It is a dangerous thing to disagree with Steven Poole, but I think his defence of Hobsbawm’s Stalinist account of Eastern European history is just plain wrong. Hobsbawm wrote, in a lecture for Amnesty,

Since the life-and-death struggle of the Russian Civil War, torture in the USSR — as distinct from the general brutality of Russian penal life — had not served to protect the security of the state. It served other purposes, such as the construction of show trials and similar forms of public theatre. It declined and fell with Stalinism. Fragile as the Communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even a nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.

and the rather unpleasant Oliver Kamm claimed that this meant Hobsbawm was implying that the crushing of the Prague Spring was a “limited, even nominal” use of armed force. Poole thinks this is either stupid or mendacious, since Hobsbawm was clearly talking about only torture. I don’t think he was. He was talking about torture in a general concept of coercion, and claiming that not much of that was necessary after 1957. This is, strictly speaking true, but in a way which is entirely dependent on the cut-off date. The reason that 1957 matters is that the Hungarian uprising had been the year before. The Russian tanks had then quite clearly demonstrated that they were prepared to use as much force as was necessary to crush any resistance. So when they rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 there was no fighting. Everyone remembered Hungary. There was some fighting in Gdansk in 1970, but not a huge amount. Unarmed demonstrators cannot stand up to tanks. So it is strictly true that only a limited and by Stalinist standards nominal use of armed coercion was needed to maintain the system after 1957, but only because everyone knew—or believed from Hungary to Gorbachev—that massive and wholly unrestrained force would be used to defend the system if it ever were at serious risk.
Morally speaking, Kamm is entirely right here.

Everything seems to be running fine to judge from the error logs: a few robots complaining that they find themselves hors texte, a place that structuralists believed could not exist; I have meanwhile been running around when not writing nonsense elsewhere, and so this will be something of a grab-bag of improbable observations.

• Yahoo maps has much less detailed satellite pictures than Google of most of the places that interest me. But its coverage of the Göta Älv valley is extraordinarily high resolution. I can just about pick out the potato patch in Lilla Edet where Anita suggested we get married; I can certainly see the exact spot where my book ends, because the casting jetties are distinct against the ice in this photograph. Why should this be? It’s not as if anyone lives there and when I look at the more populated parts of the world, like Essex, or even Uddevalla, the pictures once more receded to blurry green clumps, grey and brown.


• The OLPC project has turned into a complete fiasco. I have a piece about this on tomorrow’s Guardian site somwhere but it happened more quickly than I was expecting. I talked to one of the project’s more sensible and clever boosters this afternon, and his excuse was that while the technology was wonderful, Negroponte hadn’t realised that in order to get the Nigerian government and people like that to buy them, he would have to invest. “MIT doesn’t do bribes” said my friend, “And Negroponte was politically naïve”. Well, there’s one benefit of the OLPC: without this technology no one would ever have heard Negroponte described as naïve.


• Who sent me this? I just found in my list of things to blog a story about a scam from Minnesota headlined Lino Lakes man’s humanitarian deal was a load of carp. Whoever it was, thank you profoundly.

I read this last night in one gulp, which shows the essential virtue of his writing. The story, for American readers, concerns Adam Lang, a Labour ex-prime minister who is holed up in Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and dwindling entourage, working on his memoirs while an ex-colleague plots to have him charged at the Hague for involvement in CIA torture. Yes, it’s Blair, and he even has a strange sinister wife. The ghost-writer, an old, loyal party hack, dies suddenly, and the narrator, an apolitical word machine, is drafted in at very short notice to replace him. The book is mainly damn good fun, full of vivid caricatures: the publishing tycoon, the girlfriend in television, the unspeakably boring yet sinister¹ American foreign affairs pundit. There is also an excellent sense of the excitement of being inside a political campaign, best brought to life in a scene in which the narrator, inside a house under siege by the media, watches a huge television set watching the outside of the house while the commentators speculate on what’s going on and he listens to it actually happening in the room with him. This isn’t in the least bit a literary novel but that’s not its only virtue.

(spoilers follow after the break)
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In a story at once grotesque and astonishing, it turns out that one of the hard drives on the Columbia shuttle which blew up with the loss of the whole crew in 2003 has been treated by a data recovery firm who got 90% of the data off it—after it had been blown up and then dropped two miles. Don’t miss the picture. (via)

I hope it’s not going to be another summer when the Daily Telegraph is the paper that knows what’s going on. I don’t mean that its reports are true, but that they are uniquely informative because they tell us what the Bush junta wants us to believe, and so what it is planning to do. In the summer of 2002 it was the only British paper which wrote as if war with Iraq were inevitable as well as desirable; for the last few years, after the catastrophe in Iraq, became apparent, the Telegraph has been pretty subdued. But now I see Con Coughlin mongering war again.
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I’m pretty certain I saw a peregrine falcon yesterday, even though we are on the limits of their range as reported by the RSPB: in any case, a fairly large falcon with pointed, scimitar-shaped wings and a long, largely straight tail was hunting over a meadow just north of Audley End house. I watched it for nearly five minutes as it gradually ascended. I was wearing polarised sunglasses so the colour was uncertain but what I saw were areas of silvery pale on the breast and body. It was definitely not a kestrel which is smaller, has straighter wings and a less strait tail. Nor did it fly like a kestrel, which tends to move briskly between hovering stations. This bird was ranging over the sky. It had a single call repeated in burst of five or six in two different pitches which is not on the RSPB site but less dissimilar to one of their peregrine posts than anything else. But if it was a peregrine, where is it nesting? The country round here is notoriously short on cliffs and even skyscrapers.

Susan McCarthy, sumac on the Well, has started a blog. She is a wonderfully shrewd and witty observer of animal behaviour, not least when the animal in question is H. Sapiens sapiens though in her hands the second sapiens is an ironic distinction.

I think I have changed the feed links over. If you get this in an rss reader, then your transfer to the new blogging system has worked. Please drop something in the comments to say so: obviously I can’t ask people for whom it hasn’t worked to complain.

It’s a pity that Rowan Williams made such a fool of himself with the Sharia lecture. He has said some interesting things since then, which no one will take any notice of; some of them are in his lecture on human rights. To the extent that this has been noted at all, it is because the Church’s only role in the matter is to deny the human rights of gays, women, and so on to the jobs they may want. Now, it seems to me a grotesque mistake to suppose that a policy of denying practising gays places in the priesthood is the same offence as urging that they be jailed or killed for their activities. Both are wrong, but only the Nigerian policy violates human rights. There’s no such thing as a human right to a particular job. I’m doubtful that there is any meaningful right to employment, either. But it certainly makes no sense to talk about a human right to be a bishop.

I’m a sucker for anyone who has absorbed Alasdair MacIntyre, and Rowan has certainly done that. But the most thought-provoking part of his speech comes in his argument about how the Christian view of human rights developed from Christian interaction with slavery. I think this encapsulates all the most attractive aspects of his thought, and draws together two of his central ideas: that truth emerges to the Church over time and through experience, and that bodies are made as instruments of love. Both of these have obvious relevance to the gay debate, but he uses them in the lecture in a much less political way:

The principle that has been established is that the human body cannot in the Christian scheme of things be regarded as an item of property. It is not just that I have an ‘ownership’ of my body that is not transferable, though some moralists (including a few recent Christian writers) have tried to argue something like this; it is rather that the whole idea of ownership is inappropriate. I may talk about ‘my body’ in a phrase that parallels ‘my house’ or ‘my car’, but it should be obvious that there is a radical difference. I can’t change it for another, I can’t acquire more than one of it, I cannot survive the loss of it. The body – and this is where Aquinas and the tradition associated with him significantly refuses to accept a separation of ‘soul’ and ‘body’ as entities existing side by side – is the organ of the soul’s meaning: it is the medium in which the conscious subject communicates, and there is no communication without it. To protect the body, to love the body, is to seek to sustain the means of communication which secure a place within human discourse. And so a claim to control the body absolutely, to the point where you could be commanded to deny your body what is needed for its life, would be a refusal to allow another to communicate, to make sense of themselves. The ultimate form of slavery would be a situation in which your body was made to carry the meanings or messages of another subject and never permitted to say in word or gesture what was distinctive for itself as the embodiment of a sense-making consciousness.

And, as usual when he is making these points, one wants to argue a lot. In particular, I want to ask when the soul arrives and when it departs. Without, if possible, wandering into the swamp of abortion, we might ask what are the necessary attributes of a body which render it able to communicate and make sense of itself. When do they arrive? When do they leave?

This is the first post written into the new live wordpress version of the blog. I started getting mysterious errors on the MT installation and it was all just too much. I think I have mostly reproduced the old layout, which I liked, on this one. Below the fold, some detailed nerdy notes on all that went wrong. I know there isn’t a flickr sidebar yet. I’m working on that. Comments welcome; first thing we note is that there doesn’t seem to be a below the fold.
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