There’s less than a fortnight to go before the poll on your favourite movies closes – and I mean forever. This presents me with a certain problem, readers, friends, casual droppers-in, observers of the human carnival, cyclists, and any other sort of guy, doll, or non-gender specific whoever you may be. As I’ve always been utterly frank with you, I’m going to tell you what this problem is.

We – by which I don’t mean I – are more than half way towards what I would regard as an exuberantly good entry, but there’s still some mileage to be covered to get the rest of the way. I have, unfortunately, in previous normblog polls, used up most of the rhetorical devices I know for persuading people. I have reasoned, I have appealed, I have cajoled, I have admonished, I have joked, I have pleaded. I’ve tried to hit on your sense of fun, your sense of duty, your sense of fellow feeling, your sense of guilt, your sense of pity and your sense of what-the-hell-let’s-shut-the-guy-up. I am running out of modes. I could offer financial inducements, I suppose, or I could lie (telling you, for example, that the front-runner movie is currently – as it is not, OK, it is NOT – Life Is Beautiful). But I’m not going to do either of these things. So you see my problem, readers, friends, casual droppers-in… and what I said before?

But the thing is, I just know there are those of you out there who read this blog, are aware of the favourite movies poll – oh yes, you are – but haven’t entered yet. How I do I know this? I know it through the various different ways of knowing. I know it by deductive reasoning in some cases. I know it by intuition in others.

If you’ve entered any of the earlier polls, why would you disappoint me by not entering this time? And if you haven’t entered any of the earlier polls, why would you disappoint me further by not entering this time? And if you’re thinking ‘I’ve had enough of this; who the hell does he think he is?!’, who I think I am is a person requesting an entry for the normblog favourite movies poll (see #3) – cue the band, cue The Band, cue The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down / And all the bells were ringin’ / And all the people were singin’, cue the great chorus of the good and the kind and the loving and the hopeful and the grumpy and the lethargic.

Or, as someone I know used to say as a young child:

Dwist do it!

Send me a list of your favourite movies. You don’t have to be a film buff and you don’t have to have ten. If it’s one, three or seven, that’s also OK.

Please. Thank you.

See this report:

BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Union’s head office said Tuesday it is suspending preparations for a seminar on anti-Semitism in Europe after Jewish leaders accused it of “intellectual dishonesty and moral treachery” in handling the issue.
…..
In a letter to the Financial Times published Monday, the heads of… two Jewish organizations accused the EU’s executive commission of censoring a study on the rise of anti-Semitic attacks and the involvement of Muslim minorities.

They also complained about the release of a “flawed and dangerously inflammatory” EU poll in which Israel was named a threat to world peace more than any other country.

“Let us not mince words: Both of these actions were politically motivated, demonstrating a failure of will and decency”.

European Commission President Romano Prodi said he was shocked by these charges which he rejected. (Hat tip: SdeW.)

I’m glad to see others are making this point, having banged on (see ‘Third,…’) about it myself the last few days. Roger Simon writes:

[Tony Blair] went on for the umpty-umpth time to reiterate the motivations for the war:

[Quoting from the New York Times:] Blair, who last visited Basra in May, said Saddam Hussein’s regime “had a proven record of use of weapons of mass destruction” and that “literally hundreds of thousands of its citizens died in prison camps.”

Critics of the war always ignore the latter part as if no one ever mentioned it before the conflagration started. I take that as a personal insult because that was always by far the most important reason to me. Maybe I’m exceptional, but I find mass murderers horrifying.

Of course, I’m not unique in this and, of course, anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention before the war saw it mentioned by virtually everybody in favor of regime change from Bush on down. That many still choose to ignore this… I can only regard as deliberate obfuscation for political purposes. They fool no one but themselves.

After posting this yesterday (see point one) about Andrew Marr’s comment on the BBC news the night before, I was directed to an item by Marr now on the BBC site. It confirms my initial impression.

But the message [of Blair in Basra] was very much the humanitarian one that, certainly here in the south of Iraq where there are some 10,000 British servicemen and women deployed, things are beginning to return to something a little bit more like normality as many countries would understand normality.

There is traffic in the streets, the economy is starting to revive a little bit, a certain amount of security returning, far fewer shootings, the odd bombing – but better.

The message was that the British involvement had helped to bring hope to a part of the world where people had been living for decades under dictatorship, police state and in great poverty.

Tony Blair cannot divert attention from why we went to war, because this is the month when Lord Hutton reports and when there is going to be inevitably a great upsurge of debate about that again.

What this shows is he accepts that he cannot hide away from that.

He has to take it full-on, and he has to try and make some of those humanitarian cases for the conflict that he did not make before the war started. (Emphasis added.)

I don’t know that this is, word for word, what I heard Marr saying on the news. But it’s along the same lines. And the final statement is false. (Hat tip: Chris Smith.)

There’s an interesting piece by Christina Asquith in the Guardian’s Education section today, on the university sector in Iraq under the Baathist dictatorship and since its overthrow:

Academics in Iraq’s beleaguered universities are seeing signs that the brain drain of the 1980s and 1990s is slowly being reversed. In recent months dozens of academics have returned from exile and are seeking to get their old jobs back. At the US-led ministry of higher education, which is staffed by expatriate academics, hundreds more have emailed from England, the US and the Netherlands to inquire about returning and to offer donations, scholarships and start partnerships. Just as lost academics were symptomatic of a universities slump under Saddam, their re-emergence offers a thread of promise for the future, particularly to colleagues struggling to piece back campuses suffering from academic repression, sanctions, looting and now terrorism.

The story of how things presently are is a mixed one, as you would expect. But one particular caution. The subhead on the piece has Asquith asking academics who stayed behind ‘how warmly they welcome their old colleagues’. This doesn’t reflect the content, merely one remark from one Iraqi academic.

I’ve just read this long review by Christopher Hitchens of two books by Victor Serge, and recommend it to you if you haven’t. It gives an informative overview of Serge’s life and his intellectual and political virtues. From it I learned something I hadn’t previously known:

Serge came up with the word “totalitarian.” He believed that he had originated it himself; there are some rival claimants from the period of what was then called “war communism,” but it is of interest that the term has its origins within the Marxist left…

The review highlights both the brutal and the more subtle realities of totalitarian rule as refracted through Serge’s writing.

> Not to trespass upon the patch of Last Night’s BBC News, but it doesn’t yet have anything up about this and nor does Biased BBC. So here’s something from last night on the Beeb’s 10 o’clock news broadcast: Andrew Marr commenting on Blair’s Basra jaunt. It’s only my impression from one viewing, but that impression was that Marr presented Blair as now going for the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq intervention because of how things had turned out with WMD and as though he had just discovered it. This is becoming one of the major components in the anti-war party’s current mythology. But that’s what it is: mythology. Blair stated the humanitarian argument plain as day, albeit as subsidiary. The same mythology now pretends that it was only the US and British governments that thought Iraq had significant WMD.

> From a Guardian leader today:

He [Tony Blair] is right that Saddam’s fall is a great boon for Iraqis. But… [i]t does not mean that forcible regime change is now an acceptable legal or moral principle.

I would say this point is moot, and there’s a long tradition of moral and legal thinking in support of my saying it.

> Anthony Cox, along the corridor at Black Triangle, writes today:

[T]here is a narrow (13 against 12) majority of European States supporting the action in Iraq. If you add in the applicant countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, who all supported the coalition, then you have nearly 60% support for the action in Iraq. This is hardly news, but it [is] worth considering next time you hear Europe referred to by America[n] right-wingers as the opposition, or European anti-war protestors suggesting the UK should get in step with Europe.

> Just before the turn of the year, I put up a post about a review by Ed Vulliamy. Tony Hutchison sent in the following comment:

I write to express my disappointment with Ed Vulliamy’s position as outlined in the Shawcross review. Vulliamy is a journalist whose work in Yugoslavia in the nineties I believe helped to alter the moral climate in Europe and the US by the end of that terrible decade. It’s thanks to brave, honest reporters like him that there were no Srebrenicas in Kosovo. What troubled me most, however, was the following paragraph from his piece: ‘It is brutal but true to say that the very worst of what was happening in Iraq was over. That had happened while Iraq was America’s ally, and after America refused to go to Baghdad in 1991, for reasons of ‘realpolitik’. Yes, the regime of terror remained, but the genocide had abated, and the regime was set to totter, with Iraq remaining part of Arabia.’ Let me just say that the ‘brutality’ of this statement itself outweighs its dubious truth content but also gets to the heart of my own disagreement with the anti-war Left. Perhaps Srebrenica was the ‘very worst’ Milosevic had to offer? Was this the case too perhaps in Kosovo after the initial attacks on ethnic Albanians? Thankfully we’ll never have to find out but Vulliamy certainly wasn’t advocating a policy of inaction then. Perhaps because it represents the Alan Clark doctrine of ‘what one group of foreigners is doing to another is no concern of ours’.

I agree. This kind of statement, which comes up from time to time in anti-war argument, seems to suggest that, short of genocidal, things are somehow tolerable, even if they are post-genocidal – and include, as here, the ‘regime of terror’ in Iraq and all that this involved. What a standard.

> Finally, I commend to you this long piece by Jurjen Smies on post-Saddam apologetics. I’m delighted No Cameras is active again.

The Lion and the Unicorn is a new, smart-looking blog which aims ‘to help fill a void in the UK blogosphere for a mainstream democratic left perspective’. Its author is Daniel (no second name given, or none that I could find). Go take a look. I welcome Daniel to the blogosphere, in a way appropriate to the medium, by engaging with his inaugural post – ‘Iraq… still’.

For, citing a post of my own as an example, Daniel expresses some puzzlement at the level of interest in Iraq there still is amongst left-wing bloggers. I’m puzzled by his puzzlement. First, this was a major issue which divided world opinion, and it still does. Second, the ultimate outcome in Iraq is of great importance – for the people of Iraq themselves, for the region, and for the world. Third – and speaking now just for myself – Iraq, or at any rate the post-9/11 world, is 50% or more of the reason why I started blogging and why I continue to do so, though it may not remain this way forever. Given how little support there has been for the pro-war, pro-liberation viewpoint on the left, and given the volume of (as we perceive it) wrong-headed argument and posturing against the war those of us holding this viewpoint encounter every single day in the publications we read and in the social spaces in which we move, blogging against that has been one way of trying to make a difference.

Daniel also asks a question about the focus of some of the anti-dictatorship concern:

[I]t is curious that the countries which most concern the ‘pro-intervention’ lefties are also frequently those that are strategically important for the West. I’ve read plenty of – quite just – criticism of Iran and Zimbabwe, for example. Far less about Indonesia, China or Uzbekistan.

I think this is unworthy. I start by – again – speaking for myself. I have an interest in Zimbabwe because it’s where I come from. The suggestion that the strategic interests of the West influence me at all in this regard I just flatly reject. But generalizing now: does anyone need any other reason for being bothered about what’s going on in Zimbabwe than how bad what’s going on is? You can say ‘But why Zimbabwe? What about x?’ But if Zimbabwe is a bad enough case of human suffering and injustice, why not? No one can do everything. Anyone who speaks or acts against any wrong is selective – inevitably. Why contribute to Oxfam? What about the Red Cross? Why the Red Cross? What about Amnesty International? Why, Daniel, post about this particular emphasis which you see as a ‘curious’, when there must be many other such?

Anyway, welcome to The Lion and the Unicorn. I’m adding it to my sidebar.

Glad I wasn’t, on the basis of this account by Scott Jaschik. And ‘there’ being a meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Diego:

This past week, about 8,000 professors and graduate students gathered here for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Most came for job interviews, to catch up with old friends, and to attend some of the 763 panels of scholars. But among the panels on topics ranging from Hawthorne to Asian cinema to “The Aesthetics of Trash” were a surprising number of sessions dealing with the war in Iraq, terrorism, patriotism, and American foreign policy.

Not that there was much actual debate. In more than a dozen sessions on war-related topics, not a single speaker or audience member expressed support for the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The sneering air quotes were flying as speaker after speaker talked of “so-called terrorism,” “the so-called homeland,” “the so-called election of George Bush,” and so forth.

The approach to the war was certainly wide-ranging – from cultural studies to rhetoric to literature to pure political speechifying. In a session on “Shock and Awe,” Graham Hammill of Notre Dame traced the ideas behind the initial bombing back to the Roman historian and orator Tacitus’s idea of arcana imperii, which translates roughly as “mysteries of state.” Like Roman emperors who used rhetoric to sway the populace, Hammill argued, the Shock and Awe campaign was a rhetorical gesture aimed at demonstrating US power as much as flattening Baghdad.

At a different panel, Cynthia Young of the University of Southern California spoke about how the White House uses Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell “to create a distorted multiracial mask on imperialism.” “What does it mean,” Young asked, “when imperialism comes wrapped in a black bow?”
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The MLA’s deliberative body, the Delegate Assembly, adopted by a landslide margin of 122-8 a resolution supporting “the right of its members to conduct critical analysis of war talk” despite government efforts to “shape language to legitimate aggression, misrepresent policies, conceal aims, stigmatize dissent, and block critical thought.”
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The closest public challenge to the prevailing geopolitical views at the MLA came when one professor asked a panel that had derided American responses to 9/11 and Iraq what a good response would have looked like. She didn’t get much of an answer, left the session, and declined to elaborate on her question.

But a young professor of English who followed her out the door to congratulate her did offer some thoughts on politics at the MLA. Aaron Santesso of the University of Nevada at Reno described himself as being “on the left” and sympathetic with much of the criticism of the war in Iraq. But he said that the tenor of the discussion “drives me nuts.” “A lot of people here don’t want the rhetoric to just be a shrill echo of the right,” he said.

Just a few years ago, he noted, the Taliban was regularly attacked at MLA meetings for their treatment of women and likened to the American religious right. Now, there is only talk of how the United States has taken away the rights of the Afghan people.

The gathering no doubt saw itself as ‘speaking the truth to power’. It’s time a few more of them woke up to a different desideratum: ‘speaking the truth to bullshit’. Especially notable here is imperialism’s ‘black bow’, and the asserted right to critical analysis, so evidently under threat in San Diego. (Hat tip: Matt Kramer.)

This is merely a matter of sharing one of my enthusiasms. I had the album Monk (1964) on vinyl for many years. The other day I found the CD. Great rejoicing. Of all of his albums, it is possibly my favourite. And of all the great jazz musicians, Monk is possibly my Top One. Both times ‘possibly’, because – you know – it’s hard.

Yair Sheleg writes in Haaretz today about the remnant Jewish community of Bulawayo (the town in which I was born and spent the first nineteen years of my life). The community’s present condition expresses in microcosm the travails of Zimbabwe more generally. According to the rabbi there, however, there is hardly any anti-Semitism and relations between Jews and Muslims in the town are good. (Hat tip: Jeff Abramowitz.)