This just in!

Fascinating relics of perhaps the world’s first real efforts at photo-journalism showed up in London this week. Up to now I’d only read about the quaint old Parisian custom of picking up paving stones and assembling them in neat piles for the sport of battling the troops of an offending regime. But there they are! And in a newspaper!
Unfortunately we don’t seem to be able to emulate Monsieur Thibault his success 154 years later, since both our own regime and that of its colleague-in-arms, Ariel Sharon, are able to keep journalists away from the nasty business of their own troops.
All did not end well in 1848, but liberalism and socialism were not destroyed either.

Revolts in Vienna, Hungary, Prague and Milan were also crushed, but not without forming part of the legend that inspired European socialists for more than a century afterwards.

Vive la Revolution!

Americans more sceptical than ever?

Noam Chomsky, within the text of an extraordinary discussion (in an interview with a Croatian journalist) of the events since September 11 and of broader topics, joins other progressive commentators in arguing that Americans really are not asleep! So, we can’t even believe the media when it reports our attitude toward its attitude?

More surprising, to me at least, was that the Sept. 11 atrocities had the opposite effect among the US population. Very quickly, it was clear that there is far more openness to critical and dissident analysis, and there has been a remarkable upsurge of concern, often activism, about issues that were pretty much off the agenda before – including, among others, the US role in the Middle East. Naturally the media and journals of opinion claim the opposite, hoping to still independent thought and impose obedience. But people who have any contact with the general population know better. Demands for talks have spiralled competely out of control, and the scale and engagement of audiences is without precedent apart from the peak moments of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. The same is evident in sale of books, and in fact by every other relevant measure. Even the media have been to some extent effected, and though still highly restricted, are more open than they have ever been in my experience over 40 years of intensive activism.

The entire interview is fairly long, but long on fairness, and accuracy, and well worth a read.

Who is Arafat?

It takes more than epithets to deal with complex problems. It never hurts to do some thinking. Sharon is almost an open book these days, but many of us want to know why we have such a problem with Arafat?

What is it about Yasir Arafat that makes him so troubling to the United States and Israel? In fact, the problem is not the man himself, as Mr. Sharon and President Bush seem to think, but the political position of the Palestinians in the Arab world today.

Look to the children!

We pride ourselves as a nation on many things, but we are beginning to realize the extent to which there is much false pride. To include our treatment of children in the list may surprise many of us.

The other sticking point for the American delegation [to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children] is the degree to which the conference document can refer to a landmark 1989 treaty on children’s rights. Along with Somalia, the United States is the only country [on earth] that has not ratified the so-called Convention on the Rights of the Child. The treaty prohibits countries from using the death penalty against criminals under age 18, a practice permitted in many American states.

Note that Somalia does not now and has not for some time had any semblance of a government, precluding the possibility of its ratification of an agreement of any kind. We have no such excuse.

Justice or vengence?

Beautiful in its simplicity and its morality, and an argument against the blind anger and fear that surrounds us all, this letter in the New York Times today should pull us all up short.

Some 30 years ago, a Hebrew University law faculty member wrote, “A border is secure when those living on the other side do not have sufficient motivation to infringe on it.”
As another Hebrew University professor put it: After every victory, “the abyss of mutual hatred will deepen and the desires for vengeance will mount.”
A few months after the 1967 war, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a leading Israeli intellectual, said that the occupation was unjust and would lead to the subjugation of the Palestinians, and even to the corruption of Israeli society.
Ancient Israel gifted the world with the revolutionary idea that it is justice, not military might, that brings peace. Now is the hour for that wisdom to be reborn.

Egan’s Law

From SatireWire a modest, almost Swiftian proposal.

Trenton, N.J. (SatireWire.com) — Under a new law designed to protect minors, local police departments will now be required to inform residents any time a known Roman Catholic church moves into their neighborhood.
The law also mandates that Catholic churches register with authorities, wear electronic monitoring devices, and be prohibited from moving to within a half-mile radius of a school.

Progress! But weird.

Certainly Taiwan has one up on us at least in this issue, but the argument and the teminology used in this latest development is as idiosyncratic as it is weird.

Defence Minister Tang Yiau-ming told government lawyers that the ban against military police candidates with “sexual orientation impairment” would be dropped because “the military preserves the security of all citizens, including homosexuals,” according to a report by the Taipei Times.

Why can’t we say the same about the protection offered by our military? But let’s keep out the phrase, “sexual orientation impairment.”

“Oh boy! Now it’s a felony.”

Reno, now more than ever.
The NYTimes visits Reno’s new show and Anita Gates finds it “. . . consistently, energetically, loudly funny.”

Reno sticks to her politics, no matter what the current fashion. At a recent performance her anti-Giuliani comments met with nervous silence, but her anti-Bush remarks were a hit. “Can’t we get a smart guy?” she asks at one point, describing the president’s unrehearsed public-speaking style as “like a drunk trying to look sober.”