tabs on treason

Not heard much on the application of our sedition laws as yet, but here's something heartening from a not always heartening corner of the world. Love the title too.

spirited reflections

Sanguesa's Romanesque church, with figured portal

Been meaning to write on this for a while now. I’ve often written against religion, or in wonderment about its mysterious hold. Many rejoinders to the non-believer from believers come in sentences which contain the words ‘lack’ and ‘spirituality’, rejoinders which naturally associate ‘spirituality’ with something morally uplifting and good, though such associations are generally implicit and ‘spirituality’ is never clearly defined.

I’m sure many of us know of people who use spiritual language regularly while behaving in their daily lives in the most crassly materialist way. We judge people, rightly, by their actions not their language. On the other hand, there are those who, in my view, have an outlook that I might call spiritual if I were inclined to use that too-loaded term, if only because their concerns are far from material; though they, too, are non-believers.

I’ll use two writers, or rather, two books, to illustrate what I’m getting at. The writers are Jonathon Raban and Cees Nooteboom, and their books are A Passage to Juneau and Roads to Santiago, respectively.

Here’s a quote from Roads to Santiago:

What I myself do or do not believe is immaterial: to the sculptor who transformed the dead stone into a living, rippling stream, the scene he depicted was as clear as it is to me today, across centuries of battles, plague and change. This is still a world that I belong to, by virtue of understanding. The carved figures, the proportions, are almost absurdly naïve, the whole scene is borne by a number of hieratic figures, of Gothic appearance already, elongated by comparison with the other figures: Mary Magdalene, Peter, the mother of Jacob, a gruesome hanged Judas. The damned souls way up on God’s left are thrust backwards into hell, Ensor-like masks and an outsized sheep appear on the scene, tucked away in the stone picture a tiny manikin lies asleep, knights with shields like overturned beetles, Moorish geometric shapes – twenty years have gone by in a split second and here I am again, just as before, gawping like the village idiot for hours on end, like someone who longs to be taken by the hand, petrified, changed into a dwarf, lifted up and placed among the others, to have perched there for the past eight centuries like the rest of them, a carving on a church portal in a forgotten Spanish village visited by no-one.

This passage was picked pretty much at random, and it’s typically untypical. Nooteboom is revisiting an eleventh-century Romanesque church, Santa María la Real, in Sangűesa, Spain, and marveling once more before its portico. Nooteboom is Dutch, and yet has had a lifetime fascination with Spain, its landscape, architecture, history and people. His observations are mordant, idiosyncratic, quizzical. The book tells of his crossing and re-crossing of the arid, untouristed interior of that country, a solitary and speculative journey. Much of his wondering addresses his own wondering, and yet he’s introduced me to many historical figures – Philip II and his great friend and court painter Velasquez; their contemporary Francisco de Zurbarán, an artist of very different temperament; the pioneering, obsessive historian of architecture, Walter Muir Whitehill; the semi-mythical Asturian king Pelayo, victor over the Moors at Covadonga in 718.

I suppose the point is that there’s no real point to this book. It moves from the historical shadows dogging contemporary Spanish politics to the horrors of the civil war to the Caliphate of Cordoba to the hollow mystique of the conquistadores as unpredictably as it moves from Navarre to Aragon to Castilla la Nueva to Galicia, bringing brief life to renaissance artists and medieval battles while contemplating a modest, unchanging corner of the modern world. The effect of such a book is much like that of pilgrimages of yore, a quest for something indefinably enlightening. To some, this wandering and wondering may have nothing to do with spirituality, and I’d be happy to agree, but for those who aren’t so sure, I’d have to say that this is, for what it’s worth, the only kind of spirituality I recognize, the only kind I respect.

And here’s something, also at random, from Passage to Juneau:

Once upon a time, people made their way across the sea by reading the surface, shapes, and colours of the water. On clear nights, they took their directions from the stars; by day, they sailed by the wind and waves. In the Homeric world there were four reigning winds: Boreas blew from the north, Notus from the south, Eurus from the east, Zephyrus from the west.

Wind made itself most useful for navigational purposes by generating swells. Whatever the fickle gusts of the moment, the prevailing seasonal wind was registered in the stubborn movement of the sea. Swell continues for many days, and sometimes thousands of miles, after the wind that first raised it has blown itself out. Islands, because they deflect the direction of swell, can be ‘felt’ from a great distance by a sensitive pilot. As the depth of the sea decreases, the swell steepens, warning of imminent landfall.

Sailing by swell entailed an intense concentration on the character of the sea itself. Wave shape was everything. A single wave is likely to be moulded by several forces: the local wind; a dominant, underlying swell; and, often, a weaker swell coming from a third direction. Early navigators had to be in communion with every lift of the bow as the sea swept under the hull in order to sense each component in the wave and deduce from them the existence of unseen masses of land.

Generally speaking, Raban’s writing is more concentrated, less discursive, but this is just a matter of degree, and a small degree at that. The commonalities are clear; Raban, too is engaged in a solitary, speculative journey, through time as well as across space. In his case it’s the sea, or at least the stormy coastline from Seattle up to Alaska, and, while battling with the weather and his equipment and temperament, he reflects on the sociological differences between Canadians and Americans, the curious transformations and adaptations of the natives of the area, the similar journey made two centuries before by the impossible Captain Vancouver and his disgruntled crew, the early Romantic passion for wild landscapes, the art of Turner, the death of his father, the mundane, compelling mystique of the ocean. Like Nooteboom, Raban is both escaping from and exploring self. A quest for enlightenment and transformation, full of stumbling.

Neither of these texts deal directly with religion, though there are strong echoes. Raban’s father, who died during the trip, was a minister of religion, and clearly a major force for him. Nooteboom’s travels among Spanish monasteries and their denizens remind him of his unhappy education at the hands of the holy brethren. Both are non-believers, but this isn’t dwelt on, their searching takes them elsewhere. In their company, though, I feel a kind of reverence, a worldly reverence.

So this is spirituality to me. Almost the opposite of a church sign saying ‘Jesus is the answer’. It couldn’t have been much of a question. And this is indeed one of the purposes of religion and its chief danger, the channeling of what I would prefer not to call spirituality, its controlling and taming and ultimate destruction, all for the sake of an answer and an end. It’s a personal response, I know, but what really gets my goat about religion, all religion, is how ultimately soul-destroying it is.

wear the white feather

Not being too much into the history of warfare, I’d not heard of the white feather thing, mentioned in a comment by Andrew Bartlett at Barista recently. I saw the strange remake of ‘The Four Feathers’ starring Heath Ledger a while back, but it obviously didn’t click.

The order of the White Feather was founded in 1914. It encouraged women to badge civilian menfolk of military age (or even a couple of years below) with a white feather symbolizing cowardice.

Being an out and out coward myself, I’ve decided to don the white feather as a permanent piece of apparel. Cowards, unite.

the disarming effects of diplomacy

Iranians paying tribute to their overlords

An interesting piece here on US-Iranian relations. It was written about a month ago, just after the Bush administration released its new National Security Strategy, and before all the kerfuffle of this month, and I think that among other things, it’s a little too face-value-accepting of the stated ideals of the strategy document, which starts thus:

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. In the world today, the fundamental character of regimes matters as much as the distribution of power among them. The goal of our statecraft is to help create a world of democratic, well-governed states that can meet the needs of their citizens and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. This is the best way to provide enduring security for the American people.

This all sounds unobjectionable, but the question is how democratic movements are to be supported, and whether certain kinds of ‘support’ are productive or counter-productive. My view is that diplomacy and open-handedness, as far as that’s possible, will do more to encourage democracy in the Middle East than the Bush administration’s current strategy, which has alienated states and peoples massively and has created a more dangerous scenario all round. It will take a lot of diplomacy to undo the bad reputation the US has in the region, but there’s no alternative, so they’d better start now.

getting the respect they deserve

in dreams ...

We’ve been having Easter Monday chit-chat today, a half-dozen of us, by the fire, in lieu of beating olives out of the tree, an annual ritual, washed out by the rain this year. We talked religion and politics, those subjects we’ve been aye cautioned to avoid. Of course they’re my life’s blood.

I found myself getting quite emotional about the behaviour of Howard regarding the recent Papuan refugees. I’ve not been following this story too closely, though I was quite intrigued the other day while reading Anthony Trollope’s ‘Framley Parsonage’ to find that the mission to Christianise the Papuans was something of a minor theme in the book. These fictional characters succeeded in their mission – the Christian faith of the Papuans, like that of the East Timorese, being a major reason for their rejection of Indonesian suzerainty.

However, I do know a bit about the situation in Papua, or Irian Jaya. Before I’d heard of blogging I used to send political emails to a group of friends under my alter-ego, Luigi, and here’s a little piece I sent out in February 2003:

Reading Heat Treatment, a travel book, by English writer Justin Wintle, published back in 1988, has brought the plight of the Melanesians of Irian Jaya to my attention.

Before the Dutch arrived, Irian Jaya, which covers the western half of New Guinea and which is now under the control of Indonesia, had an estimated population of a little over 1 million people living in small isolated villages. The Dutch had little impact at first, but when deposits of oil, copper and other valuable minerals began to be discovered from the 1930s, the Dutch increased their personnel, and brought in other interested parties, from Indonesia and from the USA, in the form of Standard Oil.

In 1942 the Japanese invaded and treated the indigenes with great brutality, introducing labour camps, torture and execution. The allies under MacArthur took possession in 1944, geological surveys were taken, and it was realised that the mineral wealth of the region was far greater than previously thought. By this time the Indonesia independence movement was gathering steam, and in general Washington chose to support independence against the Dutch colonial power. Irian Jaya, however, because of its highly tribalised, 'rudimentary' society, was seen as an exception, and it remained Dutch under an agreement of 1949.

Indonesia began to exert pressure for control of Irian Jaya, arguing that the new republic should contain all parts of the former Dutch East Indies, though in fact the Melanesians had little in common with the rest of Indonesia apart from having been a colony of the Dutch. The USA was inclined to promote Indonesian aspirations, however, to keep Sukarno onside, concerned as they were with his communist and Russian sympathies.

Under heavy pressure from the USA, the United Nations ratified the 'New York agreement' in 1962, under which the Dutch were to withdraw from the region, and a referendum was to be held within seven years on independence for the people of Irian Jaya. In the interim, the region would be managed by Indonesia.

Though a small UN peace-keeping force was stationed to oversee the transfer of power, the reign of terror began with this decision. Sukarno's concern was that the Papuan inhabitants would not, having no reason to, vote for permanent Indonesian control, so he tried to terrorise them into submission. He also tried to resettle large numbers of Javanese into the region. Finally in 1964 he declared there would be no referendum.

Suharto continued Sukarno's policy in Irian Jaya, with the tacit approval of the USA, whose interests were thus protected. However, he was forced to bow to international pressure on the referendum, which took place at the very last moment, in 1969. The rigged vote, called 'The Act of Free Choice', brought a 'unanimous victory' for Jakarta. This was assisted by the slaughter of an estimated 30,000 Melanesians between 1962 and 1969, and by the appearance of one General Murtopo at an assembly of those Melanesian representatives permitted by the Indonesian authorities to cast a vote. Murtopo suggested that anyone present still seeking independence should 'find another island'. He also assured them that he'd personally shoot anyone who voted not to join Indonesia. Irian Jaya was incorporated into the republic by 1025 votes to nil. Clearly this result suited everyone who wasn't an indigenous inhabitant of Irian Jaya.

The OPM (Organisi Papua Merdeka) or Free Papua Movement was formed in 1965, which gave Indonesia further excuses to pursue its repression. It's estimated that a further 100,000 Melanesians have been killed from 1969 to the late eighties, and this brutality has continued at least into the nineties (see this site for all the gory details. Unfortunately it seems not to have been updated since the fall of Suharto).

My emotion was brought on by recalling that Howard, a few weeks ago, in a doorstep interview, pointed out that the Papuans voted to be part of Indonesia. This remark struck me as a new low in the mealy-mouthed hypocrisy of this disgusting little man. He knew, as everyone on both sides of Federal Parliament who has had dealings with Indonesia knows, that the 1969 vote he was referring to was obtained through gross intimidation, murder and torture. While both sides of Parliament have acted with wanton cowardice in their treatment of the Papuan tragedy, I’ve never heard anyone act with such insensitivity to the suffering Papuans as to refer to that vote as if it was legitimate. It takes a special kind of person to betray the rights of a people so glibly. Such a person is our Prime Minister. And politicians wonder why they’re not respected.

Iran v the USA - maneuvring and posturing

It was Seymour Hersh who recently broke the story that Iran is now very much in the sights of the Bush administration, and that was before Iran declared itself the newest members of the nuclear club.

What does this actually mean? Iran has of course been wanting to join the nuclear club for years, as this article from more than two years ago indicates, and they’ve been at loggerheads with the IAEA for a long time about it all.

But what is the Nuclear Club? According to the above article, only five countries, the US, Britain, France, Russia and China (who also happen to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council) are members of this club, though it’s common knowledge that Israel, India and Pakistan also have nuclear weapons. Wikipedia provides a good start to getting your head around all this.

From an Iranian perspective, the current saber-rattling about its possession of enriched uranium (which it claims is entirely for peaceful purposes) must seem profoundly hypocritical, since Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons is an open secret, and the IAEA’s treatment of Israel over its nuclear capability has been very different from its treatment of Iran, which is nowhere near as far down the road as Israel in nuclear terms. On February 6 this year, Iran was referred by the IAEA to the United Nations Security Council due to suspicions in the US and some European nations about its nuclear ambitions. As noted in Wikipedia, ‘according to many sources, Israel has succeeded in developing over two hundred nuclear warheads without having been questioned or investigated by the UN Security Council.’ For a considered, if self-serving, Israeli perspective on all, this, especially with regard to Israel’s position in the region, read this.

Interestingly, considering claims that there’s a plan by the US military to make a limited nuclear strike on Iran, Wikipedia has this to say in its entry on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT):

The 5 NWS parties have made undertakings not to use their nuclear weapons against a non-NWS party except in response to a nuclear attack, or a conventional attack in alliance with a Nuclear Weapons State. However, these undertakings have not been incorporated formally into the treaty, and the exact details have varied over time. The United States, for instance, has indicated that it may use nuclear weapons in response to a non-conventional attack by "rogue states".

There is no evidence, as yet, that Iran is anything other than a non-NWS (Nuclear Weapons State), so an attack of this kind by the US might be technically illegal, apart from everything else.

Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), along with some 188 other countries. There are 3 ‘pillars’ of the NPT – non-proliferation, disarmament and the right to peacefully use nuclear technology. Of course, it’s this third pillar that causes problems. Iran is claiming, at least to the international community, that it has no intention of making nuclear weapons, but enriched uranium, required for weapons, is also used for light water reactor nuclear power stations. Iran is enriching uranium (I think this is the basis for their claim to have joined the nuclear club), but many international observers are wondering why they would be doing so, since they don’t need nuclear energy as a resource, at least not in the short term.

Iran is possibly obfuscating about its nuclear plans, but from their perspective, seeing quite clearly that the IAEA has been soft on Israel’s nuclear program, and that the NPT and the IAEA favors nuclear weapons states generally, defiance seems quite justified, even more so after the invasion of Iraq, an invasion they would’ve seen as both illegal and profoundly self-serving. They might feel the need for a deterrence Iraq didn’t have, and it would be difficult to argue with that.

Of course, the US doesn’t argue these days, it prefers to act, in what it perceives to be its best interest. Members of the Bush administration are describing Iran’s new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a madman and an Adolf Hitler. Talk of regime change is in the air, though most are playing this down, with arguments about fatigue within the military and a tendency towards overblown rhetoric on the part of Iranian leaders. Certainly other leaders, such as former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenai have called for the destruction of Israel, and it has to be noted that within the context of the Middle East, Ahmadinejad’s fulminations against Israel and the West are not particularly extreme.

Finally, the growing popularity of figures like Ahmadinejad and of political groups like Hamas are a sign that US belligerence in the region is having a polarizing and counter-productive effect. Not surprisingly, the US administration’s disdain for diplomatic solutions is percolating through that nation’s supine media – as witness the pessimistic attitude to Middle Eastern diplomacy reflected in Jim Lehrer's News Hour. The fact is that diplomacy really offers the only way forward, and the claim that it has been tried before with no success is simply false. Mutual demonisation is not only unproductive, it's positively juvenile. Opening channels of communication is the best way to sort out this problem before it becomes a crisis. After all, the US has some explaining to do – which is probably why it prefers non-diplomatic solutions. It needs to explain to Iran why it invaded Iraq, and why it has allowed its ally Pakistan to obtain nuclear weapons clandestinely. It has to come clean about its own hypocrisy and double dealing. That would be the more mature approach. It would also take courage. But when you have more, and more powerful WMDs than anyone else, you get used to having everyone listen to you and quake before you. Not a good basis for developing maturity. No wonder the US bully boys hate Iran so.

the three monkeys do their thing

Saddam fronts the inquiry: 'That little Johnny boy was in my pocket for years'.

Watching the Four Corners report on the AWB scandal made me realise that it was worse than I'd thought, and hugely damaging to us internationally. I mentioned to Sarah that the only good that might come out of it is that it could bring down the government, but on reflection that's wishful thinking. Quiggin's analysis is probably spot on with this one - it's classic see no hear no speak no evil stuff from our three guys (I wonder if there's been a cartoon along those lines - there surely must've been). Of course, much depends on Cole's eventual finding and commentary. If he expresses strong doubts about the veracity or competence of government ministers, that will surely have repercussions. Then again, the federal election's a long way off.

some brief notes on cloning and stem cells

Back in the December/January issue of the Oz science mag Cosmos there was a piece on cloning, full of breakthroughs and cautionary tales, all before the scandal in South Korea broke.

The article informed me among other things of the first successfully cloned dog, Snuppy, created by the team of Hwang-woo Suk at Seoul National University. Considering the scandal centring upon his lab, I naturally wondered about Snuppy’s credentials, but it seems that the wrong-doing is limited to fabricated data in stem cell research. Tests have confirmed that Snuppy is a bona fide clone.

First, some points to myself to clarify different features of cloning via Cosmos magazine and this site, among others:

Somatic nuclear cell transfer was the procedure used to clone Snuppy, as well as Dolly, the first mammal known to be cloned, back in July 1996. Snuppy was born in April 2005. The procedure involves removing the nucleus from a body or somatic cell (ie a mature, differentiated cell), and placing it into an enucleated egg cell. The cell is then stimulated to divide and grow. The embryo can be implanted into a female for gestation, or have its development suspended while still at the embryonic stage, to be put to various uses, particularly medical.

Somatic nuclear cell transfer is the procedure central to therapeutic cloning. The egg with the somatic nuclear material transferred into it, is allowed to divide. The resulting blastocyst ‘has an outer layer of cells and an inner cluster called the inner cell mass. Cells from the inner cell mass are isolated and used to develop new embryonic stem cell (ESC) lines’.

The difference between embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and other stem cells is that they’re totipotent in the first couple of days and then pluripotent. In fact, there are three types or ‘levels’ of stem cell, totipotent, pluripotent and multipotent, moving from less specialized to more specialized. Adult stem cells are multipotent, though there’s now a question as to whether multipotent cells can be transformed into pluripotent cells. These are the sorts of issues causing so much excitement within stem cell research.

To return to cloning – the cloning of a dog (out of some 1095 clone embryos) is the most recent of many achievements. Sheep, cows, pigs, goats, cat, mice, horses, rabbits, deer and even a mule, all have been successfully cloned, though primates seem as yet beyond the horizon.

There’s a fair amount of debate, though, about just how successful these clones have been. One of the well-known problems these clones have faced is Large Offspring Syndrome (LOS), especially in the case of lambs and calves, but other abnormalities, some of them not easily identifiable at birth, have abounded. In fact, there’s a question as to whether any cloned animal could be described as normal (a term which consequently has come under scrutiny), though they’ve produced healthy enough offspring. It seems that our tampering with the natural process of reproduction is what’s causing the problems.

One of the pioneers of therapeutic cloning, Rudolf Jaenisch, who has worked more or less exclusively with mice, is one person who believes that a normal clone has never been produced. Further, he believes that the problems of cloning are in principle unsolvable. Work done by his group in 2002 seems to have borne out his claim.

I’ll try to summarise the problem, with the help of Cosmos. It seems that in the natural fertilization process, when an egg cell is penetrated by a sperm cell, the egg ‘reprograms’ the genetic material of the sperm cell (which must be quite specialized in order to locate and penetrate the egg). It’s of course this reprogramming ability that scientists have made use of to create ESCs.

Scientists have learned to assist in this rebooting process. They’ve learned that rebooting requires cell quiescence (that the cell not be dividing). It also requires time for the reboot to be completed before embryonic development. The egg must also be unfertilized.

Yet even with a successful reboot, clone embryos lack the ability to distinguish between maternal and paternal gene sets. This appears to be vital. To quote the Cosmos article:

Although sperm and eggs bear the same genetic code, they carry slightly different instructions as to how that code should be read when they combine – so-called ‘imprints’. For instance some genes, if they reside in the egg, remain silent; if they reside in the sperm, they are read avidly. About 50 genes receive this differential treatment, many of which dictate the growth of the placenta and foetus. The theory, according to scientists such as Jaenisch, is that, because clone embryos cannot differentiate between paternal and maternal gene sets, they read both, rather than ignoring one, with the result that the foetus grows too much. This explanation also gels with the fact that the offspring of clones, which are born through the old-fashioned union of sperm and eggs (and hence receive the proper imprints) are normal.

Now Jaenisch and others may be overly pessimistic about the possibility of overcoming these difficulties, but he’s surely right in pointing out that they must be overcome before we even consider human cloning, quite apart from the various other ethical issues swirling around it. The good news is that, due to work coming out of Jaenisch’s lab, the ethical concerns about the use of ESCs may one day be obsolete. A technique called altered nuclear transfer results in the creation of embryo-like entities that aren’t viable in utero but still yield healthy ESCs. Of course there will always be some objectors, if only on the generalized ground of ‘playing god’, but the field continues to surprise and excite.

work laws in France and Oz

Don’t want to get too deeply embroiled in the economics of the situation, being thoroughly inexpert, but this rather different look at the current labor pains in France, courtesy of Jason Soon of Catallaxy, has got me thinking.

As to the situation here, the obvious difference is that, according to many, the labor market didn’t particularly need reforming, but the ideologues of the government, most notably Howard himself, were determined to introduce sweeping changes. The huge array of comments to Quiggin's brief post here gives an indication of the elite’s responses, both right and left, and it begins to look as if the government has misjudged public opinion on this.

The difficulty in all this is that I do see obvious problems for employers who aren’t able to rid themselves of dead wood, just as I see problems for workers whose job security is at the caprice of their employers. I don’t have any neat answers, but this government is clearly throwing its weight behind employers, with its eye on big-picture profitability and productivity at the expense of ordinary folks’ security. However, as one commentator put it, if the culture were changed in such a way that the stigma associated with being sacked was greatly reduced, as is apparently the case in the US, people would, theoretically, be able to switch about until they found their proper niche. Sounds to me like wishful thinking though. I mean, I’m sure there’s still plenty of stigma associated with being sacked in the US. Anyway, the issue in Australia, it seems to me, is the government’s war against collective bargaining and its obsession with sidelining trade unions. Of course, collective bargaining has in any case been seriously weakened by the increasing diversity of workplaces, but what hasn’t changed is the power imbalance, in which employers sack workers, not for capricious reasons, since their reasons usually seem rational to them, but for short-term (or even long-term) reasons to do solely with their interests. What I’d like to see, of course, is agreements which really are agreements. Current AWAs are shambolic agreements for obvious reasons. I’m probably being idealistic, but there should a more truly negotiated approach between employer and employee. They need each other after all.

same old same old

Guzman - Fujimori orchestrates Shining Path's most humiliating moment

The Hot Docs slot on SBS is usually well worth a look, and Tuesday night’s program on the fall of Peru’s briefly-beloved ‘Chinaman’ Alberto Fujimori was thoroughly absorbing, even if it was a variation of a story told a thousand times before, of an authoritarian leader instituting sweeping but much needed reforms, becoming increasingly convinced of her/his invincibility, hanging around too long, identifying his own interests with those of the state, arrogating more and more power to himself.

Much of the doc was narrated by Fujimori himself, mixing plausible analysis with outrageous rewriting of history. At first you see him as an amiable paternal figure, but his delusions about himself gradually come clear. He tries to distance himself from his more obviously criminal right-hand man Vladimiro Montesinos, but as the doc points out (and effectively shows), Fujimori was a micromanager, and it was extremely unlikely that he didn’t know and tolerate Montesinos’ profound but often convenient corruption.

As Pinker points out in The Blank Slate, liars are most convincing when they believe their own lies, as so many of them do. National leaders seem far more prone to this kind of self-delusion than wee folk like us. It’s part of the thick hide required to become a national leader, especially in volatile, violent times and regions. There were plenty of moments of hideboundness and self-delusion in the doc, which was fascinating as an example of ‘crossing the line’ between what we now like to call counter-terrorism and terrorism, and all those other lines between enforcing and breaking the law, so much more easily blurred when you as a powerful head of state start to believe you are the law.

I thought one of the more telling moments in the doc came just after the videotape scandal broke, when Fujimori, followed by a heap of reporters, went driving around Lima apparently in a hunt for Montesinos’ video horde (they showed him engaged in a stream of shonky deals), from which he apparently removed a selection that implicated him (Fujimori). It seemed surreal, but if that was what he was up to, it’s a clear indication that he knew full well he was involved in criminality.

I’d certainly lost all sympathy for Fujimori by the end of the doc. He’s now in custody in Chile awaiting extradition to Peru, the nation he hoped to return to in triumph. Not that he was the worst of offenders. Human Rights Watch is still trying to get the dirt on human rights abusers in the Peruvian military during the two decades of armed conflict between 1980 and 2000. The current government seems to be obstructing their efforts. Anyway, he did manage to knock the Shining Path out of action, though it’s arguable that this Marxist dinosaur’s extinction was only a matter of time.

Extinction? Not quite – though this site's probably past its use-by.

the terrier as terrorist

Bought a book today, Chain of Command, by Seymour Hersh [one interesting response here], which promises to be a ripping read. Reading the intro, was amused by this description of the term muckraker , a term Hersh would happily apply to himself:

Theodore Roosevelt had adapted the term from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – the man ‘who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor’ – in order to criticize ‘reckless journalists’ [who threatened to expose corporate dealings in his administration].

A more modern endorsement comes from that well-known peacenick Richard Perle. ‘Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly’. Ah, the renovation of language – they used to call them communists.

brightening and tightening

Having just posted a possible beginning to The Big Lie, I spent some part of last night revising it, after feeling irritated at its long-windedness.

This was a very worthwhile experience, in fact quite inspiring. I won’t put the results here, but they’re good enough to spur me to keep going, to really at last make a proper start with the book.

Though I don’t engage in it as much as some (I often wonder how some of them find time to make a living, or even sleep), so I should theoretically have more time to refine the language, blogging is generally a rush job, with the final product rarely satisfying qua literature.

A few months back I posted a review of a Cibo café, written before I’d even heard of blogging. It was a piece that quite pleased me, and a fellow blogger made a nice compliment about it, that it managed to say a lot with a minimum of verbiage. This is precisely what the revision process, better described as brightening and tightening, is all about, IMHO.

Method: take any piece you’ve posted – it’s usually readable and more or less acceptable as journalism. Don’t be satisfied. Remove all redundancies, rearrange sentences to say the same thing in fewer words. Target commonplace terms, find more striking replacements. Keep going till you feel you’ve exhausted all possibilities, then leave it for a day or two. Come back and go through the same process again. And again. Be ruthless, torture the language if necessary, twist it into unaccustomed shapes, and never underestimate your reader. They’ll get the idea, and be pleased with themselves for having done so, such are the smart-alecky pleasures of the text.