April 9, 2012
This morning’s editorial in Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper noted a double standard that was also a bad joke. Israel’s Interior Minister’s had declared, ‘If Gunter Grass wants to continue to distribute his false and distorted works, I suggest he do so from Iran, where he’ll find an appreciative audience.’ The minister could not detect the irony in his words, the paper said. It is precisely his decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of a poem he wrote that ‘is characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea’.
You can read Grass’s poem here. I find it a false and vainglorious work because of its strong element of self-pity.
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Posted in Spectator |
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April 8, 2012
Slightly frustrated by his downbeat assessment, I told Bouvet that the Socialist manifesto showed that Hollande was anything but a bore. It was not just his plan to hit everyone earning over €1m (£824,000) with a 75% tax rate. Every page contained ideas to find work for the unemployed, to provide cheap housing for the young, to punish the shareholders of companies that lay off workers, and to break up dangerous banks. A politician who uttered his views in Britain would be to the left of the Labour party.
Pitying French eyes looked down on me. Someone unfortunate enough to have been born an Anglo-Saxon might regard Hollande as leftwing, my companions conceded. But to leftist French intellectuals he was merely a solid social democrat. A conscientious social democrat, no doubt about it, who would make life better for most French people. But the notion that he was some kind of radical was absurd.
“He just does not give me an erection,” a weary woman explained. I thought about telling her that, in true utopian fashion, she was demanding the impossible, but decided that the English and the French could never understand each other and moved on
Carry on reading
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Posted in Observer |
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April 7, 2012
Review of You Can’t Read This Book
By Sonia Purnell
Literary Review
NICK COHEN’S book opens with a quotation from the late Christopher Hitchens about how ‘ideas and books have to be formulated and written by individuals’. It is just as well that we have individuals such as Cohen, who are sufficiently bloody minded – as Hitchens himself was – to strike out against conventional wisdoms and a wilful collective complacency. As Cohen’s work amply demonstrates, we in the West believe ourselves to be free but when it comes to freedom of speech we are anything but. Even legitimate criticism can leave us financially ruined or dead.
After Parliament gave judges the power to develop a right to privacy in 2000, the judiciary saw fit to reject England’s tradition of open justice with a breathtaking disdain for the past. They built a wedding cake of suffocating injunctions and superinjunctions, to the point, Cohen observes, that ‘the censors censored the fact of censorship’. Fred Goodwin, now stripped of his knighthood because of the way he disastrously steered the Royal Bank of Scotland to near collapse, was able to persuade a court to suppress reporting of his extra-marital affair with a subordinate. Although he was in charge of a publicly traded bank employing tens of thousands of people and responsible for the savings and prospects of many more, the courts ruled that the relationship was private and could not be revealed without fear of going to jail.
Once, England and her thinkers, such as John Milton or John Stuart Mill, were known as passionate defenders of freedom. Yet now our courts’ reputation overseas is for their eagerness to prevent unwelcome truths about the wealthy and the powerful from being aired. No wonder foreigners flock to these shores for our particularly alarming brand of rich man’s justice. read more »
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April 7, 2012
One question haunts me about the Leveson inquiry: what has happened to public interest journalism? The tabloids ran stories the public were “interested” in, no doubt about it: voyeuristic accounts, illegally obtained, of the private life of Hugh Grant, Charlotte Church and murdered schoolgirls. To date, however, Lord Justice Leveson has not heard about one story that the public needed to know rather than wanted to know; one investigation that might have made Britain a slightly better place.
Think of the opportunities the press had. In the early years of the last decade, technology gave reporters the power to behave as if they were spies in a secret police force. Yet as far as we know, no one hacked the phones of the powerful to expose the abuse of state power, corruption in the public or private sectors, the mistreatment of the elderly in old people’s homes, the rape of teenagers in children’s homes, the madness in the banks or the neglect of hospital patients.
Carry on reading
Posted in Standpoint |
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April 2, 2012
Review of You Can’t Read This Book
By J P O’Malley
Jewish Chronicle
His analysis of moral hypocrisy is first-class. If you believe we are living in an unprecedented time of freedom, in the cyber and physical worlds, do read this book and dare to be challenged.
Read the whole thing
Posted in You Can't Read This Book |
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April 1, 2012
From the Observer
On the face of it, Ken Livingstone and George Galloway could not be further apart. Livingstone is the Labour candidate in the contest to be mayor of London. The party’s leaders defend him against every critic, and indulge his every excess. George Galloway hates Labour, and Labour hates him. He accuses it of being a nest of warmongers and capitalist lackeys. Labour replies that he is a dictators’ stooge, and adds that he is the worst possible politician to represent the urban poor because the record of the last parliament showed he preferred mewing like a cat on a reality TV show to turning up for work in the House of Commons.
Step outside party politics, however, and the differences between the two disappear like the morning mist.
Carry on reading
Posted in Observer |
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March 31, 2012
From the Irish Independent
Welcome to Syria, where Assad’s crumbling regime, like so many other doomed regimes throughout history, has decided that it is going to go down swinging, killing as many of its people as possible.
It’s completely senseless and borders on the insanely pointless — a bit like Berliners being executed by the Gestapo for looting a pot or a kettle from a bombed-out house in the last days of the war.
So, where are the protests from the Irish left against this vile, murderous Government?
Carry on reading
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March 30, 2012
Review of You Can’t Read This Book
I raised the subject of Nick Cohen – who has written an incisive, depressing, and wonderful new book on censorship – over supper with some friends on Sunday evening. The topic of conversation had drifted from crappy remuneration – mine was the crappiest – to current reading habits. I supposed dropping the name of the impeccably progressive Observer columnist would score some acceptable-face-of-conservatism points from leftish friends who find my centre-right views eccentric.
This mild-mannered group – two journalists; a PR; a teacher; Paul, who does something in finance that I still don’t understand – responded with a cacophony of hooting derision punctuated by fitful denunciations largely populated by the terms “neocon”, “WMD”, “war-monger”, and “it’s all about Israel”. Cohen may not be an “Islamophobe” but he was “the kind of writer Islamophobes enjoy reading”. He was an “apologist for Bush’s war for oil” who was “almost as shrill as Melanie Phillips”. Paul, whose job, whatever it is, presumably doesn’t involve managing hedge funds on behalf of orphanages, deployed the most stinging insult in the liberal armoury: “Cohen should go write for the Daily Mail”.
Carry on reading
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March 30, 2012
Nick Cohen has a characteristically good article on “anti-Semitism of the Left” in the April edition of Standpoint. The argument he advances is a fair one. Anti-Semitism has been found across the political spectrum. In Britain the anti-Semitism of the Left was often directed at bankers and financiers. This was the anti-Semitism of Belloc and Chesterton.
But there was also an anti-Semitism of the generally decent liberal elite.
Carry on reading
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March 28, 2012
Sceptical readers of Shindler’s book might wonder what his history of left-wing anti-Semitism has to do with them. By “the Left” he means the far Left. In Stalin and Mao’s day it was one of the most horrifying forces humanity has witnessed. Now it is nothing. The Soviet Union is gone. China is a state capitalist power. Who cares about Communism? It is as dead as the Albigensian heresy or the Stuart claim to the English throne. Even Marxists don’t believe in Marxist-Leninism any more.
But in a strange manner few discuss, the death of Communism has freed far-Left ideas from the cage of the Cold War. When the far Left was a global force, the mainstream liberal Left had to draw dividing lines and defend itself from its attacks. Now that the far Left threatens no one, the borders have gone. The media would hound from public life any conservative who shared platforms with members of a neo-Nazi group. But respectable leftists can now associate with those who would once have been regarded as poisonous extremists — and no one notices. What applies to personal alliances applies equally to ideology. Foul ideas flood past the unmanned border posts, with disastrous consequences for Jews and Arabs.
Carry on reading
Posted in Standpoint |
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Nick Cohen
