In While writing his book Bad Elements, Ian Buruma had the opportunity to visit with many of China’s exiled dissidents. Buruma explains why he was drawn to these fierce men, who had endured years of incomprehensible torture only to emerge more determined than ever to fight back.

Like most [Europeans] of my generation, born just after the war in a country that had been under Nazi occupation, I have always been haunted by the moral dilemmas we never had to face. How would we have behaved? Would I have risked everything? Would I have broken under torture? There is no answer to such questions, but still I look for hints [in those fierce men], not so much to understand my own morbid preoccupations as to gain some larger insight into human nature.

(p. 103)

Like Buruma, I too have been haunted by these questions, and it’s true that there is no answer to them. But I saw a movie last week that plumbed the depths of these mysteries: Fighter, a documentary about two Czech survivors of Nazism and Stalinism—one lamb (so to speak) and one lion:

“I tell you: there was never a trip like this before- the motives are terribly sad, but we are going to have a lot of fun. This is another dimension of history.”

With these words two unconventional 70-year olds, Arnost Lustig and Jan Wiener, set out to revisit the Europe of their childhoods. But the two friends are only partially right: the trip will take take them on an original and unorthodox exploration of the Holocaust, revealing moments of joie de vivre, fighting spirit, romance and humor. It is, however, not nearly as pleasant a journey as they had expected.

Beginning as an historical biography, Fighter becomes a psychological drama as the trip becomes a contentious clash of ideologies, personalities, and life paths.

This film is another casualty of 9/11. It opened that week.

Netflix it. You won’t regret it.

The NYT’s Sharon Waxman is panting at the possibility that Judith Regan’s lawsuit of NewsCorp for her “wrongful termination” from HarperCollins might expose the skeletons in the closet of the New York publishing world:

At least that’s what Regan’s lawyer seems to be threatening, if I read Waxman correctly:

Ms. Regan, whose lively personal life is already well-worn fodder for tabloid gossip, will find lawyers poring over every off-color remark she may have made, Mr. O’Donnell said. Former colleagues have already emerged to confirm that she was reprimanded in the past for making an anti-Semitic remark at work.

Mr. O’Donnell said: “She will open herself up to every scurrilous allegation. She will not enjoy one minute of this litigation. They’ll hire a bulldog, and it’ll be a bloodletting.”

Meanwhile HarperCollins, which owns ReganBooks, would probably face uncomfortable questions about why it tolerated Ms. Regan for so long if the company found her behavior so objectionable.

And executives would also have to submit to a detailed examination of their decision-making process in the Simpson project, a book titled “If I Did It” and a television interview conducted by Ms. Regan, which unleashed such a cascade of public outrage that both were canceled.

“Everything that went on will get into evidence,” [Regan's lawyer] Fields promised. “What really happened with that interview, what Jane Friedman,” the president of HarperCollins and Ms. Regan’s former boss, “is really like.”

Fields promised? Should he be threatening HarperCollins through the good offices of the NYT? Is there an editor in the house?

Via Jeff Jarvis I note that, Roger Cohen of the IHT also has moral relativism on the brain (see my post earlier this evening) as he endorses the Euston Manifesto (which I have supported since its inception):

There appears to be little hope that Bush will ever abandon his with-us-or-against-us take on the post-9/11 world. Division is the president’s adrenalin; he abhors shades of gray. Nor does it seem likely that the America-hating, over-the-top ranting of the left - the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda - will abate during the Bush presidency.

This state of affairs is grave. The threat posed by Islamic fanaticism, inside and outside Iraq, requires the lucid analysis and informed disagreement of civilized minds. Bush’s certainties are dangerous. But so is the moral equivalency of the left, the kind that during the Cold War could not see the crimes of communism, and now seems ready to equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship.

In the wake of Saddam’s execution, Professor Bainbridge, citing Avery Cardinal Dulles on Catholicism and capital punishment, provides some useful reminders for the secularists among us too.

1. The purpose of punishment in secular courts is fourfold: the rehabilitation of the criminal, the protection of society from the criminal, the deterrence of other potential criminals, and retributive justice.
2. Just retribution, which seeks to establish the right order of things, should not be confused with vindictiveness, which is reprehensible.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The notion that some crimes deserve the ultimate punishment is now apparently a contrarian view among the bien pensant, however. The idea that there is a “right order of things” has been lost in the secular world—particularly (but not only) on the left (see Michael Walzer’s “Can There Be a Decent Left?“, spring 2002).

This was never more apparent than in the voices of those (official) secularists interviewed by the New York Times after Saddam was executed. The British government, Russia, India, the head of the EU, the Vatican (they were joined by Hamas!)—all expressed regret or recrimination at Saddam’s execution. One Brit summed up:

“Mainstream middle-class sentiment in Europe now regards the death penalty as being as ethically tainted as the crimes that produced the sentence.”

(Really? As ethically tainted as the crimes themselves? Now, that’s what they call “moral relativism.” ***)

By the way: Of all those interviewed for an article entitled “Around the World, Unease and Criticism of Penalty,“ it was only those eye-for-an-eye Israelis, said the New York Times, who were untroubled by Saddam’s execution:

In Israel, an old enemy of Mr. Hussein’s, leaders reacted calmly but with satisfaction at the execution.

Shimon Peres, the deputy prime minister, told Israeli public radio: “Saddam Hussein brought about his own demise. This was a man who caused a great deal of harm to his people and who was a major threat to Israel.”

Ephraim Sneh, the deputy defense minister, noted that Mr. Hussein had fired 39 Scud missiles “into the heart of Israel” during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Mr. Hussein, he said, was “a man who paid some $20,000 to the families of suicide bombers in Israel during the most intense time of the intifada and who was preparing a nuclear weapon to use against us.”

—–

*** See this 2001 column from the NYT’s Edward Rothstein about the heated debate he provoked after 9/11 when he attacked the relentless grip of “pomo” (postmodernism) and “poco” (postcolonialism) on the imagination of too many smart people who ought to know better.

Rothstein’s conclusion is perhaps even more relevant today than it was five years ago, when the argument between him and Stanley Fish broke out. (The current anti-Zionist fervor on the left, for exampe—most prominently, that of Jimmy Carter and Tony Judt—is distinctly “poco” in theme and flavor. Both of these harsh “critics” of Israel use the language of anti-colonialism in their judgments against it):

Avatars of absolutism—terrorist Islamic fundamentalists—are challenging the liberal democratic societies of the West, objecting to their power, their values, their differing creeds, their modern (and postmodern) perspectives. This is something Mr. [Stanley] Fish recognizes. But postmodernism tends to retain its old critical habits. So when postmodernist arguments are applied to the war, they often seem directed at the West, relativizing its claims and qualifying condemnations of the opposition.

Of course, pomo isn’t directly or indirectly responsible for 9/11. But cannot pomo be taken to task for its views and effects without Mr. Fish and others retreating into McCarthy-era rhetoric, posing as victims of Western absolutism? They are acting as if they are not quite secure in their possession of the truth.

(via Memeorandum)

I guess he’s feeling left out, because no one paid attention to his last message. This time he’s got a doozy. He heaps praise on Muslim women in the West who don the veil as implicit supporters of his cause:

AL-QAEDA’S deputy leader… praised Muslim women who insist on wearing the Islamic veil despite pressures not to in some Western lands.

He described anyone doing that as “a soldier in the battle of Islam against the Zionist- Crusader attack”.

Will this bald-faced attempt to hijack Islam in the name of Al Qaeda garner attention in the media?

Stay tuned.

Gilding the lily, Zawahiri also repeats his insistence (ignored a few weeks ago) that Palestinians stop cooperating with their democratically elected government.

“O mujahideen brothers in Palestine … the traitor secularists cannot be your brothers, do not give them legitimacy or take part in their assemblies, which are opposed to Islamic principles.”How can [Palestinian President] Mahmoud Abbas… or [his aide] Mohammed Dahlan be our brothers when they have grown fat on the Jews’ bribes and the Americans’ gifts.”

Stirring, stirring, stirring the Muslim-on-Muslim pot.

John F. Burns in the New York Times:

That I could feel pity for [Saddam, on one brief occasion] struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.

A useful reminder for those of use us who cannot take the leap of imagination—or empathy—necessary to understand what it is that our military is fighting, and dying, for in Iraq.

And yet, after reading the details about the ugly circumstances under which Saddam was executed the other day, I am sick to my stomach that we must support this current government in Iraq—that we, for the moment, have no other option.

Adam Bellow, a longtime publishing professional, has launched an innovative undertaking that looks very promising (it’s a simple, elegant idea). It marries the latest in technology (print-on-demand) with one of the oldest traditions in publishing: pamphleteering. The CJR Daily interviewed Bellow back in December:

His newest venture has as its goal no less than, as his Web site puts it, “to reinvent the book for the 21st century.” Bellow wants to do this by bringing back the art of pamphleteering. In a series of 4-by-6 inch, $4 booklets with an average of 60 to 80 pages each, he hopes to create a new, affordable forum for presenting ideas.

Bellow is consciously trying to tap into the tradition of pamphlet wars that accompanied “all the great social and political and scientific and religious revolutions in Western history… from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.”
He also notes the climate and times we live in as factors that make short books (not to mention short books that can be delivered electronically) sound so appealing:

[P]eople don’t have time to take in all the information that is thrown at them. And this in a period when the tone and the level of public intellectual argument in this country has been adversely affected by both the media revolution and by current events. It’s been polarized and coarsened by the political climate. It’s also been made shallower and more superficial by the media environment.

Excellent points, both. Bellow continues:

So that’s on the one hand. On the other hand, I noticed the explosion of activity on the Internet. After 9/11 there was this huge explosion. I think it can best be described cosmologically. First there is a big bang. Thousands and thousands of individual blogs are spewed out. Nobody reads them in particular. They are all just little points sort of flickering in the cosmic gloom. But over time, because the Internet is a kind of pure intellectual democracy, little aggregations form. People are drawn to one another by common interests. And at the same time, certain individuals emerge as large planetary bodies, very often surrounded by circles of other people who share their interests.

Best of all, Bellow gets the power of the blogosphere.
Sounds promising. I’ll be watching.

Here’s a mutual-admiration society that frustrates me no end

(via radar)

SCRIBES OF THE TIMES

Frank Rich with fellow Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd

They are unquestionably two of our smartest and ablest analysts of political theater, and they participate in one of the great crimes of our day: they are content to waste their brain cells on skewering the same old domestic foes (Republican crooks and liars) and refuse to use their considerable gifts to scrutinize the really bad actors in our world.

Why? It can’t be that hard to include the antics of, say, a Chavez or an Ahmadinejad in a colum here or there. Can it?

When are our “far enemies” going to go under the media microscope?

My inner sociologist (a long-dormant but noisy-when-roused beast) was startled by this unusual, original analysis of contemporary America from a commenter on Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine. (Unfortunately, I forgot to note the post it referred to; apologies to Jeff, whose blog I read daily, and to the commenter.)

frontier zones have been places for successive generations of creative young people to escape the suffocating rule-making and political correctness of their elders, make a life and express values which are their own, and participate in building new institutions rather than just receiving them from their elders. These new institutions have always end up re-establishing order.

The two big frontier zones accessible to today’s generation of Americans are the web and the newer, vast (politically Republican) suburbs, where young people go to have families and escape urban political machines and urban public schools. In this sense the ‘culture wars’ we see today are directly linked to the past, all the way back to the conflicts between the first and second generations of the ‘Pilgrim fathers’.

At TNR, Conor Clarke wrote a piece on Barack Obama that everyone interested in press coverage should read ($$, unfortunately).

It’s not about whether Obama should run. Rather, it’s about how innuendo seeps into the “news,” and destroys not only the credibility of the subject of given “news” stories but also the trust of “news” consumers.

The bottom line:

Without pundits there to misinterpret them, Obama’s actions [like the actions of many who are overscrutinized by the media] are trivial.

Read it.

Back in 2006, I bookmarked a bunch of things I wanted to blog about and never got around to. There’s no way I can get to them in detail, but if I post the items, there’s always the hope that I’ll get around to threading my arguments together one day. (There’s always hope.)

David Carr reported something interesting a few weeks ago in the NYT—that while last year’s Oscar race was full of small pictures with social-justice-type themes (racism; homophobia; McCarthyism),

[this year] many [films] among those being mentioned include overtly violent themes that are executed with jaw-dropping visual candor.

Here are just a few of the things we’ve been treated to:

“The Departed,” a film in which a number of characters played by big-name actors were whacked at close range as bodily fluids splattered everywhere. The body and organ count continues to mount as the season closes. Clint Eastwood’s war film “Flags of Our Fathers” featured horrific scenes of beach warfare with more soldiers blasted into more pieces than we’ve seen since “Saving Private Ryan,” including a head unaccompanied by a body. Its sibling film, “Letters From Iwo Jima” — Mr. Eastwood used the same battle to shoot a film in Japanese as well — has an extended riff on the consequences of sequential suicides by grenade.

It is not just war and crime movies that take a machete to fainter sensibilities. A message movie like “Blood Diamond” does not just refer to child amputees — it shows the process. And “The Last King of Scotland” features human flesh regarded as a cut of beef. Then the stream of bloody movie scenes becomes a river in “Apocalypto,” which has several recently removed hearts held aloft, a few more of the aforementioned bouncing, unattached noggins and enough impalement to bring to mind human shish kebab.

I’ll add Casino Royale to the list (I wrote about it here).

There may be more to this than movies being more graphic simply because it’s technologically possible to represent reality so convincingly on film.

I’d argue that it’s cultural shock therapy against our collective anaesthetization to actual violence and that, for the “creative class” in particular, it’s a corrective to the frisson-producing choreographed Technicolor violence we lauded throughout the 1990s and beyond. Blowback, if you will.
We are being shown that violence includes suffering.

Not a novel concept, of course, but a novelty for us nonetheless, it seems

Hallelujah! The new year is not even a day old and the New York Times notes some good news: that “a middle stance” has emerged in one of the hottest partisan debates going: climate change.

The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurricane Katrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.

Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

These “nonskeptical heretics,” as they’re called by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and blogger,

agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios.” …

“A lot of people have independently come to the same sort of conclusion,” Dr. Pielke said. “We do have a problem, we do need to act, but what actions are practical and pragmatic?”

Mike Hulme, the director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, is quoted with an observation that got me thinking [emphasis added]:

“I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama,” he wrote. “I believe climate change is real, must be faced and action taken. But the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory.”

As I noted in “No One Likes a Cassandra,” which I wrote the last time the Times carried a common-sensical piece about the global-warming debate, extreme partisanship does a disservice to your cause, whatever it is. Attempting to impose urgency on people is not effective; in fact, it seems that the blowback from it (denial) may be worse than the inertia that causes people to ignore problems that aren’t obviously imminent and threatening.

So I salute all those who seek a Third Way (including the New York Times in this case for calling out the highly partisan Al Gore, who has politicized global warming to no one’s advantage—including his own) to break the many log-jams that stand in the way of our managing the many, many very challenging problems we face in 2007 and beyond.