the greycat blog

The interactivity of the web is all very well, but having comments facilities on news reports is a very dubious notion: just look at what happens over at CBS News. The BBC, so committed to fawning over user-generated content that one wonders why they need all those very expensive newsrooms and journalists at all, is, of course, in love with the idea. Those bulging ‘Have Your Say’ pages hang like monstrously distended parasitic growths from many BBC news stories, and the fact that the comments are moderated only makes the prevalent ignorance, offensiveness, smug stupidity (and illiteracy) of the contents all the more disturbing.

The Have Your Sayers have been Having Their Say about Gillian Gibbons and the Khartoum teddy bear crisis (see my earlier post), and the results are truly revolting. For the full grisly picture see ‘The self-loathing Brits who think teddy bear teacher deserves her fate’ at The Monkey Tennis Centre, but make sure you take a sick-bag.

(Some choice comments have been added since the Monkey Tennis Centre’s post. Steve from Derry declares that ‘She went to another country, broke the law, and insulted an entire religion’, that ‘calls for her to be executed are welcomed’ and he hopes that ‘even if she just gets the poor sentence of 15 days, there will be a strong revolt outside the prison upon her release’. What a nice chap. ‘I think we should take a step back and be thankfull that we are all luncky enough to live in a multi cultural society that welcomes any person of any race or religion’, says optimistic James Taggart of London. Glad you feel luncky, James. From sunny Southend, Ken reminds us all (twice, in identical posts - what’s that moderator doing?) that ‘You can’t look at this with western values, this is a different culture and it has to be respected’. Personally I find it hard to respect that kind of respect.)

Today hundreds of demonstrators have flooded Khartoum’s streets protesting about the leniency of Mrs Gibbons’s sentence and demanding that she go before a firing squad.

Above: Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916), victor of Omdurman. He’d know what to do.

The quotation in the title of this post, ‘Astonishing backwardness, oh people!’, is from a posting, in Arabic, at The Sudanese Thinker, as quoted by the BBC in their review of blog responses to the Teddy Bear Crisis.

Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher working in Sudan who called a teddy bear Muhammad after the name was chosen by her pupils, has been jailed for fifteen days for ‘insulting Islam’.

Rats in this affair include the Sudanese government, judiciary and religious authorities, and Sarah Khawad, secretary at the school where Gillian Gibbons taught, who made the original complaint. But also Robert Boulos, head of the school, who reacted to the verdict by saying ‘It’s a very fair verdict, she could have had six months and lashes and a fine, and she only got 15 days and deportation’.

Among the weasels, Catherine Wolthuizen of Fair Trials Abroad, who blames the victim: ‘I think she is not someone who has sought to cause offence, she’s not someone who’s acted foolishly, but she perhaps hasn’t necessarily understood the extent to which some of the parents might have been sensitive to the use of this name’; the Right Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, who cringes and simpers like a true multiculturalist: ‘deep disappointment because this was clearly a mistake and I know that the Muslim community here in Liverpool will be as disappointed as anybody. I think, too, a real anxiety that something like this so badly handled in this way won’t do anything to build up good relations between the faith communities’; and the UK Foreign Office who have responded by quavering: ‘We are extremely disappointed with the sentence and Foreign Secretary David Miliband has summoned the Sudanese ambassador to explain what has happened’. Miliband himself has been mainly concerned to stress British respect for Islam, much good has it done him (or Gillian Gibbons).

Praise where due, however: both the Muslim Council of Britain and the American Islamic Congress have condemned Sudan in forthright terms.

Brothels struggle, mountains grow, cats invade, sheep shrink, ice sheets expand, ice sheets contract. Yes, it is just as we feared: global warming has run entirely out of control and is now causing everything.

For all the above hotness calamities and many more (600 or so, in fact) visit Dr John Brignell’s ‘complete list of things caused by global warming’. And while you’re at Dr Brignell’s site, take a little time before the coming eco-catastrophe to read his ‘Global Warming as Religion and not Science’.

My favourite piece of warmy-alarmism: ‘Climate change “could be fashion disaster”‘. Example here.

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Cold War sub-texts: the submarine and the popular imagination in post-war Britain’. This particular essay, along with several others, has recently been indexed by Intute, a service which finds, evaluates and categorizes freely-available scholarly material from across the web, and this seems to have brought it to a wider audience. Which is nice. The essay was originally written for an academic conference at the University of London’s Institute for Contemporary British History in September 2003. The Institute has since been utterly transformed and revolutionized by its renaming as the Centre for Contemporary British History.

On both sides of the Cold War the details of submarine missions were naturally concealed behind varying degrees of secrecy, but the legacy of wartime experience, combined with what was publicly known about contemporary submarine activities, ensured that these vessels retained a highly significant place in Cold War culture, not least in maritime-minded, culturally navalist Great Britain. The submarine combined advanced technology with the timeless human virtues of courage and daring; it operated in the front line of the Cold War, on the enemy’s doorstep; it had the allure of secrecy and stealth; it possessed global reach; and, in the form of the SSBN – ‘this killer whale in our midst’, as The Times put it in 1967 – it symbolized the balance of terror that ultimately embodied the Cold War confrontation.

The essay goes on to examine two popular novels by British writers from different periods of the Cold War that can be seen as embodying important aspects of the place of the submarine in contemporary culture: Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra (1963) and Craig Thomas’s Sea Leopard (1981). To read the whole of ‘Cold War sub-texts’, click here.

Picture: Soviet Sierra II class nuclear-powered attack submarine. [Source]

Thanks to Candace de Russy and Campus Watch I’ve found a moving cri de coeur from Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan. Cole is disturbed at the recent establishment of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) by academics dissatisfied with the existing Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and by the increasing signs that outside interests are trying to exert influence on the academic world for ideological reasons of their own. He sees these developments as symptomatic of the politicization of Middle East studies.

Outside groups, non-specialists, intervene because they don’t like the conclusions. The politicization of scholarship is very dangerous. Scholars are like canaries in a mine. They are on the cutting edge of research, and most sensitive to dangers in a society. If you silence them, you’re poking out the eyes of society.

This view of the importance of scholars to society surely owes more to vanity than it does to reality. Leaving that aside, how credible is Juan Cole as an opponent of the ‘politicization of scholarship’? Well, I haven’t read his latest book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, but I have a very clear idea of what it’s all about because the author has spelled it out:*

French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East … There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.

Nothing politicized about that, then. Of course not: the politicization that suits us is never perceived as politicization (as post-modernists are always keen to tell us). On 11 September 2001, Cole reports, he had written about half the book. ‘I had no way of knowing then’, he writes, ’that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush’s Iraq War’. As if it had the slightest chance of ending up as anything else.

As for the poor canaries, they were taken down mines because of their high sensitivity to carbon monoxide, which they ‘detected’ by breathing it in. Their eyes had nothing to do with it.

* For a thorough dismantling of Cole’s tendentious and politicized version of history, see Martin Kramer’s ‘Juan Cole loses head’.

The strange fixation of our age with saying sorry all the time is brilliantly anatomized by Gorman Beauchamp in the current American Scholar:

History, that is, offers so much to apologize for that the question is not where to start but where to stop. We could save time, energy, and the risk of invidious specificity by just apologizing for history itself … its annals are overrife with horrors, crimes, and cruelty. Except for reasons of political expediency and publicity, how would we cherry-pick from this long and dismal record which enormities merit apology?

A round-up of the leading current apology stories:

• Rudd will apologize to Aborigines - ‘Newly elected Australian leader Kevin Rudd renewed a commitment Monday to apologize to indigenous Aborigines for past indignities.’
• Christian leaders ask for Muslim forgiveness - ‘we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the “war on terror”) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbours.’
• Queen should apologise for slave trade - ‘The Queen of Britain should apologise for the evils the British inflicted on Ugandans during the colonial era, the chairman of Africa Leadership Institute, a think tank in Kampala, has said … “If she does not apologise to the Africans then she would suffer severe punishment from the creator”.’
• Bishop offers apology over Church’s role in bloody civil war - ‘On many occasions we have reasons to thank God for what was done and for the people who acted, [but] probably in other moments … we should ask for forgiveness and change direction.’

The above cases, wretched as they may be, are pretty tame stuff, really; it isn’t that long ago that a Danish government minister was apologizing for the behaviour of the Vikings.

I didn’t post a ‘most-read’ article last week because it was Aristotle yet again. The latests stats indicate that, barring a last minute rush of interest, Aristotle will not be topping the charts this week, so that’s a relief.

Actually, this week it’s two t-shirts of the week, to make up for being late. The theme this week is guns, and that well-known claim that guns don’t kill people. Here are two variations on the theme: top, ‘guns don’t kill people, it’s the bullets’, and bottom, ‘guns don’t kill people, well actually they kinda do’.

There are lots of gun-related designs on CafePress, but trust me, these are the only ones that are both funny and look good (although to be fair, this is a trick almost no-one selling through CafePress can pull off).

The Oxford Union’s folly continues to bring out the best in everyone, with the unholy Griffin/Irving double-act delayed by protests and a sit-in. The juvenile antics of the Union itself have been paralleled by the immature posturing of the protestors outside, whose definition of free speech means shutting up anyone you don’t agree with. Thus:

Martin Mcluskey, from the Oxford University Students’ Union, said: ‘What we are doing here tonight at the Oxford Union is putting them on a platform that will give them legitimacy and credibility. It is as if we are saying that we agree with what they are saying and that we think it is valid.’

News for you, Martin: freedom of speech means listening to people you don’t necessarily agree with and ideas you don’t necessarily think are valid. And anyone who believes an appearance at the Oxford Union carries an implication of ‘legitimacy and credibility’ is seriously out of touch with reality (even for Oxford).

The BBC rolling headline thing referred this evening to a report about an apparent ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan with these words: MoD investigating claim UK ‘friendly fire’ killed two Danish troops.

If one individual had been reported dead, would the headline have referred to the killing of ‘one Danish troop’? In the report itself the casualties are described, quite accurately, as ‘Danish soldiers’.

More BBC misuse of the term ‘troops’ here (’eight Turkish troops’) and here (’six US soldiers and three Afghan troops’ - ludicrous).

For more on what the term ‘troops’ means and how it should and should not be used, see this NPR article by linguist John McWhorter. He spoils his case somewhat by politicizing the issue, writing in a rather hand-wringing way that ‘Using a name for soldiers that has no singular form [i.e. troops] grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war’. I don’t agree: it’s not politics, it’s just ignorance.