With friends like these . . .

"There is something quite particular
about spending the second half of your life
taking revenge on the first."

When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a 'brain-dead liberal', he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of renegades.

by David Edgar


One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest.

Despite Robert Frost's stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism ("I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old"), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.

In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan's key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.

I became interested in the politics of defection in the late 1970s. I'd written a play about the far right (Destiny), but as the National Front crashed to ignominious defeat in 1979, it was clear that its thunder had been stolen by a resurgent conservatism that owed much of its passion and its principles to deserters from the left. As the death-agony of the 1974-79 Labour government unfolded, former socialists and communists contributed to proto-Thatcherite tirades with titles like "The Future that Doesn't Work" and "An Escape from George Orwell's 1984". In 1978, former leftwingers such as Kingsley Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn.

In my play about defection (Maydays, produced by the RSC in 1983), I speculated about how the British class of '68 might move to the conservative right. Essentially transposing the experience of earlier generations into the 70s, I don't think my central character's trajectory was implausible. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy and other nouveaux philosophes had provided a vocabulary of retreat for the veterans of the Paris events of May 1968. Some American popular radicals had fled to business (Jerry Rubin) or to the religious right (Eldridge Cleaver), and former Ramparts editor and Black Panther supporter David Horovitz was to mount a 1987 conference, Second Thoughts, at which former 60s radicals such as Michael Medved and PJ O'Rourke confessed and renounced their errors. Nonetheless, most of the leading figures of the period - from Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin and Bernardine Dohrn in America via Danny Cohn-Bendit in Germany to Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn and Sheila Rowbotham here - have remained faithful to their previous ideals. And while Alan Milburn, Alan Johnson, Alistair Darling and Stephen Byers have clearly moved a considerable distance since their days in or about the Trotskyite far left, they would doubtless claim to be pursuing a drastically revised version of the same, socially progressive agenda. Until very recently, almost everybody disillusioned with the far left felt there was still a viable near left they could call home.

Now, that appears to be changing. Bookshop shelves are not quite yet groaning with defection literature, but Nick Cohen (What's Left?), Andrew Anthony (The Fallout), Ed Husain (The Islamist) and Melanie Phillips (Londonistan) are all self-confessed deserters (Phillips wears the "apostate" label with pride). Although Martin Amis was never part of the revolutionary or communist left (and attacked both his father and his friend Christopher Hitchens for so being), The Second Plane is an assault on the kind of liberal, literary intellectuals among whom Amis has moved throughout his life. And although Cohen, Anthony, Phillips et al have poured particular vituperation on leftwing playwrights (David Hare and Harold Pinter in particular), they have now been joined by one - David Mamet, who last month wrote a piece for the Village Voice entitled "Why I am no longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (he no longer believes that "people are basically good at heart"). Like previous generations, these defectors have been there, done that, and can now bear witness to their former misbeliefs. In so doing, they are joining a club with an extensive membership. Most of the radical and progressive achievements of the 20th century - including the Russian revolution - were brought about by an alliance between the oppressed and the intelligentsia, and a good proportion of them - particularly the Russian revolution - were followed by disappointment and desertion. For some, disillusion set in as early as 1921, when the Bolsheviks suppressed a sailors' uprising at Kronstadt, the port of St Petersburg and cradle of the October revolution. Subsequent "Kronstadt moments" included the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the neo-Stalinist show trials in eastern Europe in the early 50s, Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of that year.

As a result of these crises, ex-communist writers such as Arthur Koestler and Stephen Spender moved to the liberal centre. Others, like WH Auden, withdrew from political involvement altogether. For many, like the American poet and bohemian Max Eastman and the fellow-travelling novelist John Dos Passos, the cold war provided a changing room from which they emerged - with new stars in their eyes - as full-blown, traditionalist conservatives.

The events of 1956 changed the rules of membership of the ex-communist club in two ways. The creation of a self-consciously non-Stalinist New Left gave people disillusioned with communism somewhere else to go. On the other hand, the subsequent activities of the New Left became a recruiting agency for the right among older radicals, socialists and even liberals. For ex-communist Kingsley Amis, opposition to the expansion of higher education ("more will mean worse") was the first of many Conservative causes which transformed the author of Lucky Jim into a Thatcherite cheerleader. Similarly, what became the Reagan coalition was given considerable intellectual ballast by a group of New York intellectuals surrounding ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, for whom the hippy counter-culture, Black Power and later the women's and environmental movement demonstrated the infantilism and nihilism of the New Left. Self-defined as "liberals mugged by reality", Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were genuinely neoconservatives, having previously been revolutionaries (Kristol), radicals (Podhoretz, Glazer) or at the very least democratic progressives.

As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a unique authority. But there is something quite particular about spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first. Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before. Most people who leave the far left do so because of their experience of far-left organisations: their authoritarianism and manipulation, their contempt for allies as "useful idiots", their insistence that the end justifies the means and that deceit is a class duty, their refusal to take anything anyone else says at face value (dismissing disagreement as cowardice or class treachery) and, most of all, their dismissal as "bourgeois" of the very ideals that draw people to the left in the first place. As Spender wrote in The God that Failed (1949), "the communist, having joined the party, has to castrate himself of the reasons which made him one".

But, often, something else is going on. Frequently, there is a sense among defecting intellectuals that it's not just the party that has let them down. Most people move left either because they are outraged by the victimhood of the oppressed (Spender's distress at men and women "sealed into leaden slums") or because they are inspired by the left's revolutionary ardour (as many of my generation were by the Black Panthers and the Vietcong). The discovery that the poor do not necessarily respond to their victimhood with uncomplaining resignation is as traumatic as the complementary perception that they don't always behave in a spirit of selfless heroism.

Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame.

One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in his quip about John Dos Passos:

On account of Soviet knavery
He favours restoring slavery.

Dos Passos was not the only American Marxist to pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the arms of William F Buckley's high conservative National Review. Initially claiming that he still believed in the end of working-class emancipation, former Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on "mush-headed liberals" who "bellyache" about civil rights; for former beat critic and latter neoconservative Podhoretz, homosexuality was a death wish and feminism a plague.

Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh expectation".

Like Eldridge Cleaver, the neocons argued that the welfare state had turned the poor into parasites; James Q Wilson asserts that, in the black community, welfare became for black women what heroin was for black men. For Podhoretz, far from being "persecuted and oppressed", the blacks he knew were doing the persecuting and oppressing.

The directness and lack of apology in neoconservative polemic is a result of the fact that its authors had discharged the same ordnance in the opposite direction, and knew the likely weight and calibre of the returning fire. Most political defectors leave the left because its authoritarian practices stand in such stark contrast to its emancipatory ideals. For many, however, there is a double paradox: on opening their suitcase at the end of the journey, they find not just that the libertarian ideals they left the left to preserve have gone missing, but that the only thing remaining is the very cynicism and ruthlessness which they left the left to escape.

So, as on the far left, there is a tendency to see the world in stark, binary terms. Kingsley Amis once admitted that "it's all pretty black and white to me now. If you decide, as I have, that there are only two sides to the argument, then it's all quite simple." Kristol insists that environmentalists aren't really interested in clean air or clean water; what they're really after is authoritarian political power. And a condemnation of the practice of radicals and revolutionaries justifies the abandonment of the groups they seek to defend. For neocon Nathan Glazer, 60s radicalism was "so beset with error and confusion" that even its mildest manifestations - such as affirmative action for African Americans - had to be swept away.

Is this pattern reflected among those defectors for whom the "Kronstadt moment" was 9/11? Certainly, Husain's The Islamist describes a progression towards and then away from the non-jihadist but pro-Caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will be familiar to any reader of defection literature; he is now working with the Conservative thinktank Civitas. Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right.

The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are giving aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to quote Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't want a theocratic empire after all'".

No one on the progressive liberal left can be comfortable with any of the religions of the book, particularly when literally applied. And those of us who dismissed the oppression of women and gay people as "secondary contradictions" in the early 70s are correctly wary of putting those issues on the back-burner now. Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation - on these understandable grounds - to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.

For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object - the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities - is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he's declaring war on the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but his "thought experiment" about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) "until it hurts the whole community" makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque.

Cohen is careful to point out that "Islamism has Islamic roots", and, clearly, the group that he dubs the "far right" goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami. It's also a group that - defined in the old-fashioned way as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - remains at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. As Trevor Phillips pointed out in his "sleepwalking into segregation" speech, made after 7/7, a Pakistani man with identical qualifications to a white man is still going to earn £300,000 less in his lifetime.

It is also a group that suffered, particularly during Cohen, Aaronovitch and Anthony's formative years. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Paki-bashing created an image of Britain's south Asian communities as a traditionally submissive group, victimised by unwarranted aggression. For some, this image was complemented by admiration for groups such as the Bradford 12, who sought to defend their communities against fascist attack, and won the right to do so in court. When, in 1989, Bradford's Pakistanis found a sense of self-confidence and identity through burning books rather than banks, it's no surprise that liberal progressives who had supported, maybe even pitied, that community felt a sense of betrayal. In their books, Cohen and Anthony frequently point out how people on the left grow bitter when the poor fail to live up to the romance of unbridled heroism or untainted victimhood. They don't fully take into account the effect of that delusion on themselves.

Many of the usual pathologies of defection can be detected in the current crop. The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking. Despite his defence of women's and gay rights against Qur'anic scholars, a distinct strain of hostility to the sexual gains of the 60s runs through Cohen's What's Left?: he blames the anti-racists and sexual reformers of the 60s for dissolving "the bonds of mutual support", dips more than a toe into the Daily Mail's critique of the welfare state (breaking up families, privileging immigrants), and blames the Respect party for Pakistani and Bangladeshi unemployment.

Martin Amis's elegant prose shouldn't blind us to his seeming obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a "gangplank to theocracy" ("Has feminism cost us Europe?" he asked in an Independent interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine (who describes the 60s as "the decade that sharply eroded authority and constraint"), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown's golden thread of British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.

Most importantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contemporary defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New Statesman's Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses brought Muslims together and "helped develop a British Muslim identity".

In fact, Bunglawala's attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of whether the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or the contemporary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In a Guardian article last June, he reiterated the importance of the anti-Rushdie campaign in building self-confidence among a small, isolated, beleaguered and frequently victimised community, but went on to "readily acknowledge we were wrong to have called for the book to be banned". Now, he confesses, "I can better appreciate the concerns and fear generated by the images of book-burning in Bradford and calls for the author to be killed". Not least because, as he wrote in response to a critical blog, the same laws that allowed Rushdie to write The Satanic Verses protects the rights of Muslims to say what they think, too.

Support for human rights legislation that protects the rights of religious as well as sexual minorities is controversial within the Muslim community, as are other examples of supposedly diehard Islamists responding to liberal criticism. For example, the MCB came under fire when it decided - not before time - to participate in Holocaust Day ceremonies. Azzam Tamimi is a leading member of the main Muslim organisation in the Stop the War Coalition, the British Muslim Initiative, a group much reviled for its close ties with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian equivalent, Hamas. Tamimi's book on Hamas (published in America as Hamas: A History from Within) contains a sustained critique of Hamas's constitution, its treatment of the Jews, and its quotation of the tsarist antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another leading member of the BMI, Anas Altikriti, points out that the Qur'an says nothing about homosexuality beyond relaying the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (and, for that matter, does not call for the execution of apostates). Altikriti negotiated for hostage Norman Kember's release in Iraq, campaigned against escalating protests over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark (while sympathising with Muslim anger against them) and argues that, unlike the British government, he has been fighting separatist Muslim extremism since long before 1997.

Despite the drumbeat of demonisation by media and politicians, these and other Muslim leaders are increasingly open to the argument that their shared interest in universal human rights trumps what we rightly regard as illiberal beliefs. They are, in other words, going in precisely the opposite direction from that which their detractors describe and predict. Are they really (to use Hitchens's formulation) to be anathematised as "fascists with an Islamic face"?

All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression. The civil rights movement in particular allied secular Jews (often with communist backgrounds) from the north with black Christians in the south. The difficulties of that relationship were demonstrated when - after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an all-black leadership of one of the main civil rights groups. Later, feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for the sexism of both their political practice and personal behaviour. Despite all that, does anyone think the creation of the alliance which successfully desegregated the American south was a mistake?

Whether they like it or not, the current defectors are seeking to provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor. So, for civil libertarians, the divide is no longer between left and right, but between authority and personal liberty. For atheists, it is between secularism and religious belief. For some American and European feminists, it is between women's rights and a multiculturalism that validates Muslim patriarchy. For a number of former leftwingers, it is between the social solidarity of a conservative working class and the demands of multicultural newcomers.

What all these fault-lines have in common is that they pit progressives against the group that is under the most sustained political attack, here and abroad, and that those who draw them include people who have the authority of the convert, having seen the error of their ways. It behoves those of us who have also been there and done that, not to defend the indefensible, but to protect the vocabulary of alliance that has done so much good in the past and is so necessary now.

Word Trade

Can we have a word?

by Henry Hitchings

Over its 1,500-year existence, English has borrowed words from more than 350 other languages. Anxiety about such imports - usually called loanwords, although this is a misnomer, since no borrowed term is ever going to be given back - has tended to be niggling, before turning sulphurous.

Typically, loans have been seen as symptoms of intellectual and moral laxity. In the age of Shakespeare, for instance, authors' verbal innovations were widely regarded as an affront to national dignity. Patriots condemned the adoption of "oversea language" and the "harsh collision" of exotic polysyllables, which laid them open to the depravity of "back-door Italians" and reputedly syphilitic Frenchmen. More recently, words learnt from German have been expunged in time of war, and, on an altogether more mundane level, consumers hostile to globalisation have sniped at the Italian locutions favoured by certain coffee chains - barista, venti and the especially hokey frappuccino.

Sometimes purist resistance has sounded endearingly whimsical. The Victorian poet William Barnes proposed wheelsaddle as an alternative to bicycle, and in the same vein suggested painlore, folkwain and nipperlings in lieu of pathology, omnibus and forceps. But arguments about language are always political, and purism is ideologically charged. It is not hard to see what the composer Percy Grainger had in mind when he called his reversion to Anglo-Saxon - in which, for instance, a piano became a keyed-hammer-string - "blue-eyed English".

English has no equivalent of the Académie Française to deliver rulings on proper usage. The creation of such a body has often been mooted, notably by Jonathan Swift. Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary was originally envisioned as an attempt to "fix" the language, but as he worked on it Johnson moved away from a narrowly prescriptive approach, and modern dictionaries, such as the OED, are conspicuously tolerant - some would say indulgent - of modish usage and spicy imports.

Today a large measure of purists' hostility is aimed at Americanisms, another little quirk I discovered while researching linguistic borrowings (The Secret Life of Words, John Murray). Among those often reviled are math, heads-up and diapers. Yet many words that once met with similar objections are now not recognised as American coinages: examples are mileage, slapstick, curvaceous and squatter. In a strict sense, these are not borrowings, but their acceptability - once contested - is a reminder that the majority of loans to English are seldom, in their daily use, recognised as such. While many people will instantly think of zeitgeist as German and smorgasbord as Swedish, there are far more words in this class whose origins will not be readily identified. Who makes any connection between marmalade and Portuguese, robot and Czech, flummery and Welsh, or toboggan and the Micmac language of Newfoundland?

Links of this type are worth digging up. Loans bear witness to history. Additions to a language signal changes - political, social, technological, aesthetic. Borrowed words are evidence of contact with other cultures. The Norse element in English (which includes words such as husband, muck and window) is the result of the Viking invasions that began in the eighth century; a much larger element, from French, started to come in with the Norman conquest. This is hardly a revelation, and neither is it surprising that English assimilated so many words from Indian languages - bungalow, pyjamas, guru, pariah - given the two centuries of British rule in India. But other connections are less easily spotted.

Take, for instance, Dutch. Words that English has assimilated from this source include wiggle, landscape, coleslaw, snack, shamble, gin and mesh. In her recent book Going Dutch, Lisa Jardine claims that when William of Orange invaded in 1688 he succeeded thanks to generations of cultural exchange. This is borne out linguistically; over the preceding hundred years, Dutch practices and the Dutch words that denoted them had permeated both England and Scotland.

Jardine claims that William's Glorious Revolution was "the slickest feat of naval planning and execution ever to have been witnessed in Europe". Naval excellence was a quality then often associated with the Dutch, and many of the words English took from them had to do with seamanship: skipper, cruise, deck, yacht and landlubber are just a handful. Aloof is another term with a maritime background, deriving from the Dutch phrase "on loof", literally meaning "on rudder" and spoken by a captain when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. (Reef is also Dutch in origin.) From the Dutch in North America, meanwhile, English-speaking settlers learnt boss, cookie, waffle and snoop.

There is a similarly neglected connection with Arabic. Medieval trade and the intellectual dynamism of Islamic Spain led to the adoption of a host of Arabic terms; particularly notable are the many names of foods and luxury goods from this source, such as artichoke, endive, syrup, mohair, damask, saffron and crimson. Details of this kind are commonly presented as amusing curios, but they are the fossils of past dreams and traumas, and examining them enables an archaeology of experience.

English is not alone in borrowing from other languages. French, for all the efforts of the Académie, has acquired le weekend and les bluejeans. Russian has the familiar-sounding biznismen and dzhemper. It's not too hard to see why in Swahili a traffic island is a kiplefti, or what a Yoruba-speaking mathematician means by a sikua ruutu. However, English-speakers are afflicted with a peculiar myopia about the extent to which their language is borrowed. In part, this is a denial of an imperial past: in part, a jingoistic contempt for the "alien" words and ideas that boost the vitality of both the English language and the civilisation it embodies.

Silvio... Again

A victory for threats, media muscle and patronage

by Bill Emmott

You have to admit the man has talent. Silvio Berlusconi's triumph in Italy's general election, to win a third spell as prime minister - at the age of 71 and less than two years after his defeated five-year government had left Italy as the slowest growing economy of western Europe - is quite remarkable. It is testimony to his resilience but also to a campaign full of jokes and provocations. His victory should, however, be deeply troubling for anyone who cares about democracy.

For in addition to his undoubted personal appeal, Berlusconi had some powerful advantages. He is Italy's richest man by far, enjoying a near monopoly of commercial television, a big publishing empire, and lots of other interests. Such a domination of the broadcast media by a party leader would be considered an unacceptable infringement of democracy in any other west European country. In fact, if Italy were a candidate for EU membership, such concentration of power would be an obstacle. Since it was a founder member in 1957, neither governments nor the European commission dare raise this issue.

As an opposition candidate, ownership of all the commercial TV channels, bar the weak La7 channel and the cooperatively rightwing Sky Italia, helped Berlusconi enormously. In government his advantage is even greater, for he can, did and will exploit Italy's tradition of political interference in the Rai public broadcasting system. An important reason why he lost so narrowly in 2006, despite his government being widely considered a failure, is that he essentially controlled the entire TV news output. During the campaign such fears cannot have been absent from the minds of every Rai political reporter and commentator who wants to stay in a job.

I should disclose at this point that there is history between me and Berlusconi. In 2001, when I was editor of the Economist and another Italian election was imminent, we conducted a long investigation into his finances and his many legal entanglements. As a result of that investigation, and aware of his conflict of interest as a media owner, we declared him on our cover to be "unfit to govern Italy". Half of Italy vilified the Economist for that cover and the other half beatified us. The still victorious Berlusconi branded us "communist", correctly pointed out my resemblance to Lenin, and presented us with the first of two libel suits, which are still rumbling their way through the Italian courts.

The notoriety that this brought was good fun. But behind it lay some serious issues. Berlusconi's defenders say that there is plenty of competition in the Italian media, so his TV ownership doesn't matter. Of course it does, for TV is far more powerful than print, but Berlusconi also uses a mixture of lawsuits, patronage and threats to intimidate Italian journalists.

His defenders argue, moreover, that he has never been found guilty of any legal charges. This is blatantly untrue, but he has been saved by the statute of limitations and by the way his own government in 2001-06 shortened those limits and decriminalised the false accounting with which he was charged. Berlusconi should be a cautionary tale for us all about what happens when you allow one man to dominate the media, and when the interests of big business and of government become intertwined.

But what will happen now? Berlusconi has won a more decisive victory than most pundits expected, and will govern in a coalition with the Northern League, an anti-immigrant and regional-rights party that was the election's other big winner. His government can be expected to last rather longer than its weak centre-left predecessor. The party representation in Italy's parliament has been simplified drastically thanks to this election, which is surely a good thing. But with no communist or socialist representatives - for the first time since 1946 - there is some danger that extra-parliamentary activism will break out in response to the new government's programme.

Italy does have law courts and a president to act as constitutional checks on the government, so there is some hope of restraint - even though during the campaign Berlusconi proposed menacingly that all prosecutors and judges should be given sanity tests. His government is likely to be corporatist rather than free market, at least on the evidence of a campaign in which he promised to block the sale of the near-bankrupt Alitalia to Air France-KLM. That intervention and any new state aid will bring him into conflict with the European commission; and a likely increase in Italy's budget deficit - thanks to his promised tax cuts and spending rises - will bring him into conflict with other member governments.

In which case, the important thing is that they stand up to him. Neither Gordon Brown nor any other European leader should repeat the disgraceful toadying to Berlusconi that was exhibited by Tony Blair, which showed that this supposed idealist had no principles at all. They will have to treat the Italian prime minister with the diplomatic politeness that is due any head of an EU government, but should go no further than that. Brown's holidays would be far better spent in Dorset than Sardinia.

The Sunday Poem

When It Rains On Sunday

When it rains on Sunday and you are alone,
open to the world but no thief comes
and neither drunkard nor enemy knocks at the door,
when it rains on Sunday and you're deserted
and can't imagine living without the body
or not living since you have it,
when it rains on Sunday and you're on your own,
don't think of chatting with yourself.
Then it's an angel who knows, and only what's above,
then it's a devil who knows, and only what's below.

A book is in the holding, a poem in release.

by Vladimir Holan

Please, Not Again...

A Style of Life is in Danger...

Almost four pubs a day are closed down in Britain...


...Save the 4P's!!!
(Pub, Pint, Paper, Peanuts)

A Major Issue

The Red

The Blonde

The Cop

The Other Tibet

Quiet death in Xingjiang

by Charles Cumming

The Dalai Lama has been called many things in his time. Rupert Murdoch once described him as "a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes", while CNN's Larry King mistakenly identified the political and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people as a prominent Muslim activist. However, until last week, nobody had ever called him a terrorist.

It was the Chinese government, inevitably, which levelled the accusation. According to Beijing, the recent violence in Tibet was orchestrated by the Dalai Lama in collusion with Uighur militants from Xinjiang, who were themselves plotting a terrorist atrocity at the Olympics. This was the second time in a fortnight that China had accused separatists from Xinjiang of posing a threat to the Games. However, with the exception of an article by Parag Khanna in these pages, the story failed to generate any further coverage in the British press.

For purely selfish reasons, I was disappointed by this. By coincidence, my new novel, Typhoon, concerns a plot by US-sponsored Uighur radicals to blow up the Beijing Games. China's suggestion that a conspiracy of this kind was actually in the pipeline was the sort of publicity most novelists dream about. However there is a more serious point to be made here. The British media's obsession with Buddhist Tibet says a great deal about western attitudes to Xinjiang and to its predominantly Turkic-Muslim population.

It may be that people remain ignorant of Xinjiang because it has no Dalai Lama, no Richard Gere, to bring its cause to the world's attention. If it did, then we would know more about the barbaric treatment meted out to Uighurs on a day-to-day basis.

So paranoid is the Chinese government about the threat of a separatist movement in Xinjiang that it will incarcerate innocent civilians on the flimsiest pretexts.

Uighurs have been jailed for reading newspapers sympathetic to the cause of independence. Others have been detained merely for listening to Radio Free Asia, an English-language station funded by the US Congress. Even to discuss separatism in public is to risk a lengthy jail sentence, with no prospect of habeas corpus, effective legal representation or a fair trial. About 100 Uighurs were arrested in Khotan recently after several hundred demonstrated in the marketplace of the town, which lies on the Silk Road.

And what happens to these innocent Uighur men and women once they land up in one of Xinjiang's notorious "black prisons"? Amnesty International has reported numerous incidents of torture, from cigarette burns on the skin to submersion in water or raw sewage. Prisoners have had toenails extracted by pliers, been attacked by dogs and burned with electric batons, even
cattle prods.

In Typhoon, I relate the terrifying true story of a prisoner in Xinjiang who had horse hair inserted into the tip of his penis. Throughout this diabolical torture, the victim was forced to wear a metal helmet on his head. Why? Because a previous inmate had been so traumatised by his treatment in the prison that he had beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.

This is the reality of life in modern Xinjiang. Quite what the Chinese hope to gain from their inhumane behaviour remains unclear. According to Corinna-Barbara Francis, a researcher with Amnesty's East Asia team, "the intensified repression of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities is in danger of contributing to the very outcome that China claims it is warding against - the radicalisation of the population and the adoption of violent responses to the repression."

Uighurs have motive, at the very least, for fighting back. On January 5 this year, 18 Uighurs were killed and a further 17 arrested during a raid on what the Chinese described as a "terrorist training camp" in the Pamir mountains. However, many western observers have cast doubt on the veracity of this claim. Just as there has been no proof of the planned attacks on the Olympic Games, the Chinese authorities have yet to produce any evidence which would suggest that the men and women killed in January were terrorists linked to al-Qaida.

Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uighur Congress, who lives in exile in the United States, believes that the threat of "terrorism" in Xinjiang has been grossly exaggerated and is being used by Beijing "both as a justification for the continued repression and cultural assimilation of the Uighur people" and as a diversionary tactic designed to disguise China's appalling human rights record in the region. But who will hear her?

· Typhoon will be published in June charlescumming.co.uk

Arthur C. Clarke (RIP)

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke

Internet Users

Internet users by language

World total: 1.09bn

English: 327.1m (%29.9)
Chinese: 153.3m (%14)
Spanish: 87.3m (%8)
Japanese: 86.3m (%7.9)
German: 58.9m (%5.4)
French: 54.8m (%5)
Portuguese: 34.1m (%3.1)
Korean: 33.9m (%3.1)
Italian: 30.8m (%2.8)
Arabic: 28.5m (%2.6)
Others: %18.2

Internet users in selected countries

USA: 210m (%70 of population)
China: 137m (%10.5 - 190m net users forecast by 2010).
India: 38.2m (%3.6)
UK: 37.6m (%62.3)
France: 30.8m (%50.3)

(*) 17m of China's 461m mobile users acces the web on their phones.

Any comment? A free coffee for each entry.

Charlton Heston (RIP)

The Sunday Poem

Translation

after translating from Welsh, particularly a novel by Kate Roberts

Your hand on her hand - you've never been
this close to a woman since your mother's beauty
at the school gate took your breath away,
since you held hot sticky hands with your best friend,
since you, schoolgirl guest in a miner's house,
two up, two down, too small for guest rooms
or guest beds, shared with two sisters,
giggling in the dark, hearts hot with boy-talk.

You spread the script. She hands you a fruit.
You break it, eat, know exactly how
to hold its velvet weight, to bite, to taste it
to the last gold shred. But you're lost for words,
can't think of the English for eirin - it's on the tip of your -
But the cat ate your tongue, licking peach juice
from your palm with its rough langue de chat
tafod cath, the rasp of loss.

by Gillian Clarke

PS: Btw, I was wondering earlier in the bus - does the Prince of Wales speak Welsh?...

European Literature

From The Sunday Times

January 6, 2008

The Accordionist's Son by Bernardo Atxaga

Reviewed by Tom Deveson

“All books, even the harshest, embellish life,” declares David Imaz, the principal narrator of this superb novel. He’s earned the right to say so and the right to be wrong. It’s not smug literary theory but a recognition of the complex relationship between what happens to us and what we say about it. The book moves skilfully between David’s time in America in the 1990s, his youth in the Basque country in the 1960s and the experiences of his parents’ generation during the Spanish civil war.

At its heart, it’s a wholly convincing account of families and friendship. We meet David’s teenage friends as they play, quarrel and develop rivalries and loyalties; we share his desperately painful suspicions about his father’s support of fascist atrocities and the drowsy eroticism of his feelings for Virginia – “ la paysanne” – who is betrothed to a sailor; we witness his delicate courtship of his American wife, with all the tenderness and strangeness of flirtation and unspoken love. Like Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera, Bernardo Atxaga excels in portraying youthful rites of passage against a merciless, often mendacious history.

The history goes deep. As a boy, David is aware of the much older Virgilian world of shepherds and wolves, and the growing and grinding of grain. There are echoes of Petronius, Ovid and Martial; the “hissing leaves” speak with Virginia’s voice and the toads croak harsh warnings. But the “ancient people” among whom he grows up are already losing their memories. Motorbikes appear beside the horses, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s hits feature on the radio, contrasting with the “sadder music” of the accordion songs that David learns from his father. To his American children, his memories will seem “from another galaxy”.

History’s worst cruelty is that a civil war is never finished. David sees old lists mentioning locals who were shot and tries vainly to forget them. Another narrator (these shifts in perspective are achieved smoothly) describes horrifying reprisals and a pool of blood on the ground. A hiding place used in the 1930s is needed 30 years later as Franco’s police sniff out subversion. The mere fact of speaking Basque or not playing the accordion for a ceremony becomes a political act; victims become executioners.

Language and loss are intimately connected. David’s country friends said “happy” or “unhappy”, not “obsessive” or “paranoid”. His student friends, however, say “alienation” as naturally as the peasants say “ mitxirrika” when they point to a butterfly. There is not a sermon here about what is or isn’t authentic, and no moral sleight of hand to prove one way of life inherently superior.

What counts most is true feeling and intensity. David’s premature death is mentioned on page two, and its approach is sensed throughout the final pages. In between, the killing of a horse, a bird or an insect are all the more moving for being placed against the atrocities that human beings perform on one another. Even as David meets his wife, he notices the baleful movement of a clock’s pendulum. But death doesn’t have the last word. Atxaga’s dextrous interweaving of themes and vibrant evocation of people and places make the book not an embellishment of life but a celebration of its richness.

THE ACCORDIONIST’S SON by Bernardo Atxaga
Harvill Secker £18.99 pp400

(A Very Good) Haiku

to convey one's mood
in seventeen syllables
is very diffic

by John Cooper Clarke

Quote of the Day

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."

Albert Einstein

Bella Italia

Free Tibet (2)

To My Love...

... Despite all the storms.

Araf/Slow

Maioha, Ivy Mae

Spain(s)

(From The Economist)

NO LONGER is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero the accidental prime minister. In March 2004, luck helped to bring the leader of Spain's Socialists to power: he was trailing in the polls until a cack-handed attempt by the ruling centre-right People's Party to blame the Madrid train bombings three days before the election on Basque separatists. This time he consistently led his PP rival, Mariano Rajoy, and duly won re-election on March 9th. Yet his second term promises to be far harder than his first.

For one thing, the Socialists again fell short of an absolute majority in parliament, so Mr Zapatero will need a regional party's backing (see article). His best bet is to dump the left-wing Catalan separatists in favour of their moderate rivals, Convergence and Union (CiU). The CiU may well demand still more autonomy for Catalonia, but it is broadly liberal on economic policy. This matters, for the economy will be Mr Zapatero's biggest headache.

Spain has been one of the European Union's biggest success stories. Thanks to the macroeconomic stability afforded by the euro, lavish EU subsidies, a property boom and a huge influx of immigrant workers, the economy has grown by some 4% a year. Over the past four years, Spain has created two-thirds of all new jobs in the euro area's biggest four countries. But the good times have come to an abrupt end. GDP growth has slowed sharply, unemployment has shot up, house prices are falling and inflation has risen. EU money is running out and immigration will follow the economy down. Consumer confidence is at a 13-year low.

Spain's vote was the first post-credit-crunch election in a big Western country. Economic woes did indeed cost Mr Zapatero some support. Yet he persuaded many voters that the slowdown was not really his fault; and that the sensible choice in such risky times was his reliable finance minister, Pedro Solbes. The PP failed to come up with a convincing cure for the ailing economy. Mr Solbes presides over a healthy budget surplus worth 2% of GDP, giving him plenty of room for tax cuts and a splurge of public spending on infrastructure.

Yet fiscal expansion will not be enough, for the end of the good times is exposing deeper weaknesses. Successive Spanish governments worked strenuously to get the country into the euro, then sat back, accepting the benefits in lower inflation and interest rates, but failing to promote the more competitive markets that the discipline of euro membership requires. Spanish labour laws are too restrictive. Rising costs are denting the competitiveness of manufacturing, which makes up a big chunk of the economy. Productivity is held back by poor education and training. Immigration and the property bubble made up for these failings for a while, but no longer.

In search of bipartisanship

Economic liberalisation is hard, as many other European governments have found, because reforms tend to be fiercely opposed by unions and other vested interests. That makes it desirable to seek bipartisan support for the more controversial ones, such as labour-law changes. In the past four years, Spanish politics has been characterised by a rancorous bitterness. But Mr Rajoy's concession speech was dignified, and Mr Zapatero wisely responded with a promise to work “without tension, without confrontation”.

Defusing Spain's regional tensions also demands a new bipartisanship. Here Mr Zapatero threw caution to the winds in his first term, drawing up a new statute for the Catalans and negotiating with ETA, the violent Basque separatist group, in the teeth of PP opposition. Yet the Catalans always seem to demand more concessions, and other regions tend to copy them. The talks with ETA failed (the terrorists seem to have been responsible for the killing of a retired Socialist councillor in the Basque country two days before the election). And Basque nationalists are threatening to go ahead with a referendum this autumn on their future status in Spain.

Unity among politicians helps solve big questions of national identity. Britain had to adopt a bipartisan approach to settle its Northern Ireland problem. Spain's experience suggests that it needs to do the same.

Always Politics? Naaaaaaaahh...

Free Tibet

Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!
Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!

Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!
Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!

Start your own currency!
Make your own stamp
Protect your language

Declare independence
Don't let them do that to you
Declare independence
Don't let them do that to you

[x4] Make your own flag!

[x6] Raise your flag!

Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!
Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!

Damn colonists
Ignore their patronizing
Tear off their blindfolds
Open their eyes

Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!
Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!

With a flag and a trumpet
Go to the top of your highest mountain!

[x6] Raise your flag!

Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!
Declare independence!
Don't let them do that to you!

Raise the flag!

by Bjork

Artificial Borders

The present border of approximately 1,500 miles between Afghanistan and Pakistan was agreed upon in a treaty signed on 12 November 1893, in Kabul by Sir Mortimer Durand, representing British India, and Abd al-Rahman, amir of Afghanistan.Durand, the Indian foreign secretary, had been sent by Lord Landsdowne, the viceroy of British India, to pursue Britain's "Forward Policy" designed to control tribal activity along the northwest border of British India. Afghanistan has never accepted the legitimacy of this border, however, arguing that it was intended to demarcate spheres of influence rather than international frontiers. In addition, the Afghans contend that this border bisects the Push-tun tribal area, leaving more than half the Pushtun tribes in Pakistan. Afghans believe that Pushtuns are true Afghans and therefore the Pushtun area, sometimes called Pushtunistan, should be part of Afghanistan. The "Pushtunistan question" has remained an obstacle to good relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan.After the communist takeover of Afghanistan in 1978, the government of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin actively challenged the legitimacy of the Durand line, largely because of their strong Pushtun sentiments. For this reason, the Afghan government formally repudiated the Du-rand Agreement in 1979. In 1993, 100 years since the signing of the agreement, the Durand Agreement formally lapsed. Afghanistan refused to renew the treaty, leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan with no official border.

Open Society Hero

1986: Swedish prime minister assassinated

The Swedish prime minister has died after being shot in a street ambush in central Stockholm. His wife was wounded.
Olof and Lisbeth Palme were attacked as they were leaving a cinema at about 2330 local time. Mr Palme was shot twice in the stomach, his wife was shot in the back.
Police say a taxi-driver used his mobile radio to raise the alarm. Two young girls sitting in a car close to the scene of the shooting tried to help the Prime Minister.
He was rushed to hospital but was dead on arrival. Mrs Palme is being treated for her injury, but it is not thought to be life threatening.
Advocate of peace
Mr Palme, 59, and a social democrat, was serving his second term as leader. He believed in open government and shunned tight security.
He had two bodyguards to protect him on official functions but frequently walked unattended through the Swedish capital and went on holidays unescorted to his summer cottage on the island of Gotland.
His assassination will come as a shock to the Swedes. They have always taken great pride in the fact their prime minister could walk openly in the streets without the security which accompanies other heads of state.
Mr Palme will be remembered as a campaigner for the working classes and Third World causes. He was first elected as prime minister in 1969.
He became a leading advocate of peace and non violence and campaigned for an end to the war in Vietnam.
He saw himself carrying the banner of Social Democracy through Europe at a time when the Right was only temporarily in triumph.
He once said: "I know that the Thatchers and the Reagans will be out in a few years. We have to survive till then."

Kurdistan: A State In The Making?

Is Kosovo Serbia?

ROGOVO,SERBIA,29JAN99 - A Serb policeman removes an AK-47 assault rifle from a dead alleged Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrilla in Rogovo, some 65 km west of Pristina, January 29. Serb security forces responding to the killing of one of their officers shot dead 24 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on Friday in circumstances which remain disputed. yb/Photo by Yannis Behrakis REUTERS

Kosovo is Serbia - Ask any historian

"Kosovo is Serbia", "Ask any historian" read the unlikely placards, waved by angry Serb demonstrators in Brussels on Sunday. This is rather flattering for historians: we don't often get asked to adjudicate. It does not, however, follow that any historian would agree, not least because historians do not use this sort of eternal present tense.

History, for the Serbs, started in the early 7th century, when they settled in the Balkans. Their power base was outside Kosovo, which they fully conquered in the early 13th, so the claim that Kosovo was the "cradle" of the Serbs is untrue.

What is true is that they ruled Kosovo for about 250 years, until the final Ottoman takeover in the mid-15th century. Churches and monasteries remain from that period, but there is no more continuity between the medieval Serbian state and today's Serbia than there is between the Byzantine Empire and Greece.

Kosovo remained Ottoman territory until it was conquered by Serbian forces in 1912. Serbs would say "liberated"; but even their own estimates put the Orthodox Serb population at less than 25%. The majority population was Albanian, and did not welcome Serb rule, so "conquered" seems the right word.

But legally, Kosovo was not incorporated into the Serbian kingdom in 1912; it remained occupied territory until some time after 1918. Then, finally, it was incorporated, not into a Serbian state, but into a Yugoslav one. And with one big interruption (the second world war) it remained part of some sort of Yugoslav state until June 2006.

Until the destruction of the old federal Yugoslavia by Milosevic, Kosovo had a dual status. It was called a part of Serbia; but it was also called a unit of the federation. In all practical ways, the latter sense prevailed: Kosovo had its own parliament and government, and was directly represented at the federal level, alongside Serbia. It was, in fact, one of the eight units of the federal system.

Almost all the other units have now become independent states. Historically, the independence of Kosovo just completes that process. Therefore, Kosovo has become an ex-Yugoslav state, as any historian could tell you.

· Noel Malcolm is a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

He is the author of Kosovo: A Short History

Upside Down

More than seven million Britons have never ventured across the nation's north-south divide, with two thirds of southerners claiming the north is 'bleak' and half of northerners assuming that southerners are arrogant snobs.

Almost five million southerners - 15 per cent - have never visited the north, while 2.3 million northerners - one in 10 - have never been south. And three quarters of British people admit they discriminate against those from other regions and use common stereotypes inspired by such soaps as Coronation Street and EastEnders, according to a survey of regional attitudes.

Half of northerners associate the south with 'wide boys' and pinstriped businessmen. Two thirds brand southerners snobs, with more than half citing arrogance as a southern characteristic. James Howison, a 35-year-old electrician from Oldham, said his only trip south was to London and he wanted never to go again.

'It was an awful experience. I felt like I couldn't look anyone in the eye. No one talked to each other,' he said. 'Southerners are stuck up and prejudiced towards anyone without a posh accent.'

And southerners appear just as scathing. One in five says they see mining villages and chip shops as defining images of the 'bleak' life 'up north'. Only one in five southerners has ever visited Liverpool, while fewer than one in 20 have been to Newcastle or Leeds.

Loren Sullivan, 29, an office manager from Stratford, east London, vowed never to travel north. 'It rains a lot more and is much colder. People from the north are a bit behind the times,' she said. 'I doubt the nightlife is anywhere near as good and I imagine the pubs are all a bit grimy and old fashioned. The north is less advanced than the south. London has everything I need.'

Richard Sharpley, professor of tourism at the University of Central Lancashire, described the generalisations as 'disappointing', adding: 'Differences should be celebrated.' And Guy Parsons, chief operating officer at Travelodge, which conducted the study of 2,000 British adults, said: 'This shows a worrying trend towards parochialism. We are travelling abroad more frequently than ever before, but at the cost of abandoning what's on our own doorsteps.'

Freedom of the Press

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Thomas Jefferson, on the necessity of a free press (1787)

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Viva la Revolucion...

...but 49 years in power is more than enough, camarada.

Gëzuar Pavarësine

Or... Happy Independence!

Time For Love in Kosova

5 Years On

To my noisy Kiwi friends.

Polish re Police

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.

by Wislawa Szymborska

We Love You, Michael

Marie Smith

Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language, died on January 21st, aged 89

BEYOND the town of Cordova, on Prince William Sound in south-eastern Alaska, the Copper River delta branches out in silt and swamp into the gulf. Marie Smith, growing up there, knew there was a particular word in Eyak, her language, for the silky, gummy mud that squished between her toes. It was c'a. The driftwood she found on the shore, 'u'l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass. If she got lost among the flat, winding creeks her panicky thoughts were not of north, south, east or west, but of “upriver”, “downstream”, and the tribes, Eskimo and Tlingit, who lived on either side. And if they asked her name it was not Marie but Udachkuqax*a'a'ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.

Upriver out of town stretched the taiga, rising steadily to the Chugach mountains and covered with black spruce. The spruce was an Eyak dictionary in itself, from lis, the neat, conical tree, to Ge.c, its wiry root, useful for baskets; from Gahdg, its blue-green, flattened needles, which could be brewed up for beer or tea, to sihx, its resin, from which came pitch to make canoes watertight. The Eyak were fishermen who, thousands of years before, were thought to have crossed the Bering Strait in their boats. Marie's father still fished for a living, as did most of the men in Cordova. Where the neighbouring Athapaskan tribes, who had crossed the strait on snowshoes, had dozens of terms for the condition of ice and snow, Eyak vocabulary was rich with particular words for black abalone, red abalone, ribbon weed and tubular kelp, drag nets and dipping nets and different sizes of rope. One word, demexch, meant a soft and treacherous spot in the ice over a body of water: a bad place to walk on, but possibly a good one to squat beside with a fishing line or a spear.

This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language. At home her mother donned a kushsl, or apron, to make cakes in an 'isxah, or round mixing bowl; but at school “barbarous” Eyak was forbidden. It went unheard, too, in the salmon factory where Marie worked after fourth grade, canning in industrial quantities the noble fish her people had hunted with respect, naming not only every part of it but the separate stems and shoots of the red salmonberries they ate with the dried roe.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life. They lost the sense that lumped apples, beads and pills together as round, foreign, possibly deceiving things. They neglected the taboo that kept fish and animals separate, and would not let fish-skin and animal hide be sewn in the same coat; and they could not remember exactly why they built little wooden huts over gravestones, as if to give more comfortable shelter to the dead.

The end of the world

Mrs Smith herself seemed cavalier about the language for a time. She married a white Oregonian, William Smith, and brought up nine children, telling them odd Eyak words but finding they were not interested. Eyak became a language for talking to herself, or to God. Only when her last surviving older sister died, in the 1990s, did she realise that she was the last of the line. From that moment she became an activist, a tiny figure with a determined jaw and a colourful beaded hat, campaigning to stop clear-cutting in the forest (where Eyak split-log lodges decayed among the blueberries) and to get Eyak bones decently buried. She was the chief of her nation, as well as its only full-blooded member.

She drank too much, but gave it up; she smoked too much, coughing her way through interviews in a room full of statuettes of the Pillsbury Doughboy, in which she said her spirit would live when she was dead. Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that she worked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

As a child she had longed to be a pilot, flying boat-planes between the islands of the Sound. An impossible dream, she was told, because she was a girl. As an old woman, she said she believed that Eyak might be resurrected in future. Just as impossible, scoffed the experts: in an age where perhaps half the planet's languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.

Stasi (II)

The pretence of oversight has been ripped aside by the Khan bugging affair: the security apparat has become a law unto itself

by Simon Jenkins

The machine is out of control. Personal surveillance in Britain is so extensive that no democratic oversight is remotely plausible. Some 800 organisations, including the police, the revenue, local and central government, demanded (and almost always got) 253,000 intrusions on citizen privacy in the last recorded year, 2006. This is way beyond that of any other country in the free world.

The Sadiq Khan affair has killed stone dead the thesis, beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, that any accretion of power to the state is sustainable because ministers are in control. Whether this applies to phone tapping, bugging devices, ID cards, NHS records, childcare computer systems, video surveillance or detention without trial, it is simply a lie. Nobody can control this torrent of intrusion. Nobody can oversee a burst dam.

Khan, an MP and government whip, was allegedly targeted by the police for having been a "civil rights lawyer" and thus a nuisance, though the recording of his meetings with a constituent in prison was supposedly directed at the inmate. Either way, the bugging destroyed the "Wilson doctrine", that MPs cannot be bugged. It appears that they can if ministers, or the police, so decide.

Security machismo claims that in the "age of terrorism", real men bug everyone and everything. The former flying squad chief and BBC dial-a-quote, John O'Connor, implied this week that it would be negligent of the police not to bug anyone they - repeat they - thought a threat. The Blair thesis that "9/11 changes everything" has been a green light to every security consultant, surveillance salesman and Labour minister wanting to flex his - or her- muscles in the tabloids.

Years ago a lawyer gave me unassailable evidence that a call with a client had been tapped by the police and handed to the prosecution. Such tapping allegedly required a personal warrant from the home secretary who, when tackled on the subject, flatly denied it could have happened without his approval, which he would never give in such a case. I checked back with a police chief, who roared with laughter. "The home secretary is absolutely right. He must authorise all taps sent to him for authorisation. But not, of course, the rest." Orwell's cuttlefish were squirting ink.

The grim reality of the past week alone is that it has seen a substantial section of the British establishment allowing itself to believe that private dealings between lawyer and client, and between MP and constituent, should no longer be considered immune from state surveillance. A cardinal principle of a free democracy is thus coolly abandoned. It is not a victory for national security. It is a victory for terrorism.

The monitoring organisation Privacy International now gives Britain the worst record in Europe for such intrusion, indeed the worst among the so-called democratic world and on a par with "endemic surveillance societies", such as Russia and Singapore. The Thames Valley policeman, Mark Kearney, who bugged Khan's conversation in Woodhill prison, claims to have protested that it was "unethical" but was overruled and placed under "significant pressure" from the Metropolitan police. He has since had to leave the force. The saga reads like a script from the film about East German espionage, The Lives of Others.

Britain's poor record is the result of government weakness towards the security apparat. Even among supposed liberals, the response is to demand not less surveillance but more oversight. David Davis, the Tory spokesman, said yesterday: "It's got to be controlled; it's got to be accountable." Civil rights champion Liberty wants "simpler and stronger surveillance laws, with warrants issued by judges, not policemen nor politicians".

People have been saying this for years. Britain has a Kafkaesque oversight bureaucracy ranking with the one it purports to oversee. Some six separate surveillance monitors trip over themselves. All operate in secret and appear to be one gigantic rubber stamp. The distinction drawn by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, between "intrusive" and "directed" bugging, illustrates the prevailing mumbo-jumbo. The chief surveillance monitor, Sir Christopher Rose, has been asked by Straw to investigate the Khan affair, which appears to be a failure by the chief surveillance monitor. Is this to be taken seriously?

When the council can bug you for fly-tipping, when prisons can record conversations with defence lawyers, when any potentially criminal act can justify electronic intrusion - and when ministers resort to the dictator's excuse, "The innocent need not fear" - warning bells should sound.

There is no "balance" to be struck between civil liberty and national security. Civil liberty is absolute, security its handmaid. Measures are needed to protect the public, but a firm line needs to be drawn round them. The line must accept a degree of risk, or a police state is just around the corner.

A quarter of a million surveillances in Britain are beyond all power of politicians or overseers to check. It is state paranoia, justified only by that catch-all, the "war on terror". In truth it is not countering terror, but promoting it. Mass surveillances one of the poisons that the terrorist seeks to inject into the veins of civil society.

It is clear the overseers have gone native. Even the "independent" security watchdog, Lord Carlile, has bought 42-day detention. More oversight will not cure surveillance but mask its spread. The extension from terrorism to benefit fraud, fly-tipping and trading standards demonstrates how the official mind flips to Stasi mode at the least excuse.

To claim that Britain is a police state insults those who are victims of real ones. But I have no doubt that feeble ministers are slithering down just this road, pushed by the security/industrial complex. It is not oversight that must be increased, but rather the categories and boundaries of surveillance that must be drastically curbed.

Of course there are people who want to explode bombs in Britain. Taxpayers spend a fortune trying to stop them. But how often must we remind ourselves that the bomber need not kill to achieve his end when we appease his yearning for the martyrdom of repression? The amount of surveillance in Britain is grotesque. It is a sign of the corruption of power, and nothing else.

Waitangi Day in Aotearoa

From Super Bowl to Super Tuesday

Stasi, We Miss You

Our state collects more data than the Stasi ever did. We need to fight back. To trust in the good intentions of our rulers is to put liberty at risk. I'd go to jail rather than accept this kind of ID card.


by Timothy Garton Ash

This has got to stop. Britain's snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don't think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain. The human rights group Privacy International rates Britain as an "endemic surveillance society", along with China and Russia, whereas Germany scores much better.

An official report by Britain's interception of communications commissioner has just revealed that nearly 800 public bodies are between them making an average of nearly 1,000 requests a day for "communications data", including actual phone taps, mobile phone records, email or web search histories, not to mention old-fashioned snail mail. The Home Office website notes that all communication service providers "may be served with a notice by the secretary of state requiring them to maintain a permanent intercept capability. In practice, agreement is always reached by consultation and negotiation." How reassuring.

The fantastic advance of information and communications technology gives the state - and private companies as well - technical possibilities of which the Stasi could only dream. Most of your life is now mapped electronically, minute by minute, centimetre by centimetre, through your mobile phone calls, your emails, your web searches, your credit card purchases, your involuntary appearances on CCTV, and so on. Had the East German secret police had these snooping super-tools, my Stasi file would have measured at least 3,000 pages, not a mere 325.

We therefore need to strengthen the protection of data, privacy and civil rights simply to remain as free as we were before. As technology lifts the sea level of information flow, we have to build up the dykes. To a limited extent, this has been happening; some legal data protection safeguards have been improved. Our stalwart information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has fought a valiant battle to protect what the Germans call, with portentous profundity, the right to informational self-determination. A valiant battle, but a losing one - as the commissioner himself acknowledges. The warning that we are "sleepwalking into a surveillance society" comes from him.

For even as he tries to strengthen the dykes, more powerful arms of government are busy tearing them down: in the name of fighting terrorism, crime, fraud, child molestation, drugs, religious extremism, racial abuse, tax evasion, speeding, illegal parking, fly-tipping, leaving too many garbage bags outside your home, and any other "risk" that any of those nearly 800 public (busy)bodies feels called upon to "protect" us from. Well, thank you, nanny - but kindly eff off to East Germany. I'd rather stay a bit more free, even if means being a bit less safe.

Yes, I recognise that the threat from homegrown suicide bombers - like those who struck London on July 7 2005, and extremists who have been picked up since, including the recently convicted would-be beheader of a British soldier - is particularly difficult to detect. I accept that it requires some extra surveillance and prevention powers. The balance between security and liberty needs to be recalibrated. But in the last decade the British government has erred too far on the side of what is alleged to be increased security.

An over-mighty executive, authoritarian busybody instincts at all levels of government, a political culture of "commonsense" bureaucratic judgments, rather than codified rights protected by supreme courts and, until recently, a gung-ho press forever calling for "something to be done": this fateful combination has made Britain a dark outrider among liberal democracies.
The birthplace of laissez-faire liberalism has morphed into the database state. We have more CCTV cameras than anyone. We have the largest DNA database anywhere. Plans are far advanced to centralise all our medical records and introduce the most elaborate biometric ID cards in the world. All this from a government which, having collected so much data on us, goes around losing it like a late-night drunk spreading the contents of his pockets down the street. Twenty-five million people's details mislaid by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs; at least 100,000 more on an awol Royal Navy laptop; and so it goes on.

Meanwhile, the government has just laid before parliament its latest counter-terrorism bill. Besides the notorious proposal to increase the period of detention without charge to 42 days, this includes provisions that, as the attached official notes explain, allow anyone to give information to the intelligence services "regardless of any duty to keep the information private or of any other restriction" (other than those mentioned in a pair of elastic subclauses). Such information can then be shared or disclosed by that service more or less at will.

This will not do; and even the staunchest supporters of the smack of firm government are beginning to say as much. The Daily Mail, that prince of firm-smackers, yesterday ran a leading article which concluded that "Under this government - of whom the Stasi would have been proud - the balance between state power and individual liberty has been outrageously skewed. It must be restored." This is something on which press and politicians of left and right are beginning to agree.

Of course that flourish about the Stasi is hyperbole. As someone who actually lived under the Stasi, I know we're nowhere near that. But the amount of information collected and shared - not to mention lost - by the British government far exceeds the Stasi's modest 160km of paper files. The potential for it to be abused, in the wrong hands, is simply enormous. Liberty is not preserved simply by putting our trust in the good intentions of our rulers, civil servants and spooks. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

My sense is that the tide is just beginning to turn in British public, published and parliamentary opinion. I hope the Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Labour backbenchers and the House of Lords will between them give the new bill the roasting it deserves. Some of our watchdog commissioners and more independent-minded judges are already sounding the alarm. If the government were still to be so foolish as to try to introduce the new ID cards before the next election, it could be to Gordon Brown what the poll tax was to Margaret Thatcher.

Comprehensive, compulsory ID cards would directly impinge on every single citizen; this is just the kind of thing the British like to get bloody-minded about.

The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has said he would go to jail rather than accept an ID card of this intrusive kind. So would I. And so, I believe, would many thousands of our fellow-citizens. (There's a good website called NO2ID where you can join the fray.) Which is why, I suspect, the government won't be so foolish. But we need to draw the line well before ID cards. There are liberties that we have already given away, while sleeping, and we must claim them back.