Checking my prejudices - 2

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, 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.

Mary Wollstonecraft

I’m too busy just now to read or write much, but am listening to the radio as I paint.

On BBC Radio 3 this week, there has been a short series of essays on Mary Wollstonecraft, the last to be broadcast tonight. You can catch up with the series online, but only for the next couple of days.

They’re all good so far, and the fourth in the series deals with her observations and reactions to the French Revolution, which perhaps makes this a sort of follow up to an earlier post below.

Hangover Monday

(With added links throughout the day.)

European elections: miserable results in the UK, and comparison figures from last time.

Comment from Oliver Kamm: The price of failure. From Marko Attila Hoare: We must defend our Britain and our immigrants from the fascist menace. ModernityBlog: Fascists, ferrets, and how to stop the far right. Bob from Brockley: Post-election depression. Fat man on a Keyboard: Doomed I tell ye.

Your Friend in the North tells how he cast his vote.

Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland are using the Single Transferable Vote system rather than a list system like Denmark or most of the UK, so counting is still going on. I miss the Irish system, it’s the most fun you can have with a ballot paper.

Danish results, gains for Socialists and far right Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) at the expense of Social Democrats and Radikale Venstre (Social Liberal).  Here’s Politiken’s short english language report.

Lebanese elections: positive news, and comment from Abu Muqawama.

Iranian elections: further to the post below, here’s Norm: Stirrings in Iran.

Not elections: Martin marks the bicentennial of Thomas Paine’s death. See also a substantial item on the BBC News site.

More not elections: Americans for Bosnia continues a series of posts on “Washington’s War” by Michael Rose: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

The author of the book in question is General Sir Michael Rose, commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia from January 1994 to January 1995. Below is a depiction of him from Joe Sacco’s outstanding piece of journalism in comics form, Safe Area Goražde.

Click to enlarge.

Copyright © 2000 Joe Sacco.

Teaching evolution, challenging creationism

This came up Saturday before last at a birthday dinner for the Professor, and now it’s all over the papers, though with a different cast of characters.

Here’s a hard line from Oliver Kamm, hearts and minds (and follow up) from Francis Sedgemore, and practical experience from Shuggy, who writes:

Sometimes you talk about it, sometimes it’s appropriate to close conversations down. It's a balance that is difficult to strike - no doubt we get it wrong on many occasions, but I have not the least doubt that any attempt to routinise the practice even in the most limited way would make this more difficult than it already is.

(Update: Shuggy has now written a good follow up  too.)

Back at the Prof’s dinner I brought up Thomas Paine. The Age of Reason provides the best argument I know of for resolving the conflict between the religious impulse and scientific method. By defining God as the creator of the universe, and by arguing that God’s creation, not the word of dead men, is the only true evidence of the nature of God, Paine provides a view of God that is grander than the petty conjurer of the old holy books, but that can in no way be in conflict with science, because science is the only reliable path to understanding the works of God.

The so-called creationists set the words of dead prophets above the evidence of God’s creation. This is human hubris in the face of a creation grander than they can imagine.

The central statement in The Age of Reason is this: “The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things.” There are later passages in the work which I think fall short, where despite that principle Paine attempts to ascribe motives to God, to prove God’s benevolence. It doesn’t work. However, read the following extract if you will - a definition of God the creator wholly compatible with science.

But some, perhaps, will say: Are we to have no word of God — no revelation? I answer, Yes; there is a word of God; there is a revelation.

THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information. The idea that God sent Jesus Christ to publish, as they say, the glad tidings to all nations, from one end of the earth to the other, is consistent only with the ignorance of those who knew nothing of the extent of the world, and who believed, as those world-saviours believed, and continued to believe for several centuries (and that in contradiction to the discoveries of philosophers and the experience of navigators), that the earth was flat like a trencher, and that man might walk to the end of it.

But how was Jesus Christ to make anything known to all nations? He could speak but one language which was Hebrew, and there are in the world several hundred languages. Scarcely any two nations speak the same language, or understand each other; and as to translations, every man who knows anything of languages knows that it is impossible to translate from one language to another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently of mistaking the sense; and besides all this, the art of printing was wholly unknown at the time Christ lived.

It is always necessary that the means that are to accomplish any end be equal to the accomplishment of that end, or the end cannot be accomplished. It is in this that the difference between finite and infinite power and wisdom discovers itself. Man frequently fails in accomplishing his ends, from a natural inability of the power to the purpose, and frequently from the want of wisdom to apply power properly. But it is impossible for infinite power and wisdom to fail as man faileth. The means it useth are always equal to the end; but human language, more especially as there is not an universal language, is incapable of being used as an universal means of unchangeable and uniform information, and therefore it is not the means that God useth in manifesting himself universally to man.

It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.

Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed! Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the Creation.

The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And incomprehensible and difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.

In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence that carries us on, as it were, by necessity to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause man calls God.

Darwin drawing drawn from yellowed pages of an ancient Times Higher Education Supplement.

Disestablish the Church of England

Now I don't want all you cats and studs to think I'm down on The Nazz, but Common Sense says that all you hear of him is hearsay, and we don't need no state-sanctioned rumour-mongering around here.

Rectification is loooong overdue.