The Charlock’s Shade is a blog I’ve had on my sidebar for ages and which I visit regularly. In appearance, content and feel, it’s quite unlike any other blog I know. It’s generally dedicated to literature and the arts, with a concentration on English literature and English authors and personalities. But other things also get a look-in from time to time. Recently there have been a couple of cricket posts, and that has to be good.

Charlock is an eccentric mix, with an Eng lit flavour. It’s full of items on literary figures about whom you may have heard but not necessarily know all that much: J.F. Powers and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example. Down one side of the front page there are very short reviews of the sort of books that are often overlooked by literary publications taken up with the new and the fashionable. Two essays – on Aldous Huxley and Mark Twain – caught my eye. These are writers who are well-known without perhaps being as well-read as they used to be, and it’s good to have a reminder of their continuing worth. The site guides you to interesting reviews, such as the one about Nathaniel Hawthorne, which throws light on his most famous work: The Scarlet Letter. There are also amusing informational odds and ends. Did you know that Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is a bestseller in the Sudan?

It’s a blog for the intellectually curious, those unafraid of books written a long time ago. Enoch Soames, yer ‘main man’ at The Charlock, doesn’t care how recent an author is, as long as he or she has something interesting to say. So, see, I’m recommending it to you.

Today marks his return and Gideon Haigh is writing about it:

Warne is due to step on to Melbourne’s Junction Oval this morning to join the second day of the Victoria Second XI’s game against Queensland’s Academy of Sport, to star again in a drama of his own creation.
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Where sporting comebacks usually involve the appearance of some portly travesty of the former great, moreover, the 34-year-old Warne returns perhaps as strong and streamlined as he has ever been. Over the past six weeks he has had three 50-ball bowling sessions a week, plus a programme of bike rides, swimming, sprint work, weights, plus skipping, boxing and karate routines. With his earring, photogenic smile and hair grown fashionably shaggy, he looks fit to star in a reality television show – which over the next few weeks he essentially will.

If I had to assemble my Top 10 experiences of cricket spectating in going on 50 years, watching this guy bowl would certainly come within the first three. My only quibble with Gideon Haigh is that he says of Warne that he is ‘perhaps’ the greatest ever practitioner of leg-spin bowling. Uh uh – there’s no perhaps about it. Warne is arguably the greatest bowler of any kind who ever played. As a young Australian sitting behind me at the Oval in August 2001 said, ‘Spin ’em out of town, Shane.’

Round at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse is calling for assistance in compiling a list of books (published since 1970) that the ‘educated person’ should have read. He calls for submissions of two books per reader and offers a fabulous reward. Since, by the time I got there, some commenters were already bending the rules, I allowed myself – kind, hey? – three suggestions: Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars; Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved; and Jose Saramago, Blindness.

This could have been the occasion for a new normblog poll, but I’m not ready yet, still exhausted from the last one.

I’ve had some interesting correspondence on my recent posts about David McKnight and Naomi Klein. Clive Bradley writes regarding the former:

[He] refers to the Worker-Communist Party as ‘Iran-leaning’ – which is certainly false. They are militantly anti-clerical… They are linked to a party of the same name in Iran – perhaps that’s what he meant. The rest – that they denounce the ‘resistance’ as terrorists – is true. I interviewed one of their leaders in our paper a while back.

Here is the link to the interview Clive mentions. It contains much interesting information while also embodying, in my own view, the same contradiction as is to be found in David McKnight’s piece: Muayad, the leader Clive interviewed, says his organization didn’t see the war as a liberation, and the conditions and difficulties he sets out are indeed daunting. At the same time he describes an explosion of political and civil activity that would not, without the Coalition intervention, have happened or be happening.

South African reader DF writes:

Your posts on the comments of David McKnight and Naomi Klein underline a growing sense that many who were passionately antiwar are now, in the face of undeniable evidence from Iraqis themselves, not to mention the continuing exposure of Saddam’s tireless atrocities, beginning to realise there is a moral fissure at the heart of this option.

Both these commentators… are clearly trying to resolve their moral dilemma. It may be that many cannot bring themselves to do so without simultaneously denying any moral right on the side of the wartime allies. I’m encouraged anyway.

Relatedly, Alan Johnson has pointed me to this letter of his on the Worker’s Liberty website. Speaking of ‘propagandists of the denial’ like Michael Moore, Alan says:

In this white and padded world there is no terrorism, only “terrorism”. No democracy, only “democracy”. The substitution of clear thinking by the tyranny of the inverted comma is now learnt as the very height of critical thinking at Smart Alec 101 classes across the world, while the Wahhabi-funded madrasas churn out another kind of education altogether.

In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, the good humanists keep repeating, as the plague spreads, “There are no rats in Oran”. You see there cannot be.

Large chunks of the left are today like the people of Oran. Quite why this is so, or why some are even starting to half support the rats, I don’t have space to discuss here. But we should not indulge them.

Wake up, and repeat after me, THERE… IS… A… TERRORIST… THREAT. Now, does the left have anything sensible to say about that threat? Anything? Any distinctive ideas about how to defeat it? Can it even allow itself to pose the question of how to contain and defeat the terrorist threat? Or can it only make silly jokes?

The ‘good humanists’. That is a label I would willingly share. But over a decade or so I have begun to wonder whether there is something intrinsic to a certain kind of well-meaning progressive outlook that makes it resistant to recognizing the darker possibilities which from time to time overwhelm whole segments of humankind.

In reminding us of the Right Honourable James Hacker’s estimates of the British press, Jurjen Smies is imputing a strange ambition to me. Let me assure him, therefore, that having been Head of Department (or Chair as some of you will call it) for four years… I don’t need to finish this sentence.

You can read here of the fate of someone who did have that ambition until quite recently.

I’m guest-blogging up at A Fistful of Euros this week. My first post there is about Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.

There’s a harrowing report here about a deserter from a Zimbabwe youth militia who ‘was ordered to rape women as part of a campaign of intimidation against opponents of President Robert Mugabe’, and later fled to Johannesburg:

I was deployed to a rural area near Bulawayo and that is when I died as a human being… We would be sent out into the countryside to punish people who support the opposition. We even beat mothers whose children had been seen at (opposition) meetings. I was living in hell 24 hours a day, but I had had no feeling left for anything, even for myself.
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Asked how many women he had raped, Moyo said it had been “many” over a period of months. When pressed further, he started shaking, fell silent and turned his head away.

Those of you with access (it’s in the Sunday Times) should read the whole thing.

In the Observer today Nick Cohen reports on the effort to bring the Guantanamo and other detainees within the compass of the rule of law:

There are signs that the judges are beginning to resent the limit on their power to insist on proper distinctions. Just before Christmas, judges at the federal appeals court in San Francisco asked a good question. If the Bush administration was free to hold detainees outside the rule of law, was it also free to torture them or summarily execute them? Yes, replied the Government’s lawyer, in theory Guantanamo detainees could be tortured and shot and there would be nothing the American courts could do.

The judges were horrified. This was ‘the first time that the government has announced such an extraordinary set of principles – a position so extreme that it raises the gravest concerns under both American and international law.’ They snubbed the administration and ruled that the US courts could hear claims from the detainees.

The Supreme Court will decide whether the verdict stands.

Christopher Hitchens writes about the Democratic contenders – and related matters:

I claim no prescience for predicting the implosion of Howard Dean… A man who will say anything to any audience if he thinks it will raise the roof is a candidate to be shunned…
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John Kerry should decide whether he’s a moral hero for fighting in a futile and filthy war against the Vietnamese revolution, or for protesting against that war. Can I guess from his demeanor which of the two was his “noble cause”? No. Shouldn’t I know by now? Yes, I should, since it’s not evident at this relatively late date whether or not he’s proud of voting to remove Saddam Hussein.
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I’m a single-issue person at present, and the single issue in case you are wondering is the tenacious and unapologetic defense of civilized societies against the intensifying menace of clerical barbarism. If in the smallest doubt about this, I would suggest a vote for the re-election of George Bush, precisely because he himself isn’t prey to any doubt on the point.
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Make up your own mind, is my own best recommendation, and put “electability”… to one side. An Edwards-Kerry ticket would be made up of serious men, at least, and this is a test that people and politicians have to pass whether they are looking for votes or not.

(Via Michael Totten.)

David McKnight, writing in the Australian, picks out some differences between the Iraqi left and some sections of the Western left:

HAVING mobilised the biggest demonstrations seen in a generation against the invasion of Iraq, the Left and anti-war activists now face a dilemma as post-war Iraq unfolds.

For multiple reasons many times recounted, the US invasion was wrong and hypocritical. But the invasion cannot be undone. And the reality is that Iraq now has the potential for a democratic future, as well as the potential for regression if the underground terrorist resistance assumes power.

But on this issue the Western Left is divided. Do the bloody actions of the so-called resistance constitute a war of national liberation, making them worthy of left-wing support? Are Saddam Hussein’s thugs comparable to the Timorese fighting Indonesian occupation? Or to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress? Or to the French Resistance against Nazi Germany?
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In a radio broadcast on December 31 last year, [John] Pilger told American listeners: “I think the resistance in Iraq is incredibly important for all of us. I think that we depend on the resistance to win so that other countries might not be attacked, so that our world, in a sense, becomes more secure. Now, I don’t like resistances that produce the kind of terrible civilian atrocities that this one has, but that is true of all of the resistances.”
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The fact is that in Iraq today, the Iraqi Left, as well as the vast majority of religious and political forces, denounce the campaign of bombings…

The Iraqi Left can speak with some moral authority, having been murdered, tortured and imprisoned in their thousands by Saddam for many years. They fear the resurgence of the fascist Baath Party and the rise of fundamentalism that will use anti-US struggle as a springboard to reimpose Baathism or an extreme Islamic state.

One member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Hamid Majid Musa, is a leader of the Iraqi Communist Party. His party argues that in the war the Iraqi people “chose to stand aside, watching a fight between a foreign power which they knew only too well, and a deeply hated regime”.

Six weeks ago the “resistance” blew up an office of the Iraqi Communist Party and killed two of its officials.

The Iraqi communists chose to participate in the governing council because, they say, they wanted to build an alliance with other parties and social groups that were keen on participation. The council is an arena of struggle and will be a necessary step towards building a democratic and federal Iraq. One of the first newspapers on the streets in post-war Baghdad was that of the Iraqi Communist Party. Other publications of the communists have led a campaign under the slogan “No to the compulsory veil”.

In recent times the governing council has strongly disagreed with the decrees of the American administrator, Paul Bremer. The council insists that the oil industry, along with other vital sectors of the Iraqi economy, must be excluded from foreign ownership.

The Iraqi Communist Party nevertheless agrees that foreign investment can revitalise the economy, while urging that wide-scale privatisation be delayed until an independent government is established.

The party says it supports genuine independence and opposes the American occupation, but through peaceful, political means, not with guns and bombs. It urges UN participation in the transition, which would include elections. (The party’s website is at http://www.icp.org/framse1.)

Another communist group in Iraq is the Iran-leaning Worker-Communist Party of Iraq. It too has denounced the so-called resistance and warned Western leftists not to be taken in by it. A statement by its political bureau (www.wpiraq.org) argues that the bombings in Iraq “have nothing to do with the rights and future of the Iraqi people. To achieve their own reactionary objectives, these groups victimise people and sacrifice the basis of life in society. They attempt to win the support of the people by deception and by promoting Arab nationalism and Islamic sentiments among the people under the pretext of fighting the occupiers.”

It goes on: “In this conflict the remnants of the Baath regime and the Islamic groups resort to blowing up civil targets and attacking the sources of people’s livelihood. The WCP struggles to defeat these reactionary forces and thwart their role. It also strongly condemns attacks on social services and all the terrorist actions against people and civil institutions.”

Other statements by the WCP of Iraq support the secular women’s movement and their establishment of women’s refuges that will be “a safe haven for women of Iraq (and) a humanist and progressive symbol in the society whose priority is to protect women’s dignity”. (These quotes are taken from Forward, a fortnightly newsletter of the WCP of Iraq distributed in Australia but produced in London.)

Naturally, the WCP also calls for the US to get out. But in a bitter irony that is characteristic of the new period in which we live, the Cold War enemies now have a common enemy – the remnants of the Saddam regime and the ultra-reactionary Islamic fundamentalists who have come to Iraq to kill Americans, religious enemies and communists.

The Left in Iraq has been a significant secular and modernising force since the 1930s. Given what it has suffered, it is bizarre to see armchair generals… denouncing it and presuming to give it the benefit of their wise “anti-imperialist” advice.

David McKnight is untroubled by the tension between ‘the US invasion was wrong’ and ‘Iraq now has the potential for a democratic future’, but that apart, he’s on the ball. Note that in the Pilgerian night all resistances appear to be the same colour, a point I commented on a few days ago here in a different connection (see the paragraph beginning ‘Third…’). Note also ‘in the war the Iraqi people “chose to stand aside…”‘ – an option that might have been considered by some others.

(Hat tip: Jim Nolan.)