In arguments about recent wars there tends to be one war that gets treated differently. Even amongst those leftists and liberals for whom pretty well all the most recent wars have been wrong (whether because they were American, imperialist, about oil, or whatever), the Second World War, the war against Nazi Germany, tends mostly to get a better press, as having been a war which was worth fighting.

Step up to the plate Professor Lisa Jardine.

Anthony Cox has the goods on her performance on Newsnight Review on Friday, when she was one of a panel discussing the programme Dunkirk – to be screened later this week on BBC2. He also has the link you need, to watch this clip during the next few days (start at about 16 minutes in). Money quotes:

Lisa Jardine: Oh there always has to be a moral good. So, you know there have to be bad Germans. The Germans are called barbarians at least twice…
…..
Michael Portillo: I’m sorry to say this, but the Nazis were murderous bastards who swept across Europe killing millions of people. [At which Jardine is heard to exclaim sighingly, ‘Ah…’]

L J: But we’re now part of an EU, we are part of the EU.
….
L J: I don’t think war is about balance, what you need to know about war is nobody is in the right.

Those unable to see this video may like to know that, pressed by the other panellists, Jardine responds in a most amiable, chuckly, dinner-partyish sort of a way. For a fuller transcript, go on over to Black Triangle.

Called barbarians at least twice. Heavens, whatever next.

This book review by Alexandra Fuller makes an interesting read, even though Owen Sheers – the author of the book she’s reviewing – isn’t going to be too thrilled with it. Three things interested me about it. First, it touches on the Zimbabwe ruins (Great Zimbabwe) which I saw as a child. It’s a place you don’t forget. Second, Fuller gently and entertainingly mauls the book in a way that looks convincing, though I can’t vouch for the truth of what she says about the author’s style. Third, she quotes this passage from him, saying it is ‘excellent advice for tourists’:

Travel… for the movement only, not the conclusion, that way you will be part of the journey, and not a victim of it.

Excellent advice? On such advice, I would travel hardly ever, rather than just rarely, as I do now.

If there is one thing that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt, it’s that the BBC was innocent of these charges.

So says Richard Eyre of the accusation of ‘coordinated and systemic bias against the government’ over the Iraq war. For my part I’m happy to take out both ‘coordinated’ and ‘systemic’, but so far as just plain ‘bias’ is concerned, I’d love to know where he gets ‘proved beyond reasonable doubt from’. All he cites is the Cardiff study, but that has been put in question by others. (See the post about this on my old site, The Cardiff team’s feeling for Snow – September 30). Just saying it over and again doesn’t make it so.

Rajeev Syal reports:

Prominent Jews in Britain are being targeted in a wave of anti-Semitic harassment by far-Right and Islamic fundamentalist organisations.

The home of Lord Triesman, the former general secretary of the Labour party, has been attacked by Combat 18, the neo-Nazi group. Uri Geller, the Israeli television personality, and Barbara Roche, the former Labour minister, have been the victims of graffiti and hate mail.

The incidents have emerged as police prepare to release figures this week showing that Britain saw a significant rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2003.

Read the rest. (Via Tim Blair.)

In my post a couple of days ago on Jewish haiku, I mentioned the poetic form which I originated many years ago – the shmaiku. In doing so, I cited the only instance of the form to date that I knew of (and for which too, I’m bound to say, I claim the entire credit):

Haiku
Shmaiku

However, Lorenz Gude writes from Perth to suggest what he refers to as a precursor. It’s embedded in these lines from the Tom Lehrer song, Wernher von Braun:

Gather ’round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown,
“Ha, Nazi, Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.

Lorenz’s suggestion, of course, is that this is a precursor shmaiku:

Nazi
Schmazi

Lorenz writes:

[It] wasn’t presented by itself in what now must be regarded as the classic shmaiku form. Nonetheless…

The cogency of his point is contained in those hanging dots at the end (which are his dots and not mine). Or so I thought at first. On receiving Lorenz’s email, my initial impulse was to concede that this was, indeed, a shmaiku – a shmaiku avant la lettre, as you might say; or even, if you wanted to be especially snooty about it, a shmaiku ante litteram. But then, on further reflection, I was thrown into both doubt and embarrassment. I have no difficulty with Tom Lehrer’s shmaiku being an embedded, rather than free-standing, shmaiku. The avant la lettre, or ante litteram, clause may be permitted to take care of that. No, my embarrassment is that possessing, as I thought, only one exemplar of the form hitherto, I had never really pondered what its essential properties are. To give you an example of the doubts now assailing me, I’ll ask you the following. Is either of these two works below a shmaiku?

Helter
Skelter

Abigail
Shmabigail

I’m inclined to say no, myself. But, then, is this a shmaiku?

Plenty
Shmenty

I’m not keen to agree that it is a genuine shmaiku, either. For this would lead to a massive proliferation of shmaiku in which the foundational link to the ‘haiku’ word had been lost.

I begin, therefore to think that ‘Haiku / Shmaiku’ may have been, all these years, the sole shmaiku, not merely contingently, but for reasons of logical necessity. Unless any reader can show me otherwise.

Here’s one kind of reason to be blue; and here’s another kind of reason to be blue. Here, on the other hand, is a reason not to be.

Prior to a certain football match yesterday, I open my dnoc where I mostly do – at the sport (this way I get to postpone seeing the ‘no-WMD etc and so forth’ sections) – and in an article by Daniel Taylor I read of a certain Kevin Cummins complaining about the treatment of Manchester United by the media. Says Kevin:

“I’ll never forget Des Lynam introducing Match of the Day on the night of their first title success for 26 years with the immortal words: ‘At last the league championship comes home’.”

Cummins blames what he calls the “Man U-loving media” and explains: “The press are compliant in the deception that Man U are ‘the world’s greatest football club’. Chant the mantra often enough and the public will believe anything. It’s pathetic.”

Run that one past me again: the ‘Man U-loving media’? Kevin Cummins is evidently a Manchester blue, but not to put too fine a point on it, this is just plain ridiculous. It’s about like ‘Iraq war-supporting Guardian’, or the ‘judiciously impartial BBC’ (same issue).

‘World’s greatest football club’, on the other hand – I can’t think of a single counter-consideration.

I linked recently to a piece on Mary Seacole, who had just been voted the greatest black Briton. There’s an informative article about her by Mark Bostridge in yesterday’s Graun:

[W]hile there is every reason to commemorate her remarkable contribution to nursing, the comparison with Nightingale does justice to neither. There is no doubt that in terms of practical nursing expertise, Seacole far outdistanced Nightingale’s experience.

Julie Burchill writes in the Times:

I’ve heard some pacifist claptrap in my time, but Benardo Bertolucci’s recent babble – “An orgasm is better than a bomb!” – really took the biscuit. What, the orgasm of a rapist, a paedophile, or a wife beater is better than a good, honest bomb dropped on a genocidal enemy?
…..
[W]hat joker decided that it had to be either/or? Whatever he was on, it was probably the same stuff as the clown who wrote the lyrics to last year’s biggest chart hit Where Is The Love, a song complaining about, among other things, the extremely just war against the monstrous Baathists.

“When you hate, you’re bound to get irate/Badness is what you demonstrate/ So meditate to the love, y’all!” There you go – if those Kurds being gassed to death and those others guys being fed feet first through a shredder by the Baathist dudes had only managed not to get irate, and found a way to meditate to the love (y’all), there wouldn’t have been any need for a nasty war… Anyway, the point is that on Valentine’s Day, when all around is pink and fluffy, I for one would like to put the case for – in an imperfect world – the coexistence of bombs and orgasms, love and war, snuggly bunnies and brave soldiers both. Furthermore, probably because I’m (a) spiteful and (b) don’t know when to stop, I’d like to question the motives and morality of those people who keep repeating the astounding claim that Bush and Blair are “worse” war criminals than Saddam, and who have so relentlessly demonised we who were in favour of the war as bloodthirsty perverts compared with their little-friend-of-all-mankind shtick; in short, the Bombs vs Orgasms crew.

I’d like to say to them upfront; those bombs are the best ensurers and protectors of your orgasms currently operative. I’m not asking you to love ’em, but I am asking you to acknowledge them, hear them, feel their pain – and, if possible, give ’em a great big old Oprah-style hug.

When the war started, I could comprehend why some of those who were against it felt as they did. I could understand that certain racists and xenophobes and grumpy old men believed that the life of one British soldier was worth more than the lives of a thousand Iraqis. I could understand why the Catholic Church was against the war; after all, they above all have shown such great empathy and support for fascist tyrants down the ages. These people were merely being consistent; they didn’t approve of personal freedom in their own countries/congregations, so why should the Iraqis have it either?

But what I couldn’t understand were the huge numbers of what I thought were People Like Me who were willing to march against the right of Iraqis to have a chance at freedom, an escape from tyranny. Women, gays, trade unionists; all of them, their snuggly self-righteousness coming off them in radiant waves, like in the old Ready Brek adverts, marching for the right of Saddam and his psychotic gang to continue torturing and murdering the people of Iraq – and Iran, and Kuwait – as he pleased.

Some of them were people I knew – my friends. I knew they weren’t evil – I loved them, in my fashion. So in the end, I came to the conclusion that they were in some way daft, even though they spoke intelligently – it was the only way I could keep talking to them. Christopher Hitchens described the anti-war marchers as “the sinister leading the silly”, and I’d rather think of someone I liked as silly than sinister.

It hasn’t stopped there. The continuing alliance of the anti-Blair Left with extreme Islam is extraordinary…

(Hat tip: SdeW.)

Here’s a report by Wilson Johwa from Bulawayo on the state of education in Zimbabwe:

It was once celebrated as a rare African success story, an example of what committed leadership can do.

Education for all was the policy Zimbabwean authorities pursued diligently for much of the first decade since independence, from Britain, in 1980. The goal was to extend education to the previously disadvantaged black majority.

As a result, scores of schools were built and the training of thousands of teachers speeded up.

The investment did not take long to bear fruit: By 2000 Zimbabwe had achieved an adult literacy rate, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), of 93 percent, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sadly, those classroom gains are currently in jeopardy, threatened by triple digit inflation and political impenitence.

One urban primary school says at least half of its more than 1,000 pupils cannot afford fees, while a government directive says learners must not be sent home.
…..
The situation is equally dire in most urban schools, and often worse in rural areas. Here, not only are parents too poor to finance non-salary recurrent costs of education, but teachers have the additional burden of being targeted by President Robert Mugabe’s marauding youth militia and war veterans.

Witness Ncube, a teacher at Matshetsheni Primary School in Nkayi, Matabeleland North province, says he fled after three encounters with war veterans, who accused him of preaching opposition politics to students.

Like multitudes of other teachers, who have turned their backs on low salaries and poor conditions, he is planning to go to Britain to do whatever work he can get. Meanwhile, three months after his departure, the school still has not found a replacement.

(Hat tip: John Abeles.)

In today’s Guardian 25 writers give their views, pro and anti, on the Iraq war. As is not going to surprise anyone, the breakdown is well over two to one on the anti-war side. Of the many anti-war statements there is only one that, in my own judgement, measures up to the gravity of the issue. This is the statement by David Lodge. Though coming down in the end against the war, Lodge speaks of the difficulty he had in doing so and of the primary reason for it:

It is increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein’s regime was an exceptionally evil one, and very unlikely that it would have fallen without armed intervention from outside.

Most of the rest of the anti-war writers either don’t register this consideration at all or do so only obliquely and without appearing to have let it trouble them too much or too long.

To readers wishing to save themselves the time of reading all those anti-war statements, I offer you a convenient short cut. As it happens, Linda Colley had a piece in the same newspaper on the previous day, containing the following passage:

If Saddam Hussein really didn’t possess any WMD, then there was no justification for a pre-emptive strike against him (always, anyway, a dubious notion). And – if this was the case – then whatever they personally believed, and whatever the benign effects this conflict may have, Bush and Blair conducted a war that was not necessary, even though they assured us that it was.

There you have it: ‘whatever the benign effects this conflict may have’, they just don’t come into the reckoning. Getting rid of a regime which was ‘exceptionally evil’ doesn’t come into the reckoning for Colley, and so it is with most of the anti-war writers collected in the Guardian today. Just one more symptom, if any more were needed, of the moral failure of left-liberal opinion in face of the threats to left-liberal values today.