A Guardian column on "alt-right" celebrity Katie Hopkins' carpetbagging critiques of London stumbles into an important truth. Marina Hyde:
For now, it falls to her [Hopkins] to explain London to the Americans. “Londoners can’t even be honest about these attacks,” she told Fox News. “Because it would mean everything they believed in was false.” >Ah, the false idols of the decadent metropolis! Had Katie spent more than 10 minutes in the World History aisle of Wikipedia, she would know there have always been people who hated cities for what they stood for. The metropolis has at many times served as shorthand for a kind of moral decay and wicked permissiveness that requires (usually forcible) regression. “This place where monsters lurk and steal lives away in an instant,” thunders Katie of the capital’s wickedness. “For nothing.” Dear, dear – it does all seem rather terminal. I wonder what Katie would do with the failed, corruptive experiment that is London? The Khmer Rouge decided that the only solution was to empty the cities, and send their suspiciously educated denizens to the countryside. Come Katie’s revolution, perhaps Londoners will be forcibly migrated too.
Quite right, Marina. Don't forget that anyone wearing glasses will be labeled as a dangerous intellectual and eliminated.
Half a century after United States B-52 bombers dropped more than 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia's countryside Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million ($662 million) war debt.
The demand has prompted expressions of indignation and outrage from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.
Over 200 nights in 1973 alone, 257,456 tons of explosives fell in secret carpet-bombing sweeps – half as many as were dropped on Japan during the Second World War.
The pilots flew at such great heights they were incapable of discriminating between a Cambodian village and their targets, North Vietnamese supply lines – nicknamed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail."
The bombs were of such massive tonnage they blew out eardrums of anyone standing within a 1-kilometre radius.
War correspondent James Pringle was two kilometres away from a B-52 strike near Cambodia's border.
"It felt like the world was coming to an end," he recalls.
According to one genocide researcher, up to 500,000 Cambodians were killed, many of them children.
The bombings drove hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, an ultra-Marxist organisation which seized power in 1975 and over the next four years presided over the deaths of more than almost two million people through starvation disease and execution.
The debt started out as a US$274 million loan mostly for food supplies to the then US-backed Lon Nol government but has almost doubled over the years as Cambodia refused to enter into a re-payment program.
William Heidt, the US's ambassador in Phnom Penh, said Cambodia's failure to pay back the debt puts it in league with Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
"To me, Cambodia does not look like a country that should be in arrears…buildings coming up all over the city, foreign investment coming in, government revenue is rapidly rising," Mr Heidt was quoted as saying by the Cambodia Daily.
"I'm saying it is in Cambodia's interest not to look to the past, but to look at how to solve this because it's important to Cambodia's future," he said, adding that the US has never seriously considered cancelling the debt.
Cambodia's strongman prime minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected to Vietnam, hit back, saying "The US created problems in my country and is demanding money from me."
They dropped bombs on our heads and then ask up to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF (International Monetary Fund) not to lend us money," he told an international conference in early March.
"We should raise our voices to talk about the issue of the country that has invaded other (countries) and has killed children."
Mr Pringle, a former Reuters bureau chief in Ho Chi Minh City, said no-one could call him a supporter of Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia with an iron-fist for three decades.
But he said on this matter he is "absolutely correct."
"Cambodia does not owe a brass farthing to the US for help in destroying its people, its wild animals, its rice fields and forest cover," he wrote in the Cambodia Daily.
American Elizabeth Becker, one of the few correspondents who witnessed the Khmer Rouge's genocide, has also written that the US "owes Cambodia more in war debts that can be repaid in cash."
Mr Hun Sen pointed out that craters still dot the Cambodian countryside and villagers are still unearthing bombs, forcing mass evacuations until they can be deactivated.
"There are a lot of grenades and bombs left. That's why so often Cambodian children are killed, because they don't know that they are unexploded ordnance," he said.
"And who did it? It's America's bombs and grenades."
A diplomat posted in Phnom Penh between 1971 and 1974 told Fairfax Media the food the US supplied Cambodia came from excess food stocks.
"I remember well that shipments of maize were made," he said.
"Cambodians do not eat maize so it was fed to the animals."
He pointed out that the US refused to normalise relations with Vietnam until it accepted to take on the US debt of the former southern regime.
Dana Kramer-Rolls says on Facebook: Dr. Ben Carson got into some trouble by saying that black slaves were immigrants, too. But I heard poetry and wondered what Maya Angelou would have made of it. I'm not her, but here is my take.They came as immigrants, Stolen by invaders, sold by their kings.They came as immigrants, Chained in the holds of ships, the living and the dead.They came as immigrants, Sold, beaten, families torn apart.They came as immigrants,The religion of their mothers mocked and forbidden.They came as immigrants,Now the chains were broken, but they were still lynched, shot.And then it began again.They come as immigrants.Fleeing invaders, fleeing the bombs.They come as immigrants, Washed up on shores, the living and the dead.They come as immigrants,Their religion mocked, families torn apart.They come as immigrants,They think they are safe, but still they are beaten and shot.Will it ever end?
Americans have made quite a cult of the Founding Fathers, the political and military leaders who led the Atlantic colonies to throw off British rule – a remarkable achievement that often is used to support the similar idea of American exceptionalism: that America is a country unlike any other, thanks in large part to the wise choices made by the equally exceptional Fathers.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the Fathers were pretty amazing. George Washington, for instance, had exactly the aristocratic character that was needed to lead a new republic in the 18thcentury. But his ability to charm and impress his contemporaries is now entirely mysterious to us. If he showed up in modern America he would have no hope of a political career. It's hard to imagine what kind of role he could find in public affairs. Aristocratic, eccentric rich guy, perhaps a shadowy investor in cutting edge tech firms?
An amazing FF that we can partially understand is Thomas Jefferson. He gets credit for a wide selection of contributions to the American character and American institutions over more than 50 years of public life. We appreciate and praise his constructive efforts, the importance of which is pretty obvious (freedom of religion); what we wonder is how he addressed all of those issues.
Kevin Gutzman may not have an answer to this question, but he gives a pretty good analysis of what he considers Jefferson's key achievements. This is not a full biography – there are good biographies and they are massive –it's a portrait. Gutzman compares Jefferson to a pointillist painter who created a political philosophy by dealing with one issue at a time. Gutzman himself has a pointillist approach in describing Jefferson, and it works for him.
Gutzman identifies five areas that Jefferson dealt with in the course of his career: Federalism (his opposition to centralized power), Freedom of Conscience (his opposition to established churches), Colonization (what might be better called Deportation, meaning the elimination of racial conflict by eliminating the slaves), Assimilation (of the Native population) and "Mr. Jefferson's University" (the most important piece in Jefferson's desire for public education). Put those 5 issues together and you find yourself treading surprisingly familiar paths through a political landscape that maybe has changed less in the past 200+ years than we might first think. I am particularly thinking of the issue of "federalism," meaning not centralism (as it does in Canada) but quite the opposite, which Jefferson supported because he believed in the legitimacy of the separate states, with their differing institutions and "values" as people say today.
One issue that Gutzman says little about is Jefferson's relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemmings. It's a tough question for an alumnus of Jefferson's own university, but I do have to wonder if she would have been deported, if colonization of slaves and ex-slaves had ever taken place. Is this so ridiculous a question? I think this is just one way that the contradictions of the Founding Fathers' position can be expressed.
So: a book of reasonable length, well-written, with the power to inspire serious contemplation about both Jefferson's time and America's present.
Next session, women will compose 19.5 percent of Congress. “We went from 104 to 104 — down one in the House, up one in the Senate,” reported Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. Obviously we could do better, but on the plus side, we’re just a sliver away from passing Equatorial Guinea when it comes to gender diversity in the nation’s legislature.
Of course, we are no longer taken aback by such comparisons.
Last month I announced I would occasionally revisit some of my better posts of yore. Well, today I recalled my discussion of a Pulitzer-prize-winning novel and its author, Allen Drury, whose books recall a lost time when FDR was the great villain of American politics -- because he ruled by an expansive interpretation of executive authority. Have a look at thee posts that use the label "Allen Drury," starting with this one.
Dear America, We have been watching the drama of your presidential elections with much interest and curiosity for some time now. It’s hard not to notice the many similarities between our own countries and yours. From fiery inauguration protests and bitter disputes about crowd size, to the intelligence service’s forays into politics and the rise of right-wing extremists, it appears that you are traveling very much in our direction—and at the same time, like us, becoming a curiosity for foreign correspondents trying to explain what’s happening in your region to the world. You might be distraught about where you are headed, but we aren’t! Perhaps this will be an opportunity to put our differences aside and recognize how similar we are. Let’s start at the beginning. During the campaign we were surprised to learn of the influence that the head of the American mukhabarat (state security, i.e. your FBI) can wield over the election process, simply by choosing to pursue a certain line of investigation. As you may know, this has been a constant feature of our politics since independence. Our surprise turned to astonishment when we started to witness the blossoming feud between the then-president-elect and the American mukhabarat, another important feature of Arab politics. On top of that, we started to hear reports of foreign meddling in your elections, which some say may have influenced the result. Of course, we are quite familiar with that situation, too, not least because of the efforts of your own administrations over the decades. Yet it came as a surprise to hear talk of “foreign hands” and “secret agendas” in a country like America. We sympathize.
...
The moment at which we felt real solidarity with the American people, though, was when we started hearing BBC reporters talking to your citizens with the patronizing tone they normally reserve for the Middle East. Correspondents were sent to far-flung corners of the United States to talk to farmers and factory workers to try to understand how they feel and to ask condescending questions. I’m from the British Broadcasting Corporation, are you familiar with the BBC? Where do you get your news from? Do you feel angry? Does religion play a role in how you are voting?. (The only thing missing were pictures of people with blue ink on their thumbs; please consider introducing that practice in the future.)
In my years as a university professor, I taught both the English Civil War (=Revolution) and the French Revolutions, and the American one as well, all of them at various levels of detail. On all of them, I read far more material than ever got into my lectures.
I've always had an interest in constitutional law and constitutional change and so lots of facts and theories continue to rattle around in my head, waiting for a moment of relevance when they will pop out.
Here's today's moment of relevance.
It is a sign of real trouble to come that Trump has managed to alienate a large number judges in his first week in office. Any political system that has a meaningful constitution (not necessarily a good, or democratic or even a healthy constitution, just one that more or less functions) needs the support of the judiciary and the senior lawyers to get anything important done. The collaboration (usually an uncomfortable one) between the elected officials and the judiciary etc. is a well-known feature of the American political system; but this applies to places like Pakistan where more than once a quite corrupt, autocratic and military-based government has been stopped in its tracks (or at least slowed down) by lawyers demonstrating and resisting. (On at least one occasion I remember hearing that the lawyers brought clubs (which looked a lot like sticks of rattan!), whether for offensive or defensive purposes I don't know.
In both the English and French Revolutions, some of the earliest conflict was between the executive branch and the constitutional courts. The judges, if I recall correctly, took a "conservative" stand, while the king and his ministers were trying to introduce innovations (partly to raise money) and justifying their actions on the right of the king, or at least the crown, to tell everybody else what to do. The argument over what was constitutional soon got out of hand.
I am not saying that we are on the brink of an American revolution. But the situation has tremendous potential for instability.
I am a regular reader of Josh Marshall's politics website, talkingpointsmemo.com. Back in the early 2000s, I found him one of the most sensible and honest American commentators on both the Bush regime and its disastrous wars.
Recently Josh wrote an optimistic piece on the current political situation, optimism meaning "not primarily a prediction but an ethic, a philosophy, a way of confronting the world." Granting all the terrible problems Americans (yes, and others) face, he also sees a positive challenge. He does it by referring to the famous Lyceum speech made by the young Abraham Lincoln in 1838. A theme in that speech was the apparent lack of opportunity for Americans to win the glory won by the founders of the republic.
[Sez Josh:]
Lincoln explained that his generation faced a paradox. They were blessed with free government. But their dutywas simply to preserve it. They had no field for glory and great deeds like those who had lived during the revolutionary era, the last of whom were just dying at the time. To Lincoln, his generation was both immeasurably blessed and yet robbed of the chance for greatness, condemned to a competent and steadfast mediocrity.
As Lincoln writes ...
This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others?
[Josh:] Our field of vision is quite different today, certainly in retrospect. We know that in 1838 slavery was practiced throughout the South, women couldn't vote, much of what we now know as the architecture of democracy and freedom didn't exist. It's hardly like there was no work left to do. And yet there is a basic similarity. The challenge, the potential for accomplishment, for 'glory' to use that archaic and perhaps uncomfortable word that could be found in preservation and betterment simply couldn't compare to that of creation. There is a certain boringness and restraint inherent in being the preservers and betterers of a republic that has endured for almost a quarter of a millennium.
And yet here we have the opportunity to be its guardians and protectors at a unique moment, perhaps a moment of especial peril. Who would not embrace that challenge? We know the curse: may you live in interesting times. We are living in interesting times. Most of us would not have chosen it. But we have it. I think many of us look back at critical momentous moments in our history, the Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and other comparable passages in the country's history and think, what would I have done? Where would I have been? Well, now's your moment to find out. We are living in interesting times. We should embrace it rather than feel afraid or powerless. We have a fabric of 240 years of republican government behind us. We have the tools we need.
Elsewhere on the Web I have noted other people arguing for an equally important point. Fact-checking Donald Trump at this point is going to be of limited utility. Anyone who cares to know Donald Trump and his character knows what they need to know. Getting involved in debates on his latest outrageous statement just lets him set the terms of the debate, and since he doesn't play fair, what does that get us? . A sense of our own virtue? But that doesn't win elections, deal with climate change, or achieve any of a number of worthwhile goals.
What's needed is for that same fact-checking, critical energy to be put into organizing -- some of which will be reporting facts people need to know, but also in building organizations and movements to resist Trumpism and achieve real political goals. To Americans, let me suggest that the make-up of the House of Representatives and what to do about it should be something you think about ALL THE TIME. The Republicans are in charge now. Make sure, using tactics pioneered by the Tea Party, that they have to take responsibility for every disaster that takes place on their watch. There will be no lack of them.
I have been talking recently to several people who share my interest in the chivalric virtues of courtesy and franchise. My methodology has been pretty crude, largely restricted to looking at scholarly dictionaries in English and French, and reflecting on my own experiences of those languages (but mainly English).
It makes sense to me to trace courtesy back to "court" meaning an enclosed space, a farmyard or a courtyard. The same word designates a judicial institution, so the court is an enclosed space under the control of some kind of superior authority. Go back to that recent article on the British kingdom of Rheged and the reconstruction of its capital in northwestern England. There is exactly one building in that royal settlement that is big enough to have a court(yard).
Court can also mean the business that takes place in such a space, or the institutions that provide the context for legal business.
But legal and political business are not the only things that take place in an enclosed space under superior authority. The people who have such authority also have the wealth and prestige to support a distinct culture. Says Froissart in his description of the court of Foix:
In short, everything considered, though I had before been in several courts of kings, dukes, princes, counts, and noble ladies, I was never at one which pleased me more, nor was I ever more delighted with feats of arms, than at this of the count de Foix. There were knights and squires to be seen in every chamber, hall and court, going backwards and forwards, and conversing on arms and amours. Every thing honourable was there to be found. All intelligence from distant countries was there to be learnt; for the gallantry of the count had brought visitors from all parts of the world. It was there I was informed of the greater part of those events which had happened in Spain, Portugal, Arragon, Navarre, England, Scotland, and on the borders of Languedoc; for I saw, during my residence, knights and squires arrive from every nation. I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the count himself, who cheerfully conversed with me.
If you like to play linguistics on the amateur level, get hold of the Oxford English Dictionary and read the many, many meanings that the word "cheer" has had over the centuries. A good word to think about in connection with the 14th century.
