A Twofer!
The September Standpoint is out. We have Nick Cohen, as predicted by commenter Bubby, on Bonekickers.
Nick, paragraph 6:
So the writers of Bonekickers weren't "booed off the stage"? And not because a) writers aren't usually on the stage, and b) it was on television, after all. Nick paragraph 5:
That looks like booing to me. Readers may know what he's on about. I don't.
There's more with World of Decency watchee Marko Attila Hoare.
There's a much more interesting piece on Alexander Solzhenitsyn by Robert Conquest which seems to me to be closer to understanding "the resurgence of Russian aggressiveness".
Never mind the next President, I haven't seen the incumbent doing much about Putin. The comments on the Hoare piece (five so far) are simply wonderful.
Nick, paragraph 6:
All true, but the otherwise forgettable Bonekickers was worth remembering because it illustrated how the disasters of the Bush Administration and their own intellectual and aesthetic inadequacies have allowed writers to get away with a bad faith that would have had them booed off the stage in less fevered times.
So the writers of Bonekickers weren't "booed off the stage"? And not because a) writers aren't usually on the stage, and b) it was on television, after all. Nick paragraph 5:
“Mind-bogglingly dreadful,” said The Guardian. “Rubbish,” said The Times. The authors have the right to fail, said the man from The Independent, but “I’m not sure that it was wise of them to exercise it so vigorously”.
That looks like booing to me. Readers may know what he's on about. I don't.
There's more with World of Decency watchee Marko Attila Hoare.
Nevertheless, the next US president will have a much more difficult job managing South East Europe than either Clinton or Bush was faced with. The principal reason for this is the resurgence of Russian aggressiveness and power under Vladimir Putin.
There's a much more interesting piece on Alexander Solzhenitsyn by Robert Conquest which seems to me to be closer to understanding "the resurgence of Russian aggressiveness".
As for the recent past, Solzhenitsyn blamed Yeltsin for the failure of the 1990s, while praising Gorbachev who, though politically inexperienced and irresponsible, “first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of our country”. But in general it was Putin he praised, as the one who “started to do what was possible – a slow and gradual restoration”. Part of this “restoration”, for Solzhenitsyn, was Russia’s emergence as a great power unsubservient to Washington.
When it came to foreign policy, Solzhenitsyn believed that, after 9/11, when Russia had given “critically important aid in Afghanistan”, the US had been completely ungrateful and then tried to push other demands. The pro- Western mood in Russia, he said, had started changing with the Nato bombings of Serbia: “All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings.” Things got worse “when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex- Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine.” Gorbachev carries more weight than his fellow Nobel laureate. He too has supported Putin’s foreign policy and accused America of thinking in terms of “a new empire” and of taking a series of unilateral decisions that “ignored the Security Council, international law and the will of their own people”. The comments of these two figures show how Russians who are against the return to a Cold War still hold some of the old nationalist attitudes
Never mind the next President, I haven't seen the incumbent doing much about Putin. The comments on the Hoare piece (five so far) are simply wonderful.
posted by Chardonnay Chap at 8/28/2008 08:56:00 PM
58 Comments:
Poor Marko. I am afraid the esteemed Director of the Greater South East Europe Co-Prosperity Sphere has got a bit of a raspberry here. Perhaps our friend should hove closer to the discerning commentariat on HP Sauce.
Not me CC I think it was the organic cheeseboard. My predictions have been up the spout recently. You wouldn't want a tip from me on the National.
Old Marko is getting excited again isn't he? His prose is so breathless. Plots and betrayals are afoot. You can almost taste the intrigues. Frankly I think Marko needs to get out a bit more and get a sense of perspective. Maybe, you know, chill out for a bit, rent a copy of Jack and Sarah with that nice Richard E. Grant and have a bit of a duvet day.
The comments afterwards are funny though aren't they? Especially the one about the Armenian genocide - I mean what was he thinking?
god, has it come to this? Robert Conquest, an elegant and stylish writing, using the word "unsubservient".
Blimey Nick's one is pretty barking isn't it? I mean what does he want - every crime drama to feature a Muslim baddie? Have there been no fictional TV programmes which have dealt with the issue? What about documentaries? Has he read the Sun, Express or Mail recently?
At the moment Nick really reminds me of a drunk who is constantly trying to pick fights with people.
[insert standard AW(i'WoD') disclaimer here regarding the subject of Nick Cohen and alcohol - new readers, our view is that he is clearly a heavy drinker and often an angry one but not an alcoholic in the medical sense and is obviously capable of holding down his job and producing his columns, books, etc]
What an utter mess Nick Cohen's piece is. He seems to have never heard of Contraction and Convergence, which solves the problem he seems to find so incomprehensible.
His work really is worthless now. Sad.
Utterly trivial but mildly amusing: the word recognition anti-spambot thingy on Marko's article gives me "Bulgaria rudely". What can it mean?
... like Clinton before him - he probably would not do very much in the field of foreign affairs.
Clinton's dovish, multilateralist, do-nothing approach to foreign policy
Does Marko suffer from short-term memory loss? I seem to remember Clinton being quite active in Ireland, the Middle East, invading Haiti, etc., etc.
Marko doesn't have short term memory loss; any discrepancies between his recollections and the facts demonstrates a failure of moral seriousness on the part of history, which will soon be corrected.
[grinding noises, shimmering blue phone box]
what are you talking about? Clinton didn't bomb Serbia, that was President Dole.
Poor old Nick, after too many sips of coffee, says:
For reasons that are not all of its own making by any means, the Bush Administration has reinforced the idea of a satanic America among the intelligentsia.
Satanic? Blimey, I have heard various criticisms of America, but the notion that it is "Satanic" I have not heard yet - even at those horrible north London dinner parties that Nick Creally hates now.
I must say that I am shocked and dismayed by Marko's revelations about the activities of Armenian Americans. I knew there was a big community of Armenians in California, but I never dreamed that they would do something so reprehensible as to lobby their congressmen over things like aid to Armenia, the Karabakh situation or recognition of their genocide.
And, not only that, but Marko informs us that Illinois Serbs actually went so far as to write a letter to their senator asking his opinion on Kosovo!
It really is a disgrace that these sort of ethnic lobbies are allowed to operate in the United States. And it's just as well that Jews don't do that sort of thing. At least, Norm has told us that is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, so I assume it doesn't happen.
"I have not heard yet - even at those horrible north London dinner parties that Nick Creally hates now."
Well, after all the abuse and breaches of confidentiality, it's no surprise that they've stopped sending him invitations.
I've been trying for some years to understand the difference between "a dinner party" and "going round to a friend's house for dinner" and I think it's possible that the issuing of invitations may be key. Do you think they need to be formal? In the present age, my invitations be sent by an ordinary email or must they actually be sent as an attachment?
Also, is a dinner party different from an At Home? And is Marko ever likely to be At Home again?
I think the Islington Dinner Party is a definite candidate for exposition in Decentpedia.
"Africa (if it ever breaks out of kleptomania and backwardness)"
I'm sure he could have come up with something better than 'backwardness'.
I was intrigued that Nick thought it implausible that Christians would be killing Muslims.
Presumably the Decent TARDIS is stranded in a parallel space-time continuum where the Bosnian war never happened.
Also love the way, when discussing German-Russian relations, Marko drops in the word "axis" and mentions the understandable fears of Poland. Hey, you know how I'm always saying it's just like the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact? Well, this time it really is!
I am afraid I don't have my copy of Pretty Straight Guys to hand, so here is a genuine question. I seem to remember that Nick, in his attack on Mr Tony's Holocaust Memorial Day, had a bit of a go at the government for omitting any mention of the Armenians for fear of offending the Turkish government. Is this correct, or is my mind playing tricks on me?
He probably did; viz this in the New Statesman in 2000.
Note also this, by Marko a while back; his view on the Armenians is actually quite considered and not unreasonable, and it's only the general context of moral outrage at anyone else who dares to do nuance that makes it so hilarious.
Yes, the Mr Angry act doesn't do his argument any favours. Nor did his rather bizarre idea IIRC that the Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs should apologise for seeking independence from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. I generally think Marko might do better if he drops the waffle about universal values and just gives us a regularly updated list of nations he either approves or disapproves of.
Just out of idle curiosity: is Marko related to Quentin Hoare? I remember Quentin wrote quite a bit (letters to papers/mags anyhow) about Brave Bosnia & Satanic Serbia back in the 90s, but appears to have dropped off the radar recently.
Yes -- he's the son of Quintin "Selections from the Prison Notebooks" Hoare and Branka "Destruction of Yugoslavia" Magas.
Marko also has this week's Normblog profile. He's a funny old bird: he identifies with Tony Blair, yet he'd abolish faith schools.
What would you do with the UN? > Lots of things, but above all: expel Russia and China from the Security Council, and suspend the memberships of all states run by dictatorships, or guilty of genocide, state-sponsored racism or other forms of massive human rights abuse.
Wouldn't that exclude the US when the UN was formed? (On the state-sponsored racism thing.) And massive human rights abuse - some of us (Amnesty International and me, to name two) think the death penalty qualifies.
Yes, I saw that too - surely the funniest part is this, on political ideas it's important to combat...
The misguided belief that true morality lies in attachment to a set of dogmas - be they religious, political or other - and that these dogmas must be rigidly adhered to, by ignoring evidence that undermines them or changes in the world that render them obsolete, and by suppressing one's own sense of scepticism.
Physician, heal thyself etc. I'm not saying I'm anybody's independent thinker, but, damn, those are some brass balls.
I suppose this might be an opening for Norm to return to the idea of a League of Democracies, a more exclusive club whose membership would be limited to countries who live up to civilised norms. Or who meet the approval of Civilised Norm.
DD - I agree that 'unsubservient' is a clunking word. However, I think that it's the right word in this context.
Bubby, yes Nick is pretty barking. There was a much longer version of the above in my head at one time (about NC anyway, I only posted after I discovered the MAH thing, so it was a rush job). Various charges: Nick is pants at specifics. He doesn't name the Bonekickers writers, but proceeds to assume that all dramatists write in bad faith. I don't get the 'Jack and Sarah' reference (because I haven't seen the film), but he could see 'Barton Fink' (about script writing) or for that matter 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (about journalism). William Goldman (who knew a thing or two) said "No one knows anything." Script writing and film making are gambles. It's true that no modern-day Christians have beheaded Muslims: it's also true, inter alia, that the Nazis never met their comeuppance in a Fedora wearing archaeologist, there are no boarding schools where pupils ground down by philistine suburbia realise their true aristocratic nature playing Quidditch; no one has ever sold a Norwegian Blue parrot nailed to its perch and claimed that it was 'resting' or 'pining for the fjords'; no one ever woke up and found that he had metamorphosed into a cockroach.
The unbelievable thing is not that something happens in drama when a slightly twisted version has happened in the real world, but that anyone employs an arts critic who believes that the point of art is to promote goodthink. I am an extremist Wildean: I really believe that books are well written or badly written and that is all. But I can't slip a cigarette paper between NC the tv critic and Mary Whitehouse (re everything), divers ayatollahs (re Rushdie), Swansea council (re Brian), the Lord Chancellor - I think (re Lady Chatterly), Stalin (re everything), etc et bloody cetera.
the Nazis never met their comeuppance in a Fedora wearing archaeologist
Or indeed a cynical chessplaying exile with a radical past....
does beheading have to be done with a sword or similar, or does it count if you just blow peoples heads off by bombing them from 'planes ? If the latter, then there are plenty of "christians" beheading "muslims" on a weekly basis.
I think Marko may change his mind now that Obama has chosen Biden. The following quotes from Biden should explain why:
"We should go to Belgrade and we should have a Japanese-German style occupation of that country.
"The Serbian nation is ...a bunch of illiterates, degenerates, baby killers, butchers and rapists" — a tirade on CNNs Larry King Live that was left without a comment, reprimand or any semblance of apology, to date.
A man on the record for stating that all Serbs should be placed in Nazi-style concentration camps during Senatorial deliberations in 1999 over NATO aggression on Serbia.
Surely, this is music to Marko's ears.
Whilst it is widely accepted that leaders and regimes are fair game for demonisation by the press/pundits, it is generally the case (in the liberal West at least) that to demonise, vilify etc. an entire people is fascist. Unless of course we're talking about the Serbs.
Perhaps the likes of an Ed Vulliamy or a Marko Attila Hoare could explain why that is?
Meanwhile, check out the roasting that Slavenka Drakulić is getting on CiF from her compatriots for noting that a Croatian Holocaust camp commander was recently buried in full fascist uniform in his homeland.
For shame! Marko has already given us the narrative, which is that O'Bama is simply a puppet of the Greco-Serbian conspiracy to sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids. If Biden's record suggests otherwise, it just proves that Biden's record is Unserious and should be attended to by Reputable Historians.
[grinding noises, shimmering blue phone box]
Biden, 1992: "Hey, that Karadzic guy has some really good ideas!"
CC the 'Jack and Sarah' comment was facetious. Its a terrible movie, the worst kind of rom-com pap you can imagine. What I was implying was that it can't be easy being Marko bearing the entire future of the Western Alliance on his shoulders and that sometimes he probably needs, you know, a little down time. I mean do you think Marko ever kicks back, blows the froth off a couple of cold ones and sticks on Match of the Day? I doubt it.
I thought your comments regarding morality and art were interesting though I am sure I completely agree with you. I don't think you can ever completely bracket off culture from your moral or political reaction to it. This doesn't mean that I think you should expect art to fulfill a particular political project, as Nick seems to but at the same time I'm not sure that you really think that all matters is whether something is well written or directed. I mean if you really believed that then you would lose the ability to critique something like Birth of a Nation, or Triumph of the Will both of which were brilliantly executed.
Ironically enough, there is a school of thought which contends that Barton Fink is really an allegory about weak-left wing intellectuals (Fink) failing to stand up to the rise of Nazism (Mad Man Munt). Substitute Islamists for Nazis and its Decentism all over.
Barton Fink is one of my favourite films and close to perfection in dialogue, plot and acting.
"Nick Cohen is away."
Andrew Anthony is gobsmackingly awful.
In the absence of Nick, it looks as if AA has decided to break a Seal of Dacre on his behalf.
(Incidentally, Nick has been away for a fortnight now, and it hasn't been long since he had that whole month off. Is he having more editorial problems?)
At least he managed a whole column without mentioning the phrase "white working class". Might have been a bit difficult, given the subject matter, though.
I mean is the country really full? Outside London and its immediate environs it seem pretty sparsely populated. This article seems to talk about London as if it represented the whole of Britain. It also really fails to ask why London has expanded so rapidly recently - how much has been internal migration and how much immigration? And how much have government policies which favoured the interests of the City over other sectors of the economy contributed to the increase.
Considering his previous work on the plight of white Britishness one cannot fail to detect the whiff of something a little iffy.
@splintered
Biden gets his stash on Serbia from some "ultra nationalist" Franciscan priest who makes Bishop Brennan look like some home counties Anglican vicar.
But Marko's vanity is such that he might not take too well to a 'demonisation gap' if the priest is seen to be out-demonising him. Surely, Marko wants to go down in history as the sole author of the Decent view of Serbia without a pesky Franciscan getting some of the credit.
Quite. Congestion, public transport, school and hospital problems are as much due to Government policy, especially a lack of a regional policy, and our inability to organise a piss up in a brewery as anything else.
The article isn't helped when it faces one of Hindus attacking Christians in India.
Very low population density here in Oxford, of course, and various Tories think that there's space to put another million people here...
good grief, what a cunt. Since this is the week in which so much virtual ink has been spilled over "surely it must give people pause to think that they are on the same side as antisemites etc etc", it ought to give Andrew Anthony (and the rest of the crowd) a little bit of a self-reflective moment to think that they keep on having to write variations on the phrase "of course, previously this view has been the preserve of racists". I mean, Andrew Anthony thinks a) that Bangladeshi immigrants have a way of life that's inconsistent with British democracy, b) that the white working class is being discriminated against in favour of non-white immigrants and c) that Britain is overcrowded. At what point do we stop taking his protestations that he's not a racist seriously? Or if we continue to take him at his word on this one, when does he start taking more responsibility for the consequences of what he's saying.
I'm actually getting a bit worried about "Decent Racism" - these people are not entirely without influence and their main activity is the construction of superficially sensible liberal-sounding rationales for right-wing policies (in this case, the immigration policy that David Cameron drew up for Michael Howard's manifesto). I think that perhaps an ENGAGE-style campaign to try and make the rest of the pro-war left disassociate themselves from people like Anthony (and for Harry's Place to sack Brett Lock and clear up its comments section) might be in order.
I think such a campaign might start with Oliver Kamm and Marko Hoare - I mean, after all, the Jacksonaut wing of Decency are very keen indeed on EU membership being extended to Turkey, and it is very hard indeed to see how the obvious labour market consequences of that can be fitted into the Andrew Anthony view of the world.
He certainly has some bizarre hang ups about race, for example this from last year:
"For in reality, almost all of us good liberal anti-racists carry around a set idea of what being “black” entails: physically strong, non-academic, in some way anti-authority and of course promiscuously heterosexual. And anyone, particularly a male, who does not adhere to these preconceived notions is by definition somehow less black. "
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2317287.ece
Er speak for yourself, Andrew.
What he, Cohen and other "mugged by reality" ex-liberals have in common is that they are embarrassed about some of their own youthful idiocies, so falsely ascribe them to all liberals and then proceed to attack "liberals" for holding idiotic views.
""For in reality, almost all of us good liberal anti-racists carry around a set idea of what being “black” entails: physically strong, non-academic, in some way anti-authority and of course promiscuously heterosexual. And anyone, particularly a male, who does not adhere to these preconceived notions is by definition somehow less black. ""
Crikey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
jeepers creeeeeepers; thanks for that Janosch, I think.
Blimey! With "good liberal anti-racists" like that, who needs racists?
Oooh, I imagine there will a few people in the marketplace of ideas willing to offer a more thorough version of the same service.
I've never heard a "white liberal anti-racist" use the expression 'coconut'.
AA's view is that the most important racisms which now exist are the racism of the black community and the racism of liberal white people. So no room for the racism of, say, the BNP, which one might have thought was worthy of at least a mention.
"nowhere in the world are white Christians, fanatically racist or otherwise, beheading Muslims." .....100lb bombs dropped on Afghan cottages can do a nice job of decapitation Nick.
I don't think you can ever completely bracket off culture from your moral or political reaction to it.
i do agree bubby although i still find nick's approach to both literature and art very strange. The most telling example was the blind hatred for Mark Wallinger's reproduction of a war protest, which Nick seemed to think was an anti-war protest itself, when it was actually a work of art about the idea of protesting through art - the distance from the houses of parliament and situation in a state-funded gallery were all-important, and nick comprehensively missed the point, as he usually does (witness his bizarre dislike of Chris Morris).
In general Nick's approach to arts criticism can be summed up as taking pieces of mass entertainment hokum far too seriously, while dismissing genuinely thoughtful and important works of art as, er, hokum.
The 'booed offstage' thing is just lazy writing isn't it? I mean how many authors have ever been booed offstage anyway? only one ones who were acting in their own plays, really. You don't get the 'author, author' call if the play's gone down badly.
I still don't understand the Decent ire directed at bonekickers. It was clearly 'inspired by' the da vinci code etc, and absolutely nobody could take anything in the programme seriously. He only seems to have watched the first one, too, since a later episode focused on idealistic Iraqi democrats who wanted to unite the country behind, um, a small girl who could play chess. surely that would meet with Nick's unqualified praise, to use these same standards of what constitutes good and bad TV?
In general I'm finding it increasingly hard to take Standpoint seriously as somewhere to 'think again'. I mean Nick's column is if nothing else massively lazy - it might as well be called the 'liberal-media-bashing column', so predictable (and, crucially, out of date) are his targets. The episode of bonekickers he castigates was broadcast on the 8th of July. The 6-part series finished a week before this issue of standpoint came out.
It's also telling, to repeat a comparison already made on this thread, that the only works of mass entertainment fiction Nick has a problem with are ones in which Muslims are portrayed in a vaguely positive light. I mean surely as a committed secularist blah blah blah he should castigate the last indiana jones film for suggesting that aliens exist?
this column is just the latest in a series of job adverts aimed at securing work in the right-wing press once the observer reverts to being the paper of the labour opposition isn't it?
I still don't understand the Decent ire directed at bonekickers. It was clearly 'inspired by' the da vinci code etc, and absolutely nobody could take anything in the programme seriously. He only seems to have watched the first one, too, since a later episode focused on idealistic Iraqi democrats who wanted to unite the country behind, um, a small girl who could play chess. surely that would meet with Nick's unqualified praise, to use these same standards of what constitutes good and bad TV?
Well, the initial hype about the series was about the first episode - but then why would Nick want to get into a snit about a series that featured that conspiraloon staple, the Knights Templar?
That said, I'm sure NC might get round to reviewing House of Saddam some time in 2009. Who knows, he might even like it.
[redpesto]
I know Andrew is a bit of a plonker but what he said in that article from the Times is still a shocker. Can't help thinking that Janosch has this one spot on. It really is all about projecting one's former idiocies onto 'the left' and then berating them for the false views you've just ascribed them. You can see this most clearly in AA but its also evident in NC, DA and Decent circles more widely.
I don't quite agree with that, at least not in this instance, because I'm far from sure that it would involve opinions that any of the Decents would agree that they formerly held.
There is an enormous willingness to employ saloon-bar characterisations about Liberals or The Left in toto and to so do in the most provocative manner in circumstances that are far from appropriate. I agree that part of this process involves a degree of berating one's former self, but I'm not sure it's the major part of it by any means.
Here the Decent Repentant (NC, AA) has a different style from the Decent Militant (David T, Gove, member of the AW extended familyM MAH)
Chris Williams
I think Justin's right here: I simply don't believe that Andrew Anthony used to hold such offensive and racist stereotypes of black people when he was a liberal. And furthermore, at some level, he knows it, doesn't he?
That Andrew Anthony thing on the manly black man...sweet Jesus! Beyond the valley of the parody police surely.
As Nick Cohen's arts reviewing prowess has cropped up, surely there's a better than even chance of him commenting on this at some point:
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/10714.html
I mean honestly, a dastardly Michael Moore type converted to the righteous defence of The West, and directed by "9/11 Republican" David Zucker. Surely this is satire Nick can get behind.
Von Pseud
Marko's latest (re: Florence Hartmann getting indicted by the ICTY) -
"Florence is fighting the battle for truth on behalf of all the victims of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and all present and future historians. We are 100% on her side."
Er.. "We" at 'Greater Surbiton', or "we" meaning "all present and future historians"? I worry that Marko's delusions are such that he now imagines he speaks for the unborn too.
Marko's point of view in that article appears to be based on an unusual interpretation of the meaning of the word "Tribunal"; as far as he sees it, the job of the ICTY was to punish the guilty Serbs ^H^H^H^H men and that's that; all this business of "contempt of court", "due process" and so on is just so much judicial fanfarraw.
To be fair to Marko, it's quite possible to believe both "whistleblower X has probably broken the law and/or their contract of employment" and "X has blown a whistle that needed to be blown and for which they deserve the thanks of historians yet unborn". (Remember Stanley Adams?[1]) But it's a troubling, teethsucking, yeah-but-even-so sort of combination - particularly when the employer in question is a relative white-hat[2] like the ICTY. Marko doesn't really do yeah-but-even-so.
[1] I didn't, I was convinced his name was George. Hell of a time googling him.
[2] Interesting to see Marko denouncing the Court as a catspaw of the West on the grounds of its failure to prosecute Serbian war criminals. He should get together with Neil Clark some time - at least they'd agree about something.
It all depends on the specifics of the "whistleblowing" I guess. If she's a genuine whistleblower and the ICTY is just trying to covers its ass and maintain Carla Ponte's amour propre, then I agree with Marko. On the other hand, contempt of court provisions are often there for a reason, and if the ICTY is trying to defend its status as a genuine tribunal and avoid prejudicing other defendants' right to due process, then that's not whistleblowing in my book.
I guess I will never know the answer to this, as I can't be bothered looking for sources of information other than Marko Attila Hoare, and his own track record is one of such voluminous partisan bluster that I absolutely won't rely on his unsupported word.
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