Stuff

Apologies for the paucity of posts last week; I was unwell, and am getting back to things. Here are some stories I noticed.

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post writes aptly:

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.

Moderate voices urge sensitivity to deeply held religious beliefs, and a willingness to apologise where offence is caused. Should He - as I doubt - exist at all, God spare us from moderate voices. Free speech does cause hurt, and - with the exception of incitement to crime - there is nothing wrong in this.

A rather predictable piece by Roy Hattersley in The Times urges mistakenly:

If anybody in Labour’s leadership is interested in the ideas on which “renewal” could be built, Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, published 50 years ago this month, provides the classic formula for relating the ideals of social democracy to the realities of the modern world.

By "the ideals of social democracy", Hattersley means equality of outcome. This has precious little to do with the realities of the modern world. I'm in favour of economic redistribution, but on grounds of autonomy rather than equality. If it's equality of outcome you want, the quickest route may be to damage the quality of secondary education, as Crosland did quite effectively. For a more sober perspective on New Labour and Crosland, see a letter by Bill Rodgers in the current issue of Prospect:

In historic perspective, and despite Iraq, the Blair governments will probably stand the test of time against the running-down years of Wilson and Callaghan. Tony Crosland himself was not a successful minister, and was passed over as chancellor of the exchequer, the job he really wanted, in favour of both Roy Jenkins—as home secretary the one unqualified success of the 1964 government—and Denis Healey. Crosland's real influence was in the 1950s, before he became a minister.

if there were an award for political evasion of the week, it would be won by The Guardian's leader last Friday on the black American singer Paul Robeson, to whom a memorial was unveiled last week in London. Robeson was courageous in his opposition to racism at home, but that's no excuse for the leader writer to add by way of feeble extenuation of Robeson's more disreputable causes: "In the second half of his life, his pro-communist views made him a pariah in his own land. He was a complex and controversial figure."

The historian Harvey Klehr, who has done much to reveal from the Venona decrypts and other sources the extent to which the Soviet Union infiltrated American institutions, wrote in Commentary in May 1989, with reference to a sympathetic biography of Robeson by Martin Duberman (link requires fee):

In 1949 Robeson arrived in Moscow in the midst of Stalin's notorious anti-Zionism campaign. Uneasy at his inability to find old Jewish friends, he asked to see Itzik Feffer, the noted Yiddish writer. Feffer was brought from prison to Robeson's hotel, where he silently communicated that their conversation was being bugged. Other Jewish cultural leaders, he was able to convey, had already been purged; drawing his hand across his throat, he indicated what was to be his own fate as well. Robeson's response was to include a tribute to Feffer during his last Moscow concert. Duberman extenuatingly suggests that the gesture was "all that he could have done without directly threatening Feffer's life," but that life was doomed anyway; more telling is that on his return to the United States, Robeson vehemently denied the existence of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Feffer was shot in 1952.