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The Argentine ambassador Alicia Castro has a letter in today’s Times. She’s taking issue with the column by Matthew Parris from last month, in which he wrote of the ‘systematic destruction and total dispossession of Argentina’s original population’ and pinpointed the hypocrisy in Argentina’s president accusing Britain of colonialism over the Falklands. Castro now responds to Parris that ‘Argentina has more inhabitants who consider themselves of indigenous descent than, for instance, Brazil’, and continues as follows (£):

This is not to say we do not acknowledge the wrong done to Indians in our past. We do. In schools and universities up and down the country we condemn the extermination, removal and abuse of indigenous peoples. A vast body of legislation now ensures the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples in Argentina.

Castro even makes a good point when she contests the suggestion that Argentina is ‘doomed by its past’:

This would be like asserting that the UK cannot advocate democracy and the upholding of human rights in the world because it used concentration camps in the Boer War, or perpetrated the massacre of Africans in the Mau Mau uprising.

Quite so. It’s a point that should be digested by those fond of the Simon Jenkins-type argument that countries whose past isn’t clean are in no position to ‘lecture’ other countries about democracy, human rights and what have you. That’s a bad argument. So, good for the Argentine ambassador in saying that ‘Argentina has moved on’.

There is one strange omission in her letter, however. She doesn’t answer the point that her country is not well-placed to be charging Britain with colonialism. On this Castro is silent. One must presume that had she had an answer on the matter she would have availed herself of it, and therefore that she doesn’t. In the circumstances, moving on might come to include dropping the colonialism theme from Argentina’s publicly-stated positions concerning the Falklands.

How many degrees of it could there be? There’s: a bit difficult; and (plain) difficult; and very difficult; and, maybe, extremely difficult (if ‘extremely’ is thought to be a stronger intensifier than ‘very’). Anything else? You don’t know the half of it. Here’s Cristiano Ronaldo before last night’s game against his former club, Manchester United. He’s asked if he could ever envisage playing for Manchester City and replies:

I’m not going to say it is impossible, because in football the impossible doesn’t exist.

But I can say it would be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very difficult to play at Man City. VERY difficult because of Manchester United.

That difficult and still not quite impossible. I hope the difficulty suffices. (Thanks: MS.)

While I’m on the subject of football, let me register another worry I now have – which is that my ever-loving wife and children’s writer (among many other accomplishments) might start turning out for Chelsea.

Further to this recent post about the setting up of a joint Argentine-Iranian commission to look into the AMIA massacre of July 1994, there’s a forthright piece by Dante Caputo, Argentine academic and former diplomat, about the agreement that established the commission. Caputo says that it ‘will have no judicial value’; it is, rather, ‘a parody of justice’. He says, too, that Argentine President Kirchner’s description of the agreement as ‘historic’ may be right, but this is only because it ‘will certainly leave a historic stain on Argentina’. Also of interest is what Caputo writes in the following passage:

A couple of years ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Cuba. These four countries’ governments, which claim to be progressive, received – without a hint of concern – a leader who denies the Holocaust; beat, jailed, repressed, and killed protesters who objected to the fraudulent election that brought him a second term in office; and flaunts his contempt for individual liberties, with gay Iranians particularly vulnerable.

Why do some leftists find Iran’s reactionary, homophobic president so seductive? Are they enthusiastic simply because he opposes the US? Does being anti-American excuse all sins and justify all friendships? Maybe the answer is simpler: often, it is not shared ideas and values that bring individuals together, but rather power and money.

The questions, anyway, are all too familiar. (Thanks: HG.)

A pair of early recommendations from my reading year are Mister Pip by LLoyd Jones and Heft by Liz Moore. Both books tell a good story and tell it well.

Beyond that basic plug, Mister Pip will be of special interest to anyone who likes Dickens, and who likes Great Expectations especially. It is also about what reading can do for children – about its special magic.

Heft is the tale of two individuals seemingly separated by a chasm but whose lives are linked nonetheless. One of them is a young, budding sportsman, the other a reclusive and obese ex-academic. Moore traces the two lives and the connection between them, leading you on towards an uncertain denouement. There is something of Anne Tyler in her depiction of unconventional family set-ups, but Moore’s book can make its own way in the world and doubtless will.

You can’t always be sure that self-styled liberators are going to liberate anybody, but sometimes there are signs aplenty that they certainly aren’t going to. Now, where could this be?

Teenage girls and women can only rarely be seen singing in public, but men are encouraged to sing, without musical instruments…

Read what else and where here.

Last night me and WotN ventured out to go and hear John Mullan in Ely, talking about the divine Jane. I must tell you that there’s no other writer from the rich history of world literature for whom I would go this far in cold, cold weather and listen to a talk about them, when I could stay home and read in the warmth of my own home. But for Austen I make exceptions, and I’ve heard good things both of John Mullan’s book about her and of him as a speaker.

I wasn’t sorry. It was a wonderful event. Organized by Toppings of Ely, it was held in St Etheldreda’s Church in Egremont Street and, no offence to either the Church or the organizers, but the temperature inside wasn’t what you’d call toasty. It didn’t matter. Mullan was just excellent: knowledgeable, informative, entertaining, funny, and as sharp as can be on the Austen novels. He spoke about weather in Jane Austen and umbrellas; on the significance of an Austen character being called John, and on the way in which crucial plot information is often revealed by one of her less bright creations. He spoke of Emma as not only the best of the six books – a judgement with which I agree – but the best novel in the language. I could have listened to him for another hour again, easily. If I could take his course on Jane Austen, I would seize the opportunity. If you ever have a chance to hear him speak on Austen, you should seize the opportunity.

And here’s the topping of it all (to coin one). Adèle and I are standing on platform 2 of Ely station, about to get on the train home to Cambridge, when who do we see but the man himself talking to two others who’d been at St Etheldreda’s Church to hear him. We go over to thank him for a splendid evening, and he invites us to join what is now a Jane Austen train party. So we travel along, the five of us, talking you know what. Best of all, John inscribes and signs my newly acquired copy of What Matters in Jane Austen? – he writes, ‘To Norm, well met on Ely station’. I’ll be showing that about for a while, rest assured.

Further to my post of yesterday concerning Owen Jones and the young, I’ve learned of someone else who went off on an Owen Jones-type ‘why-oh-why’ about the big Iraq war demo a few days before he did. This is Sam Parker, whose lament you can read here. It has the truly relishable sentence, ‘Blix swept into the darkening saga like a comforting beam from a lighthouse’; but Parker’s complaint is that it just didn’t occur to him that ‘it might not work’ – that is, that the anti-Iraq war demo might not succeed. Well, now he knows. But he’s charging Tony Blair with having ‘robbed a generation of their faith in politics’.

Tom Harris MP briskly puts him right on a number of points: among them, what was thought to be the case about Iraq’s WMD before the military intervention; and Blair’s election victory in 2005, after it. Central, however, is Harris’s explanation to Parker that democracy doesn’t mean ‘getting your own way’.

So elementary is this observation that one has to wonder how the common leftist anti-war lament comes to be as common as it is. A friend has suggested to me that some on the left have to believe there’s something wrong with the political system since it so rarely generates the policies they favour. Possibly. But I wonder if there isn’t also an assumption – one to which I’ve alluded here before – that probably most people really think like ‘we’ do, give or take a spot of false consciousness. So ingrained in these quarters is the notion that the left is (always) right that their denizens just can’t believe that there isn’t a (deep but hidden) majority for what ‘we’ think; this even when other people on the left disagree with what ‘we’ think; an inconvenience then sometimes handled by saying that such people can’t be on the left. All of it relieves those who harbour the assumption in question of the most difficult task of all – that of understanding that you need to persuade others of your view, then of actually persuading them, and then of winning political majorities for the view through democratic institutions. Those who don’t reach the point of this understanding haven’t fully grasped the meaning of democracy. A beam from its conceptual lighthouse might not come amiss. (Thanks: RB.)

Those interested in the fate of the Occupy movement might like to read a discussion by Thomas Frank of some books on the subject. Frank takes a critical look at both the books and the movement, but sees himself as critical in the way a friend might be, since he sympathizes with the impulses behind the movement. Some of the notes he strikes will be familiar to readers of this blog. For instance:

OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time. Nearly every one of these books makes sweeping claims for the movement’s significance, its unprecedented and earth-shattering innovations. Just about everything it does is brilliantly, inventively, mind-blowingly people-empowering.

And what do we have to show for it today in our “normal lives”? Not much…

Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began – an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted…

Frank’s article is on the long side and some won’t be interested enough to read the whole of it. But be advised that it contains some very entertaining moments. Here’s one of them:

A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording, a panelist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were “speaking for themselves” rather than acknowledging that they were part of a group. Another one of the panelists was moved to utter this riposte:

What I would note, is that people can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure there, in that the self is then held into question, as any poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you towards… I would agree, an individualism that our society has definitely had inscribed upon it and continues to inscribe upon itself, “I can only speak for myself,” the “only” is operative there, and of course these spaces are being opened up…

My heart dropped like a broken elevator. As soon as I heard this long, desperate stream of pseudointellectual gibberish, I knew instantly that this thing was doomed.

Another choice item, quoted by Frank from an Occupy-related pamphlet:

Our point of attack here is the dominant forms of subjectivity produced in the context of the current social and political crisis. We engage four primary subjective figures – the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented – all of which are impoverished and their powers for social action are masked or mystified.

Movements of revolt and rebellion, we find, provide us the means not only to refuse the repressive regimes under which these subjective figures suffer but also to invert these subjectivities in figures of power.

There’s a ‘dear God’ from Frank after that one and reference to ‘impenetrable essays seemingly written to demonstrate, one more time, the Arctic futility of theory-speak’.

Taking off from a discussion about writing that was started recently by Philip Roth, Avi Steinberg chips in with the view that writers are unhappy people. It’s hard to assess his view, because it’s not clear what proportion of writers he means it to apply to. But anyway, this is his emphasis:

I know plenty of writers for whom living in their own mind is a far from pleasant experience. Writers are very often miserable people: some thrive on unhappiness, others don’t. But few are immune from feelings of deep and avid dissatisfaction. We write because we are constantly discontented with almost everything, and need to use words to rearrange it, all of it, and set the record straight.

I’d say that that view is way too narrow. Primo Levi wrote an essay (which can be found in Other People’s Trades) trying to answer the question ‘Why Does One Write?’ These were his answers: because one feels the drive and the need to do so; to entertain others and oneself; to teach something to someone; to improve the world; to make one’s ideas known; to free oneself from anguish; to become famous; to become rich; out of habit. That’s quite a variety of reasons, and Levi allowed that one could come up with others.

Given both the number and the variety of reasons for writing, my hypothesis would be that there is every which kind of writer, ranging from unhappy to reasonably contented, and I’d be sceptical about the unhappy kind massively predominating.

I’m talking about five things he might say in the situation he describes here:

When I visit schools, students who were six, seven or eight years old when we marched [against the Iraq war] ask how they can change anything if up to two million demonstrators couldn’t.

Owen doesn’t let on how he answers that question, so I don’t know whether or not in doing so he endorses a possible presupposition behind it: namely, that street demonstrations as big as this should suffice for securing change. In any event, here are three things directly relevant to the question that Owen could say in response to it if he were so minded.

(1) On a matter where opinion is very divided, it helps if you have a clear majority on your side, as those opposing the Iraq war did not.

(2) In a parliamentary democracy, it helps if, when the issue dividing opinion is put to the vote in parliament, the view which you support prevails, as opposition to going to war in Iraq did not.

(3) In a representative democracy street demonstrations, even when large, are not sovereign.

Two further points Owen could make, if he were interested in helping the young to understand the deep and wide division of opinion there was at the time Britain went to war against Saddam Hussein’s regime, are these:

(4) The human cost of the Iraq war was indeed terrible, as Owen now emphasizes. Just for that reason, in speaking of costs it is necessary to explain, if you want others to appreciate what the arguments of the time were about, that those who supported the war were influenced in their thinking by a concern for what the costs might be of leaving Saddam in power. There is reason to think they would not have been small either. Simply to omit that consideration doesn’t contribute to educating anybody.

(5) Likewise, to write as if, prospectively rather than retrospectively, the whole argument had only one side, only one set of conscientious reasons, fails to enlighten anyone on why the debate divided people as it did. But this is precisely what Owen Jones does in his peremptory discounting of the presence of ‘humanitarian considerations’ in favour of the war.

Keep on battling away, Owen. You may eventually succeed in persuading yourself that there was no moral case for the overthrow by US and British arms of a genocidal and fascistic regime. But even the bump of holiness won’t enable you to help the young – let alone anyone else – to understand what the divisions of 2003 were about.