Færsluflokkur: Bækur

Að endurskrifa bækur

Það olli all nokkru fjaðrafoki þegar fréttist að "endurskrifa" ætti bækur Roald Dahl.  Það er ekki að undra enda bækurnar á meðal vinsælli barnabóka um langa hríð.  Margir hafa á þeim dálæti og áttu erfitt með að hugsa sér að þær yrðu "barnaðar", ef svo má að orði komast, en til stóð að taka út öll "særandi" orð.

Þannig hefði orðinu "feitur" verið skipt út fyrir "heljarmikill" eins og lesa má í viðtengdri frétt. Ýmsar breytingar hefðu verið gerðar til að sleppa "kyngreiningu" o.s.frv.

Persónulega finnst mér þessar breytingar ekki til bóta og myndi vera þeim andsnúinn, en geri mér þó fulla grein fyrir því að handhafi höfundarréttar getur gert þær breytingar sem honum þykja best til þess fallnar að viðhalda og jafnvel auka sölu bóka.

En ég fór hins vegar að velta því fyrir mér hvernig færi með verk sem fallin eru úr höfundarrétti?  Getur þá hver sem er breytt þeim og "endurskrifað" eins og best þykir?  Er eitthvað sem verndar slík verk?

Hvenær er um breytingu og hvenær er um nýtt verk að ræða?  Er til einhver skilgreining á slíku?

En þó að mér skiljist að hætt hafi verið við breytingar á bókun Dahls, hef ég littla trú á því að þetta sé í síðasta sinn sem við heyrum af eða sjáum viðlíka breytingar.

En til lengri tíma litið munu slíkar breytingar líklega littlu ef nokkru skila, en krefjast sífellt fleiri og nýrri breytinga.

Því næsta víst er að ef orðum eins og "feitur" er skipt út fyrir "heljarmikill", mun fljótlega verða til einstaklingar sem móðgast yfir að orð eins og "heljarmikill" sé notað og vilja flokka það sem særandi.

 

 


mbl.is Ritskoða barnabækur sem allir kannast við
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Ríki óttans?

Bókin "A State Of Fear" kom út í Bretlandi í gær, 17. maí.  Þar fjallar höfundurinn Laura Dodsworth um hvernig stjórnvöld í Bretlandi hafi skipulega vakið ótta hjá þjóðinni til að fá hana til að sætta sig við harkalegar aðgerðir gegn "veirunni", svokallaðar "lockdowns".

Ég hef ekki lesið bókina, en hún virðist vekja all nokkra athygli.

Tilvitnanir í hana eru nokkuð sláandi, s.s.:

"Another said: “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon… Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”

As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.

Another member of SPI-B said they were "stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology" during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them"."

Í þessu sambandi er t.d. fróðlegt að velta fyrir sér hvernig hugmyndir stór hluti almennings hefur um "veiruna" og hvernig hún hefur herjað á heimsbyggðina.

Hvað skyldu margir geta nefnt það lands sem hefur þurft að þola flest hlutfallsleg dauðsföll?

Hvar í þeirri röð skyldu t.d. Bandaríkin vera? En Bretland? Svíþjóð? Indland?

Hvað hefur stór hluti jarðarbúa látist úr þessum "bráðsmitandi sjúkdómi", á því rúmlega ári sem hann hefur "geysað"?

Hvað skyldu mörg af þeim löndum á "top 20" þar sem hlutfallslega flestir hafa látist vera í Evrópu?  En N- og S-Ameríku? Í öðrum heimsálfum?

Hver verða "eftirköstin"? Hvernig er andlegi þátturinn? Sá efnahagslegi? Hvernig hefur yngri kynslóðin það?  Þó nokkur hluti hennar víða um lönd hefur ekki stigið fæti inn í skóla í meira en ár.

Hvað margir hafa bugast af ótta og hræðslu?

Enn er auðvitað of snemmt að segja til um það.

Sumir eru hræddari en tali tekur við "veiruna", aðrir óttast ekkert meira en bólusetningar.  Hvorugt er góð fylgd í lífinu.

Hræðilegar fréttir selja er oft sagt.  Því mótmæli ég ekki.  En þeir sem kaupa fá oft "köttinn í sekknum".

P.S. Bretland hefur ákveðið að skipa óháða nefnd til að yfirfara viðbrögð við "veirunni".  Það verður fróðlegt að sjá hennar niðurstöðu.

Ég held að slíkrar nefndarskipunar sé þörf í fleiri löndum.


Barátta "öfgaaflanna"?

Ég hef ekki lesið bók Houllebecq, Soumission, líklega verður einhver bið á því. Ég er ekki það sleipur í Frönskunni.

En þetta er þriðji staðurinn sem ég sé minnst á bókina á tveimur dögum.  Hinir tveir voru bloggsíðum þeirra Egils Helgasonar og Haraldar Sigurðssonar.

Á bloggi Egils mátti lesa þetta stutta ágrip af söguþræðinum:

Bókin gerist 2022. Það ríkir óöld í Frakklandi, en um hana ríkir þögn í fjölmiðlum. Það er komið að kosningum, og nú gerist það að frambjóðandi nýs múslimaflokks, Mohammed Ben Abbes, vinnur stórsigur á Marine Le Pen. Áður hafa reyndar kosningar verið ógiltar vegna víðtækra kosningasvika. Abbes sigrar með stuðningi bæði hægri og vinstri manna.

Daginn eftir hætta konur almennt að klæðast vestrænum fötum. Þær fá styrki frá ríkinu til að hætta að vinna. Glæpum linnir í hættulegum hverfum. Háskólar verða íslamskir, og prófessorar sem streitast á móti því eru sendir á eftirlaun.

Það getur verið varasamt að draga stórar ályktanir af stuttu ágripi, en ég gat ekki varist því að upp í huga minn komu þriðji og fjórði áratugur síðustu aldar.

Þá tókust á, ekki hvað síst í Evrópu, tvær öfgastefnur, keimlíkar en samt svarnir andstæðingar.

Ógnaröldin hófst þó ekki fyrir alvöru fyrr en þær gerðu bandalag.

En hvar ríkti óöld á götunum?  Hvar var konum bolað út af vinnumarkaðnum? Hvar fengu nýgift hjón hagstæð lán gegn því að konan væri heima?  Hvar voru skólar miskunarlaust "stjórnmálavæddir" og kennarastaða skilyrt flokksaðild?

Hvar hurfu glæpir af götunum, en voru "ríkisvæddir"?

Hvar sýndi almenningur ótrúlega undirgefni og breytti um stíl á stuttum tíma.  Tileinkaði sér tísku, menningu og lífstíl í "einingu við þjóðina"?

Næsta spurning sem dúkkaði upp í kollinum á mér var, skyldi vera minnst á gyðinga og samkynhneigða í bókinni?  Hver yrðu örlög þeirra undir slíkri stjórn?

Framtíðarsögur eru oft hrollvekjandi lesning.  Það er ekki oft sem bjartsýnin er við völd.  Upp í hugann koma bækur eins og 1984 og Brave New World.

En er rangt að skrifa svona bækur?  Ala þær á ótta, tortryggni og "phobium"?

Eða hvetja þær gagnrýna hugsun, vara við hættum?

Hvaða hefði verið sagt ef stjórnmálamaður hefði sett fram svipaða framtíðarsýn?  Eða eru þeir að því?

 

 

 

 


mbl.is Íslamski Svartiskóli Parísar
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Að mennta hershöfðingja

Þó að framhjáhald sé í sjálfu sér ekkert gamanmál, þá get ég ekki hlegið að einstökum atriðum í þessu máli.

Að Petreus og Broadwell (sem hann hélt við) hafi fyrir stuttu gefið út bókina:  All In:  The Education of General David Petraeus, er í mínum huga brandari sem ekki er hægt að búa til.  Slíkir gæðabrandarar verða aðeins til í raunveruleikanum.


mbl.is Hótunarbréf komu FBI á sporið
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Saga Borgarættarinnar - á Eistnesku

Í morgun áskotnaðist mér eintak af Sögu Borgarættarinnar, á Eistnesku. Það sem er þó ef til vill hvað merkilegast við þessa útgáfu af bók Gunnars Gunnarssonar, er að hún er prentuð og gefin út hér í Toronto.  Nánar tiltekið árið 1961.  Heitir sagan á Eistnesku Borgi Rahvas.

Útgáfan virðist vera hluti af útgáfu bókaklúbbs og er bók næsta mánaðar auglýst innan á kápunni.  Líklegast er að útgáfan sé að mestu leyti endurprentun á Eistneskri útgáfu sem kom út árið 1939.  Útgáfan frá 1939 hefur líklega verið nokkuð vönduð, m.a. eru gerðar sérstakar grafíkmyndir fyrir útgáfuna af Eistneska listamanninum Ernst Kollom.  Sömu myndirnar eru að öllum líkindum í Toronto útgáfunni, en ég hef ekki hugmynd um hvort að þær eru allar.  En þær eru merktar EK þannig að líklega er óhætt að draga þá ályktun að þær séu þær sömu.

Það sem er þó ef til vill merkilegast í þessu samhengi, er að þetta litla samfélaga Eistlendinga sem var hér í Toronto skuli hafa gefið út bók Gunnars.  Þá bjuggu hér í borginni líklega einhvers staðar á milli 12 og 15.000 Eistlendingar, þannig að markaðurinn hefur ekki verið stór.  Eitthvað hefur hugsanlega verið selt til Bandaríkjanna því þar bjuggu einhverjir tugir þúsunda af Eistlendingum.

En þessi fyrsta kynslóð Eistneskra innflytjenda, sem kom hér eftir seinna stríð, lagði mikið á sig til að viðhalda tungu sinni og menningu.  Að mörgu leyti er ótrúlegt hvað ekki stærra samfélag hefur komið í verk.

Nú þarf ég að reyna að grafa upp hvort að einhverjar fleiri Íslenskar ættaðar bækur hafi verið á meðal þess sem hér var gefið út.


Sigurvegarar og þeir sem töpuðu

Þegar kosningar eru afstaðnar upphefst gjarna umræðan um hverjir eru sigurvegarar og hverjir hafa tapað og sýnist gjarna sitt hverjum.

Hér á eftir fer mín eigin útgáfa á því hverjir eru í hvorum flokki.

Sigurvegarar:

Vinstri græn.  Það getur engin tekið frá þeim að þeir eru sigurvegarar.  Vissulega unnu þau ekki eins mikið á og skoðanakannanir gáfu til kynna nokkrum vikum fyrir kjördag, en ríflega 5% og 4 þingmenn er ekki eitthvað sem stjórnmálaflokkar grípa upp af götunni.

Hingað til má ef til vill þó segja að þau hafi tapað stjórnarmyndunarumræðunni, þeirra yfirlýsingar og ummæli hafa verið í skrýtnari kantinum og ekki til þess fallin að efla traust á flokknum eða afla honum fylgis.

Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn.  Tvimælalaust sigurvegari kosninganna.  Bæta við sig um 3% og 3 þingmönnum.  Vissulega minna en VG, og sömuleiðis rétt að þetta er ekki "sögulegur" sigur hjá Sjálfstæðisflokki, en ef 16 ára stjórnarsetu er bætt í jöfnuna, kemur út að þetta er feikilega góður árangur og góður persónulegur sigur fyrir Geir Haarde.  Þorgerður Katrín vinnur sömuleiðis gríðarlegan og mikilvægan sigur í sínu kjördæmi.  Flokkurinn náði sömuleiðis þeim áfanga að vera stærstur í öllum kjördæmum.

Þegar það bætist svo við að flokkurinn hefur stjórnað stjórnarmyndunarviðræðunum er sigur hans augljós.

Af öðrum sigurvegurum má nefna:

Valgerði Sverrisdóttur.  Eins og ljósgeisli í myrkrinu fyrir Framsóknarflokkinn.  NorðAustur skilar 3 þingmönnum, næstum helmingnum af þingflokki Framsóknar.  Eina kjördæmið þar sem Framsóknarflokkurinn er yfir 20%, eina kjördæmið þar sem Framsóknarflokkurinn nær því að vera annar stærsti flokkurinn.  Valgerður hlýtur að hafa gríðarlega sterka stöðu innan Framsóknarflokksins.

Ellert Schram.  Óvæntasti þingmaðurinn í þessum kosningum.  Skutlast inn á þing eftir langa fjarveru.  Hans sigur er þó algerlega á kostnað Marðar Árnasonar, Láru Stefánsdóttur og Róberts Marshall.

Kristinn H. Gunnarsson.  Kemur enn á óvart og kemur inn á þing fyrir þriðja stjórnmálaflokkinn.

Þeir sem halda í horfinu.

Frjálslyndi flokkurinn.  Hélt sjó, hélt þingmannafjölda, formaðurinn sterkur.

Siv Friðleifsdóttir.  Slapp inn á 11.  Hélt í horfinu, þó að hún sé verulega "löskuð", á sér þó von um "upprisu" og hefur "lifað af" marga andstæðinga sína.

Guðni Ágústsson.  Stendur nokkuð keikur, en styrkurinn er horfinn.  Líklega hans síðasta kjörtímabil.

Þeir sem töpuðu.

Framsóknarflokkurinn.  Það getur enginn á móti því mælt að Framsóknarflokkurinn fékk háðulega útreið í þessum kosningum.  Flokkur sem ekki fær þingmenn í öllum kjördæmum getur varla talist til "Fjórflokksins" og fasts pólitísks skipulags landsins.  Eins og hálftóm blaðra sem marrar í hnéhæð en er ekki sprungin enn.

Samfylkingin.  Það er engin leið að segja annað en að stjórnarandstöðuflokkur sem tapar ríflega 4% fylgi (eftir að hafa verið í stjórnarandstöðu frá stofnun) hafi gert annað en að tapa.

Enn verra fyrir flokkinn er að tapið er hvað mest í þéttbýlinu þar sem því sem næst allir forystumenn flokksins voru í framboði, formaður, varaformaður og formaður þingflokksins.  Samfylkingin er ekki 30% flokkur og ef þetta er breiðfylking jafnaðarmanna sem á að vera burðaafl í Íslenskum stjórnmálum, þá er það ekki beysið.

Það er hálf grátbroslegt og stráir salti í sár Samfylkingarinnar, þegar maður sér forystumenn hennar vera að telja sér trú um að þetta sé frábær árangur og "næst besti árangur vinstri flokks", því það er eins og þeir gleymi því að Samfylkingin er samruni fjögurra flokka, Alþýðuflokks, Alþýðubandalags, Kvennalista og Þjóðvaka.

Þegar menn tala um eins og það sé eðlilegt að VG sé arftaki Alþýðubandalagsins og fylgis þess, gera menn lítið úr fólki eins og Margréti Frímannsdóttur, Jóhanni Ársælssyni og fleirum sem komu langt í frá fylgislaus til liðs við Samfylkinguna.  Ennfremur má líklega minna á menn eins og Björgvin G. Sigurðsson, Róbert Marshall og Össur Skarphéðinsson sem eiga rætur í Alþýðubandalaginu og svo er líklega um marga fleiri.  Ekki er heldur ástæða til að gera lítið úr fylgi Kvennalista og Þjóðvaka.

Ef menn vilja telja sér trú um að Samfylkingin hafi "sigrað kosningabaráttuna" og skoðanakannanir, hlýtur það sama að gilda um Framsóknarflokkinn.  Hann var kominn niður í um 4% þegar verst lét, en endað í tæpum 12. 

En það sjá allir að það er fáranlegur málflutningur.

Íslandshreyfingin.  Lítill sem enginn árangur af framboðinu og þegar við bætist leiðinda væl eftir að úrslit voru ljós, er "lúserstimpillinn" ennþá meira áberandi.

Björn Bjarnason og Árni Johnsen.  Þegar um eða yfir 20% af kjósendum sjá ástæðu til að strika frambjóðenda út af kjörseðlinum, hafa menn beðið hnekki og ósigur.  Að mínu mati þarf ekki að rökstyðja það neitt frekar.

 


Vonbrigði í Malasíu

Ég get ekki neitað því að ég var bjartsýnn fyrir hönd okkar Ferrariaðdáenda fyrir kappaksturinn í Malasíu, en hvílík vonbrigði.

Frá fyrstu mínútu glutruðum Massa og Raikkonen þessu niður, Massa gerði slík mistök að það var með eindæmum, en það verður að horfa fram á við.

Það eina sem gladdi augað í þessum kappakstri var fantagóður akstur Hamilton, raunar með eindæmum hvað hann ekur vel, rétt eins og hann sé að keyra sinn 50 kappakstur en ekki 2.


Að þekkja vinstri frá hægri, eða snýst allt i hringi?

Ég fékk senda í tölvupósti í dag tengingu á dálk í Breska blaðinu Guardian.  Dálkur þessi er útdráttur úr bók eftir blaðamanninn Nick Cohen, sem er víst væntanleg snemma í febrúar.

Það er þó nokkuð langt síðan ég hef lesið eitthvað sem ég er meira sammála eða hefur fengið mig til að bíða útkomu bókar, ég held að þessa bók verði ég að lesa.  Það sem lesa má í útdrættinum er feykilega vel skrifað og hittir vel í mark, í það minnsta að mínu mati.

Það er fjallað nokkuð um "pólítíska rétthugsun" og síðan er Íraksstríðið í þungamiðjunni.  Afstaða vinstri manna til baráttunnar í Írak hefur valdið höfundi miklum heilabrotum og skilar hann þeim frá sér að einkar skýran og aðgengilegan hátt.  Hvernig Cohen gerir skýran greinarmun á stuðningi við við stríðið í Írak, og stuðningi við við uppbyggingu í landinu eftir stríð, eða stuðningi við "uppreisnarmenn" í Írak er líka vel þess virði að gefa gaum að.  En best er að lesa útráttinn úr bókinni og mynda sér sínar eigin skoðanir.

En grípum aðeins niður í útdrættinum:

"In the early Seventies, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn't buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidising General Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either, because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn't have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for then President Richard Nixon or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinson's disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.

Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie's house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think.

'It's funny, Mum,' I said as we drove home, 'but I don't remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.'

'You've only just noticed? We didn't let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.'

'Ah.'

'We didn't buy you the Beano either.'

'For God's sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?'

'It was printed by DC Thomson, a non-union firm.'

'Right,' I said.

I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read Beano when he is older - I spoil him, I know - but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line.

I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the left.

I'm not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents 'politically correct', but there was nothing sour or pinched about our home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality."

"Looking back, I can see that I got that comforting belief from my parents, but it was reinforced by the experience of living through the Thatcher administration, which appeared to reaffirm the left's monopoly of goodness. The embrace first of monetarism and then of the European exchange-rate mechanism produced two recessions, which Conservatives viewed with apparent composure because the lives wrecked by mass unemployment and business failure had the beneficial side-effect of destroying trade-union power. Even when the left of the Eighties was clearly in the wrong - as it was over unilateral nuclear disarmament - it was still good. It may have been dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers, but it wasn't wicked.

Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didn't have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the left: my family told me that. My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals."

"There were many moments in the Thirties when fascists and communists co-operated - the German communists concentrated on attacking the Weimar Republic's democrats and gave Hitler a free run, and Stalin's Soviet Union astonished the world by signing a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. But after Hitler broke the terms of the alliance in the most spectacular fashion by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, you could rely on nearly all of the left - from nice liberals through to the most compromised Marxists - to oppose the tyrannies of the far right. Consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the left's prestige in the second half of the 20th century. A halo of moral superiority hovered over it because if there was a campaign against racism, religious fanaticism or neo-Nazism, the odds were that its leaders would be men and women of the left. For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more."

"It is hard to believe now, but Conservative MPs and the Foreign Office apologised for Saddam in those days. Tories excused Farzad's execution with the straight lie that he was an Iranian spy - and one reptilian Thatcherite declared that he 'deserved to be hanged'.

By contrast, Saddam Hussein appalled the liberal left. At leftish meetings in the late Eighties, I heard that Iraq encapsulated all the loathsome hypocrisy of the supposedly 'democratic' West. Here was a blighted land ruled by a terrible regime that followed the example of the European dictatorships of the Thirties. And what did the supposed champions of democracy and human rights in Western governments do? Supported Saddam, that's what they did; sold him arms and covered up his crimes. Fiery socialist MPs denounced Baathism, while playwrights and poets stained the pages of the liberal press with their tears for his victims. Many quoted the words of a brave Iraqi exile called Kanan Makiya. He became a hero of the left because he broke through the previously impenetrable secrecy that covered totalitarian Iraq and described in awful detail how an entire population was compelled to inform on their family and friends or face the consequences. All decent people who wanted to convict the West of subscribing to murderous double standards could justifi ably use his work as evidence for the prosecution.

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America's enemy. At the time, I didn't think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a 'new Hitler' the next, but I didn't dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a 'new Hitler' one minute and excused him the next. All liberals and leftists remained good people in my mind. Asking hard questions about any of them risked giving aid and comfort to the Conservative enemy and disturbing my own certainties. I would have gone on anti-war demonstrations when the fighting began in 1991, but the sight of Arabs walking around London with badges saying 'Free Kuwait' stopped me. When they asked why it was right to allow Saddam to keep Kuwaitis as his subjects, a part of me conceded that they had a point."

"I got to know members of the Iraqi opposition in London, particularly Iraqi Kurds, whose compatriots were the targets of one of the last genocides of the 20th century. They were democratic socialists whose liberal mindedness extended to opposing the death penalty, even for Saddam Hussein. Obviously, they didn't represent the majority of Iraqi opinion. Equally obviously, they shared the same beliefs as the overwhelming majority of the rich world's liberals and leftists, and deserved our support as they struggled against fascism. Not the authoritarianism of a tinpot dictator, but real fascism: a messianic one-party state; a Great Leader, whose statue was in every town centre and picture on every news bulletin; armies that swept out in unprovoked wars of foreign aggrandisement; and secret policemen who organised the gassing of 'impure' races. The Iraqi leftists were our 'comrades', to use a word that was by then so out of fashion it was archaic.

When the second war against Saddam Hussein came in 2003, they told me there was no other way to remove him. Kanan Makiya was on their side. He was saying the same things about the crimes against humanity of the Baath party he had said 20 years before, but although his arguments had barely changed, the political world around him was unrecognisable. American neoconservatives were his champions now, while the left that had once cheered him denounced him as a traitor.

Everyone I respected in public life was wildly anti-war, and I was struck by how their concern about Iraq didn't extend to the common courtesy of talking to Iraqis. They seemed to have airbrushed from their memories all they had once known about Iraq and every principle of mutual respect they had once upheld.

I supposed their furious indifference was reasonable. They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances. I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened - not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa ... in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn't think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by 'insurgents' from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn't think again when Iraqis defi ed the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted."

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

A part of the answer is that it isn't at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America."

"On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs. "

"Saddam Hussein was delighted, and ordered Iraqi television to show the global day of action to its captive audience. The slogan the British marchers carried, 'No war - Freedom for Palestine', might have been written by his foreign ministry. He instructed the citizens of hdad to march and demand that he remain in power. Several thousand went through the streets carrying Kalashnikovs and posters of the Great Leader.

No one knows how many people demonstrated. The BBC estimated between six and 10 million, and anti-war activists tripled that, but no one doubted that these were history's largest co-ordinated demonstrations and that millions, maybe tens of millions, had marched to keep a fascist regime in power.

Afterwards, nothing drove the protesters wilder than sceptics telling them that if they had got what they wanted, they would, in fact, have kept a fascist regime in power. They were good people on the whole, who hadn't thought about the Baath Party. Euan Ferguson, of The Observer, watched the London demonstrators and saw a side of Britain march by that wasn't all bad:

'There were, of course, the usual suspects - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Socialist Workers' Party, the anarchists. But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say they had never experienced such a mass of humanity. There were nuns, toddlers, barristers, the Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and "Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice)". One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham. I called a friend at two o'clock, who was still making her ponderous way along the Embankment - "It's not a march yet, more of a record shuffle" - and she expressed delight at her first protest. "You wouldn't believe it; there are girls here with good nails and really nice bags."'

Alongside the girls with good nails were thoughtful marchers who had supported the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan but were aghast at the recklessness of the Iraq adventure. A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile, published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?'"

"In fairness to all of those who didn't want to think about the 'occasional genocide' or ask heaven's forgiveness for recommending that the Baath party be left in power, they were right in several respects. The protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war. They weren't necessarily lying, in the lawyerly sense that they were deliberately making up the case for war - nothing that came out in the years afterwards showed that they knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and thought, 'What the hell, we'll pretend he does.'

But they were manipulating the evidence. The post-mortem inquiries in America convicted the US administration of 'collective group think': a self-reinforcing delusion in the White House that shut out contrary information and awkward voices. Lord Butler 's inquiry in Britain showed the Prime Minister turned statements that the Joint Intelligence Committee had hedged with caveats into defi nite warnings of an imminent threat. Before the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned in protest against the war, he pointed out to Blair that several details in his case that Saddam had chemical weapons couldn't possibly be true. Cook told his special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either.

'A half truth is a whole lie,' runs the Yiddish proverb, and if democratic leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to level with themselves as well as their electorates. If Blair had levelled with the British people, he would have said that he couldn't be sure if Saddam was armed, and even if he was there was no imminent danger; but here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it. Instead, he spun and talked about chemical weapons ready to be fired in 45 minutes. If the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough justice in his political execution.

The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. Generals, diplomats and politicians covered their own backs and stabbed the backs of their colleagues as they piled blame on each other, but for the rest of the world pictures released in 2004 of American guards with pornographic smirks on their faces standing beside the tortured and sexually abused bodies of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison encapsulated their disgust. To those who knew that the Baathists had tens of thousands of people tortured and murdered at Abu Ghraib, the pictures were evidence of sacrilege. It was as if American guards had decided to gas a prisoner in Auschwitz, while their superiors turned a blind eye.

Just as dozens of generals, politicians and diplomats shifted the blame, so journalists and academics produced dozens of books on the troubles of the occupation of Iraq. One point demanded far more attention than it got. Hard-headed and principled Iraqis, who knew all about the ghastly history of their country, failed to understand the appeal of fascism. The y worried about coping with the consequences of totalitarianism when the Baath party was overthrown. They talked about how many people you could reasonably put on trial in a country where the regime had made hundreds of thousands complicit in its crimes against humanity, and wondered about truth and reconciliation commissions and amnesties. They expected the invaders to be met with 'sweets and flowers' and assumed Baathism was dead as a dynamic force. They didn't count on its continuing appeal to the Sunni minority, all too aware that democracy would strip them of their status as Iraq's 'whites'. They didn't wonder what else the servants of the Baath could do if they didn't take up arms: wait around for war crimes trials or revenge from the kin of their victims? Nor did they expect to see Islamist suicide bombers pour into Iraq. Despite vocal assurances from virtually every expert who went on the BBC that such a pact was impossible, Baathists and Islamists formed an alliance against the common enemy of democracy."

"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, wasn't against elections because he was worried they would be rigged or because he couldn't tolerate American involvement in the political process; he was against democracy in all circumstances. It was 'an evil principle', he said, as he declared a 'fierce war' against all those 'apostates' and 'infidels' who wanted to vote in free elections and the 'demi-idols' who wanted to be elected. Democracy was a 'heresy itself', because it allowed men and women to challenge the laws of God with laws made by parliaments. It was based on 'freedom of religion and belief' and 'freedom of speech' and on 'separation of religion and politics'.

He did not mean it as a compliment. His strategy was to terrorise Iraq's Shia majority. To Sunni Islamists they were heretics, or as Zarqawi put it in his charac teristic language, 'the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom'. Suicide bombers were to murder them until they turned on the Sunni minority. He explained: 'I mean that targeting and hitting them in [their] religious, political, and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancour working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.'

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffi ng up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed."

"When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices. The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy.

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifi able anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross'.

They chose to go berserk."

1. hluti greinarinnar er hér og 2. hlutinn hér.

Allar feitletranir eru blogghöfundar.

 

 


Frank og Jói

Það muna eflaust einhverjir eftir því að hafa lesið á barna eða unglingsárum bækurnar um Frank og Jóa Hardy.  Alla vegna gleypti ég þær í mig á bókasafninu í gamla daga, og hafði gaman af.

En ég vissi ekki fyrr en ég sá það á vef Globe and Mail, að höfundurinn var Kanadískur, skrifaði undir dulnefni og tók skrifin á Frank og Jóa bókunum að sér gegn fastri greiðslu, u.þ.b. 100 dollara á bók (sem var svo sem þokkaleg upphæð þá).  Hann fékk því engan skerf af þeim auðæfum sem bækurnar sköpuðu, en þær voru þýddar á yfir 50 tungumál og prentaðar í milljónum eintaka.

Hér eru nokkrar klausur úr greininni:

"The personal archive of Canadian author Leslie McFarlane -- much better known as Franklin W. Dixon, the pseudonym affixed to the best-selling mystery series, the Hardy Boys -- has been given by his heirs to Hamilton's McMaster University.

The material, valued at about $150,000, includes boxes of correspondence and daily diaries that McFarlane kept between 1929 and the early 1950s.

McMaster archivist Carl Spadoni, who negotiated the donation, says the archive will be added to material that McFarlane gave to the university in 1976. The total now occupies some 12 feet of shelf space in the library.

Calling it "wonderful stuff," Spadoni says the diaries reveal McFarlane's "daily struggle to earn a living during the Depression, wondering when the next cheque would come from his agent.""

"Under the pen name Roy Rockwood, McFarlane subsequently produced seven novels in the syndicate's Dave Fearless series, then moved on to write more than 20 Hardy Boys novels.

For most of these, he was paid a flat fee of $100 per book and, although the novels sold many millions of copies and were translated into 50 languages, he earned no royalties. A well-preserved first edition is now worth about $1,500.

At the time, according to his son, Brian, himself the author of some 65 books, he regarded the Hardy Boys assignments as something of a nuisance, having no awareness of their growing popularity.

"In his diaries," Brian McFarlane said in an interview last week, "my father talks about having to write another of those cursed books, in order to earn another $100 to buy coal for the furnace. And he never read them over afterward. It was only much later that he accepted plaudits for the work."

"The major focus was money," concurs Spadoni. "He's a freelancer and he's churning the stuff out. The Hardy Boys recedes in the background. He wasn't in denial. He just didn't think it was important."

"They'd give him an outline," recalls his daughter, Norah McFarlane Perez, also a writer of short stories and novels. "But to make it palatable, he'd come up with different characters and add colour and use large words, and inject his wonderful sense of humour. And then he'd finish and say, 'I will never write another juvenile book.' But then the bills would pile up and he'd start another.""

"Even a small percentage of the royalties would have made McFarlane wealthy. "It's kind of sad," says Brian McFarlane. "We never owned a car. The house was rented and a little chilly. But we never thought we were poor -- we sure had a good upbringing."

It was only a year before his death, with publication of his 1976 autobiography, The Ghost of the Hardy Boys, that McFarlane announced his role in their creation. The Stratemeyer Syndicate had insisted that their ghostwriters never reveal authorship."

Greinina í heild má finna hér.


Nokkrar bækur sem myndu gera það gott í jólabókaflóðinu, ef þær aðeins kæmu út

Hér eru titlar að nokkrum bókum sem ég held að myndu gera sig vel í jólabókaflóðinu, ef þær kæmu á annað borð út.  En það eru líklega ekki miklar líkur á því.

Nokkur góð ár án Ingibjargar
Össur Skarpshéðinsson rifjar upp ár sín sem formaður Samfylkingarinnar á sinn hispurslausa hátt.

Einn á báti í grasrótinni
Kristinn H. Gunnarsson segir frá árum sínum í Framsóknarflokknum

Vinstribylgjan
Ný pólítísk skáldsaga eftir Sigmund Erni Rúnarsson

Alla í bátana
Ritgerðasafn eftir frjálslynda íslenska stjórnmálamenn um innflytjendavandann

Oft er í holti heyrandi nær
Nýtt safn þjóðsagna og ævintýra, Jón Baldvin og Árni Páll tóku saman.

Frelsi, jafnrétti og systkinalegur kærleikur
Stiklað á stóru í sögu kvenfrelsis og mýtur táknmynda og orða karlrembusamfélagsins brotnar til mergju. Sérstakur gaumur er gefinn umferðarljósum og öðrum karllægum kúgunartækjum.

Tækni og mistök tengd henni
Ný sjálfshjálparbók eftir Árna Joð.

Ég er drekinn, kæri Jón
Löngu tímabær bók sem tekur á þeim tilfinningu sem þeir upplifa sem missa starf sitt af völdum Jóns.  Höfundarnir Margrét Sverris og Róbert Emm. segja frá upplifunum sínum og gefa góð ráð.


mbl.is Konungsbók enn söluhæst
Tilkynna um óviðeigandi tengingu við frétt

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