normblog

Dude on the street

Christopher Hitchens (via Stygius) writes about a vanquished cliché:

The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase "The Arab Street"?
.....
The London-based newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi, which has for some time been a surrogate voice for "insurgent" talk in the Arab diaspora, polled its readers after the Iraqi elections and had the grace to print the result. About 90 percent had been favorably impressed by the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future. This is a somewhat more accurate use of the demotic thermometer than the promiscuous one to which we have let ourselves become accustomed. Meanwhile, the streets of, say, Beirut have been filled with demonstrators who are entirely fed up with having their lives and opinions taken for granted by parasitic oligarchies.
.....
The battle for clarity of language is a part of this larger contest...

Read the rest. The Iraqi street. The Lebanese street. And a street in Hilla today after the murderers had done their work.

Aronson, Deutscher, force

There's a long review by Ronald Aronson (writing in The Nation) of Isaac Deutscher's reissued Trotsky trilogy. Aronson captures the grandeur of Deutscher's work and of the story it tells. He also expresses well Deutscher's importance for a generation of the left:

For those of us who were anti-Stalinist Marxists, reading Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy was a rite of passage. It was simultaneously a sympathetic, critical and reflective biography of Trotsky and a full-blown history of the Russian Revolution.

Aronson's discussion of the weaknesses within Deutscher's - and Trotsky's - historical perspective runs along the lines that the 'original sin' of the Bolshevik Revolution was the revolution itself, which on any sober Marxist reckoning had to be premature. For the sake of its prematurity, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks sacrificed the principles and practices of democracy. Aronson's review, in this regard, vindicates the Mensheviks. The whole is interesting and well worth reading.

It is marred, however, by a cheap closing flourish on behalf of opposition to the Iraq war. We have learned, says Aronson, 'that force cannot create a humane society'. It's as if he's now suddenly become a pacifist. He might have done for all I know, though I doubt it. If he has, then so much the worse for him, since pacifism (strictly) would allow every oppressor, every aggressor, every regime responsible for no matter what atrocities, a more or less free hand. But I very much doubt it. I'm guessing that Ronald Aronson would endorse certain wars and certain liberation struggles even now. So the question is, as it was before, what force is justified and what force isn't? Opponents of the Iraq war were opposing the use of force to remove a regime that itself deployed 'force' - in spades.

(See also the discussion by Gareth, via whom; and these two earlier posts of mine.)

From Kansas to Kansas

He's about to try and fly around the world - in one go. That's Steve Fossett:

Fossett is scheduled to launch the single-engine GlobalFlyer Monday afternoon from central Kansas in an attempt to fly solo, nonstop and without refueling around the world.

He will be powered by a single jet engine, 18,000 pounds of fuel and diet milkshakes.

"I just picked a bunch of flavors off the shelf at the store," [he] said.
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Fossett is scheduled to end his flight at least 66 hours later, or sometime Thursday morning.

He acknowledged being 'a bit nervous'. (I'd be nervous, too.) The route:

... from Kansas, past Chicago, Toronto and Montreal before it heads across the Atlantic and beyond.

About three days later (after traversing the Middle East, China and the Pacific), the world's most efficient jet... will touch down on the same runway.

(Also here.)

Iraqi television now

This article by Katie Grant in the Scotsman (via Marcus) follows up on the Bartle Bull piece of which I posted an excerpt over the weekend. It also refers to a slot on BBC Newsnight on Friday, about Iraqi television post-Saddam. You may still be able to view the programme again here. In any case, there's this companion article by David Lomax who made the feature:

When Saddam fell there was a sudden mushrooming of demand for television sets, decoders and satellite dishes. Banned under Saddam's rule, or at least only available to senior Baathists, these were bought as fast as they could be imported at $350 a time.

Entrepreneurs made millions as new dishes sprang up on apartment blocks. 7 million were sold in less than a year. "I thought this country was hungry for food," one Iraqi sociologist told me, "but they were hungry for television."
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Sistani's supporters won most of the votes in the recent elections and the Shia influence will obviously dominate the new government.

But trying to control TV may not be at the top of their agenda. In any case, as one Iraqi TV observer puts it "there's nothing they can do; the genie is out of the bottle now."

Swappies

Email from another normblog reader:

My sister is over visiting me from America. When she was at university in the late 70s she was a member of the SWP. ('Lindsey German is the reason I left...') On Saturday morning we were standing at the bus stop [somewhere in London] watching the Swappies set up their Troops Out banners outside Budgens.

'What do they say, she enquired, when you ask them about the Saddam regime?' (She was a supporter of the war.)

'They say, Saddam was a dictator, but he has to be overthrown by the masses not US imperialism.'

'And what if you ask...?' 'They say, has to be overthrown by the masses.' 'And what if you...?' 'Overthrown by the masses.' 'And what if...?' 'The masses!'

'Wow!' she said, 'its all coming back, like riding a bike.'

And she proceeded to recite to me the entire SWP position on the war. 'It's easy, once you have a few basic principles down, you can apply it to every situation and it works every time, apart from the fact that it never works at all.'

Where's Ronee?

A reader writes in to ask if I have any information on the whereabouts of Ronee Blakley. I don't. Any offers?

The Passing Parade

Check out The Passing Parade, if you don't already know it. I suppose, since I'm recommending it to you, I should give the blog its full name - The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind (phew). Anyway, the proprietor is 'Akaky Akakyevich'. I enjoyed his post about nude dining:

I assume... that kosher nudist restaurants are not any great improvement over their more orthodox clothed counterparts, although the whole idea of a restaurant full of unclothed Hasidim chomping on knishes while discussing the finer points of the Talmud is almost too bizarre to grasp outside the special circumstance of a drug induced stupor, although I wonder if the Hasidim were to patronize such an establishment would they take off their hats?

And also this one:

Lobsters feel no pain, a recent study suggests, because their brains are too small for them to realize that they should feel pain. This hypothesis is based, however, on the idea that a creature must have a brain in order to feel pain, a concept disproved almost daily by large numbers of my relatives, who tend towards the klutzlike in their dealings with the mechanical world.

Go take a look.

Who, me?

I've been called a lot of different things in the last couple of years, but 'a plump, wrinkly old washerwoman from Fez, Morocco' wasn't one of them. Indeed it wasn't any of them. Until now.

Middle East roundup

David Aaronovitch 'would love to have something flashy and definitive to say' about the present situation between Israel and the Palestinians. But he doesn't have. He's hopeful all the same, and what he wants is 'for everyone to become proselytisers for the slow, tedious, complicated business of drawing people away from negative actions and towards positive ones'.

Relevantly, it seems there has been public anger amongst Palestinians over the latest suicide bombing. Haaretz reports:

All the sharp Palestinian denunciations and reservations must be seen in the context of the atmosphere among the Palestinian public, which wholeheartedly supports Abu Mazen's calming policy and the attempts to restore normalcy to life in the West Bank and Gaza.

In the streets of East Jerusalem, at least, the report of the suicide bombing came as a total surprise... Yesterday, a store owner on Sultan Suleiman Street said all his customers registered anger when they heard of the attack.

And the Lebanon Daily Star reports that, since the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Syrian taxi drivers entering Lebanon have been protecting themselves from the danger of anti-Syrian attacks by carrying Hariri's picture:

According to the Interior Security Forces, more than 10 attacks have targeted homes of Syrians in Lebanon during the past week.

However, the most violent attack occurred during Tuesday's demonstration in Sidon, which gathered an estimated 13,000 people calling for a Syrian troops withdrawal from Lebanon. Some of the demonstrators attacked the residence of Syrian workers, firing their weapons and hurling stones and insults.

Meanwhile:

Israel has warned it is prepared to attack Syria and has declared the Middle East peace process frozen until the Palestinian leadership wipes out terrorist groups.

The father of Yael Orbach, killed in Friday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, has called for her death to be avenged:

Otherwise, he would do it himself, Orbach said, "in a way not yet seen."

Finally in this roundup: some Iraqis would rather have Thursday as part of their weekend than Saturday - because Saturday is a Jewish, or a Zionist, holiday.

The continuing agony of Darfur

"There is nothing left in my village. Everything is burnt. Please, my son is sick, he is hungry."

But he is not hungry enough, and she has to leave. "We can only take children who are 80 per cent or less than their normal body weight," explains a regretful Elin Jones, the [Médecins Sans Frontières] team leader. Halim's baby, it seems, is not yet thin enough to qualify.