From the print edition of the IHT, October 29, p3:

Atom thefts increasing, watchdog informs UN

How can they tell?

 12 comments

Poor Gordon Brown. No sooner does he save the world than he finds that, as they say, questions are being asked about Peter “Lord” Mandelson, whom he brought back into the government to help save the world some more.

Peter “Lord” Mandelson had claimed that he didn’t know yacht-owning Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska until 2006. On Friday this claim was clarified: Mandelson had in fact dined with Deripaska in 2004 “at a fashionable Moscow restaurant just weeks after he was appointed Trade Commissioner” for the EU. Later, Mandelson “cut tariffs on imports of aluminium into the EU which benefited Mr Deripaska’s company Rusal — one of the world’s largest manufacturers of aluminium — to the tune of tens of millions of pounds.”

So as to head off any suggestion of impropriety, the Telegraph has been asking the EU for the records of all Mandelson’s meetings with Deripaska while the former was trade commissioner. The EU’s response is not exactly helpful, as the newspaper reports:

Under the European Union’s “access to documents” regulations, upheld in the EU courts last year, the Commission should make public details of meetings between Commissioners, their officials and lobbyists.

But repeated requests by The Sunday Telegraph for details of meetings between Lord Mandelson and Mr Deripaska, under the EU’s transparency “1049 rule”, have been flatly refused.

The European Commission has insisted that any records or diaries of formal meetings relating to Lord Mandelson are not “documents”.

An EU spokesman said: “The concept of document to which regulation 1049 applies must be distinguished from that of information. The public’s right of access covers only documents and not information in the wider meaning. Only information contained in existing documents has to be treated under the regulation.”

Well, according to the EU regulation in question, 1049/2001, a “document” is defined thus in Article 3(a):

a) ‘document’ shall mean any content whatever its medium (written on paper or stored in electronic form or as a sound, visual or audiovisual recording) concerning a matter relating to the policies, activities and decisions falling within the institution’s sphere of responsibility

Records or minutes or diaries of meetings between Deripaska and Peter “Lord” Mandelson would evidently be “content” that concerns “activities” of the Trade Commissioner. So they clearly would qualify as “documents” as well as “information” under this definition.

The problem appears to be that, according to an analysis by Tony Bunyuan [pdf] in September, the Commission is desperately trying to narrow the definition of “document” from that given above, so as not to have to release documents it doesn’t want to. In April, for example, the Commissioners proposed to add to the above definition of document the proviso that it should have been

formally transmitted to one or more recipients or otherwise registered, or received by an institution.

In other words, if a diary or record of a meeting has not been formally transmitted to other people, it’s not a document. I suppose a cynic might point out that the kinds of document that are not formally transmitted to other people are often just those kinds of document that people wish to keep secret. Luckily, according to the Commission’s current “understanding” of what a document is, if it’s secret, it doesn’t exist!

What kinds of “document” have you denied the very existence of recently, readers?

 1 comment

George Packer at the New Yorker, whose writing I admire greatly, has had it up to here with the vocabulary of the current US election campaign:

When this is all over, certain half-dead words will need to be put out of their misery with a quick bullet to the back of the head. My candidates for a mercy verbicide: pivot, tank, cave, pushback, gravitas, message, game-changer, challenges, the entire litany of Palinesque nouns, attack dog, battleground, pork-barrel, earmark, impacting, and impactful. Other words that are too important to be executed will need to undergo a long and painful rehabilitation before they can be safely used again: change, experience, straight, truth, lie, victory, character, judgment, populist, and elite.

So far, so potentially interesting. But one’s heart sinks at what follows:

It was Orwell, of course, who first explained the relation between decadent language and corrupt politics.

Of course, it wasn’t. The relation had been explained previously by John Arbuthnot, Confucius, and Cicero, among many others, as I pointed out in the Introduction to Unspeak. Packer goes on:

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” [Orwell] wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” In our time, the corruption takes a different form. Instead of defending the Soviet purges with Latinate words like “liquidate,” politicians and journalists use clichés mainly borrowed from sports, war, and rural life in order to seem to be saying something tough-minded when in fact they’re saying nothing.

Saying nothing? I beg to differ: when George W. Bush assures the American public that prisoners are being “questioned by experts”, or when Condoleezza Rice refuses calls for a ceasefire on the grounds of seeking a “sustainable ceasefire”, or when Martin Amis complains that his society is unable to “pass judgment on any ethnicity”, they are definitely saying something. The task (heroically shouldered by this blog, among others) is to figure out what exactly that something is. Packer claims to be offering a different diagnosis than Orwell’s, but really they are making the same claim: that politicians are not worth listening to.

Such nihilism is, in my view, Orwell’s most malign influence. But there is another one, of which Packer reminds me when he goes on admiringly about Orwell’s other essays (having just edited a new two-volume edition of them). He draws our attention to “lesser-known gems” among Orwell’s essayistic output, among which is what he calls Orwell’s “brilliant takedown of Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’”. I assume he means Orwell’s 1942 essay on Eliot that was published in Poetry magazine, which luckily is also included in my Everyman edition of Orwell’s essays. Whether you think it counts as a “brilliant takedown of Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’” depends first on whether you accept that a discussion only of the first three Quartets¹ should count as a “takedown” of all four; and then, I suppose, on what you think of Eliot, and of Orwell’s style of criticism.

The essay begins with Orwell’s lamenting the fact that, of Eliot’s recent poetry, he can only remember only four lines: “that is all that sticks in my head of its own accord”. Having been proven lately incapable of writing lines of poetry gluey enough to stick in Orwell’s head of their own accord, which is after all the acid test of the poetic art, Eliot is subsequently subjected to a dull-witted exegesis of the ideology that supposedly informs his poetry, and a distasteful narration of what the telepathic critic someknow knows the poet “feels”. The heart of the problem, of course, is Eliot’s religion, as Orwell generously explains:

In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree.²

That sounds excitingly relevant to modern times, doesn’t it? Of course, the easy criticism of others as “mentally unfree” oddly resembles a type of speech that would later come to be characterized as “Orwellian”.

At least it cannot be denied that this kind of thing was influential. Orwell’s clunking, faux-proletarian, I-don’t-know-much-about-art-but-I-know-what-I-like mode of artistic criticism is these days much in vogue among many of those British Orwell-worshippers who were so much in favour of the Iraq war. Funny, that.

1. In Orwell’s archly fatigued description, “these three poems, Burnt Norton and the rest”. ↩
2. “T. S. Eliot”, in Carey, John (ed.), George Orwell: Essays (London, 2002), pp.425-431. ↩

 49 comments

I have noted before on this blog the interesting coincidence whereby the snazzy nu-atheism promulgated by Sam Harris devolves so often to an attack on Muslims in particular, eg as vectors for a horrible disease. Now at edge.org, there is an interesting discussion by Jonathan Haidt of “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion“, to which a bunch of nu-atheists give varyingly hysterical answers. One of them is our old friend Sam Harris, and a particular part of his “response” jumped out at me:

When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I even expect that conservative epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years just imagine how we liberals will be disposed to think about Islam after an incident of nuclear terrorism.

Um, wouldn’t it depend first on whether the incident of nuclear terrorism had in fact been committed by “Islam”? The unexamined assumption that an incident of “nuclear terrorism”, when it happens (again), will be committed by Muslims, let alone the fault somehow of one whole religion in particular, nicely betrays Harris’s lowbrow bigotry.

 7 comments

Barack Obama made one thing very clear in his “debate” against John McCain on Friday. There are frightening things rising up again in the world. Which things? Why, Russia for one:

Russia is in part resurgent and Putin is feeling powerful because of petro-dollars…

…a resurgent and very aggressive Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region.

This differs from poor Sarah Palin’s vision of Russia only in that Palin thinks Vlad Putin can actually fly, and that he makes regular stealthy trips to Alaska, flapping his great wings all the while:

As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.

Um, yes. Anyway, back to Obama. According to him, something else is also “resurgent”, and it’s more terrifying even than a Vlad Putin who can actually fly. It is, of course, “al-Qaeda”:

bin Laden is still out there. He is not captured. He is not killed. Al Qaeda is resurgent.

al Qaeda is resurgent, stronger now than at any time since 2001.

Trying to scare voters into supporting you by invoking a supposedly increased threat from Osama bin Laden is, of course, just the sort of breath of fresh air one would expect from a revolutionary new kind of politician like Obama, who transcends politics and is a beacon unto the world, etc. At least “resurgent” is a classy new option, carrying energetic connotations of “surge”, “insurgent” and so on, while remaining usefully vague about the extent or nature of the rising-again that “al-Qaeda” is allegedly doing. Perhaps they are training themselves in yogic flying so as to bounce merrily along the ground under Vlad Putin’s flightpath, on the way to destroy the USA.

My favourite part of the “debate” was this exchange:

MCCAIN: And Senator Obama is parsing words when he says precondition means preparation.

OBAMA: I am not parsing words.

MCCAIN: He’s parsing words, my friends.

OBAMA: I’m using the same words that your advisers use.

It is good to see that both candidates share a healthy indignation at the decadent and vicious practice of parsing words. What more fundamentally anti-American activity could be imagined?

 10 comments