Some choice stuff on Start the Week this morning, showing that you can be 'one of the world's leading theatre directors' and still have a richly... er, flexible moral imagination. Here's Peter Sellars:
And John [Gray], as you say in your book, it's in almost every case... it [suicide bombing] is in response to an occupying army. I mean I really think we have to deal with unequal battlefields and battlefields in which an army moves into your neighbourhood, and in which the question is what do you have to put against something that every single day denigrates your own humanity and self-determination - and finally you have nothing more than your own body, over and over again, in every one of these situations. So it's not also just simply wild-eyed, it is people who have absolutely nothing else and also an absence of any other recourse or any other future. And I think the elimination of futures is also very much responsible for the idea that then you have to devote your last breath to something that lives beyond you.Nothing more than your own body - apart from all the innocent bodies that you devote your last breath to having ripped to shreds. Still, Sellars is obviously right about the elimination of futures: their futures.
Here he is a bit further on, on what to call Islamists...
It would be very nice to call people, first of all, what they choose to call themselves. It tells you a little more than frequently some of these larger labels, because the larger labels again are used to infect fear in a larger population which leads to this irrational sense of fear and betrayal around every corner. And I'm sorry that is truly exaggerated and appalling and is used as a method of control by unscrupulous governments.Is this what they call themselves, 'unscrupulous governments'? It would be very nice, after all, to call people what they call themselves. Oh, I see, that's a privilege reserved for the body-shredders. You can listen again here. Start 17 minutes in. (Thanks: AE.)