In the latest edition of The Spectator (registration required) Brendan O’Neill is questioning the evidence for the now notorious story that, under Saddam’s regime, Iraqis were sometimes murdered by being fed into an industrial plastic shredder. What he reports is certainly disturbing. If there was no truth to the story, and it was built up, as O’Neill suggests, merely on the say-so of one or two people, then – and I speak as someone who believed this story – it is a serious matter. A thing of such gravity and ghastliness needed to be solidly grounded in evidence before being disseminated as it was.

At the same time, O’Neill’s article has a bad smell about it. As he himself says:

Nobody doubts that Saddam was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who murdered many thousands of his own people (at least 17,000 according to Amnesty; 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch) and that the vast majority of Iraqis are glad he’s gone.

But he concludes on the following note:

It remains to be seen whether this uncorroborated story turns out to be nothing more than war propaganda – like the stories on the eve of the first Gulf war of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies from incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floors. What can be said, however, is that the alleged shredder provided those in favour of the war – by no means an overwhelming majority in Britain last March – with a useful propaganda tool.

For those, including myself, who thought the war was justified on humanitarian grounds, believing the plastic shredder story will have had a part in our thinking so. But the idea that it could have been decisive, given the level of brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, is rather implausible – as would be the suggestion that the incubator story was decisive to showing why the first Gulf War was justified (which it was). O’Neill doesn’t say that this is what he means. But nor does he make clear the contrary either: namely, that the humanitarian case for the war didn’t depend on the plastic shredder story. A ‘useful propaganda tool’ for those who supported the war – as if his own ‘Nobody doubts…’ clause carries no real weight. If the Nazis had not in fact carried out cruel medical experiments on people… (Hat tip: SdeW.)

Bill Wallo grew up in and around Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Life on the Great Plains did not involve stagecoaches, wagon trains or attacks by ‘wild Indians’, except in the Western theatre on TV every Saturday afternoon. After discovering that a BA in English rendered him virtually unemployable, he graduated with highest honours from the University of Oklahoma College of Law. He has worked as a groundskeeper, stagehand, web designer, pizza delivery driver (no relation to the main character in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash) and lawyer, and he currently serves as a law clerk to a federal bankruptcy judge. He has published a number of legal articles, as well as a series of online business-related newsletters and some short fiction. He presently lives in the north woods of Wisconsin with his wife and four children. Bill blogs at Walloworld.

Why do you blog? > I blog because it’s fun. I enjoy the immediacy of it and the possibility of feedback.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Having someone email me and say that he’d stumbled across my blog and found it encouraging to his faith.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Take it seriously – but not too seriously. Any form of writing is hard work, and you can’t expect people to care if you don’t take it seriously. On the other hand, you have to make sure that you enjoy what you’re doing.

What are your favourite blogs? > Three blogs I visit routinely are The Evangelical Outpost, Andrew Hagen and Franklin’s Findings.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > As a lawyer, I have some preference for jurists – I admire Hugo Black, John Marshall, Learned Hand, John Marshall Harlan (predominantly for one dissent, in Plessey v. Ferguson, the ‘separate but equal’ case) and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I admire Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison.

What are you reading at the moment? > Near a Thousand Tables, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, and America’s Best Mystery Stories 2003.

Who are your cultural heroes? > C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr and Mother Teresa – people who put their faith into action.

What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > Can I say I hate ‘best’ questions? One of the best novels I’ve read recently was Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair.

What is your favourite poem? > Again, no real favourite; I’m partial to e.e. cummings. I also like ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Tennyson.

What is your favourite movie? > Favourite comedy: Young Frankenstein. Favourite romance: Moonstruck. Favourite drama: The Long Hot Summer. Favourite action movie: The Terminator or Iron Monkey.

What is your favourite song? > DC Talk’s ‘Jesus Freak’. Or Ceili Rain’s ‘Long Black Cadillac’. Of course, that’s right now; it could change. One of my all-time favourites is Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’.

Who is your favourite composer? > Probably Mozart.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > The existence of God.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Democracy and the principle of self-rule.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > The postmodern notion that there is no universal truth, which often translates into such things as the belief that there can be a morality associated with terrorism.

Who are your political heroes? > John Adams. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Winston Churchill.

What would you do with the UN? > Require member nations to demonstrate a greater commitment to democratic principles and human rights.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > People. Philosophies and doctrines change; human nature doesn’t.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Something a kindergarten friend of one of my daughters said: ‘You get what you get. So don’t throw a fit’. That, or ‘Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional’.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Probably not. One of us would likely die. Or leave.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > A willingness to listen to others.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Intolerance of the opinions of others.

Do you have any prejudices you’re willing to acknowledge? > Probably a prejudice against stupidity.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > If I’ll ever achieve all my goals.

What would your ideal holiday be? > My ideal vacation would be a couple of weeks some place beautiful and relatively unspoiled where I can relax, read and just hang out.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > I play a bit of basketball, bike, read, watch movies and write. And of course spend time with the family.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Henry.

What talent would you most like to have? > The power to cloud men’s minds. Or the ability to fly. Oh, you meant real talents? I’d like to be able to play a musical instrument.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Robin Williams or Steve Martin (both in their younger days). Mel Brooks – at least with The Producers or Young Frankenstein.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Michael Jordan. Andre Agassi. John Stockton. Randy Johnson.

What football team do you support? > Oklahoma Sooners (US college football); Dallas Cowboys (American professional football).

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > C.S. Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, and John Marshall Harlan. I think Lewis and Lincoln would make fascinating dinner guests; Harlan I’d love to talk to about how a former know-nothing party member and Confederate sympathizer ended up writing the dissent in Plessey and voicing the view that our Constitution should be ‘colourblind’.

[Previous profiles: Ophelia Benson (Nov 7); Chris Bertram (Sep 26); Alan Brain (Oct 10); Chris Brooke (Jan 2); Francois Brutsch (Dec 5); Michele Catalano (Feb 13); Anne Cunningham (Jan 23); Jackie D (Oct 17); Brad DeLong (Jan 16); Harry Hatchet (Oct 24); Saddam Hussein (Nov 14); Jeff Jarvis (Dec 26); Oliver Kamm (Nov 21); Ken MacLeod (Jan 30); Sheila O’Malley (Dec 19); Stephen Pollard (Feb 6); Glenn Reynolds (Jan 9); Natalie Solent (Nov 28); Roger L. Simon (Oct 31); Michael J. Totten (Oct 3); Brian Weatherson (Dec 12). The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature.]

‘This article [by Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism intelligence analyst] assembles and reviews the evidence for the integration of social service and terrorism in Hamas.’ (Hat tip: JA.)

Mohsen Asgari reports from Tehran:

Iran’s judiciary on Wednesday night shut down two reformist dailies that had published long extracts from a letter by parliamentary deputies criticising Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.

The judiciary also ordered internet service providers to filter three websites of reformist organisations.

The moves come on the eve of the Islamic republic’s seventh parliamentary election.

The report goes on to say that the deputies’ letter violates a taboo against criticizing the leader, whose authority derives from God; but that the move against these newspapers and websites also reflects ‘concern over coverage of the election, and especially the sensitive issue of voter turnout’.

Last week Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said:

Today the country enjoys a total freedom of expression.

FrontPage Magazine speaks to John Kekes about ‘The Lie of Egalitarianism’. In response to one question, the terms of which are so laughable I decline to reproduce them on my blog, Kekes responds in part as follows:

I shall do my best to answer your question, but I must point out that I am not a psychologist and what I say is a guess. One part of the egalitarian motivation seems to me to be an envious resentment of success. Egalitarians seem to mind that some people achieve excellence in some area of life and enjoys [sic] the rewards his excellence brings him…

Another part of the egalitarian motivation is pity for those who are at the bottom. This is a noble sentiment, but it easily becomes sentimentalism. For it makes a great difference why people are at the bottom. If they are the helpless victims of misfortune, that is one thing. If their position is their own fault, that is quite another. People who are deprived through no fault of their own should be helped.

I’d be interested to know what Kekes’s own estimate is in the matter of how many of the world’s people who (just let’s say) don’t have enough to eat are in this situation through some fault of their own. But the main thing I want to comment on is his psychological hypothesis regarding the motives for egalitarianism. Pity isn’t exactly how I would choose to formulate the better of the two impulses he speaks about, but never mind. Here’s a question. Why, given that he acknowledges such a better motivation – ‘a noble sentiment’, he even calls it – does he need ‘envious resentment’ as well? Indeed, does he see the two impulses behind egalitarianism as combined in the same people? (‘Those swines who are richer than I am. I wish I could be like them. Oh, and – show compassion, brothers and sisters, for the wretched of the earth.’) Maybe, he just means it’s different motives for different egalitarians. I don’t know. I, too, am not a psychologist.

(Via Political Theory Daily Review.)

This is not about Mick Jagger doing another gig. No, it goes back to my gathering no moss survey. Believe it or not, as a result of that Google now seems to take normblog as a top source in the matter. Possibly as a consequence, Sue from Denver wrote to me asking if I knew the origin of the proverb. I had to confess that I didn’t. Sue did some research and wrote back to say that it goes back at least as far as Publius Syrus (42 BC).

Publius evidently knew some stuff. Along with a rolling stone gathering no moss, familiarity breeding contempt and it being a bad plan which admits of no modification, you will find amongst his maxims these which – I don’t know – I just kind of like:

Never thrust your own sickle into another’s corn.

You cannot put the same shoe on every foot.

He who has plenty of pepper will pepper his cabbage.

I’m not too sure about this, though:

The next day is never so good as the day before.

And Publius wasn’t in favour of multi-tasking:

To do two things at once is to do neither.

I don’t buy it.

Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy, writes a piece expressing some scepticism about the formal teaching of virtue. But given that there are, and will continue to be, courses on ethics, he thinks they should accommodate material on self-interest and self-deception. He offers an example from his own recent experience:

Ethics education also ought to include training to make us better able to detect inner reflections that are solely in the service of the pleasure principle. Consider [this] example of a dubious inner dialogue. A few weeks ago I was on my way to a fancy restaurant when I was accosted by a disheveled man who put out his hand and pleaded, “I haven’t eaten all day – would you buy me a meal?” My first impulse was to say, “Of course.” My second thought was, I don’t want to stop, and besides, I have only 10- and 20-dollar bills on me, and I don’t feel like doling out that much money. Plus, I thought, if I give money to this person, I should also give it to all relevantly similar people. Because I am unwilling to make that kind of a sacrifice, it would be only fair to hold onto my money and keep on truckin’ to the four-star restaurant… To be sure, many believe that they do not have an obligation to try to personally feed strangers who claim to be hungry. After all, what if they use the money for drugs or booze? I think such reasoning is cynical and patronizing – unless, of course, I am in a rush and have only tens and twenties on me.

Tongue in cheek? But surely a professor of philosophy can come up with a higher class of self-deception than ‘if I give money to this person, I should also give it to all relevantly similar people’. If that was the thought I had, I’d know I was bull-shitting and turn back instantly. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

The South African Sunday Times reports:

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has given himself powers of detention that allow his police to hold opponents of his regime in prison for up [to] a month without legal process on charges of “subversion,”…

The state-owned press reported at the weekend… that sweeping presidential powers wielded by Mugabe banned judges or magistrates from giving bail to suspects, but only in cases of money-laundering, fraud and illegal foreign currency and gold trading.

However, scrutiny of the decree after it became available yesterday revealed that the law also applied to a wide range of offences under the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), including “attempting to coerce” the government through boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience or “resistance to the law,” said MDC secretary for legal affairs David Coltart.

He accused Mugabe of making “a silent declaration of a state of emergency.”
…..
MDC secretary-general Welshman Ncube said Mugabe’s decree was “a rehash” of 30 day detention laws used by South Africa’s apartheid regime and the former white-minority Rhodesian government.

Mugabe continued to use them after independence in 1980, during the massacres by his security forces of about 20,000 people in Matabeleland.

Human rights studies in the two countries say tens of thousands of people were tortured, assaulted and murdered under detention laws.

See also here (registration required – via Marcus.)

That’s as in some things are just pretty obvious however many people decline to respond about them however many times. From a letter to my dnoc by Tim Jones:

Political motivations for war are always impure, but that needn’t taint outcomes. Does anyone remember or care what motivated the Vietnamese to depose Pol Pot, or the Tanzanians Idi Amin? I usually find that the question “if you could turn back the clock and put Saddam and his sons back in power and reimpose sanctions” produces embarrassed silence from opponents of the Iraq war. The gangsters are gone and the invaders are attempting to nurture democracy.

But if they won’t say they’d turn back the clock, then… ummm… buzz, whirrr, clank…

Just above that letter, there’s this one from Philip Jacobson:

I was reporting from both [Israeli and Palestinian] communities during the war and have since returned on several occasions. My Palestinian contacts, who yearned for the bloody defeat of the US and British forces, are today even more bitter and resentful about the role played by Bush and Blair.

‘Yearned for the bloody defeat of…’ Of course, it would give you great confidence in the moral and political judgement of someone that this was the outcome she or he wanted, a triumph for our well-known war-starting, poison gas-dispensing, mass-murdering, eye-gouging, ear-chopping and plastic shredder-employing dictator. The letter-writer doesn’t comment on that aspect.

You’ll need to be patient because it can take some time to load, but this interview with the writer Aharon Appelfeld, Holocaust survivor and author of the masterpiece Badenheim 1939, among many other books, is well worth reading:

“Look, there was an aggressive element in Zionism. It fought against Yiddish and it fought against the Diaspora and it fought against Jewish riches. I understand that this was necessary. For a time, it was necessary. But in the final analysis, we are paying a terrible price for it. We are paying for it in the form of the diminishment of the Jewish soul. I am not an ideologue. I am not a polemicist. I am trying to apprehend the full complexity of the Jewish story. I am trying to understand the modern Jewish soul in all its transformations. I feel close to Yiddishkeit and to Zionism as well; to the communists and to the assimilators, too. Because I saw them there. I saw them all being killed in the same pit. Therefore I feel sympathy for them…”
…..
“Abroad we are described as a militaristic society, lusting for land, bloodthirsty. A kind of Sparta where everyone is a soldier, everyone is a mad patriot, going down to the tank next to his house and rushing off to Nablus. But that’s not what I see around me. I don’t see Sparta. I see a refugee camp…”
…..
“…To say of the Jews that they are a little like the Nazis. Not exactly Nazis, just a bit. When I see that, I say that there is something very deep in European civilization: the need to demonize us runs very deep. Because to this day, Europe has not given itself a full reckoning of what happened between 1939 and 1945. Because it is not only the Nazis, you know, it’s not only Germany. Women and children were taken from France openly. There was collaboration all across the continent. And it didn’t happen in Zimbabwe or in Nicaragua; it happened in the very heart of Europe. Therefore, because to this day they haven’t made a confession, the Europeans feel the need to say of the Jews that they are no better than them. On the contrary – they are worse.”
…..
“Fears exist. There is no one here who doesn’t have fear. Even those who behave confidently have fear. I will try to articulate it quietly: there are approximately 200 million Arabs who don’t like you. Don’t like you very much. And about a billion Muslims who also don’t like you very much. And Europe doesn’t actually like you. You are a small minority. Five or six million is a very small minority. I will say no more.”

(Hat tip: Gur Hirshberg.)