Blogoir: June

A Polish reader Ludwik Kowalski now long established in the USA has sent in a link to this unusual free online memoir, namely extracts from his diaries which he wrote while growing up in the USSR then Stalinist Poland:

This is my “book of life.” It is based on what I recorded in diaries, first as a teenager in the USSR and Poland, then as an adult, in Poland, France and the USA. It traces my evolution from a dedicated Stalinist into an active anti-Stalinist. Romantic affairs and other preoccupations are not totally ignored...

My notebooks were kept in an old green metal trunk. In late 2009, at the age of 78, I finally decided to open it. Up to then, I had never re-read the diaries. Their total volume was approximately three cubic feet.

One thing became clear as soon as I started reading. Translating everything made no sense, considering poor composition, numerous repetitions, and too many details. But I began to see my life more clearly, and decided there was enough substance to be of interest to others...

Here is my story in a nutshell. Born in 1931 in Poland, I spent my early childhood, up to age 15, in the Soviet Union. During that time my idealistic father became a victim of the Stalinist regime; like millions of others, he was arrested and sent to die in Siberia.

My mother and I returned to Poland after the end of WWII. That is where my undergraduate and graduate education were completed. In 1957 I went to France for postgraduate studies. After returning to Poland in 1963 with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, I was invited to a scientific conference in the US, and became a research associate at Columbia University. My teaching career began in 1969...

Well worth a look.

First, it's free.

And second, it is striking to read about the intellectual and emotional evolution from a boy who wrote cheery poems praising Stalin to ahighly educated man who finally grasped the truth about the Soviet regime and its cruelty to millions of its own people.

Could nimble French banks be getting bailed out in effect at Germany's expense, by playing the way the French-led European Central Bank helps Greece?

That would be perfide indeed, and at a very high level of betrayal.

Surely not.

Maybe it all gets just too complicated. Too many things go wrong at the same time.

The capacity of the world's leaders and institutions to respond in a coherent and authoritative way on several huge problems at the same time ebbs away. This opens the way for calculated lunges by different regional powers, aiming quickly to establish some new facts on the ground while attentions are distracted elsewhere.

Imagine some sort of geo-political storm featuring, among others:

• escalating tensions between Turkey and Israel, with Arab countries and Iran weighing in opportunistically to arm Hamas and drive up a sense of inevitable confrontation. Israel's very existence is openly challenged in numerous capitals
• South and North Korea relations decline amidst mutual recriminations over various off-shore naval incidents
• the European Union's legal authority is hammered by rulings in the German courts declaring unconstitutional the various attempts by Brussels to underpin the Eurozone by side-stepping existing EU treaties
• the Eurozone crisis quickly enters a new phase, with civil unrest breaking out in Greece and financial markets seizing up in other European capitals. Cash machines across much of Europe run dry; just-in-time supplies of food to Europe's supermarkets falter 
• ethnic clashes break out in several southern European countries, including some within the European Union (Slovakia, Hungary, Romania) and in Serbia/Kosovo and Bosnia
• Europe's leaders run out of intelligent joint responses to these simultaneous crises - the European Union itself looks vulnerable to abrupt disintegration, as France and Germany bluntly disagree over what needs to be done merely to keep the show on the road
• the financial crisis in Europe spreads to Russia, causing numerous banks to fail. Various parts of Russia proclaim a new autonomy, defying Moscow's authority. Road-blocks start to appear on many internal borders. Attempts by Moscow to crush opposition in the regions backfire, causing widespread violent demonstrations against Putin's rule
• NATO forces in Afghanistan and US forces in Iraq suffer heavy losses in a series of terrorist suicide bombings, giving the impression that the USA is being driven back
• Christian/Muslim communal fighting in Nigeria spills beyond Nigeria's borders
• the BP oil leak suddenly gets worse again
• Israel warns that it will use every possible means to defend itself, and bombs a number of suspected Iranian nuclear bomb installations
• Turkey announces that it will use military force to 'blockade' Israel and its airspace.
• the Obama administration cannot react coherently to any of this, above all the soaring tensions in the Middle East. Washington dare not try to rein in Turkey and/or Israel, lest one or other or both simply ignores the pressure...
• The UN is powerless - the five Security Council permanent members are overwhelmed with internal and external dramas

It is not so much that any one of these problems is uncontainable. It is the fact that they come along simultaneously, creating a sense that the shared understandings and responsibilities which have kept some sense of global order since WW2 are giving way to a new 'grab what you can' attitude.

Western policy-makers in particular are paralysed, bogged down in their economic problems and unwilling to use military force since it is no longer clear (a) that Western military force can achieve victory in the sort of conflicts now breaking out in different places, and (b) what a stable outcome in any one place might look like.

Western hesitation is matched by Chinese, Russian and Indian hesitation. Those powers themselves are struggling as world markets seize up, but they see an historic opportunity for themselves to move into the philosophical space created by Western retreat.

World Wars One and Two were conflicts with global reach arising from European power-struggles. But there was at least a clear context, involving thematic rivalries in an understandable form. 

World War Three is different. For the first time in centuries the USA and Europe are unable to set or even define the global agenda, and so face philosophical and psychological defeat. Other powers come to the fore, fighting and redrawing the map - and therefore the rules - as they see fit.

The turmoil is all the more dramatic and vicious for being in a sense anarchic and incoherent, even if civilisational principles are implicitly at stake.  

Or maybe it will all be fine.

BP stop the leaking oil. Turkey and Israel meet for a quiet drink and sort out their differences. 

Brussels' efforts to reform the Eurozone are seen to be brilliantly successful, and prompt even deeper happy integration among all EU members.

England win the World Cup, Jermain Defoe scoring a brilliant solo winner.

Phew. I was getting worried there.   

How does the Obama administration's response to the BP oil-leak crisis look as seen from the viewpoint of someone who has walked on the moon - and so understands the limits of technology?

Not too good:

The response after an oxygen tank explosion in the Apollo 13 spacecraft on its way to the Moon illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled. It stands in sharp contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Solve the problem first; then investigate objectively; apply the lessons; and then, if absolutely necessary, worry about responsibility.

... In contrast, President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of the Gulf oil spill situation “from day one” assumed that failure is an option and, indeed, may want BP to fail for their own ideological reasons.

Oh come on - never mind all that political stuff.

Why can't they just plug the fracking hole ?

Some answers here.

How to 'explain' the shootings in Cumbria?

Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian helpfully shows why he is inexplicable:

The second thing is, in our desire to explain these events solely as examples of personal pathology, we concentrate on the individual, and do not interrogate the role of society and a socially produced ideology of individualism ...

The importance of self-expression, self-indulgence, self-realisation in our society is bound to have its less glamorous form; and for all the exaltations of success, the parade of showy individuals who, by virtue of their beauty or skill, or simply their assertiveness and celebrity, there is bound to be another, suppressed march of misery, frustration, despair and hatred.

The insistent singleminded worship of wealth and power is itself a powerful generator of a darker side of human experience; and all the pathologies of crime, disorder, emotional breakdown, psychiatric illness and depression, are simply the shadow of the excessive adulation offered up to fame, youth or talent...

This is junk journalism, discombobulated sentences filling the available space but based on nothing coherent at all. As far as he is making any claim which is capable of being understood, it appears to be that the horrible shootings committed by Derrick Bird were somehow caused by a socially produced ideology of individualism.

Jeremy. If you want to write for a supposedly serious newspaper by making outlandish claims, try looking at the other side of the argument as well.

Your claim might make some sense if it can be shown that societies which emphasise the Collective over the Individual consistently do better when it comes to mass murderers.

Yet what do we find when we look at the finest example of a society which has made strenuous efforts to suppress any ideology of individualism?

Take the case of hungry Nikolai Dzhumagaliev. And lots of other Soviet-era cannibals. Or even Andrei Chikatilo.

More importantly, those societies which play down the ideology of individualism tend to produce people in positions of authority who really enjoy murdering on a lavish scale for the sake of the ideologically proclaimed common good.

Such as our favourite NKVD killer Vasili Blokhin. Every night for some four weeks he executed Polish prisoners every three minutes, some 250 a night. Then he went home and slept and did whatever NKVD killers did in their free time in those days, before heading back to another busy night's work.

And Che Guevara himself:

"If in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island.

Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written--adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment...

No, Jeremy. You have it exactly the wrong way round.

It's because we live in a civilisation which values individual life that (a) the sort of horrible shootings seen in Cumbria are mercifully rare, and (b) the state does not execute people on a massive scale.

The so-called Queen of the White House press corps Helen Thomas has disgraced herself by calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.

Is it my imagination, or are Helen Thomas and the Evil Witch in Snow White by some chance related?

I report. You decide.  

Come on, readers, wherever you may be on the planet, but esp in the UK.

We urgently need a networked generosity swarm effect here.

Time to chip in for a good cause.

Update: many thanks to those who have pledged a little something to Elly. As Instapundit says, Faster please

Another superb piece by Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front, this time looking at a new book which is making a big impact: The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr: 

The general Carr argument is that the immediacy of unlimited communication actually changes the way we think, to the extent of affecting the way our very neural circuits tick:

... fewer and fewer people are likely to be engaged in such contemplative, deep reading activities due to the highly distractive nature of the Internet and digital technologies.

“With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use,” Carr claims. “At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.”

The Net and multimedia “strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding” ...

This piece took me to Nicholas Carr's blog Rough Type.

See eg his ideas on delinkification - cutting hyperlinks from work (such as this sentence!) to help the flow of thought and general self-discipline, or at least listing the links only at the end of the piece.

And this magnificent, elegant effort about why LP records emerged. Was it to help 'bundle' more songs on to a single disk? No:

The long-player was not, in other words, a commercial contrivance aimed at bundling together popular songs to the advantage of record companies and the disadvantage of consumers; it was a format specifically designed to provide people with a much better way to listen to recordings of classical works.

Anyway, does the Internet in fact change our brains?

Probably.

We read more, but surely we also read less systematically. We get jumpy if we have not checked our emails/texts.

I am struck by the way even serious grown-ups now think there is nothing wrong in abruptly tuning out of a conversation with the person next to them while checking some or other e-device. Go to a park or restaurant and look at people who are ostensibly together in fact ignoring each other, as they tap away on little gadgets or simply talk to people on their mobiles. The remote starts to get more 'real' or at least immediate/important than reality.

Nicholas Carr again on e-addiction:

At the end of Ioffe's piece, she reports on a recent trip that Tournovskiy made to West Virigina to meet his IM buddy and "real friend," Kirill Gura, face to face: "'It was a little weird, you know,' Ternovskiy told me later. 'We was just looking at each other without having much to say.'"

A vast and fascinating subject.

QUESTION FOR READERS: Is it better not to clutter a piece with hyperlinks and eg list them at the end?

The advantage of keeping the links in the text is that it lets people check your sources and so helps to raise standards (one reason why bloggers have been doing well against newspapers latterly, although I see that online versions of newspapers are starting to include links too).

The disadvantage is that it adds clutter and is distracting, if only subliminally - do I leave this page for another and break the chain of thought, or not?

Maybe I'll experiment and see if anyone notices.

In the meantime, another link. To someone who found true peace by getting away from all those busy communication gadgets.

The Murderer.

Here is a must-read piece at Samizdata, which looks at a seemingly novel phenomenon, namely huge boosts to the money supply in the USA but no signs of price inflation.

How can that be?

Because the state in effect is bribing banks not to lend:

So to put this thumbnail in a nutshell, the Fed has inflated the available money supply by 1 trillion dollars while simultaneously paying banks to not loan 1 trillion dollars. While there is no obvious connection between these two acts, the effect is a simple one. The FRB/Treasury is competing against the free market, effectively borrowing banks' consumer lending funds to keep the band playing while the lower decks of the nation slip beneath the waves.

Killing loans is how they are hiding the evidence and disguising the potential hyperinflationary effect of monetizing. The Fed/Treas has to smother the private loan market or all of that new money they are creating and giving to special interests would show up in the form of doubled consumer prices.

As appears to be illustrated by a terrifying graph, which shows that something dangerous and unprecedented has happened:

The problem is not and never was 'market failure'. It was and continues to be incorrigible government and inevitably corruptible politicians and regulators.

This economy could and would have recovered quickly from even the most recent policy created bubble, the real estate 'boom', had the advice and opinions of some of us (even here on Samizdata threads) been heeded.

The cause of this continually worsening crisis is the repairs the self-anointed experts are inflicting. Paralyzing the lending market, taking money out of the free economy and using it to fund government sector favorites, is like giving muscle relaxants and pain killers for an asthma attack.

Sure the stridor of economic desperation diminishes, but that momentary relief is called 'dying'.

The Final Irony.

Capitalism/Freedom trends towards Collectivism/Serfdom because the state destroys the core feature of freedom - honest money..?

The previous posting where I take on veteran socialist Brian Barder is, perhaps, looked at from the point of view of ... love.

Read this excellent interview with Eva Illouz:

For me at least, the right and left often diverge on the issue of responsibility, of who is responsible for what. The left is much more willing to say we are put into situations not of our will, not of our responsibility, and we should help you. The left wing sensibility is about compassion for people who had bad luck in their lives.

Meanwhile, the right wing sensibility is that people can and should help themselves; if they have fallen into difficult circumstances, it is better for them get out of it on their own because this will form their character.

Where I find myself trapped is that I’m aware of the psychological explanation that makes people responsible for themselves and plays quite often in an uncompassionate view of others and a view that would make them too responsible.

On the other hand, you cannot help but think on a private level, that the only thing really as the Stoics saw it, we cannot change the world but we can change ourselves.

That’s my dilemma in terms of hesitation. On one hand, not wanting to play into an individualistic point of view, something that gives too much responsibility to people, but on the other hand thinking that it is much easier to change our emotions and inner life than it is to change the world...

Beautifully put.

Brain Barder responds to my posting about Being, Not Producing - and poses some Questions:

Don't you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can't or won't hold down a job must be forced to work, employing the sanction of poverty-level social security 'benefits' for those who resist? Are we all no better than cattle to be milked for the enjoyment of mega-rich senior managers and other tycoons?

Can we really not tolerate the idea that some people are incapacitated for work by their psychological or physical defects, their low IQs and illiteracy, their inability to obey authority and convention, their poor health, their deep-seated aversion to compulsion, routine or subordination, indeed in some cases their sheer innate laziness?

Can't we in this wealthy society afford collectively to keep this small minority alive and even in a degree of comfort? Is there really much point in trying to drive people like this into jobs when there are two-and-a-half million unemployed, most of whom would give their right arms for jobs if only they could find them?

Doesn't the philosophy summed up as "Work makes us free" have a chilling connotation, even in English?

Questions, questions. I don't know the answers, but they all seem worth asking.

Hmm.

Let's answer them seriatim (a neat little word which I always like to use if I can).

Don't you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can't or won't hold down a job must be forced to work, employing the sanction of poverty-level social security 'benefits' for those who resist?

As far as I know no-one in this country is 'forced to work'. But everyone's bodily functions require fuel (ie food). So either that fuel is earned or it is given, by friends/family or someone else.

People who choose to live off other people's generosity without contributing anything in return are, in effect, beggars. Societies of all shapes and sizes down the ages have taken a dim view of beggars and mendicants.

Most parents start to lean on their offspring to start to make a contribution of some material sort once they leave school - that's just the right and fair thing to do. So if we all tend to take an unsympathetic approach to idleness among people we know best, should we be more generous with people we do not know at all? On the face of it, not.

Are we all no better than cattle to be milked for the enjoyment of mega-rich senior managers and other tycoons?

I think that your characterisation here is fatuous. People who do work all make a contribution, and the market rewards that contribution.

You seem to espouse a lumpen Marxist 'surplus value' idea that all work = exploitation. To which I say, piffle - whatever problems the market throws up, it is better than all the alternatives - and it does make everyone better off, including beggars.

Can we really not tolerate the idea that some people are incapacitated for work by their psychological or physical defects, their low IQs and illiteracy, their inability to obey authority and convention, their poor health, their deep-seated aversion to compulsion, routine or subordination, indeed in some cases their sheer innate laziness?

Maybe we can 'tolerate' it. But we also need to keep a keen eye open for what causes these things, which you (like me) seem to regard as unattractive or regrettable qualities.

Once people get caught in a low-income plight, the state can make it very difficult to escape. This is what your beloved Labour Party left us:

Gordon Brown made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost tax credits.

Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply doesn’t pay to work harder.

Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay...

And this:

... Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006.

These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.

So whereas there may well be individuals who can not cope and need help, it is (I believe) undeniable that the fact that we have created a welfare monster on this scale (which in turn emerges from a frequently dysfunctional state-run education system) has to be down to the consequences of sustained bad policies.

Can't we in this wealthy society afford collectively to keep this small minority alive and even in a degree of comfort?

But it is not a small minority! All common sense suggests that if you give people something comfortable for nothing, the marginal impact will be that more people inch towards this easiest option, reducing the pool of 'givers' and piling on the burden for those Givers who remain.

Is there really much point in trying to drive people like this into jobs when there are two-and-a-half million unemployed, most of whom would give their right arms for jobs if only they could find them?

The problem as we have seen above is that millions of poor but highly motivated Poles travelled across Europe for these UK jobs, since poor but highly unmotivated Brits up the road did not take them. Therefore what?

Doesn't the philosophy summed up as "Work makes us free" have a chilling connotation, even in English?

No. Hell no.

How can you even begin to think this?

Contributing to society through one's energy and creativity is a core part of being human. Work need not be paid employment.

There is nothing stopping all those unemployed people getting some self-respect by organising themselves and picking up litter or helping out elderly people. You sound just like grim old Commie Govan Mbeki:

I later went to visit veteran communist leader Govan Mbeki (father of the now fallen Thabo, then recently released from Robben Island) at his little house. This recalls that memorable encounter.

I described to G Mbeki my visit to Red Location - surely the ANC as the local power should be doing more to motivate the people living there to clean things up a bit and try to improve their lot.

"It's not the job of the people to do the job of the government", retorted Mbeki, tetchily.

Which of course may be true. Yet what a bleak practical philosophy that attitude brings with it: a willingness to let people rot - if not to encourage them to rot to pep up their sporadic militancy - until the state fixes things.

Above all, the corollary of your position is that Being Compelled to Reward People Who Do Not Work means that Work Makes You Unfree - the worker is in fact the slave of the non-worker.

Not much freedom in that for the people toiling to keep the whole sorry show on the road?

It doesn't matter, anyway. The 'European Social Model' model of unlimited 'solidarity' paid for by borrowing far into the future is dying on its/our feet.

We'll get back, the hard way, to a better balanced way of doing things.

In some ways it may be less Fair. But it will be a lot more Honest.

When I was growing up, Israel was a favourite in some progressive quarters - an open-minded and successful society in a national-socialist Middle East, with trendily progressive kibbutzim where gap year students could go and hang out in the sunshine.

Israel had been created in 1948 with the best possible level of international credibility of the times - support from both Washington and Moscow, as shown by these wise words:

During the last war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering... The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference, since this would be incompatible with the high principles proclaimed in its Charter...

The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defence of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State.

It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.

Then slowly but surely the mood changed after the Six-Day War.

Israel started to be portrayed not only as an oppressive but increasingly as an outlandish and above all illegitimate phenomenon, a pseudo-country created and surviving only on injustice to others. A unique apartheid-style phenomenon on the world scene, with the (un)usual suspects shrill in the attack.

Their hard core aim is simple. That Israel in its current form (ie as a mainly Jewish homeland) must cease to exist.

This means that any accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians or its Arab neighbours (eg in a 'two state' solution) has to be at best a short-term tactical manoeuvre aimed at consolidating gains in preparation for a final heave to topple Israel (and the Jews) once and for all.

Here is a hard-nosed Israeli look at the global delegitimization attack in all its myriad current variations (my emphasis):

Clearly, an Israeli and Palestinian comprehensive Permanent Status Agreement that establishes a Palestinian state and brings about an 'end of conflict' or 'finality of claims' would weaken the grounds of Israel's delegitimization. However, even given such an agreement, the logic of the delegitimization campaign would persist.

The issue of Israel's Arab citizens may become the next ‘outstanding issue' driving delegitimization in the event that an Israeli-Palestinian Permanent Status Agreement is secured. In fact, the Resistance Network has already attempted to mobilize this community albeit with very limited success.

Here too, credible and persistent commitment for full integration and equality of Israel's Arab citizens would weaken the grounds of Israel's delegitimizers, but will not end their campaign, whose logic is rooted in challenging Israel's existence and not its policies.

The binary 'to be or not to be' policy aimed at destroying Israel has had a huge boost from the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. He more than anyone else (OK, with some noisy help from Chavez) has radicalised global discourse and challenged hitherto established moral standards, all in an explicitly anti-civilisational direction. See eg his explicit anti-Israel diatribes and his sly Holocaust denial.

The practical result of this sort of language, as backed by huge amounts of Arab oil money pumped and unrelenting official Islamic indignation, is that demands for 'justice for the Palestinians' morph effortlessly into rabid anti-Western and anti-semitic ideologies. Anti-Israeli and openly anti-semitic ravings seep into Western discourse at all levels, not least the Guardian and Independent.

Israel struggles to cope with the sheer weight of propaganda and military force aimed in its direction. Maintaining reasonable and consistent operational policies is increasingly difficult.

Here is a good short piece by Jeffrey Goldberg which wonders if Israel can still summon the seichel (which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance) to deal with the existential threats it now faces.

An important new force in all this is Turkey. For many years Israel and Turkey had a close and friendly relationship, with Turkey happy with its role as a key Western ally and growing European partner.

That is changing fast. Turkey's 'moderate' Islamic leadership see the USA's interest in NATO wilting and the ailing EU looking hard for reasons not to let Turkey join any time soon, if ever.

So as a large and confident country Turkey finds new opportunites for unilateral regional and even global leadership, eg by getting engaged with Iran and Brazil on the Iran nuclear problem and by asserting an ever-tougher leadership role vis-a-vis Israel. The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back - not necessarily something which the Arab states welcome? In any case, a major setback for general Western cohesion.

All this leaves 'the West' unhappy and uncertain.

Much of President Obama's openly Left and Hard Left Democrat base seems to have given up on Israel completely, leaving President Obama at best a lukewarm supporter of Israel's cause. Pro-Israeli conservatives in the USA find it all depressingly hard going.

The European Union with its growing Muslim minorities wrings its hands; the new UK government has edged towards a more critical position.

The main point for me is that the intellectual and political onslaught against Israel is so stunningly dishonest as to reveal that a much deeper Negotiation is going on.

Basically, almost all parts of the planet and indeed much of the chattering classes' space in the democratic West are directly or by implication supporting policies of a new Strident Irrationalism, aimed at delegitimizing not only Israel but Truth itself.

Facts in this drama count for nothing. Not the fact that if we are looking for brutal violence at sea and horrible oppression at home, North Korea leaves Israel and everywhere else on Earth far behind.

Not the fact that when Muslims are massacred almost every day they are massacred not by Israelis but by crazed Muslims.

Nor the fact that if we want to rail against crimes against humanity in the Middle East, the biggest and worst have been committed by Arab leaders against their own people.

And certainly not the fact that whereas Israel obviously operates some sort of pluralist political system, much of the Arab world is still rotten with the legacy of oppressive lumpen national socialist extremism dating back to WW2. Had the Arab world opted for pluralism and progress after the Cold War ended, the whole context for dealing with the Palestine problem would have been far easier.

Behind these malodorous hypocrisies lurks a darker force, hoping to deligitimise not only Israel but also the Holocaust and Nazi/Soviet crimes and the whole moral force of 'the West' and the Enlightenment.

This is the Negotiation of our age. Between Hope and Nihilism. Israel and the Palestinians are merely collateral damage.