
principal excuse for inactivity is that this is primarily a political blog –
and my political beliefs are currently in a state of extreme flux. So what’s
new,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>you may ask? Hasn’t this blog
charted <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/a-political-journey-of-marginal.html">repeatedly </a>(and probably tediously) my movement from youthful Tribunite
Labour left-wingery, through Gramscian Marxism, to critical support for New
Labour? </span><span lang="EN-US">Didn’t I once claim, in my <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/11/the-normblog--4.html">normblog profile </a>no
less, that I started this blog ‘to help me work out what I think’?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And wasn’t it precisely the experience of
writing this blog that helped me to clarify the anti-totalitarian
liberal-social-democratic politics that has characterised my thinking for most
of the blog’s life? <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Yes, but this feels different. The change
in my political outlook feels more seismic this time. I’m reluctant to
articulate the change too precisely, for fear that the sands may have shifted
again in a few months, and I’ll have to recant any positions I espouse here. So
how to characterise the change? Maybe it’s enough to say that these days I find
myself reading <i>Standpoint</i> and <i>The Spectator</i> more frequently, and with more
pleasure, than <i>The New Statesman</i>; that I tend to haunt websites such as <i><a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/">Front Porch Republic</a></i> and <i><a href="http://ethikapolitika.org/">Ethika Politika</a></i>; that having hero-worshipped <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/tom-paine-hero-of-enlightenment.html">Thomas Paine</a> for
years I’m much more sympathetic to his nemesis Edmund Burke; and that I now find Chestertonian distributism more attractive than any form of socialism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">That last item is a partial clue as to <i>why</i> my views have changed. My re-engagement with religious faith in the past year or
two has certainly made me more 'conservative' on some social issues, and while my
re-awakened faith has helped to keep my passion for social justice alive, it
has also made me more open to different ways of imagining and achieving it. But
it’s not just about religion. Another way of describing the change in my
politics is to say that my growing disillusionment with certain aspects of
contemporary leftism – whether it be kneejerk anti-westernism in foreign
affairs or ‘big state’ paternalism at home – has led over time to a questioning
of the foundations of progressivism <i>per se</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">To put it another way, and please forgive
this brief philosophical excursion by someone who’s by no means an expert in
these matters: it’s partly about questioning the adequacy of the Enlightenment
tradition. Like many others who have featured in my blogroll sidebar over the
years, I began blogging partly out of a sense of alarm at the rising tide of
irrationalism and moral relativism in contemporary political discourse,
particularly on the Left – manifested in contorted attempts to ‘understand’
terrorism, a refusal to condemn misogyny and racism if espoused by non-westerners,
and the abandonment of a sense of universal human rights. In this context,
post-Rushdie, post-9/11 and post-Danish cartoons, it seemed important to rush
to the barricades (or at least, the blogs) to defend the gains of the
Enlightenment. Indeed, it became something of a badge of honour when, in a
burst of tortuous illogicality, Madeleine Bunting (‘Our Maddy of the Sorrows’,
to quote the late great <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/12/books_not_for_c.html">Norm</a>), one of the torchbearers for the
anti-rationalists, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/10/comment.madeleinebunting">condemned</a> writers of our stripe as ‘Enlightenment
fundamentalists’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But what if an appeal to Enlightenment principles
is not enough to roll back the tide of postmodern relativism? And going further:
what if the Enlightenment, rather than being the solution, was itself the
genesis of the problem? On the first point: it could be argued that the
Enlightenment, for all that it began as a critique of religious thinking,
actually depended on unspoken but deeply shared religious foundations. For
example, its defence of reason, liberty and progress was founded on certain
assumptions – that history has a purpose, that every human life is of value –
that are inexplicable outside a Judaeo-Christian worldview. It could also be
argued that, as those shared religious assumptions have weakened in the last
two centuries, so the Enlightenment principles that were (implicitly if not
explicitly) founded on them have also been shaken. In a post-religious world,
and in the postmodern marketplace of ideas, the principles of the
Enlightenment appear no more and no less ‘universal’ than any others. Bunting
is not alone in her critique: plenty of more serious postmodern thinkers have
argued (spuriously, of course) that Enlightenment ideas are 'merely' a reflection of the interests of a particular
group of privileged, white and probably imperialist men belonging to a particular (and
particularly oppressive) society and culture. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Which bring us on to the second point: that
the Enlightenment may actually share some of the blame for this descent into
the slough of moral relativism. How so? Well, once again, I’m not a
philosopher, but I was struck by this paragraph in Rodney Howsare’s brief
<a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/08/what-you-need-to-know-about-hans-urs-von-balthasar/">introduction</a> to the ideas of the modern Swiss theologian Hans Urs von
Balthasar:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">For Kant, and the moderns in general, the
notion that the unifying center of a thing <i>really does appear</i> in the
individual thing was denied. When I see this particular tree, therefore, all I
see is the <i>appearance</i> of this particular tree. If any generalisations
are to be made about it, they will have to come from the side of the subject.
This means that the classical transcendental properties of Being—unity, truth,
goodness, and beauty—must no longer be conceived as <i>properties</i> of Being,
but as characteristics <i>attributed</i> to Being from the side of universal
subjectivity. All postmodernity has to do to achieve nihilism, it would seem,
is to deny any universal subjectivity. Postmodernism is not so much an
alternative to modernism as its <i>reductio.<o:p></o:p></i></span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We’ve strayed somewhat from our
discussion of the direction of contemporary politics. But what I take Howsare
to be arguing is that it was the Enlightenment’s denial of transcendence and
objectivity that paved the way for the postmodernist critique that eventually
sank its claims to universality: in other words, Enlightenment thinkers sowed
the seeds of their own destruction. This makes it increasingly difficult to
ground a critique of the creeping relativism and irrationalism of much
contemporary political thinking in a call for a return to Enlightenment
principles. What is needed instead, perhaps, is a deeper kind of return: to a
way of thinking grounded in a sense of the sacred and of an objective moral
order. (I can imagine the objections already being tapped out on the keyboards of my more secular-minded readers...)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">These are the kinds of issues I find myself
wrestling with these days, as I struggle to find new foundations for my
political thinking, and an alternative to the Enlightenment rationalism that
has been the source of my politics for so long. I’m going to make a determined effort to
use this blog, once again, as a vehicle for working out what I think. You may
notice some changes – in the kinds of themes and issues I discuss, the sources
I turn to, and the links that appear in my sidebar. If you were a fan of the ‘old’
Martin In The Margins, you may not find the new incarnation quite to your
taste, in which case you should feel free to move on and I shan't be offended. But I rather hope you’ll stick around and share the next stage of the journey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-65278222488214429252015-01-02T22:35:00.000+00:002015-01-02T22:35:43.002+00:00Islamists and Stalinists: brothers under the skin?<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It’s tempting to regard the atrocities committed
by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as uniquely barbarous. I can't help thinking of the scores of young <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-30573385">Yazidi women</a>, torn from their families, raped, and forced to marry IS fighters, with no prospect of an end to their ordeal,
and of the despair that they and their loved ones must experience. Surely this
transcends anything perpetrated in the recent history of warfare? But then, over Christmas, reading Joachim Fest’s<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-I-Memoirs-German-Childhood/dp/1843549328/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420237621&sr=1-1&keywords=joachim+fest"> account </a>of growing up in an anti-Nazi family in Germany
during the Second World War, I came across this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In those days almost every story ended with
acts of violence of some kind. As the Red Army approached, my sisters had left
their grammar school in the Neumark, east of Berlin, and returned to Berlin;
they now learned that their classmates – all aged between twelve and fifteen –
had been raped, transported and disappeared into the expanses of Russia.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></blockquote>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There are many similar accounts of atrocities by the
‘liberating’ Red Army in Anne Applebaum’s devastating book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=iron+curtain+anne+applebaum&sprefix=iron+curtain%2Cstripbooks%2C167">Iron Curtain</a></i>. Perhaps we make too much of the peculiarly religious character of
Islamic State’s reign of terror. The quotation from Fest, with its uncanny foreshadowing of recent events in the Middle East, is a reminder that
religious and secular totalitarianisms have more in common than we sometimes
think. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-91673934150498565662014-07-15T18:49:00.001+01:002014-07-15T22:17:21.586+01:00Nine reasons to like Michael Gove<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So farewell then, Michael Gove, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28302487">reshuffled</a>
from the Department of Education to become government Chief Whip. I hope <i><a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/the-spectator/2014/07/the-hiring-begins-live-blog-of-cabinet-reshuffle/">The Spectator</a></i>’s James Forsyth is wrong in arguing that ‘the move is a big blow to
the education reform agenda’, and that his colleague Isabel Hardman is more
accurate when she writes:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Left-wing
teachers who opposed Gove’s reforming agenda might be celebrating, but it is
absurd to suggest that his move to chief whip – itself a big job – is a ‘scalp’
for the unions. Gove’s reforms have already been enacted. He has got everything
done that he wanted. He has succeeded, and can move on.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I make
no secret of the fact that I’m a fan of Michael Gove. I get irritated at
the avalanche of abuse directed at him, and at what Frank Furedi correctly <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13695#.U8ViHhaRhg0">identifies </a>as
‘Govephobia’, the way that expressing hatred of Gove ‘works as a kind of
password that grants one entry into the inner circle of polite society’, a
ritualised way of ‘establishing one’s moral distance from the modern personification
of evil’. As anyone who works in the sector will be aware, this is particularly
true of educators, at whatever level:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It’s as
if Govephobia now provides many teachers and educators with a kind of corporate
identity. The very mention of Gove’s name in a meeting is guaranteed to raise a
collective smirk and the knowing shaking of heads. Saying something awful about
Gove provides a person with the shining moral status that comes with being on
‘the right side’. Not only do you have permission to despise Gove – you are
expected to express your emotions publicly whenever you can.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Of course, implacable hostility towards
individuals who symbolise everything you dislike in the opposing party is not
unusual in the tribal world of British politics, and it helps to have a single syllable
surname that fits easily on a placard and can be spat out with appropriate
venom on demos. (Mind you, the Left’s dislike of Tories like Gove
is as nothing compared to the hatred they reserve for one of their own who is perceived to have betrayed the true gospel: think of the malice with which they
utter that other single-syllable name – ‘Blair’.) </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">But it’s when people who
should know better join in with the ritual Gove abuse that I get particularly
annoyed. I’m talking about those who, like me, are passionate about education
and about extending educational opportunity, but for some reason see Michael
Gove, who is equally passionate about these things, as an enemy rather than a kindred
spirit. I’m not talking here about legitimate criticisms of Gove’s policies, some of which I share, but about sweeping dismissals of his entire reform agenda and often willful
and ignorant misunderstandings of his intentions. In this category I would place
those who seem to think Gove’s aim is to shore up educational privilege
and deny access to learning to the poorest in society – when the opposite is
actually true. It’s as if some people, blinded and deafened by a tribal dislike of everything Tory, are unable to see what’s in front of their eyes or to hear what the man is actually saying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So, rather than getting into further endless
and mostly pointless arguments on Facebook and Twitter, I thought I’d share
with you nine reasons why I like Michael Gove:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(1) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">He has unashamedly continued the reform
agenda set in motion by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis. Now, when New Labour were
in power, I was often critical of aspects of their educational policy. I
thought the emphasis on choice was a chimera when what most parents, including
me, really wanted was the guarantee of a good, local school. However, I’ve
changed my mind and have come to believe, with Michael Gove, that real reform
was not going to occur – standards and aspirations for all children were not
going to be substantially raised – while local authorities maintained their
monopolistic stranglehold on state education, and that freeing schools from LEA
control – whether by converting them to academies, or founding new ‘free’
schools – was perhaps the best way forward.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(2) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">More generally, Michael Gove is an
admirer of Tony Blair, and has said that he regards Blair’s memoir <i>A Journey</i> as a kind of manual for government. I know this won’t endear him to those on
the Left who still regard Blair as a traitor to the good old cause (rather than
the most popular Labour prime minister ever, the man who introduced the minimum
wage, devolution, increased education and health spending exponentially, brought peace to
Northern Ireland, freed Sierra Leone and Kosovo, etc…..), but still…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(3) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Gove is a passionate opponent of the
knowledge-lite leveling-down low-aspiration culture
that has gripped the education sector for the past quarter of a century, and that has become entrenched in the teacher training colleges, teaching unions and the
Department of Education. Instead, he <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18020187">believes</a> in raising educational standards for
all children, not just the privileged, and in extending educational
opportunities, as a means of improving social mobility and overcoming
inequality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(4) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Unlike some of the philistines and
utilitarians who have filled the post of Education Secretary, Gove actually
believes in the value of education for its own sake. Remember his <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9678834/Michael-Gove-backs-study-of-French-lesbian-poetry.html">brave defence</a> of
teaching ‘French lesbian poetry’ in response to the Gradgrindian businessman who scoffed at
the uselessness of the humanities? He reads books too – proper books – including the kind
of books people on the Left like to read:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for example, he’s been known to <a href="http://www.guerillapolicy.org/education/2012/12/28/think-like-an-education-secretary-goves-2012-reading-list/">quote</a> from Jonathan Rose's <i>The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Classes </i>and Raphael Samuel’s <i>The Lost World of British
Communism</i> (see the video at the end of this post). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(5)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As the above shows, this is a man who understands the Left. I think I read that he supported Labour as an undergraduate. Indeed, some would <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100221661/michael-gove-the-best-leader-labour-never-had/?fb">argue</a> that, in other times, he would have been a natural Labour politician.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(6) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Moving away from education, Michael
Gove has written, in <i>Celsius 7/7,</i> one of the best books you’ll come across on
terrorism, the Middle East, and the West’s response. He’s also on the Council of the
Henry Jackson Society, and anti-totalitarian leftists and liberals should find
in him a natural and sympathetic ally. That’s why some of us think he would
make an excellent foreign secretary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(7) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">He’s genuinely funny. I know some
like to mock his pratfalls, his odd facial expressions and, most recently, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/26774451">his love of rap</a>, but they miss the point: he’s sending himself up. This is a politician who most definitely can laugh at himself. The first time I
saw him face-to-face was in a hotel corridor, engaged in a balloon fight with one of his
young children. Which brings me on to:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(8)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">He’s a nice guy. OK, not a reason to
like his politics, but I thought I’d include it anyway. The above mentioned encounter took place when we <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/what-we-did-and-who-we-saw-on-our.html">found ourselves</a> two doors along from the Gove
family in a Portuguese hotel a few years ago. He wasn’t so well known then,
and I hadn’t really been following his career until that point, so I didn't pluck up the courage to speak to him. But I had the opportunity to observe
him over a number of days, at the next table in the restaurant, reading by the
pool (we were reading the same Lisbon-based thriller,) and he came across as an
affable and likeable family man. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">(9) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And following on from the above – he’s
also a Lusophile. As he once said, a love of Portugal is the only thing he has
in common with George Galloway. Me too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A number of Gove's qualities are on display in this very civilised discussion with David Aaronovitch, who makes an ideal interlocutor. Pity the same can't be said for the people asking questions at the end, who respond to Gove's thoughtful attempts to reach out to his left-leaning education sector audience with crass political pointscoring. I've no doubt in my mind who has the better arguments.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-16146338399643996792014-01-06T16:55:00.002+00:002014-01-08T16:27:17.029+00:00Christian anti-Zionism: an update<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">You wait ages for a clear example of growing Christian
hostility to Israel to come along - as evidence of a new anti-Zionism in the churches - and then two arrive together. In my <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/understanding-new-christian-anti.html">two-part</a>
<a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/understanding-new-christian-anti_16.html">post</a> before Christmas, I used an article in the Catholic weekly, <i>The Tablet</i>, itself inspired by
Oxfam’s current campaign focused on Gaza, as the starting-point for my analysis
of the reasons behind the increase in anti-Israel sentiment among Christians. But barely a week had passed before news emerged about an even more egregious
instance of partisan ecclesiastical posturing on the Middle East: <i><a href="http://bethlehem-unwrapped.org/">Bethlehem Unwrapped</a></i>,
a Christmas ‘festival’ at St James’ church in Piccadilly, which had as its centrepiece
what purported to be a lifesize replica of the ‘separation wall’ surrounding
the ancient city.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUe2zK7KzOYcsHOhoQBMExto8uCsYiRNIQxD7E6oNaDXL78Auw6JxNMiD8H1B5lSxWwbxwwYuCjjLOpZOmliNFUPlSB1v5LJK3vaoKj0DyYlZAVzkmxJQHgGuI8RrOd7zcYauTIc-IblI/s1600/beth-20131223_193536.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUe2zK7KzOYcsHOhoQBMExto8uCsYiRNIQxD7E6oNaDXL78Auw6JxNMiD8H1B5lSxWwbxwwYuCjjLOpZOmliNFUPlSB1v5LJK3vaoKj0DyYlZAVzkmxJQHgGuI8RrOd7zcYauTIc-IblI/s1600/beth-20131223_193536.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I don’t propose to offer my own critique of
this controversial campaign here, except to say that it seems to me to be guilty of
precisely the same sins of which I accused Elena Curti’s <i>Tablet</i> article, the
Oxfam Gaza campaign, and (<a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/greenbelt-from-bible-bashing-to-israel.html">some time ago</a>) the ‘If Greenbelt was Gaza’ event.</span> That’s to say, the festival at St James’
manifests the same obsessive focus on the supposed sins of the Jewish state to
the exclusion of all other contemporary issues; its treatment of the issue is
appallingly one-sided, dishonest and misleading; and it completely obscures,
and indeed shows no interest in the voices and perspectives of Israelis, and
in particular of the Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There’s no need for me to say any more,
since others have already responded with far greater eloquence than I’m capable of.
<a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/douglas-murray/2014/01/absolute-moral-squalor-on-display-at-a-london-church/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=absolute-moral-squalor-on-display-at-a-london-church">Douglas Murray</a> bemoans the ‘absolute moral squalor’ represented by the
installation at St James’, <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/5698618/AntiZionist_parody_of_a_Christmas_Carol_to_be_sung_in_St_Jamess_Piccadilly/">reminding </a>us that the church has form on this issue,
having previously hosted an event where participants sang ‘versions of carols which
decry the Jewish state’. (‘Once in royal David’s city / Stood a big apartheid
wall’ ran one particularly execrable parody.) Murray condemns the obvious one-sidedness
of the current campaign, in which ‘the visitor is invited to believe that all
the problems of Bethlehem’s Christians today stem from Israel’s security
fence’, while no reference is made to the fact that ‘Christians are being
gradually cleansed from their historic homeland by Muslim Palestinians,’ or to
the wave of persecution of Christians in every other country in the region
except Israel. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://israeltheviewfromhere.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/the-lies-they-tell-at-stjamess-church.html">Barry Shaw</a> takes up the theme of the
problems faced by the Arab Christians of Bethlehem, since control of the city
was handed over to the Palestinian Authority, ranging from death threats to
actual physical violence from Muslim extremists. Barry comments:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
How sad
it is that this church, the British Methodist Church, and many other Christian
leaders are blindsided in their pursuit of a perceived Jewish enemy that they
fail to come to the rescue, or campaign for, their co-religionists, persecuted
by those who they actively and expensively support. </blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.embooks.com/blog/single/a-church-of-hate">Melanie Phillips</a> has written an open letter
to the Archbishop of Canterbury, wondering how he can reconcile the message of
love in his Christmas Day sermon ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #3c3e42; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">with the fact that one of your churches, St James’s
Piccadilly, chose Christmas to turn itself into a church of hate?’ Listing the
lies about the security ‘wall’ embodied in the church’s campaign, Philips
describes the ‘stunt’ at St James’ as part of a ‘wider anti-Israel bigotry in
your church<span style="background-color: #f0f0f0; color: #4d4f53; font-family: 'Sorts Mill Goudy', Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">’</span>, going far beyond this particular campaign. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">One of the most powerful responses to the
wall has been from <a href="http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-st-james-church-london/">Kay Wilson</a>, the victim of a horrific Palestinian terror attack two
years ago that left her friend Kristine Luken dead. She has written a letter to
the organisers of the campaign, in which she describes the fake wall as ‘hopefully just a result of your own
ignorance and generalisations concerning the complex situation here in the
Middle East.’ Wilson adds:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Nevertheless,
like all walls, it serves as a facade and a barrier. If your wall was
scrutinised, one would see that underneath the whitewashed surface that
concerns itself with Israeli policies, there are blocks of anti-Semitism.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/dr-denis-maceoins-letter-to-st-james-church/">Denis MacEoin</a> has also written to the ministers
of St James’ church, and his letter is notable for its generosity of spirit and for going out
of its way to understand the motivation behind the campaign - but it’s no less
scathing for that. Having acknowledged the positive work that St James has done
in the past, Denis goes on to excoriate the church for having constructed ‘a
mendacious wall on its premises in order to make an ignominious political
point, something I would not have believed your church capable of. It is
mendacious because it pretends the entire separation is a wall, when the wall
covers about 1%. It is mendacious because it does not mention the 30 or so
security walls and fences that have been built by other countries, many much
longer than Israel’s.’</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Denis continues:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">It is mendacious because it carries no
message to explain why it is there, when it is explicitly there to deter
violent attacks from the West Bank into Israel. It is mendacious because it
carries no statement alerting onlookers to the fact that the barrier has
already saved thousands of lives. Or does saving lives really not matter to
Christians? Or are Jewish lives not as important as the lives of suicide
bombers and other terrorists? If you seek fairness and I suspect you do in a
muddled way why did you not contact the Israeli embassy, who could have loaned
you something apposite: a bus, on board which passengers died when a suicide
bomber detonated himself?</span></blockquote>
Finally, Alan Johnson of <a href="http://www.bicom.org.uk/">BICOM</a> took part in a debate at the climax of the <i>Bethlehem Unwrapped </i>festival last Saturday (transcript not yet available, as far as I know), and also <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03nrnw0">debated</a> Rev Lucy Winkett, rector of St James on BBC Radio 4's <i>Sunday</i> programme - the segment starts about 37 minutes into the programme.<br />
<br />
<b>An update on the update (8th January): </b>You can read an abbreviated version of Alan Johnson's powerful contribution to the end-of-festival debate <a href="http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/this-barrier-stops-fascists-a-response-to-bethlehem-unwrapped/">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-5859109714073034752013-12-20T09:27:00.000+00:002013-12-20T13:32:59.055+00:00The rhetoric of evasion revisited: strange logic in the gender segregation debate<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">The other day I was <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/understanding-new-christian-anti_16.html">bemoaning</a> the absence
of Madeleine Bunting from the pages of <i>The Guardian</i>. Regular readers of
<a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/">Normblog</a> will remember <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/10/more_madeleine.html">Our Maddy of the Sorrows</a> (© Norman Geras circa 2005) as the leading exponent of a certain
kind of world-weary, anti-Enlightenment 'liberalism', which often included a
perverse desire to understand (what Norm, in her honour, dubbed
<a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/10/on_mbunderstand.html">‘mbunderstanding’</a>) the actions of religious fundamentalists. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But hey, who needs Madeleine Bunting when
we’ve still got Priyamvada Gopal? Like Bunting, Gopal, a lecturer in English at
Cambridge University, has a reputation for writing <i>Guardian</i> columns in which she ties
herself in rhetorical knots defending the indefensible. Norm
wrote about her efforts <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/06/salman_rushdie_.html">here</a>, <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/10/a-shameful-soun.html">here</a>, <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/08/bedtime-stories-of-violence-against-women.html">here</a>, <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2011/01/me-the-people.html">here</a>, <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2011/03/without-when-it-means-with.html">here</a> and <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2013/01/talking-democratic-deficit-blues.html">here</a>, while my own humble attempts to understand
Gopalian logic can be found <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06/warm-and-not-so-warm-welcomes-for-sir.html">here</a>, <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/who-said.html">here</a> and <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/no-to-discriminatory-boycotts-yes-to.html">here</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It was only a matter of time, surely,
before Ms Gopal weighed into the debate about <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/10468115/Universities-can-segregate-men-and-women-for-debates.html">gender segregation in British universities</a>. If you’ve ever wondered how a secular, liberal feminist might end
up supporting the right of religious fundamentalists to segregate men and women
in a place of higher learning, then you need look no further than her <a href="http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4481/the-right-may-have-hijacked-the-issue-of-gender-segregation-but-thats-no-reason-to-ignore-it">article</a> about the issue,
published earlier this week, not in the <i>Guardian</i> for a change, but (perhaps surprisingly) by the
<i>New Humanist</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Actually, the article is really an
object lesson in how to <i>avoid</i> engaging with a contentious issue. Rather than taking on the arguments of the anti-segregation campaigners, or suggesting counter-arguments, Gopal uses <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/rhetoric-of-invasion-or-art-of-changing.html">some familiar rhetorical strategies</a> to ensure that she doesn’t have
to, which include:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>Delegitimising the opposition</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Gopal takes up a lot of space in this short
piece, and certainly expends a great deal of linguistic energy, portraying those who campaigned against gender segregation in a
negative light. She argues that the campaign has taken place in a
context ‘heavily shaped by an intolerant Western 'liberalism’ passing itself
off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou.’ One wonders who
she is talking about here: who exactly are these liberals who are somehow also
‘intolerant’ (how does that work?), who are only <i>pretending</i> to be secular and
enlightened (so what are they really: religious, and living in the Dark Ages?),
and who claim superior knowledge? Can we have some names, perhaps?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Having erected this straw man, Gopal
moves on to specific accusations against those involved in the recent campaign.
Her main target is <a href="http://www.studentrights.org.uk/">Student Rights</a>, which we learn is ‘an offshoot of the
bullishly paternalist Euro-American think tank, the Henry Jackson Society’ and
a ‘reactionary and opportunistic formation’ which has ‘cynically’ seized on
this issue. Elsewhere she describes their campaign as ‘aggressive’, though she
doesn’t substantiate this accusation. In fact, Student Rights was only one of a
number of organisations taking part in the campaign, and hardly played a leading role, but it makes a very convenient
scapegoat, especially as it can be tarnished with the brush of being both pro-American
and right-wing. Never mind that many of those arguing against the ruling by
Universities UK were non-western feminists. Later in the article, Gopal characterises the anti-segregationists as ‘so-called "muscular liberals" (generally, in fact, deeply conservative white males with a
commitment to the idea that West is Best)’.
This will come as a surprise to <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/12/15/oh-the-irony/">Maryam Namazie</a> and the other left-wing,
non-white, female activists who played a leading role in the campaign. And
once again there’s that completely unfounded suggestion that liberals who
oppose religious fundamentalism are somehow patronising and superior, when
there’s not an iota of evidence to support this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">By falsely linking her opponents with
everything that her intended audience can be assumed to be against –
America, conservatism, a certain kind of sexist masculinity
(‘bullish…muscular…paternalist’) – Gopal seeks to undermine their arguments
without ever having to confront them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>Changing the subject</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Rather than take on the arguments of the
anti-segregation campaigners, Gopal hurriedly moves the discussion on to a different set
of issues. She claims that ‘the group’ – presumably she means Student Rights –
‘has not addressed greater gendered problems on campus, such as the pay gap or
sexual violence’ and has been ‘silent about far more widespread forms of gender
and economic segregation including the private, often single-gender schools for
the wealthy’. But Student Rights was set
up explicitly to combat extremism on campus, not to
tackle these other issues. Nevertheless, many of the other activists involved
in the current campaign <i>do</i> have a good record of fighting against wider institutional
sexism and inequality. But even if they didn’t, would that mean they weren’t
allowed to discuss <i>this </i>example of gender discrimination? It's rather like criticising Rosa Parks for highlighting the issue of racial segregation on buses in the American South in the 1950s, rather than focusing her attention on the 'real' issues of black poverty and inequality. <o:p></o:p></span>It’s a strange and self-serving kind of logic. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>Off-limits to outsiders</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Gopal’s third rhetorical avoidance strategy is to suggest that those who campaign against gender
segregation don’t really have the right to do so. Having established her own cultural
street cred (‘I grew up in a context where gender segregation in many public
spaces is common’) she adds: ‘It did not take the proverbial "decent, nice,
liberal" Europeans to get us to ask what segregation meant in both ideological
and institutional terms’. It sounds like Gopal is saying that western liberals and feminists should keep quiet
about discrimination within minority communities. She bolsters this by
characterising criticism of cultural practices – such as segregating men and
women – as ‘selective attacks on our communities’. Elsewhere, Gopal accuses the
anti-segregation lobby of ‘targeting’ Islamic student groups – when of course,
these are the only groups that are actually enforcing segregation. Somewhere, buried in the dense and tortuous final paragraph of her article, is an
appeal to women from minority communities to ‘express a dissenting view’ from religious traditionalists. At least I think that’s what she’s saying. But it's so
wrapped up in qualifying clauses, and tangled up in the message to outsiders
to mind their own business, that it gets lost in the thickening rhetorical fog.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Gopal’s smearing of the anti-segregation
campaigners as a bunch of condescending white male conservatives is given the lie
by two other contributions to the debate that appeared this week – both written by women, one a secular white feminist, the
other a liberal Muslim. </span>Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offered her critique of the pro-segregation ruling <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/its-shameful-that-our-universities-have-accepted-gender-segregation-under-pressure-from-the-most-oppressive-religious-fanatics-8991593.html">here </a>and celebrated its defeat <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-talibanisation-of-british-universities-has-got-to-stop-9006322.html">here</a>. Ophelia Benson takes Pryamvada Gopal’s arguments apart
<a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/12/a-context-so-heavily-shaped-by-an-intolerant-western-liberalism/">here</a> and <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/12/until-the-west-comes-along-to-teach-us-progress/">here</a>. Ophelia ends with this appeal to Gopal:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Liberal universalists are not your enemy.
We’re not the ones who think you should be at home instead of teaching at
Cambridge … Why… are you ignoring Maryam Namazie and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and
Abhishek Phadnis and focusing on Student Rights who had nothing to do with the
protest against gender segregation? Why are you ignoring the very possibility
of international solidarity, and the reality of it that is so conspicuous in
everything Maryam does? What the hell do you think that accomplishes? Why not
drop the fake accusations of imperialism and just join Maryam and the rest?</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why not, indeed.</div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-88562445536798232932013-12-16T22:23:00.000+00:002013-12-24T06:16:13.211+00:00Understanding the new Christian anti-Zionism: Part 2<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">In the previous <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/understanding-new-christian-anti.html">post</a> I wrote about an
example of the growing hostility towards Israel among Christian
groups. In this post, I want to suggest a number
of factors that might explain this phenomenon. But what about my title:
is it really fair to talk about a new Christian anti-Zionism? We’ve become used
to talking about (and laughing at) Christian Zionists: those rather odd, mostly
American fundamentalists who support Israel uncritically because they believe
the return of the Jews to their homeland is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy
and a sign of the coming End Times. But Christian <i>anti-</i>Zionism – does such a
thing really exist? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Let’s be clear. What I’m talking about here
is not the occasional criticism of particular Israeli government policies. Rather,
as I noted in the last post, I’m concerned with some Christian groups’ persistent and obsessive focus on the Israel/Palestine issue, to the
exclusion of more serious human rights abuses and instances of human suffering
elsewhere in the world. And, in focusing on that issue, the wilful tendency to take the side of Israel’s enemies and to characterise
Israel in a way that comes close to undermining its legitimacy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So what explains the growing strength of
this attitude among Christians? Here, in no particular order, are some of the
factors I think are at play:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-US">Missionary
guilt<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Much of the recent hostility to Israel
comes from liberal Christians who have imported from their counterparts on the
secular Left a view of the world that is largely motivated by post-colonial
guilt. The anti-imperialist Left is driven by a powerful desire to disavow the
West’s colonial past, and in the process they tend to blame the developed world
for the problems of its former colonies. Just as Victorian imperialists saw the
world through a simple binary framework –
West good, the rest bad – so their anti-imperialist successors simply
reverse the poles and adopt a worldview in which Britain, Europe and the US are
the source of all that is wrong with the world, and the once oppressed ‘Others’
– whether African, Asian or Arab – are innocent and passive victims. But
liberal Christians overlay this secular Left perspective with what we might
call post-missionary guilt, which drives a constant quest to compensate for
their predecessors’ imposition (as they see it) of western values on the rest
of the world. At the same time, some progressive Christians share with
some secular liberals a certain weariness and disillusionment with modern,
consumerist western society and a tendency to idealise, exoticise and
romanticise the non-western world (the much-missed
<a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/09/minding-madelei.html">Madeleine Bunting </a>of the <i>Guardian</i> was the mouthpiece <i>par excellence</i> of this
tendency).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Liberal Christians, like
their secular counterparts, make the mistake of imposing this simplistic,
bipolar framework on the Middle East conflict, and reducing a complex historical
dispute with multiple causes to a black-and-white case of a white-ish, western-looking
nation oppressing a non-white, non-western ‘indigenous’ group. Anything that
doesn’t fit into this model – such as the long history of Jewish residence in
Palestine, or Arab anti-Semitism – is simply excluded from the narrative. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-US">Heroes
and villains<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Layered on top of this is a specifically
Christian tendency to <i>moralise</i> political issues. What I mean is that some
religious people, when intervening in political debates, tend to look for parties
who can act as simple carriers of good and evil, praise and blame. In a
moralised universe, any situation that is unjust must have a party that is
responsible for the injustice and can be prophetically preached against, and a
victim who can act as the object of Christian pity and charity. This kind of
moralising discourse is not much use in political situations where there are
multiple shades of grey and where there isn’t a single, straightforward root
cause. Thus there is no room in this approach for the kind of complex chain of
causation one finds in the Middle East – no room for an acceptance that the
Palestinians might have brought some of their sufferings on themselves, by
their refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist, by deliberately failing to resettle refugees in order to shame Israel, or by carrying out attacks that
precipitated the building of a
security fence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As in secular anti-imperialist thinking,
there is a reluctance in Christian anti-Zionist discourse to attribute agency to the victim group – in this case, the Palestinians. If Palestinians
act in a particular way – whether throwing stones at Israeli soldiers or
blowing up Israeli bus passengers – it must be because they are ‘reacting’ to
something that Israel has previously done. As <a href="http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alan-johnson/pascal-bruckner-and-tyranny-guilt">Pascal Bruckner </a>has written, this
refusal to allow non-western peoples their own autonomous motivation is a kind
of narcissism (everything is about ‘us’ – the ‘west’ ). And as I’ve noted before, it’s ironically a kind of post-colonial racism, a refusal to allow the
‘other’ to be anything but a pure victim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I had a friend at university who was one of
the nicest people you could hope to meet. He was a Christian of a very
undogmatic kind, from a public school background, and known for his acts of
selfless generosity. But he shocked me when he argued that the
problem with socialism was that it would do away with the need for charity. So
working-class people needed to remain poor, just so that people like him could
be charitable towards them! Something similar seems to be going on with Christian
attitudes to Israel/Palestine: it’s as though the Palestinians are the latest
group that are required to play the role of pure victims in a certain kind of
Christian narrative. Dare I say that this sometimes seems to be more about
Christians (and others) needing to feel sympathetic and righteously indignant than about the real needs of the objects of their pity?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-US">Sacred
and secular<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As well as simplifying the Israel/Palestine
issue by moralising it, some Christian groups also misrepresent it by
‘sacralising’ it – by turning it into a religious argument. Christian
commentators on the conflict are often quick to move it on to religious
territory, where they clearly feel more at home. Their first rhetorical move is to
assume that the justification for Israel’s existence is purely religious, and
that this is how Israelis justify both the foundation of their state and their
government’s current policies, including occupation of the disputed
territories, a.k.a. the West Bank. Having made that assumption, they can draw on
their biblical knowledge and theological resources to take that argument apart,
and fulminate about misinterpretation and misuse of holy Scripture. At the same
time, they can paint Israelis as intolerant religious fundamentalists drawing
on an outdated understanding of the Bible (unlike open-minded progressive
Christians, of course).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The only problem with this line of argument
is that, at least in my experience, Israelis and supporters of Israel very
rarely draw on religious arguments to justify their state’s existence or
actions. Perhaps a few ultra-Orthodox fundamentalists might do so, but the most common arguments for Israel are determinedly secular – based on the longstanding
presence of Jews in the land, the need for a refuge from persecution,
whether in Europe or Arab countries, and the right to a homeland
of their own. </span>Having recourse to religious discourse in
this way seems like a neat way of sidestepping those compelling secular
arguments, and moving the argument on to territory where you think you can put
one over on the other side.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-US">Not ‘getting’ it<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This brings us on to another factor that I
often think is influential in shaping current Christian attitudes to Israel. To
put it simply, I think a lot of Christians just don’t ‘get’ Israel, and if they
do, they don’t really like what they see. What I mean is that modern,
pluralist and fairly secular Israel doesn’t fit some Christians’ image of what
the Holy Land should be like. Hence the desperate need to squeeze Israel into a
pre-determined religious framework that doesn’t quite fit. Israel was fine, on this view, when
it was full of noble pioneers sharing their worldly goods in kibbutzes, but
it’s not so easy to identify with its people now that, in many ways, they’re
just like us. We’re back to that need for the ‘Other’ to fit the stereotypical
image that we’ve created for them. By becoming modern and westernised,
the Jews have foregone the right to play the part of the idealised Other, so Christians
(like secular Leftists) need to look for another group that can be romanticised: step forward 'the Palestinians'.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And we shouldn’t forget that many
Christians just don’t ‘get’ Jews, generally. A lot of Christians don’t know any
Jewish people and find it hard to understand Jewishness: is it a religion,
a race, what is it? I write as someone who grew up in a suburban Methodist
setting and didn’t meet a single Jewish person until I went away to university:
I remember having many of the same questions, and experiencing the same
puzzlement, about what it meant to be Jewish. In the gap created by this ignorance,
there’s inevitably a tendency for lazy stereotypes to form.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And that brings us on finally to…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-US">The
‘a’ word<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">No, I don’t think that the current spate of
Christian hostility to Israel is <i>necessarily</i> anti-Semitic. However, I do think
that as Christian hostility to the Jewish state increases, it’s
something we can’t avoid talking about. The legacy of Christian anti-Semitism
is so deep, of such long duration, and so recently disavowed, that I think
Christians should be extremely careful that ancient, barely-submerged attitudes
don’t get inadvertently drawn on when criticising what is, after all, the world's only
Jewish state. We're back to my starting-point: if we're not going to use the 'a' word, how else are we to describe this singular focus on Israel's supposed sins and this one-sided refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Israeli perspective? I'll leave the last word to the late <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/rip-norman-geras-1943-2013.html">Norm Geras</a>, <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/02/oneeyed-in-gaza.html">writing</a> in a 2009 blogpost about attitudes to Israel's actions in Gaza:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 19px; text-align: left;">In the outpouring of hatred towards Israel today, it scarcely matters what part of it is impelled by a pre-existing hostility towards Jews as such and what part by a groundless feeling that the Jewish </span></span><em style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 19px; text-align: left;">state</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 19px; text-align: left;"> is especially vicious among the nations of the world and to be obsessed about accordingly. Both are forms of anti-Semitism. The old poison is once again among us.</span></span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(You can find Part One of this post <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/understanding-new-christian-anti.html">here</a>)</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-83623167642270252562013-12-16T11:18:00.000+00:002013-12-17T08:29:21.713+00:00Understanding the new Christian anti-Zionism: Part 1<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">Now that I’ve resumed more or less regular
posting, I can keep a longstanding promise. A few years ago I <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/greenbelt-from-bible-bashing-to-israel.html">wrote</a> about
Greenbelt, the annual Christian music festival, its obsession with the
situation in Gaza, and what I saw as its worryingly one-sided representation of that issue. In the course of the debate that followed in the 'comments', I undertook
to write something that would try to explain the increasing hostility to Israel among some Christian
groups. I felt I was in a good
position to do this, both because of my own Christian background, and because I
used to be fairly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel myself. This is the first post in a two-part series in which I'll try to fulfil that commitment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In the period since I wrote that post,
attitudes have, if anything, hardened, with anti-Israel campaigning migrating
from fringe groups to the mainstream churches. A recent example of this was the
Methodist Church seriously <a href="http://www.methodist.org.uk/BDSBriefing">debating</a> whether to boycott Israeli goods and
institutions – something that particularly aggrieved me, as someone brought up
in the Methodist tradition but who is also a critical friend and supporter of Israel. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As I was casting about for a text on which
to base this post, the latest issue of the Catholic weekly, <i><a href="http://www.thetablet.co.uk/">The Tablet</a></i>, dropped fortuitously through the letter box, bearing this front cover:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR6vxmm3uZqWTerZODkwQEtS9Wk45a_h0RQRzwM-HOt-eK2qgXlYBg7s385T5xXFKX16MkpU5hMrMyBsZoY3fUPRHLc6FS50lxQgOy7Y3YAeAUYblSdeB5pGYJd20DnIuon4OMwUFnFVs/s1600/tablet+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR6vxmm3uZqWTerZODkwQEtS9Wk45a_h0RQRzwM-HOt-eK2qgXlYBg7s385T5xXFKX16MkpU5hMrMyBsZoY3fUPRHLc6FS50lxQgOy7Y3YAeAUYblSdeB5pGYJd20DnIuon4OMwUFnFVs/s1600/tablet+cover.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The cover image promoted a <a href="http://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/1071/land-of-no-milk-and-honey">major story</a>
inside the magazine by Elena Curti, describing the sufferings of Palestinians
in Gaza and the West Bank. </span>Taken together, it seems to me that the image and the story
exemplify many of the key components of recent Christian attitudes to the issue
of Israel/Palestine. Let’s start with that photo, which is typical of a
certain kind of pro-Palestinian iconography. The whole complicated and intractable
conflict is reduced to, and symbolised by, two figures: Israel is represented
by an armed soldier, the Palestinians by a young child. Not only that, but the child is foregrounded and looking at the camera, as if making a direct appeal to the reader, while the soldier is lurking in the background, hand-in-pocket, nonchalant and impersonal. </div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It’s pretty clear what
this is supposed to tell us: the Israelis are the aggressors, while
Palestinians are simply innocent victims. It’s not that the image is necessarily
‘untrue’, but it’s obviously partial and selective. Think, for example, of the very
different meanings that might have been conveyed by a photograph of Israeli
children cowering under school desks during a Palestinian rocket attack. Or
imagine if, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a magazine had carried
a picture on its cover of a Catholic child walking past a British soldier.
Readers might justifiably have felt that the image represented a simplistic and
one-sided view of the conflict, sidelining IRA atrocities and the reasons why
British soldiers were present in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Similarly, my problem with Curti’s article
in <i>The Tablet</i> is not that what she writes - about the everyday sufferings of
Palestinians as a result of the separation fence and the occupation - is
necessarily a lie. I’m not qualified to dispute the substance of the piece, and
indeed that’s not really the point of this post. But there are a number of
things that are remarkable about the article, and I think they are typical of
much recent Christian coverage of the issue. Firstly, there's an exclusive focus on the sufferings of the Palestinians. There's not a word about
the sufferings inflicted on innocent Israelis by the aforementioned rocket
attacks from Gaza, or by suicide bombers targeting restaurants and buses – the
very actions that prompted the need for the security fence and the restrictions
on goods entering Gaza in the first place. Nor is the mainstream Israeli point
of view given any space in the article: the only Israelis whose voices get represented are a fringe group who oppose their government’s policy. Curti
makes not the slightest attempt to provide a balanced perspective, or to put
the suffering of Palestinians in any kind of wider context. You’ll search in vain here,
not only for any reference to the ongoing campaign of aggression against Israel by Hamas, but
also for any mention of the tons of supplies allowed into Gaza by Israel every
day, or to the blockade of Gaza by its other neighbour, Egypt, or indeed to the
sufferings inflicted on ordinary Palestinians by the increasingly authoritarian regime of Hamas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">And then there’s the underlying question:
why choose to put Gaza on the front cover and make it your lead story at this particular time? I suppose o</span>ne explanation is that Christians have an understandable
interest in the Holy Land, especially at this time of year, and stories that
try to find parallels between the Nativity story and the current situation
there have become a staple of Christmas coverage – often, it has to be said, with a simplistic <a href="http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/if-mary-and-joseph-were-alive-today/">anti-Israel</a>
inflection. The more immediate pretext for the <i>Tablet </i>story is that Gaza is the focus of this
year’s Christmas campaign by <a href="http://www.christianaid.org.uk/getinvolved/christmas/story/hope.aspx?approachcode=A018819&gclid=CKf-w9fAtLsCFWnjwgodIAgAmQ">Christian Aid</a>. If you follow the link to the charity's website, you’ll find further evidence of Christian obsession with the issue,
and yet more one-sided treatment of it. On the day that I read this article in <i>The
Tablet</i>, the television news was dominated by images of the desperate plight of
Syrian refugees in Lebanon, as winter temperatures begin to plummet. One
wonders why this urgent issue, or the continuing need of the victims of the
floods in the Philippines, or any of the other myriad and more pressing needs
around the world, are not the concern of Christian Aid this Christmas – rather
than yet another campaign focused on Gaza, in which a complex conflict is reduced to a cartoon in which Israel is the only bad guy?</div>
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<span lang="EN-US">How are we to explain this current
Christian obsession with Israel/Palestine, often to the exclusion of other more urgent issues? I’ve already suggested one reason – the natural concern of
Christians with the land which gave birth to their faith – but this hardly
accounts for the increasingly partial and one-sided attitude to the issue shown
by Christian churches, charities and campaigning organisations. In the next
post, I’ll share my personal analysis of the reasons for this emerging Christian anti-Zionism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
(You can find Part 2 of this post <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/understanding-new-christian-anti_16.html">here)</a></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-57830071777999577242013-12-09T21:56:00.000+00:002013-12-09T21:56:45.778+00:00Lost in translation<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">The BBC’s
Hugh Schofield <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25198154">wonders</a>
why French books – and especially modern French novels – don’t sell abroad.
This is in spite of the fact that France has a thriving literary culture, and
despite the popularity of books translated into English from other European
languages, notably Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The authors and readers
interviewed by Schofield propose various reasons, ranging from the supposed
elitism and intellectualism of French literary culture to the unexciting covers
of French novels, and on the other side, the laziness and misconceptions of
Anglophone publishers and readers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I
actually quite like French book covers, as well as French bookshops, which are
described rather dismissively as ‘cramped and colourless’ in Schofield’s piece.
Those unadorned cream covers, enlivened only by the author’s photograph, are
surely what makes a book distinctively French - it wouldn’t look right to have
a French novel that wasn’t in that familiar Flammarion, Gallimard or Livre de
Poche style. I can see a number from where I’m sitting (see photo below), and
they bring a breath of the Left Bank into the room. As for French bookshops,
I’m rather fond of their uniform rows of identical-looking volumes and
studiously highbrow demeanour – all very un-Waterstones, and long may it
continue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheXBOEQIcLjUkHj5W3bD3uoYS6RDUqRQSuR9IVABFGsZnAd5qKS6erHRFCHUCYPJBT0hgnJ3cEustO3oGgBMbE-yfEZLRItdclqq59KxxaPP0pCnoZRo_zoKCm3MBtFBpGXs8IKBvEPS8/s1600/IMG_0049.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheXBOEQIcLjUkHj5W3bD3uoYS6RDUqRQSuR9IVABFGsZnAd5qKS6erHRFCHUCYPJBT0hgnJ3cEustO3oGgBMbE-yfEZLRItdclqq59KxxaPP0pCnoZRo_zoKCm3MBtFBpGXs8IKBvEPS8/s320/IMG_0049.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I wonder
if the absence of modern French writing from British and American shelves has
something to do with the fact that the small publisher Harvill (absorbed first
into Harvill Secker and more recently into Random House), which was largely
responsible in the post-war years for introducing English-speaking readers to
contemporary European writers, had a bias towards other countries, such as
Portugal, Russia, and the old Eastern bloc - or was it just that there happened
to be a number of brilliant translators available from those nations? But then
I've just remembered that Harvill published the detective stories of Daniel
Pennac, so maybe I've got that wrong. (Perhaps my brother Michael, who used to
work for Harvill, will read this and be able to help out here).
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Whatever
the explanation, Hugh Schofield is basically right in his assessment that a
great deal of contemporary French literature remains untranslated into English.
If a major Spanish author like Javier Marias or Javier Cercas brings out a new
novel, you know it’ll only be a matter of time before an English translation
appears, and that it will be enthusiastically picked up by the Sunday
broadsheets, as well as by the <i>LRB</i> and <i>New York Review of Books</i>.
But there’s rarely an equivalent process, or fuss, over a French literary
success, apart from, as Schofield points out, the headline-grabbing Michel
Houllebecq.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I confess
to having a personal interest here, since I’ve developed a yearning to read a
couple of recently-published French novels, and I’ve been frustrated at the
absence of English translations. I discovered these books via one of my current
favourite blogs – <a href="http://catholicenglishteacher.blogspot.co.uk/">The
Catholic English Teacher</a>. I know it won’t appeal to my agnostic and atheist
readers, but I think it’s one of the best literary blogs around - and I love
the masthead. Despite the title, Roy Peachey, the blog’s author, is remarkably
well-informed about a range of contemporary literatures in languages other than
English, and especially in French. Having read his recommendations, I’m keen to
track down <a href="http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Folio/Folio/L-art-francais-de-la-guerre"><i>L’art
francais de la guerre</i></a> by Alexis Jenni, which won the Prix Goncourt
a couple of years ago, and also the work of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Claire-Daudin/e/B004N821KW">Claire Daudin</a>,
who as well as being a prize-winning novelist is also an expert on Mauriac, Bernanos
and Peguy. However, neither of these authors has yet had any of their writings
translated into English.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There’s a
particular pleasure in being able to read something, however brief – a
short story, an article, a poem even – in the language in which it was
written. But as it stands, my French isn’t quite up to it, despite the
fact that I have an ‘A’ Level in the subject. You could see this as the fault
of the British education system – a failure to teach languages so that people
can actually use them – or a reflection of my own laziness and lack of
linguistic flair. I did only get an ‘E’, after all. Mind you, I enjoyed
sixth-form French: watching Mr Levine pacing back and forth, gesticulating
expressively as he went into raptures over poetic passages from Zola.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As I <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/my-fiction-addiction.html">mentioned</a>
in a recent post, I had a bit of a Mauriac phase around the time of our visit
to Bordeaux last summer. As our driver, Marise, pointed out while transporting
us from the station, Mauriac is one of the three local ‘M’s – the others being
Montaigne and Montesquieu. My family mock my habit of having to read something
by a local author wherever we go: it was Saramago in Lisbon, Hammett in San
Francisco, etc. On this occasion, I read <i>Therese Desqueyroux</i> before
we left home, and<i> Le Noeud de Viperes</i> on the way back, both in
English translations (sorry, can't seem to do the accents on
Blogger).
However, on our return I was keen to read more by Mauriac and
searched online for a collection of his post-war political articles - or <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nouveau-Bloc-Notes-1958-1960-F-Mauriac/dp/B003B19WOA/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386621825&sr=1-13&keywords=mauriac+bloc-notes">Bloc-Notes</a>.
(Mauriac, a devout Catholic, was nevertheless a staunch opponent of the Franco
regime in Spain and a supporter of the French Resistance.) But I discovered
that these were only available in the original French, and reading them has
been a bit of a struggle, to say the least. (Those books in the photo above?
They all belong to my Other Half, who was a much better student of French
literature than I ever was.)
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">And so
I’ve gone back to basics. Since October I’ve been working my way through Hugo’s
<i>French in 3 Months</i>, filling in the gaps created by failing memory. I’ve
just reached the end, and after Christmas it’ll be on to the advanced course.
Mind you, as I <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/my-fiction-addiction.html">related</a>
last week, I made a similar resolution earlier this year with regard to
Portuguese, and that fell by the wayside. And then there was the year I took a
Pavese novel in the original Italian on holiday, but gave up after a couple of
chapters. I love languages, and since childhood I’ve been deeply envious of
those who were brought up to be bilingual, but I’m a bit of a magpie – I tend
to know a little about a lot and don’t speak or read any single foreign
language very well. We’ll see how it goes.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So, when
it comes to contemporary French literature, I’ll have to wait, either for my
facility with the language to improve considerably, or for some enterprising
small publisher (do they still exist?) to develop a line in translations of
modern French novels. Either way, I think I’m going to have to be very patient.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-29545591360019169612013-12-06T16:12:00.000+00:002013-12-06T16:13:36.930+00:00Close encounters with New Left luminariesThis is a kind of footnote to my <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/lost-up-kilburn-high-road.html">post </a>about Stuart Hall and the Kilburn Manifesto. It prompted a couple of friends to share their memories of accidental meetings with Hall and other leading lights of the New Left.<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">First <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/02/writers-choice-194-tom-deveson.html">Tom Deveson</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">A memory from about March 1967. I am
invited out to lunch by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams">Raymond Williams</a>' son who lives on my staircase in
Trinity. We arrive in the restaurant and the other people at the table are
Raymond, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson">Edward Thompson</a> and Stuart Hall who are writing and proofreading the
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/May-Manifesto-1968-Penguin-specials/dp/B0000CO7L6">May Day Manifesto</a> (first-ever version). I feel very young in their company - I
was not yet nineteen.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">And from a different decade, <a href="http://www.pootergeek.com/">Damian Counsell</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Weirdly, long before I met <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/rip-norman-geras-1943-2013.html">Norm</a>, and
completely by chance, I lived in NW6, first as a physics postgrad at Imperial,
but also for some years afterwards, in a flat above <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Laclau">Ernesto Laclau </a>and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantal_Mouffe">Chantal Mouffe</a>, who were both intellectual foes of Norm and personal mates with Stuart
Hall.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">It was only when I first answered the door
to Stuart Hall (a frequent visitor) with the immortal words: 'You're
Stuart Hall, aren't you?' that I had any real idea who the people
downstairs were.</span></blockquote>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
Tom claims that Damian has the better punchline, but I think he's being modest. Tom's experience was surely equivalent to walking into the Red Lion in Great Windmill Street on an evening in 1848 and coming across Marx and Engels arguing over the wording of the Communist Manifesto. Or finding yourself, some time in April 1917, on the 3.15 to the Finland Station and watching an intense, goateed man in the seat opposite putting to the finishing touches to the speech he would make on his arrival.<br />
<br />Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-35383466195678667462013-12-04T19:50:00.000+00:002013-12-04T21:00:09.133+00:00My fiction addiction<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">I’ve given up on <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/">Goodreads</a>, the website (now owned by Amazon, I understand) that lets you tell people which books you’ve been reading, and what you think
of them. Not only is the site counter-intuitive (or maybe it’s just me), but
there’s a patronising whiff of the school report about its updates: ‘Martin
made progress with <i>Cousin Bette</i>’, indeed. On the other hand, what’s the
point of reading a book if you can’t share the experience with your
friends? So today I’m writing a post
about my recent reading.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I'll begin with a confession. Until a few
months ago, my reading of fiction had fallen away and in the past year or two there
have been very few novels leavening my diet of historical works and
biographies. This, despite having not one but two degrees in English Literature:
but then, as a student, my primary passion was always for poetry rather than prose. There
was a brief Mauriac obsession last summer, after our visit to Bordeaux, but my
most memorable reading experiences of late have been John Guy’s <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thomas-Becket-Warrior-Priest-900-Year-Old/dp/0141044675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386182840&sr=1-1&keywords=john+guy+thomas+becket">book</a> on Thomas Becket, Amanda Vickery on <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentlemans-Daughter-Womens-Georgian-England/dp/0300102224/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386182882&sr=1-1&keywords=amanda+vickery+the+gentleman%27s+daughter">the lives of eighteenth-century women</a>, and James
McPherson on <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Penguin-history/dp/0140125183/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386182920&sr=1-1&keywords=james+mcpherson+battle+cry+of+freedom">the American Civil War</a>. If asked to justify my focus on
non-fiction, I would have argued that the best historical writing encompasses many of the characteristics of good novels: engrossing
narrative, compelling characters, stylish prose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But I began to think I was missing
something, and so this summer my novel reading revived. It’s one more thing
that I can credit the late Norman Geras with. As I wrote in my <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/rip-norman-geras-1943-2013.html">appreciation</a> of
him the other week, I never ceased to be impressed by his appetite for fiction
and his insightful writing on his favourite novelists, from Jane Austen to Anne
Tyler. When we visited him earlier this year, Norm described his daily
novel-reading habits and quizzed me about my own preference for non-fiction, so
that I began to feel rather embarrassed by my abstention from fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Spurred into action, I took from the shelf
a novel that I’d been meaning to finish for ages: Irene Nemirovsky’s <i>Suite
Francaise</i>. If you look back at <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/11/the-normblog--4.html">my Normblog profile</a>, you’ll see that I claimed
to be reading this as long ago as 2007, but in fact I never got beyond the
first few pages. Returning to the book, I was immediately captivated by
Nemirovsky’s account of refugees fleeing occupied Paris – made
even more compelling by the author’s personal experience of her subject-matter,
and by the knowledge that very soon after writing it, she would herself become
a victim of Nazi terror.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Having realised what I was missing by
excluding fiction from my imaginative diet, I went on to fulfill a long-overdue
promise to myself, to re-read Dostoievsky’s <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i>. I’d seen that
there was <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0099922800/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386183090&sr=1-4&keywords=the+brothers+karamazov">a new translation</a>, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, that supposedly
captured the dynamism of the original Russian better than the Penguin version by
Constance Garnett that I’d read many years ago. (I should add that my return to
Dostoievsky was partly prompted by my renewed interest in religion: <i>Karamazov
</i>was the book that inspired the actor Martin Sheen to return to Catholicism, and
it’s surely one of the great Christian novels.) The new translation turned out
to be every bit as lively and engaging as its was reputed to be, capturing the
humour as well as the pathos of this greatest of Russian writers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">This doorstop of a novel book-ended,
so to speak, my summer: I read about half before we went away on holiday and
the other half when we returned. In between, I spent two weeks lying
beside a Portuguese pool, but whereas normally I would have packed mostly non-fiction, this time I threw in a scattering of novels. On the long train
journey south through France and Spain, I’d been reading a book about the
little-known wartime hero <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Man-Evil-Times-Aristides/dp/0670888036/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386183192&sr=1-1&keywords=de+sousa+mendes">Aristides de Sousa Mendes</a>, the Portuguese consul in
Bordeaux who was responsible for helping hundreds of Jews and others escape
from occupied France. Then, on arrival in Portugal, I followed this with something
I’d really been looking forward to: Neill Lochery’s <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lisbon-Shadows-City-Light-1939-45-ebook/dp/B005OVTLGE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386183233&sr=1-1&keywords=neill+lochery">account</a> of wartime Lisbon,
which included a fascinating collection of photographs of the city and the
celebrities and spies who took refuge there. Unfortunately, the photos turned
out to be the best thing about this badly-written and poorly-edited volume.
Nevertheless, there was a connection between these two non-fiction appetisers
and the first novel I read on holiday - Joseph Roth’s <i>Radetsky March</i>, set in
the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire – since Otto von Hapbsurg had
been one of those helped by de Sousa Mendes to escape to Portugal. I shall certainly be reading more by Roth.
Then it was on to a non-fiction book with an Austrian theme: Alexander Waugh’s
<i>House of Wittgenstein</i>, which I bought because of my interest in Ludwig’s
philosophy, though he turned out to be just one member of a fascinatingly
eccentric family, none more so than his brother Paul, an accomplished one-armed
concert pianist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Norm Geras’ influence was apparent in my
next novel choice (he’d recommended it on his blog): John Williams’ reissued
<i>Stoner</i>. My absorption in this slim volume was reflected in the fact that I read
it in virtually one poolside sitting. However, I should add that I found the
story of this obscure, disappointed mid-western teacher unrelievedly
depressing, lacking any hint of possible redemption.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My ‘big read’ of the holiday was <i>Os Maias </i>–<i>
The Maias</i> – by the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiros. One
of my New Year’s resolutions had been to improve my knowledge of Portuguese to
the extent that I’d be able to be read something by this author, or
perhaps by Pessoa or Saramago, in the original, by the time we went on holiday.
However, this went the way of most of my resolutions, and I ended up, once
again, opting for a new English translation. I’d bought the Carcanet edition
following our first visit to Lisbon seven years ago, when we’d stayed in a small hotel that had been the model for the family home in de Queiros’
novel, but had never quite got around to reading it. Then I read that Margaret Jull Costa, whose renderings of Saramago and of Spanish authors such as Javier
Marias I had long admired, had produced <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Maias-Dedalus-European-Classics/dp/1903517532/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386183323&sr=1-1&keywords=the+maias+eca+de+queiroz">a new translation</a>. I wasn’t disappointed: the novel is
compendious, rollicking, moving, a great nineteenth-century realist novel,
with some Dickensian touches but without any Dickensian caricatures or sentimentality.
I thoroughly recommend it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">De Queiros was influenced by the great
French realists, and especially by Balzac, another embarrassing gap
in my reading, so on my return I plucked <i>Cousin Bette</i> from the shelf and
jumped into the middle of the ‘Comedie Humaine’ cycle. The experience was rewarding,
but it didn’t really whet my appetite for more by the same author, not just yet
anyway. However, I was now feeling inspired to plug other shameful gaps in my
literary knowledge, and at the same time wanting to stick with the nineteenth
century for a little longer, so this autumn I turned back to the English
classics. From Balzac I went on to Dickens, rapidly consuming <i>The Old Curiosity
Shop</i> – sentimental and maudlin at times, but still compelling – and
<i>Oliver Twist</i> – apprentice work for the far superior <i>David Copperfield</i>, but a
lively youthful narrative all the same. Then from George Eliot's <i>oeuvre</i> I selected <i>Adam
Bede</i>, which I’d never read, and found completely absorbing, not least because
of my identification with its Methodist theme, and at the moment I’m rather
plodding my way through <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Another novel I’d never got round to
reading was Charlotte Bronte's <i>Villette</i>, which starts very engagingly, but then
kind of loses its way. What critics describe as a fascinating double
narrative replete with fluid identities, I thought was a flawed and poorly
structured piece of work, in which personal biography was never quite fully
transformed into imaginative literature. But the highlight of my autumn reading so
far has been <i>Vanity Fair</i>, another unforgivable omission from my literary
knowledge. There were many similarities with <i>The Maias -</i> another thoroughly engaging,
inventive and light-filled imaginative experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So, after a dry period with no
novel-reading at all, I’ve now become reliant on my regular fiction fix and have to
have a novel in progress all the time. (This doesn't mean I've stopped reading history books: I'm part-way through Hugh Thomas' <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spanish-Civil-War-Hugh-Thomas/dp/0141011610/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386183459&sr=1-3&keywords=hugh+thomas">classic account</a> of the Spanish Civil War and am just finishing Mark Kishlansky's Penguin <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-History-Britain-Transformed-1630-1714/dp/0140148272/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386183490&sr=1-1&keywords=mark+kishlansky">history</a> of seventeenth-century Britain.) Now, I’m planning my December reading
schedule. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I definitely want to be reading Dickens
at Christmas. <i>Christmas Carol </i>would be too obvious but should I re-read <i>Great
Expectations</i> or <i>Bleak House</i>, or seek out the unread<i> Pickwick Papers </i>or <i>Our
Mutual Friend</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Watch this space for updates. And please feel free share your own recommendations, or your opinions of any of the books mentioned here.</span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-69983386160027249172013-12-03T20:19:00.000+00:002013-12-04T08:07:28.065+00:00Lost up the Kilburn High Road<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">Last week I received an invitation to a
showing of the new film about Stuart Hall (not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(presenter)">that</a> one – <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist)">this </a>one) – you
can watch a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Yp9oHV_oU">trailer</a> here - which has prompted me to dust off a half-written
post that I started earlier this year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Stuart Hall was one of my heroes. I
discovered him in the early 1980s via his classic articles about Thatcherism in
<i>Marxism Today</i> and, as I wrote in <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/a-political-journey-of-marginal.html">my last post</a>, went on from there to explore
his work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I also have him to
thank for introducing me to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Back then Hall
carved out an original and sophisticated political position, clearly critical
of Thatcherism and its ‘authoritarian populism’, but attempting to understand
its popularity (in Gramscian terms, the ‘good sense’ in its ‘common sense’) and
to develop a contemporary progressive response that embraced ‘New Times’. It
was a world away from the shrill sloganeering of the old revolutionary left,
whether Trotskyite or ‘tankie’, and showed a much clearer understanding of how
Britain, and its working class, had changed, than the ‘one-more-push’
oppositionalism of the Bennites. At a personal level, too, I found it easy to
identify with Stuart. Like him, I had begun as a student of literature, had
worked in adult education, and my politics were also grounded in an attempt to
understand the intersection of class and culture. Hall soon joined William
Morris, Raymond Williams and E P Thompson in the pantheon of my political and
cultural heroes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Some time later, I found myself on a
postgraduate adult education course at Nottingham, supposedly run along ‘dialogic’
Freirean lines, but in fact an induction into a distinctly old-school
Marxism, from which dissent was difficult. The tutors were particularly hostile
to Hall and to ‘New Times’ analysis, regarding it as a betrayal of the true
Marxist gospel, and I found myself regularly forced into defending him – which only
strengthened my attachment to his ideas. It wasn’t long after this that I came
to work at The Open University, where Hall himself had migrated from
Birmingham. In fact, my first piece of course writing – on ‘culture’, as it
happened - was sent to him for critical reading. Stuart was characteristically
generous and helpful in his response to this piece of callow apprentice work.
It was a few years before I actually plucked up the courage to speak to him –
or rather, before a mutual colleague introduced us. I shyly muttered a few
words about how his <i>Marxism Today</i> articles had kept me going through the Thatcher
years, and Hall said something self-effacing about how ‘a few of us’ were
hoping to get a similar venture going again soon. That venture turned out to be
<i><a href="http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/contents.html">Soundings</a></i>, the journal of culture and politics that has now produced its own
political programme – <a href="http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/manifesto.html">the Kilburn Manifesto</a> – which prompted the writing of
this post.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I think my unadulterated admiration of
Stuart Hall’s work began to diminish some time in the late 1990s, for both
political and academic reasons. <i>Marxism Today</i>, which had collapsed along with
its Communist Party sponsors after the events of 1989, revived itself for a
special edition to mark Labour’s landslide victory of 1997. As someone who had
rejoined the Labour Party shortly after Tony Blair was elected leader, in part
because the New Labour project seemed to embody much of what Hall’s ‘New Times’
thinking was pointing towards (modernisation of the progressive message, new kinds
of alliances, an understanding of the changing identities and aspirations of post-Thatcher Britain),
I was deeply disappointed by the analysis that Hall and his fellow contributors
now offered. Not that I was completely uncritical of Blair, but the simple
negativity of that response seemed indistinguishable from the knee-jerk
oppositionalism of the ‘old’ left, whether parliamentary or otherwise, from
which Hall’s writings had once offered such a refreshing change.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Academically, too, but over a much longer
period, I had gradually became disillusioned with the direction that cultural
studies, the discipline that Stuart Hall had founded virtually singlehandedly, and
of which he was still the key theoretical luminary, had begun to take. In my
view it had become increasingly obsessed with high-theoretical hairsplitting,
riddled with obfuscating jargon, and divorced from any engagement with practical
politics. Theoretically, cultural studies seemed lost in a post-structuralist
fog that I came to see not just as aloof from politics but dangerously
apolitical and morally relativist, exemplified (to cite two of the most
egregious examples) by Michel Foucault’s <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/foucault-and-iran-lessons-for-todays.html">endorsement </a>of the ayatollahs and
Judith Butler’s <a href="http://kishkushim.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/berkeley-professor-hizbullah-and-hamas.html">claim</a> that the racist, misogynist Hamas was part of the ‘global
left’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Of course, I should acknowledge that I too had
changed in the interim. No longer describing myself as any kind of Marxist,
like many others in the aftermath of 1989 I had come to accept that any form of
progressive change worth having must be rooted in individual liberty, representative democracy
and – yes, free markets. As I explained
in my last post, I had moved away from both the Bennite Labourism of my youth
and the Gramscian Eurocommunism of later years and was now an unashamed social
democrat. Then, in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of the new global threat of
militant fundamentalism, I began to find myself in sympathy with the anti-totalitarian
democratic leftism of the <a href="http://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/">Euston Manifesto</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There’s a definite nod to that document, of
course, in the name of the <i>Soundings</i> team’s latest intervention, which I
suppose Eustonites should take as some kind of compliment. Given my earlier engagement with Stuart Hall’s
work, it was with mixed feelings that I read his <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/24/kilburn-manifesto-challenge-neoliberal-victory">introduction </a>to the Kilburn
Manifesto in <i>The Guardian</i> back in April, and then the <a href="http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/s53hallmasseyrustin.pdf">first instalment </a>of the
programme itself that has been published online (more instalments have since been published, but I have to confess that I haven't read them thoroughly yet). There’s much in the document and the article that resonates, particularly the delineation of our current ills. Who on the Left could take issue with this
description of where we are currently:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">The breakdown of old forms of social
solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening
gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the
working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell.</span> </blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But while the diagnosis may be (partly)
sound, the prognosis often feels like a blast from the past, as if nothing has
really changed since those heady days of the late Seventies and early Eighties.
The language and style of argument used, the forms of address, all seem to be resonant of that earlier era in our political history – and in my
personal political journey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I say ‘partly’ sound because I think the
Kilburnites also get some things wrong about the current state of things. Of
Margaret Thatcher, who died shortly before his article was written, Hall writes
that her funeral ‘was designed to install her as the emblem of a unified
nation, and set the seal on three decades of work by three political regimes –
Thatcherism, New Labour and the coalition – to fundamentally reshape Britain.’
Leaving aside the way this skates over very real differences between three
democratically elected governments, the model of political change assumed here is
of a unified exercise of power by a dominant elite. We’re back
in the mechanistic, top-down world of Louis Althusser, and a world away from the
multiple sites of power identified by Foucault, one of Hall’s key
influences, never mind the unending struggle for hegemony described by Gramsci. It’s
not far removed, in fact, from conspiratorial thinking about a hidden hand
pulling the strings behind the scenes, with democratic ‘choice’ being little
more than an illusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A similar one-way model of the exercise of
power is evidenced in these words about popular culture:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Market forces have begun to model
institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as
dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols
celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive
individualism.</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There’s a grain of truth in this, of
course, as there is in much of what Hall and the Kilburnites have to say – the
good sense in their common sense, one might cheekily say. But one gets the
feeling that, in this political worldview, it’s only external forces – of which
market forces are one example – that have any agency and are able to
‘shape…extol…promote’. Reading this, you’d think that people never voluntarily
watched a television programme or freely voted for measures that encouraged
individualism. The same forces are said to have ‘thoroughly undermined the
redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state’. But what if that consensus failed because it
lost credibility and popular support? Where now the complex ‘New Times’ understanding
of Thatcherism, the past failures of the Left, and new class formations?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Moreover, Hall’s use here of the word
‘regime’ for the elected British government, as if this were the Soviet Union or
some tin-pot dictatorship, rather grates. It’s the sign of a worrying inability
to distinguish between western democracies, however fallible, and truly
oppressive systems. In fact, you’ll search in vain in this article, or in the online extract from the Kilburn Manifesto, for any acknowledgement that every radical social experiment of the kind advocated here has ended in some form of tyranny.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I found it telling, too, that the only
footnote in the first online extract is a reference to Althusser,
the anti-humanist Marxist theorist whom E P Thompson so memorably excoriated in
<i>The Poverty of Theor</i>y, and whose mechanistic, top-down systematizing of culture
and society were robustly criticis</span>ed in Hall’s earlier writings. And then,
while it’s only a footnote, there’s surely something awry when your sole secondary
reference is to a theorist whose name will mean nothing beyond the social
scientific academy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The writers of the manifesto still seem,
after all this time, to be seeking new social movements to unite with the
traditional working class (whatever that might be, these days), to form a
majority for their progressive project. This leads to an unwarranted excitement
about entirely marginal, unrepresentative and sometimes worryingly illiberal
insurgencies like the Occupy movement. Behind this chimeric search for an
extra-parliamentary alliance is a tacit admission that the existing electoral
system has, time and again, failed to provide a majority in favour of radical
socialist change. This comes across as fundamentally elitist, as if the British
public were wrong to vote repeatedly for New Labour, and more recently to
reject all forms of Labourism and elect a coalition of Conservatives and the
Liberals. To quote Brecht, it sounds like a call to dissolve the people and
elect another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Where do the Kilburnites look for templates
for their political programme? </span>Two get a mention in Hall’s piece: ‘the
short era of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the radical experiments under way in Latin America’,
and indeed our Ken’s image adorns the head of the article. But you’ll find no
reference here to critiques of Livingstone’s communalism or to his more
<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alanjohnson/100216030/">dubious alliances</a> in the interests of civic multiculturalism. And which Latin
American ‘radical experiments’ are signified here, or is it left deliberately
vague? One hopes it doesn’t mean <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=chavez">Hugo Chavez’</a> dictatorial regime: now there’s
‘authoritarian populism’ for you. Once again, there’s little sense of the
failures and shortcomings in these socialist experiments, whether at the local
or national level, nor of the risks of history repeating itself if the same
formula is followed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So while I shall watch the new film about
Stuart Hall with interest (not least for its cool jazz soundtrack), and continue to value his huge contribution to our
understanding of the intersection of politics and culture, and of course to my
own intellectual development, I shan’t be signing the Kilburn Manifesto. My
politics will remain firmly rooted in <a href="http://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/">NW1</a>, rather than NW6.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-71874932829844799802013-11-26T18:12:00.000+00:002016-02-24T07:59:03.788+00:00A political journey of marginal importance<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
I thought I’d write something about the evolution
of my political opinions. Not because I’m immodest enough to think that my
views are of the remotest interest to anyone but myself. But, as I said in
answer to one of <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/rip-norman-geras-1943-2013.html">Norm’s</a> <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/11/the-normblog--4.html">profile</a> questions, I started blogging to help me
work out what I think - and right now I feel a need to take stock of where I’ve
got to, and how I got here. On the other hand, if this blog still has the
occasional reader, I think I owe it to you to explain where I’m coming from, so
to speak, and to update you on how my thinking has changed since I began
blogging half a dozen years or so ago. And maybe some of you might recognise
aspects of your own political journey in this account.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Mind you, in case you’re tempted to take
the ideas expressed here at all seriously, you should bear in mind that the
extent of my political activism, apart from voting, has been my work in adult
education, subscribing and donating to the odd cause or campaign, and - well,
blogging actually. On a similar cautionary note, I should add that I feel some empathy
with Andrew Marr who, when asked why he hadn’t gone into politics, explained
that he tended to agree with the last person he’d been talking to. I’m not quite so fickle, but I kind of know
what he means. I set great store by Keats’ notion of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability">negative capability </a>– ‘when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason’. You could describe this as the
would-be creative writer’s capacity to understand the other person’s position –
or you could just call me indecisive.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I was born into an East End working-class
family, and I’m fairly sure that my grandparents were Labour voters. My
paternal grandfather, a council worker, was a NUPE shop steward, and I remember
my mother saying (this was some time in the Seventies or Eighties) that today’s
Labour party was no longer the party her late father had supported. We moved
out of London to suburban Essex when I was a few years old. Despite their
background, my aspiring parents were<i> Daily Mail</i>-reading Conservative voters for most of
my childhood, and I thought this the most natural thing in the world. Even in
my first year at grammar school, I remember walking home with friends, and two
of us taunting a third, the son of a Labour local councillor. How on earth, we
wondered, could anybody even think of supporting that lot? Needless to say,
within a few years, my fellow-taunter and I would be among the most dedicated Leftists
in our class.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">What changed? Well, my parents, as well as
being upwardly mobile, were also devout Methodists (their faith would later
lead them to doubt their Toryism and go so far as voting Liberal), and I suppose
it was the emphasis on compassion for the poor and the ‘developing world’, not
to mention Methodism’s close ties and structural similarities with the Labour
movement, that rubbed off on me. By the time I began to think about these
things, it seemed obvious that, since both Christians and socialists cared
about the poor, then Christians should also be socialists. And of course, I was
a child of the Sixties, excited by the social and cultural changes happening
around me as I reached puberty. At the age of 12, I
remember being deeply affected by media coverage of the Vietnam war, and feeling
a wave of solidarity with the demonstrators outside the US embassy in Grosvenor
Square. In the quiet of my bedroom, I strummed my guitar and wrote countless
unsent letters to world leaders, begging them to give peace a chance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This hippyish yearning for peace ‘n’ love was
given shape and rigour as sixth form beckoned, and I began to study history and
politics with more interest. I came under the influence of Dave Roberts, our diminutive
Liverpudlian British Constitution teacher, who converted much of the class to
his brand of Tribunite democratic socialism. I began to spend lunchtimes in the
school library, devouring the <i>Guardian</i> and <i>New Statesman</i>. Dave organised a
school trip to the Houses of Parliament, where we gasped to see one of our
heroes, Michael Foot, striding across the entrance hall in front of our eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">When I went up to Cambridge to study
English Literature, my democratic socialist outlook deepened as I was
introduced to the writings of Ruskin and Morris, and attended lectures by
Raymond Williams. But Cambridge was also the place where, having lost my
youthful evangelical faith, I began to be attracted to Catholicism. The
discovery of liberation theology, not to mention the Catholic Marxism of Terry Eagleton,
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_McCabe">Herbert McCabe</a> <i>et al</i>, made it possible to find some kind of accommodation
between my quest for spiritual meaning and my political principles. Meanwhile,
my inner monk battled with my outer punk, as I became a regular at new wave
gigs down at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, with a distinct preference for the
more earnestly political bands like the Clash.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My intertwining religious and political
beliefs inspired a year’s voluntary work with ex-prisoners in Worcester, and
then postgraduate studies in Manchester, exploring the social and political
dimensions of 20<sup>th</sup> century Christian poetry. Here, after a brief burst of enthusiasm for
my new faith, my attachment to Catholicism began to wane, and I launched into
another period of hectic intellectual exploration, as I read my way through Nietzsche,
Marcuse, Norman O. Brown <i>et al</i>., to a soundtrack of the Doors and Joy Division.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Then my grant ran out and I found myself
back home in Essex with an unfinished PhD and a need to earn some money. I
began to do bits of adult education teaching, including a spell with the WEA,
before landing my first full-time job running an education project for
ex-offenders in Basildon. Around this time I read Marx properly for the first
time – nerd that I am, I remember being bowled over by ‘The German Ideology’ –
and motivated myself for work by absorbing Freire and Illich. By the time I
moved on to my next job, running another NACRO project in North London, I was a
regular reader of <i>Marxism Today</i> and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-Communist-Party-Literature-Journal/dp/B000V009OG">Red Letters</a></i>. I spent my lunchtimes in the
Centerprise Bookshop in Stoke Newington High Street, where I bought my copy of
Gramsci’s <i>Prison Notebooks</i> and browsed the publications from Stuart Hall’s
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was now the mid-80s, the time of
the miners’ strike and the high-water mark of the GLC, who part-funded our
project. If asked to define my politics at this time, I’d probably have said I
was a wet marxist, or a soft eurocommunist, with a dash of pro-feminism and
vigorous anti-racism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I took this outlook with me to my next job,
as a community education organiser on a depressed estate in the middle of the
Oxfordshire countryside. Here, my metropolitan Marxian idealism ran up against
political apathy, a moribund rural Labour Party, and a working-class community
where the most dynamic wanted to move up and out to the middle-class villages,
not to stay and foment political change, and where the unemployed adults I was teaching
wanted skills for jobs, rather than Freirean consciousness-raising. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And then 1989 happened. Of course, the
collapse of the sclerotic Stalinism that most of us on the Left had defined
ourselves against shouldn’t have shaken our basic faith in socialism – but
somehow it did. It felt rather churlish to carry on calling for socialist revolution,
when the people of Eastern Europe were rejoicing in free markets and running
away from any form of collectivism. There were domestic repercussion here, too,
as the Communist Party fractured and then disappeared, <i>Marxism Today</i> went
under, and the machinations of the Bennite left made Labour seem increasingly
out of touch and unelectable. Britain, and the world, had changed, but the Left
had failed to keep up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">From Oxfordshire I moved to an adult
literacy project in Milton Keynes, and thence to a job at the Open University,
developing access courses. Long conversations about pedagogy with my colleague
Andy Northedge (the person who effected a personal introduction to my erstwhile
political hero, Stuart Hall) put more dents in my already wobbly faith in the
knowledge-lite Freirean educational methods that I’d begun to doubt as a
community educator. Meanwhile, Labour was changing: I supported Kinnock’s
reforms and when Blair was elected leader, I renewed my long-lapsed party
membership. I saw myself as a critical friend of New Labour, liking the attempt
to modernise the message, sometimes critical of the dogma of ‘choice’, but
generally in favour. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And then came 9/11. What was it
about that cataclysmic event that changed so many political minds? In part, the shock of this violent assault by the forces of apocalyptic unreason on a liberal, plural, open society helped to crystallise what it was that I valued about that kind of society. And in part it was
another kind of shock – of watching as many on the Left, supposedly on ‘our’ side of the political aisle, rushed to
explain, excuse, and apologise for that violent assault, to see it as
‘understandable’. There were other arenas, too, in which this Left, which seemed to have become mainstream
and acceptable, ‘understood’ terror, repression, authoritarianism, as long as
it was ‘anti-imperialist’ and directed against us, the West. Something else
happened to my thinking as a result of 9/11. I’d become fairly pro-Palestinian in recent
years, an admirer of Edward Said’s writings, and had even joined the Palestine Solidarity
Campaign - at the time, it had seemed like just another of the worthy solidarity campaigns,
like those for Chile and Nicaragua, that concerned Leftists should sign up to. But
I’d begun to have doubts about one-sided accounts of the Middle East
conflict, and the events of September 2001 helped to confirm them. I began to
feel rather more sympathy for what ordinary Israelis had been suffering for
years, at the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and started to see Israel not so much as as a neo-colonial oppressor, as it was characterised in
the simplistic anti-imperialist playbook, but as the only liberal democracy in the region, surrounded by illiberal and aggressive opponents who desired its destruction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">These new strains in my thinking were
nourished by my introduction to the world of blogging, beginning with my discovery of <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/">Normblog</a> and then moving on to other sites
associated with the Euston Manifesto and the broader anti-totalitarian
democratic left. I was broadly supportive of New Labour’s endorsement of US
intervention in Afghanistan, maybe more dubious about the liberation of Iraq, though
instinctively more sympathetic to those who made a moral case for war than to the ragbag of ‘anti-imperialists’ and apologists for tyranny and theocracy who
made up the 'Stop the War' movement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As the first decade of the 21<sup>st</sup>
century wore on, the old political boundaries of left and right seemed more blurred
and porous than before. Often, whether supporting women’s rights in the Muslim
world, standing up for Israel, or fighting to defend freedom of expression at
home, one found more allies on the right than in some sections of the left. Inevitably,
once you’ve discovered common ground with former enemies on one issue, then you
become more open to listening to their opinions on other matters. And of
course, I was now a middle-aged man, a homeowner with a growing family, so there was the
inevitable gravitation away from youthful radicalism and towards the political
centre.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But in the last few years there’s been
another influence at work too. Religion had
never really gone away, and there had been a number of periods of renewed if
fleeting attraction. However, these had faltered, due to what I saw as irreconcilable
contradictions with my socialist-feminist principles. No, in my 50s, I’ve
found myself more seriously and consistently drawn back to belief, and those objections
seem less of an obstacle. At this stage, I’m only prepared to say that I’m
‘exploring’ faith, but it doesn’t seem to
want go away. Inevitably, it’s having an impact on my political thinking, so
that issues such as abortion assume a greater importance -
another area in which, sadly, one is more likely to find allies on the right
than the left. At the same time, my renewed faith, if that’s what it
turns out to be, also prevents me from making a full-scale tilt to the right. In
Catholic social teaching, a consistent ethic of life also means opposition to
the death penalty, compassion for the poor, and resisting monopolies of power, whether governmental or corporate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
events of 9/11 led to a shift in my thinking on international affairs, then the
riots of summer 2011 helped to unsettle some of my ideas about domestic
politics. I watched the unfolding scenes that night, as crowds with the merest sliver
of an excuse about a possible police shooting in another part of town, callously vandalised, burned and looted, destroying the homes
and livelihoods of their neighbours, built up over years of hard work. Like
many others that night, I was angry and in despair at the sheer greed and
mindless violence, and at the inaction of the police. The official Left
response was slower and more reticent than after 9/11, as if sensing that the
usual explanations wouldn’t work this time. Nevertheless, there were one or two
attempts to pin the blame on police brutality, poverty, the cuts. However, my
<a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/not-very-rapid-response-to-riots.html">sympathies </a>were completely with the victims – those who lost their homes or
businesses, or saw their neighbourhood go up in flames – and with those
public-spirited residents who volunteered to clean up the mess made by others
the next day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I also found myself wondering about those
who chose <i>not</i> to riot – the people in the affected areas, also living in
inadequate housing, maybe unemployed, victims of the same cuts to local
services. Why didn’t they join in? Maybe social conservatives were right when
they talked about the importance of individual responsibility, about the positive influences of
good parenting, stable families, even religious upbringing and values? And
maybe, just maybe, there was even something in the argument that a skewed
welfare system, combined with a rampant consumerism, had bred a sense of
entitlement – so that many of the rioters thought there was nothing wrong with
grabbing what they could and appeared surprised when they had to face the
consequences in court. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So where does all of this leave me? Perhaps
it’s easier to answer that question in relation to real-life political situations.
For the past decade or so, I’ve been a
devoted follower of US politics.We were in <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/five-days-in-san-francisco-part-one.html">San Francisco </a>at the time of the
2008 campaign, and if I’d had a vote, it would definitely have been for Obama.
My disillusionment with him has been slower than for some, and probably has as
much to with the changes in my own thinking as in his performance as President.
As a liberal interventionist, I’ve been deeply disappointed</span> by
the administration’s lukewarm support for democratic reform movements in the
Middle East, particularly in Iran, its tendency to blame Israel for the failure
of the peace process, and its abject humiliation by Russia over Syria. On the domestic
front, I supported healthcare reform but I’ve become concerned about the
authoritarian requirement on religious healthcare providers to act against
their own principles in relation to abortion and contraception. On abortion, too,
I gave Obama the benefit of the doubt initially, believing him sincere when he
said he wanted to reduce the number of abortions, but I was disgusted by the Democrats' cynical use of the issue to scare voters in 2012. In short, if I were American,
I’m not sure which way I’d vote in 2016: I’d like to see a President who shares
Obama’s desire to reform healthcare and immigration, but who is also pro-life
and willing to stand up to tyrants and defend democratic values abroad.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As for British politics, as a loyal-ish
Blairite (and, it would appear, like a majority of Labour Party members) I
voted for the Other Miliband, was disappointed by the use of union power to
deny him victory, and have been irritated by union-backed attempts to
cleanse Blarites from positions of influence in the party. As an admirer of
Michael Gove, not only for his writings on terrorism but
also for his continuation of the Blair-Adonis educational reforms, I’m
irritated by the kneejerk opposition to him from the Labour front bench. I
dislike Ed M’s disavowal of the New Labour policies that won three general
elections, and find it hard to forgive the two Eds for their part in the
Brownite cabal that plotted against Blair. On the other hand, I quite like the idea of One Nation Labour, admire some
of the work that Jon Cruddas is doing, and am more sympathetic these days to
<a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/blue-labour.html">Blue Labour</a>, though I think Maurice Glasman, for all his undoubted qualities,
overestimates its appeal beyond the inner-city enclaves, where ties of faith
and community are weaker. Also, I’m not sure he really ‘gets’ working-class
aspiration…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Which is kind of where I began.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">That's about it, for now. The journey continues...</span></div>
Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-61232109128082010432013-11-21T17:39:00.000+00:002013-11-22T08:06:37.555+00:00A man with a plan<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I read about Ed Balls’ <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/21/ed-balls-labour-new-towns-housing?CMP=twt_gu">plan</a>, if Labour
are elected, to build a 'wave' of new towns, I wondered whether the current
nostalgia for all things 1963 had gone to his head. Or perhaps this was an
extreme example of the two Eds’ intention to eradicate every trace of New
Labour, and to unlearn the lessons of the wilderness years of the Eighties and
early Nineties. Surely new towns were a feature of the unpopular Old Labourism
that voters decisively rejected at the end of the Seventies, along with tower
blocks, nationalisation and the closed shop? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In case you’re wondering whether I know whereof I speak, I should mention that my first full-time job was in Basildon, another was
in Berinsfield (a planned ‘new village’ in the Oxfordshire countryside), I now live a
few minutes from Stevenage, and for the past two decades I’ve worked in Milton
Keynes, arguably the only new town that (sort of) works. All of these, except
perhaps the last, are characterised by bleak and soulless centres,
brutalist architecture, and large and isolating housing estates. What
they lack are many of the things residents of ‘old’ towns take for granted: the
informal bustle of street life, an attractive diversity of architecture in
which the ancient jostles with the modern, buildings and spaces hallowed by tradition
and collective memory, and the capacity for organic and spontaneous social,
economic and cultural initiative. A recent <a href="http://www.thecomet.net/news/stevenage_is_unhappiest_place_in_hertfordshire_1_2943045">story</a> in our local paper reported
that Stevenage is the ‘unhappiest’ town in Hertfordshire. To be sure, many of
its social ills (a high unemployment rate, widespread drug and alcohol problems) are shared by a number of ‘old’ towns and cities, but
surely they must be exacerbated by the depressing built environment and the
legacy of soulless, centralised planning? Perhaps the most telling sentence in the report is the last:<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-family: inherit;">'</span></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Being a new town, Stevenage might not have the established community networks to make people feel they belong, leading to alienation.' (This is despite the 'new' town having been there since 1946).</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another thing new towns tend to lack,
though it’s difficult to talk about, particularly on the Left, is class diversity. The new towns of the Sixties were, by and large, one-class towns –
working-class towns, in fact – unsurprisingly, since they were mostly intended
as a means of clearing the decaying slum areas of London and other big cities, and offering their residents a better life in the country air. By contrast, ‘traditional’
towns tend to be marked by a vibrant social mix, from which everyone gains. Like it or
not, in most communities it's those with economic, educational or cultural capital - the middle classes, in other words - who keep the schools going, organise
cultural events, attract higher-end shops and restaurants, and campaign to preserve
the local environment. It’s probably the social diversity of Milton Keynes
which accounts for it being one of the more attractive and popular of the new
towns - which isn’t to overlook its negative aspects, such as the lack of streets you can actually walk along, its disadvantaged outlying estates,
and the dire transport connections for anyone without a car. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The deliberately proletarian character of
the Sixties new towns always had vaguely Soviet overtones, as did the
council-run cultural centres and centrally-planned landscapes and public art
works. Balls & co. might object that their new generation of
new towns will learn from these past mistakes, and will go out of their way
to attract a social mix, employ decent architects, and ensure good transport
facilities. But that doesn’t get away from the basic problem with new
towns, whether we’re talking about the windswept decay of Basildon or the consumer
paradise of</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Milton Keynes: and that is that they are </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">planned</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Surely the main
lesson from the new towns of the Sixties is that you can’t plan community, that it
has to grown organically over time, and given the choice, most people would
prefer to live in an unplanned traditional town, with its mixture of old and
new, than in a centrally-planned new town where the government and local authority
have preordained where and how you shall live, shop, and enjoy</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">When I posted about this story on Facebook and Twitter earlier today, a few commenters suggested that garden cities such as Welwyn and Letchworth provided examples of 'good' new towns and might offer a better model. However (and again, writing as someone who lives within a few minutes of both of the aforementioned places), I have to agree with <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/thou-shalt-join-in.html">Jane Jacobs</a>, who was as hostile to the fantasies of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Howard">Ebenezer Howard</a> as she was to those of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses">Robert Moses</a>. In <i>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</i>, Jacobs <a href="http://mises.org/daily/1247">described</a> Howard's aim as '</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;">the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge'. I'm biased, of course, but I much prefer Hitchin, the old, diverse, attractive and constantly surprising town where I'm privileged to live, to either of its rationally-planned near-neighbours, whether the brutalist squares of Stevenage or the orderly avenues of Letchworth.</span></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-89221697954782290402013-10-18T16:29:00.001+01:002013-10-18T19:07:52.096+01:00R.I.P. Norman Geras (1943 - 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXID9PQL0JZ931W3OXTCULn0dkuP_ej2M7rfK24FSYJy9RGD7VVgdT__hQYTUFcb40WLqqp9KRjYiq1pq9koS6hCWsiU3Syh8O1118_I3Ao5zLtQmvIM_H0UntR5g0HReAw0AK3qOZQMM/s1600/norman_geras_140x140.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXID9PQL0JZ931W3OXTCULn0dkuP_ej2M7rfK24FSYJy9RGD7VVgdT__hQYTUFcb40WLqqp9KRjYiq1pq9koS6hCWsiU3Syh8O1118_I3Ao5zLtQmvIM_H0UntR5g0HReAw0AK3qOZQMM/s1600/norman_geras_140x140.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It must have been some time in 2003 that I came across an
article in a Sunday newspaper, about a Marxist professor who supported the Iraq
war. Although it had been a long time since I’d called myself
any kind of Marxist, and at the time I was sceptical of the rationale for
invading Iraq, I was intrigued. Perhaps it was because I’d been having my own
internal debates with conventional Left thinking and was increasingly
disappointed and depressed by my fellow progressives’ failure to condemn (and
in some cases their tendency to find apologetic ‘explanations’ for) terror and tyranny, as long as it was
directed at the ‘imperialist’ West. To my shame, I
hadn’t heard of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Geras">Norman Geras </a>before then, despite the fact that he was a
recently retired professor at Manchester, where I’d been a postgraduate
student. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The newspaper article mentioned that Geras wrote
something called a ‘blog’ – the first time I’d come across this neologism. Curious, I looked up the eponymous <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/">normblog</a> and was immediately
hooked. I found myself nodding in frequent agreement with Norm’s concise but
elegant posts and reading his disquisitions soon became a daily habit. From
normblog, I branched out to read the bloggers and commentators that he linked
to, many of them associated with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_Manifesto">Euston Manifesto</a>, of which Norm was one of
the key authors, and the broader anti-totalitarian, liberal-interventionist
Left. As well as finding myself in immediate sympathy with many of Norm’s
political opinions, I’m happy to acknowledge that he was also influential in
changing my mind on a number of important issues, most notably Israel. In fact, as
time went on, I came to see Norm as one of the key influences on my political
thinking, on a par with figures like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall
at earlier stages in my life. Of course, it wasn’t all about politics: Norm was
just as stimulating and entertaining when writing about Jane Austen, country
and western music, John Ford movies, cricket or his beloved Manchester United. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As time went on, I decided I wanted to be a
participant in, and not just an observer of the online debates to which Norm had introduced me,
so I <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/on-aggressive-secularism.html">started</a> my own blog. I was enormously flattered when Norm started to link
to my own posts, and like many other bloggers, I regarded being granted a
<a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/11/the-normblog--4.html">normblog profile</a> as the highest possible accolade. I now realise that, as well as being
the inspiration and model for my blogging, Norm was also my imaginary ideal reader: on many occasions, I’ve held back from posting something, not so much because I
thought Norm would disagree with it, but because I knew the argument wouldn’t
come up to his exacting standard. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Despite his towering reputation as a political philosopher, Norm was a generous
supporter and nurturer of the talents of others, and although I had only met
him virtually, I regarded him as a mentor and a friend. Then, earlier this
year, came the opportunity to meet him in person: Norm and Adele Geras kindly invited Helen
and me to lunch at their new home in Cambridge. I was as nervous as it’s
possible to be at meeting one of my political gurus, but we were made to feel very welcome. Norm must have been
quite ill at the time, but characteristically he didn’t mention it once.
Instead, we got a guided tour of his book collection, including the unrivalled
cricket section, and the extensive ‘waiting to be read’ shelf. I was surprised to
discover that this most well-informed of bloggers, who somehow managed to read
and comment on everything before the rest of us, was in the habit of not
switching on his computer before mid-morning. Instead, he spent the first hour
of each day reading a novel – a practice that he repeated every evening.
Normblog regulars will be aware that he was a <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2013/10/a-book-list-with-a-difference.html">voracious reader of fiction</a>,
something that I believe shone through in the imaginative and humane sympathy
that characterised his posts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Nick Cohen has <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2013/10/norman-geras-rest-in-peace-comrade/">written</a> about his own habit of
turning to normblog when he wanted to find a way through a difficult moral or
political issue. For many of us, ‘What does Norm think?’ became a reflexive
response to perplexing items of news or complex debates. One of the many
sadnesses of his passing is that he’ll no longer be around to help us think
things through in his characteristically clear, rational, humane and often highly amusing way. That won’t stop us from occasionally wondering 'What <i>would</i> Norm
have thought?’ And that won’t be a bad starting point for any debate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria;"><span style="font-size: small;">Today my thoughts and prayers are with </span><a href="http://adelegeras.com/">Adele Geras</a>, who is of course a well-respected and much-loved writer herself (Norm kept a detailed and devoted bibliography of her numerous publications), though to normblog
devotees she’ll always be (and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind the appellation) ‘WotN’: Wife of the Norm. May he rest in peace.</span><br />
<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-27525962887155229282013-04-27T21:02:00.000+01:002013-04-29T15:32:27.352+01:00POOPCAN<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">Does this sound familiar? You’re
thoroughly absorbed in reading a biography or historical work, lost in
admiration for the author’s ability to bring the past alive, when suddenly,
perhaps in the final chapter of the book, you experience a rude shock. All of a
sudden, the spell is broken: the essential relationship of trust between writer
and reader has been undermined, and you feel traduced, irritated, sullied even. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">What has happened? The author has committed
what I’m tentatively calling a POOPCAN (though if anyone can come up with a better
acronym, I’m open to suggestions). A <i>what</i>, you may ask? A POOPCAN. A Politically
Objectionable Out of Place Contemporary Analogy. Departing from his or her
brief, and straying from their acknowledged expertise as a biographer or
historian, the author has unexpectedly drawn a tendentious parallel between
historical events and current concerns, and worse, has attempted to see ‘lessons’ in the
past for contemporary debates. And let’s be honest: it's especially grating
when this parallel-drawing serves to reinforce political positions that the
reader finds objectionable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The most egregious example of this sort of
thing that I’ve come across is in the closing pages of Carmen Callil’s
devastating <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Faith-Forgotten-History-Fatherland/dp/0099498286/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/203-1423413-4039925?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187022181&sr=8-1">account</a> of anti-semitism and pro-Nazi collaborationism in occupied
France. <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/holiday-reading-2.html">For me</a>, the book was almost ruined by her concluding (and deeply offensive) claim that the Jews of Israel were now ‘passing on’ to the
Palestinians what they had experienced at the hands of the Nazis.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Much less offensive, but still extremely
irritating to this reader, was Jenny Uglow’s attempt,
towards the end of her richly<a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/roundhead-or-cavalier.html"> enjoyable</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gambling-Man-Charles-II-Restoration/dp/0571217338/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367081531&sr=1-1&keywords=jenny+uglow+a+gambling+man">book</a> about the Restoration, to compare
Charles II’s high-handed behaviour with the strategy of a recent British prime
minister. Discussing the king’s controversial negotiation of the Treaty of
Dover in 1670, Uglow writes:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was the secrecy of the treaty that was so
significant. For a king who had intended to be so open and accessible, this was
an admission that he must now rule in a different way. His assertion at the Restoration
that he wanted to rule with his parliament was implicitly denied, and his
actions were the forerunner of many later deals, when heads or cabinets of
allegedly democratic states commit their nations to action without the
knowledge or full agreement of parliament and people. To modern eyes, the
treachery may lie less in ‘the design about R[eligion]’, which so shocked his
contemporaries, than in Charles’ committing his country to fight a pointless
war in which thousands of lives might be lost.</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Uglow was writing in 2009, and it’s not
difficult to see which recent events were in her mind. The analogy is both
anachronistic (there's a world of difference between a 17<sup>th</sup>
century monarch ruling as if by divine right and an elected 21<sup>st</sup>
century leader) and deeply flawed. If it’s the decision to go to war in
Iraq that Uglow is referring to (and I’d bet good money that it is), then she
is conveniently forgetting the fact that the decision, whatever you think of
it, was supported by a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2862749.stm">majority</a> in Parliament and that the debate was conducted very
much in public. Then there is the lazy use of the hackneyed terminology of what
Norm Geras<a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2013/03/verkrappt-adj.html"> calls</a> the <i>verkrappt</i> Left: ‘allegedly democratic states’, ‘pointless
war’. At this point carefully-evidenced historical narrative gives way to
political grandstanding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My most recent experience of POOPCAN-spotting
came a couple of weeks ago. We spent a few days in Barcelona over Easter, and
one of the books I took with me was Michael Eaude’s<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Catalonia-Cultural-History-Michael-Eaude/dp/1904955320/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367083883&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+eaude"> cultural history</a> of Catalonia. It’s an
informative and wide-ranging introduction to this stateless nation, covering
history, literature, the visual arts and sport. But it was almost spoilt for me by a single throwaway remark. Writing about the expulsion of Muslims from Catalonia in the
Middle Ages, Eaude adds in brackets: 'the War on Islam is nothing new'. Hang
on: what war on Islam? Does such a thing even exist, outside the paranoid
ravings of fundamentalists, or their apologists on the aforesaid <i>verkrappt</i> Left? And what’s with the capital ‘W’,
lending this tendentious coining a semi-official status? OK, so it's literally a parenthetical remark, but what I found objectionable was the lazy recycling of the slogans of clerical fascists, in a way that can only give comfort to their spurious claims of victimhood. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Like
Uglow’s nudge-nudge reference to the Iraq war, Eaude’s use of the unexamined
assumptions of a certain section of the Left appeals to a set of supposedly shared assumptions –
‘we all think this way, don’t we?’ - which is both objectionable and out of place.
POOP, in fact. I shall be on the lookout for further examples and would be
pleased to have any others pointed out to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-65852376740619314882012-11-23T17:03:00.001+00:002012-11-26T20:48:56.485+00:00The voice of the academic left? Not in my name.<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">This <a href="http://www.irishleftreview.org/2012/11/22/open-letter-condemning-israeli-assault-defenceless-people-gaza-strip/">open letter</a>, condemning ‘the Israeli
assault on the defenceless people of the Gaza strip', angered and saddened me
so much that it has finally lured me out of my extended blogging hibernation. The
letter, sent to the <i>Irish Left Review</i> but no doubt also published in other
earnest left-wing journals, is signed by no fewer than 136 academics. Some of
them are the usual suspects – the far-left anti-Zionist Ilan Pappe, the Hamas
spokesman and suicide bombing apologist <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/london-review-of-hamas.html">Azzam Tamimi</a> – but among the others are
one or two people I vaguely know, others whose academic work I admire, and at
least one (<a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/eustonian-in-po-mo-world.html">Judith Butler</a>) whose writing I used to like but whose naïve interventions on this particular issue have caused me to re-evaluate
everything she’s written. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The letter made me angry because I believe
it is wrong on almost every level: every sentence is stuffed with lies and
half-truths. And it made me sad because
this collection of intellectual worthies seemed to be presenting themselves as
the combined voice of the ‘academic left’. I'm an academic – have been for
the better part of a quarter of a century. I am also of ‘the Left’, a paid-up
Labour member who has never<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>voted
for any other party (unless you count a tactical vote for the Liberals in a
Tory safe seat thirty years ago), whose political thinking has been shaped by
the likes of Ruskin, Morris, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, plus
a smattering of early Marx, feminism and anti-racism. And yet when I read this,
the supposed collective voice of the ‘academic left’, I feel nothing but alienation and
revulsion, and want to cry out: ‘Not in my name!’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The letter is short, so a line-by-line
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking">fisking</a> is in order. Here’s the first sentence:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">We the undersigned watch with horror yet
another ruthless and criminal Israeli assault on the defenceless people of
the Gaza Strip.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">You
would never know from this that Israel’s ‘assault’ came after a week in which
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel,_2012">hundreds of rockets </a>were launched indiscriminately from Gaza towards residential areas in Israel. Surely, if anything was ‘ruthless’ or ‘criminal’, it was this series of unprovoked terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. This lack of informing
context is, to say the least, surprising from a list comprising so many
expert social scientists. And in what way was Israel’s response, carefully
targeting terrorist leaders, arms dumps, communication centres, and going out
of its way to<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arsen-ostrovsky/israel-did-everything-it-_b_2175491.html"> avoid civilian casualties</a>, ‘criminal’: do states not have a
right to protect their people against terrorist attack? ‘Ruthless’ and
‘criminal’ might better describe Hamas’ strategy of siting their military hardware among civilians, using their own people cruelly and cynically as
<a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/israel-hamas-using-journalists-and-children-as-human-shields">human shields</a>. And ‘defenceless’? What about all that firepower aimed at Israel
in the past few weeks, including sophisticated weaponry <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/middleeast/iran-missiles-in-gaza-give-tehran-government-a-lift.html">supplied</a> by Hamas’
paymasters in Tehran?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Moving
on:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The assassination of the Hamas’ military
commander, Ahmad al-Jabari, by Israel was intended to disrupt any chance for a
permanent cease fire between the two sides and caused the current cycle
of violence.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">This is
quite breathtaking. Remember: before Israel targeted al-Jabiri, there was no
two-sided conflict requiring a 'ceasefire', just a one-sided campaign by Hamas and its proxies. It was <i>this </i>series of attacks that ‘caused’
the current cycle of violence: Israel’s careful targeting of one of its
masterminds was an attempt to <i>end</i> the violence. Again, it’s astonishing to
find academics who spend their professional lives analysing causation wilfully
misreading the obvious chain of cause and effect here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">For the last five years al-Jabari had been
responsible for limiting rocket attacks on Israel.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Far leftists are often unfairly accused of being implicit apologists for terror –
but this is a quite brazen <i>apologia</i> for a known terrorist. As Carlos Tomatis
(to whom I'm indebted for the original link to this letter) commented on Facebook: ‘These
fine people think that it's okay to attempt to murder random Jews as long as
you don't do it too often.’ It’s striking that the signatories to this letter
go out of their way to ‘understand’ a jihadist commander like al-Jabiri, but
refuse to extend any such understanding to his victims, or to those who seek to
curtail his terrorist activities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #1a1a1a; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The inaction of the
Western governments is further proof of their indifference to their
electorates’ wish to stop Israel from perpetrating yet another massacre against
the Palestinian people.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #1a1a1a; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Again, ‘massacre’ hardly seems the appropriate word for
carefully targeted attacks against terrorist infrastructure – and what do they mean by the
other 'massacres' implied here? Have these supposedly thoughtful and critical academics bought into the <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/218vnicq.asp">myths</a> of one side? And what ‘action’, exactly, do these signatories want western governments to take? Do
they want to stop Israel making <i>any </i>response to Hamas’
provocation - and if so, why?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">We
call upon our governments, which have stood aloof and indifferent, in the face
of Palestine’s dispossession and colonization since 1948 to take
immediate and effective action. No other people in the world has been
subjected, for more than sixty years, to such relentless acts of collective
punishment and military brutality as have the Palestinian people.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these
are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution, one in
which Israelis and Palestinians live peacefully side-by-side in two legitimate nations. No, this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own. This is also the boilerplate rhetoric of the anti-imperialist far left, which seeks lazily to impose a false template, transferred from very different conflicts, on the complexities of the Middle East.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As for the second sentence in this
paragraph, it’s a downright, ugly lie. Even if
Israel’s admittedly imperfect treatment of the Palestinians could be
accurately described using terms such as 'collective punishment' and military brutality' (terms with, one suspects, deliberate and offensive overtones of Nazism and fascism - and by the way, did you <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57552657/hamas-kills-suspected-collaborators-with-israel-witnesses-say/">see </a>the actual collective punishment meted out by Hamas to suspected collaborators this week? - there's real fascism for you) - how can any sensible person say this is worse than (say) the treatment of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs by Saddam, or the Tibetans by the Chinese, or the East Timorese by the Indonesians? The list could go on indefinitely, and the more examples are adduced, the more absurd and offensive this letter's claim becomes. To accept that Israel's treatment of Palestinians could be compared to these brutal, genocidal campaigns would be to acknowledge that words have lost their meaning - again, surprising for a group of academics whose writings are often concerned with the precise nuances of language.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">We
call for the removal of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, the free movement of
people and goods in and out of the region and a total cessation of lethal
attack from the air, land and sea, against a helpless civilian population in
one of the most densely-populated areas in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">At last, you may think, an end to
the rhetorical windbaggery, and something like a measured call for practical action. After all, even 'moderate' voices like Tony Blair have called for a removal of border restrictions between Israel and Gaza. But those voices also recognise, as this letter quite fails to do, the reason for those restrictions: the fact that, as events even this past week have shown, there are some who would abuse an open border to launch yet more terror attacks on Israel. And as for the sea blockade, surely the <a href="http://efg-bnusfoodreserves.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/deadly-lethal-fajr-5-rockets-in-bound.html">news </a>this week of a secret Iranian shipment of weapons to Gaza has demonstrated that Israel is absolutely right to maintain this, for as long as Hamas and its backers in Tehran explicitly seek to destroy the state of Israel and call for genocide against the Jewish people. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The world cannot stand by when Palestine is
once more battered to death.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Sorry for
resorting to linguistic trivia, but that just isn't English: you can’t be battered to death more than once, any more than you can commit suicide twice. More seriously, it prompts the question: why did 'the world', including this esteemed collection of academics, 'stand by' a couple of weeks ago when Israel was literally being 'battered' by repeated rocket attacks out of Gaza? Where were the letters to the press then? The almost complete silence from the great and the good following that outbreak of violence, when taken together with this letter's complete disavowal of Hamas' role in the 'cycle of violence', not to mention the bloated and offensive rhetoric, might lead some people to wonder about the motivation of the letter writers. How would these academics, many of them skilled in textual analysis, respond themselves to this kind of text in other circumstances - a text so replete with absences and silences, and one which focuses its whole attention on the actions of one party in a conflict to the exclusion of all others? </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">By the way, I <a href="http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=285721">read</a> that more than 400 Arabs of Palestinian origin have been killed in the civil war in Syria: maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I don't recall seeing any letters to the left-wing press protesting this particular massacre of Palestinians. One might wonder what it is about Israel that, alone of all the nations in the world, spurs such a hasty and vehement response from the combined academic 'left'. Some of those who signed this letter are acknowledged experts in the analysis of racism: I wonder what <i>they</i> would call it, if they came across another text in which one nation, one people, was singled out for such opprobrium, to the exclusion of all others, in defiance of all sense of balance and reason, and in such ugly and contemptuous terms?</span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-83576615147282674982012-06-17T16:13:00.002+01:002012-06-17T16:56:36.661+01:00John McCarthy: well-meaning but wrong<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">John McCarthy seems like a nice chap. I quite
like his <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qjds">travel programme </a>on Radio 4 on Saturday mornings, and he has that air
of affability and basic decency characteristic of the more liberally-minded
members of the English upper middle classes. And he seems admirably unbowed by
his hellish experience as a hostage in Lebanon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So I was disappointed to hear him talking,
on this morning’s <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0080bbs">Andrew Marr Show</a></i>, about his forthcoming documentary on 'the Palestinians
of Israel’(sic). Of course, I haven’t seen the programme, or read the accompanying
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9288074/You-Cant-Hide-the-Sun-A-Journey-through-Israel-and-Palestine-by-John-McCarthy-review.html">book</a>, but from the few things McCarthy said by way of introduction, I could
tell that this was an intervention with a very definite agenda.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">For a start, there’s that jarring title:
not the Arabs – the usual term - but the <i>Palestinians </i>of Israel. Not the Palestinians of the West Bank, or Gaza, but of <i>Israel</i>. This seemed to
be a political, and deliberately provocative choice. To me, it suggests that Arab
citizens of Israel are not simply an ethnic group among others but one with
nationalist claims to the land in which they live. It’s an odd term, because
there never was a country called ‘Palestine’, and Israeli Arabs have never
lived in a country with that name: except in the sense that it was a province
of the Ottoman Empire, and then a British Mandate – and in that sense, the Jews
of Israel have as much claim to be called ‘Palestinians’ as their Arab
neighbours. To which we must add the undeniable fact that the main reason there is no state called Palestine is that the Arabs rejected the two-state solution offered to them in 1948, preferring a war to deny the Jews <i>their </i>right to a homeland, a war they have continued and renewed at intervals ever since. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">And maybe it’s just me, but to call the
Arabs of Israel ‘Palestinian’ also suggests that you think the land is somehow
‘really’ theirs - is really somewhere called ‘Palestine’ - and is yet another example
of well-meaning (?) western liberals effacing the existence of the state of
Israel. It’s almost as odd as it would be to call the Jews who live in Arab
countries ‘Israelis’: but then, of course, many Jews <i>became</i> Israelis precisely
because they were expelled from their homes in Arab countries such as Iraq, and
those who remain in countries like Egypt and Tunisia are feeling particularly
vulnerable right now, with the rise in antisemitism and religious
intolerance following last year’s revolutions. Not to mention the chilling
<a href="http://blogs.jpost.com/content/%E2%80%98judenrein%E2%80%99-state-palestine">promise</a> of some Palestinian leaders to ensure that any future Palestinian
state is <i>Judenrein</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I may be wrong, but it doesn’t sound like
you’ll hear much about Arab antisemitism and the threats to Israel’s existence
in McCarthy’s documentary. On <i>Marr</i>, he talked about the image Israel has as the
Middle East’s only true democracy, and how his findings about the
treatment of its ‘Palestinian’ population undermined that claim. But Israel’s
democracy, which affords democratic rights to all its citizens, regardless of
ethnicity or religion, is a matter of fact, not conjecture. As is the poor democratic
record of literally every Arab and North African state. Israel is by no means
perfect, but when (say) European states have shortcomings in their treatment of
their minority populations, their democratic legitimacy is not usually called
into question.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">At the same time, I wonder whether McCarthy’s
programme will introduce us to the Arab judges, politicians and soldiers who
serve their country (Israel) loyally? Or talk about how the lives of Arab
women, or Christians, or gays, are infinitely more free than they would be in
any Arab or Muslim country? Or balance its discussion of the lives of
‘Palestinians’ in Israel with the experience of Palestinian refugees in Arab
countries such as Lebanon or Syria, not to mention those countries’ callous
failure to allow those refugees to settle permanently, so that they can continue
to be used as a political tool to ‘shame’ Israel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Finally, when Andrew Marr asked John
McCarthy what he thought were the current prospects for the peace process, the
latter thought the outlook was negative. Why? Because of Netanyahu’s
‘right-wing’ government. Now, I’m no fan of Netanyahu, and certainly not a
right-winger, but surely the more immediate threats to peace in
Israel/Palestine come from the continuing rocket attacks from Gaza, the tearing-up
of existing peace agreements and warlike noises from the emerging parties in
the new Egypt, not to mention the rejectionist propaganda spewing out of the
PA-controlled media in the West Bank?<sup><o:p></o:p></sup></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Against this hostile background, Israel’s
treatment of its Arab citizens, while not perfect, is surely to be commended rather than condemned.
How many other countries in the region can claim to grant members of ethnic and
religious minorities comparable rights? And when will we see well-meaning western liberals making high-profile documentary films about them?<o:p></o:p></span></div>Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-15070245154280271212012-05-29T14:54:00.000+01:002012-05-29T15:00:07.807+01:00My ancestors in the age of revolution<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">Last week I <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/roundhead-or-cavalier.html">wrote</a> about the way that
one’s historical sympathies can be swayed by one’s ancestors’
political affiliations, and I mentioned my discovery that my Robb forebears had
supported the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 as a case in point.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">For the <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/">family historian </a>with an interest
in political history, discovering an intersection between your ancestors’ lives
and wider historical events is always thrilling. However, until recently, I
believed that my family had always been on the 'wrong' side of history. Besides
their support for the romantic but reactionary Jacobites, there was also the case
of <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/rev-william-robb-key-dates-and-publications/">Reverend William Robb</a> (1763 - 1830), the brother of my great-great-great-grandfather Charles Edward Stuart Robb. He was an Episcopal clergyman in St
Andrews, chaplain to Lord Elibank, and a poet: in fact, the only member of our
family until the current generation to make it into print. In addition to a
number of verses ‘illustrative of the genius and influence of Christianity’,
William Robb wrote a long poem entitled <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/another-poem-by-rev-william-robb/">‘The Patriotic Wolves’</a> in December 1792
‘when [as he says in the introduction] the agents of France, and those
seditious societies, falsely styling themselves “The Friends of the People”,
threatened the subversion of our happy constitution’. The poem, a ‘fable’ characterising reformers as ravenous
wolves threatening the sheep-like British people, was published in the
arch-conservative <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jacobin_Review">‘Anti-Jacobin Review’</a>.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWMKqYYK2Smhyphenhyphenjklc48IY9JeWnIYWlReIH8YGMZbhl7LfvMd4YDPYB2cgGA46GrjIkzTIGEMhQCGTOwBByzPx7SwrT5wIPbM830FtYPq9tM8sis3Ih5bseTO78VW0anmnd2AEoAWDaVeY/s1600/LCS+HANDBILL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWMKqYYK2Smhyphenhyphenjklc48IY9JeWnIYWlReIH8YGMZbhl7LfvMd4YDPYB2cgGA46GrjIkzTIGEMhQCGTOwBByzPx7SwrT5wIPbM830FtYPq9tM8sis3Ih5bseTO78VW0anmnd2AEoAWDaVeY/s320/LCS+HANDBILL.jpg" width="180" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-US">Handbill produced by London Corresponding Society, 1793</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I’ve had a longstanding fascination with
the late eighteenth / early nineteenth centuries, the age of
revolution and reform, the period covered by E. P. Thompson’s seminal <i>The </i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Making of the English Working </i><i>Class</i>: an
era when radical politics was still untainted by bureaucratism, when
Enlightenment rationalism had yet to give way to pious Victorian
sentimentalism, and when the cause of liberty had a romantic sheen and boasted
literary luminaries such as Hazlitt, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Byron and Shelley:
bliss was it in that dawn indeed. So while it was intriguing to find that one of
my ancestors had contributed to contemporary political debates, it was disappointing to
discover that he had been an implacable opponent of progress.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdXVK3MNz9QADAQoJmh4h2Qdw_uVGg1IWyGeb9Eef2P_A9KmBTJ8J8V7GtRfeFvAvWZzDIaT0VKCfJlPViDi2Au8wQy6-IrPnxrNG38IoR6kwAHQ5Ib-4oCwXdbY_02CUONxnPSz7mPzQ/s1600/220px-Francis_Place.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdXVK3MNz9QADAQoJmh4h2Qdw_uVGg1IWyGeb9Eef2P_A9KmBTJ8J8V7GtRfeFvAvWZzDIaT0VKCfJlPViDi2Au8wQy6-IrPnxrNG38IoR6kwAHQ5Ib-4oCwXdbY_02CUONxnPSz7mPzQ/s320/220px-Francis_Place.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p>Francis Place</o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The only marginal corrective to this
ancestral conservatism was the fact that, when my 3 x great grandfather Charles brought his family down to London some time in the 1820s or 1830s, they found
<a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/the-robb-family-at-charing-cross/">lodgings</a> at 29 Charing Cross – the very house that had once been occupied by
the radical tailor <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/francis-place-at-29-charing-cross/">Francis Place</a>. This provided a rather tangential link with
radical history - I’m fairly sure my ancestor Charles would have had little
sympathy with the politics of the previous occupant of his house - but it was
better than nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So much for my father’s family: mind you,
in the next generation they would switch from Episcopalianism to Wesleyanism,
slip in class terms from distressed gentry to respectable working class, and
move from the West End to the East End, their line culminating in my late
grandfather, a teetotalling Methodist, council lamplighter and NUPE shop steward
in East Ham.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj91dTijU1K0a_JeqLDLei88MgXeQR_BuHHsh78bb_qfmGUAJn0HwC_yqybOiZoPfN0cg9N0crBQHSt-CWPZfhhj5EbHTRFJhyphenhyphendyIiOho9BuwHkg-UcVnaKX6iWFcWwNB1WK4cNof1gSuY/s1600/westminster-election-1784.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj91dTijU1K0a_JeqLDLei88MgXeQR_BuHHsh78bb_qfmGUAJn0HwC_yqybOiZoPfN0cg9N0crBQHSt-CWPZfhhj5EbHTRFJhyphenhyphendyIiOho9BuwHkg-UcVnaKX6iWFcWwNB1WK4cNof1gSuY/s1600/westminster-election-1784.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Westminster election campaign, 1784</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">However, I’ve recently found out that my
ancestors on my <i>mother’s </i>side were of a more radical cast, and in precisely the
historical period that interests me. Thanks to the excellent <a href="http://www.londonlives.org/">London Lives</a> website, it’s now possible to find out who voted in elections in the
Westminster constitutency during this period: the poll books contain details
not only of their addresses, occupations and property values, but also the way
they voted (no secret ballot in those days). And since Westminster had a wider franchise than some other boroughs, it
included some of the craftsmen and tradesmen who populate the upper branches of
my maternal family tree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Among them was James Blanch (1755 – 1840), one
of my great-great-great-great-grandfathers. Born in <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/the-birth-of-james-blanch-a-breakthrough/">Tewkesbury </a>the son of a Quaker heel and patten maker (pattens were the metal over-shoes worn to protect
against the mud of the eighteenth-century streets), he grew up in <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/the-blanch-family-of-bristol-another-breakthrough/">Bristol</a>
and came to <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/the-blanch-brothers-in-bristol-and-london/">London</a> as a young man, an apprentice in the same trade as his
father. Living in Compton Street, Soho, James <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/marriage-bond-and-allegation-for-james-blanch-and-jane-barlow/">married</a> for the first time in
1779, to a young woman who was probably the daughter of his <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/analysing-the-will-of-william-barlow/">apprentice master</a>.
The Westminster poll books record the <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/james-blanch-and-william-barlow-in-the-westminster-pollbooks/">votes</a> of James Blanch, patten maker, in
three elections: 1780, 1784 and 1790.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBylawOfdMjvMqeW_WNEnf69Xrp1QptKXYZJ78c111fvud6rG8syP9dfxOvba1d8l7YwX8vmmCCOE6NIYKUOhRM8RJ7uBMGj0g34BVzDVq7QHpbnFHGespmJ3VL9Gxl4Fy8JcEFyufhvY/s1600/250px-Charles_James_Fox_by_Karl_Anton_Hickel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBylawOfdMjvMqeW_WNEnf69Xrp1QptKXYZJ78c111fvud6rG8syP9dfxOvba1d8l7YwX8vmmCCOE6NIYKUOhRM8RJ7uBMGj0g34BVzDVq7QHpbnFHGespmJ3VL9Gxl4Fy8JcEFyufhvY/s1600/250px-Charles_James_Fox_by_Karl_Anton_Hickel.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Charles James Fox</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I was delighted to discover that James voted
for the most radical candidate in two out of three of these elections. In the
election of 1780, he cast his vote for the radical Whig politician <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_James_Fox">Charles James Fox</a>. The latter was a supporter of the American and French revolutions
and a campaigner against slavery and in favour of religious tolerance and
individual liberty. Victorious in the 1780 election, he was lauded with the title ‘Man of the People’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">However, my ancestor was obviously not a
party man, since in 1784 he hedged his bets and voted for both the Tory Samuel
Hood (perhaps because he was something of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hood,_1st_Viscount_Hood">national naval hero</a>) and the Whig
<a href="http://home.worldonline.co.za/~townshend/cecilwray1.htm">Sir Cecil Wray</a> – even though Fox was standing in the same election. This was
the <a href="http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/westminister-election-of-1784.html">controversial ballot </a>in which Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, toured the
streets offering kisses in return for votes on behalf of Fox, who won narrowly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p>John Horne Tooke</o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">By the time of the 1790 election, James Blanch
was living in Cross Lane in the parish of St Martin-in-the- Fields: on this
occasion he voted for the radical <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horne_Tooke">John Horne Tooke</a>. A prominent member of the
Bill of Rights Society and the Society for Constitutional Reform, Horne Tooke
was strongly influenced by the writings of Tom Paine and was a supporter of the
working-class London Corresponding Society. His involvement in organizing an
abortive constitutional convention led to his arrest and imprisonment in the
Tower, along with leadings lights of the LCS, on a charge of treason. To great
popular acclaim, the jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I find it nicely ironic that John Horne
Tooke, the favoured candidate in 1790 of my mother’s ancestor James Blanch, was
exactly the kind of person that my father’s ancestor, Rev. William Robb, would
satirise and condemn in verse two years later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Joseph Priestley</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">James Blanch’s votes for Fox and Horne
Tooke are the only definite evidence I’ve found of radicalism among my direct ancestors.
However, I remain intrigued by the fact that, two generations later, my great-great-grandfather Daniel Roe, another shoemaker (he married Mary Ann Blanch,
the daughter of James Blanch’s son John), named his youngest son (my great-grandfather) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Joseph Priestley</i> Roe.
This was almost certainly a tribute to the great 18<sup>th</sup> century
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Priestley">dissenting minister</a>, inventor and radical reformer. Joseph Roe was born, in
1862, in Great Windmill Street, Soho, just a few doors away from the Red
Lion pub, where Marx and Engels had hammered out the first draft of the Communist
Manifesto, fourteen years earlier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI62Z94XyAKQwGjZoTEPG9KGh5GD9zkNNcwDRO9EJKj5DVuKBDpMLeAY4uKRKYuNBG6k91trIVTY3nGhJSeUWugLz-qdFGgfGLU0wMbx7aL96kau8240vps0RZz0lPGA2aVPEPo-Zdbio/s1600/guy-aldred.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI62Z94XyAKQwGjZoTEPG9KGh5GD9zkNNcwDRO9EJKj5DVuKBDpMLeAY4uKRKYuNBG6k91trIVTY3nGhJSeUWugLz-qdFGgfGLU0wMbx7aL96kau8240vps0RZz0lPGA2aVPEPo-Zdbio/s320/guy-aldred.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Guy Aldred</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Finally: I can claim a much more distant family connection with a more recent radical. Also on my mother's side of the family, it seems that the anarcho-communist writer and activist <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/guy-alfred-aldred-1886-1963/">Guy Alfred Aldred</a>, who died in 1963, was my fourth cousin twice removed. To put it another way: my great-great-great-grandfather was his great-great-great uncle...well, you get the general idea.</span></div>Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-14138918824742583442012-05-19T10:24:00.002+01:002012-05-19T10:25:16.513+01:00Something for the weekendJust heard this online at <a href="http://kcsm.org/">KCSM</a>, the Bay Area Jazz Station. It's 2.30 a.m. over there, but I often find their lazy late-night moods match mine on a slow Saturday morning. Lots of wonderful things about this - the Hoagy Carmichael tune, Oscar Peterson on piano, Satchmo's growl. But just marvel at the purity of Ella's voice...<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BEdhPfs8--Q" width="420"></iframe>Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-7319904616862683002012-05-16T17:02:00.000+01:002012-05-29T15:17:16.990+01:00Roundhead or Cavalier (or a bit of both)?<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">I imagine serious historians must tear
their hair out at programmes like<i> <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hr7k9">Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You? </a></i>which was on BBC 4 last night (though I noticed quite a few of them among the
contributors: they must have been reading <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/may/14/celebrity-academic-radio-tv-funding?newsfeed=true">this</a>). Me, I gave up a couple of
minutes in, when the presenter described Cromwell as an ‘egalitarian’. From the
little I saw, the programme committed the cardinal sin of history
documentaries: reading modern debates and divisions back into an era utterly
unlike our own. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Nevertheless, the parlour-game format
around which the programme was built – where can we see the ‘two tribes’ of
Roundhead and Cavalier in contemporary Britain, and which one do you belong to?
– is a bit of harmless fun. The trouble is, speaking for myself, it’s not a
question I find easy to answer – not any more, anyway. Once, in my
far-off youth, it was all so much simpler. Brought up a Methodist, with early
stirrings of socialist sympathies, I was an instinctive Roundhead. As a child,
‘Oliver Cromwell’ was probably my favourite in the Ladbybird history series: I
felt a natural sympathy for the spiritual simplicity, the political reformism,
even the clean, proto-modern lines of the uniforms, clothes, hairstyles. As for
the Cavaliers, they were so obviously everything we aspiring-working-class
Nonconformists were against: hierarchy, pomp, ritualism, tradition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But then, as I grew older, it became more
complicated. In my early twenties, I had a short-lived flirtation with
Catholicism. That’s to say, I converted, but lapsed soon afterwards, though I retained
strong residual sympathies in that direction, and if I were ever to become a
practising Christian again, I can’t imagine belonging to any other denomination.
I was inspired by the Catholic Worker movement and the liberation theologians
of Latin America, and my conversion fractured the connection within me between Protestantism and political radicalism. (It helped that evangelical
protestants, the modern-day heirs of seventeenth-century Puritanism, tended to
align themselves with the political right). Left-wing Catholicism offered me a
way of being traditionalist and sacramentalist in religion, while supporting
social justice on the political level.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Complicating things still further, my
researches in <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/">family history</a> led to the discovery that my father’s forebears
had been Aberdeenshire Episcopalians who (so family tradition had it) fought
for the Bonnie Prince in the ’45: indeed, my great-great-great-grandfather bore
the name Charles Edward Stuart Robb in his memory. As a result, I became
fascinated by the Jacobites and by extension the Stuarts: their cause seemed
far more glamorous than that of their dour Presbyterian opponents, with their
grim sabbatarianism and censorious kirk sessions (before which some of my
ancestors were apparently <a href="http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/george-robb-in-the-auchterless-kirk-session-records-part-1/">hauled </a>for various offences against purity and
sobriety). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">My theological and genealogical sympathies
have also inspired some recent revisionist historical reading, from which I’ve
learned, <i>inter alia,</i> that it was the Catholic <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/in-my-end-is-my-beginning-reflections.html">Mary Stuart</a> who tried to
introduce a degree of religious tolerance to Scotland, only to be thwarted by
the fanatically Calvinist and misogynist John Knox, just as it was her great
grandson James II, who, for all his autocratic ways, wanted to extend religious rights to both
Catholics and Dissenters, a policy that in part prompted the so-called Glorious
Revolution – supposedly the foundational moment of modern liberal democracy,
but from another perspective a coup by the Protestant elite. As for Charles II, he was just a lot more <i>fun</i> than his predecessor Cromwell: I enjoyed reading Jenny Uglow's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gambling-Man-Jenny-Uglow/dp/0571217346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337183153&sr=1-1">biography</a>, especially the unforgettable image of Charles and James rolling up their sleeves to help put out the Great Fire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Then, last year, I read Michael Braddick’s
superb revisionist <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gods-Fury-Englands-Fire-History/dp/0141008970/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337183203&sr=1-1">account </a>of the English Civil War, a period I’d never really
studied properly before. Braddick sees the various internecine wars of the
seventeenth century in these islands, not so much as the beginnings of English
political radicalism, but as a continuation of the religious conflict sparked by
Henry VIII’s rupture with Rome in the previous century. I found the book
revealing about the religious as well as the political beliefs of those who
rebelled against Charles I. I don’t think I’d realized before quite how important
Calvinism was to the religious outlook of the Puritans: rather than simplicity of
worship and equal access to the scriptures being their prime motivation, as the
Whig version of history taught us to believe, it was their core belief in the doctrine
of predestination - in the divine election for salvation of a chosen few (and
therefore the uselessness of human ‘works’) - that galvanised their opposition
to Church and King. Far from the Puritans being egalitarians or
proto-democrats, this was about the most elitist worldview imaginable, not to
mention one that tended towards a strident paternalism, a knowing-what’s-best
for the unsaved and unwashed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">For all of Charles I’s many faults and
missteps, Braddick’s book showed the battle for legitimacy between crown and
parliament as much more finely balanced than
I remembered. And the victory of the parliamentary cause seemed, in the end,
more like a military coup than a democratic revolution. In recent years, there
has been a tendency to confer retrospective secular sainthood on groups like
the <a href="http://www.levellers.org.uk/">Levellers </a>and to throw an ahistorical social-democratic patina over the
Roundheads generally. But reading Braddick’s history, Cromwell seemed more like
Lenin or Mao than Attlee or Bevan. As for the New Model Army, seeking to impose
their theocratic will by force of arms and (when in power) banning Christmas, closing down theatres and imposing strict dress codes, one was reminded less of
the dear old Labour Party than of the Taliban or the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">And if you want to see what happened when
the Puritans got a chance to found their own God-bothering commonwealth, just
think of New England later in the seventeenth century: the memory of what
happened at Salem is a useful corrective to any notion that they foreshadowed
modern egalitarian tolerance. Nearer to home, the three words ‘Cromwell in
Ireland’ should be enough to undermine any simple notion of a great democratic
liberator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It goes to show that you shouldn’t
try to interpret past conflicts in terms of modern categories. ‘Roundhead’ and
‘Cavalier’ aren’t timeless universals, but labels with very particular meanings
in a very different historical context. The same goes for ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ in
the next century, labels which are easily misconstrued in terms of today’s
Conservative-Labour divisions, when in fact (for example) Tories began as
supporters of the insurrectionist Jacobite Pretender, while the original Whigs
were those dour and paternalist Presbyterians again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Two more points. What if, rather than
representing two persistent ‘tribes’ of Britons, the Cavaliers and Roundheads
reflect two complementary aspects of the British spiritual and political psyche
that were unnaturally split apart some time in the sixteenth century (the
Reformation having a lot to do with it)? And what if, rather than representing
a cleavage in society, these labels reflect a fault-line that runs through each
of us? After all, it was said of Robbie Burns that he was both Jacobin and
Jacobite, a paradoxical position that sounds impossible to sustain, but one
with which I have an instinctive sympathy. What if there’s both a bit of the Roundhead
and a bit of the Cavalier in anyone with any kind of sympathetic imagination,
and the struggle isn’t to decide which one you are, or to defeat one or the
other, but to reconcile the warring tendencies within oneself...? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4318375667051435937.post-88691931656105969442012-05-11T14:28:00.000+01:002012-05-11T14:28:41.233+01:00Brody and blowback: reflections on 'Homeland'<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">So farewell then, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1796960/">Homeland</a></i>: or rather,
farewell Season 1, since we’re told that a second series is currently being <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/culture/claire-danes-arrives-in-israel-to-film-second-season-of-homeland-1.429423">filmed</a>. We’ll have to wait until the autumn to find out whether
Carrie’s delayed memory of Brody muttering the name of Abu Nazir’s son in his
sleep has been wiped by electro-convulsive therapy. (Apologies to
non-aficionados: it would take far too long to explain…) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As others have <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/may/06/homeland-british-tv">said</a>, <i>Homeland</i>
really has been the best thing on television for a long time: combining an
original premiss, nail-biting plot, intelligent script – and superb acting.
From such a stellar cast, it’s invidious to mention individual performances:
though Claire Danes deserves every award she’s got for her depiction of
obsessive CIA agent Carrie Mathison, while Mandy Patinkin as her grizzled
colleague Saul, and Morgan Saylor as Brody’s teenage daughter Dana also stand out,
and (as with <i>The Wire</i>) it was good to see two British actors, Damian Lewis and
David Harewood, taking on key roles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Any criticisms? To my mind, the first half
of the series, which cleverly played with our suspicions about whether or not
Brody had been ‘turned’ in captivity was more engaging than the later episodes,
which substituted the more traditional suspense of the thriller - will he/won’t
he (blow up himself and half the US government)? And I half-agree with <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100156753/homeland-great-drama-set-in-a-world-imagined-by-liberals/">Ed West</a> that Brody’s conversion to
Islam, and his turning from loyal US marine to potential al Qaeda suicide bomber, was not
entirely convincing. (For those with an interest in matters theological,
West links to a couple of <a href="http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/05/08/is-homeland-anti-christian/">interesting</a> <a href="http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/04/18/the-tv-series-homeland-never-gets-to-grips-with-its-key-question-why-would-a-us-soldier-embrace-islam/">articles</a> about the show by
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith – the first piece headed by a photo of three of the show’s
photogenic stars which provides more, ahem, eye candy than one is used to seeing
in the <i>Catholic Herald</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">My own marginal reservations about <i>Homeland</i> are slightly different
to West's. I wonder whether, in attempting to provide a plausible reason for why
a loyal US soldier would turn into a terrorist who would attack his own
country, the programme-makers have failed to reflect what we know of the actual
motivation of Islamist terrorists, and risked giving comfort to those who blame
the West for providing the rationale for terror.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">At about the half-way point in the series,
we see the hostage Sergeant Brody – unwashed, long-haired, bruised and beaten –
being taken from his hellish captivity, to the home of his captor, the
terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir, in a remote corner of northern Iraq. Brody is
allowed to wash and shave and given clean (ethnically and religiously appropriate) clothes. The experience looks like a
new birth, a rising from the dead, and indeed Nazir’s house - clean, bright,
book-lined – resembles a kind of paradise, after
the purgatory of captivity. The picture is completed by Nazir’s cute son Issa,
whom Brody is to teach English. Can this really be the hide-out of a notorious
terrorist? It looks more like the retreat of a noted scholar, or a spiritual
master, and indeed in this and subsequent episodes, Abu Nazir is often depicted
in this way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It could be argued that <i>Homeland</i> does, in fact,
show another side to Nazir. After all, before being given this chance of new
life, we see Brody (in scenes that are almost too gruesome to watch) being
beaten, tortured and (he believes) forced to murder a fellow prisoner. But the
programme fails to show any <i>connection</i> between Nazir the torturer and planner
of terrorist outrages, and Nazir the scholar, man of God and loving father.
Perhaps it’s expecting too much of as primetime thriller to get inside the mind
of a terrorist, but what’s surely missing from the depiction of Abu Nazir and
his world is the obsessiveness, the puritanical paranoia, the warped
religiosity of the fanatic, with which we’re all too familiar from al Qaeda propaganda
videos and the like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The portrayal of Nazir is actually of a
piece with <i>Homeland</i>’s sterling efforts to show Muslims in a favourable light.
Back in the US, we see the FBI pursue Tom Walker, another ex-captive American marine who definitely has been ‘turned', into a
DC mosque, where a number of innocent worshippers get killed in the crossfire.
The programme goes out of its way to depict the imam and his wife (despite her traditional
headscarf, shown as equal in status to her husband) as gentle, inoffensive
types, with the programme-makers’ desire not to offend reflected in the Arabic
greetings and general cultural sensitivity of Carrie and her colleagues. It feels
like reverse or compensatory stereotyping, of the kind we’re familiar with from
depictions of native Americans in anti-Westerns of the 60s and 70s, in which
every Indian seemed to be of the ‘we come in peace’ variety, as if deliberately
making up for decades of crude Hollywood racism. It’s not to say that such
imams and such mosques don’t exist, far from it: but would a terrorist stooge
like Walker, and his Saudi (and presumably Wahhabi) contact choose this kind of
mosque for their rendezvous? Wouldn’t it have been more convincing – if risking
accusations of more traditional negative stereotyping – to show something more
like the Finsbury Park or East London mosques?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As for the explanation for Brody turning
terrorist – the death of Nazir’s young son, to whom Brody has become
close, in a drone strike ordered by the
programme’s one unmistakable ‘baddie’, the US vice-president - one can see why
the scriptwriters hit on this, as it provides a powerful and intensely personal
justification for Brody’s anger against his own government. But I think Lucie-Smith is right to question whether someone like
Brody would ultimately put revenge for his captor’s son ahead of his attachment
to his own children. Ed West is also right that drone strikes
of this kind are hardly typical, and the episode distracts attention from the
undoubted fact that almost all of the massacres of innocent men, women and
children in Iraq after the fall of Saddam were carried out not by US forces but
by al Qaeda and their sectarian surrogates – led by people rather like Abu
Nazir - and were deliberate acts of mass murder, not accidental or ‘collateral’
damage. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Moreover, by choosing this event as
Brody’s, and by extension Nazir’s motivation for a terrorist attack against the
United States, the programme provides implicit support to blowback theorists, who misinterpret acts of Islamist terror as tit-for-tat repayment for western
actions, rather than as the working-out of a twisted clerical-fascist ideology.
As I’ve <a href="http://martininthemargins.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/tackling-blowback-theory-head-on.html">written before</a>, blowback theory gets it back to front: the reactionary
worldview comes first, and the sins of infidel westerners are mere excuses that
play into an existing narrative. Even if the actions of western governments
were blameless (and even when they are in support of Muslims, as in Bosnia),
they would still hate us: not for what we do, but because of what we <i>are</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">By making Brody’s decision to work for
Nazir a calm, rational choice based on emotions with which the viewer can
identify,<i> Homeland</i> is certainly convincing on the superficial plot level, but in doing so it
leaves no room for the role of ideology, or for the kind of brainwashing
process that has always been evident in the few cases of hostages ‘turning’ to
identify with their captors. There are hints earlier on in the series of Brody
developing a kind of love-hate attachment to his erstwhile torturer, Nazir, but
this is soon dropped in favour of the simpler motivation of revenge for Issa’s
death. The only sign, on Brody’s return, of his continuing identification with
his captors is his conversion to Islam, but this is kept in a kind of sealed
box (literally as well as figuratively: he says his prayers in a locked garage after his wife and children have gone to bed) that is separate from his dealings with his family and friends, and the
programme misses an opportunity to show how his new faith might have changed
his outlook, for good or ill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Having said all that, it’s surely a sign of
<i>Homeland</i>’s general brilliance that, despite these cavils, I still think it’s
the best television programme of the year. In its temporary absence, it’s time to
settle down and watch the <a href="http://skyarts.sky.com/prisoners-of-war-hatufim">original Israeli version</a>…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15608932251584881007noreply@blogger.com0