Airforce Amazons

What’s up Prof?

2012-01-27T23:53:00.000-08:00

This painting of mine, from the StoryWorld card set The Mad Professor’s Workshop, is for sale as part an upcoming show at The Illustration Cupboard gallery, London.

The show is titled Celebrating Asylum and is a benefit support of the St Mary Magdalene Centre for Refugees and Asylum Seekers. There will be over fifty pictures, including art by Charlotte Voake, Chris Riddell, Catherine Anholt, Korky Paul, Jessica Ahlberg, John Lawrence, Dana Kubick, and Axel Scheffler.

You can see more StoryWorld paintings by scrolling down my portfolio page.

Celebrating Asylum, 2nd - 14th February 2012 at The Illustration Cupboard, 22 Bury St, St James's, London SW1.

IQ light

2012-01-26T09:01:00.000-08:00

The IQ light is a modular lampshade that my father, Holger Strøm, designed in the early 1970s when he was working at the Kilkenny Design Workshops in Ireland.

You wouldn’t be wrong in guessing that he has a fondness for Buckminster Fuller, not just in relation to geometry, but also the pleasure in designing an object that achieves much with little. There’s an element of play in this pleasure, and I think he would enjoy the playing card sphere below.

Poker Cards Sphere by Nick Sayers. 270 poker playing cards slotted together (exactly five packs of cards including the jokers). Inspired by Holger Strøm’s IQ light system. See more of Nick’s spherical sculptures on Flickr.

IQlight® copyright © 1973 and 2000 Holger Strøm.
Poker Cards Sphere copyright © 2011 all rights reserved by Nick Sayers.

Missing Sadie paintings update: two found

2012-01-22T16:02:00.000-08:00

Back in 2008, three paintings of mine went missing from the Ian Logan Design Shop, London, when it closed down. All three were illustrations for my picture book, Sadie the Air Mail Pilot. Yesterday two of the paintings, shown above, were recovered, thanks be the internet! One painting, the one below of Sadie getting dressed, is still missing.

Thanks to Ruth in East London, who saw these two paintings at a car boot sale in Epping some three years ago, and had the good taste to buy them for her young son, and thanks to her sharp eyed friend who recently recognised them as being from the book. Ruth’s lad now has two framed digital prints of the images in his room to replace the paintings, as well as a signed first edition of Sadie the Air Mail Pilot. He’s lived with the images for a long time, but never read the book before. I hope the story lives up to any he may have daydreamed for himself!

You can download a wanted poster here showing the one painting still missing.

Checking my prejudices - 2

2012-01-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

In the earlier post, I spent some time on a single paragraph of a recent Simon Jenkins column from The Guardian on the subject of Afghanistan. The column was titled Vanity, machismo and greed have blinded us to the folly of Afghanistan, and the first paragraph was as follows:

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country's drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world's greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.

I spent some effort looking at the issue of hunger in Afghanistan. You can read the full post here, but the short of it is that directly contrary to Simon Jenkins’s claim that “western occupation of Afghanistan” has led to starvation, wheat production (the central issue in Afghanistan’s food shortages) has never been as low since the 2001 defeat of the Taliban as it was before. This is despite drought, primitive agricultural practices, the absence of a viable milling industry, and the underfunding of the WFP. I hadn’t originally intended to spend so much effort on that one claim, but the subject is a serious one.

That earlier post also includes a passage from Terry Glavin’s excellent new book, Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, to demonstrate why Simon Jenkins’s phrase “western occupation of Afghanistan” is the exact opposite of truth.

Now I’d like to go through the rest of the column. A lot of it is just abuse, which is pointless to argue with, but as well as looking for clear falsehoods like the ‘western occupation causes hunger’ claim, I’d like to clarify the argument behind the abuse and lies.

Here’s another lie to make clear that my use of the word isn’t just rhetoric: he writes of “the decade-long punishment of Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden.” To believe that the US or NATO has been punishing Afghanistan is to disbelieve the opinion of the majority of Afghans. The graph below is taken from the December 2010 ABC/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll, Afghanistan: Where Things Stand (ABC story here and full PDF here) and it shows support for the presence of US forces amongst Afghans surveyed ranged between 78% and 62% in the years from 2006 to 2010.

The graph also shows satisfaction with US efforts dropping faster than support for their presence, suggesting that while the majority of Afghans want the US military presence, they also want them to do a better job. But for all the dissatisfaction, this is clearly not a nation that believes it is undergoing “punishment” by the US as Simon Jenkins claims.

Another Jenkins quote: “The demand that [Afghanistan] also abandons the habits of history and adopt democracy, capitalism and gender equality was imperial arrogance.” On capitalism, a 1999 article, The Life of a 102 year-old Afghan Entrepreneur: An Economic Perspective, by Mir Hekmatullah Sadat, gives an interesting view of 20th century developments in Afghan capitalism. On gender equality, the struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan didn’t begin with the fall of the Taliban; here’s a short chronology. As for democracy, in every democratic country, the struggle for democracy has been a struggle against the habits of history.

And this, his opposition to democracy’s struggle against the habits of history, can be the key to unwrapping Simon Jenkins’s argument, and showing how perverse it is that he has become a resident favourite in the pages of The Guardian, supposedly a paper of the liberal left.

Simon Jenkins is on the side of of tradition against change, Tory against Whig, Lords against Commons, Burke against Wollstonecraft and Paine, feudalism against democracy.

His anti-war argument is not the same as that of the anti-West anti-imperialist kitsch left, though it sounds it at times. His stand against British imperialism is rooted in nationalist isolationism rather than second-campism. He claims that the West’s Afghanistan policy will likely benefit “those who lost the cold war, Russia and China”. Similarly in a more recent column, Why is Britain ramping up sanctions against Iran? he writes that it seems as if “every utterance from Washington and London at present is scripted to bolster the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on his insecure throne,” and laments that:

The attempt to set up pro-west regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan led the west to upset the balance of power established by the Iran-Iraq war and the Taliban-Pakistan regime in Kabul. Now the Iraq occupation has secured for Tehran unprecedented influence in Baghdad. Its influence also penetrates deep into western Afghanistan, and its support for resistance movements in the Gulf sheikhdoms is said to be growing by the year.

Be very clear about what he’s saying in the quote above. He laments the loss of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and of Pakistan’s domination of Afghanistan via the Taliban, because these regimes helped contain Iran, a greater enemy in his view. This is the brutal talk of a right wing ‘Realist’ rather than a second campist hoping for the overthrow of Western hegemony. I don’t like the latter any more than the former, but I do find it extraordinary that The Guardian gives regular space to the kind of reactionary views I remember seeing in The Sunday Telegraph in the 1990s.

I’ll have mercy and stop there. If I can suppress the nausea, I might do a third post on the bigotry of Mr Jenkins, but I’m not promising.

Again with the narwhals

2012-01-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

Refugee drawings by Ronald Searle

2012-01-03T14:23:00.000-08:00

These drawings are from a series made in European refugee camps. They were published as a 17 page feature in Punch in 1959, and then as a book by Penguin, titled Refugees 1960: A Report in Words and Drawings by Kaye Webb and Ronald Searle.

See selections from the book at Graphic Witness, and more from both the book and the Punch article at Perpetua, a Ronald Searle tribute blog, part one here and part two here.

The above image, a pencil drawing of Isrecko Dimitriyevich, San Antonio Camp, Salerno, dated 16 Nov 1959, comes from the Chris Beetles Gallery site. The Punch page below is from Matt Jones’s Perpetua blog.

Matt Jones has gathered together links to some of today’s obituaries for Ronald Searle. See also Charley Parker’s Lines and Colors blog.

Added: more on Searle and Kaye Webb - the Gentle Author on Ronald Searle in Spitalfields. Stephen Kroninger shares some Ronald Searle book jackets from his shelves, and Brad Holland on why Searle was an inspiration:

“It wasn’t his style that I wanted. I got over that quickly. It was the witness he bore to the times we lived in.”

Checking my prejudices

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

It’s been some years since I stopped spending money on The Guardian. I still read bits of it online, and regularly skim through other people’s copies, but I don’t really try to keep up with it as much as some.

I’m aware the paper has been responsible for excellent work on the news reporting side. It’s the comment and lifestyle stuff that grates, even more if it leaks into the news coverage. Leafing through now, in a peeping through my fingers sort of way, I still find all that as irritating as when I stopped buying, and I usually choose not to seek out the irritation, at least not too often.

Still, I have to keep checking, in case my prejudice is overdone. So when over Christmas a friend, a subscriber to the paper, said she liked reading Simon Jenkins, particularly mentioning his writing on Iraq and Afghanistan, I found I wasn’t clear in my memory as to who he was or what kind of stand he took, and thought I’d better have a look.

I decided first of all to see what he’d written on Afghanistan. His most recent piece on Afghanistan was titled Vanity, machismo and greed have blinded us to the folly of Afghanistan, which begins:

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country's drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched.

So, here Simon Jenkins is implying a causal link between Western military intervention and hunger in Afghanistan. Firstly, the direct cause of the WFP call for aid is drought, which is obviously not caused by military action. If we try to interpret or improve his argument, we could take it as implying Western action has lowered resilience to drought in Afghanistan. If the WFP or anyone else has ever made such an argument, Mr Jenkins provides no evidence for it.

This 2007 WFP report show Afghanistan domestic wheat production as follows:

1,469,000 Metric Tons in 2000
1,597,000 MT in 2001 (the year that began the West’s direct military intervention)
2,686,000 MT in 2002
4,362,000 MT in 2003
2,293,000 MT in 2004
4,266,000 MT in 2005
3,363,000 MT in 2006

This 2011 Reuters story quotes an estimate of around 4,500,000 MT for 2009 and 2010. This September 2011 USAID report predicts a 28 percent decrease to 3,250,000 MT for 2011 This 2011 WFP report gives more detail on drought impact, suggesting drastic effects in many areas.

Note that the worst figures above are from the Taliban period. There is nothing in them to suggest that Western military intervention has “led” to the need for food aid. The need however is real, and is great.

According to the 2007 WFP report cited above, “though more than half of the total wheat area is irrigated, Afghanistan’s drought-prone climate results in staggering annual variations in wheat production.” Problems listed include primitive agricultural practices, lack of improved seed and fertilizers, storage problems, as well as harsh conditions and limited irrigation. “Most wheat is consumed on-farm [...] less than 10 percent of production reaches the markets.” Because of this, “major portions of the expanding urban population are increasingly reliant on imported flour [...] due to limited marketable supplies of wheat and the non-existence of a viable milling industry. Also, the on-going major road building projects are causing fundamental changes in the local wheat markets.” Pakistan is the main source of imports as its industry is subsidised, estimated at 600,0000 MT out of a total of 1 million MT imports for 2007/08. “Bread accounts for 50 to 70 percent of the calories in the diet.”

On the WFP budget needed for Afghanistan, this VOA story from July 13 2011 explains that the WFP annual budget for Afghanistan is $400 million, but at the time the story was written, the WFP had received only half the amount for the year. The US is the WFP’s biggest donor, but contributions fell significantly because of the budget impasse between Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

Back to Simon Jenkins - he goes on:

Afghanistan is the world's greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.

It’s hard to pin down the argument here. Should less aid be spent on Afghanistan? He doesn’t say. What aid would he cut? He doesn’t say. Or does he think more would be spent in aid if less went on military spending? He doesn’t say. All he seems to want to communicate is hopelessness and expense, without any substantive analysis. This is not an argument for doing things better; if anything it’s an argument for doing nothing.

Here’s a more informed starting point for a productive critique of Afghanistan aid.

This seems enough for one post, and I’ve barely dealt with one paragraph of one piece by Simon Jenkins. I want to write more about the rest of the column, and about other articles of his, but will save that for a further post. Before I leave this paragraph, however, I want to look at Mr Jenkins’s phrase “ten years of western occupation”.

To show why this phrase is grossly misleading, here are a few paragraphs from Terry Glavin’s new book, Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan:

It isn’t true, in any conventional meaning of the term, that the United States or its NATO partners “invaded” Afghanistan. By September 11, there was no sovereign country left to invade. At the time, while the multinational jihadist joint venture known as the Taliban did control most of Afghanistan, Pakistan was the only country that formally recognized the regime. The only other countries that had ever recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government were the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but they’d bailed long before September 11. Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations was occupied by the Islamic State of Afghanistan, led by the Northern Alliance chief Berhanuddin Rabbani and the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud. They’d been pleading for military help for years. Immediately after September 11, even Pakistan was scrambling to give the appearance of disowning its Taliban progeny, and Rabbani’s government was loudly reiterating its long-standing invitation to the Americans to help chase the Taliban out.

Strictly speaking, it isn’t even true that the Taliban were overthrown by the United States, or by the United States and its NATO allies. The Northern Alliance would have remained dug in up in the mountains had it not been for a US bombing campaign, American arms and supplies drops and all the Special Forces soldiers skulking around. But the Taliban, al-Qaida and their sundry jihadist brothers-in-arms had been driven out of Kabul by a ragtag assemblage of Afghans before any regular American troops arrived. The Taliban were even chased out of their legendary heartland of Kandahar by the locals before any US combat troops showed up.

[...] As late as 2005, the United States was still only lukewarm to the idea of an expansion of the international military and reconstruction effort in the country.

[...] At least fourteen major national opinion polls and focus group surveys were undertaken by various independent agencies across Afghanistan in the decade following 2001. All the available data show unambiguous Afghan support for the so-called US occupation of their country and for the military intervention overseen by the UN’s poorly resourced, forty-three nation NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The polls do show Afghans to be impatient about the paucity and ineffectiveness of American and NATO troops, however. The United States deployed a mere 7,000 troops to Afghanistan during the first two years after September 11 - this was before the White House could use Iraq as an excuse - and almost all the US troops in Afghanistan were dispatched in a ‘war on terror’ exercise known as Operation Enduring Freedom, mostly in the country’s remote southeastern borderlands. As late as the autumn of 2005, ISAF had extended its reach to only half of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and there were only about 40,000 ISAF troops in the whole country. It took until 2009 for the combined ISAF troop strength to reach roughly 150,000.

You can find links to the above-mentioned polls and surveys about Afghanistan on the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee resources page.

Earlier in his book, Terry Glavin writes, “Having spent fifteen years of my life working for daily newspapers, I’m well acquainted with the distance that can exist between the way the world really is and the way accounts of that world enliven the public imagination. But between the real Afghanistan and the imaginary one, there is a chasm.”

The time I drew an Aliens comic

2011-12-28T19:01:00.000-08:00

Well, not a whole comic, just one page. The publisher had a notion to do a story where each page was drawn by a different artist. What larks, I thought, a chance to have some fun! Not as much fun as I thought though, and following their patient requests I had to relent and re-draw the above panel with no cannon, no baseball bat, no mummification, and no acrobatic attack formation. Oh well.

Due credit to the editors, they did print the original version in a ‘making of’ section at the back of the issue.

Aliens TM & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Strike a light

2011-12-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

A colour sketch for part of the current project. I’m working from this acrylic painting as I draw colour separations in ink.

The future

2011-12-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

Bad as things are, let’s keep some perspective and listen to someone who takes a long view. A view so long it covers several hundred light years in distance. Here’s William Borucki, principal investigator for the Kepler Mission and a space scientist at the NASA-Ames Research Center, talking to Ira Flatow on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, from December 23rd. Asked whether he’s worried about the prospect of future missions in light of economic difficulties and budget cutbacks, Mr Borucki responded:

I believe that in Europe and the United States, we'll look seriously at our problems, and we will solve them and that we will get back to a much more productive, happy time in the future.

Blimp and the City

2011-12-26T19:59:00.000-08:00

From The Complete Colonel Blimp, a collection of David Low’s cartoons edited by Mark Bryant and published by Bellew Publishing 1991. More of Low’s Blimp in this earlier post.

See also Francis Sedgemore on David Cameron’s recent EU performance, From Chamberlain to Churchill to Blimp. My apologies to Francis for being so slow in finding the appropriate illustration.

While we’re on that fortnight-old subject, I found the following worthwhile reading: Joe Lynam, business correspondent for BBC News, asking Is the City worse off after David Cameron’s EU veto? Chris Dillow asking Why defend the City? And Peter Ryley’s summing up:

Cameron has upset everybody by vetoing a treaty imposing the wrong remedy on the basis of a wrong diagnosis even though he agrees with the diagnosis and is busy applying the same wrong remedy to the British economy.

Somebody Else’s Christmas

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

John Dog - Somebody Else’s Christmas

Written and arranged by Raymond Butler and performed by John Dog.
© All rights reserved.

Hear more at raymondbutler.bandcamp.com

Public domain images from archive.org, specifically here and here.

‘Troops Out - Stop the War in Iraq’

2011-12-23T01:23:00.000-08:00

News coverage of yesterday’s bombings in Baghdad, some links via Iraqi Mojo.

Los Angeles Times: Baghdad bombings leave at least 60 dead, nearly 200 injured

A string of explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing at least 60 people and injuring nearly 200 just days after the last U.S. troops left the country, police and health officials said.

The attacks came in the midst of a political standoff between the country’s main Shiite and Sunni Muslim factions, heightening fears of a return to the sectarian bloodletting that devastated the country a few years ago.

Authorities said more than a dozen bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad in a seemingly coordinated assault during the morning rush hour. Most of the targeted neighborhoods were predominantly Shiite, but some Sunni areas were also hit.

In the deadliest attack, a suicide bomber detonated an ambulance packed with explosives in front of a government anti-corruption office in the Karada neighborhood, shattering windows and setting cars ablaze. A police officer at the scene said at least 16 people were killed and 45 injured.

Jack Healy, The New York Times: Blasts Rock Baghdad as Political Crisis in Iraq Deepens

The attacks began at 6:30 a.m. and transformed the morning commute into a bloodbath. Car bombs and improvised explosives destroyed schools, markets and apartments. An ambulance packed with explosives incinerated a government office. At least 63 people were killed and 185 wounded.

On Thursday night, four more blasts shook Baghdad, killing three more people.

There were fears that the precipitous withdrawal of American troops might lead to instability in Iraq, but the speed with which conditions have deteriorated has alarmed Western officials. Until Thursday, however, the bitter fighting between Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, and his foes in Parliament had not been accompanied by a rise in violence.

Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor: Iraq's Maliki threatens, Sunnis grumble, and Baghdad goes boom

Today's death toll in Iraq, by the grim standards of the country's almost nine-year-old war is sadly nothing special. The current count, according to the BBC, is 68 dead in at least 16 bomb blasts across the Iraqi capital today. With the toll almost certain to rise – dozens of seriously injured are in city hospitals – Dec. 22 may well end up one of the worst days of 2011 in Iraq.

But at the height of Iraq's civil war and insurgency, hundreds were killed in single days. While the US troop surge of 2007 helped tamp down Iraq's violence – and, the US hoped, created "space" for sectarian reconciliation – in the years since, Iraqi politics have remained largely driven by sect and ethnicity, their politicians pursuing a zero-sum game for absolute power.

Unsurprisingly, rates of political violence have been on the rise this year. More than 30 attacks across Iraq on Aug. 15 killed more than 70 people – so while today was horrific, it was far from a isolated instance. In July, then US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction wrote that "Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place to work. It is less safe, in my judgment, than 12 months ago." He asserted that assassination of judges and security agents remained commonplace and the "situation continues to deteriorate."

There have been no signs of improvement since, and the fears that Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his allies would continue to seek to consolidate security and political power in their own hands have quickly borne out, just days after the last US combat troops departed the country.

Mr. Maliki has had an arrest warrant issued for Sunni Arab Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who has fled to autonomous Kurdistan. Mr. Hashemi has been charged with running a death squad. Whatever the merits of the charges against him - few Iraqi politicians are more than one or two degrees separated from the sectarian violence at the height of Iraq's civil war – the timing of the charges sent a strong message that political consolidation, not reconciliation, is the order of the day.

BBC News: Baghad blasts: Hashemi blames Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attacks, but analysts say the level of co-ordination suggests a planning capability only available to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is a mainly Sunni insurgent group.

Mr Maliki said the attackers should "confirm once again to any doubters the political nature of the goals that those criminals want to achieve", but that the attackers should not be allowed to influence the political process.

The BBC's Jim Muir in the region says most Shias will conclude that Iraq's disaffected Sunni leadership was behind the latest violence.

There is a strong possibility, he says, that insurgents on the Sunni side were just waiting for the most tense moment to unleash attacks they had been planning.

Elsewhere on BBC News: Al-Qaeda around the world

Al-Qaeda in Iraq was formed in 2004, the year after the US invasion, when the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden. It is also known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Al-Qaeda here has been responsible for many attacks, but the group's capacity diminished from 2006-7, when Sunni Arab leaders turned on them, and the US military launched its troop surge.

But al-Qaeda in Iraq remains operationally active.

Al-Zarqawi himself was killed in June 2006. He was succeeded by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, whose death was reported in 2010.

Mahanagar

2011-12-22T17:27:00.000-08:00

Mahanagar by Satyajit Ray, as a YouTube playlist here.

Giraffe

2011-12-20T18:48:00.000-08:00

A screen print by Bo.

At Swim Two Birds

2011-12-20T18:46:00.000-08:00

A screen print by Peggy.

Tyrant dies in his bed shock

2011-12-19T03:12:00.000-08:00

Rope and bullet saved for successor?

Mick Hartley has more: The Dear Departed Leader and You can hear the sound of wailing outside. Also: Death on a train? (I’m sticking with my headline for now.)

Below, Christopher Hitchens on North Korea and Orwell, Czechoslovakia and Kafka.

Added, Hitchens writing for Slate, February 2010: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs, Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought.

Vaclav Havel, 1989 and 2003

2011-12-18T18:28:00.000-08:00

From the BBC World Service archive, episode 2 of the 2009 series John Simpson Returns to 1989 focuses on Czechlosovakia’s Velvet Revolution, interviewing a number of participants, the first being Vaclav Havel.

John Simpson’s TV obituary of Havel includes a little joke. “In terms of intellect, he was way ahead of most other political leaders,” says Simpson, over a shot of Havel being presented with a medal by President GW Bush.

Unlike most (all?) of the obituaries of Christopher Hitchens this week, Simpson’s obituary of Havel doesn’t mention Iraq. Nor does the BBC News website’s written obituary mention Iraq, nor their news story on his death.

The Guardian’s editorial marking Vaclav Havel’s death doesn’t mention Iraq, nor does Julian Borger’s news story on Havel’s death for the same paper. Nor does a more personal memoir by Timothy Garton Ash.

The New York Times report by Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez does include this penultimate paragraph:

He never stopped preaching that the fight for political freedom needed to outlive the end of the Cold War. He praised the United States’ invasion of Iraq for deposing an evil dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps this is all appropriate. Vaclav Havel’s great contribution was his part in the Velvet Revolution, an event that continues to inspire attempts at non-violent revolution worldwide. His support for action against Saddam Hussein came at the end of his political career, and can be seen as a footnote.

It’s a striking footnote all the same. A man who was justly praised for his part in a non-violent revolution, went on to support the violent overthrow of a dictator by means of an invasion that was the most criticised, the most reviled, military action in recent decades. Why did he do this? Why support war? Why not wait and hope for a peaceful revolution in Iraq?

The implication must be that, despite the success of Czechlosovakia’s Velvet Revolution, he believed there were circumstances where non-violence was unlikely to succeed. The mixed outcomes of this year’s Arab revolutions would seem to support such a view.

Here, from a 2003 article by David Remnick for The New Yorker, is Vaclav Havel’s own explanation:

A year after Havel came to power, there was a crisis in Iraq, and now, as he was leaving office, he was involved in another. Earlier in the month, he had spent hours with his aides at his country villa, discussing the problem, and that day, in the Wall Street Journal, there was a letter signed by Havel, along with seven other European leaders, which essentially agreed with the Bush Administration's position. I asked him why.

“I think it’s not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in those countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven’t had the same sort of recent experience,” he said. “The Czech experience with Munich, with appeasement, with yielding to evil, with demanding more and more evidence that Hitler was truly evil—that may be one reason that we look at things differently than some others. But that doesn’t mean automatically that a green light is to be given to preventive strikes. I always believed that every case has to be judged individually. The Euro-American world cannot simply declare preëmptive war on all the regimes that it doesn’t like.”

Havel coughed and took a sip of wine. I asked him why he thought a policy of containment could not work in Iraq more or less indefinitely.

He put his glass down and said, “Civilization has changed. Today, any crazy, practically any crazy person can blow up half of New York. That was hardly possible fifteen or twenty years ago. That’s not the only reason. On the whole, the world has changed. There once was a bipolar world, a balance of two great powers, who made agreements on weapons reductions, so that they were capable of destroying the world seven times instead of ten. Now we live in a multi-polar world. . . . Of course, the question is: When is the best time for action? Should it have happened a long time ago? That is a political issue, a diplomatic issue, a sociological issue. But, generally, it’s a matter of the functioning of the world’s immune system, whether the world can deal with such a case of extreme evil before it is too late.”

The tragedy is that there was justice in John Simpson’s joke at the expense of Bush. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was led by people without the intellect of Havel, and particularly without the moral intelligence of Havel.

Here is the full text of the January 2003 letter on Iraq by eight European leaders including Vaclav Havel. Here is the response at the time by then French President Chirac. He was also in the news this week.

Wealth creation and renumeration

2011-12-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

For some reason, watching the documentary Inside Job (see previous post) put me in mind of the Lucky Luke comic album Jesse James, drawn by Morris and written by Goscinny, also writer of the original Asterix stories. In Goscinny’s version, Jesse James is inspired by reading about Robin Hood, but this inspiration creates a problem in dealing with the proceeds of his crimes. In the excerpt below, his brother Fank James has the solution. (Click to enlarge.)

The above scans are from the Brockhampton Press edition, translated by Frederick W Nolan. Cinebook are currently publishing good value paperbacks of most of the Lucky Luke stories. I recommend them for all ages.

Lucky Luke excerpts copyright © 1968 Dargaud S.A. English-language text copyright © 1972 Brockhampton Press Ltd.

Charles Ferguson on corruption in academic economics

2011-12-16T16:45:00.000-08:00

Below, two clips from Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award winning documentary on the 2008 Crash, and following them, an interview with him that includes a focus on the issue of corruption in academic economics.

Christopher Hitchens completes his life

2011-12-16T03:28:00.000-08:00

The Daily Mash: Hitchens cancer not intelligently designed

Salman Rushdie for Vanity Fair, February 2012 issue: Christopher Hitchens

A response to Salman Rushdie’s article by Mick Hartley, Hitchens, In Memoriam, echoed by Norman Geras, Rushdie right and wrong about Hitchens

Juli Weiner, Vanity Fair: In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011, also a slideshow of photos from his life

Christopher Buckley on The New Yorker’s News Desk blog: Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

George Packer, also on The New Yorker’s News Desk blog: Hitchens and Iraq

William Grimes at The New York Times: Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, With Wit

BBC News: Christopher Hitchens dies after battle with cancer. Related on BBC News: Christopher Hitchens talks to Jeremy Paxman, and Blair v Hitchens debate: Is religion a force for good?

Last updated 8 January 2012.

Look out to starboard!

2011-12-15T06:19:00.000-08:00

The Moon on a Stick

2011-12-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

Time for a John Dog song - The Moon on a Stick.

Written and arranged by Raymond Butler and performed by John Dog. © All rights reserved.

Download available from raymondbutler.bandcamp.com

Galway Super-8 by Caroline D'Souza. NASA Apollo 9 and Apollo 11 images from archive.org.

Graham Linehan on Twitter etiquette

2011-12-08T19:46:00.000-08:00

This is a Twitter post, and worse than that it’s a Twitter argument on politics, legality, morality, and truth. So, a disaster already. Don’t read on.

Really, don’t . . .

Twitter can be bewildering to a newcomer, with its specialised acronyms and sometimes obscure mechanics. Even Twitter veterans can have difficulty using it.

Graham Linehan is an old hand at this, but even he seems bewildered in the following exchange. The subject is genocide denial, but it quickly becomes clear that Mr Linehan is more concerned with Twitter etiquette.

The conversation is a continuation of one from the 24th of November, but I’ll get back to that. We begin with Oliver Kamm addressing Mr Linehan:

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner 1/2 Only just noticed you asked @medialens to tell you if I replied to their serial attempts to get my attention. Pls be aware...

13 hours ago

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner 2/2 ... that I don't debate with people who deny Bosnia & Rwanda genocides, but if you write to me at Times, will provide details.

13 hours ago

Mr Linehan then, rather than enquire further as to what facts Mr Kamm might be able to provide on genocide denial, which he categorises as a matter of opinion, instead turns to the question of when it is appropriate to include the Twitter username of a party under discussion:

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm aware of your opinions on it, ta. What I don't understand is why you draw their attention by putting their username in tweets

10 hours ago

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm seems odd to bring them in on the debate in this way and then refuse to debate them

10 hours ago

Mr Kamm then explains that he included the Twitter username so that genocide deniers would be “disabused of notion they’re part of a debate.”

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm
@Glinner No "debate" that 8,000 Bosniaks massacred at Srebrenica. Deniers of that fact shd be disabused of notion they're part of a debate.
9 hours ago

Mr Linehan doesn’t seem to understand or recognise the explanation:

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm yes, but you didn't answer my question. Why include their username in your tweets if you don't want to debate them?
8 hours ago

Mr Kamm explains once more:

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner 1/3 I did, but happy to spell it out. There's no debate 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred in Srebrenica genocide, July '95. But...
8 hours ago

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner 2/3 ... @medialens claim otherwise. They say Edward Herman "perfectly entitled" to dispute 8,000 victims. Well, he's not. Bodies...
8 hours ago

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner 3/3 ... have been found & identified. People who subscribe to fraudulent conspiracy theories shd know they're outside legit debate.
8 hours ago

Mr Linehan once again fails to recognise the explanation’s existence, never mind comprehend its meaning.

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm again, you haven't explained why you constantly include their username if you don't want to debate them.
8 hours ago

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm I don't want to debate with people who deny the massacre of 600,000+ Iraqis by Blair and Bush, so I don't include their username
8 hours ago

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm it's the equivalent of calling someone out for a fight and then running away.
8 hours ago

A last attempt to make it clear:

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner OK, no real purpose in repeating with different words. Have done @medialens favour of explaining why they're outside legit debate.
7 hours ago

But Mr Linehan remains in the dark:

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm still none the wiser. And there you've done it again. Now when they write back, you'll ignore them. So odd.
7 hours ago

And Mr Kamm gives up:

OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

MT @Glinner still none the wiser.>> This appears to be true.

7 hours ago

But now Mr Linehan raises another point of etiquette:

Glinner Graham Linehan

@OliverKamm editing tweets now! Twitter really brings out your classy siode.

7 hours ago

Mr Kamm helpfully explains the meaning of the MT acronym on Twitter:

@OliverKamm Oliver Kamm

@Glinner That's what "MT" signifies, i.e. "modified tweet". You'll find it used quite often on this site.

6 hours ago

As I said at the start, all this was a continuation of an earlier discussion from the 24th of November.

That began with Mr Linehan re-tweeting a link to a story by Medialens regarding Iran. Peter Risdon and Citizen Sane tweeted him to point out the genocide denial issues surrounding Medialens, linking to articles by Oliver Kamm and George Monbiot.

Mr Linehan then changed the subject to Oliver Kamm and his opinions on the Iraq war. Mr Sane tried in vain to highlight George Monbiot as an alternative source on Medialens, while Mr Risdon argued against Mr Linehan’s one-sided assignment of blame for deaths in Iraq.

I briefly stuck my head in, and for my trouble it was suggested by Mr Linehan that I was likely to condone torture next, and when I firmly rejected this, he blocked me.

Presumably I was guilty of some breach of Twitter etiquette.

The whole mess below the fold.

jackseale Jack Seale

A massive must-read from @medialens on the Iran 'nuclear threat': crucial facts, going almost totally unreported. medialens.org/index.php?opti…

Airforce Amazons

What’s up Prof?

IQ light

Missing Sadie paintings update: two found

Checking my prejudices - 2

Again with the narwhals

Refugee drawings by Ronald Searle

Checking my prejudices

The time I drew an Aliens comic

Strike a light

The future

Blimp and the City

Somebody Else’s Christmas

‘Troops Out - Stop the War in Iraq’

Mahanagar

Giraffe

At Swim Two Birds

Tyrant dies in his bed shock

Vaclav Havel, 1989 and 2003

Wealth creation and renumeration

Charles Ferguson on corruption in academic economics

Christopher Hitchens completes his life

Look out to starboard!

The Moon on a Stick

Graham Linehan on Twitter etiquette

Zero point zero five

Sailor cats

Bo on guitar

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Three Strøms

Playing exquisite corpse with Peggy

Foxes and cloxes

One thing and another

Poor whale

Barnaby Rudge illustrations, chapters 4 to 11

Barnaby Rudge illustrations, chapters 1 to 3

Paintings at the Affordable Art Fair, Amsterdam

Batavia

Junk

The sail in shreds

Maspero massacre

Why viewers will like PBS UK

The goldeniest Little Golden Book

A ship for Odysseus