Year: 2003

Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter, has spent some time hob-nobbing with the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. And his fathomless snobbery has always led him to idolize the British upper crust. So it’s no big surprise that his magazine this month should produce a puff-piece about a sympathetic new miniseries, “Cambridge Spies,” about Britain’s Communist double-agents from the 1930s onward. The series is produced by the BBC, naturally, and recounts the story of how Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt betrayed their own country in order to support the mass murders of Joseph Stalin. Vanity Fair gives us the requisite, sepia-toned, boy-band-like group photograph. Its caption describes these supporters of totalitarianism as “glamorous turncoats.” The writer of the series is unabashed in his admiration for men who knowingly betrayed secrets that led to the deaths of their fellow-countrymen and who perpetuated a system that imprisoned thousands and condemned millions to death and terror. The four traitors were “devastatingly effective double agents who knew from the start that they stood or fell together,” opines writer Peter Moffatt. “Burgess is the loudest spy in the history of espionage. Philby is the most successful spy of the lot, becoming head of counter-intelligence in M.I.6. Blunt is cool, viciously funny and clever, while Maclean veers between being warm and friendly and drunk and difficult.” Now imagine a series being written and produced by the BBC and puffed by Vanity Fair that featured upper-class fascists who spied for Nazi Germany. Yet there is no relevant moral difference between that and these four treacherous supporters of Stalinist horror. The double-standard remains – buttressed by far too many “see-no-evil” liberals and leftists. But the last word goes to Vanity Fair itself, editorializing with breath-taking insouciance:

“Double agents are hard to root for – but ‘Cambridge Spies’ makes a splendid case. ‘It is controversial, portraying these guys as heroes,’ says [actor Rupert] Penry-Jones. ‘But to stand up for what you believe in the way they did is pretty heroic.'”

“Heroic.” What does that make Solzhenitsyn or Havel? Fools?

“Most of us have learned to simply accept the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. exists in the world, just as we’ve come to accept that there are terrorists among us, as well as people who scam grandmothers out of their savings.” – Keith Olbermann, Salon.
(Routine disclosure: I write a weekly column for News Corp.’s “Sunday Times.”)

CHIRAC’S WORLD COALITION: Mugabe signs on. The anti-war crowd have another dictator ont their side.

“Playwright Harold Pinter, speaking at last weekend’s rally, said ‘The US is a nation out of control,’ and ‘unless we stop it, it will bring barbarism to the entire world.’ He said America was ‘a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug.’ When Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. When US television broadcasts a speech with Billy Graham hosting an Excalibur replica from the Franklin Mint Collection, demanding the decapitation of Muslims, let me know. When George Bush grips the podium and beseeches American rock formations to give up the location of non-Christians so we can slit their throats, and it’s carried live on national TV by presidential order, drop me a line. It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache – and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.” – James Lileks, bleating like a lion.

Yes, some feminist Harvard students destroyed the giant snow willie. Here’s one of them owning up. The letter contains the classic and largely unanswerable statement: “No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.” In writing? Even one that’s melting? And what about a flaccid one? The final money quote:

Many women and men, including myself, are the victims of sexual assault, child sexual abuse and rape. The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat; it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not. There was nothing ‘challenging’ or ‘subversive’ about the penis. The only thing it did was create an uncomfortable environment for the women of Harvard University.

Oh, please. Is the Washington Monument safe?

Seems less outrageous now, doesn’t it?

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE I: “There is no other government on Earth with the same publicized aspirations to tyrannical control [as the US government]. Other countries, including Korea, Iraq, Russia, and China, maintain arms to defend their shores against invaders and those who would ‘dominate the weak and intimidate the world.’ The two governments that do not maintain armies and weapons solely for defense are the US Government and Israel, a coalition of pure evil intent on destroying human freedom.” – Ed Lewis, “Liberty For All,” February 16.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE II: “‘The times’ require us to give up some eensy-weensy freedoms, so we can duct tape our houses and our mouths and worry about that Code Yellow which followed 8 useless months of Code Orange. Code Red is right around the corner. Be prepared to give even more away. Ronald Reagan described to us the Republican ideals of what an “Evil Empire” is. I guess the last vestages of the Old Republic has been swept away. Because we have met the Evil Empire Reagan described… and it is us.” – Bob Bankard, Phillyburbs online magazine.

Democracy? Doesn’t look like it. A provisional American-run government, designed to foster reconstruction, humanitarian aid and a fledgling constitution, is a perfectly understandable idea. But a long-term de facto colony is surely asking for trouble – both in terms of actual governance and in terms of American public acceptance. Of course, these plans will change under the pressure of events, but I can’t be the only one concerned that democratic institutions do not seem very high on the Cheney wish-list (and it’s largely Cheney’s construction). The extent of de-Baathification is also critical. Krugman gleefully declares today that only “Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced.” The Washington Post, with a far better track record than Krugman, reports that

Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi government officials would be subjected to “de-Baathification,” a reference to Hussein’s ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows from the “de-Nazification” program established in Germany after World War II. Criteria by which officials would be designated as too tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials said. A large number of current officials would be retained.

Which is it? We’ll see. But the administration needs to be put on notice by its supporters as well as its opponents. Many of us signed onto this war not merely to protect the West from terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, but as an attempt to grasp the nettle of Arab autocracy. If we make no effort to foster democratic institutions, the rule of law and representative government in Iraq, then we will lose the peace as surely as we will have won the Iraq war. And losing that peace means losing the wider war on terror as well.

“If Tina Brown is following Maureen Dowd, does that make her quasi-MoDo?”

POSEUR ALERT: “Like Nepalese religious shrines tendered on cow dung, the blues disc is an ‘opportunity for devotion.’ In the three economies in which it occurs, of the market, of society, and of the self, a disc collection such as James McKune’s or Harry Smith’s becomes a kind of counter-capital, a harvest of illth, like Dickens’s dustman converting what is dispersed, discarded, ruined, and despised to what is recovered, concentrated, and renewed, rendering it at once rare and precious, scandalous and subversive. In the vertical archeology of the social body, it is an edifice of the repressed, making one’s own despised or ruined condition available for contemplation and turning it, by virtue of our irrepressible sociality, into a source of cultural power. ‘Whatever we worship we make sacred.'” – an abstract of an academic paper on blues recordings.

A cartoon says it best.

THE CASE FOR SURRENDER: An American Prospect piece argues that Blair should avoid war because it could lead to terrorist reprisals. Good to see simple fear and cowardice being profferred as a war strategy.

“If, as is looking increasingly likely, Blair loses office over this war, it won’t be because he’s been martyred by a nation of spineless appeasers, or for that matter because we’ve seen too many cartoons showing poodles (wearing a lieutenant’s pips) shovelling elephant shit (the elephant guided by a giant wearing spurs and a cowboy hat). It’ll be because, for years now, he has allowed his spokespeople to tell any lies that, media-wise, seemed appropriate, while assuming that, because he always believes what he is saying at the time, the populace will believe him when he assures them he is sincere. He’s a talented, likeable and quite interesting politician: and a study in what might have happened if Clinton had been granted his deepest wish, and been President during challenging times.” – more insight and doggerel on the Letters Page.

THE DEMS AND GAYS: The Democratic Senators are quite happy to see a rampant homophobe become a judge, while filibustering Pickering. Check out Stephen Miller’s column on the strange priorities of the Democrats:

The lesson: if you are conservative but not anti-gay, look for the Democrats to oppose you with everything they’ve got. But if you’re anti-gay but not otherwise objectionable, that’s just dandy. I guess the Democrats figure no matter what they do, gay liberals will keep supporting them. And, sadly, they’re probably right.

It was a year ago today that the Islamofascists murdered him in cold blood because he was a Jew. The Wiesenthal Center is organizing a small tribute. A better tribute is to continue the war against the forces that murdered him. And, yes, that does mean the terrorist-sponsoring mafia now ruling Iraq.

COULD THE “PEACE” DEMOS PROVOKE WAR? They might if Saddam interprets his current position as unassailable and so forces a sternly negative report from Hans Blix. This drama has had so many twists so far, we’d be foolish to rule out another one.

THE UGLY CONSERVATIVE: A worthwhile piece dissecting the extreme vulgarity and political hate-mongering spewed by right-wing radio host, Michael Savage.

ANOTHER BEEB QUOTE: This time from the BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, David Loyn: “”If America was engaged in the rest of the world rather than, frankly, wanting to bomb it and, as Yasmine says, take its resources…” No wonder the Economist this week simply categorized the BBC as an anti-war organization, motivated by simple anti-Americanism.

AFTER “WEASELS”: A British tabloid goes for another Chirac analogy.