normblog

De-nationalization

Linda Colley is worried about the extent of US influence upon our sovereign island. She speaks of 'London's postwar position of considerable clientage to Washington in terms of foreign policy and much else'; she says that 'America's influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised'. From one of the examples she gives you can see why it bothers her:

The central place of deposit for Britain's historic archives at Kew, for instance, used to be called the Public Record Office, but is now re-named the National Archives. Why? Presumably because this is what the US styles its central place of archival deposit in Washington.

Horrors and begorrahs! At first I naively thought that 'National' might fix the thing with a nicely localizing tag, but once it has been pointed out that this could be a crude borrowing... well, they might just as well have called it the Star Spangled Banner Archive.

Cranberry

I'm going out on a limb here. Too bad. From just about everything I've read, most of the audience are loving it, but after watching the second episode I'm bound to say that I think the BBC's production of Cranford is lousy - a missed opportunity if ever there was one. Naturally, it's most tastefully done in a BBCish sort of way, with an excellent cast and some impressive performances. If you forget the book, maybe it comes over better. But if you don't forget it, this is but a pale caricature of a fine novel.

These are my gripes.

First, the narrator's voice - its understatement, its subtleties, its irony - is crucial to the whole atmosphere of Elizabeth Gaskell's book, and it is lost in the adaptation. In part, that may be unavoidable; it's television, not another piece of writing. But the atmosphere of quiet humour and affectionate observation, building slowly, one story at at time, to create a series of portraits of the main women protagonists, has been replaced on the screen by hectic and rackety comings and goings, with the focus shifting every moment from one narrative thread to another, sub-plot crowding upon sub-plot.

Which is the second thing that's wrong. The whole is too busy: there are too many stories running at once. In the book the focus is more spare, encouraging the reader to take in every detail. In last night's episode, hardly had Miss Deborah keeled over dead - a rather significant event in the architecture of Gaskell's tale - than the scene shifted to another death in the community, that of a young child. I'm sorry to have to report that, in my own case, this speed of transition merely prompted the thought that the programme could do with a few more early departures to the great beyond, to get the cast of characters and collection of sub-plots down to a more manageable number.

Third, there are now more men about, and there's more young romance, than in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. There, the presence of men is rationed and precise - important to the balance the author (quite explicitly) intended. I have nothing against either men or young romance, but in the proportions they appear here they unbalance something that makes the original the uniquely compelling creation it is.

So... I have no wish to spoil anyone else's fun. I hope you enjoy the rest of it, if that's what you've been doing so far. Cranford it ain't. The makers would have done better trying for a greater fidelity to that, than adding on, as they have, other Gaskell works. (And this is to say nothing of the stories original to Cranford that the BBC series has actually wrecked for no good reason one can see.)

Free speech but no platform

Round at Harry's Place, Peter Tatchell discusses whether the Oxford Union should be hosting David Irving and Nick Griffin in the debate this evening. He thinks they shouldn't be, and I agree with that. But he argues for the view in an ambiguous way, confusing the issue of whether free speech rights should be extended to fascists with the question whether individuals or organizations are obliged to offer fascists a platform on which to express their views. Thus Peter asks:

Are fascists entitled to free speech? Or are some people so threatening and dangerous - especially to minority race, sexuality and faith communities - that it is legitimate to limit their freedom of expression?... [W]hy should fascists be given free speech when they would, if given half a chance, deny free speech to others?

Fascists are entitled to free speech if we consider this to be a basic human right. Of course, that right is not absolute; there is a limit that prohibits incitement to violence. But within that limit fascists are - and they should be - free to say what they please. The question why they should be when they would deny the same right to others isn't to the point. You don't have to qualify to enjoy rights of free speech. That's the point of treating them as rights.

From what Peter Tatchell goes on to argue, however, it becomes clear that he doesn't need to compromise free speech principles to think that the Oxford Union shouldn't have invited Irving or Griffin:

Support for free speech does not oblige the Oxford Union to reward these men with a prestigious public platform, which will give them an air of respectability, raise their public profile and allow them to espouse their intolerant views. It is helping them propagate their bigotry. Not offering hate-mongers a platform is not the same as banning them.

Precisely so. The same reasons that told against Columbia University's invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in September apply in this case.

Two views on Annapolis

Amos Oz on the prospects at Annapolis. And Eric Lee on what he would say there if he were Israeli prime minister.

Inside the ruined country

Under that title, there's an extended report from Zimbabwe by Aoife Kavanagh in yesterday's Irish Times. It's behind a subscription wall, unfortunately, but here is an excerpt, on health-related matters:

The downward spiral of the economy even affects the dead. In rural areas, people can no longer afford to buy coffins for their loved ones. Neither can they afford to register their deaths. The truth is that nobody knows exactly how many people are dying in Zimbabwe from hunger or disease. In Bulawayo, the local, state-owned newspaper, the Chronicle, used to regularly publish the number of people who died from starvation in the area, until the government banned it from doing so.

Contaminated water, poor nutrition and a HIV/Aids rate of 15 per cent would place heavy demands on any health service. But in Zimbabwe the health service is failing the people when they need it most.

The country's public hospitals have almost ground to a halt, so much so that if a patient needs a simple procedure, like a couple of stitches or an injection, the instruments or the antiseptic might not be available.

Two weeks ago, three of the country's main hospitals were without electricity for more than four days. Fires burned outside the kitchen doors so staff could cook food to feed their patients.

Half of all medical posts are now vacant, as doctors leave for London or Dublin or Sydney to earn a decent wage.

Dr Andrew Fairbairn, a white Zimbabwean, whose family has been here for two generations, is one of the few doctors who hasn't left. He runs a private clinic on the outskirts of Harare. Every week he watches the gradual but persistent decay of the health system. "Medical care is almost not available to people who can't afford it, such that someone needing surgery or chronic medication cannot get it," he says.

When we met he was making plans to travel to Baghdad for two months as a doctor-for-hire in order to earn some foreign currency before coming home again. He says he is struggling to keep his clinic going because of the severe drugs shortages and the spiralling cost of treatment. "It's shocking to see some elderly people coming in here, wasting away, losing weight because they can barely afford to buy food," he says. "Many people are cutting their medication in half, or not taking it at all. They come to me and ask me which of their medicines they can do without because they can't pay for them."

Restricted by the price or the unavailability of certain drugs, pharmacists occasionally stock medicines not registered by the Zimbabwean drugs authorities. Friends of Dr Fairbairn's have been arrested and thrown in jail for days for attempting to supply their customers with the drugs they need. "A couple of pharmacies have been closed down. It's common for them to be arrested on a Friday so that they squirm in an over-crowded cell all weekend without access to a lawyer," he says.

(Thanks: SC.)

Pilgrimage

Adèle and I returned yesterday from a visit to Austen country. More specifically, we'd been to Chawton to see the house where Jane Austen lived from 1809 until the last few weeks of her life, in 1817. The house is now a museum, and we walked about it looking at everything in a suitably reverent way. For me the highlight of the visit was this - the table at which she wrote. The very one. I stood before it in wonder.

We then had a bite to eat in a place across the road called 'Cassandra's Cup', before heading off to Winchester. There we went to the house at 8 College Street where Jane died on 18 July 1817, and to Winchester Cathedral where she is buried. Her gravestone bears the words:

The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her and the warmest love of her intimate connections.

And of how many thousands of readers?

(There's an old piece here from the New York Times on the Chawton house.)

Records as a barrier against the darkness

Writing about the origin of the concept of 'the record' and the proliferation of more and more bizarre types of record - 'eating jelly with chopsticks against the clock, assembling giant stacks of poppadoms'; 'building the world's largest chocolate igloo'; 'seeing how far a human [can] blow a Malteser with a straw' - Joe Moran succeeds in situating the phenomenon at a deep level, in the very lineaments of the human condition:

[E]veryone, not just the record breaker, creates these little bubbles of meaning, drawing a line around a tiny portion of the world to make the arbitrariness of life bearable.

Different thresholds

Joan Bakewell starts out in this piece with what she calls a dilemma, but resolves it swiftly and without any apparent difficulty. The dilemma is between 'show[ing] tolerance and understanding of a different culture' and responding in a properly critical way when people of another culture impose 'barbarities' on women - as in the case of the woman in Saudi Arabia recently sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being raped by seven men; or the case of Maryam Hosseinkhah, in Tehran's Evin prison because she has been campaigning for equality for women. In Bakewell's eyes, there is no real dilemma. Those who uphold and enforce such laws are to be forthrightly condemned; pressure should be brought to bear on the countries in question by Western political leaders and high-profile women. In other words (my words rather than hers), respect for other cultures has its limits - limits set by certain universal human rights standards applicable to everyone, women as well as men.

Admirably clear on the basic point, Bakewell unfortunately risks confusing the issue by running together two questions: that of respect for other cultures and that of the limits of state sovereignty. She writes:

Now that the Iraq war has discredited the case for humanitarian intervention, we are back with the theory of respecting the sovereignty of another state and its laws.

I'll just say in passing that if the Iraq war has really discredited the case for humanitarian intervention, this is bad news for the future of the international legal system and even worse news for potential future victims of genocide and other mass atrocities. But, in any case, the instances Bakewell is discussing are not relevant to the issue of intervention and sovereignty. Even not discredited, even understood as a legitimate form of action for dealing with large-scale state criminality and the rescue of populations under grave attack, humanitarian intevention requires some minimum threshold. There can be discussion about what this threshold ought to be; but it is unlikely to allow military action in response to single cases of punishment, however horrific, or to the imprisonment of individuals (or even small groups), however unjustified. The threshold for overriding sovereignty is bound to be higher - much, much higher - than the threshold for criticizing the ways of other cultures, the virtues of tolerance and respect notwithstanding.

Labor winning

You may have forgotten this - if, that is, you ever knew it. But I made him what he is today. I'm talking about Kevin Rudd. Ever since we met at the SCG in January, he was destined to become Prime Minister. (Thanks: Jim N.)

An Iranian Schindler

A normblog reader in Iran emails:

I read your post about the NYT's article on the Iranian TV series. Maybe some notes can be useful; the basis of the story is true and the Persian section of Yad Vashem's site has an article about the Iranian Ambassador in Paris, Abdol Hossein Sardari Qajar, who during World War II helped Jewish people to flee from occupied France.

The TV series was not a faithful historical movie: it showed that the Ambassador was a bad man who sold the passports to Jews and did not give them for humanitarian motives. And there was another hero, the young student in love with the Jewish girl, who worked at the embassy too and helped Jews because of his faith in humanity and his love. Historically, that seems not to be true and it was not justice about the Ambassador; it seems that, as the Yad Vashem site asserts regardless of the TV series, Sardari has helped those people on several occasions that could have put him in danger too...

About the subtle negative message, I can agree with the NYT's reporter; but it was very important, I think, that the movie apparently and several times mentioned that the Holocaust happened, and in fact the structure of the story is based on this fact. One can consider it as a matter of political schizophrenia within the ruling elite in Iran, or a way that some in the regime have found to draw its line with Ahmadinejad and his crazy theorists - I do not know.

On Abdol Hossain Sardari see also here.