Category: Uncategorized

Here’s another one – like the face veil – that’s had an earlier outing or three on this blog, with a moderate case for Tottenham fans to dump the Yid chants being both stated and opposed (by a normblog reader). But much of what goes around comes back around, and so this has, with the FA now warning ‘that the use of such words [as ‘Yid’] could result in a banning order or criminal charges’, and David Cameron saying that without mens rea – in this case being ‘motivated by hate‘ – terms of hate are (or so I presume) innocent. Here’s David Baddiel denying they are that: ‘Yid’, he says, ‘is a race-hate word.’ And here he is in discussion with David Aaronovitch, a Tottenham supporter who disagrees with him.

I, for my part, don’t think use of Yid-slogans by Spurs fans should be subject to any penalty. The campaign against them should be an effort in persuasion. But I would offer these three further observations.

First, the use of hate speech and its constituent terms does not depend on malicious intent to be offensive. This is because language doesn’t fully belong to any individual user or even small group of users. Words acquire meanings and associations as part of a whole structure of usage, and you can’t simply legislate away hateful connotations by declarations of intent. The anti-Semitic lineage of ‘Yid’ is of long standing.

Second, it is unlikely that a tiny group of people (relative, that is, to the great wide world) will be able to reclaim the term by some attempted contra-usage at football matches. This is an empirical matter, but the weight of such football-specific effort by comparison with the frequency with which the term is used for overtly anti-Semitic purposes will probably fail to swing things.

Third, football supporters are notoriously adversarial, contrary and counter-suggestible. I won’t quickly forget the occasion at Old Trafford some years ago when Manchester United were playing Liverpool, and the two clubs had taken an initiative to improve relations between the two sets of fans. Before the game, a United supporter and a Liverpool supporter were brought out on to the pitch, named on the public address system and said to be good mates, kicked a ball around some (I think), and finally shook hands. This was greeted all over the ground, including in the away supporters section, by vehement booing and jeering. Getting the Yid-chants dropped at White Hart Lane might yet take a while.

I’ve just read Gideon Haigh’s book on Shane Warne. It’s a stunning achievement – not only the best book I’ve read on an individual cricketer, but one I would place among the finest books about cricket ever written, and period.

On Warne doesn’t have the form of a conventional cricketer biography. It is, rather, a portrait of the man in five chapters, each of which explores an aspect of his career and personality. It’s a portrait in depth, navigating between the image or images of Warne, the reality, and what grew into a popular sporting myth; it moves back and forward between these to check them against one another, the whole being informed by an immensely detailed knowledge of Warne himself and the game of cricket, both past and present, as well as by a perception of human affairs that is consistently thoughtful, wide-ranging and nuanced.

The chapter on Warne’s art – just how he bowled – is a tour de force. Gideon gives a detailed description of the mechanics of Warne’s leg-spin and the variations he employed. He offers technical analysis of the complexity of what Warne did, against a background of the whole history of spin bowling. He goes into the psychology of Warne’s approach, at once the science and the emotion, describes particular episodes and dismissals and difficulties, and caps all this with a recollection of the Warne performance – something that no one who ever watched it closely can forget and which those who missed the opportunity have now preserved for them here in literary form.

The book’s discussion of some of Warne’s most important cricketing relationships is also not to be missed. The partnering Warne-McGrath – unusual in being one between spin and pace and so not like most of the other legendary pairings (Lindwall-Miller, Laker-Lock, Lillee-Thommo, etc) – is astutely examined for how the two bowlers complemented one another, yet also in some dimensions didn’t. And I learned things from this book about Warne’s relations with Steve Waugh that I hadn’t previously known.

Indeed, On Warne yields one of the very best pleasures in reading about matters in which one has had a long interest: it goes over ground that is already familiar but puts it under a fresh light and shows you things you hadn’t seen before. Warne was a veritable phenomenon and it is hard to see anyone ever improving on Gideon’s account of him. That may be a rash accolade but I make it unreservedly. Just incidentally – or perhaps not – the book concludes with a wonderful characterization of Shane Warne’s importance in the greater scheme of things, set against one of the best ripostes to the dismissal of sport as mere sport that I have seen.

I’ll tell you something I hate. It’s when you think you’ve dealt with something and it turns out you haven’t. Not through any fault of your own but because of someone else’s delinquency or inefficiency. They told you it had been taken care of and it hadn’t. You gave the information and they copied it down wrong. They told you nothing needed to be done when something did need to be done. You and they agreed a course of action which they haven’t followed up on and it all has to be discussed again. I hate it.

Why do I hate it? Simple – you never know where you are. Things long crossed off your list have to be put back on it. What’s the good of having a list if it’s always in jeopardy like that?

[Earlier this year my friend Ian Holliday staged an art exhibition at the University of Hong Kong. He is following up with a second one at City University of Hong Kong, starting next week. Below Ian sets the scene. – NG]

In Myanmar, a gradual removal of strict authoritarian controls over the past couple of years has enabled creative artists to give increasingly free rein to their talents. The weight of censorship was perhaps never quite as heavy for painters as it was for writers and film makers, because government officials typically had little understanding of their art, and limited concern about its political impact. Nevertheless, in the long dark night of state socialism from 1962 to 1988 and then military rule from 1988 to 2011, many subjects were taboo, many styles were frowned upon, and even some colours were banned. Today, almost all of these restrictions have been lifted, and any residual censorship is generally light-touch. At the same time, Myanmar’s rapid reopening to the outside world has triggered renewed global interest in its cultural landscape and heritage. The result is an explosion of artistry and flair inside the country.

The painters now emerging do not comprise a single generation. Indeed, even the sixteen artists brought together in this exhibition, all but one of whom are male, range in age from early twenties to early seventies. Nevertheless, there is clearly something of a cohort effect among present-day painters, focused on the major city and core artistic hub of Yangon. Within the conurbation, some artists have created an informal alliance, others have formed a mutual support association, many meet sporadically in downtown galleries such as Pansodan and Nawaday Tharlar, and still others are content to be loosely connected on the fringes of these overlapping networks. In an ever more liberal society, all are aware of advances made by fellow artists, and keen to learn from them in developing their own styles.

Equally, contemporary painters look to traditions stretching many centuries into the past. Nearly one thousand years ago, Bagan in the dry central plains of Myanmar became a key site in the evolution of Theravada Buddhism. Currently it boasts two thousand temples and stupas. Here line painting designed to instruct the faithful and gain merit for sponsors remains visible in both austere and exuberant murals painted in the earth tones from which natural pigments were made: black, brown, green, yellow, and deep red. From an animist spirit world came thirty-seven nats, god-like figures derived from historical beings held still to watch over human affairs. The minority ethnic nationalities found in contemporary Myanmar also generated distinctive cultures. All of these traditions provide inspiration for artists today.

Overlaid on these indigenous influences were pressures from outside. Some reach far back in time, for the land the British mapped as Burma in the mid-nineteenth century has long been shaped by the great Asian civilizations to the east and west of Myanmar’s current borders. More insistent in the past two centuries, though, were contacts with the West imported above all by Britain, which asserted imperial control over Burma through wars fought in 1824-26, 1852 and 1885. Colonialism introduced to Burma not only western cultural traditions, but also wealthy officials keen, in a small but significant number of cases, to encourage and support local artists. Eventually it also facilitated the spread of modernist ideas, though a progressively hostile climate after independence ensured that the imprint was never large. More recently, growing use of the Internet initially through cybercafés in urban areas and then through smartphones has delivered international influences directly into the country. Many contemporary painters draw on this eclectic mix in their work.

The result is that many ideas now swirl in cultural circles, and diverse artistic responses are made to the assorted reforms sweeping Myanmar. Some painters are openly political, and others make vague or obscure reference to current events. Most have no overt political intent, however, seeking simply to depict a society in which much is changing, but much is also largely unaltered. Together, the paintings assembled in this exhibition, all of which date from the current transitional era, thereby comprise important primary source material from a critical phase in the country’s history. While individuals in other walks of life attempt to capture the period in words, photographs, music and dance, painters portray it in pictures of faces and places that are stunning to behold, and intriguing to contemplate. (Ian Holliday, The University of Hong Kong)

If there were only one person who didn’t want a national debate about the wearing of the face veil, that person would be me. It’s not that I think the issue is either uninteresting or unimportant; it’s that I’ve already written about it and related issues more than 50 times. If you want to sample what I’ve had to say on the subject, go to this post and then take your pick from the 54 links I give four paragraphs down.

Still, and in a nutshell, the overriding consideration is that wearing what one wants is a matter of affirming one’s identity, whether religious or other, is an aspect of freedom of speech and opinion, and is therefore of major importance. Other things equal, it should suffer no restriction from the law. By the same token, no one should be coerced or intimidated into wearing what they don’t want to, and where this happens it should be subject to legal restraint and penalty. But women who freely choose to wear a face covering should have the right to do so, and if you find that objectionable, as a symbol of women’s subordination, you have to proceed by argument, persuasion and education in the hope that these will secure the dissemination of more egalitarian cultural norms.

Freedom to affirm one’s identity, however, is not the only value of critical importance, and Judge Peter Murphy’s ruling is right in holding that judicial processes depend crucially on people’s being in a position to see those giving evidence, so as to be able to evaluate their evidence properly. Personally, I’m not convinced by all arguments of the sort, ‘Successful interaction within our culture relies on encounters being open and face-to-face’. It isn’t always so: think of how much we can and do do by phone and email. But assessing the quality of someone’s testimony is mostly facilitated by being able to see their face. The fair and efficient administration of justice is important enough to require some compromise of the freedom to wear what one likes. There are other such exception-requiring situations: those, for example, where one needs to be able to verify a person’s identity. Nothing, however, can justify a blanket principle that no one should ever be able to hide their face from others.

I haven’t read the other books on the Booker shortlist, but being a big fan of Colm Tóibín’s books I have read his The Testament of Mary, and I would be happy to see it win the prize. It’s a moving account of the crucifixion story through the eyes of the grieving mother and, as I read it (possible spoilers follow), it puts into her words an anti-redemptive outlook which has more in common with Primo Levi than with Christianity. Nothing redeems the commission of great evil; nothing the terrible cruelty of the crucifixion, or the suffering of Jesus or his mother’s pain. At the same time, Tóibín imparts to his Mary a consciousness that the pain of another, while it can in some sort be shared, remains irreducibly theirs and not anyone else’s, not even a mother’s, so deepening the human predicament and its competing pressures of self-interest and compassion.

Mary, in this telling, is no stereotype but an individual sketched with matter-of-factness and imaginative skill – a woman resistant to the narratives of others, including Jesus’s disciples. Her own unique suffering as his mother defies conventional efforts at consolatory myth-making. Alone, she affirms the rights of the human individual against every initiative, however positive, of co-optation.

Not for every dot and comma but for the general spirit informing it, I draw your attention to this column by Sebastian Junger:

To one degree or another, every person has an obligation to uphold human dignity in whatever small way he or she can. It is this concept of dignity that has given rise to international laws protecting human rights, to campaigns for prison reform, to boycotts against apartheid.

More particularly, this bit hits the nail on the head in identifying the way the term ‘antiwar’ has been appropriated by people who are not much exercised either about war in general or about a lot of specific wars:

I cannot think of any moral definition of “antiwar” that includes simply ignoring the slaughter of civilians overseas.

Much of the so-called antiwar movement seems only to protest against wars waged by the US, Britain and Israel; wars waged by dictatorial regimes, whether externally, or internally against sections of their own population, don’t spur it to the same oppositional passion or mobilization.

(Loosely apropos, at Onpoint here you can listen to Michael Walzer – who hitherto has been opposed to US military intervention in Syria – explaining why he favoured the limited strike President Obama was threatening in response to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons to kill civilians.)

There are complementary columns in the Guardian and the Times today by, respectively, Timothy Garton Ash and David Aaronovitch. The former outlines the factors he sees at work in current American ‘withdrawalism’ from world affairs and worries that this may be lasting. He concludes:

To the many critics and downright enemies of the US in Europe and across the globe, I say only this: if you didn’t like that old world in which the US regularly intervened, just see how you like the new one in which it does not.

David Aaronovitch also identifies a ‘Look to America! America First!’ tendency across the Atlantic, and sees it matched in this country. As he characterizes the outlook: ‘The world let us down and now we want as little as possible to do with it.’ But David, for his part, sees this as an arid fantasy (£):

Real leaders, people who discern a better future and seek to move towards it, will be the ones who try to re-engage with the planet. False leaders, or non-leaders, will simply tell us that they too share the dream of apartness.

For the sake of the world, one has to hope that David’s greater optimism will prevail. Withdrawalism and apartness do not provide a good formula for the strengthening of international law or maintaining the progress made since World War II in affirming that there is a law and a morality above the laws and activities of individual states. Nothing guarantees this progress and more of the same other than the ‘togetherness’ of the global community and the collective will within its human-rights-respecting parts – whether governments, NGOs or democratic publics – to hold delinquent states and movements to account.

There’s a conundrum familiar within political philosophy, or at any rate within the kind of political philosophy that looks towards making the world a better place. It goes roughly like this. Do you have to hope for a change in people in order to create a better society? Or must there be social and institutional change as a precondition for improving human conduct? What comes first, the change of heart or the change in external circumstances? For if it’s the change of heart, it may be that the possibility of this is blocked by the existence of corrupting circumstances. And if it’s the change of circumstances, it may be that unreformed people are unwilling or unable to bring about such change or to sustain it.

I was reminded of this problem by a column of Ian Birrell’s on the need to reform the UN. The UN’s paralysis over Syria has only accentuated this need once again. Should ‘countries with… soiled records on democracy, human rights and self-determination’, Birrell asks, and should ‘a corrupt oligarchy’, have ‘carte blanche in perpetuity to determine the rules of international engagement’? Indeed do any of the five nations with a veto in the Security Council deserve to retain it? He accepts that change will not be easy; earlier attempts at reform ‘have hit the rocks of geopolitical reality’. Still:

The most hopeful solution is to bring in a second tier of permanent members [of the Security Council], then slowly strip away the right to veto of the fractious five through majority voting. And it would be good – although almost certainly impossible – to have a bar on countries that display contempt for universal human rights.

An ‘almost certainly impossible’ change – this doesn’t understate the difficulty. Only consider the fact that, as things are, even the UN Human Rights Council is unable to exclude from membership countries with an appalling record on human rights. To reform the parent body – the UN itself – in a more human-rights-friendly direction when some of its most powerful members don’t have a lot to boast about in this regard is a tall order.

This is not an argument for not trying. But, as with the more general problem I began by outlining, we have to recognize the ‘blockages’. Perhaps reform of the UN depends on a greater number and weight of liberal and democratic member states. At the same time, initiatives from the UN encouraging liberalization and democratization within states are always to be welcomed. What comes first? Both.

Nearly three thousand people murdered – or was it more than three thousand? On a day whose very numbers are now a mark of moral infamy in the civilized consciousness of our species. And not once but twice. On this day:

When Joan Jara went to identify the body of her husband, Victor, she found it riddled with 44 bullets and dumped among a pile of corpses in the Santiago morgue. The poet’s wrists and neck were broken and twisted. Where his belly ought to have been was a gory, gaping void.

The memory of that grim scene soon after the Chilean coup – on 11 September 1973 – is still painful for Jara, but it is not the only cause of her grief. The prime suspect in the killing, a former lieutenant in the Chilean army, is still alive and at liberty in the US, where he has citizenship through marriage.

Now the campaign to extradite him to his homeland has taken a step forward after Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, who lives in Florida, was served notice of a lawsuit in the US accusing him of torture, extrajudicial killing and crimes against humanity.

It is not the only quest for justice in Chile that dates back to the dark days, weeks and years following General Augusto Pinochet’s ousting of socialist president Salvador Allende. Thousands were executed or made to disappear, and thousands more tortured after the CIA-backed military takeover.

Then, 28 years later, another horror, an act of mass murder that shocked the world, signifying as it did the absence of all limits on the will and in the calculations of the enemies of humankind. We know such events today as crimes against humanity, and not until the world learns how effectively to prevent or punish them – yesterday Chile, and New York and Washington, yesterday Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rwanda, today the children of Syria – will we be able to be satisfied that a global rule of law truly prevails.