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Apologies for the blogging silence lately. It’s not only that it’s August; if I’m honest – and why wouldn’t I be? – I am lost to cricket these last few days. The least I can do then is supply a cricket-related item. OK, so here is a picture of me at the age of 14 getting the autograph of the great South African off-spin bowler Hugh ‘Toey’ Tayfield.

Er… sorry for all that space; I don’t know how to deal with it. Let’s just say it’s my way of giving the item special prominence. The occasion was a game between Rhodesia and Transvaal played in Bulawayo on 28th and 29th September 1957. (The link I’ve provided gives the venue incorrectly: the match was played, in fact, at the Raylton ground and not at Queens, as can be confirmed by consulting Jonty Winch, Cricket’s Rich Heritage: A History of Rhodesian and Zimbabwean Cricket 1890-1982, at page 62.) Some background about Hugh Tayfield (and me) can be found here and in the third paragraph of the essay here.

From a group of photos from the German trenches in World War I.

And here you can find colour photography from the same time, with an accompanying article. (Thanks: AS/JB.)

Was Karl Marx an anti-Semite? I have twice before written setting out the reasons why my own answer to this question would be an unqualified yes (see here and section 1 here): Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ uncritically deploys certain standard anti-Jewish themes; and from time to time (for example, in his correspondence) he displayed disparaging attitudes towards Jews.

But when the question is posed in an interview with Jonathan Sperber, the author of a new biography of Marx, Sperber proffers ‘an ambivalent response‘, saying that historians are ‘notoriously reluctant to give yes-or-no answers to any question’. Yet the material he cites in favour of his ambivalent response is not, in my view, apropos. Thus he says (as is true) that Marx favoured the political emancipation of the Jews, so that they should enjoy the same democratic rights as everybody else; and he cites evidence of Marx admiring certain individual Jews and occasionally writing of his own Jewish origins in a more friendly way. And that’s basically it – aside from a remark that when viewed through the genocidal project of the Nazis in the 20th century Marx’s attitudes to Jews look more sinister than they are

I have no quarrel at all with that last point. It won’t do to project back on to Marx anything like the exterminationist thinking of Adolph Hitler. There is not a scrap of evidence for doing so. But, for the rest, none of what Sperber adduces is to the point. One could not persuasively say of a person who supported the enjoyment of all the usual democratic rights by black people but also wrote and spoke of them in an abusive way, mobilizing standard anti-black stereotypes, that he or she wasn’t a racist. In some matters you can’t ‘balance out’ material of one kind by saying there is also material of another kind. It is relevant to know that there is this other material and it can make an important difference to the overall moral picture, but the other side of the story doesn’t neutralize the side to which it is other.

For an analogy, you only have to consider whether the question ‘Is Hilda a vegetarian?’ should give anyone pause when Hilda is known to tuck in regularly to sumptuous beef steaks and plates of fried chicken – give them pause because Hilda also likes vegetables and eats them in quantity. Hector, likewise, is not a libertarian if he favours savage laws of every kind but hesitates over a ban on the sale of hard drugs.

Marx wasn’t a Nazi or a precursor of Nazi racial anti-Semitism. But the fact that he sometimes displayed friendlier attitudes to Jews and Jewishness does not dispel the anti-Semitism that is manifestly there both in his work and in his unpleasant remarks about certain Jews, remarks relating precisely to their Jewishness.

This headline had me puzzled for a moment:

Monty Panesar fined for urinating on bouncers

How do you urinate on a type of cricket delivery? Could it be that because he’s a spin bowler, Monty has figured out a way to do this – to wee on the offending type of ball from the quicks because of the distress it can cause to batsmen?

But my mind is too much on one track this summer. Turns out that it’s a different kind of bouncer and Monty has apologized. This sort of chap.

One for Sally’s Word Den?

In June I posted an item about casualties of the Syrian civil war being treated in Israel. Here’s more on that from the New York Times:

As fighting between Syrian government forces and rebels has raged in recent months in areas close to the Israeli-held Golan Heights, scores of Syrian casualties have been discreetly spirited across the hostile frontier for what is often lifesaving treatment in Israel, an enemy country.

Most are men in their 20s or 30s, many of them with gunshot wounds who presumably were involved in the fighting. But in recent weeks there have been more civilians with blast wounds, among them women and children who have arrived alone and traumatized.

Israel has repeatedly declared a policy of nonintervention in the Syrian civil war, other than its readiness to strike at stocks of advanced weapons it considers a threat to its security. Officials have also made clear that Israel would not open its increasingly fortified border to an influx of refugees, as Turkey and Jordan have, given that Israel and Syria officially remain in a state of war.

But the Israeli authorities have sanctioned this small, low-profile humanitarian response to the tragedy taking place in Syria, balancing decades of hostility with the demands of proximity and neighborliness.

Note, in particular, this passage from the report:

Like many Israeli hospitals, this one serves a mixed population of Jews and Arabs; its staff includes Arabic-speaking doctors, nurses and social workers. In the lobby, a glass display case contains the remnants of a Katyusha rocket that was fired from Lebanon and hit the hospital’s eye department during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. The rocket penetrated four floors but nobody was injured because all the north-facing wards had been moved underground.

With more than 100,000 people estimated to have died in the Syrian civil war, Dr. Barhoum, an Arab Christian citizen of Israel, acknowledged that the Israeli medical assistance was “a drop in the ocean.”

But he said he was proud of the level of treatment his teams could provide and proud to be a citizen of a country that allowed him to treat every person equally.

Not exactly an apartheid state then. Funny, where was it I heard the opposite?

Some people may have had the idea that once England retained the Ashes, interest in the present series would be over. Not me. And not now, either, Dan Hodges. But I must say I find Dan’s effort to argue for the proposition that there’s still some interest to be had from this series somewhat strained and artificial. In itself he thinks the series is dead; or it would be if you didn’t regard it as part of a longer ten-match event: ‘a ten-Test Super Ashes’, a great ‘extravaganza’.

Well, if that’s how you want it, I suppose there’s no harm done. But I don’t see the need. True, the primary aim in contesting any Ashes series is to retain the Ashes if you already hold them and to regain them if you don’t. But who says that’s all that’s at stake? The result of the series also matters; winning it is better than drawing it, and drawing it better than losing. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain the drama of the final day at the Oval in 1968 when Derek Underwood bowled England to victory with only minutes to spare, enabling England to level the series at 1-1, with the Ashes already retained by Australia since they’d won the first match, and the second, third and fourth had all been drawn. Wisden for 1969 described it as ‘a momentous day’. In The Australians in England, 1968, Bobby Simpson wrote:

This was one of the most exciting half-hour’s cricket that I have ever watched and the drama of the situation had been unbearable at times.

Underwood himself wrote in his autobiography, Beating the Bat:

I doubt whether anything will compare with that fantastic victory against the Australians at the Oval in 1968 which enabled England to draw the series one-all.

Drawing the series meant something to England, as it would now mean something to Australia, though there’s little chance of this happening, I think. More than that, the Oval victory was, just in itself, something to celebrate for England supporters. A Test match is a Test match is a Test match, and it’s because each one is fought as seriously as it is that the five-match Test series as a whole is the incomparable thing that it is. Furthermore, in the shape of one series there may be signs of what the future holds for the next, seeds of development or decline or a mere shift of emphasis. And teams care whether they win or lose by one Test only or by three, four or all five. It makes a difference. All five happened to England in 2006-07, in the wrong way, and it was noticed and is now part of history.

In 1972, incidentally, it was a similar story but in reverse. After four Tests England were 2-1 up with one to play, and so had retained the Ashes won by Illingworth’s team in Australia in 1970-71. Australia then won the fifth Test at the Oval to level the series, Dennis Lillee taking five wickets in both England innings. In his The Ashes, 1972 John Arlott wrote ‘The Australian celebrations were wholehearted’; he quotes Ian Chappell as saying, ‘The team should be better the next time we meet England in our own country in 1974-5’! In his own book on the same series, Tigers among the Lions, Chappell recalled:

The scenes in the dressing room were quite fantastic. People came from all directions to congratulate us and join us in our mood of celebration.

So for my money, though I, too – simply because I love Ashes cricket – am glad of the ten-match extravaganza well under way, I don’t need it in order to maintain interest in what is going on right now. The Ashes are always alive.

In late May I put up a post explaining that I was ill with advanced prostate cancer. I wanted the fact of my illness known, so that readers of this blog would understand why my blogging might be interrupted now and again; but at the same time I was clear in my own mind that I wasn’t going to be making my illness a regular topic of discussion here. I haven’t done that and nor do I mean to start doing it. As important as the subject has become to me and those close to me, I don’t assume that my condition is a matter of wide interest.

There is, however, a general question about the way cancer is discussed that interests me. I came across it again last week, in a column by Mike Marqusee. While I will draw on my own experience in writing about it, it’s the interest of the general issue and not my personal experience that is my reason for doing so.

In some thoughtful reflections about how cancer is talked about, Mike – who was himself diagnosed with multiple myeloma several years ago – expresses his reservation about the habit of applying the language of warfare to the illness:

Some people feel buoyed when people compliment their “bravery”. Others, including me, find the bravery rhetoric around cancer deeply misconceived. It shifts responsibility on to the patient; if you succumb to your cancer, or even if you just complain about it, are you wanting in “bravery”? When someone tells me I’ve been “brave” I don’t know what to make of it. There’s no choice in the matter. This is a front line it’s impossible to flee from. [Italics mine – NG.]

It’s a reservation Mike has expressed before, saying that the language of a ‘war on cancer’ is misconceived. He doesn’t like the possible implication that someone who fails to beat their cancer might be failing on account of a personal ‘weakness or flaw‘.

It seems that Christopher Hitchens, who died of oesophageal cancer in December 2011, took a similar view. ‘I’m not fighting or battling cancer’, he wrote, ‘it’s fighting me.’ And, as Carly Weeks put the point of the objection in The Globe and Mail a while back…

A significant problem is that most of the common words and phrases we use to describe the experiences of people who have been diagnosed with cancer imply that personal will and self-control play a large part in determining who will live or die.

To say Mr. Layton lost his fight implies he had a say over his fate.

Now, although I don’t think the force of these reservations derives from the strict logic of the terminology of battle, I do agree with the concern that they embody. In strict logic there is no necessary implication that if you lose a battle it must reflect some moral weakness on your part. In warfare one side may lose to the other simply because the other is overwhelmingly stronger, whether in numbers, resources, military technology, or what have you. Still, in so far as talk of battle tends to get coupled with the use of morally suggestive terms such as ‘bravery’ and ‘courage’, it is easy for people to slip into thinking that the individual suffering from cancer has more of an influence over the outcome of the disease than he or she actually does. That is an extra and unnecessary burden for them to have to carry, over and above the burdens that just go with the illness itself.

Once this point is clearly registered, however, I would argue that there’s a perfectly meaningful sense in which contending with cancer is a battle of sorts, and that this sense should not be overlooked. From here on I argue mostly from my own experience, knowing as I do that different forms of cancer are different in their effects and also that different people have different experiences not only of the illness but also of the various treatments available to them. In any event, on the basis of what I’ve learned over the last five months, I would say that prostatic bone cancer can be felt as a constant battle. It’s a battle against tiredness. It’s a battle against sometimes desperately low levels of energy. It’s a battle against loss of appetite or the seemingly arbitrary whims of appetite, leading to rates of weight loss that, beyond a certain point, cannot be healthy for an already ill person. It’s a battle against nausea and against other physical discomforts that I won’t go into. People who have had a longer experience of chemotherapy than I so far have could add a number of other particular battles resulting from some of the side effects.

These various ‘battles’ – or hardships and attempts to cope with them – call for a daily effort in face of what can seem like a relentless assault on one’s wellbeing. What is the simplest of ordinary tasks for a healthy person can sometimes feel to the person with cancer as if it demands an extraordinary concentration of will: bathing, getting dressed, walking any distance, going out somewhere and encountering the normal ‘frictions’ of the world out there. Before I got ill I had no trouble walking a brisk three miles; since I’ve been ill the best I can manage without exhausting myself is 20 minutes ambling slowly. Even reading, something that might be thought not to require much physical energy, becomes rather more difficult if you’re more given to falling asleep through fatigue and being on painkillers. The same applies to concentrated thought, as in serious writing.

So while I would leave bravery out of this – since, as I see it, it’s not a matter of being brave, but merely of coping – and while I take back nothing of what I’ve said above in agreeing that a moralizing language of battle about cancer isn’t appropriate and, worse, potentially hurtful, I think there’s another way in which talking of a ‘battle against cancer’ fits well with what many people with cancer go through.

Further to this post of yesterday, here’s Jan Raath in today’s Times (£):

Less than 30 years ago, Mugabe’s security forces slaughtered up to 20,000 civilians in the western provinces of Matabeleland; they threw them down mineshafts and buried them alive. Mugabe has never shown any remorse for this. In each of the parliamentary elections since 2000 when the MDC [Movement for Democratic Change] first challenged Mugabe, Zanu (PF) has managed narrowly to win one seat out of 26 in the region. Now Zanu (PF) has got 21.

The margin of the Zanu (PF) victory in the parliamentary elections is jaw-dropping. “54 per cent might have been credible,” tweeted David Coltart, the distinguished human rights lawyer. “75 per cent is not.” We are in the joke realm of 99 per cent election victories of the long-dead Communist bloc and African one-party states of the 1970s that the rest of the educated world – which includes Zimbabwe – is trying to forget.

The joke is particularly sour as Zimbabweans dropped their guard and thought the poll might be more or less fair because there was no serious violence or intimidation in the run-up and the opposition had been left relatively free to campaign.

It is becoming clearer, however, that this project to steal the election was planned over a long time. The key to the Mugabe victory was his tampering with the electoral register. The names of young, urban voters were erased, then the votes of the dead were added, the names of other voters duplicated and the votes of the millions who have fled the economic ruination were restored. Thousands of shaven-headed young men (police and militia recruits identifiable by their tightly folded blankets) were bussed into polling stations to cast these phoney votes.

With Robert Mugabe and his party winning another election victory in Zimbabwe despite concerns about the odd irregularity (£) here or there, where might you go to find someone with a good word for the old thug? You don’t need more than one guess.

Yes, Apologia Central is your place, and on this occasion Roy Agyemang is your man.

For Agyemang, Mugabe is the leader who has ‘giv[en] back the African his dignity well beyond symbols of nominal independence’. Agyemang refers to Zimbabwe’s leader as ‘ostensibly… imperiling human rights’ but wisely holds back from making a judgement about that ‘ostensibly’. Instead he gives us a leader of this stamp:

I have seen Mugabe fight for his political life before, in the controversial and contested 2008 elections. Then his back was against the wall… Yet he hung on, just.

And:

Today Mugabe is back in the election trenches in a radically different political environment. Blair, Gordon Brown and George W Bush, his foremost opponents are gone.

It never fails to amaze (but also amuse) me, this trope of the wily dictator who has outlasted political leaders of democratic countries. Indeed it sometimes happens, but that’s because leaders of the latter type submit themselves to genuine democratic processes of election and potential removal – a point that should be in their favour. And yet you get this barely disguised tinge of admiration for the one clinging to power at whatever cost in violence and corruption. There’s speaking truth to power and there’s also cringing indulgence towards it.

‘Is it getting solipsistic in here, or is it just me?’

‘This sentence contains exactly threee erors.’

Those are both from a post on philosophical humour by Gerald Dworkin. I like the observation he quotes that ‘Hegel loses a lot in the original’. There’s also a longer joke about Talmudic interpretation that I commend to your attention. And this. (Thanks: SdeW.)