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Fans of the greatest football club might like to look at a short film about the team’s recent visit Down Under. Could they be trying to impart their winning ways to Australian cricket, something Australian cricket has a long history of being familiar with but has lately mislaid? Anyway there’s only one problem: the film also deals with the visit of another football club… Hang on, I’ll remember its name in just a moment. Yes, that’s it – Liverpool. Unfortunately, the brazen commercialism on display in the Liverpool section of the film might distract you from the pure spirit of football you’ll get from the Manchester United part. (Thanks: Fi.)

In connection with the reopening of the case of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, Matthew Syed asks (£) whether justice is served by pursuing people who committed crimes decades ago.

It seems to me that when it comes to the most serious crimes there is only one possible answer – an unambiguous yes. We should acknowledge the legal obstacles and moral difficulties, but we should also press ahead with prosecutions, however belated. This is not just about delivering justice upon past crimes; it is about deterring future ones.

He also discusses the issue with reference to the pursuit of ageing Nazi war criminals today, writing:

Neither does time diminish the horrors of what happened in Nazi Germany. Some have argued that it is tasteless to haul octogenarians or nonagenarians before a judge, but it would be a far greater affront to natural justice to turn a blind eye, even when the suspect is nearing the end of life.

I agree with Syed about this, and I would agree with him even if there were empirical evidence to suggest that trying people for crimes committed a very long time ago had no deterrent effect whatsoever. As a matter of fact, in international law as it stands there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity and this is as it should be. In my view there are at least two reasons why.

The first is a simple reason of retributive justice. A person who has committed grave crimes against others and so far gone unpunished stands in a relation to their victims of unrecompensed wrongdoing. It doesn’t matter how old they are. Other things equal, we can only assume a continuity of moral identity between the criminal (against humanity) of yesterday and the unpunished old man or woman of today. If the latter goes to his or her grave without having been brought to justice, a terrible wrong remains unrectified. He or she gets away with it, as we say, and their advanced age hasn’t altered a thing in that regard.

Second, from a societal point of view, there is a declarative as well as retributive dimension to not forgetting a crime just because it is an old one. We announce by not forgetting, by continuing to pursue the culprit(s), that the crime is so grave that nothing apart from due process and consequent judgement can ‘clean’ it in the public record, that as a community we show no tolerance towards the material act that constitutes this crime, irrespective of how long ago it was committed.

Samir Chopra blogs about cricket here. At my invitation he kindly agreed to contribute the following memory to the long-running normblog series.

I first heard about David Hookes a month before my 10th birthday. An Indian sports magazine carried a little story about a new, young, blond-haired genius who had scored five centuries in six innings in the Sheffield Shield. I read the story with great interest, and on learning he was from the same state side as Don Bradman, instantly became a fan. A few weeks later, I learned he had been picked for the Australian side to play in the Centenary Test. I could hardly wait.

Hookes’s debut was not auspicious. But then neither was the Australian first innings. Out of a total of 138, Hookes contributed a mere 17. But after Lillee and Walker had bowled England out for 95, Australia were in the hunt. Still, it’s often forgotten that in the second innings, Australia were in strife again when they slumped to 53 for 3. But three successive partnerships of 79, 55 and 57 salvaged matters. Hookes was implicated in the last two; of the 112 runs put on while he was at the crease, he scored 56. And 20 of those – his last 20 – came in five consecutive deliveries bowled by Tony Greig: a lofted drive, a sweep-pull-paddle around the corner, a cover-drive, an on-drive, and then a cover-drive again.

Back in India, I read the report on his batting with glee. A boy’s hero comes good in a debut Test against England? What was not to like? But I had to rest content with verbal descriptions and photographs. There was no television coverage of the Centenary Test in India, not even highlights.

Years went by. Hookes’s career never quite lived up to its early promise. He was a failure in England in 1977, joined Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, had his jaw broken, returned to the fold, and stayed on the fringes. Twenty-three Tests for a batsman of his calibre still seem a shame. I knew he did well in domestic cricket but that was scant consolation. He became a commentator – I enjoyed hearing his enthusiastic, if at times overdone, takes on the game. Finally, he became a coach, returning to guide the fortunes of young cricketers.

And I still hadn’t seen those five fours of his. I lived in Australia from 2000 to 2002, and hoped to catch a glimpse of them on some nostalgia package but it never happened.

Then, finally, thanks to the miracles of the Internet and YouTube, it happened. Some kind soul uploaded long highlights of the Centenary Test, and I saw it all: Lillee’s bowling, McCosker’s broken jaw, Randall’s second innings heroics. It was all there. As were Hookes’s five fours (at 39 minutes 40 seconds in).

Now, finally, I attached images to words: the young man on debut, unawed by the occasion, playing in the cauldron of the MCG, boldly, freely, stroking his way into immortality. I played the video again and again, making sure I didn’t miss out any details, marvelling at how different batsmen of that era looked: lighter bats, no arm guards, no helmets. It lent Hookes’s batting a special unencumbered light touch, a grace and finesse combined with power.

I was not a 10-year-old boy any more, but those brief video clips made me feel, if only for a short time, young all over again.

From contemporary accounts I’ve found among the books on my shelves:

…
the young left hander, Hookes, a brilliant 56. – John Arlott in Frindall’s Score Book: The Centenary Test at Melbourne and England versus Australia 1977

Yet the spotlight centred on the 21-year-old David Hookes who won his place on the forthcoming tour to England with an innings straight from the fount of youth. This six feet two inches powerful left-handed batsman, who had scored five centuries in 1976-77 Sheffield Shield cricket, strode to the crease with a confidence even more apparent when he struck Greig for five 4’s in an over – off, pull, cover, mid-wicket, cover. – Wisden 1978

There was all the innocence of youth in these shots, all the splendid simplicity of a talented young batsman playing his natural game in a totally uninhibited way. There was no calculation or tactical awareness, just an instinctive and spontaneous response. Greg Chappell saw it as the moment that Australia really took control of the game. – Christopher Martin-Jenkins, The Jubilee Tests

Greig snatched his jumper and cap from umpire O’Connell in something more than mock relief at the over’s conclusion, while famous names in the pavilion pondered when last such a feat had been achieved. Victor Richardson did it, they concluded, against J.W.H.T. Douglas in the Melbourne Test of 1920-21. – Frank Tyson, The Centenary Test

[For links to the other posts in this series, see here.]

Those who have seen Midnight in Paris will know that Gil, the main protagonist, makes several visits to the past, where he converses with writers, artists, film directors and other such folk.

If this doesn’t describe one of the most useless law suits of all time, I’d like to hear of a more feeble one:

A clearly exasperated federal judge dismissed copyright claims over the use of a nine-word William Faulkner quotation in the Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris.”

Faulkner is one of many 1920s luminaries to whom “Midnight in Paris” pays homage as its modern-day protagonist Gil Pender finds himself back in what he thinks of as a societal Golden Age.

“The past is not dead,” Pender says at one point. “Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party.”

The full Faulkner quotation, from “Requiem for a Nun,” is “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Faulkner Literary Rights, as administrator of the author’s literary estate, sued Sony for disgorgement of profits from the 2011 film, plus damages, last year.

Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Mills in Oxford, Miss., threw the case out Thursday.

The judge ruled it was a case of ‘fair use’ and said that ‘the film indeed helped the plaintiff and the market value of Requiem if it had any effect at all’. As a blogger at Outside the Beltway (via which) comments, Faulkner is actually credited with the relevant words.

When Youssra’s three-and-a-half-year-old son started nursery school, he really wanted his mum to come on a school trip. So she signed up to help out on a cinema visit. She buttoned the children’s coats outside their classroom and accompanied them to the front hall. But there, she was stopped by the headteacher, who told her, in front of the baffled children: “You don’t have the right to accompany the class because you’re wearing a headscarf.” She was told to remove her hijab, or basic Muslim head covering, because it was an affront to the secular French Republic. “I fought back,” she says. “I brought up all the arguments about equality and freedom for all. But I was forced home, humiliated. The last thing I saw was my distressed son in tears. He didn’t understand why I’d been made to leave.”

The French charity worker is now part of the protest group Mamans Toutes Égales, or Mothers All Equal. Based in Montreuil outside Paris, it has blocked school coaches, boycotted outings and staged street demonstrations in protest at the growing number of mothers in headscarves being barred from school trips. “This is an attack on freedom and democracy in state schools. They seem to want to wipe Muslim women off the landscape,” says Youssra, 36.
…..
Anissa Fathi, 34, stirs her coffee in a halal burger bar in Montreuil while her eldest son plays. She has three children. Since her eight-year-old second son’s primary school barred her from helping on outings because of her headscarf, she worries about the impact on a new generation who have seen their mothers picked out and excluded in front of the class. “Children are not stupid. They understand. A lot of children who have been exposed to this treatment of their mothers have had psychological difficulties. My son would have fits of rage, he was self-harming and hitting his head against the wall at home because I couldn’t go. Whenever the date of a school trip approached, he would be extremely anxious and in tears.”

From a piece by Angelique Chrisafis in today’s Guardian on attempts to extend the reach of an illiberal French tradition. (For earlier normblog posts on this issue see the 54 links I give here.)

Michael Rosen writes an open letter to the SWP concerning recent events in that organization by which he, like many others, was appalled. Towards the end of the letter he draws some conclusions from recalling the attitude of his parents towards the Communist Party.

I often used to ask my parents about why they stayed in the Communist Party for so long, why they left, what they considered valuable about having been part of it… and so on. In these long discussions, one aspect that is relevant here, I think, is the point my father made about why he went on defending the CP and the Soviet Union even when he ceased to believe that it was right to do so. He said that that was because he felt that there was only one interest involved in attacking the CP and the Soviet Union: the ‘bourgeoisie’… So, he said, even as he might sometimes have felt that the CP or the Soviet Union was in some way wrong, he couldn’t admit it or do anything about it, because to do so would make it easier for the enemy (bourgeoisie, ruling class, the bosses, international capitalism, etc) to survive and win. So, he shamefully admitted, he and our mother supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary because otherwise the enemy would move into Hungary and take over.

I am not going to claim that this is your Hungary moment. The fate of millions of Hungarians – and indeed of the whole eastern bloc (as was) – is very different from a few thousand of us on the left in Britain being worried, concerned or fed up. However, I’m going to draw one analogy, no matter how inappropriate it appears at first. It concerns the state of mind my father described that went on justifying the CP and the Soviet Union even when he knew it was wrong. It seems to me that throughout this whole affair I’ve seen aspects of this state of mind when reading what SWP loyalists have written. That’s to say, ‘if we concede that we’ve got something wrong with this Comrade Delta affair, this will only bring comfort to the enemy… so even though something’s not right, loyalty comes first’. Or put another way: ‘if the Daily Mail are saying that we got it wrong, we’ll have to say that we’re getting it right’.

All I can say is that there comes a point at which this kind of view – if indeed I’ve typified it right – is not only unhelpful, it becomes dangerous. No, I’ll put it another way: it brings ideas and views that I think are valuable and necessary into disrepute. Yes, I think that international capitalism can only offer inequality and war. It can develop ‘production’, it can develop ‘the economy’ but only by enriching tiny minorities, while dividing and impoverishing millions of others.

There comes a point. Notice how late that point appears to have come, according to Michael’s own account of things, for his parents. They felt the CP and the Soviet Union were ‘in some way wrong’ at the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when the show trials, the purges, and the millions of victims of Stalin’s rule were already long established facts; but refrained from criticism nonetheless because criticism could only benefit… the interests of the bourgeoisie. One can only agree with Michael that to cede your own judgement to others, especially perhaps a party leadership, on matters of great moral import, is dangerous. That he should have been able to see in the SWP, an organization that continues to proclaim its vanguard-Leninist credentials, a valuable political ally is perhaps the more surprising in the circumstances. The danger Michael detects is not unrelated to that lineage.

For any mature member of the left, the point that duly arrives, in other words, should arrive rather earlier than when some self-styled socialist outfit is beginning to imprison and kill people; it should arrive on the first day it usurps the autonomous judgement of conscientious political activists. Equally, no one should ever sign up to the thesis that you can’t criticize organizations you support because to do so will give ammunition to their enemies.

Note also in passing here Michael’s observation that ‘international capitalism can only offer inequality and war [etc]’. Yes, what did the Romans ever do for us? If he were to re-read some Marx he would find material to contradict this ludicrous statement, as he also would by taking a look at the real world.

In today’s Times Michael Savage writes (£):

The fact that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had a baby boy will not derail plans to introduce new laws ending gender discrimination in the succession to the Crown.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, steered legislation through Parliament earlier this year that stopped the royal succession from bypassing an eldest daughter. Old rules had seen it passed straight to an eldest son.
…..
British ministers have already made clear that when new laws are eventually agreed, they would be applied retrospectively to the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess should she have been a girl.

This point appears not to have weighed much with Joan Smith in comments she made last night on Newsnight. There she said (see, in turn, 7 minutes 10 seconds and 15 minutes in) that it was weird, given that equality is one of our core values, that for the rest of the 21st century, unless something unexpected happens, there will be no head of state who isn’t a white male, since the position of head of state in this country ‘absolutely excludes women’; and, again, that no woman can be head of state for the next century.

I find this a rather eccentric way of putting things. Let’s say that for the next 50 years there isn’t a hope in hell that the voters of Muggledychurch will elect for their MP anyone but a Conservative. Does this mean that our electoral laws absolutely exclude Labour or any other parliamentary representation for Muggledychurch? Or that no Labour MP can sit in parliament for the said constituency? Evidently not.

Returning to the case of the monarchy, suppose that something unexpected did happen: that the Prince of Cambridge decided, on reaching the age of majority, that he would prefer the life of a Formula One driver to being king, and so ceded his title to the throne to the second-born, who had, as it happened, turned out to be a girl and then woman. This would show that the position of head of state in this country didn’t absolutely exclude women – as the intention is that it no longer should.

He being Matt Haig.

America, you are infinitely complicated, and you have more than enough issues to warrant therapy, but I could still explore you for ever and not even begin to get bored any more than you can get bored in dreams.

It’s a love that ‘remains undimmed’, and it’s one I share – and indeed shared even before I ever set eyes on it.

Owen Jones doesn’t like the Tories and he explains why. But to the suggestion that they’re evil he registers an objection, all the same. This is the core of it:

Cruel? Certainly. Unforgivable? Beyond doubt. Evil? No. “Evil” is a comforting, but worrying concept. Its connotations are so extreme that, by applying it to someone, you at a stroke strip them of their humanity; you cease in any way to be able to imagine their rationales or thought processes; they simply become a cartoon villain, for whom the ultimate thrill is the inflicting of misery. As soon as you fail to understand your enemy, they have already defeated you. It would be easy to imagine the Tories as a cabal of upper-class sadomasochists, spending their evenings plotting ever more devious ways to hunt children on council estates like rural foxes. But it misses the point.

And Owen goes on to say that most people act on the belief that what they’re doing is right and they rationalize things so as to obscure or othewise marginalize facts which are inconvenient to their view of the world. So it is with the Tories.

That people are subject to the temptation to adjust the world to fit in with their beliefs, rather than modifying their beliefs when necessary to face the facts of the world, is true. But, otherwise, I think there are several points in what Owen says or implies about evil here that are open to question.

First, it isn’t the case that by invoking the concept of evil with reference to some person or group you strip them of their humanity. There are conceptions of evil that make it a sort of inhuman force, but not all notions of evil do this. When Owen says, as he does, ‘Talk of “evil” is best left to theologians’, he denies there is legitimate space for quite secular conceptions of evil, without justifying the move by argument. I can think – and I do – that people can do evil because of some very human impulses.

Second, one can adopt a secular conception of evil without this entailing that you’ve given up on the effort to understand people’s actions in other terms as well. Thus, for example – and these examples are merely illustrative; I’m not proposing them as giving an adequate account of evil – one might think that acts in which individuals take pleasure in the needless suffering of others, or by which they show themselves perfectly indifferent to the suffering of others, are evil acts and that those much given to such acts are evil characters, without wanting to forego attempts to explain how certain policies can be adopted that give some the opportunity to enjoy or disregard the suffering of others. Thus, a political party may adopt policies that cause much suffering without the generality of its membership being evil, but simply because they are mistaken in certain beliefs; yet, at the same time, there could be cruel impulses at work within that ‘constituency’.

Third, to write on this topic as if the left didn’t have its own problems with a history of cruel policies, and people who went along with them, is one-sided at the very least. This history is now rather well known, and nor is it entirely in the past. Owen doesn’t pretend to be ignorant of it; but he also passes over it without mention. I would have thought it was of some relevance to the suggestion he is opposing, according to which a large political party of the centre-right within a democracy one shares with it consists of evil people – whereas we on the left, innocent of any such burden, may freely debate whether its members are indeed fully evil or merely cruel and unforgivable.

Play it again, boys and girls. This from a report in today’s Times (£):

The official inquiry into the Iraq war has indicated that it intends to criticise Tony Blair for secretly plotting with George W. Bush for Britain to join the invasion [of Iraq].

Politicians, civil servants and military officers facing censure will be contacted within the next two weeks. Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry chairman, said that it had identified those who would be criticised for “some aspect of the part they played” in the invasion in 2003 and the seven-year occupation.

I don’t want to repeat myself on this, so I’ll limit the repetition to saying that Blair could not have given Bush anything more than a conditional undertaking over Iraq. Let’s just say, this time round, that if ‘secretly plotting’ is really how the Chilcot inquiry will find, then it has a strange conception of what a secret plot is, with one of these able to make its way through a democratically elected parliament. Had I a secret plot, I’d try to conduct it… more secretively (as one might say).