Category: Uncategorized

Should we be worried about the prospects for democracy in this country? I don’t know. Personally, as it happens, I’m not that worried. I’m sure one should never be complacent about this and also that there are tendencies towards apathy, disillusion, cynicism and what have you that need always to be combated. But at the same time I believe that people who enjoy the benefits of pluralist democracy mostly understand on some level that they do, and there’s strong evidence that many of those who don’t have access to the same benefits wish that they did. So I’m reasonably optimistic.

A more particular question now, suggested by a column of Jonathan Freedland’s, is the following: should we be worried about the prospects for democracy in this country, on the basis of a visit to the theatre? This I very much doubt. Jonathan is writing about Peter Morgan’s new play ‘The Audience’. I haven’t seen it, but – I rely here on Jonathan’s account of it – it’s a plug for our own dear Queen, who is shown by Morgan ‘as shrewd and uncommonly sage’, ‘as constant, modest and preternaturally wise, dedicated selflessly to serving the people’. By contrast the prime ministers she successively has to deal with are all ‘needy and dysfunctional in their own way’; they are made to reveal ‘the grubby, inadequate world of the elected politician’. And here’s the crux of the thing: audience reaction, as Jonathan reports it, was warm, showing that Morgan ‘is not speaking for himself alone’.

Given a choice, it’s clear who both he and his audience prefer: the affection in the room is not for the flawed people we have chosen to send to No 10, but for the woman who reigns in Buckingham Palace by virtue of the blood in her veins (and who need never take an unpopular decision).

Jonathan reads this as possibly representative of a more general ‘preference for the non-democratic’ that is abroad in the world and concludes that the commitment to democracy ‘looks terribly fragile’.

How fragile or robust it is I’ll leave to one side – beyond the few speculative remarks with which I began. But what I think is certainly fragile is Jonathan’s evidence in this column. It may well be true that a majority among theatre audiences have a greater liking and regard for the present Queen than they have for the prime ministers who have succeeded one another during her reign. Even if so, that doesn’t translate automatically, or at all, into a preference for monarchy – and monarchy unrestrained by democratic assembly at that – over parliamentary democracy. A question to which I don’t know the answer for certain but which I will nevertheless hazard a guess about is: how would Jonathan’s audience, or indeed the British electorate, vote if offered a straight choice between unrestrained monarchical power and a continuation of, roughly, the representative democracy they have? I cannot, myself, believe the answer to this would be in doubt. They would vote to retain what they have. I would be interested to know what Jonathan’s own guess here would be.

The Times has a summary here (£) of world media and other reaction to the all-party plan for a press watchdog here, able to impose hefty fines. Criticism and more criticism: from the Wall Street Journal; from Le Monde, Le Figaro and L’Express; El País and Die Welt; the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and Sri Lanka’s Centre for Policy Alternatives; the former Commonwealth general secretary; the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; the South African Press Association; the Economist. What do they all say? Dangerous experiment, black day, serious restriction of democratic rights, beginning of a long downward spiral. In general, bad news. It’s enough to make a citizen of this country feel embarrassed or worse.

Here’s a report from Canberra:

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered a historic national apology in Parliament to the thousands of unwed mothers who were forced by government policies to give up their babies for adoption over several decades.

More than 800 people affected by the policy cried and cheered as they listened to the apology in the Great Hall of Parliament House and responded with a standing ovation when it was finished.

A national apology was recommended a year ago by a Senate committee that investigated the impacts of the now-discredited policies. Unwed mothers were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies from World War II until the early 1970s so they could be adopted by married couples, which was perceived to be in the children’s best interests, the committee report found.

“Today this Parliament on behalf of the Australian people takes responsibility and apologizes for the policies and practices that forced the separation of mothers from their babies, which created a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering,” Gillard told the audience Thursday.

It’s usual after one of these to encounter someone, somewhere, lamenting the meaninglessness or undesirability of such apologies. Sometimes these lamenters are Simon Jenkins. You can imagine it: ‘What part did Julia Gillard have in taking the babies away from their mothers? Hey?’

Perhaps on this occasion it won’t happen. It seems from the reaction of people in the Great Hall of the Australian parliament that those who suffered the effects of the forced adoption policy found this apology perfectly meaningful, and welcomed it. It’s an official acknowledgement of a national wrong – end of story.

Sudan’s president perhaps didn’t choose his words (£) as carefully as he might have done:

Sudan’s ruling party is searching for a new leader after President Omar al-Bashir, who has ruled since 1989, said in a surprise announcement that he was stepping down.

Mr al-Bashir, who is accused of committing war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court, said it was time for “fresh blood and a new impetus” to take the country forward.

See here as well. Al-Bashir has also been charged by the ICC with genocide and crimes against humanity.

There is a video clip here of President Obama signing the vistors’ book at Yad Vashem. You might want to start three minutes in, as that is when he begins speaking. One of the things he says early on is this:

We have come here a thousand times and each time our hearts would break.

A single sentence constituting, all on its own, a total response to those who say there’s too much attention given to, too much said about, the Holocaust (on which see this normblog series). Obama’s few words that I quote above are the elementary response of any feeling human being whose head has not been stuffed with ideological nonsense of one kind or another.

The Guardian today reports on the many voices around Mrs Thatcher, in the lead-up to the Falklands war in 1982, that spoke against what it calls ‘the jingoistic spirit at the time’:

Some of Margaret Thatcher’s closest policy advisers voiced strong concerns that the Falklands Islands were not worth the fight, from the earliest days of the campaign, according to the latest release of files from the former Conservative prime minister’s personal papers.

The report goes on to quote or summarize what a whole number of people close to her were thinking and saying at the time: proposing schemes to buy out the islanders, warning her about deep divisions among Conservatives, arguing that the islands weren’t worth the effort, urging the prime minister to ‘let the Argentinians have the Falklands’.

A Times leader offers this contrasting paragraph (£):

Hours before the first shots were fired in the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher noted in a telegram to General Leopold Galtieri, the Argentine dictator, that in a few days they would both be reading casualty lists. “On my side,” the Prime Minister wrote, “grief will be tempered by the knowledge that these men died for freedom, justice and the rule of law. And on your side? Only you can answer that question.”

It’s not often I write in praise of Margaret Thatcher. I’ll correct that: it’s hardly ever. But here is something for which praise is precisely what she deserved and deserves.

It being Chico Marx’s birthday today, what better way to begin than with a bit of Chico Marxism?

There’s more of the same here and here. Play it again and again, Sam. (Thanks: TD.)

President Obama made an important speech in Jerusalem today. One of its themes was that peace is at once necessary, just and possible. That it’s necessary and just I have no doubt; I wish I could think it possible. At any rate I hope it is. You can find the full text of the speech here and here. Some excerpts from it worth highlighting:

That is why I believe that Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition, but also in a simple and profound idea: the idea that people deserve to be free in a land of their own. And over the last 65 years, when Israel has been at its best, Israelis have demonstrated that responsibility does not end when you reach the promised land, it only begins.
…..
Israel has established a thriving democracy – with a spirited civil society, proud political parties, a tireless free press, and a lively public debate – lively may even be an understatement.

And Israel has achieved this even as it has overcome relentless threats to its security – through the courage of the Israel Defense Forces, and a citizenry that is resilient in the face of terror.
…..
So that is what I think about when Israel is faced with these challenges – that sense of an Israel that is surrounded by many in this region who reject it, and many in the world who refuse to accept it. That is why the security of the Jewish people in Israel is so important – because it can never be taken for granted. But make no mistake: those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you – particularly the young people – that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vahd.

You are not alone. Words only perhaps, but the words of the president of the United States of America and worth more than a little against the poison of the Israel-haters.

There’s a good report in the New York Times of a two-day celebration of the work of Philip Roth. It included:

… papers on narrativity, performativity and counterfactuality in Roth; on the connections between Roth and Austen, Roth and Joyce, Roth and Yeats, Roth and Synge; on Roth in Romania and Roth in Russia.

Quite right too – a literary giant and no mistake. Both there and here, you can see a picture of Roth and his adoring mom on the beach at Belmar in 1935. I also like this:

[Roth] added a defense of the writer’s habit of rummaging around in memory for just such details. “This passion for specificity, for the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in,” he said, “is all but at the heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined since Herman Melville and his whale and Mark Twain and his river: to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal depiction for every last American thing.”

If we could only get him to keep writing.

Malala Yousafzai, shot by Taliban thugs for campaigning for the basic right of all children to go to school, is now back at school herself – a shining example in the fight for equality for women, and for civilized values more generally.