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For peaceful regime change 2

The second column I want to discuss is that by Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian, and the argument of his I want to focus on is part of a larger point to the effect that between doing nothing about ruthless dictatorships and bombing them there are other options. Like the Christian Science Monitor editorial just featured in my previous post, Jonathan emphasizes the costs in human life of military force, and he also speaks of the potentially distortive effects of external intervention on the political sequel. So as not to repeat the observations I've already made about this, I concentrate on a different feature of his argument. This is that, among the non-violent measures that can be used against hated regimes, there are things that don't depend on governments but can be undertaken by people at large. '[W]hy leave it all to the politicians?', Jonathan asks. 'We can act - and we surely must': we can boycott companies trading with Damascus; we can help people living in repressive states to reach sites on the internet that are blocked to them.

I have no desire to quarrel with this proposal in itself. Encouraging a widespread ethic of solidarity with those in dire need of it, an ethic of aid and rescue, has been an important emphasis of my own work, and the need today to build an international civil-society movement attentive to human rights and their violation is of central importance. However, this cannot be self-sufficient. Action by governments, including military action on occasion, is also necessary. It is necessary for the same kind of reason that charity is not by itself an adequate way of dealing with poverty and other major social problems; of dealing with natural disasters; or epidemics; or major threats to national security. There are some things that require a more organized, concentrated and sometimes urgent response than individuals acting on their own can achieve. This is one good reason why people often look to governments to act, to act on their behalf.

Voluntary individual action - which is in its general nature peaceful action - vis-à-vis Syria is very much to the point. But contrasted with the perspective of non-peaceful means, whether by internal or external agencies, it is merely hoping for the best. Let us indeed hope for the best for the people of Syria. But right now, under cruel assault as it is, I don't know how anyone could rule out the possibility of means of opposition to the Assad regime that are other than peaceful.

For peaceful regime change 1

It is no more than a mild coincidence that, so soon after the toppling of the Gaddafi regime with the aid of Nato air power, two op-ed pieces (one each on either side of the Atlantic) should be urging the superiority of peaceful means of political transition as compared with the use of arms - both columns making reference to the present situation in Syria. As I mean to put some part of their argument in question, in this post and the next, I had better start by making the following three points clear.

One of the two columns is an editorial in The Christian Science Monitor and it says, among other things, that non-violence is a better way of challenging regime legitimacy and is less costly in human life. So first, yes, peaceful transition is obviously to be preferred when it can succeed. This hardly needs any supporting argument.

Second, violence - whether of revolution, of civil war, of military intervention or of all three - is costly in human life, and if violent loss of life can be avoided, it should be.

Third, I would hate to advise anyone currently battling the Assad regime about what they should do. This is not because I think that outside opinion is, in general, inappropriate in commenting on the affairs of a country; it isn't, or at any rate not always. It's because I don't know enough about Syria to be confident about which tactics of resistance and opposition will work and which won't. And it's an old and I think still valid moral principle that there is a right of resistance against political tyranny, including of armed resistance, though this does not permit, it should be noted, terrorist violence against civilians.

The last point, however - about not knowing in advance what will and won't succeed – leads to my reservation about The Christian Science Monitor's editorial view. Yes, peaceful means are better where they can succeed. But they don't always succeed, and therefore sometimes force is necessary in the removal of a tyranny. It would have been a minimum concession to political realism to have acknowledged this. To write as though non-violence is a universally effective strategy, particularly in face of the evidence we have that dictatorships sometimes fight to the bitter end, is incautious counsel.

[For 2, see here.]

The normblog guide to soaps 10

As it's a bit of a slow day round here, I might as well bring you the next of my soap recommendations. Like the last one, I owe this, too, to a suggestion sent my way - by @bombaylychee. The soap is pure vegetable and made in France by L'Occitane; it's the Verbena Shea Butter Extra Gentle Soap. Gentle enough it is, but its distinctive quality to my mind is that it has a kind of tang. Now, I've not said that about any earlier soap in the series - tang, I mean. But it's the only word that will do. For some reason I think of sherbert when I'm using it. I take it this is down to the Verbena ingredient, but what do I know from Verbena? It's only a guess. Still, the long and the short of it is that this Occitane bar will both wake and freshen you, at the same time as getting you clean. What more could one ask?

Libyan angles

> The New York Times puts a question mark against Europe's present military capabilities in the light of Nato's Libya campaign.

> Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer tells Spiegel Online what he really thinks: 'the behavior of Germany's government during the Libya conflict, its abstention in the UN Security Council (vote in March on whether to impose a no-fly zone in Libya), was a one-of-a-kind debacle and perhaps the biggest foreign policy debacle since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany'.

> Six Libyan women talk about their role in the uprising.

Writer's choice 319: Sandra Lee

Sandra Lee is an Australian journalist and the best-selling author of three works of non-fiction, Beyond Bad, The Promise and 18 Hours, The True Story of an SAS War Hero. Her most recent book, Saving Private Sarbi, will be published next month and is about an explosives detection dog with the Australian Army that went missing in action in Afghanistan for 13 months before being found. For more about the author, visit her website at Sandra Lee. Below Sandra writes about Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Mikal Gilmore's Shot In The Heart.

Sandra Lee on The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, and Shot In The Heart by Mikal Gilmore

Question: how does one choose from a shelf aching with the weight of books and pick just one that is a favourite? Or one that has left an indelible mark on you or made you change your perspective, rethink your past, retool your future, open your mind, or just plain shocked or rocked you?

It is too difficult, so here's two and this is not cheating, for the two are inexorably entwined and bookend many shelves of true crime, one of my favourite genres and the first to which I turned my hand as an author in 2001 when I wrote Beyond Bad, The Life and Crimes of Katharine Knight, Australia's Hannibal.

I'll start with The Executioner's Song, the propulsive book written by Norman Mailer and billed as a 'true life novel' when published in 1979. The second is the must-read companion book to Executioner's, written by Mikal Gilmore and titled Shot In The Heart, published 25 years later, not as a response to Mailer's Pulitzer Prize winner, but as an explanation - in part - of the possible sources of the violence wrought by Gary Gilmore, the man of whom Mailer wrote and who was Mikal Gilmore's brother.

Background: Gary Gilmore was the first man executed by firing squad in 1977 in Utah after the reintroduction of the death penalty in the United States, following a 10-year hiatus of execution as punishment.

Gilmore was an unsuccessful criminal (he spent more time in jail than out) and had built himself a long rap sheet starting from childish tomfoolery and ratcheting up to assault and armed robbery.

In 1976, Gilmore's criminal trope followed a new and unexpected arc, more malevolent and violent than ever, culminating in cold-blooded murder. By two. No remorse. His victims, two honest, hard-working American men, Mormons, were cruelly gunned down for doing what was demanded of them by a callous-hard crim, on parole for four months, who chose to punctuate two armed robberies with two killings.

At age 36, Gary Mark Gilmore was convicted and given the death penalty. He was also given the choice of being hanged or shot by firing squad. He chose the latter. His case became a cause célèbre because of the judicial history surrounding the death penalty, and history alone demanded the harrowing story be told. But Gilmore's cause 'celebrity' (for want of a better word) soared into the stratosphere when he dismissed any possible appeal and insisted on getting on with the business of being executed.

And so, on a cold January morning in 1977, after uttering his famous last words 'let's do it', Gary Gilmore was killed by a lineup of five unseen executioners, four of whom fired one bullet each into his heart, killing him instantly.

Now enter Norman Mailer, by then a well-known and critically acclaimed author and writer. But first, we need to backtrack a little and introduce the photographer, producer and eclectic professional named Lawrence Schiller, who came up with the idea of the book.

A newspaper article about Gilmore's love affair with his tragic girlfriend sparked Schiller's interest in the murderer, not the actual crimes he committed in cold blood.

Schiller bought the rights to Gilmore's life and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his mother, Bessie, as well as with many associated with them and their family. But Schiller didn't consider himself 'intellectual' enough to write the book and asked Mailer, who accepted the invitation to write The Executioner's Song.

Mailer and Schiller collaborated but the buccaneer author wrote the book he wanted to write, based on Schiller's exhaustive research, and Mailer wanted his book to be more than just an essay on the crime, the trial and the conviction.

As he later wrote in The Spooky Art, Some Thoughts On Writing, 'Every concept I had about him [Gilmore] was inadequate. So I wanted the reader of The Executioner's Song to confront the true complexity of one human'.

Humans, being curious, want to know what makes our fellow man do bad things. What remit to murder, the worst of crimes, the greatest sin? Are those who murder mad or just plain bad? Did evil lurk in the soul of Gary Gilmore? Is there even such a thing as evil?

Why do most of us stay on the side of right when a few willingly cross to wrong? What factors - social, familial, economic, psychological - do we blame? Or not blame? Or can blame? Or should blame? Dare we think that perhaps, most chilling of all, some people are simply born bad, bad enough to become killers? Is it chance or choice, or something more foreboding and unyielding?

Gilmore and Mailer tackle these themes adroitly and with a nimbleness that both engages and provokes the reader; they go to the heart, or heartlessness, of the human condition.

The Executioner's Song is as harrowing as it is compelling, as nihilistic as it is optimistic. Witness the opening passage for the optimism: 'Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree... Gary caught her as the branch came scraping down... She was six and he was seven and she thought he was swell. He might be rough with the other kids but never with her.'

At the age of seven, we already see a complex boy, tender yet rough. We know what becomes of him, but how did he get there?

The end of chapter one has reunited Brenda with her cousin, Gary, in April 1976 after he's been paroled from a long stint in jail during which they corresponded. She hasn't seen him in years but still holds hope for the innate goodness and innocence she saw in him as a child. Despite the optimism the chapter ends with looming dread. When Brenda looked into Gary's eyes, wrote Mailer, they 'felt full of sadness again... They did not know what would happen next'.

That uncertainty, combined with a nagging, rattling fear felt by those on the near periphery of Gilmore's life, drives this stunning, taut, revelatory book. They endure torment after torment in searching for answers to 'why' he did what he did, was what he was. Tormented because the question never blooms with a real answer, a singular truth.

Mailer finds many things in his 1000-page-plus opus but he never finds that - probably, maybe, because Gilmore didn't understand why himself, or perhaps he plain ignored introspection. He was the human equivalent of a verb. He did. It's true he had few good role models but on that he is not Robinson Crusoe. Many people have bad starts to life, hail from the wrong side of the tracks, are thrown curve balls they dodge, but few graduate to a life of crime, fewer still to murder. Nature? Nurture?

The Executioner's Song is a phenomenal literary layer cake of a crime and the community in which it occurred. Mailer puts a microscope on a unique part of America and the people who inhabit it. The language is pure, raw, powerful and simple.

Mikal Gilmore's Shot In The Heart is a perfect companion piece to Mailer's Executioner's and a tour de force of family memoir. He asked similar questions to Mailer but from a different perspective, a personal perspective – 'why Gary, why not me?'

I used to tell myself that whatever ran in Gary's blood that turned him into a killer did not also run in my blood, and that whatever turned my family's hopes to wreckage would not also devastate my life. I was different (Gilmore's italics) from them, I knew. I would escape. I now know better. To believe that Gary had absorbed all the family's dissolution, or that the worst of our rot had died with him that morning in Draper, Utah, was to miss the real nature of the legacy that had placed him before those rifles: what that heritage or patrimony was about, and where it had come from.

Mikal Gilmore's insider view of a very dysfunctional family, riddled with child abuse, violence, alcoholism, four brothers - two of whom did good, the oldest, the youngest, two who did other – is heartbreaking. Mother Bessie and father Frank were both violent liars whose parenting skills were at once loving and hellish. The Gilmore home was not Arcadia but it was home.

Mikal was the youngest brother by 10 years and with the gap came a measure of brotherly isolation and his words occasionally read as a threnody for the loss of brotherly love. Yet, as he grew he was freighted with the burden that he had 'Gary's notoriety to contend with'. It wasn't easy and the book isn't easy to read; it is equally haunting, tragic and sad. And yet Mikal Gilmore, like Frank Jr, didn't turn out bad, proving that DNA does not equal destiny.

By the end of Mailer's and Gilmore's books we still don't know what made Gary Gilmore kill, but that doesn't detract from the enormous power of either book. There probably isn't one reason why.

Gilmore and Mailer succeed in slowly revealing the human condition, in showing the 'complexity' of one human being, a criminal who did his worst. They did the same for those in Gary Gilmore's orbit. And Mikal Gilmore triumphs again by showing that being good can be as complex as being bad.

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

Fleshed out

I guess it had to happen. You remember the scene at the end of the movie of that name in which the Charlton Heston character discovers the real ingredients of the processed food Soylent Green? You can remind yourself here. Well, Soylent Green is now on the market - crackers in a tasteful box. What the sales pitch will do for consumer appetites remains to be seen. (Via Tim Blair.)

Socialism tabled

Socialists of every stripe and indeed complexion will be familiar with debates about the different roads to socialism: gradualist and reformist, parliamentary; insurrectionary, revolutionary, syndicalist or what have you - in which different strategic conceptions of how to get from here (capitalism) to there (socialism) are considered. But I had not, myself, previously come across the hundred-tables road, as expounded today in an interview in G2 with Ken Loach:

Does he think there's a chance of a revolutionary moment in the UK, after the financial crisis, the MPs' expenses scandal, the phone hacking revelations, and the exposure of the cosiness between the police and the Murdoch empire? "It just needs leadership," he says. "It's like a head of steam. The steam won't drive anything unless there's an engine, and somebody to stoke it, and to drive the wheels around." The moment in recent history, he thinks, when a proper movement could have been launched, was at the march against the Iraq war in 2003.

"At the end there should have been a hundred tables, here's a pen, give us your name, we're anti-privatisation, anti-war you know – it's Lenin's bread, land and peace. If you sign up to that, you'll be organised and it'll be democratic and there will be no vain personalities trying to take it over, and we can articulate a programme and a movement that might become a party on that basis. There was a huge feeling across the country. None of the politicians spoke for us. That was the moment, but it was missed."

It would be funny if it weren't so deluded. No, I'll rephrase that: it is funny because it's so deluded. First, there's the notion that a mobilization against one particular war expressed the possibility of a movement general enough to answer the question put to him about 'a revolutionary moment in the UK' (my emphasis). Second, there's the claim that only leadership was lacking, as if this lack in itself didn't express a deeper problem about the politics of the sort of left that Loach would like to see doing the leading. Why wasn't it there, or there with sufficient foresight and clout to do the necessary? Third comes Loach's conjunction of the name of Lenin and the assurance that things would be - of course - democratic, without any sign that some people, even including amongst the marchers of February 2003, might see this conjunction as a problematic one.

There is a very long way to go before any wide movement in this country (to say nothing of anywhere else) is willing to place itself behind an avowedly socialist political programme. One of the things that makes it more difficult to envisage than it is anyway is the clearly deluded nature of what passes for socialist advocacy much of the time.

Libya as an excuse for inaction on Syria

Philippe Bolopion holds the position of UN Director at Human Rights Watch. In a column in the LA Times, he says that Nato has, for many countries, failed a certain test in Libya. It has done so by not keeping the protection of civilians (as envisaged in R2P) distinct from the goal of regime change. Bolopion writes:

The Libya operation has strengthened the case of those questioning the concept that the world has a responsibility to protect citizens from their rulers, and the backlash is already contributing to tragic consequences.

In Syria, where security forces have killed more than 2,000 protesters and arbitrarily arrested and tortured thousands, including children, people are clearly in need of protection. If the Security Council were to take its responsibility to protect seriously, it would have long ago used the many nonmilitary tools at its disposal to put pressure on Bashar Assad's regime. It could have passed a resolution demanding an end to the violence, the creation of a commission of inquiry, an arms embargo or an array of sanctions targeting the leadership of the government or the oil sector.

There are many reasons for this disturbing failure to act: the opposition of veto-wielding Russia and China, the silence of the Arab League, the presence in the Security Council of Lebanon, which is a virtual hostage of Syria. But a crucial factor against action has been that key votes in the council - India, South Africa and Brazil - are missing. Behind closed doors, their diplomats have explained that they are reluctant to go down the Libya road again. Of course, nothing in a draft resolution initially offered by the Europeans even hinted at military action or regime change. But for India, South Africa and Brazil, it's payback time. The Syrian people are paying the price for what some countries see as NATO's overreaching in Libya.

I won't say anything here about the reluctance to countenance regime change where the regime in question and to be changed is plainly criminal, guilty of violating the most fundamental human rights norms that the UN is supposed to uphold. Readers of this blog will be familiar with my views on the topic. But it is worth noting how Bolopion slides down a standard slope of contemporary left-liberal apologetics - as is unfitting in an official of a human-rights organization but not, unfortunately, unprecedented. The votes of India, South Africa and Brazil have been missing, according to his own report, even though nothing even approaching military action in Syria has been mooted. Rather than just criticizing the three countries concerned for their wrong-headed opposition to non-military measures against the Syrian regime, he eases the burden of R2P obligation on them by reference to Nato's perceived military overreach in Libya. However, even if that supposed overreach was wrong in principle - as I would contend it wasn't - this doesn't excuse India, South Africa and Brazil for being opposed to other forms of action against Syria. Nobody else than themselves is responsible for the stance of those three countries.

There were two crooked men

Some time way back then, we used to say this rhythmic line (spelling out the letters one by one and as here grouped) as a way of remembering how to spell Mississippi:

M I S S/ I S S / I P P/ I - I P P / I S S/ I S S/ I M.

But until a few days ago I wasn't aware of the following variant of the same thing:

M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback, humpback, I.

I only became aware of it through reading Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, at the front of which you are told that this is how southern children are taught to spell the name of the state. I recommend the book. Part crime novel, part picture of a small Mississippi community, but mainly the story of two boys, Larry Ott and Silas Jones, one white, the other black, whose boyhood friendship is cruelly sundered, but whose paths again cross in adulthood on account of the key events of which the book tells, it is well-paced and beautifully constructed, and it has what I considered to be a most satisfying ending. The title of Franklin's novel might also be read as signifying two lives which have been knocked out of shape, in part by the racial aspect of the ties and the tensions between them. In any event, it's a really good read.

Columnists and cats

With the weekend bobbing into view, Chris means to share a joke with his readers - of whom I am one of the most loyal. He's saying that it's pointless taking issue with newspaper columnists since they aren't paid to get things right but to echo the prejudices of the paper's readership. OK, to criticize someone just because they got something wrong doesn't butter any parsnips. Everybody gets things wrong sometimes. However, public discussion of issues that matter itself matters if democracy means anything - as I assume here, without argument, that it does - and criticizing the views of others, proposing counter-arguments, pointing out when someone has made a mistake and is reluctant to acknowledge or correct it, exploring their reasons for what they say and what they don't, trying oneself to meet the arguments of others, and yet more of the same ilk, is the very substance of public discussion.

As for journalists being paid merely to echo prejudices, I take this to be a lighthearted insult to the profession of journalism and unjust; it is based on ignoring better exemplars than those Chris must evidently have in mind. The fact that businesses have to give customers what they want would only succeed as an argument if there weren't newspaper readers who wanted something else from the papers they read than the confirmation of their own prejudices - you know, information, accurate news, compelling analysis, and so forth.

(I did once try to teach my cat to read but only got as far as the letter D.)