normblog

Fight night

Here's a programme I'll be wanting to see, and in case you might be too, I'm flagging it: 'Boxing at the Movies: Kings of the Ring' is on BBC4 this coming Sunday, March 3, at 9pm. Danny Leigh, who made it, writes about cinema's romance with boxing in today's Guardian. As a boy he followed the fortunes of Charlie Magri. For me it was Rocky Marciano. My interest in this particular intersection between sport and screen was registered on normblog in a post I did going-on seven years ago. Seven years. Ouch.

Not much of a thank you speech

Shalom Auslander just won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for Jewish Literature, for his book Hope: A Tragedy. You can watch his acceptance speech below, but be warned - he has some harsh things to say about the Almighty, although he seems to fear Him at the same time. Hilary Mantel also puts in an appearance.

(Via.)

To break the silence

Further to this recent post of mine, Gary Kent explains why today's House of Commons debate on recognizing the Kurdish genocide is important.

Halabja. The name of this small Kurdish town used to be a byword for the multiple crimes of a fascist regime - that of Saddam Hussein. Yet a new generation has come to see Iraq mainly through its experience of the intervention in 2003. Halabja and the wider genocide against the Kurds, in addition to Saddam's crimes against the people of the rest of Iraq, have been somewhat lost...
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MPs from the right and left of British politics will debate a motion moved by Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi, who was born in Iraq of a Kurdish father. They are active members of the all-party parliamentary group on the Kurdistan Region, which has sent several fact-finding delegations to Iraqi Kurdistan and seeks to deepen and broaden the commercial, political and cultural relationship between the Region and the UK, which also has a large Kurdish Diaspora.

The motion formally recognises the genocide against the people of Iraqi Kurdistan and encourages governments, the EU and UN to do likewise. It says that this will enable Kurdish people, many in the UK, to achieve justice for their considerable loss and enable the UK, the home of democracy and freedom, to send out a message of support for international conventions and human rights, which is made even more pressing by the slaughter in Syria and the possible use of its chemical arsenals.

Against boycott, for academic freedom

Can you be proud on account of something done in which you played no part? Well, I'm proud of the students of Oxford, my old stamping ground. They've just voted, in a ratio of roughly 7 to 1, against boycotting Israel. There's a report by Jonny Paul here, and reaction from the Union of Jewish Students here.

At Essex University last week a lecture by Israel's deputy ambassador to this country had to be abandoned after disruption from protesting students of a boycotting cast of mind. The Vice Chancellor of the university yesterday circulated a message to all staff. It reads in part:

The Registrar and Secretary has formally notified me that the actions of some of our community went entirely beyond legitimate protest and led to the event being curtailed. In accordance with our procedures the Proctor... will commence an investigation into potential breaches of the University's Disciplinary Regulations and our Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech, and the Registrar and Secretary has requested the Students' Union considers whether any actions have breached the Union's Code of Conduct.

At the very heart of our values and what we stand for as an academic institution is that we are committed to academic freedom and freedom of expression within the law. Whatever the outcome of the investigations that now follow, as Vice-Chancellor, I want to re-affirm the University's commitment to these values. This is not just a matter of legal obligation, it is a matter of conviction.

A powerful moral imperative

Sir Menzies Campbell is quoted here as follows:

Ten years on, it is almost impossible to find anyone in this country or even in the United States who is willing to support the military action against Saddam Hussein.

He can't be trying very hard. This is John Lloyd, in a column headed 'Iraq: Why Blair was right':

I and others who supported the invasion of Iraq a decade ago did so because we thought that Saddam Hussein's regime was among the worst in the world. This was, on the one hand, because of his propensity to violence against his neighbours – Iran during the 1980-88 war and Kuwait, which he attempted to annex in 1990 – and, on the other, because of his eager sponsorship of terrorist groups that saw the destruction of Israel as their life's (and death's) work, as did he.

But more significant still was the active delight in savagery in which he indulged, and passed on to his sons and presumed heirs. This he visited on the Kurds, on the southern marsh Arabs and on those, including members of his entourage, whom he suspected of disloyalty or who were linked to supposed traitors. It was a savagery which, unlike that of his hero Stalin, was not governed by a great deal of rational calculation: Saddam's war against Iran was a disaster for his nation and the invasion of Kuwait still more so. The possibility that such a man might possess weapons of mass destruction was a nightmare for the world.
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Rightly or wrongly, we were too sanguine about the prospects of regime change, especially in the light of the mess made of it. This was perhaps inevitable, because even well-trained armies are good at destroying but not fitted for constructing. In my case, nearly a decade of reporting in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for the Financial Times predisposed me to see western intervention (not military in that instance) as benign, as I believe it generally was. But we did not anticipate that Iraqi forces who hated the US – including those loyal to Saddam – would dominate after the invasion, that the population would not be active in ensuring democratic choice as it had been in, say, Poland, and that the west had limited staying power. We were much influenced by Kanan Makiya’s searing book Cruelty and Silence (1993), which detailed the horrors of Iraq under Saddam and called for intervention – an intervention, the author argued, that would be greeted with "sweets and flowers".

However, the responsibility to protect remains a powerful moral imperative. It must remain part of the armoury of those states with the power and the will to stop tyranny where it is possible to do so and where intervention is likely to work – as it did in Sierra Leone, in Kosovo and ultimately in Bosnia. It may work in Mali. More thought needs to be given to how it might work in Syria. For the left, the responsibility to protect should be part of a progressive view of global problems. That the principle has become synonymous with a kind of refurbished imperialism is a sign of decadence.

Reminding Sir Menzies Campbell and others like him why there was support for Blair in this country - and plenty of it - is at once a matter of historical accuracy and a way of combating the impulse towards pretending that that support had no justificatory basis anyone can now recall.

Well and truly booked

Good places for book-lovers - no fewer than 30 of them. Feast your eyes. (Thanks: TD.)

If I may make a modest addition, here's number 31...

And please don't tell me you wouldn't be able to find anything to read there.

The power of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

Having just re-read Orwell's classic, I remembered an old essay of Isaac Deutscher's about it and so re-read that as well, to remind myself of what Deutscher had made of the book and compare his reactions with my own. His essay was written in 1954 and appears in the collection Heretics and Renegades.

An incidental interest of Deutscher's essay is his tracing of the influence on Orwell of Yevgeny Zamyatin's earlier dystopia We, and the several parallels he sees between it and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But for me the main interest of the essay lies in Deutscher's diagnosis of the limitations, as he sees them, of Orwell's bleak vision and their origin in his intellectual outlook. That origin Deutscher locates in Orwell's rationalism, which, disillusioned in face of the mid-20th century horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, found its outlet in the writer's portrayal of the cruelties of a power wielded for its own sake.

The contrasting reference point for Deutscher to Orwell's 'defeated rationalism' was, of course, his own Marxism. Marxism, Deutscher writes, though sometimes taken to be rationalist, is 'not at all so':

... [Marxism] does not assume that human beings are, as a rule, guided by rational motives and that they can be argued into socialism by reason... [T]he authentic Marxist may claim to be mentally better prepared than the rationalist is for the manifestations of irrationality in human affairs...

I, for my part, would demur at Deutscher's 'not at all'. In the Marxian socialist project there is a core idea of trying to bring some rationality, as well as justice, into the cooperative social life of the future. But, at the same time, I think Deutscher was right to say that Marxists should be well placed to grasp some of the non-rational sources of human behaviour, since Marxism focuses so centrally on the social mechanisms involved in people's pursuing their own interests, including ideological deceptions and self-deceptions and training in the customs and the uses, often callous, sometimes brutal, of privilege and power.

Be this as it may, unable to trace the horrors of 20th century totalitarianism back to its historical causes – in Deutscher's terms, the 'complicated social background', the 'tangles of political motives, calculations, fears and suspicions', the 'complex historical context' - Orwell, he thinks, could only fall back on a 'mysticism of cruelty' in which 'The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power' (the words Orwell gives O'Brien). In Deutscher's judgement that notion, foundational to the construction of Orwell's dystopia, is 'the most banal, the most abstract, the most metaphysical, and the most barren of all generalizations'.

The way I would score this is: 3-1 to George Orwell against Isaac Deutscher. Deutscher's critique is valid, in my view, just to this extent, that a system of power with no other end than the exercise and preservation of power itself is implausible in the light of what we know about human societies throughout history. Power is nearly always wielded on the back of some social interest(s), and though the specialization of functions creates people wedded to the techniques of power as such, it is hard to envisage an entire social and political order in which power has come loose from its moorings in interests of that kind. Moreover, an order as dedicated as Oceania is to the denial and repression of ordinary impulses towards happiness would find it difficult to endure. I don't say impossible; heaven forbid but perhaps there could be circumstances securing it for a very long time. But difficult, surely, for a regime so crushing of the elementary humanity of its population to endure in perpetuity.

On Orwell's side, however, there is - first - the fact that he was creating a fictional entity, not making a prediction, and it is perfectly proper to that enterprise to exaggerate certain features while abstracting from others, whether as a warning of dangers to be on the lookout for or merely as a way of focusing the attention of readers on what is picked out, so that they might learn to know it. There is - second - Deutscher's underplaying of the autonomous force of cruel impulses and impulses towards power in the human make-up. Having insisted, realistically enough, on the irrational in human affairs, he backs off from giving it its full weight by adverting to background social causes. Such causes there always are indeed, but the more negative human traits do not go away on their account and they are capable of terrible mischief in their own right. There is nothing at all banal or abstract or metaphysical about their motivational force once the restraints of law, morality and civilization are lowered. On this matter, I would say that Orwell has been vindicated many times over, as compared with Deutscher's critical judgement on him.

Third and above all, Deutscher passes over what is not only a central theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four but also site of the adjunct and very servant of power there, namely, the monopoly on 'truth'. The importance of this theme - the way in which ideas are controlled, the past altered, memory denied, lies disseminated, by those wielding power - cannot be overstated, but it isn't given the attention it deserves in Deutscher's reading of Orwell. Here, again, we have seen repeatedly how subject ruling cliques or those intent on power can be to the temptation of the 'one truth', theirs, and of imposing it on others at whatever cost to human happiness and well-being.

Orwell's, therefore, was the great book and Deutscher's critique of it too narrow - on account of a too narrow construal by him of what Marxism encompasses.

Writer's choice 375: Kate Ellis

Kate Ellis was born and brought up in Liverpool and studied drama in Manchester. She is married and has two grown-up sons and lives in North Cheshire. Kate worked in teaching, marketing and accountancy before discovering that writing crime fiction was what she'd wanted to do all along. The most recent of her many books are The Cadaver Game, Watching the Ghosts and The Shadow Collector. Here she writes about Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair.

Kate Ellis on The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Are things always as they appear to be? And can even overwhelming evidence be proved false? These are the questions at the heart of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, originally published in 1948.

Small town solicitor, Robert Blair receives a visit from a woman he knows only by sight; a woman called Marion Sharpe who tells him that she needs legal advice as serious accusations have been made against her and her elderly mother. A fifteen-year-old girl called Betty Kane has made claims that Marion and her mother kidnapped her and imprisoned her at their house The Franchise. She says the two women beat her, starved her and made her work as a domestic slave and she gives a convincing account of her ordeal and of how she managed to escape to tell the harrowing tale of the women's cruelty.

Marion and her mother are outsiders in the community and the people of Milford are only too willing to believe the young girl's terrible allegations. And as the evidence mounts against the Sharpes, the town's residents, urged on by the local paper, The Ack-Emma, unite to persecute the women.

Betty Kane is the picture of innocence, the classic victim with her school uniform, mousy hair, candid eyes and unmade-up face. Detective Inspector Hallam of the local police describes her as a nice kid who could have been one of his own and calls her a prosecuting counsel's dream of a victim. However, Robert Blair feels that her story doesn't quite add up.

The police have no reason to disbelieve the girl who tells the tale of her captivity in such convincing detail. Surely the Sharpe women are lying. However, as Blair gets to know Marion better he is increasingly convinced of her innocence.

The Franchise Affair is a disturbing study of prejudice. The people of Milford, emboldened by the local press, are only too eager to believe the worst of two women who don't quite fit into their closed community and the whispers soon turn to violence.

Robert Blair is attracted to Marion Sharpe and there is the ever present possibility that this attraction is affecting his judgement. But even so, he can't shake off the feeling that something is amiss, that the sweet Betty Kane is an expert liar. As in all good detective stories, it is the tenacity of the investigator, in this case Robert Blair aided by DI Grant of Scotland Yard and DI Hallam of the local force, that brings the guilty to justice. Being used to crime, the policemen can keep an open mind and accept that things are not always as they seem, and it is with the professionals' help that the truth is eventually brought to light.

The book describes vividly the life of a small town in the 1950s, with its hierarchy and preoccupations. The Sharpes are treated with suspicion because they don't quite conform. They are seen as women who 'keep themselves to themselves', which, it is suggested, means they could have something unsavoury to hide.

My latest book, The Shadow Collector, deals with 17th century witchcraft, and many of the same social factors that caused women to be accused of being witches centuries ago are seen quite clearly in The Franchise Affair. Josephine Tey's novel is dominated by the often unseen and pervasive presence of the apparently harmless child who makes terrible accusations with the support of the community, demanding that the wrongs done to her are avenged. Reading accounts of witch trials during the course of my research for The Shadow Collector, I found many such cases of apparently innocent young girls accusing neighbours they disliked of consorting with the devil, girls who were as convincing as Betty Kane.

As Robert digs deeper into Betty's version of events he begins to find discrepancies and ask some searching questions. How, for instance, is Betty able to give such an accurate description of the inside of The Franchise, a house she claims never to have visited until the Sharpes kept her there by force? If Betty's story wasn't true, where had she been during the time she was missing from home? And what is the significance of the temporary substitution of a double decker bus for a single decker on the route that runs past The Franchise? When the truth finally emerges, the solution is as satisfying as it is believable. But I won't spoil things for those who haven't yet read this excellent book by giving the game away.

The Franchise Affair is a crime novel without a murder but somehow the case is so intriguing that the regular crime fiction reader's regular dose of blood and death isn't really missed. It is a combination of mystery and social observation and I consider it to be one of the finest and most unforgettable novels in the history of crime fiction.

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

Figures from a dark time XVII

These days you'll often come across people saying that there's too much stuff about the Holocaust. I wonder if they know of Karl Jaspers, who wrote: 'That which has happened is a warning... It must be continually remembered.'

62. Gisella Perl:

Every time Dr. Gisella Perl enters a delivery room, she stops first to pray: "God, you owe me a life, a living baby." That debt was incurred in Auschwitz in World War II, when the Hungarian gynecologist, who was both inmate and physician at the concentration camp, realized that to save the lives of hundreds of pregnant women, she would have to prevent them from giving birth.
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"The greatest crime in Auschwitz was to be pregnant," she said in an interview the other day, recalling the edicts of Josef Mengele. The so-called doctor of death of Auschwitz performed savage medical experiments on prisoners, in particular, women, the physically handicapped and twins, and was in charge of deciding who would go to the gas chambers.

"Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him," Dr. Perl said. "He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, 'I am pregnant.' I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz."

She interrupted the pregnancies, she said, "in the night, on a dirty floor, using only my dirty hands."

63. Adam Paluch:

In 1942 the Gestapo stormed into his family's home in Poland. His mother fled to a nearby building and jumped to her death from a second-floor window. She left behind Adam and Ida, 3-year-old twins who were quickly split up and led separate lives for the next five decades.

In 1995 his sister, now Ida Kersz and living in Skokie, saw a picture of her long-lost brother in a Jewish publication. The man pictured was living in Poland and had a different name, Jerzy Dolebski. But Kersz immediately recognized some of his physical features - he resembled her maternal grandfather - and got in contact with him.

64. Otto Dov Kulka (£):

In the cattle truck from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz, Otto Dov Kulka and his mother managed to push their way to a window. It was covered with barbed wire. His mother scribbled messages in a notebook and scattered the pages onto the passing fields of Bohemia. On each note was scribbled the address of Kulka's aunt and these words: "We are ­travelling to the east. We do not know to where. Please, anyone who finds this note, send it to the address above." After the war, Kulka learnt that his aunt had received the messages and, probably wisely, destroyed them. His mother did not ­survive, dying of typhoid fever in a ­German village in 1945, after escaping from Stutthof camp.

65. The figure 100,000:

In total, nearly 100,000 Jews, or 70 percent of Holland's pre-Holocaust Jewish population, were transported from Westerbork to Nazi extermination and concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt, according to Yad Vashem. The premises of the former Nazi camp have been made a national memorial.

66. Daniel Finkelstein's grandmother (£):

By the time my grandmother boarded the train from Belsen she was close to death. For a year she had given every scrap of food she had to her little girls, to my mother and her two sisters. Now starvation meant that she could scarcely stand. But somehow she managed to hold herself upright and stumble on board.

She had to, for this train was the only chance of liberty. A prisoner exchange had been arranged and somehow, using false passports, my family was on it. But the Nazis were excluding anyone whose illness might disclose to the Allies the hunger and disease in the camps. My grandmother knew that, starved though she was, she would have to walk to freedom. If she did not, her girls would die, as so many, many more had died and were still to die.

On board she collapsed as the train made its winter way through frozen countryside to safety in Switzerland. And then, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the train stopped. A guard appeared. He waved his hands at my family and told them that there were too many people on the train. They would have to get off. They would be left to die in the snow.

My aunt, the eldest child, protested. My grandmother was too ill to be moved, she said. The Nazi guard looked. He shrugged. OK, he said. And he moved on.

My grandmother lived just long enough to see her little girls through their ordeal, to deliver them from the camps to safety. She crossed the border to Switzerland and before the day was done, she died.

(For an index to the whole series, see here)

Rocking with the Al Q boys

An op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor features some 'secret documents discovered last month in the Malian city of Timbuktu'. From these it would appear that the Al Q franchise has some image problems:

The papers... are part of a "confidential letter" written by Abdelmalek Droukdel, the head of Al Qaeda in northern Africa. He left parts of the letter as he fled the city. In it, he warns subordinates that they have been too quick and brutal in imposing sharia, or Islamic law. He worries that local Muslims will reject the religion and come to hate the jihadists, which would "consequently lead to the failure of our experiment," which includes establishing a global base for Al Qaeda.

He decries the stoning of adulterers to death, the barring of women from public areas, and the prevention of children from playing. He worries about losing local support after his men destroyed local shrines that they deemed sacrilegious.

Al Qaeda's notion of women as second-class people can be seen in one court document also found in Timbuktu that ordered a woman to be given 60 lashes for "mixing with men." During its 10-month reign, Al Qaeda required women to be clothed head to toe when in public. They could wear no makeup and use no perfume.

There's talk, as well, of 'internal dissension'. May they enjoy that; they could even possibly learn something from it. In light of the above, one can understand the Christian Science Monitor's optimism concerning the way bad ideas sooner or later fail. The trouble is if it's much later rather than sooner, a lot of people can suffer along the way. (See also here.)