On a more trivial scale something similar happened recently to a review of mine. A discussion of Keith Windschuttle’s new book The Stolen Generations, appearing in the June 2010 issue of the highly esteemed New Criterion, it was sent for publication with the title “Stolen Children and Academic Lies”. I think it’s pretty clear from this who is being blamed and who are the sinners — the usual suspects in the universities. The lies objected to are academic; they have nothing to do with Aborigines.

Imagine my surprise when for some reason or other “Stolen Children and Academic Lies” was changed without notice to “Aboriginal sin?” What the folk at the New Criterion were thinking of when they came up with this I’ll never know. It flatly contradicts the moral point and meaning of the original title, and is gratuitously provocative as well. Anyway I feel that comment and correction are due: the word “sin” as here applied to Aboriginal conduct is as inappropriate as the word “stolen” used to describe the child removal program in Keith Windschuttle’s indispensable book.

The nature of frontier societies

All Australians know that Aborigines have been more sinned against than sinning. But in any case the concept of sin is here woefully out of place. The varied legislation involved in Australian child removal programs was designed for a frontier society where encroaching pastoralism and mining impinged on tribal life —especially on Aboriginal family life. And in case you haven’t heard or didn’t notice, frontier societies were amoral through and through.

True, missions and missionaries tried to offer a more inspiring human prospect. True, there were a handful of hard-working, caring pioneers living in orderly homesteads where books were read and a piano in the corner might sometimes be gathering dust. But these were islands of civility in the wilderness. For the period that concerns us, from roughly 1830 through to 1930 in northern Australia, and at various other times in New Zealand, in the American West, in South Africa, in Canada, and in parts of Brazil today, the men and women of these frontier societies were a very wild bunch indeed.

Drifters, drop-outs, escapees and petty-criminals on the run, adventurers, opportunists, loners, slaughter-house workers and hard-drinking miscellaneous toughs, along with all the rough-necks working sheep and cattle in godforsaken stretches of barren country, or prospecting for gold on patches of stony ground — these are the human types, often brutal and violent, that confronted the tribal world. Their enjoyments were drinking and whoring, and for many of them home life consisted merely of brothels and saloons. In New Zealand around 1820, before a better class of colonist arrived to settle the land and impose law and order, frontier society consisted of little but odoriferous whalers and sealers, grog-shops, and a ready supply of local prostitutes. In Australia, survival for the Aborigines meant dealing for long years with a kindred social milieu.

In this disreputable company who was free from sin? Is it any wonder that some indigenes became indistinguishable from their unsavory surroundings — that they became what they beheld? Is it any wonder that alarm was felt for children born into this world, or that governments considered it their responsibility to take children away for their own good? Is it any wonder, finally (in case this is what the New Criterion means by “Aboriginal sin”) that those coming from this background often do their utmost to conceal the fact, to lie about it, and pretend they were “stolen” when that was not the case?

Frontier society, in Australia as elsewhere, was a cruel and miserable place where vice proliferates and virtue is thin on the ground. The vocabulary of the Sunday school does not help us understand its denizens. Those who ignorantly imagine otherwise — or on the other hand fill their minds with fantasies about the cultural glories of tribal life, whether traditional, or in the tattered shanty-towns of the fringe-dwellers — should read what Windschuttle has to say in Chapter Four, “The Culture of the Camps”. It is a study of universal degradation. It is also an unsparing account of decades of child neglect and child abuse demanding action, and is the best antidote to the nonsensical myth that either racism or cultural genocide underlies the child removals which every state government felt compelled to undertake.

Welfare and mission staff on the frontier

Something might also be said about those who volunteered to staff the settlements where Aborigines gathered, finding refuge from the harsher world outside. Those of us who knew them fifty years ago (I was a documentary film-maker at the time) remember men and women with sundry minor failings, but they were invariably good people, doing their best in difficult circumstances according to their lights.

It is of course a crying shame that the modern academics who excoriate these men and women did not themselves volunteer to go into the tropics and work on behalf of the wretched and oppressed. Why didn’t they themselves choose careers in welfare work if they’re so keen to judge those who did? Plainly, the army of censorious professors have a purity of motive, a clarity of moral vision, and a depth of social compassion that is sorely needed in Australia’s north — today even more than in the past. Anyway, in the circumstances prevailing yesterday, those despised missionaries and settlement administrators did a lot to alleviate the misery and confusion of indigenes caught up in tumultuous change. Much more, it might be added, than any academic has ever done.

Finally, among the over-excited responses to the review of The Stolen Generations in The New Criterion was the indignant denial that the tale of the “stolen children” constitutes a “myth”. So here’s my own view of the matter. That children were removed from what were considered unsafe and unsatisfactory situations is a historical fact. That laws existed requiring their removal is a historical fact. That welfare staff acted to remove them, and sometimes with a degree of coercion, is a historical fact. That some removals succeeded in providing better lives, that some did not, and that some were abject failures, is a historical fact. For all those reasons the story of the policy embracing these activities is properly described, in plain English, as “child removal and its consequences.”

To describe these activities as driven by racism, let alone by motives of genocide, is the mythologizing of history by urban intellectuals who wantonly subject facts, and their description, to conspiratorial fantasies of evil and doom. The imaginative story of Australian “genocide” is only the latest of these. That is why the documented account of the child removal program by Keith Windschuttle is in my view historical, but wild talk of stolen children and genocide and planned extermination is not only myth, but a pernicious myth that betrays and incriminates thousands of ordinary Australian citizens, now dead, who cannot defend themselves.

Jayant Mukundray Patel, medical miscreant sans pareil, has at last been found guilty of serious crime. And in the Brisbane Supreme Court on July 1st 2010 he received his penalty. For the manslaughter of Mervyn John Morris, James Edward Phillips, and Geradus Wilhelmus Gosewinus Kemps, and for causing grievous bodily harm to Ian Rodney Vowles, Justice John Byrne sentenced him to seven years in jail.

Addressing Patel, Justice Byrne said that “In view of the verdicts of the jury, there is no denying the gravity of your offence and your repeated serious disregard for the welfare of the four patients.” The judge added that Patel’s fatal operations “might easily have been avoided. Had you sought a second opinion on whether to proceed, the indications are that another surgeon would have advised against them all.”

But Justice Byrne was much too kind. Patel’s psychopathic eagerness to wield the knife had been known well before he arrived in Australia. And a second opinion was something he never required. At the Kaiser Permanente Hospital, in Oregon, where after several years of malpractice his surgical cases were reviewed (three had died, while a fourth lost gastrointestinal function after Patel performed a colostomy backward) “Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases this surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient.”

For his depredations in Brisbane the prosecution asked a minimum of ten years. Given that the death toll for which Patel appears responsible may have been between 80 and 90 men and women (in the course of two years’ surgical mayhem) many think this was too short. And the prospect of his now being released on parole after only 3½ years is for some surviving victims downright disturbing.

But Australians are a generous and forgiving people. Mrs Judy Kemps, who lost her husband Geradus Kemps, said the main priority was a conviction. “That guilty verdict is what I really wanted. The jury did a good thorough job, sitting there all those weeks listening to the case.” According to a report in the Brisbane Times Mrs Kemps went on to add that “even if Patel was released after three and a half years she would not be concerned.” Anyway, the whole grisly story of Patel’s career as a medical mutilator is here: Doctor Death in Bundaberg.

This they signally failed to do. Instead, they systematically obstructed investigations into criminal activity within their jurisdiction, and blatantly intervened to assist Patel escape justice, providing him with a free flight back to America.

Three representative members of the administrative bureaucracy at Bundaberg Base Hospital appeared as witnesses before an inquiry in 2005 — The Director of Services, the District Health Manager, and a third responsible for the nursing staff. Samples of their testimony are presented at the conclusion of Doctor Death in Bundaberg as Appendices A, B, and C.

Reader’s opinions will no doubt be varied and various. My own view is that it would be difficult to find a lower caliber of personnel: intellectually limited, with unconvincing credentials, devoid of any sense of responsibility, and morally impaired. Devotees of nationalized medicine with its armies of nondescript officials should perhaps be careful what they wish for. You wouldn’t trust a sick dog with Appendices A, B, and C. Ultimately, alas, and regardless of rogue medicos like Jayant Patel, bureaucratic personnel like these always ruin such schemes. Read the full story here: Doctor Death in Bundaberg.

It was a day when every book repels, when each title brings a sense of ennui. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution? I don’t think so: out of Mexico always the same thing. The Second Plane? No Martin we’ll give that a miss. What remains to be discovered: mapping the secrets of the universe, the origins of life, and the future of the human race? Not just now Sir John.

Then I had a bright idea — why not poetry? So reaching up I took down from my shelves an old Penguin with the following title: The Centuries’ Poetry: an anthology compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts. Volume 4, Hood to Hardy.

Denys Kilham Roberts

As one may see from the portrait Penguin Books conveniently provide of Mr Roberts, who was born in Cornwall in 1903 and died in 1976, there’s something about him less than reassuring. He looks directly and solemnly into the camera (does the clenched hand on which he rests his chin cover an old scar, or is that how you looked thoughtful in the 1940s?).

His expression suggests a dark or even tragic view of life, with distinct intimations of mortality, and perhaps that should have been a warning. Yet nothing prepared me for the catalog of suffering, misfortune, woes miscellaneous and woes particular, graves, cemeteries, and dismally prefigured endings that readers have to cope with here. More than half Mr Roberts’ poets seem more than half in love with easeful death.

The very first page (it is page 13) has a poem by Thomas Hood about autumn. Remember Keats? Remember those mists and mellow fruitfulness and swollen gourds and nice plump hazel shells? Rather jolly, no? I think so. Brings to mind peasants merrily treading a measure on the winnowing floor. In Keats, autumn rounds out the best summer any living bee can remember, with honey oozing out of the comb.

But now listen to Thomas Hood:

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn…

Forlorn! The very word is like a knell. If there’s anything that defines the tone of this lugubrious literary regiment that’s it. In Autumn, Hood mourns the passing of summer, the vanished flowers, the fallen leaves, the swallows that have flown. All that remains is teary and sunless, shadowy, fearful, and bare. Forlorn indeed!

But here the autumn Melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone…

There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

Sorry Tom, and I don’t want to interrupt, but what’s all this about earth’s “bitter fruits” and bowls full of “chilly droppings”? I don’t know what Hood had for breakfast the day he wrote this, but chances are it was porridge. Made from oats. Good stuff for feeding horses and poets, and part of the harvest a bountiful earth provides.

Talk about gratitude.

But enough of fear and shadowy despair and enough of Hood. Moving along to page 24 we find “Is Love a Fancy?”, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge. The eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley seems to have had problems with the bottle (he was once dismissed for ‘intemperance’) and more trouble with women.

“Is love a fancy or a feeling?” he brightly asks, but if you think this is going to be about lovers in the springtime, the only pretty ringtime, when birds do sing, hey ding a ding ding — forget it. Barely half way through we’ve got pensive gloom hovering o’er a tomb; suicide gets into the final couplet; and in his last line he describes Hope morosely as “a spectre in a ruin bare”. And with Hope in that condition, can Death be far behind?

Draping a funereal coverlet over Thomas Lovell Beddoes and “Death’s Jest-Book”, pages 27–29 — Bare as Death’s shoulder… For the King of the grave… Our nest is queen Cleopatra’s skull… — (Beddoes’ voice sounds like a crow cawing over a cadaver) we come on page 33 to the jollifications of Edgar Allan Poe:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne (he tells us, describing some lost city in the sea)
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason, moral, political, or religious, that the city has fallen, with its time-eaten shrines and palaces and towers. But Poe likes the idea of fallen things, dying things, decomposition and desuetude: he sniffs the historical wind and it smells of decay; he imagines long-forgotten sculptured ivy and stone flowers and sees disintegration with a sickly joy — all of it under the vast inescapable doom wheeled in for his conclusion:

While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

Will it fall on us? Devour us? Kill us with its monstrous gaze? Or is it just another pointless example of Poe’s Gothic fantasizing? Of course few poets except Poe have only one song to sing. Poor sick Poe. But I suppose it must be said in the editor’s favour that when on page 36 Mr Roberts comes to John Clare, he does wait a little before trying to make one’s day worse (with a contribution by Clare from the Northampton County Asylum).

Before that ordeal, however, we are allowed a thrush singing hymns to sunrise, warping the moss to form a nest, laying eggs like heath-bells gilt with dew. Or there’s First Sight of Spring with its hazel blooms in threads of crimson and the yet-to-arrive whitethorn leaves. Or the squirrel sputtering up the powdered oak:

With tail cocked o’er his head, and ears erect,
Startled to hear the woodman’s understroke;
And with the courage which his fears collect,
He hisses fierce half malice and half glee,
Leaping from branch to branch about the tree,
In winter’s foliage, moss and lichens, deckt.

That reminds me — I must find out some time the right way to pronounce “lichens”. Like, or litch? Still a bit vague about that. Anyway, with Clare’s poem there’s none of that skull beneath the skin business where breastless creatures lean backward with lipless grins, or the rest of Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service about death by water or the sprouting of the corpse that was planted last year in the garden or dead men’s bones in the rat’s alley or white leopards that have fed to satiety on legs and liver and that which had been contained in the hollow round of my skull.

Poor sick poets. Plato knew a thing or two. Too self-regarding. Too many words and not enough Dinge an sich. Anyway I’ve done with reading. Done with poets. Today I was walking over a headland where swifts swoop and a small downy-breasted hawk hung in the wind’s updraft. Saw a whale steaming along too.

“Nah, only make things worse”. My mate reckoned it would mostly stimulate inflation, and weaken the currency too. He’d been reading a book that was full of bad economic news. “If I found a million dollars I’d put it under my bed.”

Now I think this is crazy. Like other beachcombers I read the newspapers and know that capitalism is on the rocks and the solution is obvious: spend money, as much as you can on anything at all — the other day Paul Krugman said Obama should just come up with a figure and then add 50 percent and spend, spend, spend. Free money will free up the free market. Stands to reason.

“Nah, it’s been tried. Won’t work. Read this.” My beachcombing pal took his book and pointed to something written by FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, over 70 years ago:

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it doesn’t work… We have never made good on our promises… After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… and an enormous debt to boot!

That had to be wrong. Wasn’t Morgenthau the guy who said German industry should be levelled and the country turned into cow pastures? In 1944? Anyway that was a long time ago and economists are heaps smarter now. Right? How about Japan in the 1990s I asked.

“Japan? Gotta be joking!”

Shifting to a more comfortable rock, suitable for a more expansive exegesis, my learned friend said that between 1989 and 1992 the Nikkei dropped from 40,000 to 15,000, that real estate prices dropped 80 percent from 1991 to 1998, that the Bank of Japan and the Japanese government did all they could to prop up prices and bad debt.

Interest rates were pushed to zero, trillions of yen were spent on public works, zombie companies had billions thrown at them to prevent them going bust, and the government launched no fewer than ten stimulus packages totalling over 100 trillion yen. None of it worked. Japan’s depression lasted nearly two decades.

“But what about the Fed!” I cried, for surely the Federal Reserve is an economic rock, placed there to protect all beachcombers against adversity and guide us toward the promised land.

“The what? Gimme a break!” As he saw it the Fed was the greatest culprit of all by messing with interest rates. First of all the Federal Reserve Bank has nothing to do with capitalism and is not a free-market institution at all. It exists to politically interfere with the natural price of money. Left to itself the interest rate has a useful role: it coordinates production across time. But it can only do this if it’s allowed to freely move up and down. According to my beachcombing friend the Fed’s intervention constantly mismatches market forces.

As for the Fed being chartered to protect the interests of ordinary beachcombers, he laughed in my face. The Federal Reserve Act, he said, was actually drafted by a cabal of bankers at a private meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1910, to entrench the special privileges of the banking industry at the expense of everyone else. When it became law in 1913, he said, it was “special interest legislation masquerading as a public-spirited measure”. Much better to let banks fail than have a privileged banker’s bank like the Fed using tax revenue to protect bankers from their own follies. Why should the guy in the corner store be the only one forced to fail?

And there’s no such thing as easy credit. What’s easy credit during politically engineered booms is hard cheese when cometh the bust. And for some it’s worse than that. Leveraging’s really cantileveraging, like an unbalanced crane on the edge of El Capitan swinging further and further out into space… til down it crashes to the valley floor.

I’d had enough. It was time to leave. No more bad news for me. But on pages 74-75 of his little book I did find this. It’s called “The Austrian Theory” and may perhaps be of interest.

1. Interest rates come down in two ways. Either the public saves more and they come down spontaneously, or the central bank artificially forces them down.
2. Businessmen respond to lower rates by starting new projects. The projects they start tend to be interest-rate sensitive — big projects like mining, construction, etc.
3. If the interest rate is lower because of natural causes — increased saving for example — then the market works smoothly. Those savings provide the wherewithal for new investment projects that can be seen all the way to completion.
4. If the interest rate is lower because of the political manipulations of a central bank — then these projects cannot all be completed. This is because the necessary resources to do so have not been saved by the public. Investors have been misled into forms of production they cannot sustain.
5. Imagine a builder who thinks he has 20 percent more bricks than he really has. And 20 percent more bricks than he can pay for. That inaccurate brick count will have dire consequences: the house will be bigger than it should be, and the longer he goes on building without realizing the real situation the worse the final reckoning will be.
6. The economy is like the home builder. Forcing interest rates lower than the free market would have set them makes us act as if there are more saved resources than really exist. Some of our new investment is malinvestment — investment that makes no sense in the light of reality.
7. That’s what has happened. Politically imposed low rates misdirected huge resources into home construction. It was unsustainable. There were only so many $900,000 homes that the public, which had been saving very little, was able to buy.
8. The sooner this chronic monetary manipulation comes to an end the sooner the malinvestment can be shaken out, and misallocated resources directed into sustainable lines. And the longer we try propping things up and bailing things out the worse the bust will be. For everyone.

[The title of the book my beachcombing friend Rafe passed along is Meltdown: a free-market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse, Regnery, 2009. Its publishers have done us all a service, and I hope its author, Thomas E. Woods Jr, will forgive me for pilfering his text.]

Three quotations from Meltdown

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.

Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever.

When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged overinvestment in housing. (16)

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, September 10, 2003.

“We need more regulation!”

Financial “deregulation” has often been blamed for the economic meltdown, with then Senator Barack Obama late in the 2008 campaign ceaselessly condemning the Bush administration’s alleged drive to “strip away regulation”.

But lenders in the housing market were doing exactly what the federal government and its central bank wanted them to do. Saying that more government oversight was needed misses the point. More and riskier loans are what the government wanted.

Fashionable opinion everywhere, especially throughout the government sector, cheered as traditional lending practices were abandoned and riskier ones adopted — why, the American dream is being extended to more and more people! (29)

Symptoms, causes, and the war on reality

The fall of stock prices is not the cause of problems in the economy. Stock prices are merely a reflection of the economy’s condition. Artificially inflating them treats the symptom rather than the cause… The fact is financial bubbles need to burst, so that the inflated prices of the assets involved can fall to their market price…

Nor are falling house prices the problem. They are the market’s way of correcting the distortions produced by unleashing the Fed’s credit spigot.

Yet here we have the federal government, which claims to want to make housing more affordable… endorsing a policy of maintaining bubble prices in the real estate market. Whatever happened to the goal of affordable housing? Can a stream of rational thought be found amid all this convoluted nonsense? (57)

Zimbabwe is not a happy place. The killing never ends (it only pauses) and the prevailing ethic is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Morgan Tsvangirai looks like a man who has better ideas than Robert Mugabe. But because he’d rather live than die he abandoned a dangerous election that might have seen a general massacre of his followers.

As for an eye for an eye—in 1982 Mugabe, a Shona, warned his enemies of the Ndebele tribe (also known as Matabele):

Some of the measures we shall take are measures that will be extra-legal. An eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye.

Following Ismail Kadare, we might call this an explicit blinding order. Or official permit. A recipe for ruin.

Civil war in Africa

Anyway Mugabe is adamant he’d rather have civil war than yield to parliament. In fact he rather likes war, and has boasted that he “has a degree in violence.” War, and nothing remotely resembling parliamentary compromise, has been his theme for years. In 2000 he said “the Movement for Democratic Change will never form the government of this country, never, ever, not in my lifetime or even after I die.”

At a party conference in December 2001 he declared “What we are now headed for is real war, a total war. We should move like a military machine,” adding a warning for Morgan Tsvangirai: “Death to the tea boy!”

Pessimists foresee a possible genocide by Mugabe’s mainly Shona supporters against Tsvangirai’s Ndebele-based Movement for Democratic Change (in earlier pogroms against the Ndebele during the 1980s some 10,000 to 20,000 are said to have died). And of course Zimbabwe is not alone. In other parts of the world too, intransigently hostile groups reject any mechanism for reconciling their differences, achieving unity, and moving on. An eye for an eye rules.

Why is this?

The Athenian breakthrough

2,500 years ago the Greek city states were continually at each other’s throats. Each behaved toward the others in a solidary way solely concerned with its own members and its own cause.

Then Athens made a breakthrough. A number of thinkers arose—poets, artists, and legislators—who looked at larger matters than tribal self-interest and asked questions about the general nature of justice and injustice, good and evil, war and peace.

Perhaps the most astonishing of them all was Aeschylus. A poet and dramatist who knew about war and killing at first hand, he fought against Darius and the Persians at Marathon in 490BC and against Xerxes’ assault on Athens in 480BC.

He’d seen the cruelty of man-to-man combat and felt the pain of watching his comrades die. A raging thirst for retributive vengeance would have been only natural. An eye for an eye. But that’s not what happened. Instead, in the year 458BC, he wrote a memorable trilogy dramatizing humanity’s need to bring cycles of bloodshed to an end.

Agamemnon and Troy

It took the form of allegory. And like most Greek dramas of the time its characters were drawn from myth and legend— especially Homer’s story of Agamemnon and the fall of Troy.

The background story was this. Before sailing across the Aegean to attack Troy, Agamemnon’s fleet had been held up for months by unfavourable winds. A god warned that only if Agamemnon made an offering and sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia would the weather improve and carry his ships across.

And lo! After cutting his daughter’s throat the wind picks up, he sails for Troy, spends ten years away—and returns (with new girlfriend Cassandra) to face his wife Clytemnestra. After a decade grieving for Iphigenia it was now Clytemnestra’s turn.

And it’s at this point in the story that Aeschylus begins a trilogy where against all likelihood the fateful alternating violence of a traditional feud leads finally to judicial process, to the hearing of evidence, to the authority of legal judgment, and to at least the beginnings of inter-tribal peace.

The trilogy

The first play, Agamemnon, shows Clytemnestra luring her long lost husband into the palace where she stabs him to death in his bath, gloating afterwards over the bloodstained sheets and windings.

For this act of vengeance she in turn must die, and in the second play, The Libation Bearers, her own son Orestes kills his mother for killing his father. Now the Furies pursue him, hounding him to his doom in Hades, and it seems that his own fate is sealed…

But it isn’t. Because in the third play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, Aeschylus brings in the goddess Pallas Athena to adjudicate. She fears that if this sort of thing goes on and on — exactly as it does today in Zimbabwe and elsewhere today — then the suffering will never cease.

She speaks of the frightening prospect of civil war. No-one wants that. Speaking as the goddess of wisdom Pallas Athena says enough is enough: at her court in Athens she will listen to rival arguments in what she calls “the first murder trial”, after which the aggrieved parties must abide by her decision. From that day on law and judicial process replaces vengeance. Juries replace Furies. It all ends with the pacification of the Furies themselves, who are turned from agents of the underworld into models of good citizenship… and Orestes lives.

From Draco to Cleisthenes

This poetic interpretation generalises a long evolutionary process by which Athenian law developed from the days of Draco (who was draconian), to the reforms of Solon (who was wise, and made a first attempt to deal with Athenian tribalism) to the reforms of Cleisthenes (who made a second attempt, and sought to establish equality before the law regardless of descent or heredity).

But the point is this: the Athenians saw an internal political problem that had to be fixed. And they proceeded to fix it constitutionally in ways that were a lesson for mankind. There had to be established procedures for reconciling sharply opposed interests within the state, and for preventing blood feuds getting out of control. Otherwise there’d be civil war and unending anarchy.

Why is it so hard to get this message accepted today in places like Zimbabwe? In Sri Lanka? In the Balkans? In the Middle East? If somebody still has her number, would they please call Pallas Athena again.

The concept of human rights goes back some two hundred years, but it reached its greatest glory in the second half of the 1970s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had just been exiled from his country, and his striking figure adorned with a beard and handcuffs, hypnotized Western intellectuals sick with a longing for the great destiny that had been denied them.

It was only thanks to him that they started to believe, after a fifty-year delay, that in communist Russia there were concentration camps; even progressive people were now ready to admit that imprisoning someone for his opinions was not just…

Thanks to Solzhenitsyn human rights once again found their place in the vocabulary of our times; I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day ‘the fight for human rights’ or ‘violations of human rights.’ But the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more in loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights.

The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street. (Immortality, 1990)

Kundera’s cynicism is understandable. But it would be unfortunate if the excesses of human rights campaigners blinded us to the grim realities their doctrine originally sought to combat. Today I read in the newspaper about a 15-year-old Indian rape victim in the state of Madhya Pradesh. A dalit (untouchable), she had been burned alive for identifying her upper-caste Rajput assailant.

There are alas cultural systems that cannot cure their own ills, and India presents a prime example. Contra Kundera, the content in this case is all too hideously real. The simple truth is that for most dalit caste creates a hell on earth of unimaginable injustice. In places like India a transcendent ideal of human rights, above and independent of the national culture, is a beacon that keeps the hope of social and political improvement alive.

Writers and reporters naturally reach for the strongest word—the most vivid, the most colorful, the one most likely to grab the eye. In the age of the sound-bite anything less may be overlooked. And some of the time this may be legitimate. But there are also words we are obliged to treat with special care. These are terms that carry such historical freight that reckless or frivolous use not only shows the superficiality of the writer, it disastrously debases their moral meaning and true significance.

One such word is ‘Holocaust’. Brendan O’Neill, deputy editor of the website Spiked, has written extensively about what he calls ‘Holocaust relativism’ and the cheapening of the term by all and sundry: those interested should hunt him up.

Another word is ‘Gulag’. Nowadays anyone coming across a system of detention they disapprove of is inclined to describe it in this way. Not long ago Abu Ghraib was supposed to be an “American Gulag”. The real Gulag was however a great deal worse than even the nastiest jail in Iraq. As Anne Applebaum states in her indispensable history of the Soviet camp system (Gulag: a History, 2003), during the many long years of their operation from 1923 the vast network of Russian labor camps may have cost around 2.7 million lives.

The best book to read on the matter is by Anne Applebaum. The best film or video introduction to the real Gulag I know of, as opposed to the notional ‘gulags’ floating around in the overheated minds of journalists, is a remarkable documentary film by Marina Goldovskaya, The Solovky Power.

The following article is about that film. With the title ‘Hollywood Meets the Zeks’ it appeared originally in the 2005 Summer web edition of The New Criterion.

The Solovky power

Made in 1987-88 when political controls were crumbling, providing a historical analysis of the origins of the Gulag in “the Solovky” (shorthand for the entire complex of penal institutions in the White Sea Solovetsky archipelago as a whole), The Solovky Power belongs to the extraordinarily small number of distinguished documentary films treating Soviet, rather than Nazi, concentration camps.

It is a work of considerable artistry. Serious documentarians drawn to this subject matter have had difficulty maintaining an aesthetic balance between outrage and art. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) set a high and exacting standard, while some would say that the much earlier and admittedly very different Night and Fog, by Alain Resnais, leaned to overly poetic artifice. At all events it is in this elevated company that Goldovskaya’s The Solovky Power belongs—a film equal to its tragic subject that honors both the cinema and the dead.

In the chapter “The Archipelago Metastasizes” of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn himself wondered ironically why, when “the peaked roofs of ugly camp watchtowers became the most dependable landmarks in our landscape… they were not seen in either the canvases of our artists or in scenes in our films”.

But of course we know perfectly well why no Soviet films contained a record of such things. The film director or artist who made a record of the watchtowers and barb wire would end up inside, and quickly too. Less clearly understood is the absence of almost any photographic evidence at all of a documentary kind about the Soviet camps, since we have all seen footage taken of Belsen and Buchenwald. Yet the reason is painfully simple: no victorious army ever smashed through the gates of Vorkuta, or into the Kolyma camps, or the Solovky itself, at the height of their operations, allowing photographers to expose their infamies to the world.

* * *

“With an iron fist we shall drive mankind to happiness”. Inspired by this slogan, the administrators of the Solovky organized the dispersed system of local camps, on separate islands, which provided the geographical basis for Sozhenitsyn’s “archipelago”. Those held there at first were quite a distinguished group. Discussing the composition of the prison population, Anne Applebaum says of the Gulag overall that “Even in 1938, the year the Great Terror raged among Moscow and Leningrad intellectuals, those with higher education in the camps still numbered only 1.1 percent while over half had primary education and a third were semiliterate.”

But it wasn’t like that on the Solovky in the early days, when a high proportion of those imprisoned were intellectuals charged under Article 58. The inmates ranged from engineers to theologians, from historians and economists to poets, writers, and playwrights. They included the archaeologist Nazimov, Father Pyotr of Voronezh, the poets Alexei Gastev and Nicolai Serov, and the renowned Pavel Florensky, religious philosopher, mathematician, and cultural historian.

Most of course were long dead by 1987, the year when Marina Goldovskaya was interviewing survivors; but two literate and articulate witnesses were still available, both of whom figure in Anne Applebaum’s history, and this makes a world of difference to a film in which spoken evidence is a vital resource. One of them was the respected and revered literary scholar Dmitri Likhachev. The other was Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, accused in 1936 of a conspiracy to kill Kaganovich, and ultimately forced to serve 20 years in “confinement and exile.”

At one point she was moved east to Magadan, and at a transit camp in Irkutsk there was a large mirror. Not since their arrest four years before had she and her fellow prisoners once seen their own reflections. They rushed to look. But at first she could find nothing there.

Then suddenly I saw my mother. A sad exhausted face. Grey hair. It turned out to be me!

As she recounts this episode, we see before us the photograph of a handsome young mother of two small children, about the time when she was first seized and taken away, juxtaposed with a picture of her own mother aged about fifty or so, looking as grey and exhausted as described: and we also see, in the 80-year-old woman now talking about these events before Goldovskaya’s camera, the poignant facial vestiges of each.

Evidence and documents

The main Solovetsky island in the White Sea was 60 kilometers off the Russian coast, nearly 1000 kilometers north of Leningrad. Very few escaped and lived to tell the tale. In winter, captured escapees were stripped, shot, and their frozen corpses kept on public view. But in one of the only recorded instances of a successful escape, two White Guards got off the island in May 1925, made their way to the West, and in 1926 produced books about their experiences.

This was highly embarrassing for the Soviets. In government circles there was a feeling that some response was required, and in 1927-28 the GPU ordered the making of a propaganda film to correct the rumors that were spreading far and wide. Eminent figures like Maxim Gorky were recruited to appear and reassuringly report that everything on the Solovki was just fine.

Although a lot of footage was shot, no finished film was ever released. And like so many of the prisoners photographed, the film disappeared without trace. Unlike them, however, a print of high quality was found alive and well in a Soviet film archive 60 years later, and this forms the basis of much of Goldovskaya’s own enterprise.

The subtitle of The Solovky Power is “evidence and documents”. This is important. For though the original propaganda footage consists of communist disinformation from first to last, the graphic evidence of the camp that it unavoidably includes becomes a useful tool for eliciting, from survivors, a true account of camp life. While a videotape of the old Soviet black and white film plays in one corner of the room, aged witnesses sit in another corner and comment mockingly on what they see. A scene of the camp admission procedure, with prisoners being courteously received as if at a hotel, provokes an outburst from the writer Oleg Volkov, who well remembers the sickening “fleapit” he was put in and the rain of lice falling on him as he tried to sleep.

Reception at the Solovky was indeed something you didn’t forget. Prisoners were brutalized in ways designed to break the strongest spirit. Men were made to run round and round a yard high-stepping with “knees up” until they dropped; the least remonstrance brought a savage beating with staves; and the helplessness of their situation, beyond the reach of law, was again and again emphasized by guards who shouted at each batch of rookie zeks:

This isn’t Soviet power! It’s Solovki power! A prosecutor never set foot here! Nobody lags behind on the march, and a single step to left or right is considered an escape!

Need one add that Kurilko, the commandant who both devised and enforced this rule of terror, and ensured that numerous prisoners were murdered when they fell behind or tottered out of line, was himself eventually charged, incarcerated, and shot? Other scenes from the past show a visit by Maxim Gorky in 1929. Along with his daughter-in-law (who Applebaum notes was conspicuously dressed as a chekistka in “leather jacket, leather jodhpurs, high boots and a leather cap”)

Gorky duly announced that on the Solovky the Soviet government had built a corrective institution of a refreshingly new kind. In some rooms, he wrote, there were “four or six beds, each decorated with personal items and on the windowsills there are flowers… No, there is no resemblance to a prison, instead it seems as if these rooms are inhabited by passengers rescued from a drowned ship.”

But it doesn’t seem like that to the surviving “passengers” looking at those scenes today. Shots of table linen and comfortable beds with sheets make them howl with mirth. A scene of camp guards judiciously tasting the prison food (Is it too hot or too cold? Too sweet or too sour? Should it perhaps be returned to the kitchen as unsatisfactory and replaced?) produce from today’s living witnesses explosions of bitter scorn.

The gulag as a model of the Soviet system

A leading argument of The Solovky Power is that the system of slave labor devised on the islands not only served as a punitive model once the Gulag “metastasized”, as Solzhenitsyn put it, but can be seen as evolving into the definitive system of “high Stalinism” within the Soviet Union as a whole. In the narrator’s words:

The more we examine the evidence of the time, the more we begin to clearly understand that the Solovky was a state in its own right. A primitive totalitarian power with its own government, its own emblems, its own attributes of authority. It had ministries of a kind, too. The information and investigative section; the culture and education section; and an economic section.

It had its own privileged class, the Chekists. The line of authority was well-defined from the all-powerful chief of the camp down to the heads of sections, guards, group overseers, and at the very bottom the convicts, who had no rights at all.

There is more than just plausibility to the idea that the principles of the gulag empire, first worked out at the Solovetsky Islands, were spread throughout the Soviet world as a whole, so that in Stalin’s day the only difference between one side of the barbed wire and the other was a small matter of relative amenity.

Both inside and outside the camps the climate of fear was universal, because spying itself was universal and nobody could be trusted day or night. Within the camp, at least one dependable friend could make the difference between life and death. As for the world outside, especially as it affected escapees, things might be even worse. Whereas in Czarist times sympathetic citizens would feed and shelter fugitives, under Stalin they were certain to be turned in. No-one could risk not handing them over.

According to Applebaum, tribal peoples like the Eskimos and Kazakhs “became professional bounty hunters, searching for escaped prisoners in return for a kilogram of tea or a bag of wheat. In Kolyma, a local inhabitant who brought in the right hand of a runaway” (or even the head, from some reports) “received a 250-ruble prize, and the prizes seem to have been similar elsewhere.”

Then consider the “theory of labor” propounded by Matvei Pogrebinskii, named in the film as “an officer of the OGPU, and a writer of sorts”, according to whose book The Human Factory, “humans were nothing more than raw material and should be subject to the same factory processing.” On this severely materialistic account of Soviet Man, what difference did it make if one was inside or outside the prison walls?

Related to this was the little matter of getting shot. According to communist theory a zek who tried to escape was only partly seen as avoiding punishment. More importantly, as the property of the state, and a valued economic unit, for a slave to pretend to be free labor and move away from his workplace in “the human factory” defied a basic obligation of Soviet citizenship. Yet the case of the “free” citizen who tried to run the gauntlet and find freedom in the west was no different. Whether inside the penal microsystem, or inside the wider Soviet system as a whole, state property that grew legs and showed a perverse will of its own received the same penalty—a bullet.

The parricide as hero

Catriona Kelly’s recent book, Comrade Pavlik: the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero, tells the tale of the boy who achieved Soviet stardom as an informer by denouncing his father. As she herself makes clear, so much mythology came to surround the case that one might easily think this kind of thing never really happened. But it did. At the Solovky there was an even worse case, and it was all too real.

Comrade Uspensky was the son of a priest when the Revolution happened, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn gives space to his story. In Solzhenitsyn’s words, under the new regime “What did he have to look forward to? Security questionnaires, restrictions, exile, persecution. And there is no possible way to erase this from one’s record, no possible way to change one’s father. But no, Uspensky discovered there was a way: he killed his own father and declared to the authorities that he had done it out of class hatred!”

Perhaps he hoped to impress the Party and obtain a reward, much as the Eskimos and Kazakhs were rewarded for bringing in bits and pieces of dismembered escapees. But if so it didn’t happen. Alarmed by such homicidal zeal, the police sent him off to the Solovky, where, at the time of the next mass execution, he received an assignment: on October 28, 1929, he and some others shot dead 300 inmates in one night.

Goldovskaya’s team tracked Uspensky down, and Dmitri Likhachev is shown handling a pile of recent 8 x 10 inch black and white photos showing a respectably dressed but stooped and aged man. He is seen in the streets of an anonymous city, or going into his apartment house, or shopping—always with his eyes considerately blacked out by the filmmaker to obscure his identity. It is a measure of the contrast between the madness of communist fanaticism and the natural humanity of normal men and women that Likhachev, who only narrowly escaped being shot that night himself—he hid in a woodpile while the massacre took place—implores the filmmaker not to reveal the mass murderer’s name:

He’s still alive, and he’s older than me. It is terrible. I understand that he has a wife. Children and grandchildren. I pity them. Please don’t say what his name is. (Perhaps Likhachev is referring to a modern pseudonym: any reader of Solzhenitsyn could easily find the name Uspensky, RS) Of course he isn’t the only one. Knowing the scale of Stalin’s repressions, you can imagine the number of people who took part in them. They still live among us. Why name only him?

Anne Applebaum does not appear to have seen The Solovky Power. At least there is no reference to it in her index, and nor is there any mention of its director, Marina Goldovskaya. This would be of no great interest except that Applebaum prefers the figure of 50 shot, taken from official camp archives, to the figure of 300 given by Solzhenitsyn, on the one hand, and by Likhachev, the young man in the woodpile, on the other. From the vividness and transparent authenticity of the account given by Dmitri Likhachev in the film, I suspect most people would incline to go with the higher figure.

Sources: The basic resource, supplementing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, is Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag: a History (Doubleday, 2003)

Melvin Laird, a former Secretary of Defense who extricated the US from an earlier war, has written in Foreign Affairs strongly urging rapid Iraqization because he feels this sort of thing would be better handled by Iraqis themselves. American military force is too provocative; the army’s footprint too large. That is also the message now coming from Laird’s modern counterpart Donald Rumsfeld, who said in June that “If the insurgency does go on for four, eight, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever … it is going to be a problem for the people of Iraq”: they are evidently expected to handle it themselves in the long term. But setting aside Mr Rumsfeld’s cavalier “15 years, whatever”, would an action like this fare any better or worse with Iraqi troops in charge? Today domestic sectarian hatred is at least as great as hatred of the outsider. If the householders were Sunni, would they welcome being shelled by Shia troops?

The soldiers themselves had seen it all before, one of them telling CNN’s reporter that it was hard fighting a war where civilians and combatants were inextricably mixed. As if we didn’t know. The clip ended before there were too many scenes of householders confronting the troops with their injured and their dead. After that the frustrated, angry, well-meaning and sturdy “nation-builders”, weapons in hand but unable to tell friend from foe, fearful, confused, hating their task and doubting their president, went stumbling on.

A good idea at the time

Democracy at gunpoint never seemed a good idea. But it seemed not too bad an idea if there really were WMDs, and if Saddam had to go, and if change in this part of the world would come no other way, and if western oil interests had to be defended, and if contingency plans had to be made to buttress the House of Saud, and if mere containment after 9/11 was not an option.

American optimism is infectious, and by and large the world needs more of it. So why not take out Saddam? And if that works why not take out the rest? Let’s have democracy from Morocco to Mindanao, from the shores of the Red Sea to the heights of the Hindu Kush. Thus was born a dangerous but bewitching plan.

Realists warned—in Walter Lippman’s words—that “Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.” But what the hell? We all know about realism.

Some said if terrorists flooded into Iraq, who cares? We’ll kill them as they come! (Easier there than here.) Doubters prophesied that invading Iraq would double their number, perhaps treble, perhaps quadruple. And now that’s what seems to have happened: pouring in from other lands and eager to join the jihad, the prophecy is self-fulfilled. It is less than three years since it started, but those who have forgotten the beginning cannot see the irony of the end. “President Bush is right on target”, said a former CIA operative on Fox News the other day, “Iraq is proving to be the center of terrorism in the world.” Translated: what we now have is a full-scale guerrilla war.

Though as the bombs explode who can tell how many enemy there really are? Estimates range between 20,000 and 100,000. And where are they coming from? According to Robert Baer in Newsweek a Syrian official reported that of 1,200 suspected suicide bombers arrested by Syrian authorities since 2003, 85 percent were Saudis. An interview with Iraqi guerrilla leaders showed a more serious threat than living bombs: two mature ex-military men determined, in their words, to fight ‘until the last American soldier is dead’. The rhetoric was unoriginal; but their patriotic resolve was chilling. The existence of guerrilla commanders like these would seem to make it largely academic whether or not there’s a rift between Zarqawi’s killers and the rest. Zarqawi might disappear tomorrow. But the commanders will not.

Incredible political progress

Meanwhile President Bush was still talking of “incredible political progress” early in October, though sectarian tensions were mounting, scores were dying each day, and pessimists talked of civil war. A similar optimism inspires Front Page Magazine, though speakers at its regular symposia help the editors stay in touch. One of these gatherings explored the mind of the suicide bomber, Theodore Dalrymple explaining for anyone who would listen that

The act of killing oneself for a cause, in the process taking a few ‘enemies’ with one, is an apologia pro vita sua. Let us not forget that we in the West have a long and inglorious irrational tradition of supposing that the lengths to which people are prepared to go in the furtherance of a cause is itself evidence of the moral worth of that cause.

American military tactics have widely alienated the very people we liberated. Something’s not working right… Yes, there’s an elected government, but when Baghdad lacks power and water, and the road to the airport is a life-threatening crap shoot, and I can’t leave my hotel here in Basra without Iraqi protection—I can’t see much nation building going on.

Insurgents win by not losing. If they keep Iraqis living in misery, then no matter how many we dispatch to Paradise Amir Zarqawi gets the prize. In assessing the war effort, then, we must also include the quality of Iraqi’s lives. Want a grade for that? F.

The symposium adjourned, and by time it reconvened Steven Vincent had been kidnapped and killed. But he had managed to make another point before he died. Asked about the motives behind the unending killings, most of the dead being Iraqi themselves, he said:

Perhaps its time we consider that there is no answer, that the killing has no point, beyond archaic notions of tribal honor and revenge.

Tribal honor and revenge

But “archaic notions of tribal honor and revenge” are things Washington doesn’t understand. Nor does it grasp the psychology of tribal cultures that would rather die than switch. Nor can it see that Iraqi religious obsessions are entirely beyond the reach of ballot boxes and equable public discussion. As for the notion that the trial of Saddam “will bring closure” to anyone inside Iraq—who is deluding whom? Anyway the men and women who talk about freedom, democracy, constitutions, and market economies (all of them things I strongly approve of) don’t seem to understand—or realise the wild destructiveness of the emotions now unloosed.

As western tempers fray some call for a stiffening of the will, others look for straws in the wind. When things are not going well “if onlys” multiply. Why wasn’t the Syrian border mined to prevent incursions? If only this had been done those Saudi suicide bombers might have been stopped. Too many people have been influenced by Lady Diana’s campaigns against a perfectly sensible weapon. Were it not for her crusade against anti-personnel mines the border could have been sealed long ago.

If only liberal and progressive Islamic scholars would speak up… But they don’t, says Ahmed H. al-Rahim in the Wall Street Journal, and as a result “the battle against Islamism—and also for the heart of Islam—has become a battle for the West to fight.” Mr Rahim is a sometime teacher of Islamic studies at Harvard. He says it is shameful that there are no mass Muslim protests. “Why not a ‘Million Muslim March’ on Washington, of law-abiding Muslim citizens clamouring to reclaim their faith from those who would kill innocents in its name?” Why indeed?

Some find grounds for hope in reported divisions within the insurgency. Bernard Haykel says that “Mr Zarqawi’s war on Shiites is deeply unpopular in some quarters of his own movement.” There are supposed to be growing splits among the jihadis, some of whom feel on-camera beheadings are counter-productive. Meanwhile, back home in Washington, there is increasing doubt as to whether the most sacred doctrine of the Coalition—that democracy will automatically reduce the country’s divisions and usher in peace and freedom—will in fact have that effect.

Perhaps it will only sharpen the divisions. Or galvanize the antagonists. Or precipitate civil war. It is unclear from conflicting statements from the White House, on one hand, and from the generals, on the other, whether there are now thirty battalions of Iraqi troops able to go “in the lead” against the insurgents, or only one. It is quite possible that none of these morally torn, divided, and fearful men are capable of going it alone. Some strategists want more troops in Iraq. Others want fewer. As Macaulay wrote, those behind cry “forward!”, and those before cry “back!”

From labyrinth to conflagration?

Which legend best describes our situation? James Carroll writing in the Boston Globe prefers one from ancient Crete: “The myth has it that a person entering the maze will never find the way out. As if that were not terrifying enough, inside the maze lives the beast whose special appetite is for the young. The maze is a cluster of tricks, paths to nowhere, the realm of dead ends. There is no escape. The young must fear being eaten alive, but an eternity of false exits threatens everyone.”

Then there is the legend of Laius, who is told by the oracle that his own offspring will kill him, and no matter what he does, no matter what action he takes, events move relentlessly toward that fated end. Or does this really belong with the legendary law of unintended effects, by which even the most enlightened acts may lead to disastrous consequences—consequences no-one could foresee? The introduction of democracy leading to civil war, and that to a general conflagration throughout the Middle East? Though the west continues to talk about the desirability of Saudi democratization, Robert Baer, an experienced observer familiar with Saudi popular sentiment, gave this opinion back in 2003:

If an election were held in Saudi Arabia today, if anyone who wanted to could run for the office of president, and if people could vote their hearts without fear of having their heads cut off afterward in Chop-Chop Square, Osama bin Laden would be elected in a landslide.

Mr Taranto and Mr Polk

Recently James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had this to say: “The reality is that President Bush’s legacy will be judged on two things: whether America is successful in Iraq, and, if so, whether success in Iraq helps promote democracy and discourage terrorism elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. If the former happens, history will recognize Bush as a near-great president; if the latter, as a great one…”

Both predictions seem to me unlikely. Rather more realistic was the assessment given by William R. Polk last January in an article with the title “A Time for Leaving”. Iraq, he wrote, is a shattered country. Few of its people have useable drinking water. Seven out of ten are unemployed. Society has been torn apart, up to 100,000 Iraqi have died, and “dreadful hatreds have been generated”. As Polk sees it, we are now in the middle of a classic guerrilla war, similar to that in Algeria in the 1950s, where although relatively few men may be fighting for the “insurgency”, many more who do not fight support them.

Polk is a former member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council, when he was responsible for the Middle East. He was also a founder of the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Most Iraqis, he wrote last January, regard the present government as an American puppet, and he himself sees little point in a constitution that “is not anchored in the realities of Iraqi society. Absent the institutions that give life to a constitution, it will be simply a piece of paper as was the one the British provided 80 years ago.”

He sees three options available for America—Staying the Course, Iraqization, and getting out now rather than being forced out later. The first means digging an ever deeper hole. Of the second he says that “the idea that America can fashion a local militia to accomplish what its powerful army cannot do is not policy but fantasy.” Everything we have seen so far of action by Iraqi troops suggests that this is true. Regarding the third—a truce and a pull-out—he says that “time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be unambiguous…” Ultimately it will need a decision by President Bush “as courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria when he called for a ‘peace of the brave’.”

I am not as optimistic as William Polk when he says that following such a bold initiative “fighting would quickly die down”. The political forces unleashed both nationally and internationally now have a momentum of their own. But with Donald Rumsfeld talking publicly of a 15-year war, and both George W. Bush and his Coalition partners bereft of ideas, the alternative may mean wandering in the labyrinth forever. As the months turn into years, and the years into a military epoch, we may live to find Ms Shock and Awe—her curls greying, her helmet dented—reporting the “incredible political progress” she has seen the preceding week. [Recommended reading: Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid.]

Her May 5^th seminar The Anal Imagination: Psychoanalysis, Capitalism, and Excretion pushed the frontier of social analysis into areas previously unexplored. Speaking at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, and taking her cue from Freud, she showed how superficial it is to mistake chocolate for food when analysing the digestive disorders of late capitalism. And also how naive it is to regard excretory taboos as a mark of civilization—in fact they denote a whole sad complex of a posteriori neuroses about money and lavatorial wastes. But it would be presumptuous to try and summarise her own inimitable words:

The central claim presented is that while the bawdy gags of Rabelais or of the Fabliaux may have excited guffaws and hooting in the early modern era, the acrobatic farting routine of Joseph Pujol at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s provoked nervous laughter of a kind altogether unique to late modern capitalism, new to bourgeois Europeans of the fin-de-siècle metropolis, and indicative of a colonising subjectivity.

This is acute. Those of us still given to nervous laughter in the presence of carelessly untoward emissions are exposed as woefully blind. Now all is clear: at bottom, this embarrassing reaction reveals the same old grubby obsession with profit and loss. Dr Kakatoscopy, a scholar as devoted to classical music as she is to cloacal anatomy, notes shrewdly that

In the time span from the music of Mozart played in the courts of Europe to the melodious virtuosity of Pujol, something had changed in what the anus was understood to symbolise…

Evidently hoping to change our understanding still further, her paper is a chapter from a book she is writing:

Informed by Marxism, by the work of Mary Douglas, Kristeva, Bataille and Baudrillard, The Anal Imagination proposes that the bANALity with which the subjects of excrement and chocolate history are often approached is itself indicative of a nervous avoidance that is testimony to the psychoANALytic metaphors presented in this book.

Orthographically playful, intellectually feisty, robustly committed to kicking ass in her preferred target zone, Dr Kakatoscopy writes in a biographical note that “her ongoing project is about the history of excretory taboos in Europe from the mid nineteenth-century and their relationship to visions of progress, class and colonial identification. In this vein she had published ‘Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the Excretory Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Carden-Coyne and Forth (eds), Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World, New York: Palgrave, 2004.”

So don’t believe what you hear! Our universities are in good shape. Led by thinkers like Dr Kakatoscopy, Australian academic life is not only in safe hands, it is audacious, innovative, and in some places—the University of Queensland for example—it is setting new and courageous standards for the world.

Though what has happened to ‘glory’ is worse than that. It always implied honorable pre-eminence of some kind. But today we live in the age of Jerry Springer: our times being inglorious, any sort of distinction will do—as the irresistible rise of Dr Kakatoscopy shows. Her solemn scatologizing may well give the University of Queensland a degree of prominence; the Centre for the History of European Discourses will now enjoy a raised if rather seamy profile; and at a time when no-one can tell the difference between notoriety and genuine scholarly achievement, the dim refulgence of an exercise in academic bum-wiping will quite possibly bestow glory on her institution… of a kind.

Which brings us to the word ‘jest’. And with the University of Queensland the jest is at the expense of the taxpayer. There are still people alive who remember when humanities departments were concerned with higher thought—not nether regions. I am reliably informed that some Vice-Chancellors remember those days too. Fifty years ago, as a student, I heard professors of modern languages who were not only memorable lecturers, they were so theatrically gifted, so sure in their grasp of their material and so culturally well-rounded, that the campus productions of Molière and Beaumarchais they staged were almost of professional standard.

And the joke is that today large numbers of otherwise sensible mums and dads think nothing has changed. They imagine that just because the names of humanities departments still sound much the same—English, French, Modern Languages or whatever—that the staff in these departments are still teaching what they used to teach; and they happily send their children to such places for what is still called higher education. Yet in some cases little is left but the hollow shell of a once distinguished institution, an Arts Faculty in name only, with whole departments full of gabbling mountebanks.

They are supposedly teaching the humanities. More often, in the aftermath of postmodernism, they give courses in prestigitation and necromancy. Like the criminal classes they have invented an argot that keeps their true activities obscure. Like the criminal classes they will continue these activities, however intellectually corrupt, until they are forcibly stopped. And like everyone else who is up to no good they prefer to be left alone. All this is obvious: how does the world not know? But if you think the top international universities have been spared, read “The Truth About Harvard” in the March 2005 Atlantic Monthly.

The three words of our title are Alexander Pope’s. In his Essay on Man they refer to humanity’s gift for mixing the absurd, the wicked, the virtuous, and the sublime. That is what Pope meant when he wrote of the ‘riddle’ of mankind. And for a three-dimensional flesh and blood illustration we might turn to the India of the Maharaja and his wife. Winston Churchill seems to have regarded Russia as uniquely enigmatic; but to my mind the true enigma is the Indian subcontinent—largely because it combines the infinitely old and the utterly new side by side, a contrast producing contradictions difficult to comprehend.

Born to great wealth and unchallenged privilege, master of countless peasants in numerous towns, educated at Oxford, the Maharaja remained a boor in his own house, adopting an unpardonable tone toward helpless, wretched servants, who shrank against the wall as he spoke, and who would probably have been lucky to receive a handful of rupees each day.

While this is puzzling, perhaps it’s no more than that. Brutes of exalted background are a dime a dozen. The Maharani on the other hand was a genuine riddle of the kind that might have intrigued Alexander Pope. One half of her was sensible, humane, cultivated, modern and rational. Engaging to talk to, she performed her aristocratic role in local life impeccably, and though not without an appropriate hauteur, she was always perfectly civil. I remember in particular a draper spreading bolts of cloth over a large living room floor, a man who squatted deferentially before her as she expertly fingered fabrics of green and gold, questioned him about prices, and discreetly concluded a deal.

But that calm and practical woman was only her visible side. The secular, domestic persona, as it were. She had also a spiritual side too, spending long hours alone at puja in a darkened shrine, chanting before incarnations of Vishnu, the darkness lit dimly with candles and tapers and incense sticks. When questioned on religious matters she said she might end her life as a sati, and commit herself to fiery self-immolation. How serious was this? Hard to say, though every now and then we still read of some pious woman suiciding on a Hindu pyre. It is difficult for a modern mind to grasp such an event… The living flesh in flames—the body fats igniting and blazing up; pain beyond belief; agony unimaginable—in order to achieve sainthood. In his ‘Proem’ to his Essay on Man Pope speaks of the human spectacle as a mighty maze—yet not without a plan. With the act of sati, it is the plan that puzzles rather than the maze. But it’s time to let Pope speak for himself:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!