normblog

Providing connection

Julie Andrews - yes, this Julie Andrews - is putting in a word for adequately funding libraries. And good for her. I just wish she'd left out the bit knocking the internet:

Perhaps most important, libraries offer a powerful antidote to the isolation of the Internet, providing connection, support and community. Rather than wading in a solitary fashion through the morass of potential misinformation available on the Net...

Hey! I'm now connected by the internet to people in L.A., as I didn't used to be. And there's no 'rather than' about it; it's the internet as well as libraries. You know, just like being able to have Truffaut or Buñuel and The Sound of Music. And there's straight information there too, oodles of it.

Bird talk

If you like Charlie Parker and/or jazz, do yourself a favour and read this item. In fact, do yourself the favour anyway. It's about a man's passion, 'blurring the line between exhaustive and exhausting', one of those glorious insanities of a harmless kind of which human beings are so capable. A sample:

Not long ago, I listened to him [Phil Schaap on his radio programme] play a recording of "Okiedoke," a tune that Parker recorded in 1949 with Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. Schaap, in his pontifical baritone, first provided routine detail on the session and Parker's interest (via Dizzy Gillespie) in Latin jazz, and then, like a car hitting a patch of black ice, he veered off into a riff of many minutes' duration on the pronunciation and meaning of the title - of "Okiedoke." Was it "okey-doke" or was it, rather, "'okey-dokey," as it is sometimes articulated"? What meaning did this innocent-seeming entry in the American lexicon have for Bird? And how precisely was the phrase used and understood in the black precincts of Kansas City, where Parker grew up? Declaring a "great interest in this issue," Schaap then informed us that Arthur Taylor, a drummer of distinction "and a Bird associate," had "stated that Parker used 'okeydokey' as an affirmative and 'okeydoke' as a negative." And yet one of Parker's ex-wives had averred otherwise, saying that Parker used "okeydoke" and "okeydokey" interchangeably. (At this point, I wondered, not for the first time, where, if anywhere, Schaap was going with this.) Then Schaap introduced into evidence a "rare recording of Bird's voice," in which Parker is captured joshing around onstage with a disk jockey of the forties and fifties named Sid Torin, better known as Symphony Sid. After a bit of chatter, Sid instructs Parker to play another number: "Blow, dad, go!"

Okeydoke, says Bird.

Like an assassination buff looping the Zapruder film, Schaap repeated the snippet several times and then concluded that Charlie Parker did not use "okeydoke" as a negative. "This," Schaap said solemnly, "tends to revise our understanding of the matter." The matter was evidently unexhausted, however, as he launched a rumination on the cowboy origins of the phrase and the Hopalong Cassidy movies that Parker might well have seen, and perhaps it was at this point that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap's behalf.

(Thanks: GC.)

Philosophers and the uses of philosophy

Does philosophy have anything to say that is of relevance to the way non-philosophers think about the world? This question is put to a group of philosophers, and one of them, Jonathan Barnes, answers 'not very much'. This is what he says by way of explaining his answer with respect specifically to moral philosophy:

[G]lance about at our colleagues. There's Professor W, who has written some brilliant pieces on ethics: Is he more honourable in his philandering than my neighbour Bernard? And there's Professor D, the most competent logician of the age: Are his practical reasonings better regulated than those of my neighbour Brian? The answers are: No, and No. Moreover, I incline strongly to think that ethics, as it's done by philosophers, is more likely to confuse than to enlighten non-philosophers, and that logic, as it's done by logicians, tends to produce logic-choppers rather than reasoners.

Hmmm... I don't know Jonathan Barnes; but one thing I do know is that should I ever need a philosopher to speak up for me in some matter, I won't now be approaching him first. That Professor W is a philosopher and a philanderer, while the non-philosopher Bernard is faithful to his spouse, only shows that personal virtue doesn't necessarily accompany intellectual learning, or analytical ability, or an understanding of the complexities of some moral issue or other. However, going out of his way to deny the use of learning, analysis and attempting to understand the contours of difficult moral issues, Barnes doesn't give the best possible advertisement for his subject.

Fortunately, Raymond Geuss, responding to the same question, makes some observations which are usefully to the point: about the internal complexity of many of the moral and political concepts in common use, and the need to attain some clarity about their different components and meanings. Unfortunately, in offering these observations, Geuss gives out the global-dinner-party view that there was nothing at all complex, unclear or requiring philosophical analysis in the arguments surrounding the Iraq war, in particular those connected with democracy. It was all just obvious (in the dinner-party direction, needless to say). Geuss thus demonstrates - what you should already know - that a philosopher can say intelligent and stupid things in the same place, and therefore you shouldn't take what a philosopher says as beyond challenge; just as you shouldn't take what anyone else says as beyond challenge.

Philosophy itself, indeed, encourages a questioning frame of mind. It should also encourage those who practise it to perceive that moral issues that divide intelligent people can have complexities to them, especially where they concern alternative courses of action that are both – or all – costly in human terms; and should encourage them, likewise, not to pretend in such circumstances that their own preferred view just stands out boldly in the facts, as if it had been written there by a Superior Hand. It should encourage these attitudes, but evidently doesn't always do so. That is not the fault, though, of philosophy, merely of the fallible humans that we all are, including even those who are philosophers.

Reticent generals

Jesus! No, I don't mean by that to offend anyone's religious sensibilities. I'm merely referring to the figure whose name is invoked in this rank piece of apologetics by the Reverend John Bell on the BBC's Thought for the Day. You can listen to what he has to say here.

I'm not an apologist for the cabal of generals who rule Myanmar... but should we be surprised if the leaders of a country which Western governments have accorded pariah status are reticent to defer to our wishes?

That's what they are, reticent. And it's 'our wishes', rather than a will to help people in distress. Bell says it again later:

[Our] cultural ignorance [as displayed in Iraq] may explain why the Burmese generals, even if they do not speak for the majority of citizens, feel more reticent about welcoming unknown Western experts than they are about receiving the aid supplies now trickling into the country.

He's not an apologist, but he accentuates reticence over other possible motives that could be at work with the Burmese generals - such as a worry about opening the country to influences of an unsettling kind. Then comes Jesus. This is in a concluding reference by Bell to the 'untidy way' in which Jesus responded to need. 'Suffering,' Bell says, 'whether in the body or the body politic, is always a mystery.' Perhaps we should be sending that message in multiple copies to the people who have been stricken by Cyclone Nargis. (Thanks: SdeW.)

Marx and the agency of change

[T]he redemptive role attributed by Marx to the united workers of the world was taken over by the rich, formerly stigmatised as grinders of the faces of the poor...

So argues Jeremy Seabrook. Never mind about 'redemptive'. It suggests a saviour role for the workers of the world and I prefer to think about these issues in non-religious terms. The question I wish to address, though, is this one: why did Marx think it would be the working class that would act as an agent of revolutionary change, change to create a more just society than capitalism?

It's not because the workers were poor and oppressed. That Marx thought of the modern working class as having 'nothing to lose' may have been for him a necessary condition of socialist change; but it wasn't a sufficient one. Had the latter been his assumption, he could have envisaged socialism as a possible product of peasant revolt or of the uprising of a slave class. But this wasn't his line of thought. One reason why it wasn't was that he saw capitalism as creating the material preconditions for socialist economy. He wasn't thinking of a socialism of shared indigence and hardship. There is, however, a second reason which is companion to that first one. The kind of society that Marx envisaged emerging from capitalism would require a populace that had been organized and educated by capitalism itself to be able to run an advanced modern economy. In this sense, what mattered to him about the working class was not so much its (relative) impoverishment or oppression, but its capacity. I mean its political capacity: the result of characteristics it possessed - geographical concentration, trade union and political organization, literacy, technical competence, political and economic experience - through being integral to the running of capitalist society itself, at the same time as it mobilized its forces to oppose and reform certain features of that society.

Marx got many things wrong. But some he got right. Such hope as there is today for achieving a world in which there is less systemic injustice, more freedom, less poverty, greater equality, rests in significant part on the kind of populations that developed capitalist economies increasingly put in place (this despite every countervailing tendency encouraging selfishness, greed, and so forth): populations educated, increasingly aware, competent - and not well-shaped for tolerating being dictated to.

Calculated act of cruelty

Two days ago I posed the question of whether denying people access to food could count as a crime against humanity. Now This Is Zimbabwe points to evidence of food being destroyed in a country suffering from hunger and malnutrition: Zanu PF thugs - or should we call them 'militants'? - are burning piles of maize.

Gaps in thought

Nonsense that is expressed clearly is always preferable to the kind of stuff being highlighted by David Thompson today, but from time to time it's worth being reminded that this exists:

The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision - felt not seen - and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster's subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.

Ahhh... a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is not only multiple but also present. Much better than such a gap or trajectory that is multiple while absent. Just think what it might get up to in its absent multiplicity. But that threshold in between nodes - ouch! It must really hurt. And the gap that is felt but not seen. They were talking about it on The Wire. You feel me?

A revisionist account of atheism

The world being complex, understanding it isn't always easy. Still, you can make the task more difficult than it already is. On the strength of a letter of Albert Einstein's coming up for auction in London this week, Andrew Brown starts by telling us that he - Einstein - was a model atheist. Straightforward enough, you might think. In the letter Einstein says that the word 'god' is a 'product of human weaknesses', and he places religion amongst 'the most childish superstitions'. A dictionary definition of atheism gives it as 'a disbelief in the existence of deity' and 'the doctrine that there is no deity'.

By the end of his post, however, Brown has arrived at the conclusion that Einstein 'had rid himself of belief in atheism too'. By what route does he arrive there? He arrives there via the observation that Einstein accepted that devout believers could share the 'striving to make life beautiful and noble'. So to be an atheist, on this revisionist account of what atheism is, you have in fact to be either a fool or someone impervious to empirical evidence: you have not merely not to believe in a deity, you have also to deny that religious believers can work for the good of humankind. The nonsense of Brown's short journey is made more obvious by the clarity with which he traces it out; and that, at least, is to his credit.

Australia fair

You can dismiss it as empty rhetoric or mumble something else as to why it isn't really of consequence. Or else you can condemn it for the hateful thing it is, and better still, try to do something about it. Kevin Rudd's government is seeking legal advice on the possibility of taking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the International Court of Justice for incitement to genocide. Greg Sheridan thinks the move is unlikely to succeed, but praises it nonetheless. (Thanks: BD.)

Essential jazz

David Remnick offers a list of 100 essential jazz albums. Like all such lists, it invites reservations and quarrels. So... why not?

For Miles, I too would have Kind of Blue, but I wouldn't have either Birth of the Cool or Bitches Brew; and I'd have the Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, rather than just the Highlights album. Despite its sales record, I wouldn't have Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert. And Pharoah Sanders's Karma has surely been included only as a joke. Top marks, though, for the inclusion of Art Blakey's Moanin'.

Of course, I have my own slowly growing list, which other people would doubtless want to fault. It's a perilous business. (Thanks: Stuart.)

The rest of the Booker

To go with the Best of the Booker Prize event, for which voting is currently in progress, Scott Pack is organizing a 'Best of the Rest of the Booker'. Any shortlisted book that failed to win will be eligible for this. Scott has called on a panel of judges to come up with its shortlist from all the titles that failed to win. Though I'm not on the panel, here's a nomination from me: Amongst Women by John McGahern.

The protocols of Comment is Free

Comment is Free is a quasi-blog - somewhere between a giant group blog and a blog-provider - run by the Guardian newspaper. The Guardian is known as being a liberal paper. Comment is Free is not a site of reportage but an opinion site.

Hamas is a political organization the character of which is indicated in part by its charter. In this document, you will find reference to the notorious anti-Semitic forgery 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and to the old theme of a Jewish plan to dominate the world:

Today it is Palestine and tomorrow it may be another country or other countries. For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Only when they have completed digesting the area on which they will have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion, etc. Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.

The Hamas charter also refers to the 'Nazism of the Jews' and to Jews as 'merchants of war'. It says that 'Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims'. It proclaims:

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!

Well, so... Comment, after all, is free. And this is a point of view. Let's give the guys a platform.

If that is the shape of liberalism, show me the shape of a public disgrace.

In all logic, universal intervention

Those who opposed the Iraq war know themselves to have been so right about everything, so foresightful, so vindicated, so deliciously right-down-to-their-little-white-cotton-socks right, that you wonder why some of them persist in further washing their rightness in one or another form of... hogwash. (Sorry, hogs!) Could they be a bit uncomfortable about something? Only the latest offering of the amnesiac claim that humanitarian justifications for the war were 'post-facto', the piece here by Simon Tisdall gives it a twist worthy of his special intellectual talents:

Despite Blair's post-facto justification for the Iraq war - that it was morally right to save Iraq's people from Saddam Hussein - Iraq and Afghanistan were, initially at least, primarily self-interested military-led operations that had little to do with saving lives, more with assuring an illusory "western security". If this were not so, Blair would in all logic have supported intervention to protect Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers or North Koreans against their murderous rulers.

Give that your full appreciative attention; don't let those taste buds miss any aspect of its complexly wonderful flavour. In all logic - no less - if there'd been any concern on Blair's part for the Iraqi people, he could not have supported intervention in Iraq without also supporting it against Israel and North Korea. Well, why not just everywhere? Everywhere where anything seriously bad was going on? Let's focus on two things to indicate how clever this is. (1) North Korea's nukes. (2) The fact that not even so virtuous and blessed a leader as Saint Tony can intervene everywhere simultaneously. Nay, not even the mighty US of freedom-loving, home-of-the-brave A, with all its just but deadly firepower, can do it.

Now, here's something else. The dead-tree Guardian today carries (on page 17) a world briefing column by Tisdall, 'The perils of unilateral intervention', which is a somewhat abridged version of the piece I've linked to. And it omits the quoted paragraph. Could this be because somebody at the Groan realized that Simon Tisdall's 'in all logic' argument is a killer objection to any intervention anywhere ever?

The president as 'he'

Is Hillary Clinton getting ready to face the fact that she's lost?

Speaking to voters in the Appalachian state, she said: "All the kitchen table issues that everybody talks to me about are ones that the next president can actually do something about, if he actually cares about it." Realising her faux pas, she added: "More likely if she cares about it!"

She could just have been reading David Gelernter, of course. Except that she corrected herself.

Uncontaminated views

In today's Education Guardian John Crace writes of the rapid growth, since 9/11, of research into terrorism, and of a concern about how expert are the terrorism 'experts' called on for their opinions by the media, and called on to act as witnesses in terror trials. I've no doubt there are legitimate grounds for concern here; in any burgeoning sphere of research, some of those laying claim to expertise are likely to have questionable credentials.

Be this as it may, Crace's column contains one most enjoyable detail. David Miller, professor of sociology at Strathclyde University, is quoted as having the following worry:

The real issue is one of independence: many of the expert witnesses to have appeared for the prosecution have been associated with rightwing or pro-Zionist organisations. Under these circumstances, how can the expertise not be in some way contaminated?

It is hard, reading that, not to wonder whether Miller has it as a general view that every political leaning or allegiance - rightward, leftward; anti- as well as pro-Zionist - contaminates; or if it is only the particular leanings and allegiances he names that do that. You don't have to wait long for an answer:

Miller is openly leftwing - one of those trendy critical theorists that Schmid takes a pop at - and there's not a cat in hell's chance of anyone ever asking him to stand as an expert witness. At least for the prosecution.

It would be OK then, would it, for him to be an expert witness for the defence? It's like: if you drink water while immersed in water, you're not really drinking; you're only drinking if you drink water while sitting in a tub of beer.

If your views are sound, then you're clean. Why has no one ever thought of that before?

In amongst the top cricket blogs

If you're one of those who skips over the posts about cricket when you meet them, you won't be interested in this one. (Go on, get along now.) But I'm pleased to be able to report that, despite the fact of carrying only a limited amount on the subject, normblog has made it on to a list of cricket blogs. Cricket Buzz is itself a cricket blog, run by Sagar Satapathy and P. Neelakantha Achary. At the weekend they posted their list of Top 50+ Cricket Blogs, and lo and behold, amongst these you will find normblog. I am honoured to be included and send back my thanks to the guys at Cricket Buzz. You might like to check out their top sledging incidents as well. An oldie but a goodie:

England player Jardine complained that one of the Australian players called him a bastard. Australian captain Bill Woodfull turns to his team, points to Jardine and asked "Which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?"

Writer's choice 154: Rosy Thornton

Rosy Thornton is a lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, having formerly been a Fellow of New Hall for 16 years. She teaches property law, landlord and tenant law and Women and the Law, and has published in these fields. Rosy's first novel, More Than Love Letters, came out in 2006. Her second novel, Hearts and Minds (a tale of the internal politics of a fictional Cambridge college), was published in hardback in 2007; the paperback is due out in June 2008. Here Rosy writes about Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

Rosy Thornton on North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

There is something about the moral certainties of the Victorian novel which makes it perfectly suited to appeal to the teenage ideologue. Her distinctive blending of the romantic ideal with a keen sense of wrongs to be righted made Elizabeth Gaskell the favourite author of my student years, and North and South, in particular, my favourite book. (I shall leave the Freudians to speculate as to why I should have chosen for that special distinction - ahead of Mary Barton, for example, or the tear-jerking Ruth - a novel whose hero, John Thornton, bears the same name as my father!) The pivotal riot scene, which sees heroine Margaret Hale shielding Mr Thornton from the mob of angry mill-hands and being accidentally struck unconscious by a hurled stone, never failed to provide me with the twin thrills of moral outrage and romantic longing.

She lay like one dead on Mr. Thornton's shoulder. Then he unfolded his arms, and held her encircled in one for an instant: 'You do well!' said he. 'You fall - you hundreds - on one man; and when a woman comes before you, to ask you for your own sakes to be reasonable creatures, your cowardly wrath falls upon her!'

I read it until the pages drooped.

Our reading tastes, of course, shift with age and I had not thought about the book in 20 years when, in November 2004, the BBC screened Sandy Welch's excellent television adaptation. Although substantial liberties were taken, especially with the ending, the serial captured all of the passion and moral fervour of the original. It had me racing off to wallow in a re-reading of the novel. It also found me logging on to the BBC's drama messageboard, where a group of like-minded fans were discussing the book and its adaptation in terms at once emotionally charged and impressively well-informed. When the BBC, instituting economies, dispensed with the messageboard a few months later, a group of the debaters set up an independent discussion forum devoted to all things North and South.

One of the things to which the new site played host was the posting by forum members of North and South 'fanfic'. Fanfic is an internet phenomenon which may be unfamiliar to readers of this blog, inhabiting as it does a very different corner of the web-based literary forest. Devotees of an author, book, film or television series post for one another's amusement their own stories or scripts based upon the original; sequels, prequels, parallel narratives, altered settings and new adventures for the characters all abound. A spot of googling and you will uncover reams of Star Trek fanfic, EastEnders fanfic, Harry Potter fanfic, Jane Austen fanfic. Did you know that Russell T. Davies, original screenwriter of the modern revival of Doctor Who, previously wrote Doctor Who fanfic on the net? Or that popular teen author Meg Cabot started out writing fanfic inspired by Anne McCaffrey's fantasy novels?

I read the North and South-inspired stories of my fellow messageboarders and was extremely impressed. I felt fired to take a stab myself, and posted an initial chapter. The response was encouraging; I wrote some more. Within three months I found to my surprise that I had completed a full-length novel: a pastiche sequel to Elizabeth Gaskell's book. Before this, I had written not a word of fiction since the 'imaginative essays' we were obliged to produce at school. In my daily existence I am a legal academic, and my output had previously included books rather more prosaic in nature, such as the less than passion-filled Property Disrepair and Dilapidations: A Guide to the Law. But the world of fanfic is a perfect training ground for the novice author. The characters are there, the setting is there, the loose threads of the plot are there, just waiting for you to take them up and set to work. Writing can be an isolating business, and feedback difficult to obtain - certainly before you reach the heady heights of securing an agent or editor. Your nearest and dearest have watched the pile of A4 paper growing on the kitchen table with alarm and despondency - the last thing they want is be asked to read it. But for the fanfic author an audience is out there, ready and waiting: they share your obsession and are thus perfectly primed to be receptive to your story. The discipline of posting finished chapters sequentially each week is also an interesting one, in an age when the magic of Microsoft has made it both easy and tempting to go back and change and tinker. Curiously, it is much the same discipline to which Gaskell was subject when writing North and South, which was originally published in weekly instalments in Dickens's Household Words. (The author herself, it must be said, did not enjoy the constraint; her preface to the eventual printed volume complained that serialization had made it 'impossible to develop the story in the manner originally intended'.)

Having completed the Gaskell pastiche, I found that I had been bitten by the writing bug, and embarked immediately upon my first independent novel, More Than Love Letters. The voice that I found emerging once I stopped writing in imitation Gaskellese was light, contemporary and mildly satirical. It also tended towards the humorous. This last came as quite a surprise, as it is difficult to discern a mote of levity in much of Gaskell's work - perhaps why Austen has survived as a more constant favourite of mine into an adulthood both more cynical and more tolerant of imperfection.

At the heart of my love of North and South is the way in which Margaret and Thornton's slowly building romantic understanding is intertwined with their political rapprochement. Gaskell famously portrays a clash of worlds and a conflict of viewpoints, gradually brought to resolution: Margaret's emotional sympathy with the plight of the individual cotton mill-hands (associated with the south and the feminine) and Thornton's focus (polarized as being north, male and cerebral) upon the overall needs of the enterprise, as being greater than its parts. It is a sign of my enduring preoccupation with the book that the same parallel lies at the heart of More Than Love Letters. My own heroine - named Margaret by her clergyman father after Margaret Hale - moves not north but east, to Ipswich, where she meets a man of importance in the town: not mill-owner and magistrate as John Thornton was in Milton Northern but the local Member of Parliament. Although the setting is contemporary, my Margaret has brought with her all the prerequisites of a Victorian heroine, from palely translucent skin to burning moral zeal. Where Margaret Hale goes about the poor working families of Milton with her basket of provisions, my Margaret ministers to the socially excluded of Ipswich through a hostel for homeless women. And the clash of ideologies is replicated as well: my MP is a New Labour pragmatist, a believer in the compromises of power and the need to focus on the bigger picture, while my Margaret represents the single-issue, non-party left, caring nothing for broader policy aims if they come at the expense of individual suffering. Just as in North and South, the working out of their political differences runs alongside the story of how they fall in love.

A shared affection for North and South and a coming together of like minds in cyberspace was responsible for more than just my own launch into the writing of fiction. Two other members of that original band of BBC messageboarders - Phillipa Ashley and Elizabeth Hanbury - have also gone on to publish novels after limbering up with 'N&S fanfic'.

The internet is a remarkable place – and an unlikely one, perhaps, in which to find Elizabeth Gaskell's great industrial novel exerting an inspirational influence 150 years after its publication.

[All the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, are listed here, here and here.]

On not letting it all hang out

The post here by Genevieve Maitland Hudson is marred by a piece of fashionable guardianista silliness suggesting that Tony Blair might have thought his own sincerity was sufficient grounds for going to war in Iraq (on which type of thing I've pretty well said what I want to say already). But I commend the post to you anyway. It contains some sound advice.

There's a school of thought according to which, if you have 'issues' with people you know reasonably well, the best policy is to be upfront about it. Just say what's on your mind, talk things through in an open way. My own experience, for what it's worth, is that this can easily bring on disaster. There are people between whom it can work, done with care and mutual consideration - some family, some intimate others. But with those at a greater emotional remove, and even with some friends, directness often burns too hot. Better stick to conventional forms of politeness: to tact, discretion, not saying what you think.

Two Jewish states

Adam LeBor looks at Israel on its birthday - how it got to be the two countries it now is, and what needs to be done to secure peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

Disaster relief and crimes against humanity

Whether or not the practicalities of speedily delivering aid where it is most needed in Burma now speak in favour of overriding Burmese sovereignty is not something I feel able to judge. I don't know enough about conditions on the ground to know if an attempt by the UN, other agencies or outside powers, to act independently of the Burmese junta, and against opposition from it, would be effective.

Whether or not it would be, however, last week's statement about this by Britain's UN envoy John Sawers - to the effect that the UN's responsibility-to-protect commitment doesn't apply in present circumstances - raises an important question. Sawers is reported to have said that the 2005 resolution establishing that commitment 'relates to acts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and so forth, rather than government responses to natural disasters'. But, in saying that, he would seem to take it for granted that a government's response to natural disaster could not itself amount to a crime against humanity. Is that in fact so?

There's an article by Sigrun Skogly in the International Journal of Human Rights for 2001, arguing for an extension of the concept of crimes against humanity so that it might cover severe violations of certain social and economic rights: as when a government denies people access to food or blocks humanitarian food aid. Part of Skogly's case is that the various legal instruments defining crimes against humanity are somewhat open-ended in any case; as well as the specific offences they list, they also include reference to 'other inhumane acts'. This is to be found in both Article 6 (c) of the Nuremberg Charter and Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. As Gareth Evans points out in a post on Comment is Free today, the latter of these has:

Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

It is hard to see why deliberately withholding, obstructing or delaying food and other aid to the victims of natural disaster in such a way that thousands of extra lives are lost in consequence should not qualify, under this wording, as a crime against humanity.