Að framleiða þiggjendur

Ég vil nú byrja á því að taka undir með þeim sem sagt hafa þessa frétt ruglingslega.  Við fyrsta lestur fær lesandinn það á tilfinninguna að Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn ætli sér að afnema skólaskyldu og gera foreldrum kleyft að kenna börnum sínum heima.

Þegar fréttin er lesin aftur og reynt að geta í eyðurnar fæst þá skilningur að hér sé verið að fjalla um leikskóla, eða dagheimili, en hvorugt þeirra orða er þó að finna í fréttinni.

En ég verð að segja að ég hef blendnar tilfinningar til þessarar tillögu.

Ég er reyndar ákaflega fylgjandi að því að foreldrar séu heima hjá börnum sínum fyrstu árin, ef það er mögulegt, það eru enda skiptar skoðanir um hversu hollt það er börnum að eyða of miklum tíma á dagvistarstofnunum og mismunandi niðurstöður rannsókna þess að lútandi.  Ég bloggaði einmitt um eina slíka fyrir stuttu.

En það er að sjálfsögðu ljóst að það þarf að bjóða upp á gott og fjölbreytt úrval dagvistunarkosta, slíkt er nauðsyn í nútíma þjóðfélagi.

Hitt er svo spurning í mínum huga hvort að einstaklingar sem af einhverjum ástæðum kjósa að nýta sér ekki þjónustu hins opinbera eigi rétt á því að fá að einhvern hluta, eða allan, þann kostnað sem hið opinbera hefði lagt út, hefði hann nýtt sér þjónustuna.

Persónulega finnst mér verið að leggja út á nokkuð hála braut, þar sem allir (sem eiga börn) eigi rétt á því að hið opinbera greiði ákveðna upphæð fyrir barnapössun, hvernig svo sem henni er háttað. 

Þetta er er ein byrtingarmynd af þeirri hyggju að gera alla að þiggjendum frá hinu opinbera.

En það eru vissulega rök með slíku fyrirkomulagi.  Þetta getur sparað hinu opinbera fjárhæðir í rekstri og uppbyggingu dagheimila og gert fleirum mögulegt að vera heima hjá börnum sínum.

Ég held að ég hugsi málið enn um sinn.

Miklar umræður um skólamál á landsfundi

Alþingi fyrir Íslenskumenn?

Ég hef undanfarið bæði heyrt og lesið ýmsar vangaveltur um Íslenskukunnáttu frambjóðenda í næstu Alþingiskosningum.  Fyrst og fremst hafa þessar vangaveltur snúist um Íslenskukunnáttu Páls Nikulássonar (bara grín sem ég vona að Paul Nikolov taki ekki illa upp). 

Sömuleiðis hafa menn minnst á Grétu Maríu Ólafsdóttur (ég vona sömuleiðis að Grazyna María Okuniewska, fyrirgefi mér þennan slaka húmor).

En þau hafa bæði nokkra möguleika á að komast á þing, þó líklega frekar Páll, en afar líklegt verður að teljast að þau komi í það minnsta inn sem varaþingmenn á kjörtímabilinu.

Það er vitnað í viðtöl og einhver blaða eða blogskrif þar sem Íslenskan hefur víst stundum bögglast eitthvað fyrir þeim og þar fram eftir götunum.  Menn velta því fyrir sér hvort að túlkar þurfi að vera til taks í þingsölum fyrir "erlenda" Íslendinga og hvort að það sé boðlegt að þingmenn geti ekki mælt svo vel sé á Íslensku.

Persónulega finnst mér þessi málflutningur fyrir neðað allar hellur og velsæmi, að því slepptu að það má vissulega velta því fyrir sér að þingmenn eigi rétt á að kalla sér til túlk, ef þeim svo þykir.

Hitt er ljóst að þó að Paul og Grazynu kunni ef til vill að skjöplast aðeins á Íslenskri tungu, verða þau hvorki fyrstu né síðustu þingmennirnir sem við eigum eftir að heyra "misþyrma" Íslenskunni.

Sjálfur hef ég ekki hitt þessi þingmannsefni, en hef séð ýmislegt eftir þau á prenti og þau að málfræði og stafsetningu hafi stundum verið ábótavant, hef ég ekki verið í neinum vandræðum með að skilja hvað þau voru að segja og hver meining þeirra var.

Ef til vill hjálpar það að hafa búið erlendis og "misþyrmt" þarlendum tungum, hafa átt í erfiðleikum með merkingu og tvíræðni sumra orða og annað slíkt.

Paul Nikolov fengi ekki mitt atkvæði, mér sýnist að skoðanir hans og þess flokks sem hann hefur boðið sig fram fyrir falli afar sjaldan að mínum.  Það breytir því ekki að mér finnst hann sýna hugrekki með framboði sínu og kosningabaráttunni (og Alþingi) verður án efa akkur í því að rödd innflytjenda heyrist.  Sömu sögu er að segja af Grazynu, við eigum að fagna því að "þetta fólk" vill taka fullan þátt í þjóðfélaginu, í stjórnmálum jafnt sem öðrum störfum.

Það er fólk sem talar Íslensku eftir bestu getu, en ekki fullkomna, að störfum á Íslenskum sjúkrahúsum, elliheimilum, frystihúsum, verslunum, bakaríum, veitingahúsum, strætisvögnum og nánast alls staðar í þjóðfélaginu. 

Hví ekki Alþingi?

Ég endurtek að ég fagna þátttöku innflytjenda í Íslenskum stjórnmálum, það er ekkert áhyggjuefni.

Að frelsa konur frá ríkisrekstri - Pólitík í NorðAustri.

Í gærkveldi eftir að ró fór að færast yfir Bjórá og ég var að bíða eftir að Formúlan hæfist, fór ég að horfa á Íslenskt sjónvarp.  Horfði meðal annars aðeins á Silfrið frá því á síðasta laugardag, og svo kosningaþáttinn frá NorðAustrinu á Stöð 2.

Ég verð að segja að mér fannst Margrét Pála og það sem hún hafði fram að færa ákaflega áheyri- og merkilegt.  Tölurnar sem hún nefndi yfir muninn á konum og körlum sem starfa hjá hinu opinbera var líka sláandi, fast að 60% kvenna en rétt ríflega 20% karla vinna hjá hinu opinber..

Það verður fróðlegt að sjá hvort að það verða umræður í þessa átt á næstunni, sérstaklega nú fyrir kosningar.  Það verður sömuleiðis fróðlegt að sjá hvernig "kvenfrelsisflokkarnir" bregðast við við þessari umræðu.  Það er líklega flestum í fersku minni hvernig R-listaflokkarnir reyndu að virtist að bregða fæti sem oftast fyrir einkarekstur, t.d. í skólakerfinu.

Enda virtist fulltrúum Samfylkingar og VG í Silfrinu ekki líka þessi málflutningur, enda ekki þekktir fyrir stuðning við einkarekstur, þó að þeir tali líklega þega "mikið liggur við".

En ég myndi segja að það væri þarft að ræða þetta frekar.  Háskólasamfélagið á Íslandi hefur tekið gríðarmiklum breytingum með tilkomu einkareksturs og eftir því sem ég heyri hefur skólum og leikskólum Margrétar Pálu verið afar vel tekið.

Kosningaþátturinn frá NorðAustri var nokkuð sléttur og felldur, þó að það færi ekki fram hjá neinum að Steingrímur og Valgerður létu hvort annað fara í taugarnar á sér, snertiflöturinn hjá kjósendahópnum enda stór í kjördæminu.

En niðurstaðan úr þeirri skoðankönnun var ótrúleg og niðurlæging Valgerðar og Framsóknar algjör.  Þó að ég hafi nú trú á því að Framsókn "skrapi" inn 2. mönnum í kjördæminu er staðan augljóslega ekki góð.

Það verður fróðlegt að sjá hvernig umræðan um álver á Bakka á eftir að þróast, en mér þykir líklegt að hún verði fyrirferðarmikil fyrir kosningar. Ég yrði ekki hissa þó að það yrði stærsta málefnið í þessu kjördæmi.  Athyglisverð sú hugmynd sem Kristján Þór skaut fram í þættinum,  að kosið yrði á meðal Húsvíkinga um byggingu álvers, samhliða þingkosningum.

Allir þeir sem voru fylgjandi því að Hafnfirðingar fengju að segja sitt álit á stækkun Alcan þar, hljóta að óska þess að Húsvíkingar fái sömuleiðis að greiða atkvæði.

Mín spá fyrir þetta kjördæmi er Sjálfstæðisflokkur 3, Framsókn, Samfylking og VG 2 hver, erfiðara eins og gefur að skilja að spá fyrir um jöfnunarmanninn.

 

 

 

Þorrablót í Toronto

Öll fjölskyldan fór á "Þorrablót" í kvöld. Eins og ég hef reyndar minnst á áður hér á blogginu, þá er það siður hér í Toronto að "Þorrablót" er haldið í endann mars eða byrjun apríl. Því verður ekkert haggað.  (Það minnir mig reyndar á það að nú er ég búinn að blogga í rúmlega ár, því með fyrstu færslum sem ég setti inn var færsla um Þorrablótið í fyrra).

Aðsóknin var með ágætum, eða fast að 200 manns og létu menn vel af sér.

Jóhanna Sigrún Sóley fór á kostum, Leifur Enno skemmti sér manna best, maturinn var ljómandi, rauðvínið ágætt,  Reyka vodki á boðstólum og meira að segja hákarl fyrir þá sem hafa bragðlauka fyrir slíkt.

Að sjálfsögðu var ýmislegt sér til gamans gert, þó að hið fornkveðna, maður er manns gaman hafi spilað stærstu rulluna.  En það voru afhentir skólastyrkir, þögult uppboð fór fram, föndur og söguhorn voru fyrir börnin og síðast en ekki síst þá spiluðu og sungu Sigrún Haraldsdóttir og Michael (ég náði bara ekki eftirnafninu) félagi hennar, nokkur lög, bæði Íslensk og erlend. Frábært atriði.

Ég tók mér það bessaleyfi að setja hér inn upptöku sem ég gerði af söng þeirra, en þar eru þau að flytja (ef ég man rétt) lag og texta eftir Magnús Þór Sigmundsson.  Ég bið þó þó sem á horfa að hafa í huga að upptakan er gerð á litla Canon myndavél og sömuleiðis virðist "syncið" eitthvað hafa farið úr skorðum þegar ég flutti þetta yfir á YouTube.  En þetta er svona tilraun að setja þetta hér inn.

 

Þeir kætast hér fyrir Vestan

Það má fullyrða það að þessar fréttir munu ábyggilega gleðja marga hér fyrir "Westan"  Fáir staðir á Íslandi eru fólkinu hér ofar í huga en Vesturfarasetrið. 

Margir hafa komið þangað og bera því vel söguna, en þeir eru líklega enn fleiri sem hafa áhuga á að fara þangað.

Ættfræðiáhuginn er býsna sterkur hér og margir hafa komið við á Hofsósi í "pílagrímsferðum" sínum bæði þeir sem ferðast á eigin vegum og svo auðvitað þeir sem hafa farið í "Snorra prógramið".

Það má því fullyrða að hér verði menn kátir með að fjárhagsleg framtíð Vesturfarasetursins sé trygg.

Hitt er svo auðvitað umdeilanlegra hvort að ættfræðirannsóknir eigi að vera reknar af ríkinu?

 

Samið um fjárveitingar til Vesturfarasetursins

Dagvist, óþekkt og orðaforði

Niðurstöður úr viðamikilli rannsókn á áhrifum dagvistar á börn í Bandaríkjunum hafa vakið nokkuð mikla athygli.  Alla vegna hef ég fengið greinina "emailaða" til mín frá 3. mismunandi aðilum.

Í stuttu máli sagt eru niðurstöðurnar þær að dvöl barna á dagvistarstofnunum hafi skaðleg áhrif á hegðun þeirra.

Það kemur einnig fram í niðurstöðunum að börn sem hafa verið í dagvist hafi gjarna betri orðaforða en börn sem ekki hafa dvalið á slíkum stofnunum.

Það hefur reyndar vakið athygli mína að fjölmiðlar virðast sitt á hvað kjósa að hampa þessum niðurstöðum, en það er þó líklega ekki óeðlilegt, en stundum myndast þó sá grunur að það fari nokkuð eftir pólítískri afstöðu fjölmiðlanna hvoru er vakin meiri athygli á.

Þetta er óneitanlega athyglivert innlegg í umræður í þjóðfélögum sem leggja á meiri áherslu á dagvistir og æ stærri hópur barna eyðir á meiri tíma á dagvistarstofnunum.  "Vinnudagur" barnanna á dagvistarstofnunum enda gjarna lengri en vinnudagur foreldranna.

Ég myndi líka þyggja tengla ef einhver hefur upplýsingar um aðrar slíkar rannsóknir, ég tala nú ekki um ef einhverjar hafa farið fram á Íslandi.

En í frétt NYT má m.a. lesa eftirfarandi:

"A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.

On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school."

"The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day care, experts say.

“I have accused the study authors of doing everything they could to make this negative finding go away, but they couldn’t do it,” said Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education. “They knew this would be disturbing news for parents, but at some point, if that’s what you’re finding, then you have to report it.”

The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.

“This study makes it clear that it is not just quality that matters,” said Jay Belsky, one of the study’s principal authors, who helped set off the debate in 1986 with a paper suggesting that nonparental child care could cause developmental problems. Dr. Belsky was then at Pennsylvania State University and has since moved to the University of London.

That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade, he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?”"

Fréttina má finna hér.  Heimasíðu rannsóknarinnar hér.

Geitur framleiða mjólk

Það er alltaf ánægjulegt að sjá þegar bændur fara nýjar (eða taka í raun upp gamlar) leiðir til að auka fjölbreytni framleiðslu sinnar og þjóna markaðnum betur. 

Geitamjólk er afbragðs afurð og fæst í verslunum hér í Kanada, þó ekki ógerilsneydd, og keyptum við geitamjólk handa Foringjanum fyrst eftir að móðurmjólkinni sleppti og kunni hann vel að meta.

En ég held að það sé víðast um veröldina sem gilda ströng höft og reglugerðir um matvælaframleiðslu og víða er það sem bændur þurfa að berjast harðri baráttu til að geta haldið áfram að framleiða vörur sem framleiddar hafa verið svo öldum skiptir, t.d. osta.

Það hefur ekki síst verið innan ESB sem reglugerðafarganið hefur verið að sliga bændur og hafa margir bændur og svokallaðir "artisan" frameiðendur lent í vandræðum í baráttu sinni við kerfið.  Það hafa verið búin til einhver göt fyrir "traditional producers" en margir smáframleiðendur hafa átt í erfiðleikum með að uppfylla strangar reglugerðir (og borga fyrir eftirlit með sjálfum sér) og hafa gefist upp.´

Líklega eru það því bæði Íslenskar reglur og "systur" þeirra ættaðar frá Evrópska efnahagssvæðinu sem koma í veg fyrir það að litlir framleiðendur eins og Jóhanna fari af stað, en það væri gaman ef einhver sem veit meira setti hér inn athugasemdir.

P.S.  Það getur vel verið að það sé rétt að segja að dýr framleiði mjólk, en einhvern veginn finnst mér það ekki hljóma vel.  Persónulega finnst mér t.d. kýr ekki framleiða mjólk, heldur kemur mjólkin úr kúnum.  Að tala um afurðaframleiðslu dýra er eitthvað svo skratti "verksmiðjulegt" að mér finnst það ekki eiga við, alla vegna ekki í þessu tilviki.

Geitaostur framleiddur í Búðardal

Hring-iða/ekja stjórnmálanna

Það þarf góðan tíma til að fylgjast með og vita hver er í hvaða flokki og hverjir fara í framboð fyrir hvern í Íslenskum stjórnmálum þessa dagana.  Svo ekki sé nú talað um hverjir ætla í framboð og fyrir hvað þeir standa. 

Ef marka má þær fréttir sem ég hef séð er Frjálslyndi flokkurinn byggður á stefnuskrá Framsóknarflokksins (sem Framsóknarflokkurinn fer ekki eftir, ef marka má fréttirnar) og getur sömuleiðis komið í stað Samfylkingarinnar, ja alla vegna svona málefnalega séð ef marka má sumar yfirlýsingar.

Hverjir eru til vinstri og hverjir eru hægrimenn virðist verða óskýrara og óskýrara, flokkar eru of pólítískir (bara sagt í gríni) og allt snýst í hringi.

Er það furða þó að stór hópur kjósenda sé óákveðinn?

En það er víðar en á Íslandi sem menn hafa orð á því að skil á milli flokka og stjórnmálamanna séu að verða óljós og jafnvel að mönnum þyki hin pólítíska veröld hafa umpólast eða snúist í hringi.

Ég bloggaði fyrir nokkru um bók eftir Nick Cohen, sem heitir What´s Left (sjá blogg hér) þar sem hann fjallar um hvernig þessir "snúningar" komu honum fyrir sjónir frá sjónarhóli vinstri manns.

En nú las ég dálk í Kanadíska tímaritinu Mcleans þar sem breskur blaðamaður er að fjalla um sambærilega hluti frá sjónarhorni hægri manns.  Bæðir virðast þeir vera þeirrar skoðunar að Bresk stjórnmál hafi í það minnsta að hluta til "umpólast".

En hér er dálkurinn, skrifaður af Martin Newland:

"My wife has forbidden me from talking about politics at family meals. If I nevertheless manage to navigate myself into an argument over Israel or the importance to global stability of a strong U.S., she leaves the table because she knows the bread rolls will soon start flying.

My broadly pro-U.S., pro-Israel stance has relegated me to the cultural and ideological fringes. The hatred of the U.S. and Tony Blair is so intense here in the U.K. that many sections of the right have found themselves in an unlikely alliance with elements of the hard left. Thus, the Daily Mail in London seems to be in competition with the left-wing Guardian and the BBC to see who can heap the most ordure on the U.S. and Mr. Blair.

It is strange that, as a conservative, I feel more politically in tune with the outgoing Labour Prime Minister than with the new-ish Conservative leader. The latter, David Cameron, finger held aloft to test the political wind, has made a point of criticizing U.S. foreign policy, and has attacked Mr. Blair for being too "slavish" to Washington's dictates.

The Conservatives took advantage of the recent war in southern Lebanon to adopt the language of "proportionality" when speaking of Israel and to talk up their "soft power" credentials. Malcolm Rifkind, a former minister and a bit of a "Tory wet," was dispatched to speak to the media about Iraq as a greater foreign policy disaster than either Vietnam or Suez. I don't remember any such talk when the party, its new leader included, voted to invade Iraq in the first place. The Conservatives were fully signed up to "shock and awe" tactics then, as were the British military.

There has always been a streak of anti-Americanism in British conservatism, which probably has something to do with the replacement of British world hegemony by American influence in the last century. Many conservatives now adopt an air of patronizing exasperation when talking about the U.S., as though Americans were well-meaning rednecks with more power than sense. This is pure idiocy. It is likely that the Conservatives will gain power soon. They clearly do not realize that the Americans have long memories, and that any new administration of either political hue will expect public solidarity from its English ally across the water, or at the very least complete discretion.

For my part, I think Cameron is a good politician. But I simply do not trust him as an international statesman. If I wanted Jacques Chirac-style international isolationism I would move to France, where the quality of life is in any case better than in the U.K. For the first time since I turned 18, I think I will be staying away from the polls the next time around. My country has lost its cojones.

The post 9/11 world appears to have firmly rejected what George W. Bush and Tony Blair, for all their blunders, saw as a fundamental truth: we are locked in a cultural and military engagement with resurgent world Islamism, and that unless we defend Western principles -- the rule of law, democracy, the separation of the judiciary and the executive, the separation of church and state, and a fundamentally Judeo-Christian system of ethical behaviour -- we run the risk of becoming culturally and morally overrun. Already our moral sense has become disordered. Conservative commentators are writing about the "calm and dignified" way in which Saddam sought to meet his death. Dinner parties and the media remain obsessed with the invasion of rogue state Iraq, but seem quite relaxed over our handing of the Olympics to China, which suppresses democracy, the flow of information and religious freedom.

We seem incapable of discerning the difference between theocratic Iran possessing nuclear weapons, and democratic Israel possessing them. EU polls have named Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. What about North Korea? What about the fact that the closest the world has come to nuclear exchange since the Cuban Missile Crisis was when India and Pakistan threatened deployment a few years ago? What about Pakistan specifically, whose "father of the bomb," A.Q. Khan, disseminated nuclear know-how to unstable regimes?

When allied to Western interests, U.S. power is a good thing. Instead, we celebrate Washington's weakness and gloat over the humiliation of Tony Blair, who, despite his many failings, has proved himself the most effective British leader since Margaret Thatcher. We appear to welcome the political misfortunes of our Western leaders, and seem ready to place our faith in the hope that myriads of differing and divergent national interests can somehow magically align themselves toward a common purpose should something nasty happen to Western interests, or should the West identify a reason, as it did in Kosovo, to engage in some global policing.

We do not recognize the pacifying influence of American global power, backed by the most formidable military machine in history. Its carrier fleets sit off troublesome coastlines, as reminders to volatile, expansionist states such as Pakistan, China and North Korea that the above-mentioned "Western principles" will be defended to the hilt. Until the pundits and the politicians come up with another formula for the global defence of Western interests and values, I will stick with the Americans.

It will mean eating in another room at family dinners, but that's okay by me.

Dálkinn má finna hér.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Er það ekki furðulegt...

... að sjálft Ríkisútvarpið skuli vera að stilla Íslenskum karlmönnum upp sem einhverjum "sex objektum" og láta greiða atkvæði þar um?  Og það á sjálfan bóndadaginn.

Og er það ekki furðulegra, að það virðist sem svo að athæfinu sé ekki mótmælt, að öllum sé sama?

Gísli Örn valinn kynþokkafyllsti karlmaðurinn