Category: Culture

Praise the Lord! The Washington Post‘s news division, which for long months before the US invasion of Iraq had suffered from what I thought of as the “Hoaglandization” of the entire newspaper, seems finally to have rediscovered its sanity, focus, and journlistic ethics.
(“Hoaglandization”, after prominent WP columnist Jim Hoagland who for some years prior to the invasion had been acting as one of the chief flaks in US journalism for any slight whim or preference expressed by wellpknown Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi. And yes, that included Jim acting as an influential cheerleader for the invasion.)
I may be wrong in suspecting that Jim’s general influence on 15th St NW was instrumental in skewing not just the WP’s notoriously pro-war editorial and op-ed pages in that direction but also, over the crucial months prior to March 17, skewing the paper’s news coverage, too.
In those months, anti-war activities and demonstrations got short shrift. The administration’s claims re Saddam’s weapons programs got generally uncritical coverage, with many vital questions about those claims getting unasked, or at least, unreported.
But now, the news division is back on the job, in the time-honored tradition of independent journalism and much more in line with the heroic kind of role that the WP itself played in the days of, for example, the Vietnam war.
(The op-ed pages are still terrifically skewed. And my personal jury is still out on the paper’s own editorial line on war/occupation issues. I’m ready to be persuaded the line is getting better… )
But back to the big, definitive story in today’s paper– the one whose headline states baldly– based on leaks from within David Kay’s “Iraq Survey group”– Iraq Survey Fails to Find Nuclear Threat.
Bart Gellman, who wrote this story, writes:

Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq’s nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

This is truly a great scoop. When Kay was in Washington a couple weeks ago, all he would say in public was that it “would take more time” to come to a definitive judgment on whether Saddam did indeed have any active nuclear program prior to March 17, 2003.
Now, what Kay’s people– including plucky Australian General Stephen D. Meekin, who heads “the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay”– and some of the key ISG documents that were leaked to Gellman all reveal is that no amount of extra searching is going to turn up evidence for a program that, these impeccable sources have concluded, never even existed post-1991.
Gellman’s piece, which I urge you all to go and read in full, underlines that it was the nuclear weapons allegations against Saddam that were crucially used by Bush and Blair to explain why they had to launch their invasion right then, in March 2003, rather than leaving more time for UNSCOM’s inspections to do their work. The specter of a nuclear-weapons “mushroom cloud”–and not the much less fearsome threat of a chemical or bio weapons attack– was what was invoked by those two leaders anmd their key advisors as they made their case for the war…
Well, good for Bart Gellman getting the story. Good for General Meekin, for being the only person on Kay’s staff who was willing to be quoted on the record regarding the content of what the ISG had actually found. (Several others spoke “off the record,” Gellman reported– but having Meekin’s assessments there on the record gives the piece a huge amount of heft it would not otherwise have had, and presumably allowed the Post’s lawyers to let its publication go ahead.)
And good for the Post’s new division, having finally gotten back into the business of independently and where necessary critically reporting the news.

Ever since my daughter Leila’s wedding some 12 days ago, I’ve been sort of tour-guiding various aspects of US history and culture for, serially, two of my three sisters. Last week, I got to accompany my sister Hilly and her partner around “Independence Hall” and various other sites in Philadelphia, and this week I got to accompany my sister Diana around Thomas Jefferson’s historic home Monticello, which is located near my hometown here in central Virginia.
Both of these are sites that I’ve visited before. But I think that the “interpretation” of historical sites is something that is often done extremely well here in the US. So I was quite happy to line up in each of these places and go and take the tours again. Plus, I find it interesting to see how the interpretations change over time.
And I wasn’t disappointed. The US National Park Service guide who took us round Independence Hall last week, and the guides from the privately-run Monticello Foundation who led the two tours we took there this week, all did a good job: informative, well-considered, and interesting.
What I found new in the NPS tour we got in Philly was the nuance the guide gave regarding the whole historical episode of the Anglo colonists’ 1770s-1780s fight against the British Crown. I was prepared for something like the anti-George III rant that is often found in US textbooks, but this guide told the story in a much more nuanced way. First, he stressed that all the (white) settlers who settled in this part of the continent in the 1600s and early 1700s came under the jurisdiction of the British Crown, whatever land they might have come here from. And as subjects of the British Crown they enjoyed, and valued, many important rights that dated back to the Magna Carta…

Continue reading “U.S. history, interpreted”

So, that plucky young leader George W. Bush has “taken on” those naughty Muslims by telling Malaysian PM Mahathir bin Mohamad that his remarks about Jews at the recent Islamic summit were “wrong”.
(Full text of Mahathir’s remarks are here.)
And then, there’s Richard Cohen, pluckily writing on the same subject in today’s Washington Post. Cohen was writing from Berlin, from a spot near the Wannsee Villa, which was where the Nazis’ plans for their grisly “final solution” for Europe’s Jews (and Roma, and gays, and various other unwanted persons) were all hatched.
“Across the lake from where I am writing, hidden in trees streaked with the colors of autumn, is the Wannsee villa where the Nazis in 1942 held a conference on how to dispose of Europe’s remaining Jews,” Cohen writes. “Things have changed. We have gone from the phonograph to the disc player but as Mahathir shows, for too many people the thinking remains the same.”
Cohen goes on to quote–selectively– from what Mahathir told his audience of fellow Islamic leaders, and to accuse all of them of “rampant anti-Semitism”:

[W]hat ails part of the Islamic, especially Arab, world, is both anti-Semitism, which is rampant and state-tolerated, and the sort of thinking that underlies it. The belief that Jews have some sort of mystical powers — that they are smarter and, of course, more diabolical than others — provides the Islamic world with a handy explanation of why more than 1 billion Muslims cannot seem to cope with little Israel.

He goes on to warn, portentously:

The use of such language, the support of such ideas, is too often a precursor to violence. The scenario of Germany and the rest of Europe cannot apply. Islamic countries have next to no Jews. But it does transform the opposition to Israel from a political-nationalistic dispute into a kind of vast pogrom in which compromise becomes increasingly impossible.

Get a grip, Richard! It does seem you didn’t actually read the full text of Mahathir’s speech.
If you had read it, you would have seen, in Mahathir’s carefully numbered paragraphs, first of all an honest and very moving description of the Muslim community’s decline from its days of glory. Then, in paras 33-34 comes this:

33. But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people?
34. It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack. As Muslims we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years? struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do.

Then, in paras 38-40, we have this:

38. It is sure[l]y time that we pause to think. But will this be wasting time? For well over half a century we have fought over Palestine. What have we achieved? Nothing. We are worse off than before. If we had paused to think then we could have devised a plan, a strategy that can win us final victory. Pausing and thinking calmly is not a waste of time. We have a need to make a strategic retreat and to calmly assess our situation.
39. We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.
40. We may not be able to do that. We may not be able to unite all the 1.3 billion Muslims. We may not be able to get all the Muslim Governments to act in concert. But even if we can get a third of the ummah and a third of the Muslim states to act together, we can already do something. Remember that the Prophet did not have many followers when he went to Madinah. But he united the Ansars and the Muhajirins and eventually he became strong enough to defend Islam.

It was, of course, that latter part of para 39 that Bush and Cohen had read and focused exclusively on– NOT the broader context in which Mahathir was actually presenting the achievements of the Jews in modern times: as an object of emulation, not of excoriation.
In the New York Times, Paul Krugman has a far better-informed and more realistic take on Mahathir’s speech. His column is titled, appropriately enough, “Listening to Mahathir”.
Krugman at least seems to have read all of Mahathir’s speech (though he does seem to have given the key passage about Jewish power a more paranoid rather than more generous reading). But he notes, rightly, that “A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of … the best-selling book about the Islamic decline.”
Krugman asks, “So what’s with the anti-Semitism?” And then he goes on to give a fairly nuanced political explanation of how, as PM of a predominantly Muslim country, Mahathir has worked hard to preserve a favorable climate in which Malaysia’s mainly ethnic-Chinese (and non-Muslim) traders could continue to contribute to the country’s prosperity while also covering his political flank with the Muslim indigenes…
I actually disagree that the sentiments Mahathir is expressing constitute clear anti-Semitism, at all. For example, in para 42, Mahathir says: “We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are welldisposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.” That is not the way that purveyors of hate speech usually express themselves.
Then, further on in his speech, Mahathir was mounting a carefully crafted argument against the suicide bombers and other angry extremists in the Muslim world. In paras 48-50 he writes:

We need to be brave but not foolhardy. We need to think not just of our reward in the afterlife but also of the worldly results of our mission.
49. The Quran tells us that when the enemy sues for peace we must react positively. True the treaty offered is not favourable to us. But we can negotiate. The Prophet did, at Hudaibiyah. And in the end he triumphed.
50. I am aware that all these ideas will not be popular. Those who are angry would want to reject it out of hand. They would even want to silence anyone who makes or supports this line of action. They would want to send more young men and women to make the supreme sacrifice. But where will all these lead to? Certainly not victory. Over the past 50 years of fighting in Palestine we have not achieved any result. We have in fact worsened our situation.

So really–and this is directed more at Richard Cohen– is this the kind of language that, as he wrote, “transform[s] the opposition to Israel from a political-nationalistic dispute into a kind of vast pogrom in which compromise becomes increasingly impossible”?
I don’t think so. And I think that if highly-paid columnists (unlike yours truly, that is) in the most powerful country in the world want to even try to engage seriously with the 1.3 billion people in the world who are Muslims, then they would do a lot better to actually read what leaders and intellectuals in the Muslim world are saying rather than just take out selectively-chosen, out-of-context snippets and headlines before they sound off.
I guess the same goes for George W. Bush, too. But then, we already know that he reads only the thin bouquets of pre-digested factoids that his flunkeys lay in front of him.

… No, I’m not talking political differences here. I’m talking political culture. Bill (“the spouse”) and I are coming up to 20 years of a transatlantic marriage. It took us a few years to figure out that when we talked about the role of “race” in society, we were talking about different things. (Americans construe “race” largely in terms of skin color– a legacy of the role of slavery, I guess. But in Britain, it’s construed much more along the lines of “national group” or whatever– the concept for which US citizens now use the term “ethnicity”.)
Actually, once we figured that out, it became easier to see the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the UN came to spark such hot controversy. Basically, people east and west of the Atlantic were talking about different things…
So here’s another interesting difference. On the whole bottom half of page A11 of today’s New York Times is an ad placed by a group of communities in the Outer Banks region of North Carolina. That region, which is heavily dependent on tourism, got very badly hit by the recent hurricane here, so the communities were advertising to urge tourists and investors to come back as soon as possible. “While the storm shifted our dunes and reshaped our coastline, she hasn’t changed the resiliency of the people of the Outer Banks,” etc., etc.
And then, the ad copy gets to waxing rapturous about why it’s important “to preserve this coastal destination for our children’s children” and talk about the “rich cultural and historical heritage for which we’ve become known.” The prime example they give of the latter? “After all, colonial settlers chose our islands to start a brave new life on the cusp of a new worold.”
Excuse me? We extol “colonial settlers” and their historical role?
For Europeans, the whole role of “colonial settlers” in their nation’s histories is an intense embarrassment– terrifically nineteenth century.
But not here, it seems.
Oh, and did I mention what had drawn me to p. A11 in the first place? Most of the top of the page is given over to a really depressing news acount of the Israeli government’s plan to build 600 new homes in three (highly illegal) settlements in the West Bank.
Colonial settlerism in action!

Still in New York City. Yesterday, I went to The American Effect exhibition at the Whitney with Greg and his and Leila’s friend Dave. To quote from the Whitney’s calendar, the exhibition “Explor[es] global perceptions of the United States in art made since 1990 [and] includes works from more than fifty artists in thirty countries.”
It is probably the best, most articulately expressed counterpoint to US jingoism that anyone could imagine. Here we have ageing superheroes; frank and shocking photographs of the detritus of US techno-consumerism (parts from old US computers, that is, as piled up in toxic dumps in China someplace); George Bush in a Mughal-style love-fest with Pakistani Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf (with Ronald McDonald dancing attendance); an incredibly funny re-enactment of a promotional “conversation” between Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra; and much, much more.
From seeing this exhibition, I think a person would have to draw some conclusions about the way the US is seen by the artists of the world… It is seen (mainly) as powerful, careless, and driven by consumerism.
The date of production of these items spans 9/11, which gives the exhibition considerable added “relevance” and, I think, added poignancy. It seems shocking now, after 9/11, to see the six-panel screen by a Japanese artist (forgotten the name), painstakingly painted in the style of many old “God’s-eye” city views in Japanese art—and painted some years before 9/11—that is a picture of recognizable chunks of Manhattan real estate aflame, after having been bombed by an iridescent twisted necklace of small fighter planes, shown circling above the flames and the smoke.
Still, if the events of 9/11 sparked an outpouring of sympathy from around the world, I’d have to say I didn’t see much sign of it represented in what I saw of this exhibition. The only apparently sympathetic view of the US that I saw, as produced either before or after 9/11, was New Manhattan City 3021, a futuristic assembly in the style of an architect’s model of how this artist saw a bigger, brighter, more Vegas-like Manhattan emerging a mere 1,020 years (!) after the devastation of 9/11.
I found that piece very touching. Mainly, because the artist, Bodys Isek Kingelez, is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country rent apart by its own conflicts that are so very much more deadly than anything the US citizenry has ever experienced. I think of Bodys working on this in 2002–where? under what conditions? Was the piece commissioned from him for this show? (Apparently not; it is on loan from a collection in Geneva, Switzerland.) … So he assembled the materials for it—it is a large piece, maybe 9 feet by 9 feet by 4 feet high. He acquired a map of the southern tip of Manhattan. (According to Dave, this was an old map, before the whole area of Battery Park City had been landfilled in.) And he set to work to make a piece that expressed, I think, his sympathy and his determination to be hopeful.
Determined to be hopeful, and a citizen of DRC. As a US citizen, I say thank you for your gift, Bodys. (Even though I really don’t like Vegas style, myself.)
But the rest of the exhibition sends a very different set of messages. I wish every US citizen—and especially, each one of the members of Congress and Senators—could see this show.