Just Sold!

Atoll Tupai has been purchased for 5.7 million euro by French Polynesia.

Periodic Table: An Updated View

Berlin photos

The New York Times magazine published a nice article about life in Berlin with a nice accompanying slideshow, which I found very amusing. Here is this
nice slideshow

Agriculture, mon amour

amazing pictures taken by famous Yann-Arthus Bertrand. See the full selection at his website

TLS: Edmund Wilson

A new biography of one of the greatest critics of the last century has the following passage:

Wilson senior had a horror that his only son, with his rich assortment of interests, would not make his mark, and so urged him to "concentrate on something". Wilson replied, persuasively, that "what I want to do is to try to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought".

my kinda guy... :)

Read more »

Stanisław Lem

I was shocked to read the following obituary line from the Associated Press:

Stanislaw Lem, the author of Solaris which was made into a movie starring George Clooney is dead at 84.

What a shame to reduce a prolific internationally renowned author, translated into 40 languages, into a writer of a book that was made into a film that a certain Hollywood actor blessed by his participation. America, my new motherland, will you ever learn to be respectful of the intellectuals, to appreciate the culture of the others and show a modicum of humility?

Elections in Ukraine

I think the picture says it all - fun to see all the Orange revolution collapse under the weight of the nostalgia.

LRB: A book on Peter Lorre

He thought they looked like two soft-boiled eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He featured in Looney Tunes more than once as a caricature – just two vast eyes and a menacing whine. Many adjectives have been applied to Lorre’s eyes, but none is adequate to convey their peculiar intensity, the way they veered between kindness and madness, and the manner in which he made them protrude even further when he wrinkled his forehead and wiggled his ears, which he often did. Lorre, who enjoyed disconcerting strangers by staring them down, boasted that it was impossible to look into both his eyes at once. ‘When I worked with actors I liked,’ he reminisced, Humphrey Bogart being the chief example, ‘I taught them how to act with me: “Just pick one eye and look at it. The camera will never know the difference.”’
Because Lorre was also rather small and chubby (though his weight fluctuated wildly), at least one film writer of the 1930s thought him Buddha-like – a ‘Buddha contemplating the mysteries and miseries of the human soul’. This is all wrong. Lorre’s eyes were far too animated: too agonised on the one hand and too comical on the other. There is more truth in the snap judgment of Ernst Josef Aufricht, a theatre manager who met Lorre in Berlin at the end of the 1920s before he was made famous by Fritz Lang’s M. When Lorre turned up at the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre asking for work, Aufricht laughed and said, ‘You look like a tadpole,’ before sending him off to Bertolt Brecht to ask for the part of the village idiot.

Brecht admired Lorre’s tadpoleish looks and he was soon directing him in major roles. He starred, for example, in Mann ist Mann at the same time as he was filming M. His first substantial Brechtian role was in a controversial play written by Brecht’s protégée Marieluise Fleisser called Pioniere in Ingolstadt. The play’s main preoccupation is the sordid brutality of the military and of provincial life. Opening night was Saturday 30 March 1929; the conservative element in the audience booed and hissed, the liberated element clapped, and a Nazi Brownshirt unleashed a stinkbomb in protest at the sexual content of the play, which included orgiastic sex in a cemetery. The plot concerns some soldiers who have arrived in the town of Ingolstadt to build a bridge. They are shown boorishly using the local women, before leaving town over the bridge they have built. A pitiable and hopeless local student called Fabian feels envy for their sexual success and loses his virginity to a local prostitute. The student was played by Peter Lorre. Reviews were mixed but not about Lorre. In 8-Uhr-Abendblatt the critic Kurt Pinthus set the tone for much subsequent appreciation of his acting:

And a new face was there, a frightful face: the hysterical son of the petty bourgeoisie, whose bug-eyed, bloated head swells in a yellowish manner out of his suit; how this lad staggers between sluggishness and hysterical outbursts, as he timorously walks and grasps and sometimes greedily fumbles. Even people older than I am have never seen anything so uncanny in the theatre.

It is tempting to speculate what might have happened to Lorre’s career if the Brownshirts who were playing with stinkbombs in 1929 had not gone on to far nastier forms of thuggery. Might he have ended his days as a pillar of the German theatrical establishment rather than gurning in comedy-horror B-movies with Vincent Price? Might his persona have gained the gravitas it always lacked? Lorre himself seems to have thought so. In his bloated later years, when he presented a rather sad and incongruous figure at the Beverley Hills Tennis Club, he was inclined to harp on his intellectual past. ‘I think he felt,’ one of his friends later said, ‘had Hitler not happened and had he gone on as Bertolt Brecht’s actor . . . he would have been himself and been appreciated for what he really was.’

On the other hand, it’s quite possible that his career would not have been so radically different in Germany or Austria from what it was in Hollywood. Nowhere in the world could he have become a leading man, not with those eyes. Even before he became enslaved to what he called the ‘latrine’ of Hollywood, Lorre’s place in the theatre world was eccentric. Stephen Youngkin’s reverent and scholarly new biography shows that the recurring themes of Lorre’s acting life were already set before he fled to Paris from Vienna in 1933: his distinctive mixture of comedy and creepiness, his struggle to avoid being typecast, his hopeless addiction to morphine, his seriousness about acting coupled with a refusal to see it as anything deeper than ‘facemaking’, his compulsion for stealing the show from the sidelines, and his ability somehow to rise above bad material and to make good material great.

One evening in Vienna in 1933, as Nazi thugs skirmished with police outside, Lorre sat in a ‘subterranean bohemian wine place called Majolica Hall’ with some friends: a group of writers, actors and composers. One of them started teasing him, saying how funny it was that he always seemed to play ‘a monster or a second violin’, never an ‘important classic part’. ‘You’re thinking of Hamlet,’ Lorre said, adding that he knew all the parts by heart. Someone urged him to give them a rendition. The audience waited, half-embarrassed at the thought of fat, hunched little Peter doing ‘To be or not to be’. But instead, he recited the part of the first gravedigger. ‘It was terrific,’ one of his friends recalled. At the end, Lorre rounded on his audience. ‘You sons of bitches, you thought I was going to play Hamlet and make a fool of myself. My part is the gravedigger and if I had ever played it on the stage I would have stolen that play.’

Lorre was born Ladislaw (‘Laczy’) Loewenstein in 1904, in the Hungarian town of Rozsahegy, now part of Slovakia. He was the eldest of three boys. His mother died after giving birth to the third, and his childhood was spent in various parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a hated stepmother. His father, Alajos, was a lieutenant in the Habsburg army. Not much is gained by searching for the roots of Laczy’s acting in his childhood. A picture survives of him as a seven-year-old wearing a cute bobble hat with his big eyes looking as yet entirely unthreatening. Soon afterwards, he landed the part of the largest dwarf in Snow White at school. We don’t know if he stole the show. It was only when his father forced him into a tedious job in Vienna’s Anglo-Austrian bank that he caught the acting bug. He got himself sacked for wiggling his ears at his boss, a story he later embellished, and embarked on a life of poverty and freedom, sleeping on wooden benches in the Prater and cadging rations of free hot chocolate and gugelhupf cake courtesy of the Hoover Relief Administration.

At last, in the early 1920s, he found his ‘ideal school of acting’, an experimental venue nicknamed the Therapeutic Theatre (its real name was the Stegreiftheater), run by Jacob Moreno, a former medical student who felt that theatre had lost its immediacy. Deeply of its time, the Therapeutic Theatre combined direct psychiatric therapy with the ‘ecstatic pathos of Expressionism’; Freud meets Strindberg, without the formal discipline of either. The young Loewenstein – who came to the Therapeutic Theatre complaining that his bourgeois parents did not understand him – fitted in straight away. It was Moreno who gave him his stage name, from an acquaintance called Peter and from the German word for ‘parrot’, thanks to his gift for mimicry. Moreno’s method was largely based on improvisation: his actors were required to use ‘facial muscle acrobatics’, switching rapidly from saint to murderer, using the face as if it were an ever-changing mask. Even at this early stage of his acting life, Loewenstein was particularly good at playing ‘pimps, murderers, gamblers etc’. It is fascinating to watch ‘Peter Lorre’ in his schlockier Hollywood films and see how these facial acrobatics remained with him – how he brought the tools of Viennese psychodrama to the studio picture. The tackier the film, the more noticeable it is.

Take the Mr Moto series. This was a group of movies (beginning with Think Fast, Mr Moto and ending with Mr Moto Takes a Vacation) produced by Twentieth-Century Fox between 1937 and 1939 to cash in on the popularity of Charlie Chan. Based on third-rate mystery novels churned out by John P. Marquand, the films feature an inscrutable and delicate Japanese detective/ spy called Mr Moto, a master of jujitsu. Who better to play Moto than a dumpy, tragicomic Hungarian? The director of the first film, Norman Foster, felt that Lorre was all wrong for the part, but hoped that the make-up department could work some magic. Lorre, however, refused a makeover: slicked back hair and small glasses would do. ‘Acting,’ he told a Fox studio publicist, ‘comes from the inside.’ It was as if he were still at the Therapeutic Theatre, not at the most exploitative of the studios. ‘Mr Moto,’ he went on,

is a Japanese, a clever, swift-thinking, rather suave person. Well then, I become that person and what I do is right. I do not need to study a real Japanese man to know what to do. That is wrong. There is a typed idea of each nationality and actors think they must imitate that idea, as if Japanese or Chinese men were not as varied as we are ourselves! All Chinese do not clasp their hands and run about with a jumpy step. Each man moves according to what he is. When you have imagined what he is, you must move as he does.

Lorre’s acting as Mr Moto is simply extraordinary, and not necessarily in a good way. You can see him constantly rearranging the mask of his expression. In a single banal scene where Moto hunts for a clue, his face shifts from fish-eyed impassivity to darting ratiocination to an innocent grin. Moto is a more sinister figure than the affable Charlie Chan, in keeping with American prejudice against the Japanese (a prejudice that eventually killed the series off); his adventures are preposterous, but he often turns out to be a cold-blooded killer. Most of the time, Lorre plays him in a quieter version of his usual Mitteleuropean accent, but with more of a fixed smile. When in the presence of enemies, however, he employs a strange cod-Japanese intonation, with ‘l’s for ‘r’s and ‘ee’ randomly added to the end of words, as in his catchphrase, ‘Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey’. Things get even more confusing when he goes into one of his brilliant disguises: over the course of the series, the ‘Oriental Sherlock’ imitates a pedlar, a Mongolian camel driver, an ancient guru, a curio dealer and an archaeologist. In the end, Lorre was glad to give the series up, claiming later on that the part was ‘really childish’. It makes you wonder why he took it in the first place, when it so obviously parodies his talents. Essentially, there were two reasons: drugs and M.

Drugs had been a problem for Lorre ever since his years in German provincial theatre in his early twenties. In 1925, when he was 21, his appendix ruptured and the ensuing operations left him with terrible abdominal pains, which the doctors alleviated by pumping him full of morphine. It rapidly became an expensive habit, one that he never kicked. The drugs – morphine, Dilaudid, cherry-flavoured Cheracol cough mixture and any other prescription drugs he could lay his hands on – went some way to destroying each of his three marriages (his philandering didn’t help) and left him penniless on his death in 1964. By the time of Mr Moto, he had already pursued several ‘fast cure’ treatments for his addiction, at huge cost but to no avail. Youngkin recounts how during the filming of one of the Moto films, a stuntman came into Lorre’s dressing room, to find a doctor injecting him with narcotics. While he was making the films, the drugs weakened him to the point where he was barely able to run up stairs, but the studio put out phoney stories to the effect that Lorre took his part so seriously that he did jujitsu, wrestling and acrobatics in his spare time, incurring frequent bruises, torn ligaments etc. As Youngkin writes, this ‘nicely explained his retreats to area sanitariums, where, in reality, he wrestled with his chronic drug addiction’. Drugs provided the financial incentive for making the Moto films (though he was markedly underpaid, earning only $10,000 a picture to Warner Oland’s $40,000 as Charlie Chan), but were also the palliative that enabled him to participate in such rubbish. A couple of years after the series ended, while he was making the Warner Bros film All through the Night, the director Vincent Sherman asked Lorre: ‘How the hell did you make all those Mr Motos?’ ‘I took dope,’ Lorre replied.

This wasn’t all there was to it, though. At least initially, the Moto films seemed attractive to Lorre, offering him a starring role and a chance to play a good guy, albeit of a rather ambivalent kind. ‘I made the Moto films purposely,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I wanted to get the flavour of M out of the cinema palate of the American fan.’ It didn’t work. Few roles have ever typecast an actor so decisively as Lorre’s part as the child killer in that 1931 film. Fritz Lang wrote it – ‘simply a cops-and-robbers story’, he insisted – after reading about some criminals offering to help police catch the notorious Vampire of Düsseldorf, Peter Kürten, who had knifed, strangled, axed and hammered to death forty men, women and children. In M, it is a lynch mob that catches the killer, because they can’t stand the way the intensive and inept police search for him is ruining their businesses. The killer himself, Hans Beckert, is more exclusive than Kürten was. He kills only little girls – eight when the film begins, soon to be joined by another, Elsie Beckmann, whom we see bouncing a ball on her way home from school and accepting a fatal gift of a balloon from a man in a dark overcoat whistling a tune from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.

Before we have even seen Lorre’s face, Lang has marked him as one of the creepiest figures on celluloid. Twenty years after M, the actress who played little Elsie, Inge Landgut, came to see Lorre in Hamburg while he was making his only film as director, Der Verlorene, about another killer. Even though she was now grown up, the experience totally unnerved her. She could still only see Lorre as ‘the eerie one’ – the one who had killed her already. ‘I was happy, nearly relieved when I shut the door . . . and stood outside in the fresh air.’ After M, mothers would huddle their children close to them if they saw Lorre passing on the street; society ladies sent him fan mail begging him to whip them.

Fritz Lang called Lorre’s performance ‘one of the best . . . in film history and certainly the best in his life’. It was the only film where he had material worthy of him; the one film where he played Hamlet and not the gravedigger. To appreciate his brilliance, it is worth measuring his performance against that of other screen bogeymen. Compared to the florid scariness of Bela Lugosi or the camp madness of Boris Karloff, Lorre is distressingly human – ‘a small fat man, sweating in his uncomfortable clothes’, as Pauline Kael wrote. You can almost smell the goulash on his breath, and taste his all too ordinary greed as he sits at a café and gulps down two cognacs, after a mother’s timely arrival has thwarted his intention to kidnap yet another girl outside a bookshop. More recent screen murderers – Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs or John Malkovich in practically anything – have tried to convey clinical control, as if the scariest thing were a killer unaffected by his own actions. Lorre himself was perfectly capable of playing this kind of detached psychopath, doing a softly chuckling terrorist in Hitchcock’s The Man who Knew Too Much. But Lang and Lorre knew that it is scarier still to show a murderer terrified by himself and rather clumsy, an inept figure who doesn’t notice that someone has daubed a chalk ‘M’ on his back or who drops the knife he uses to peel an orange. When he is cornered, Beckert fumbles and swears as he struggles to pick a lock. He goggles his eyes in the mirror, clawing at his own jowls, as if his face might come away if he tugged hard enough. ‘I can’t help myself,’ he screams before the lynch mob’s kangaroo court, and bites his fist. The facial gymnastics, which in Moto were so pointless, are here used to show the murderer’s divided self. Lang – a sadistic director – pushed Lorre to his limits on set, forcing him repeatedly to redo a scene where he is kicked in the shins until he couldn’t walk for three days. As Beckert breathlessly laments the impossibility of escaping ‘from myself’, Lorre’s face moves from blank incomprehension to childlike smile to evil, animal ecstasy as he re-enacts the blissful relief that killing brings; ending in a bulging-eyed, haunted stare as he repeats ‘Must . . . don’t want to . . . must.’ Graham Greene rightly said that one feels ‘an overwhelming pity’ for him.

After this, it was no wonder that his Hollywood career was something of a let-down, or that casting directors were hung up on the idea that he had to play creeps. Late in life he complained to an actress friend, Blandine Ebinger, about his typecasting. ‘It’s always the same. A murderer. A criminal.’ ‘But you can choose,’ she replied. ‘No, Blandine,’ he said, ‘I can’t choose. I’m stamped.’ Stamped he might have been, but he acted his various disturbing cameos with an astonishing air of freedom. In Hitchcock’s feeble early film Secret Agent (1936), he makes John Gielgud’s hero look stiff and two-dimensional. Lorre’s part, as a shock-haired Mexican mercenary, is ridiculous but he somehow endowed this absurd and nasty clown with depth, making his lust for every woman in sight almost sympathetic. As so often, he seems the only person in the film who is fully alive.

For as long as Lorre is on the screen, you find you can’t look anywhere else. This was partly because of his quite deliberate scene-stealing manoeuvres. Robert Alda, the father of Alan, acted with Lorre in a horror film which has since become a cult called The Beast with Five Fingers. You ‘had to be prepared’ for his ‘little tricks’ all the time, Alda claimed. When other actors had turned away, you could safely assume they were out of the scene. ‘Not Peter. He would turn his back on you and his hands would be going behind his back, and he would have things to do with his back pocket, or that famous trick of his of unleashing his collar from the front, or those hands were giving themselves a self-manicure, or anything to keep the camera’s eye on him.’ If you keep your eyes on him you see him deliberately making too much play with some sugar tongs or lighting cigarette after cigarette in an ostentatious manner.

His mesmerising quality wasn’t just a matter of tricks, however. John Huston, who directed him as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (a gay character, though the studio insisted that only gardenia perfume could be mentioned), said that Lorre’s work often seemed quite nondescript on set, but the rushes made it plain that ‘some subtlety of expression was seen by the camera and recorded by the microphone that the naked eye and ear did not get.’ The Maltese Falcon was part of what Lorre later regarded as the golden era of his time in Hollywood: the years at Warner Bros, when in the vast physique of Sidney Greenstreet the tiny Lorre finally had a worthy counterpoint, and when his friendship with Humphrey Bogart flourished in bars and in the saunas at the Finlandia Baths where they went to steam off their hangovers. In All through the Night (1942), Lorre was a bug-eyed Nazi agent to Bogart’s racketeer. In Casablanca (1943), he was the neurotic, baby-faced Ugarte to Bogart’s Rick. In his scenes with Bogart, it’s he, not Bogart, who dominates. But Bogart was the star and he was merely a ‘character’. That was always how it was for Lorre.

For a while, in the mid-1940s, it looked as though he might just manage to live the Hollywood dream, as his friends Bogart and Bacall did. He ditched his first wife, the German Expressionist actress Celia Lovsky, who had subordinated her whole life to his (and continued to do so even after the divorce, up until his death and beyond – she seems to have been Youngkin’s principal source and he writes of her ‘immutable’ devotion to him). Lorre’s second wife, Karen Verne, was a former toothpaste model and actress, much more in the Bacall mould than Celia. After they married, Lorre rented a ranch for them in Mandeville Canyon. He slimmed down to a dapper figure on a diet of steak and spinach. Youngkin writes that he ‘lived out a kind of frontier fantasy’, outfitting himself in ‘tooled belts, silver buckles, piped pockets and stitched boots’, collecting cowboy hats from local wranglers and revelling in American vernacular (‘Hello pop’ or ‘ Cream him, daddio!’). Youngkin includes a photo of Lorre and Verne riding on horseback, in crisp, clean shirts, looking the epitome of West Coast health.

It was all pretty illusory. The marriage was ruined by his drugs, her drink and their inability to have a child. What’s more, Lorre knew full well that he was not ‘the all-American boy’ (his own phrase) whatever he wore or said. Youngkin shows how the Bogart period of Lorre’s life was also the time when another ‘emblematic personality’ reappeared: Brecht, who in 1941 showed up in what he liked to call the ‘cesspool’ of Hollywood. Brecht and Lorre would often meet in the evenings – with Lorre frequently lending Brecht money he could ill afford – to talk through the finer points of stagecraft. For Lorre, Brecht was the anti-Hollywood. Where Bogart was always immaculately dressed, Brecht made a point of not washing or shaving if he had an important meeting, in case it seemed he was trying to ingratiate himself with capitalist studio executives. His hairstyle was once described as ‘like a treatment for lice’. Lorre had a lot of sympathy with Brecht’s contempt for commercial movies, these ‘laxatives of the soul’, as the playwright called them. Brecht, moreover, was one of the few people who appreciated Lorre’s greatness. According to Eric Bentley, he believed that Lorre was the modern Hamlet and was fond of quoting the line ‘He is fat and scant of breath’ to prove what a great Hamlet Lorre would have made. The obstacle was getting anyone to finance such a project. In 1946, a Brecht-Lorre modernisation of Macbeth fell through, because no studio would make it.

In 1947, Brecht returned to Germany to ‘get his theatre together again’. He told a friend, ‘I need Lorre . . . Without him, I can hardly imagine the whole thing. He has to play my parts and great classical parts too. We have a very definite style prepared and conversations and recitations by Lorre showed me that he has grown and that he has his best time as an actor (and director) before him.’ He would ‘again become a great German actor’. Brecht was wrong. Lorre was more addicted to American fame than either of them realised. While the playwright did indeed enjoy his glory days after the war, Lorre had little before him but more drugs, bankruptcy and more tawdry Hollywood roles. His own attempt to become more like Brecht, his 1950 direction of Der Verlorene, a critique of Hitler’s Germany, was a critical failure. The one great happiness of his last two decades was the birth of a daughter, Catharine, from an ill-judged third marriage.

Brecht had not been wrong about Lorre’s greatness, though; it was just that he had never really understood in what it consisted, because he never appreciated film as an art form. While Brecht excoriated the cesspool of Hollywood from without, Lorre purified it from within. No film with him in it is entirely worthless.

Bee Wilson’s The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us is published by John Murray. She is a research fellow in the history of ideas at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Visit the book's website

Did you know? Eruv...

By ALEX MINDLIN

STRUNG together out of poles and wire, the symbolic boundary known as an eruv is a flimsy thing. Under Jewish law, however, it has all the strength of a masonry wall. Within its enclosure, observant Jews are freed from certain Sabbath prohibitions on transporting items or people outdoors. For example, they may carry a prayer shawl to synagogue or push a child in a stroller.

So it was good news for many when a group of rabbis decided last fall to extend an uptown eruv southward. Formerly, the eruv had run from 125 Street to 56th Street; by summertime, it will stretch to Houston Street. But one area conspicuously left out of the eruv is the Lower East Side. And Jews in that neighborhood are asking, why not us? "It's very important to many of us," said Jonathan Shore, a board member of the Stanton Street Shul, a Lower East Side synagogue. "I'll say it right out: I want an eruv." If there was a tiny note of defiance in Mr. Shore's tone, it sprang from a fact of religious geography. Unlike most other Manhattan neighborhoods, the Lower East Side has traditionally shunned the eruv.

"It's like a taboo word," said Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, manager for religious life at the N.Y.U. Jewish center, who helped organize the eruv's extension to Houston Street. "There are strong voices on the Lower East Side who are opposed to putting up an eruv, and we didn't really have an interest in butting heads with them." Nor, he said, had anyone in the neighborhood offered to help pay for an extension.

The strongest of the anti-eruv voices was once Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a Lower East Side sage who was considered by many the leading authority of his time on Jewish law. Rabbi Feinstein, who died in 1986, believed that no eruv could ever be erected in Manhattan — the island's street layout and traffic patterns made it impermissible, he said — and his influence was such that it was unthinkable for any Lower East Side rabbi to contradict him. "Rav Moshe was the rule, and when it came to Jewish law, no one could touch Rav Moshe's toenails," said Azriel Siff, the rabbi at Chasam Sofer, a synagogue on Clinton Street. "As a result, the Lower East Side never had an eruv and never will have an eruv." Nor, he added, does it need one: "The Lower East Side survived for hundreds of years without an eruv."

Some disagree on that last point. Juda Engelmayer, the owner of Kossar's Bialys, a 70-year-old bakery, said he had seen the local Orthodox community dwindle. "If I had to survive from the Orthodox Jewish business on the street, I would have closed my doors," he said. The eruv, he said, will reverse the decline. "People will say, 'Hey, I'll come down here, there's an eruv, I can carry,' " Mr. Engelmayer said. "And maybe a community would grow down here."

Wow! Great Design!!!

I am not known for being easily stunned, but this web site had me wondered about the sheer ingeniousness of the three guys who made it all happen. Seemingly useless, serving no purpose but to show off the elements of style and artwork. BRAVO!

LRB: Israeli Lobby

by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Download full article or read it here online

9/11: The Ground Zero Conspiracy Theories

Here is a great write-up on the current state of the theories about 9/11, most of which (in my humble opinion) have some relevance, and all of which are infinitely better than what we have as an official theory.

See the New Yorker Magazine article

Wanna fly non-stop to Pakistan? You can!

Pakistan International now offers its world class hospitality, non stop to and from Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore. Now fly Non Stop

Pakistan to Toronto in less than 14 hours.
Starting 3rd March 2006.
Every Tuesday, Friday & Sunday.

Pakistan to New York in less than 13 hours.
Starting 28th March 2006.
Every Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday

Enjoy:

Hassle-free travel with no transit stops
No lost baggage in transit
Quickest way to reach your loved ones
Meeting your business commitments on time

Споемте, друзья?

Be a peep...

Move your mouse over these people at the bus stop and see what they are hiding....

The REAL Simpsons...

Great re-enactment of the opening sequence of The Simpsons done by the humans. See it here

For Bikers Only

Москва, которой больше нет...

How Pepsi is really made

LRB: Cyber Jihad

by Charles Glass

The Secret History of al-Qaida by Abdel Bari Atwan
[ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Saqi, 256 pp, £16.99

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Scheuer
[ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Potomac, 307 pp, £11.95

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden ed. Bruce Lawrence trans. James Howarth
[ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Verso, 292 pp, £10.99

Osama: The Making of a Terrorist by Jonathan Randal
[ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Tauris, 346 pp, £9.99

When I was five years old, the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, threatened to bury me. That was in 1956, when he buried the Hungarian Revolution. In California we welcomed Hungarian victims of Soviet brutality while finding no room for the Guatemalans whose democracy the CIA had crushed two years earlier. We were trained to ignore our victims and to fear our enemy. After all, Khrushchev could have buried us, even if he did not mean to do so literally, so much as to attend the funeral of capitalism. His formidable arsenal, we were told by Senator Kennedy, when he ran for president in 1960, contained more intercontinental ballistic missiles than ours. Soviet scientists propelled the first satellite and the first man into space. The Soviets had more manpower, more tanks and more dedication than we would ever have, somnolent as we were in our material comfort. ‘Monolithic Communism’ ruled most of the Eurasian landmass. J. Edgar Hoover, America’s chief law enforcer, warned us about ‘godless Communists’ and their designs on our liberties in his bestselling Masters of Deceit. Other titles in the red-baiting crusade – yes, they called it a crusade – were You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists) and None Dare Call It Treason. Under banners proclaiming that ‘The only ism for me is Americanism’, and ‘Better Dead than Red’, Dr Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade held rallies that were guaranteed to fill the Hollywood Bowl.

Every morning at my parochial school, we pledged allegiance to the flag, sang the national anthem and prayed for the conversion of Russia. The otherwise thoughtful Sisters of the Immaculate Heart sometimes asked us – a kind of moral quiz – what we would do if the Communists burst into the classroom ‘right now’, levelled guns at our heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were undermining the American way of life with foreign ideas like socialised medicine, racial mixing and unemployment insurance. The most compelling TV series was I Led Three Lives, based on the autobiography of Herbert Philbrick. Normal, God-fearing Americans shunned Communist cadre Philbrick; but we viewers knew he was secretly – and patriotically – working for good old J. Edgar at the FBI to send his comrades to the slammer. I understand now why Dalton Trumbo and Larry Adler hightailed it to England. Bad as those days were, brother, we never had it so good.

Now, the kids are terrified of some guy in a cave. The successors of McCarthy, Hoover and the 1950s television network bosses teach them that the madman Osama bin Laden can kill them at any minute, that he hates their freedom (perhaps not so much as their parents do) and is out to get them just because they are free. Unlike Khrushchev, Osama bin Laden has neither ICBMs nor nuclear warheads capable of destroying mankind ten times over. He does not even have a country. Yet he scares more than Khrushchev did. As every American schoolchild saw, bin Laden attacked the homeland on 11 September 2001 – burying a few thousand of us. He may yet bury more. We, of course, are sending his kind to their graves in Afghanistan, Iraq and other corners of the Islamic patrimony.

Osama’s is a two-theatre war: one on the battlefield, the other on the airwaves. For a guy on the run, he is not doing badly. Although his loyalists are killed, wounded and captured, volunteers for his holy war increase in proportion to the dearth of recruits to the American armed forces. While the US military lowers entrance requirements and raises pay, Osama’s guarantee of hardship, hunger and probable death has young Muslims jumping the jihad queue. By body count – which proved an unsure indicator in Vietnam – the US is winning. It has killed and incarcerated more Muslims than Osama has Westerners. But Osama has the upper hand. The American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, ostensibly designed to capture him, has not prevented him from popping up several times a year on television and the internet. America’s ‘public enemy number one’, a term dating from Hoover’s enforcement of America’s experiment with Saudi-style Prohibition, has a more devoted television following than Desperate Housewives and Big Brother. His pronouncements invariably lead the news. When he mentions a book, it scales the bestseller lists. If he endorses a war in, say, Iraq, the roads clog with volunteers. This guy is box office. Osama sells.

The Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who spent three days with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, calls the al-Qaida leader’s use of modern communications ‘cyber-jihad’. Cyber and television jihad are parts of the war that the former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer believes bin Laden is winning. Scheuer, whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised when bin Laden and al-Qaida detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.’ Why? As Scheuer notes in Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, and as the collected pronouncements in Messages to the World make clear, bin Laden will attack the United States again because he said he will. He is a man of his word.

In his introduction to Messages to the World, Bruce Lawrence writes: ‘Bin Laden is not an original thinker.’ What gives these statements ‘their unique force . . . are his literary gifts. Bin Laden has earned many labels by now – fanatic, nihilist, fundamentalist, terrorist – but what actually distinguishes him, among a host of those described in these ways, is that he is first and foremost a polemicist.’ What in fact distinguishes him is that he acts. His polemic, taken alone, would not grant him global prominence. Until he attacked American targets in the late 1990s, most of the Western world ignored him as another crank in a turban. His expulsion to Afghanistan from Sudan in May 1996, at America’s insistence, marked a change in bin Laden’s modus operandi that would increase his media celebrity. The veteran Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, in his detailed and thoroughly researched biography Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, noted that in 1996 ‘he crossed the threshold from a war of words against Saudi Arabia and the United States and planning violent operations to executing his first incontrovertible acts of terrorism.’ The acts themselves – attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen, on American embassies in East Africa, and on the United States itself in September 2001 – increased his audience share in both East and West. Similarly, George Bush’s pulpit depends on his control of the largest nuclear armoury on earth – not on his eloquence – and his predisposition to launch invasions. Violence, potential and real, rather than the force of their polemic obliges us to heed them.

Bin Laden’s utterances, beautifully translated by James Howarth and well edited with informative footnotes by Lawrence, prove a better guide to his intentions and Weltanschauung than the same words mediated by CNN anchors and New York Times columnists. He does not appear to be deranged, as his detractors insist he is. His message is plain: leave the Muslim world alone, and it will leave you alone. Kill Muslims, and they will kill you. ‘America won’t be able to leave this ordeal unless it pulls out of the Arabian Peninsula, and it ceases its meddling in Palestine, and throughout the Islamic world,’ bin Laden told the al-Jazeera correspondent Taysir Alluni six weeks after the 11 September attacks. ‘If we gave this equation to any child in any American school, he would easily solve it within a second.’ When Bush said in 2004 that his was ‘a war against people who hate freedom’, bin Laden responded: ‘Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example.’ In December 1998, two months after his followers had destroyed the American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and killed hundreds of Africans, bin Laden justified the murder of unarmed civilians on al-Jazeera:

The infidels tell Muslims that bin Laden is threatening to kill civilians – yet what are they doing in Palestine? They’re not only killing innocents, but children as well! . . . I say there are two sides in the struggle: one side is the global Crusader alliance with the Zionist Jews, led by America, Britain and Israel, and the other side is the Islamic world. It is not acceptable in such a struggle as this that he [the Crusader] should attack and enter my land and holy sanctuaries and plunder Muslims’ oil, and then when he encounters any resistance from Muslims, to label them terrorists. This is stupidity, or considering others stupid.

‘They evidently won’t wise up without the language of beatings and killings,’ bin Laden said in his post-9/11 al-Jazeera interview. ‘So, as they kill us, without a doubt we have to kill them, until we obtain a balance of terror. This is the first time, in recent years, that the balance of terror has evened out between the Muslims and the Americans; previously, the Americans did to us whatever they pleased, and the victim wasn’t even allowed to complain.’ Jonathan Randal’s caustic aside in Osama sums up the American attitude: ‘How odd that many foreigners thought the United States ran a global empire and intervened at will in the affairs of countries great and small.’

Israel’s brutality to Palestinians and, in particular, its 1982 invasion of Lebanon appear to have inspired bin Laden’s world-view:

The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon with the help of its Third Fleet . . . I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred. All over the place, houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing, crushing their residents, while bombs rained down mercilessly on our homes . . .

As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine and would be prevented from killing our women and children. On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy.

Attention! the old French saying goes, cet animal est très méchant, quand on l’attaque il se défend.

Bin Laden’s recalibration of violence between the West and Islam matches his capture of airtime on the world’s media. On the internet and television, he out-punches Bush. Unlike Bush, he is articulate and coherent. His rationale for violence is simple. You have attacked Muslims for the past century, and now Muslims are taking the war to you. ‘As I speak,’ bin Laden said in a sermon released on videotape in February 2003, ‘our wounds have yet to heal from the Crusader wars of the last century against the Islamic world, or from the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between France and Britain, which brought about the dissection of the Islamic world into fragments.’ Bin Laden is not fabricating Israeli oppression in the West Bank and Gaza or American interference in Islam’s political, cultural and financial life. He is one of the first preachers to address Muslims’ experiences in words they understand and deeds they believe are committed for their benefit. His imagery harks back to their earliest religious education. Even a secularist and bon vivant like Abdel Bari Atwan is not immune. When he stayed in bin Laden’s Afghan encampment in 1996,

the resident imam called us to al Fajr (dawn prayers). It was intensely beautiful, echoing round the lofty mountains. Some of bin Laden’s followers had taken on the names of military commanders from early Islamic conquests, and I felt as though I had stepped back into the past: here was Abu Ubaydah, there Abu Mu’adh, Abu Shayb, Abu Dharand, Abu al-Walid . . .

They had turned their backs on life a long time ago and were in a hurry to get to eternal life in the hereafter. All spoke longingly of the martyrdom they hoped for. I found it remarkable that so many of the mujahidin possessed the very highest academic qualifications. There were doctors, engineers and teachers among them, people who had left their jobs to join the jihad.

Occasionally, bin Laden’s words resonate even in the West. After the Madrid bombs that killed 191 people on suburban trains in March 2004, bin Laden addressed the ‘peoples of Europe’ on videotape: ‘In what creed are your dead considered innocent but ours worthless? By what logic does your blood count as real and ours as no more than water? Reciprocal treatment is part of justice, and he who commences hostilities is the unjust one.’

Bin Laden determines the pace at which he makes revelations, declares jihad, offers truces, condemns American military adventures and grants interviews. Abdel Bari Atwan recalls the circumstances that led to his interview with bin Laden in 1996, when the US was already offering $1 million for his capture. Atwan, who had shown little interest in bin Laden, didn’t request an interview. The invitation came through Khaled al-Fawwaz, who was then the representative of bin Laden’s Reform and Advice Committee in London – he was later arrested.

Bin Laden . . . seems to have developed a very good sense of how to use the media over the years, and when he decided to declare war on the US, he wanted it to be known the world over. He instructed al-Fawwaz to invite other selected media professionals for interviews, too. From the newspaper sector, only the British journalist Robert Fisk and I were chosen.

ABC News, Channel Four and CNN, whose producer Peter Bergen spotted bin Laden’s importance early on, also accepted. Over the years, so did several Arab and Pakistani networks. The BBC and CBS declined, Atwan writes, out of lack of interest – editorial decisions that must have been regretted. Since 2001, no journalist would turn down an offer to interview bin Laden for any reason other than fear for their safety or of subsequent internment by the CIA. The interviews are few, but recorded proclamations are many.

The bin Laden who emerges in the interviews and epistles collected in Messages to the World is the figure astutely observed by Scheuer: ‘For nearly a decade now, bin Laden has demonstrated patience, brilliant planning, managerial expertise, sound strategic and tactical sense, admirable character traits, eloquence and focused, limited war aims. He has never, to my knowledge, behaved or spoken in a way that could be described as “irrational in the extreme”.’ Scheuer criticises pundits – from the elderly Orientalist Bernard Lewis to the neocons on Fox – for consistently dismissing bin Laden as insane. ‘Bin Laden is described,’ Scheuer writes, ‘alternately as a “stateless psychopath”, a man of “mad ambitions”, the leader of “a new breed of savage and suicidal terrorists”’ who follow a ‘“fanatical warping of Islam”; a “mass murderer” who, with al-Qaida, produces “mumbo-jumbo to justify their various atrocities” . . . These writers were wrong before 11 September and are wrong now, although their stubborn resistance to post-11 September reality is remarkable.’

Bin Laden’s earliest messages were directed to Islamic scholars, who were neglecting, as he saw it, their duty to guide the faithful. In 1994, condemning the Saudi clerics who endorsed the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, he reminded them of the Prophet Muhammad’s dictum, ‘Whoever enters the Sultan’s door has been led astray.’ Throughout 1994 and 1995, he pleaded with Muslim scholars to ‘come and lead your umma, and call her to God, and return her to religion in order to correct beliefs, spread knowledge, enjoin good and forbid evil. Call her to jihad for the sake of God Almighty and call her to motivate people for it.’

Two types of scholar coexist in bin Laden’s cosmology: the good, who are in prison for criticising rulers, and the courtiers, who serve apostasy. It has fallen to bin Laden himself to fill the void. He told CNN’s Peter Arnett in March 1997: ‘When the Saudi government transgressed in oppressing all voices of the scholars and the voices of those who call for Islam, I found myself forced . . . to carry out a small part of my duty of enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.’ Men do not make laws, God does. Scholars have the important task of understanding, interpreting and applying God’s law. Bin Laden does not believe in legislators, because there is nothing to legislate. Law is eternal. It issues in the Sharia. There can be jurists and governors, but not legislators. This vision underpins his hatred of secular regimes in the Muslim world, whether democratic or dictatorial. He has a special animus against the United Nations, whose resolutions not only contradict Sharia but tend to be harmful to Muslims – like the 1947 resolution creating Israel in Palestine. He insists that ‘no sane Muslim should take his grievance to the United Nations. As for Muslims, they are not allowed to seek the help of these infidel, man-made organisations.’ When the Islamic umma is threatened, as bin Laden believes it is, the scholar’s duty is to struggle in its defence. The struggle is jihad.

In February 1998, under the banner of the World Islamic Front, bin Laden, together with Muslim fundamentalists from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Egypt, declared jihad on the United States, benefactor of Israel and of the tyrants who rule the Islamic birthplace in Saudi Arabia. The four self-declared leaders pronounced that

To kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty incumbent upon every Muslim in all countries, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Holy Mosque from their grip, so that their armies leave all the territory of Islam, defeated, broken and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of God Almighty: ‘Fight the idolators at any time, if they first fight you.’

In Imperial Hubris, Scheuer describes this jihad:

Theirs is a war against a specific target and for specific, limited purposes. While they use whatever weapons come to hand – including weapons of mass destruction – their goal is not to wipe out our secular democracy, but to deter us by military means from attacking the things they love. Bin Laden et al are not eternal warriors; there is no evidence they are fighting for fighting’s sake, or that they would be lost for things to do without a war to wage. There is evidence to the contrary, in fact, showing bin Laden and other Islamist leaders would like to end the war, get back to their families, and live a less martial lifestyle. They share the attitude of the Afghan mujahideen during the Afghan-Soviet war: they are weary of war, but not war weary in a way making them ready to compromise or fight less enthusiastically.

Some of bin Laden’s declarations, however, point to a millenarian vision of permanent warfare between Islam and the rest of the world. ‘Although our enemy lies,’ he stated in an audiotape broadcast by al-Jazeera in January 2004, ‘our religion tells the truth when it stipulates: you fight, so you exist.’ Two months later, Islamists detonated the Madrid bombs. Afterwards, bin Laden was more conciliatory, offering on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya ‘a peace proposal in response to positive recent exchanges’. Spain had just elected a socialist government, whose first action was to keep its election promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.

So I present to them this peace proposal, which is essentially a commitment to cease operations against any state that pledges not to attack Muslims or intervene in their affairs, including the American conspiracy against the great Islamic world. This peace can be renewed at the end of a government’s term and the beginning of a new one, with the consent of both sides. It will come into effect on the departure of its last soldier from our lands, and it is available for a period of three months from the day this statement is broadcast . . . Therefore, stop spilling our blood in order to save your own.

Anti-semitism of a vicious kind infects many of the bin Laden edicts. His rhetoric harks back to a moment in early Islamic history, when Muhammad and his followers fought non-Muslim tribes who happened to be Christian, Jewish and polytheist. ‘These Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery,’ bin Laden stated in a 53-minute audiotape broadcast on 14 February 2003. ‘They will leave you nothing, either in this world or the next.’ In the same epistle, he brought down the Prophet Muhammad’s wrath on the Jews:

Our umma has also been promised victory over the Jews, as our Prophet told us: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims fight and kill the Jews. They will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will say: O Muslim, oh servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, so come and kill him. This is except for the boxthorn tree, which is the tree of the Jews.’

Although the passage above comes from a hadith of the Prophet that is not recognised by all Muslims, its message is clear: defeat of the Jews is a religious priority. However, other epochs in Muslim history, when the umma’s existence was not threatened, show that anti-semitism, far from being essential to the Muslim message, is antithetical to it. Bin Laden, subtle in other ways, rarely distinguishes between Zionism and Judaism, between Israeli actions against Palestinians and the long history of Muslim-Jewish fraternisation throughout the Islamic world, between the politics of the moment and the essential duty of Muslims to honour the previous Peoples of the Book – Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians. Bin Laden’s anti-semitism contrasts with the golden ages of Islam, when the Muslim world welcomed Jews fleeing Christian persecution in Europe. The Ottoman Empire, the princely states of North Africa and Islamic Persia all made themselves havens for Jews. In pre-British Iraq, Jews were so much a part of society’s fabric that the banks closed, not on Friday for Muslim prayers, but on the Jewish Sabbath. Bin Laden is introducing a new concept into Islam when he says, as he did in 1998: ‘Every Muslim, from the moment they realise the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion.’ His belief perhaps, but not Islam’s.

In the same way, bin Laden’s Muslim tribalism takes precedence over the right of self-determination in the case of East Timor. In a letter dated 3 November 2001 to al-Jazeera’s Kabul bureau, bin Laden wrote:

Look at the position of the West and the United Nations with regard to events in Indonesia. They moved to partition the most populous nation in the Islamic world. That criminal Kofi Annan publicly put pressure on the Indonesian government, telling it that it had 24 hours to partition and separate East Timor from Indonesia, otherwise he would have to introduce military forces to do it. The Crusader armies of Australia were on the shores of Indonesia and they did in fact intervene and separate East Timor, which is part of the Islamic world.

East Timor, a former Portuguese colony whose population was almost entirely Catholic and animist, had never been part of the Islamic world. Encouraged by Washington in December 1975, the secular dictator of Indonesia, Suharto, invaded the country. Over the next 25 years, Indonesian occupation forces supplied by the United States defence industry killed or starved to death about a quarter of the population – more than 200,000 people – and implanted Muslim settlers from Java in their place. When this was done with less ruthlessness by Israelis to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, bin Laden condemned it. A strong odour of hypocrisy hovers over his endorsement of ethnic cleansing by Muslims against Christian East Timorese. After Suharto’s fall, the UN brokered an agreement and sponsored a referendum in which the vast majority of East Timorese voted for the independence that they finally won – after a final, brutal spasm of Indonesian violence in 1999 – in 2002.

By restoring the Muslim world to Islamic rule free of American manipulation, bin Laden seeks to establish rightful governance as in the Prophet’s days. The Taliban’s Afghanistan was his ideal Islamic society. But many Muslims, perhaps a majority, who admire bin Laden for his resistance to the United States would balk at Taliban rule in their homelands. Perfect states tend to alienate their citizens, who usually overthrow them as soon as they are given the opportunity.

Bin Laden would do well to study the example of another charismatic preacher who shunned worldly pleasures and condemned the corrupt despots and bogus scholars of his day. Fra Girolamo Savonarola’s sermons against the excesses of the Medici in Florence were as popular as bin Laden’s videotapes and internet epistles are today. Like bin Laden, he longed for the pure, simple life of his religion’s earliest days and the destruction of the worldly magnificence that had accreted to it. Medici and priestly corruption gave him an audience. Florentine zealots expelled the Medici in 1494 and, as the Taliban did, banished all signs of luxury. Like bin Laden, Savonarola refused public office but maintained his influence through his words. A confraternity of young men, not unlike the Taliban’s religious police or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, broke into houses to seize dice, cards and other amusements that diverted attention from the Almighty. Savonarola’s brotherhood warned women to dress modestly and interfered, via a system of household spying, in everyone’s private life. It did not help his cause that he had condemned the pope and all the princes of Italy for their dishonesty and unChristian behaviour. By 1498, Florence had wearied of religious piety and hanged him. Prophets are popular until they reach the Promised Land.

One wonders how long any Muslim population, however much its ears are attuned to the words of Osama bin Laden, the revolutionary outsider and nemesis of American imperialism, would last under a state ruled by him. How long would the Iraqis or Syrians or Indonesians tolerate the religious police instructing them how to dress and act and think? How many years would they endure spying by their neighbours to ensure their conformity with his version of Sunni Islam? How long would it be before al-Qaida’s members themselves succumbed to the blandishments of power and wealth? ‘You must know the proverb,’ Machiavelli wrote in The Art of War, ‘“War makes thieves, and peace hangs them.”’

Charles Glass’s The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East is published by HarperCollins in May and The Northern Front by Saqi in June.

St. Slobodan

And so it has began, there is now a mural at the Socialist Party headquarters in Belgrade that depicts the martyrdom of Saint Slobodan, who was secretly taking antibiotic rifampicin to get transferred to Moscow.
Religion, the ultimate clutch of the ignorant...

LRB: A History of Nighttime

by David Wootton

...Our ancestors, it seems, did not sleep as we do, we who live by clock time. Their night was divided into a first sleep and a second sleep; in the early hours they woke. Some meditated, some prayed, some read by candlelight (though candles, even when made of mutton fat, were a luxury: the poor relied on rushlights), some talked, some made love. Everyone knew the difference between first sleep and second sleep, and no one expected to sleep right through. Our own sleep patterns are profoundly artificial and unnatural, which may be why so many of us need sleeping pills to get what we think of as a good night’s sleep...

...What happens in the night is that we are alone with our thoughts, out of which we conjure our own private hells and personal demons. Our brains are ceaselessly wheeling and rolling, and we are never so deceived as by ourselves. Even in our sleep they are at work: dreams, Nashe argues, are not portents but reworkings of our undigested experiences. But Nashe can’t openly avow his disbelief in demons and spirits, in witches and conjurers, though he does assure us that we have only to face up to them to put them to flight, and he can’t openly dismiss portents and prognostications when they are authorised by the Bible....

...In the First World War, Daylight Saving Time was adopted as an efficiency measure, first by Germany, then by Britain, and finally by the United States and, two weeks later, Canada. In Britain, unlike most of Europe, DST was never repealed, though it was temporarily extended during the Second World War to Double Summer Time, and between 1968 and 1971 the country was on Permanent Summer Time – my wife, who loves the light, says these were her halcyon days. In America, federal DST ceased in 1919 (the farmers were bitterly opposed to it), though it was soon established over much of the North-East by local ordinances: by the late 1930s about a quarter of the population observed DST. It was reintroduced nationally after Pearl Harbor, and repealed immediately the war ended. After 1945, cities and states chose their own time, which inevitably resulted in a good deal of confusion: only in 1966 did the Uniform Time Act impose a national DST (in 1974, during the oil crisis, the country went briefly onto Permanent Summer Time). Most countries now employ some form of DST...

At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime by Roger Ekirch [ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Weidenfeld, 447 pp, £20.00

Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward by David Prerau [ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Granta, 256 pp, £14.99

As a small child, I was afraid of the dark, or rather of the monsters that entered my bedroom under cover of darkness. As an adult, I feel safe in my bed, and, until recently, I was never in true darkness except when in bed. But I have been reacquainting myself with the dark: I have become a weekly commuter, and spend part of each week on a narrow-boat. In winter, when the sky is cloudy, I have been leaving my boat and returning to it in pitch darkness: stumbling along the towpath, trying to fit a key into a lock by touch, feeling my way from one end of the boat to the other to reach the main battery switch. Because I have dogs, one of which has to be kept on a lead because he would catch sleeping waterfowl if he could, I have to venture forth into the dark last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Thus I have become acquainted with shades and degrees of dark of which I was previously unaware, from pitch black to the bright light of the full moon, and acquainted, too, with the noises of the night, the barking of foxes, the hooting of owls, the cracking of the fire, the stirring of the sleeping dogs, the sound of rainfall (particularly loud on the roof of a boat).

The other night I came back late from dinner with a colleague. There was a clear sky, a sharp frost, and no moon. The stars were reflected in the waters of the canal: they looked like Christmas tree lights strung deep below the surface of the water. Looking down, I could not tell if I was three feet or three hundred feet above the water because I was looking into deep space and seeing objects hundreds of light years away. I could identify constellations and planets in this topsy-turvy world. Turning back towards my boat, I realised I could see where I was going. I was seeing my watery world by starlight. If you live in Arizona or India the idea of seeing by starlight won’t surprise you; it certainly will if you live, as I do, in Yorkshire.

If I leave behind my million-candlepower rechargeable torch (which turns night into day, but fades to a glimmer after a few minutes) when I step off my boat at night, I step back in time to a world before street lighting, a world where a misstep can result in a twisted ankle or a broken arm. On the boat, though supplies of hot water are strictly limited, there’s always artificial light to read by. I have never had to prepare for a class by candlelight. I have never had to look for matches by the light of the fire. I always have a torch placed where I can find it in the dark. I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to live without electricity or gas, without torch or match, in a world of sparks and glows and flickering flames. I enter this world only on land, and then only when the electricity fails, which is almost never; when I do, I expect at any moment to be released from it. Or at least I had no idea of what it would be like to live in darkness until I read Roger Ekirch’s history of nighttime, which draws on accounts of the dark in early modern Europe.

In a recent LRB John Demos pondered the perils of popular history, in which events constantly drive the story onwards, in which interpretations receive short shrift, in which character and personality trump situation and circumstance. Ekirch has written a book that anybody with any imagination will find fascinating, but one that is the mirror image of conventional popular history. He has a beady eye for the tiny anecdote, the telling vignette, the mini-narrative, but these events don’t drive his story onward, for it constantly circles back on itself. The whole book is an essay in interpretation, and it is all about situation and circumstance, with only the most fleeting references to characters and personalities. And yet, flickeringly, the dead come alive, as if stepping out of the darkness into the circle of light cast by a lanthorn. Poets and philosophers, the rich and the poor momentarily rub shoulders, as if passing in a narrow street. Goethe, ‘overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space’ on a moonlit night in Naples, is joined on the page by an English grazier, ‘treading home from an evening’s merriment’. ‘Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars,’ he exclaims. To which his companion replies: ‘With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.’

In the dark, ghosts walked. Travel was dangerous. Cities locked their gates as dark fell, and strung chains across the streets. In the darkened alleyways, when curfews were not effectively enforced (as they often weren’t), prostitutes, thieves and drunks took control, though doctors and midwives also went out at night. In darkened houses, people drank, sang songs, told stories and whispered their secrets. At home, a toppling candle could burn down a house, or even a whole town. This book, which has been two decades in the writing, is in a sense merely an endless labouring of the obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less wonderful, for Ekirch spares no pains to rediscover the lost world of the dark.

Our ancestors, it seems, did not sleep as we do, we who live by clock time. Their night was divided into a first sleep and a second sleep; in the early hours they woke. Some meditated, some prayed, some read by candlelight (though candles, even when made of mutton fat, were a luxury: the poor relied on rushlights), some talked, some made love. Everyone knew the difference between first sleep and second sleep, and no one expected to sleep right through. Our own sleep patterns are profoundly artificial and unnatural, which may be why so many of us need sleeping pills to get what we think of as a good night’s sleep.

Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little pamphlet, ‘speedily botched up and compiled’, as he put it, called The Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions. It is full of digressions: ‘I have rid a false gallop these three or four pages,’ Nashe says, resolving to ‘walk soberly and demurely’ for a while. It is very nearly finished before we learn that its ‘accidental occasion’ is the apparitions that appeared before death to a respectable gentleman: apparitions of devils fishing for souls, of carousing sailors, of Lucifer, of ‘an inveigling troupe of naked virgins’, who ‘to the end their natural unshelled shining mother-of-pearl proportions might be more imprintingly apprehended . . . made impudent proffer unto him of their lascivious embraces’. He assures us this story is more or less true, even though he has dressed it up a bit to entertain his readers; ‘and yet methinks it comes off too gouty and lumbering.’

Is there sense in Nashe’s nonsense, grace in his gouty lumbering? The point of the book is surely to turn all apparitions into hallucinations, to argue that ‘everyone shapes his own fears and fancies as he lists.’ What happens in the night is that we are alone with our thoughts, out of which we conjure our own private hells and personal demons. Our brains are ceaselessly wheeling and rolling, and we are never so deceived as by ourselves. Even in our sleep they are at work: dreams, Nashe argues, are not portents but reworkings of our undigested experiences. But Nashe can’t openly avow his disbelief in demons and spirits, in witches and conjurers, though he does assure us that we have only to face up to them to put them to flight, and he can’t openly dismiss portents and prognostications when they are authorised by the Bible. (Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, which Nashe read, is avowedly sceptical, but was published without a licence.) So his mockery of those, including himself, who are ‘benighted in an old wives’ tale of devils and urchins’ (urchins are goblins) has to be balanced by credulity. He starts by finding devils everywhere: in Tewkesbury mustard, in flint, in gunpowder, in the bubbles in streams. So tiny as to be virtually invisible (the microscope has yet to be invented, but Nashe has played with powerful magnifying glasses), they pullulate everywhere. Infinite millions of devils, he assures us, ‘hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose’. These devils, too, lose their demonic character and become aspects of chemistry and biology.

The aim of Nashe’s Terrors of the Night is to shine daylight into the night’s dark corners; but that doesn’t suit Ekirch’s purposes, so he reads Nashe as reporting real terrors, not imaginary ones. A text that Ekirch misses, but one that would fit neatly into the chronology he proposes, is Lord Kames’s essay ‘Dread of Supernatural Powers in the Dark’ (1751), which argues, like Nashe, ‘that the terror occasioned by darkness is entirely owing to the imagination.’ Ekirch never explains why people were frightened of the cold and damp night air, or how they understood the physiology of sight. He has a tendency to recount the discoveries of modern science when Aristotle would be more to the point, and he seriously underestimates the number of people executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe. But these defects, like the fact that neither Ekirch nor the many people who read this book in draft have ever, it seems, looked a goat in the eye, are minor in a book that can’t be summarised but must be experienced.

David Prerau’s Saving the Daylight begins where Ekirch ends. Through the 19th century, more and more city streets were lit by gas lamps; in the early 20th century mains electricity spread rapidly. Artificial light made it possible to live and work by clock time. But clock time itself had become artificial. Clocks had once been set to local noon; but in 1840 the Great Western Railway imposed London time throughout its network. In Oxford, the clock on Tom Tower was fitted with two minute hands, for London time was some five minutes ahead of local time. Greenwich Mean Time only became the national standard in 1880, at which point local time disappeared. The United States was divided into artificial time zones by the railways in 1883. The triumph of artificial lighting and artificial time led in England in 1905 to the first serious call for Daylight Saving Time (in the 18th century Benjamin Franklin had already complained that the inhabitants of London and Paris lived by candlelight and slept by sunshine).

In the First World War, Daylight Saving Time was adopted as an efficiency measure, first by Germany, then by Britain, and finally by the United States and, two weeks later, Canada. In Britain, unlike most of Europe, DST was never repealed, though it was temporarily extended during the Second World War to Double Summer Time, and between 1968 and 1971 the country was on Permanent Summer Time – my wife, who loves the light, says these were her halcyon days. In America, federal DST ceased in 1919 (the farmers were bitterly opposed to it), though it was soon established over much of the North-East by local ordinances: by the late 1930s about a quarter of the population observed DST. It was reintroduced nationally after Pearl Harbor, and repealed immediately the war ended. After 1945, cities and states chose their own time, which inevitably resulted in a good deal of confusion: only in 1966 did the Uniform Time Act impose a national DST (in 1974, during the oil crisis, the country went briefly onto Permanent Summer Time). Most countries now employ some form of DST.

Saving the Daylight is a compact, entertaining, efficient history of artificial time. But the resistance to DST in the US between 1919 and 1966 is a reminder of just how many people continued and continue to live by daylight. DST affected farmers because they had to get milk to the morning train an hour earlier, while hired hands arrived at work too early, when dew was still on the crops, and left too early, when there was still light to work. Even the farmers, though, had matches, torches and electric lights. For a century now, no one (in this country at least) has lived by moonlight, starlight and rushlight.

Ekrich’s history seems long overdue. But perhaps a decent interval has to pass before what was once obvious becomes worthy of its own history. A century after the triumph of the railroad, Braudel rediscovered the power of geography in the world before the steam engine. If you want to re-enter Ekrich’s world in your imagination, close the curtains to shut out the street lighting; if you have a fire, throw a log on it; light a candle; tell a story to your companion or sit alone with your thoughts. Make time and space for the dark. The monsters, I trust, will not appear, but you will find the dark still changes who you are. Living always in the light, we have become artificial people.

David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates will be published by Oxford in June. He teaches early modern history at the University of York, where he is an Anniversary Professor.

NYT: Silent Struggle - A New Theory of Pregnancy

A great novel way at looking at pregnancy as an unending (chemical) struggle between a foetus and a mother is described in an article at the New York Times (click read more at the end of this blurb to read the article in its entirety). As I always suspected, the fact that so many women die during the pregnancy signals how taxing and burdensome the process really is, that kids are selfish and relentlessly demanding from day 1 both biologically and consciously :)
As usual, I am surprised how common sense all new research sounds once it is "discovered", and how quickly a new theory which completely destroys the previous one, too, in its turn, acquires the common sense status almost immediately. Is it our innate hunger for explanations? Seemingly rational schemes of motivations appeal to us for some built-in genetic reasons, some need for simply absorbable cause and effect chains? Could it be that the quantum mechanics is our first foray into something that our genetic makeup is not capable of rationalizing? Is it akin to religion, an article of faith, that has to be accepted without any profound analysis and skepticism?

Too many questions....




Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy
By CARL ZIMMER

Correction Appended

Pregnancy can be the most wonderful experience life has to offer. But it can also be dangerous. Around the world, an estimated 529,000 women a year die during pregnancy or childbirth. Ten million suffer injuries, infection or disability. To David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, these grim statistics raise a profound puzzle about pregnancy. "Pregnancy is absolutely central to reproduction, and yet pregnancy doesn't seem to work very well," he said. "If you think about the heart or the kidney, they're wonderful bits of engineering that work day in and day out for years and years. But pregnancy is associated with all sorts of medical problems. What's the difference?"

The difference is that the heart and the kidney belong to a single individual, while pregnancy is a two-person operation. And this operation does not run in perfect harmony. Instead, Dr. Haig argues, a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it. Dr. Haig's theory has been gaining support in recent years, as scientists examine the various ways pregnancy can go wrong. His theory also explains a baffling feature of developing fetuses: the copies of some genes are shut down, depending on which parent they come from. Dr. Haig has also argued that the same evolutionary conflicts can linger on after birth and even influence the adult brain. New research has offered support to this idea as well. By understanding these hidden struggles, scientists may be able to better understand psychological disorders like depression and autism.

As a biologist fresh out of graduate school in the late 1980's, Dr. Haig decided to look at pregnancy from an evolutionary point of view. As his guide, he used the work of Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University. In the 1970's, Dr. Trivers argued that families create an evolutionary conflict. Natural selection should favor parents who can successfully raise the most offspring. For that strategy to work, they can't put too many resources into any one child. But the child's chances for reproductive success will increase as its care and feeding increase. Theoretically, Dr. Trivers argued, natural selection could favor genes that help children get more resources from their parents than the parents want to give.

As Dr. Haig considered the case of pregnancy, it seemed like the perfect arena for this sort of conflict. A child develops in intimate contact with its mother. Its development in the womb is crucial to its long-term health. So it was plausible that nature would favor genes that allowed fetuses to draw more resources from their mothers. A fetus does not sit passively in its mother's womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother's tissues to extract nutrients.

Meanwhile, Dr. Haig argued, natural selection should favor mothers who could restrain these incursions, and manage to have several surviving offspring carrying on their genes. He envisioned pregnancy as a tug of war. Each side pulls hard, and yet a flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves. "We tend to think of genes as parts of a machine working together," Dr. Haig said. "But in the realm of genetic conflict, the cooperation breaks down."

In a 1993 paper, Dr. Haig first predicted that many complications of pregnancy would turn out to be produced by this conflict. One of the most common complications is pre-eclampsia, in which women experience dangerously high blood pressure late in pregnancy. For decades scientists have puzzled over pre-eclampsia, which occurs in about 6 percent of pregnancies. Dr. Haig proposed that pre-eclampsia was just an extreme form of a strategy used by all fetuses. The fetuses somehow raised the blood pressure of their mothers so as to drive more blood into the relatively low-pressure placenta. Dr. Haig suggested that pre-eclampsia would be associated with some substance that fetuses injected into their mothers' bloodstreams. Pre-eclampsia happened when fetuses injected too much of the stuff, perhaps if they were having trouble getting enough nourishment.

In the past few years, Ananth Karumanchi of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have gathered evidence that suggests Dr. Haig was right. They have found that women with pre-eclampsia had unusually high levels of a protein called soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1, or sFlt1 for short. Other labs have replicated their results. Dr. Karumanchi's group has done additional work that indicates that this protein interferes with the mother's ability to repair minor damage to her blood vessels. As that damage builds up, so does her blood pressure. And as Dr. Haig predicted, the protein is produced by the fetus, not the mother. "When I first came across David Haig's hypothesis, it was absolutely cool," said Dr. Karumanchi. "And it made me feel like I might be on the right track."

Dr. Haig is now collaborating with Dr. Karumanchi and his Harvard Medical School colleagues to understand more about how exactly sFlt1 may cause pre-eclampsia. They describe their research in the latest issue of Current Topics in Developmental Biology. Dr. Haig also made some predictions about the sorts of maternal defenses that have evolved. One of the most intriguing strategies he proposed was for mothers to shut down some of the genes in their own children. This strategy takes advantage of the fact that most of the genes we carry come in pairs. We inherit one copy from our mother and one from our father. In most cases, these pairs of genes behave identically. But in the past 15 years, scientists have identified more than 70 pairs of genes in which the copy from one parent never makes a protein. In some cases, a parent's gene is silenced only in one organ.

Scientists do not fully understand this process, known as genomic imprinting. They suspect that it is made possible by chemical handles called methyl groups that are attached to units of DNA. Some handles may turn off genes in sperm and egg cells. The genes then remain shut off after a sperm fertilizes an egg. Only a few of these genes have been carefully studied to understand how they work. But the evidence so far is consistent with Dr. Haig's theory. One of the most striking examples is a gene called insulin growth factor 2 (Igf2). Produced only in fetal cells, it stimulates rapid growth. Normally, only the father's copy is active. To understand the gene's function, scientists disabled the father's copy in the placenta of fetal mice. The mice were born weighing 40 percent below average. Perhaps the mother's copy of Igf2 is silent because turning it off helps slow the growth of a fetus.

On the other hand, mice carry another gene called Igf2r that interferes with the growth-spurring activity of Igf2. This may be another maternal defense gene. In the case of Igf2r, it is the father's gene that is silent, perhaps as a way for fathers to speed up the growth of their offspring. If the mother's copy of this second gene is disabled, mouse pups are born 125 percent heavier than average. A number of other imprinted genes speed and slow the growth of fetuses in a similar fashion, providing more support for Dr. Haig's theory. And in recent years, some medical disorders in humans have been tied to these imprinted genes. Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, for example, causes children to grow oversize organs that are prone to developing tumors. Some cases of the disorder have been tied to a mutation that replaces a mother's silent copy of Igf2 with an extra copy of the father's. "Both of the copies come from the father, and you get double the amount of Igf2, " said Dr. Haig. The extra Igf2 appeared to cause a fetus to grow too quickly, leading to the syndrome.

Dr. Haig's work is now widely hailed for making sense of imprinted genes. "Molecular biologists had it worked out in exquisite detail, but they had no idea why it existed," said Kyle Summers, a biologist at East Carolina State University. "Haig just comes in and says, 'I know why this is happening,' and explained it." Dr. Haig has recently been exploring his theory's implications for life after birth. "I think it can influence all sorts of social behaviors," he said. Scientists have found that some genes are imprinted in the brain after birth, and in some cases even in adulthood. "Imprinted genes and behavior are the new frontier," said Dr. Lawrence Wilkinson of the University of Cambridge. In a paper to be published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues argue that the evidence on imprinted brain genes — preliminary as it is — fits with Dr. Haig's theory. They call it "the most robust evolutionary hypothesis for genomic imprinting."

One major source of conflict after birth is how much a mother will feed any individual offspring. A baby mammal is more likely to thrive if it can get more milk from its mother. But nursing demands a lot of energy from mothers that could be used for other things, like bearing and nursing more offspring. It turns out that a number of imprinted genes are active in the brain, where they might influence how babies behaved toward their mothers. One strong candidate for that role in mice is a gene known as GnasXI. Normally the mother's copy of the gene is silent. If the father's copy is not working, mouse pups are weak sucklers. They draw so little milk that by 9 days old, they are a quarter of the weight of normal mice. Switching off the father's copy of GnasXI may be putting a brake on the aggressive nursing of their pups.

Some genes continue to be imprinted in the brain even in healthy adults. Dr. Haig has proposed that the evolution of these genes has been shaped by the groups in which mammals live. In many mammal species, females tend to stay in the groups where they are born and males leave. As a result, females tend to share more genes with other members of their group than males. A conflict may emerge between maternal and paternal genes over how the members of the group should act. Maternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the group. Paternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the individual.

"You have to think about resources in a different way," Dr. Wilkinson said. "Instead of thinking about foodstuffs, you have to think about social resources. Your mom and dad want different things from your behavior." Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues are beginning to identify genes that may play this role. One, known as Nesp55, is active in mouse brains. The father's copy of the gene is silent. Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues found that disabling the mother's Nesp55 gene makes mice less likely to explore a new environment. Normally, the mother's copy of Nesp55 may encourage the mice to take more risks on behalf of the group, whether that risk involves looking for food or defending the group. "It's a possibility, but it needs to be proved," said Dr. Wilkinson.

Dr. Wilkinson suspects that conflict between imprinted brain genes may add to the risk for mental disorders, from autism to depression. Because one copy of each of these genes is silenced, they may be more vulnerable. "If you ask me, do I think that imprinted genes are likely in the next 10 years to crop up as mechanisms in mental disorders, I'd say yes," he said. Dr. Haig has enjoyed watching his theory mature and inspire other scientists. But he has also had to cope with a fair amount of hate mail. It comes from across the political spectrum, from abortion opponents to feminists who accuse him of trying to force patriarchy into biology. "People seem to think, 'He must have a political agenda,' " Dr. Haig said. "But I'm not talking at all about conscious behaviors. I'm just interested in these mechanisms and why they evolved."

Correction: March 16, 2006

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about recent research on pregnancy, suggesting that its dangers can be explained by a tug of war between mother and fetus over nutrients, misstated the name of the university of Kyle Summers, a biologist who praised the work. It is East Carolina University, not East Carolina State.

Working from home

Having worked from home for the last two and a half years, I was very glad to read the results of a recent survey (reported in Information Week magazine of March 6, 2006) which claim that 12% of men and 7% of women work naked, while 39% of both genders wear sweats.

New Yorker: The Right to Ridicule

by Ronald Dworkin

The British and most of the American press have been right, on balance, not to republish the Danish cartoons that millions of furious Muslims protested against in violent and terrible destruction around the world. Reprinting would very likely have meant—and could still mean—more people killed and more property destroyed. It would have caused many British and American Muslims great pain because they would have been told by other Muslims that the publication was intended to show contempt for their religion, and though that perception would in most cases have been inaccurate and unjustified, the pain would nevertheless have been genuine. True, readers and viewers who have been following the story might well have wanted to judge the cartoons' impact, humor, and offensiveness for themselves, and the press might therefore have felt some responsibility to provide that opportunity. But the public does not have a right to read or see whatever it wants no matter what the cost, and the cartoons are in any case widely available on the Internet.

Sometimes the press's self-censorship means the loss of significant information, argument, literature, or art, but not in this case. Not publishing may seem to give a victory to the fanatics and authorities who instigated the violent protests against them and therefore incite them to similar tactics in the future. But there is strong evidence that the wave of rioting and destruction—suddenly, four months after the cartoons were first published —was orchestrated by Muslim leaders in Denmark and in the Middle East for larger political reasons. If that analysis is correct, then keeping the issue boiling by fresh republications would actually serve the interests of those responsible and reward their strategies of encouraging violence.

There is a real danger, however, that the decision of the British and American press not to publish, though wise, will be wrongly taken as an endorsement of the widely held opinion that freedom of speech has limits, that it must be balanced against the virtues of "multiculturalism," and that the Blair government was right after all to propose that it be made a crime to publish anything "abusive or insulting" to a religious group.

Freedom of speech is not just a special and distinctive emblem of Western culture that might be generously abridged or qualified as a measure of respect for other cultures that reject it, the way a crescent or menorah might be added to a Christian religious display. Free speech is a condition of legitimate government. Laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted through a democratic process, and a process is not democratic if government has prevented anyone from expressing his convictions about what those laws and policies should be.

Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression; its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended. That is why cartoons and other forms of ridicule have for centuries, even when illegal, been among the most important weapons of both noble and wicked political movements.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness. If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law—if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance—then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws. If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept. Whatever multiculturalism means—whatever it means to call for increased "respect" for all citizens and groups—these virtues would be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship.

Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.

It is often said that religion is special, because people's religious convictions are so central to their personalities that they should not be asked to tolerate ridicule of their beliefs, and because they might feel a religious duty to strike back at what they take to be sacrilege. Britain has apparently embraced that view because it retains the crime of blasphemy, though only for insults to Christianity. But we cannot make an exception for religious insult if we want to use law to protect the free exercise of religion in other ways. If we want to forbid the police from profiling people who look or dress like Muslims for special searches, for example, we cannot also forbid people from opposing that policy by claiming, in cartoons or otherwise, that Islam is committed to terrorism, however misguided we think that opinion is. Certainly we should criticize the judgment and taste of such people. But religion must observe the principles of democracy, not the other way around. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one's religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.