The Madeleine Bunting article which I discussed here has evidently produced a full postbag at the Guardian. It publishes nine letters in response today. The one that succinctly expressed my own view is this one from David Lund:

President Chirac has got somewhat muddled on headscarves. A secular state is justified in not itself displaying religious signs in its schools, but this is very different from preventing those attending the schools from displaying their own personal religious items.

For some discussion on the blogs, see Cobb, Solomonia and Hub Blog.

Cathy Buckle has some seasonal verses from Zimbabwe:

In the first month to Christmas, the government gave to me:
Police torturing lawyers, judges grabbing farms, long sugar queues and inflation of 175 percent. Our leader left for Indonesia but the TV said to me, no worries, “Our Land is Our Prosperity.”

Yes, there are 11 more.

Edgar Neufeld emails:

Re your piece The well-being of his country, no one seems to understand why Mbeki will never say or do anything publicly against Mugabe. During all the years of the struggle against apartheid, Mugabe harboured and protected ANC leaders. Their gratitude for that outweighs everything else, whether we like it or not.

I think this throws some useful light on Thabo Mbeki’s stance – in a manner of speaking, explains it. But it obviously isn’t a justification. Even deserved gratitude must have some limits.

Like Gaul, this post is divided into three parts.

1. It’s the time when people decide on their top this, that and the others, and so I thought I’d pick out the best movies I’ve seen over the last year. This applies only to new movies, though not all of these were actually made in 2003. The natural cut-off point for me, when I looked through my list of movies (yes, I keep such a list – I have done since January 1967), was at three. The three top-class movies I saw in 2003 are (unranked):

> Mystic River (Clint Eastwood)
> The Pianist (Roman Polanski)
> Son of the Bride (Juan José Campanella)

I’ve written about The Pianist here; and, more briefly, about Mystic River here. Son of the Bride is a wonderfully humane and, in parts, extremely funny film, of which there’s a review here. If you do see the movie, don’t leave when the end credits start to roll, or you’ll miss the answer to a certain question.

Honourable mentions, also, for The Hours (Stephen Daldry), and 25th Hour (Spike Lee).

2. During the first week of normblog’s existence, I posted (on July 28) a list of my Top 20 Movies of all time. I’ve been aware since doing so how heavily weighted it was towards the (relatively) distant past: 15 of my favourite films were from the 1960s or earlier, and the other 5 were from the 70s and 80s. Well, I don’t want anyone saying I’m stuck back then. So I’ve compiled the following list of ten fine movies from the 1990s. I’m not saying they’re the ten best of that decade. They’re just ten that I really rate. I’ve already watched most of them more than once; and, given time and opportunity, would watch any of them again. In alphabetical order:

> The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers – 1998)
> Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley – 1992)
> GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese – 1990)
> Heat (Michael Mann – 1995)
> The Insider (Michael Mann – 1999)
> L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson – 1997)
> Lone Star (John Sayles – 1996)
> The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont – 1994)
> Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton – 1996)
> The Straight Story (David Lynch – 1999)

3. Finally – and you must have seen this coming – it’s time for the call to go out for the normblog Favourite Movies of All Time poll. Please send me yours, any number of them up to 10. No need to rank them. You’ll be sitting around over the coming week or two with lots of time to reflect on matters like this. Just think of the fun you’ll have. So, email them in. Closing date: Sunday January 18, 2004.

Well, you were spot on about the number of goals, Stephen:

Meanwhile, I’m off this afternoon to watch Spurs beat Man U… 3-0.

Only trouble is United scored two of them.

A Guardian leader a couple of days ago ended on this ominous note:

The true, inflated price for the Iraq distraction is still to be paid.

The leader writer is alluding to a future al-Qaida terrorist strike, for which George Bush – remarkably, given that we can’t yet know the chain of cause and effect involved – is already to be held responsible. But, anyway, that isn’t my object here. My object is the word ‘distraction’. In the context, it is clear that the intended meaning is distraction from the war on terror, though the writer puts this expression in scare-quotes. However it is intended, I believe that to describe thus what has happened, and is happening, in Iraq is to exhibit a lack of sensitivity to the evil that was lately ended there. The Guardian may not think that this sufficed to justify the war. It shouldn’t speak in a way which belittles the extent of the evil, all the same.

Here’s a report about the reaction of some people, who plainly don’t share the Guardian’s view, to the capture of Saddam. It’s from a local Manchester paper (but there’s no online version of the item itself):

The city’s Iraqi community took to the streets to celebrate the capture of Saddam.

Impromptu parties were held as thousands of exiles celebrated the news that their country’s former despot had been caught.

Hundreds of Iraqis s[a]ng and danced at the end of the famous Curry Mile in Rusholme, waving their flag as passing motorists honked their horns in approval.
…..
“We had been waiting for 35 years,” [a spokesman] said. “A lot of British, Asian and Arab people came up to us, as it is a joy for everybody.”

Some two or three months after September 11 2001 I stopped reading Madeleine Bunting with any kind of regularity. She is the journalist who, on September 24 of that year, gave us this:

And make no mistake, the build-up of military hardware around Afghanistan is about visible revenge. It is designed to generate the television images that will assuage American emotion, it is not about justified self-defence…

And on October 18 this:

What makes the humanitarian situation so frightening is the scale. Over 7m people are believed to be at risk. What the war risks doing is turning a desperate, fragile situation into one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of recent decades.

And on October 22 this:

Predictably, relentlessly, this conflict shows every sign of becoming the Vietnam of our generation – the graveyard of strategic interests and ideals, as well as lives. And it will divide the west as bitterly as Vietnam did.

Then, on Thursday last, I see she has a piece on the issue of banning the wearing of the headscarf in French schools, and, inferring from its headline and subhead that she may say something I’ll find interesting, I begin to read. I’m disappointed. Not because she disagrees with me. No, she is indeed against the banning of the headscarf. But it’s the account she gives of liberalism, as being the root of the difficulty – where I would argue that the banning is itself an illiberal act – which is disappointing.

In a nutshell, Bunting seems to equate liberalism with a militant secularism, rationalism, atheism and so on, consequently with a doctrine which is intolerant of religion, unable to accommodate notions like ‘evil’ and ‘reverence’; where I would say that liberalism, in the meaning of it that counts for present purposes, is about a neutral public space in which all manner of different beliefs can express themselves and flourish. It is not intolerant of religion except in so far as some particular religion sets itself to demolish that neutral public space. Neither is liberalism less able to accommodate any notion at all than are alternative approaches to the desirable norms of public life. On the contrary, by enabling free discussion and enquiry, and a plurality of ways of life, liberalism gives us better possibilities for trying, by our own lights, to come to grips with the varieties of human belief and experience than any other politics does. The link between Bunting’s construal of liberalism and some of the passages I’ve quoted of hers above can be seen in this coda to her most recent article:

From Afghanistan to the American south, religion is resurgent in more violent and assertive manifestations than at any time in history. Liberalism appears blind to its own forms of self-assertion and aggression (economic, military or cultural), and hence to its own part in the generation of this ghastly phenomenon.

The root cause – and I use the term here with due deliberation – of a lot of the world’s troubles is liberalism. That’s according to Madeleine Bunting. For my money, the root cause of a lot of the liberal-left’s problems is this kind of idea.

This video contains a five-minute report by the BBC’s Barnaby Philipps on Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe. In the course of it Moeletsi Mbeki, Thabo’s younger brother and a businessman, says:

Mugabe doesn’t value the well-being of his own country.

Philipps says:

[Mbeki’s] critics ask why the champion of an African renaissance cannot bring himself to condemn the violence and lawlessness on his own doorstep.

Indeed. (Hat tip: JA.)

A couple of days ago I reproduced two conversations relayed to me by a friend. Dr Frank comments that they’ll…

probably be familiar to any American who has spent any time in London. I’ve heard them, practically verbatim, dozens of times.

The article here analyses the performance and, as it argues, recent improvement in US intelligence in Iraq. Anyone interested in such matters should get over to the site sooner rather than later, because the stuff there is by subscription and this piece is accessible only as a ‘sample’. I don’t have the expertise to be able to assess either how accurate it is or how sound the judgements are. I just found it very interesting. (Hat tip: JA.)