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According to a usage becoming popular since last week’s military coup in Egypt, a military coup isn’t one provided you approve of it. Thus Mohamed ElBaradei, in an interview with Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Mr. ElBaradei, you opposed the authoritarian rule of former President Hosni Mubarak. Now, it appears that you will play a significant role in the interim government put in place after military leaders overthrew the democratically elected president of Egypt. Should a Nobel Peace Prize laureate be part of such a coup?

ElBaradei: Let me make one thing clear: This was not a coup. More than 20 million people took to the streets because the situation was no longer acceptable. Without Morsi’s removal from office, we would have been headed toward a fascist state, or there would have been a civil war.

The political motivation for the usage in some quarters is clear. As Ian Black reports, President Obama wanted to ‘[avoid] use of the C-word to stave off the risk that US financial aid to a strategically important Middle Eastern ally might be cut off by Congress’. And according to Magdi Abdelhadi:

Almost no one in Egypt – except the Muslim Brothers and their closest allies – views the military’s intervention as a coup. And no one believes the army wants to rule…

The army has said it has a new plan to move Egypt out of the current impasse. Let us hope it does not repeat past mistakes. If it does now take the reins of power temporarily, it must create a level playing field so that all political players, including the Islamists, can continue to take part in Egyptian politics.

Egypt’s ambassador to the US also denies that ‘the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Mursi constituted a coup’.

Commentators who support the removal of Morsi by the Egyptian army have fallen in with these locutions. Here’s Amira Nowaira:

The overthrow of President Morsi may seem like a military coup. But to all intents and purposes it is not. The call for Morsi’s ousting was made by millions of Egyptians who went out on the streets for four days in a row, raising Egyptian flags and chanting one word directed at him: “Erhal“, meaning, “leave, depart”.

And, speaking on the World at One on Thursday, Ahdaf Soueif said of the action of the Egyptian army that it was ‘not a military coup; it’s a deposal but not a coup’. (Thanks JF for this link).

On the other side, there’s no shortage of criticism of the coup that continues to refer to it as what it was: namely, a coup. (1, 2, 3, 4.)

However, one is not bound to conflate the issues of meaning and justification. One could hold that this was a military coup whether justified or not – and therefore even if it was justified. I don’t intend to comment on the legitimacy or otherwise of Morsi’s removal. What counts as legitimate during a revolutionary process is often one of the main things in contention and is only settled post hoc. For this action to have been justified I would think that free elections now have to follow in short order, from which the Islamists have not been excluded. But, in any event, whether there has been a coup or not doesn’t depend on whether one believes it was – or will turn out to have been – for the good of the country.

Suppose, one, that you want to classify contemporary America together with pre-war fascism. And suppose, two, that you have some reason for wanting to do this. Then, try to think, three, how you could do it without stumbling upon something that might give you pause.

Enter John Pilger, stage left. He it is – one – who wants to bring off that classification. But what could be his reason – two – for wanting this? You mean his reason other than just being John Pilger and so given to such heady comparisons? His reason is that he belongs to that segment of the left on which the US/interwar-fascism comparison goes down well. So why then – three – should he be worried about stumbling upon something that will give even him pause? Perhaps because he doesn’t want to make himself a total, as opposed to merely partial, laughing stock, and America today and Nazi Germany back then are, you know, radically different kinds of society and polity and culture and just about everything. Therefore, Pilger writes:

Historians seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the true nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different, but the Damocles sword over [Edward] Snowden, like the casual abduction of Bolivia’s president, ought to stir us into recognising the true nature of the enemy.

Snowden’s revelations are not merely about privacy, or civil liberty, or even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the US now barely conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with, if not necessarily the same as, fascism.

I’ll point out what should have leapt out at you anyway: first, ‘the parallels today are very different’ (but they’re there, comrade, they’re there); second, ‘gangsterism historically identified with, if not necessarily the same as, fascism’. Can’t you see what he’s trying to tell you? That contemporary America is like pre-war fascism: just enough like it that you should be able to recognize ‘the true nature of the enemy’; but, on the other hand, not so much like it that he can be accused of saying ‘the same as‘.

Good game, or what?

‘Posturing’ is the word Chomsky uses:

What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing – using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.

Here. And there’s a bit more in this clip.

(Via.)

I finally caught up with Zero Dark Thirty. In ordinary circumstances I would have been in two minds about seeing it: on the one hand, a movie about the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden would have been of interest to me, especially with the successful outcome of that enterprise; on the other hand, the advance publicity had made it clear enough that scenes of torture were prominent in the early stages of the film, and the graphic representation of physical cruelty is not something I have a stomach for. In this case, however, I was also interested in the controversy the film had generated, with many saying that Zero Dark Thirty condoned the use of torture by the CIA after 9/11, and others – including Kathryn Bigelow, the film’s director – denying this. Having missed it when it was showing in cinemas here, I recently got hold of the DVD.

My own verdict on the controversy? It corresponds with that of Brooks Barnes in the New York Times:

The brutal scenes are presented with no obvious political tilt, creating a cinematic Rorschach test in which different viewers see what they want to see.

I watched Zero Dark Thirty twice within a short period, in an effort to make sure that I didn’t miss what it showed about evidence regarding Bin Laden’s whereabouts secured through torture and evidence secured by other means. Here, as it appears to me, both sides can cite something in support of their view. So, as Steve Coll wrote in the New York Review of Books:

The easiest question to consider is what Zero Dark Thirty actually depicts about the part torture played in locating bin Laden. As best as is known, the CIA’s crucial discovery was to identify a courier, who was known to al-Qaeda colleagues by his nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Agency officers then traced the courier to Abbottabad. Many detainees and other sources contributed information that confirmed the courier’s identity and importance. Ultimately, in the film, Maya [a CIA operative whose role as presented in the film is central – NG] tells one detainee that twenty sources have helped to describe al-Kuwaiti’s role.

There can be no mistaking what Zero Dark Thirty shows: torture plays an outsized part in Maya’s success.

At the same time, as several commentators – including Mark Strong, a British actor who appears as one of Maya’s colleagues – have pointed out, in the movie the key piece of evidence was discovered already on file. Alan A. Stone writes in the Boston Review:

Ironically the clue that leads to Bin Laden has been sitting in a file for years. A young woman who admires Maya’s dedication and emulates her diligence identifies the courier through a systematic search of old files. Chastain [who plays Maya – NG] has emphasized this fact in interviews, pointing out that torture did not lead directly to Bin Laden in the film. Yet Zero Dark Thirty tells a story about a CIA operative and her colleagues who believe, as CIA officials of that era still believe, that torture is justified and effective.

Stone’s conclusion regarding the way the film ends, with Maya in tears after the mission is all over: ‘She has lost her way and some of her humanity, and so has America.’ (See Philip French in the Observer for a similar view.)

When all is said and done, therefore, the arguments about what Zero Dark Thirty shows with respect to the gathering of evidence don’t settle the question of interpretation. Some have been categorical that it does, amongst them Slavoj Žižek, who says that Bigelow is ‘on the side of the normalisation of torture‘ – because Maya and her CIA colleague most involved in the early torture scenes regard it as a normal part of their job. But Žižek treats this as if it were part of a debate, rather than a film, about the use of torture. He doesn’t meet Bigelow’s point that ‘depiction is not endorsement‘. Naomi Wolf for her part went further, in an open letter charging Bigelow with being an apologist for evil – like Leni Riefenstahl.

My own judgement on the movie is that by showing the use of torture in this context as quickly having become a routine matter – though there are several signals that political assumptions in Washington are changing and that this will cease to be so – Zero Dark Thirty places some of the burden of interpretation on the viewer. Those who find the use of torture horrifying will find it horrifying here, and its treatment as a professional routine the more so. Those, however, who insist that the movie willy-nilly justifies torture, even against the weight of such contrary reactions, try to impose an aesthetic judgement as obligatory despite the evidence of responses which are more varied, testimony to the fact that, though there are limits to persuasive interpretation, there is rarely only ever one interpretation possible of a given piece of work.

Here’s some mental exercise for you early – well, relatively – in the day.

Figure it out. Yes, you can do it. (Via Jeff.)

Gary Younge argues in today’s Guardian that racism in the US is a problem that hasn’t gone away. One of the arguments he uses is this:

40 years is not a long period of time when dealing with a centuries-old problem

He also refers to ‘centuries of demonisation and dehumanisation in which black men, by their very existence, [were] understood as a threat.’

I put it to you, dear readers, that it is a weak argument. It’s a weak argument because we have a well-documented case of a form of racial/ethnic prejudice that is some two millennia old and yet has now totally disappeared. I’m talking about anti-Semitism. We are constantly assured that this isn’t at work, not a bit of it, even when standard themes of anti-Jewish prejudice – like Jews controlling the media, or indeed the world, through their money, or Jews being child-killers – and cartoons reproducing ugly images of Jews, are being deployed; because such themes and cartoons have to be understood as merely embodying legitimate criticism of Israel.

Well, if a hatred as old as anti-Semitism can die out as quickly as it has, this shows that ‘centuries of demonisation and dehumanisation’ are neither here nor there.

Then again, maybe Younge is right on the point, and there is a need in certain quarters to re-think matters regarding the rapid disappearance of anti-Semitism despite the continuing recurrence of some of its traditional markers.

Discussing the global attention now fixed on the person of Nelson Mandela as he lies in hospital – ‘a man whose name alone carries a unique moral weight in any language’ – Jonathan Freedland poses the following question:

[M]oral authority is a strange, elusive quality. We feel we know it when we see it, but what exactly does it amount to?

His answer centres on suffering. This is, Jonathan says, the ‘usual prerequisite‘. Most of those who are seen as possessing moral authority have ‘experienced an ordeal that commands our sympathy and therefore our respect’. Suffering isn’t sufficient on its own, he goes on to say. Usually, those with moral authority have also ‘channeled their experience into a struggle, whether for justice, peace or an end to violence’.

That Jonathan has focused here on a common background circumstance of moral authority is not in doubt, and it is also true that, where it does apply, the earlier suffering of an individual thought to have moral authority is central to the way we think about why they have it. Roughly: this man or woman went through much – made great sacrifices and/or had to endure harsh deprivations – for the (good) cause they championed; they deserve to be listened to.

At one point in his column, however, Jonathan comes close to saying that the various constituents of moral authority he is discussing are not merely its ‘usual prerequisites’ but preconditions of it without qualification; he says:

If these are the essential ingredients [my italics] of moral authority it’s not hard to see why Mandela is the uber-example. His suffering, his response to it and his wider campaign for justice are all of a scale and import without parallel.

But, important as it may be when it is relevant, suffering is not only not a sufficient condition of moral authority, it is not a necessary condition of it either. Suffering is not a sufficient condition because out of suffering some people fashion dreams of violent revenge, not even always aimed against the perpetrators of the original suffering, and such dreams mostly do not encourage in others moral respect for those who nurture them.

And suffering is not a necessary condition of moral authority because a person can also come to be seen as having moral authority on the model, roughly speaking, of the sage – someone who is wise not through personal suffering but through some combination of humility, thoughtfulness, long study, having a proven record of giving good advice over an extended period, enjoying intellectual authority in an area thought to be pertinent to the advice they give, and so on. Think about Primo Levi. He, of course, did suffer, having been a prisoner at Auschwitz, and the moral authority he was widely seen as possessing was importantly due to that. But his voice enjoyed a special authority even among Holocaust survivors and that has to be due to the wisdom so many found in what he wrote.

In principle, the two things are separable, the suffering and the wisdom. And it is possible to think of figures seen as commanding moral authority but not because their own lives have been lives of suffering. It’s harder to cite uncontroversial examples, since – to put it crudely – your sage and mine may not be the same ones. For many people today Noam Chomsky is a man of moral authority. Not for me. I think of Michael Walzer in the way they do of Chomsky. The abstract figure is clear, in any case. Not someone who is always right, since no one is that; but someone whose view you want to know, because they think deeply about moral questions and have an admirable record of careful deliberation on difficult questions.

If you missed the Beeb’s programme about Vivian Maier, you can still watch it for a while. She left 150,000 photographs, most of them not seen in her lifetime. Read about her here:

She left thousands not even developed, and most as negatives from which she never made prints.

It was sheer accident that her life’s work was discovered.

Two years before she died in 2009, Vivian Maier stopped paying the rent on five storage lockers in Chicago. Without her knowledge the contents were sold.

Or sample some of her pictures: from New York, and Chicago, and round and about.

Being portraits of some of those recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations – people in Europe during the Nazi period who ‘believed that the Jews belonged to their universe of obligation’ and took risks to honour that obligation. See also the photographs of rescuers and those they rescued, together.

Tomorrow ‘will mark a difficult anniversary to truly celebrate. On June 29, the 100th running of the Tour de France – the world[‘]s most gruelling, most important and most popular bicycle race – will begin. The race, however, has also become synonymous with the plague of performance enhancing drugs… [O]n the eve of the 100th running of what was once among the single greatest athletic endeavors the world had to offer, SPIEGEL ONLINE has assembled some of the event’s most iconic images.’