Twit Archive - 21-31 March 2011

These tweets are from the start of NATO action in Libya, plus a few on Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and even a little art for relief. Above, an illustration by Czech animator and artist Jiri Trnka, from this 50 Watts post.

Tweets below the fold.

Tyrant dies in his bed shock

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

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.

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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.

Secrets of line and colour

Above: art by the recently deceased Heinz Edelmann, best known as the designer of the hyperchromatic animated film Yellow Submarine. Here however he appears reduced to black line, which proves no hardship in the hands of a clever craftsman.

Below: before his passing he left a clue in the hands of fellow practitioner Mr Grillo, and so at last I can see what it is that I’ve been doing wrong all these years. How obvious!

Copyright © the estate of Heinz Edelmann

ADDED: Stephen Kroninger has some Yellow Submarine comics stashed away.

ALSO: Hans Bacher has some beautiful development art for Yellow Submarine by Mr Edelmann.

Jiri Trnka again

A couple of months ago I pointed to a series of posts by Michael Sporn on the Czechoslovakian animator Jiri Trnka. Now Hans Bacher has been posting some lovely images by Trnka, book illustrations as well as frames from Prince Bajaja and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and behind the scenes photos. And after that there’s the rest of Mr Bacher’s blog archive to explore, a rich visual feast. Below is a sample from Prince Bajaja.

Jiri Trnka

Of the animation blogs in the mix listed on the right, Michael Sporn’s is perhaps my favourite, generous with knowledge and imagery, and broad in scope. Earlier this week he had a post on Jiri Trnka, the latest in a series on the Czech artist and animator, mainly of puppet films.

For anyone coming here for the politics, I recommend looking at Trnka’s work, and beginning at the end. His final film, The Hand, was released in the lead up to the Prague Spring, and banned after the tanks came in. You can watch it online here. It’s also available on DVD with his wonderful feature of The Emperor’s Nightingale.

Michael Sporn’s earlier posts on Jiri Trnka: Trnka Art, Buyout, The Hand, Merry Circus, Trnka in Graphis.

And here’s an Animation World Magazine article on Trnka.

Also of interest, the DVD Cartoons for Victory contains a 1945 drawn cartoon by Trnka, Springman and the SS. 

Ethnic riot?

It brought to mind a riot of colour, exciting music, handweaving, pottery. Actually it’s about racists rioting. The racist rioters don’t seem to be part of an ethnic minority, though they are targeting one. The actual riot seems to just involve the racists and the police, not the targeted ethnic minority, so might not racist riot have been clearer?

Cast off

We know where we’re going . . .

While I’m away, The New Centrist has two new posts up, on Lithuania and the Jewish partisans of the Second World War, and on Czecholosovakia 68. Amongst other things he links to an interview with Alexandr Dubček’s son Pavol on Aktuálne.cz which in turn links to lots more. Also via TNC, this BBC News account includes Josef Koudelka’s photos.

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I find a fair amount to disagree with in some of what Sultan Knish writes, but here’s a post I recommend wholeheartedly, Back in the USSR: You have to be crazy to believe in the truth. In light of Russian rhetoric casting doubt on the mental health of the Georgian president, rhetoric some Western commentators have been happy to play along with, Sultan K. gives a short account of Russia’s dark history of using psychiatry as an instrument of political oppression.

A lesser example of using psychiatry for political purposes was seen in the UK recently. When the former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s All In The Mind Dr Raj Persaud was up before the General Medical Council accused of plagiarism, one of the voices that spoke in his defence was David Owen.

Raj Persaud’s period on All in the Mind reached a particular low point last year when he interviewed David Owen on his book The Hubris Syndrome. In the interview Owen portrayed various politicians as being somehow mentally ill.

Owen seemed unable to talk about any of his targets, I mean subjects, without mentioning his own relationship with them, and so the curious point that emerged was that those he portrayed as less than sane were people who had failed to heed his good advice, while those who seemed to have taken his words of wisdom to heart were all well balanced individuals.

The interview was completely unchallenging. No serious questions were raised as to the supposed psychological basis for Owen’s argument. Emphasis was placed on Owen’s past career as a neurologist as if this also qualified him as a psychiatrist. It was a mix of politics and personal vendetta masquerading as science, and Raj Persaud gave him a free ride.

UPDATE: Medicalising Politics by Blacktriangle blog, 21 January 2009, on David Owen and other partisan pathologisers.

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Over in the department of big theories and big maps, there’s a post on Information Dissemination about the strategic implications of Russia’s invasion of Georgia. It’s a long and interesting post, and something I’d planned on writing more on. For the moment I’ll just mention the assertion contained in the post that “Georgia, which has a relationship with the United States is being consumed by Russia, and ultimately will be regardless of what the United States does.” I disagree strongly, and I point to the history of West Berlin. Looking at it on the map it seems wholly unreasonable that the city survived Stalin’s attempts to swallow it. The effort expended on saving it also seem unreasonable in cold ‘realist’ terms. Yet in the end the Berlin Wall proved to be the keystone whose removal led to the whole iron curtain coming crashing down.

More when I return, see you in September!

The Berlin air corridors image is a detail from a 1965 US Air Force map.