Month: May 2006

"These gays wanted to lay flowers at the grave of the unknown warrior. This is a provocation. It is desecration of a sacred place. These gays go there, and openly go up to the monument. It is a contamination. People burst through and of course they beat them up," – the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, whose cops prevented a peaceful gay pride march in Moscow last weekend. My own blog-coverage of the melee as it unfurled last Saturday can be found here. Meanwhile, in Romania …

I guess we all get our cheap thrills somewhere, but my latest one is blogging on the Acela train to NYC. I’m doing an event tonight at the 92d Street Y, with my old friend, Dan Savage, and Erica Jong, orgasm pro. Usually, I’d read a book or the Economist. But I just got my new MacBook Pro and a Kycera router with Verizon wireless that lets me blog anywhere in America. Not too expensive, as the Knights who say "Ni" might say. And here we are. My first transit blog-post. All aboard!

I pass along the following pieces of grim news simply out of a duty to notice them. A reader told me today that he could no longer read the blog because it was so depressing. I try and cheer it up with funny links, videos, the windows series, and so on. But the news from the great struggle of our time is currently pretty grim. We have the worst rioting in Afghanistan since the liberation; we have news of possibly the worst American atrocity of the war in Haditha; we have Anbar province going backwards not forwards in Iraq; we have basic infrastructure in Iraq deteriorating; we have a massive hunger-strike at Gitmo; and we have a collapse of morale at home. There are ways to hope; and there is a case for patience. But this blog, unlike some others, is not into denial.

(Photo: Haditha, last November, by Lucian Read/WPN.)

"This is a district we should never lose. It’s the stink of Cunningham, and the Bush problem," – a "longtime Republican operative" on the special election for the district once represented by Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

"[T]he Maoists [in India] are fighting on two fronts. One is that they are fighting a feudal society, their feudal landlords. You have, you know, the whole caste system which is arranged against the indigenous people and the Dalits, who are the untouchable caste. And they are fighting against this whole corporatization. But they are also very poor people, you know, barefoot with old rusty weapons. And, you know, what we – say someone like myself, watching what is happening in Kashmir, where – or in the northeast, where exactly what America is doing in Iraq, you know, where you’re fostering a kind of civil war and then saying, ‘Oh, if we pull out, these people just will massacre each other.’

But the longer you stay, the more you’re enforcing these tribal differences and creating a resistance, which obviously, on the one hand, someone like me does support; on the other hand, you support the resistance, but you may not support the vision that they are fighting for. And I keep saying, you know, I’m doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won. But the point is that they are the ones that are resisting on the ground, and they have to be supported, because what is happening is unbelievable." – Arundhati Roy, backing resistance movements that would "string her up" if they succeed. Robert Fisk has a new ally.

Another take – mine is below – from Oliver Kamm in the Times of London:

At Auschwitz, of all places, Benedict might have referred to the biblical and Catholic roots of European anti-Semitism. He preferred to concentrate on the heroism of Catholic witnesses against Nazism. The picture he gave was thereby highly misleading.

The Pope prayed in the cell where a Polish Franciscan, Maximillian Kolbe, was starved and incarcerated before being murdered by the Nazis. Kolbe was canonised by Pope John Paul II. Yet Kolbe’s writings evince a firm belief in the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the existence of a Masonic-Jewish conspiracy. John Paul’s canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a nun and died at Auschwitz, caused still more trouble. The Church’s celebration of martyrs against Nazi barbarism is unerringly partial. It decries the blasphemous claims of authority, while sparing few words for the integrity of Jewish history.

A Bavarian pope had a unique opportunity to reflect on the role the Church played in providing two millennia of religious anti-Semitism which paved the way for the atheistic, racist anti-Semitism of Nazism. Benedict punted. History will remember that. More criticism here.

Blogger Jon Swift has a bad case. One cure is denial. It has worked for many.

The best discussion I’ve yet read is, as so often on these matters, at Jeff Jarvis’s site.

It’s now a year since vice-president Dick Cheney recklessly insisted that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes." Money quote:

"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Greg Djerejian does the math and finds the opposite to be the case. If you also take into acount that the U.S. military has essentially withdrawn from large areas of Iraq, now controlled by Jihadists and insurgents or name-less face-less sectarian militias, you could easily argue that the insurgency, combined with Shiite death squads, has never been as strong. Baghdad remains unsecured, over three years after the invasion. Ramadi is controlled by al Qaeda, something that was not the case before the U.S. invasion. Again, you can debate whether Cheney knowingly lied or whether once again, he simply had no idea what he was talking about. But neither option is very reassuring.

The Spiegel interview headlined by Drudge is a fascinating one. It’s fascinating because it really does give us a glimpse into the worldview of a fanatical anti-Semite. This man doubts the fact of the Holocaust; and describes the defeat of Hitler as a national humiliation for the German people. Here’s a riveting exchange:

Ahmadinejad: I’m wondering why you’re adopting and fanatically defending the stance of the European politicians. You’re a magazine, not a government. Saying that we should accept the world as it is would mean that the winners of World War II would remain the victorious powers for another 1,000 years and that the German people would be humiliated for another 1,000 years. Do you think that is the correct logic?

SPIEGEL: No, that’s not the right logic, nor is it true. The Germans have played a modest, but important role in post-war developments. They do not feel as though they have been humiliated and dishonored since 1945. We are too self-confident for that.

The Germans were humiliated and remain humiliated by their 1945 defeat? Ahmadinejad’s worldview is that international Zionists controlled the alliance powers in the Second World War, invented the Holocaust and then used that to create the state of Israel. Ahamdinejad is a neo-Nazi, who also believes the world is soon coming to an end. And he is eagerly seeking a nuclear bomb. Whatever policy we adopt, it needs to be based on a very clear grasp of what we’re dealing with.

(Photo: Lynsey Addario/Corbis.)