Category: Uncategorized

Being seven minutes or so of street scenes shot in Berlin between 1900 and 1914. As the source has it: ‘the videos show us a more relaxed city, one unaware that World War I and decades of destruction were right around the corner’.

I like the music, too. (Thanks: DS.)

You might find this useful: Ballots & Bullets, at the University of Nottingham, is putting together ‘a list of all the UK based Politics, IR and Public Policy academics‘ that they are aware of on Twitter. Here’s the list ordered alphabetically by university [pdf]. And here’s the list on Twitter.

A new title for those who want to learn more about Raphael Lemkin – his unfinished autobiography, put together ‘from drafts deposited in the New York Public Library’ – brings this discussion of Lemkin’s life’s work by Jay Winter, professor of history at Yale. It’s an interesting review and tells of the difficulties Lemkin experienced. His fate, Winter thinks, is ‘largely [to have] disappeared from history’.

Lemkin was a prophet without honors, descending into illness and poverty and dying alone, in 1959, of a heart attack at a bus stop on 42nd Street in New York City. Seven people showed up at his funeral.

The man who gave the world a definiton of the new crime of genocide wrote at one point:

I find myself pleading a holy cause at the U.N. while wearing holey clothes. My friends at the U.N. “plot” to see that I eat at least one meal a day. I am ashamed and try to limit myself to a bowl of soup when I am their guest.

Despite all this, I think it’s an exaggeration to say that Lemkin has ‘disappeared from history’. He’s not a household word, it’s true; but his name is well known to anyone interested in international human-rights law, genocide and crimes against humanity – and that isn’t only legal scholars but a more general public tuned in to these important topics.

Be this as it may, I find the bigger question Winter pursues in his review handled in a way that is curiously off centre. A detail, though a not unimportant one, is Winter’s saying that ‘Lemkin’s life’s work was to make the destruction of an entire people illegal’. Yes and no. It did make the destruction of an entire people illegal, but it went further than that: for the UN Genocide Covention ‘defines genocide as any of a number of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part (my emphasis), a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’. More generally, Winter considers why the law against genocide hasn’t been more effective and why, correspondingly, Lemkin’s achievement has been obscured. He offers several possible reasons, among them: ‘Lemkin worked not in an institution but as a one-man crusade’; the survival and flourishing of the nation state; that globalization hasn’t done much for human rights; the changing nature of war and the illiberal excesses of liberal states; and ‘the Holocaust was so monstrous in its scope that putting other abominations alongside it and saying, yes, this too is genocide, has been difficult’.

That is, to speak frankly, a mish-mash. It doesn’t matter how Lemkin worked, the Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN, as Winter himself emphasizes; and if prevention of genocide really does depend on the death of the nation state, we’ll be waiting a very long time for any improvement in this area. What globalization has or hasn’t done for human rights doesn’t bear specifically on the matter of genocide prevention, and neither does the changing nature of war or illiberal measures adopted by liberal states. Finally, putting other abominations alongside the Holocaust and seeing them as genocide is not at all difficult if in fact they fit the definition.

On the other hand, international law, including the law on genocide, is only as effective as it is – which isn’t always very effective – and powerful geopolitical interests often operate to block global institutions from doing what needs to be done when genocides threaten or occur. That is not Raphael Lemkin’s failure, and this is a more economical explanation than is Winter’s throwing in of everything including the kitchen sink.

After reading a report last night about an Israeli study showing why ‘[s]imple, everyday activities like crossword puzzles or reading books may stave off the mind-robbing Alzheimer’s disease’, I had the strangest dream. I dreamt…

Based on the long-suspected evidence that a build-up of Emmylou-beta protein in the brain causes Alzheimer’s, which affects 5.4 million people in the United States alone, Israeli researcher Inna Slutsky has found an important missing link.

It’s not just the amount of Emmylou that can create the onset of Alzheimer’s, she says, but the specific kind of Emmylou protein found in the brain. An imbalance of Emmylou-beta 40, compared to its counterpart Emmylou-beta 42, is found in those suffering the effects of the disease.

In her research, Slutsky wanted to see if she could restore the balance between the two Emmylous.

Not Emmylou, surely. No, not Emmylou. Amyloid. This is Emmylou, one and only. (Thanks: FG.)

Lloyd Shepherd grew up in Kent to Mancunian and Welsh parents. He was educated at Sevenoaks School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He spent a decade as a journalist writing about the film and television industries, before becoming a digital producer for the likes of the Guardian, the BBC, Channel 4 and Yahoo. He has written two novels to date: The English Monster, his first, was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Historical Writers Association/Goldsboro Books Crown for Debut Fiction. Lloyd lives in South London with his family. He blogs at Lloyd Shepherd.

Why do you blog? > To maintain enthusiasm for as many things as possible. I find that when I’m not blogging, I’m crabby and uninterested in the world.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Writing about book piracy and the state of the book business. It helped me learn a lot about an industry I was new to, and seemed to hit a lot of sweet spots and nerve endings.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Write every day, even if you think you have nothing to say. And don’t worry if nobody’s listening.

What are your favourite blogs? > kottke.org, Marginal Revolution, David Hepworth’s Notebook, and normblog.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Hugh Thomas, Simon Schama, Greil Marcus, Robert Hooke, Roy Porter, Kenneth Clark, Ben Goldacre, Jared Diamond, Steve Jones, Michael Pollan, George Orwell, Clive James, James Fallows, Tyler Cowen, Tim Harford, Antony Beevor, Nick Cohen, Ian Macdonald.

What are you reading at the moment? > War and Peace, The Marlowe Papers, Hellblazer.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Kurt Vonnegut, Henry James, Stephen King, David Thomson, David Mitchell, David Bowie, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Graham Greene, Christopher Hitchens, Anne Tyler, Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Middleton, Tomas Tranströmer, John Donne, Neal Stephenson, Robert Johnson, Richard Thompson.

What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.

What is your favourite poem? > ‘Ample Make This Bed‘ by Emily Dickinson.

What is your favourite movie? > Alien.

What is your favourite song? > ‘This Is A Low‘ by Blur.

Who is your favourite composer? > David Bowie.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > That the freedom to think and to say what you are thinking are the most fundamental of all freedoms.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That any political or religious settlement is more important than the freedom of the individual to think or express themselves.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > The Slave Trade, by Hugh Thomas. It caused me to question many of the ethical underpinnings and assumptions of British history.

Who are your political heroes? > My father, Neil Kinnock, Clement Attlee, Tony Blair, Alan Johnson, Barbara Castle, Abraham Lincoln. Practical politicians, not visionary ones.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Economic inequality.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > The world is better now than it ever has been, and will continue to improve.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Kindness is good for you.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Kindness, again.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Selfishness.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > The Apprentice.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > My son. My daughter. My wife. And everything else.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you’d do differently? > I would have started writing, seriously, earlier. I was too scared of not being any good at it. It’s stupid to be scared of something like that.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > By the sea, in a warm country, with a boat bobbing against the jetty.

What would your ideal holiday be? > In a house by a beach with my wife, my family and our closest friends.

What talent would you most like to have? > I’d like to be able to make interesting conversation during social occasions. Rather than clamming up like a panicked mannequin.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > It changes all the time. Currently, Louis C.K.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Bryan Robson, Eric Cantona, Jimmy and Brian Greenhoff, Lou Macari, Sir Alex Ferguson.

Which English Premiership football team do you support? > See above!

What animal would you most like to be? > Chas Chandler.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Is it a terrorist organization? There appears to be some confusion. The Bulgarian government is backing off from an earlier claim by its predecessor that Hezbollah was behind the bus bombing in Burgas last July.

“It is important that the (EU) decision be based not only on the bombing in Burgas because I think the evidence we have is not explicit,” Foreign Minister Kristian Vigenin, whose government took office last week, told national state radio BNR.

“There is an indication that it is possible (that Hezbollah was behind it) but we cannot take decisions with important consequences for the EU based on indirect data.

This report from the New York Times suggests that the new Bulgarian government has a keen eye for what determines the definition of ‘terrorist’:

The bombing investigation has placed Bulgaria in a tight geopolitical squeeze between the larger European countries, which favor the terrorist designation for Hezbollah, and those that oppose the designation. Bulgaria has also expressed concern about jeopardizing its historically close relations with Middle Eastern countries.

Other relevant material can be found here:

Nigerian authorities announced yesterday that they had made three arrests of Hezbollah operatives and uncovered a large stash of weapons, foiling a plot to attack Israeli and Western targets in Nigeria.

Nigerian military spokesman Captain Ikedichi Iweha said that three Lebanese men were arrested earlier this month in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria. Iweha said, “All those arrested have confessed to have undergone Hezbollah terrorist training.” A raid on the home of one of the suspects revealed a large cache of arms, including eleven anti-tank weapons, four anti-tank landmines, twenty one rocket-propelled grenades, more than 11,000 bullets and an amount of dynamite.

This recent report from the Times (£) and concerning Iran also has a bearing:

Iran has spent decades establishing sleeper cells with the ability to carry out devastating terrorist attacks in Latin America, according to an Argentine prosecutor investigating a bombing blamed on Tehran.

The accusation by Alberto Nisman, who is investigating a 1994 blast at a Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people, will raise alarms for Jewish and Western interests across the continent, at a time of growing tensions over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and its involvement in the conflict in Syria. Iran has denied involvement in the attack.

“These are sleeper cells. They have activities you wouldn’t imagine. Sometimes they die having never received the order to attack,” said Mr Nisman in his 500-page report.

The charge will be a blow to President Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, who this year outraged Jews by offering to collaborate with Tehran on a “truth commission” to investigate the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association building. [On which see this post – NG]

Mr Nisman accused Mohsin Rabbani, an influential Iranian cleric who was the cultural attaché in Buenos Aires at the time of the attack, of spending the last 20 years developing an intelligence network in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Surinam and Trinidad and Tobago. Mr Rabbani is now based in Qom, a city in Iran.

Well, that’s Iran, you might say. But the New York Times reported on Nisman as follows:

The special prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center here that killed 85 people released a report on Wednesday claiming that Iran had set up intelligence stations in different parts of Latin America with the aim of carrying out terrorist attacks directly or through Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group. [My italics.]

On a different but not wholly unrelated matter, have Hezbollah made a bad strategic mistake in supporting Assad in Syria? Steven A. Zyck thinks so: ‘that backing Assad may in fact be the quickest route to the destruction and marginalization of Hezbollah’; ‘it is hard’, he says, ‘to imagine a scenario in which Hezbollah’s support for the Assad regime helps the group, the Syrian people, Lebanon, or regional peace and stability’. See, likewise, here:

… the intervention by Hezbollah could be problematic for that organization, which historically has been revered in Syria for its opposition to Israel. Now, in the eyes of the Syrian insurgency and its sympathizers, Hezbollah has turned its guns on fellow Muslims and taken on the form of an occupying force.

By contrast, Qifa Nabki offers some explanation of Hezbollah’s strategic thinking. (Thanks: HG.)

It’s the 69th anniversary of D-Day, being marked in different ways. Here is a picture gallery. Then, ‘the stars-and-stripes [were] being raised in a quiet ceremony at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach‘.

James Gabaree, who landed at Omaha Beach with the 5th Ranger Battalion, says: ‘We made a difference… There is a lot of cynicism around today. I hope people remember that there were people like me and all the Rangers that I worked with, those of us who really believed in democracy.’

Nine years ago, I asked my dad where he’d been on D-Day and this is what he remembered.

On the other hand, at Comment is Free today you may, if you so choose, read about how Rosie the Riveter, ‘representing the American women who worked in factories during World War II’, was really, according to the writer’s father, a symbol of US imperialism and capitalist propaganda – ‘a motivational picture explicitly designed to encourage female munitions workers to pump out weapons harder’. There’s no reflection from the writer herself about what other powers than the US were involved in World War II and whether they were imperialist, or indeed what they were and what that war might have been about. So I wouldn’t bother if I were you. (Thanks: RB / MK.)

If checking your privilege has become ‘one of the great political rallying cries of 2013‘, we’d better all do it, right? And we’d better all do it right, right? Because to do it wrong wouldn’t be much good. It’s a thought that I’m familiar with from both professional and political experience. I remember a senior colleague once advising me that where you stand is where you sit, and I immediately grasped the point of his observation, running a large academic department as I then was and having preoccupations as a consequence that were novel to my old self and yet easily recognizable nonetheless to the new self I was becoming. Still, the anatomical difficulty of simultaneously standing where I sat did reinforce other thoughts I’d gleaned from the world of politics, and which, translated roughly, could be rendered so: you can’t jump out of your own skin.

Well, you can’t jump out of your skin, and that’s the problem about checking your privilege. You ought to do this; but can you really? For we have two tendencies here of contrasting direction and unmeasurable relative power. Each of us is a grounded consciousness and disposed to see the world from the angle that this gives; at the same time, we need to check our privilege in order to make sure that we aren’t overlooking advantages we possess that might obscure the difficulties of others.

Marxism has had endless experience with the variations. If you’re a bourgeois intellectual, or even just bourgeois tout court, what can you bring to the struggles engaged in by working people for better lives? You can bring resources of knowledge possibly, acquired through your advantages. But beware lest you also bring habits of arrogance and superiority. You are not better than they are. The intellectual can only teach the masses [!] anything if she also knows how to learn from them. So the practices of knowledge and learning must be supplemented by practices of solidarity and action. From the dialectical interrelationship something good may come.

Yet, when all is said and done this means that even the privileged, blocked as they may initially be from seeing things true and clear, have the possibility of truth and clarity available to them if they try hard enough. And from among those whose struggle they aspire to help, from workers and other relatively disadvantaged people, agents of knowledge and political experience likewise emerge. Privilege or no privilege, we all have to do the best we can, trying to get things right – or, since people rarely get things altogether right, making a contribution to not getting them too badly wrong. So what comes out in the wash is the question itself that happens to be at issue and not the vantage points of the interlocutors. To put it baldly, a person of privilege may be able to give you a better argument against his particular privilege than someone who doesn’t share it but would like to. And people without privilege are not always endowed with great wisdom, though, equally, people with much knowledge aren’t always admirable in other ways, such as morally.

Then there is also the peril of not only thinking you know better than someone else – which it’s possible that you might – but of being so certain about this that you claim a right to force it on them. You and the vanguard party. Your correct consciousness and the false consciousness of those poor benighted others. Go ahead, check your privilege on this one too: to think that by using a fashionable phrase you are revealed as a humble sort who has avoided the sin of not questioning the distortions in your own advantaged view of the world. But, of course, you may just be a one-person vanguard assuming you know better when you don’t. And a smug lot, to boot.

My conclusion? Sit, stand, jump out of your skin – all you can do in this world is try your best to make sense of things.

Last month on normblog there was a post about this book by Norm himself. The post does a good job of saying what the book is about, so I won’t go into that again. Norm also outlines many of its excellent qualities. Still, there are things I want to say about Stoner and I’m going to start by quoting a passage from it. It’s taken from very near the end, both of the book and of Stoner’s life and it’s about love.

In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him – how many years ago? – by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life (my italics), and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both…

There are three things I want to say about this novel. The first is, it’s plain and this is one of the best things about it. By ‘plain’ I mean there is no whizzy, exciting, shocking, mind-blowingly original, postmodern, out of left field aspect to it whatsoever. Writers are often exhorted to think of what’s known as ‘the two-minute elevator pitch’: a summing-up of their novel with which, in an imaginary lift, they will persuade an agent or a publisher that their book is THE ONE. John Williams’s elevator pitch would be: ‘A man lives a life dedicated to teaching he loves and then dies. This life has lots of unhappiness in it but also some happiness.’ I can’t see a modern fiction editor being persuaded by that.

Second, the unadorned and rather formal style may seem old-fashioned for a book written in the 1960s, yet to me it feels as if the prose hasn’t been ‘composed’ or ‘worked at’ but to have grown organically and naturally. There are no writerly tricks. There is no juggling with time, no first person/present tense, no attempt to make the book more like a film script. There is not the faintest hint of the exotic or the Baroque. What you have is the story of a life and what this book demonstrates (even though Stoner’s God isn’t the traditional deity but rather Literature) is the truth of George Herbert’s lines: ‘Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws / Makes that and th’ action fine.’ Stoner’s life, his unhappy marriage and his failed relationship with his daughter notwithstanding, is a worthwhile one and one, moreover, which has had its share of glory and love.

Thirdly, he is not afraid to write about emotions. The women in the book are a contrast with one another. Edith, Stoner’s wife, is not a pleasant character. Slightly mad, unpredictable and the exact opposite of a soulmate, she is still fairly and unresentfully depicted. The dealings between husband and wife, the way Stoner’s love turns into something else; the way he shoulders the burden that his wife has become: all these become the stuff of real page-turning drama. Testament to Williams’s skill is the fact that you are always longing to know what happens next.

The shining heart of the novel is Stoner’s love affair with Katherine. She is the ideal lover: beautiful, kind and able to share fully her teacher’s love of literature. The affair ends and the lovers separate, but there is a touching coda to their story, so that the Stoner/Katherine relationship is like a self-contained jewel of a story embedded in the larger book.

Almost the most tragic aspect of the novel is the gradual souring (because of the malign influence of Edith) of Stoner’s dealings with his daughter. They end the book virtually estranged. The fact that Williams can write three such different women into the narrative and bring each of them so much to life, take such care to show us subtle changes and developments in their characters, shows that he’s interested in them, pays them proper attention and does not write about them in a perfunctory way. He is careful with even the most unsympathetic of them.

Some readers have said that the book is depressing, or too gloomy, or that it emphasizes too much the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ lived by its protagonists. To me, though, it’s a story about someone doing the best he can in a profession he loves and is happy in. He deals with the hard things; he suffers. He is stoical in the face of many tribulations, but he has known love and its transcendent power and, more than this, he has delighted in teaching others to love the things which he considers make life worthwhile. In my opinion, as well as being gripping and superbly written, it’s life-enhancing, too. (Adèle Geras)

Some people say they’ve had enough of hearing about the Holocaust. Do they know all these testimonies?

73. Chaim Zajdenberg and his family:

Could this place have been my father’s grave?

His name was Chaim Zajdenberg and he gave his birthplace as Lublin in southeast Poland. As a young man, he moved to Paris, became a portrait photographer with a glamorous clientele of theater people and signed his pictures Studio Charles. My mother, Ruchla, was born in Warsaw at the turn of the last century. She emigrated in her late twenties and in France was called Rachel. Charles and Rachel met and married and I was born two years later. A curly haired sister was born when I was six, two days before the Nazis entered Paris. No longer the center of attention, I was devastated.

Family life came to an end in 1942. My mother and sister were arrested in November by French police and sent to the French camp of Drancy, then on to Auschwitz. That winter, I later read, turned bitter cold, especially in the East. They were never heard from again.

Meanwhile my father knocked on the doors of some of his well connected French clients to get his wife and child located and freed. To no avail. In April 1943, after trundling through one or another hiding place in Paris, we were both arrested in a small hotel in the Latin Quarter. As a French citizen, I was let go in the care of a relative.

Around the same time, in Warsaw, the Ghetto uprising started but within two months it was crushed and the Nazis carpet bombed the whole Jewish district in North Warsaw. Afterwards, they brought in forced labor crews from the nearby concentration camps to clean up the rubble. According to Bernard Zajdenberg, a relative who worked on one of those crews, my father was sent to Warsaw where Bernard saw him collapse of exhaustion and shortly thereafter die from typhus.

74. Jakub Gutenbaum:

These fighters [of the Warsaw Ghetto] “knew that they had to die, but they wanted to leave a trace of their existence, hence those acts of heroism, a testimony to honor,” Jakub Gutenbaum, an 83-year-old survivor of the uprising, told news agency AP on Thursday.

Gutenbaum lost his mother and brother to the gas chambers of the Majdanek concentration camp, but he managed to survive and was eventually liberated by the Soviet Red Army at another camp.

“The fact that I survived is a matter of luck… Maybe I was at the wrong places, or rather at the right places at the right times.”

75. Simcha Applebaum.

‘They took my mother right away… My mother was 43 years old.’

76. The figure 13:

Of the 13 musicians driven out of the orchestra [the Vienna Philharmonic] for being Jewish or married to Jews, five died in concentration camps, others were deported, but none returned…

77. André and Magda Trocmé, Daniel Trocmé, and the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon:

A French town where dozens of residents saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust will open a museum to commemorate the rescuers’ actions.

The Memory of Chambon museum is scheduled to open its doors on June 5 in Chambon-sur-Lignon, 70 miles south of Lyon in southern France…

The new museum will… commemorate the actions of at least 35 residents who, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, prevented French authorities under the pro-Nazi Vichy government from deporting and murdering approximately 5,000 Jews.

The rescue was initiated and led by the town’s pastor, Andre Trocme, and his wife Magda. The couple and another 33 townsfolk have been recognized as Righteous among the Nations, a title conferred by Yad Vashem to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Trocme hid Jews in his parish and smuggled many others into neutral Switzerland.

According to Yad Vashem, the Vichy authorities became aware of his activities and cautioned him to cease. His response was: “These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock… I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.”

Andre Trocme was arrested but released. His cousin, Daniel Trocme, died in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was sent for rescuing Jewish children in his capacity as director of a local children’s home.

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