NOT DEAD

They’ve been asked to wait in Paediatrics. It is five o’clock, already; and the sun is streaming in through the high, unopenable windows. Thrum, thrum, thrum, resounds the concert in the day room, and his name is Aiken Drum.
The Son is lying on top of the blanket. He has lately taken to wearing aggressively small jeans which he customises with black thread and biro drawings in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. He taps his dirty fingers on his ripped T-shirt. His large, glittering brown eyes sweep the empty ward.
“Look,” he says, in his new, adolescent, scratchy voice, “A Not-Dead.”
“What?” says the Mother. The Mother has been putting off her tiredness for so long that it tends, like a neglected middle child, to leap at her at the least chance. Just now it is sitting on her lap, arms tight around her neck, breathing the scents of Paediatrics into her mouth: strawberry syrup, toasted cheese, pee.

“A Not-Dead,” says the Son. “Look. Under the window.”
The Mother cranes round. She sees a baby sleeping in a plastic cot. It is wearing a pink woolly hat and cardigan and has oxygen tubes in its nose.

“See,” says the Son.
“It’s a baby,” says the Mother, crossly. “Someone’s baby.” But the baby’s eyes are too far apart, and it has a cleft palate, and its whole body has a flattened, spatchcocked look, as if it is trying to separate into two pieces, east and west, and the Mother is already worrying that there might be a crisis and she will be called upon to Do Something. The Mother is not a good choice for the parent of a chronic invalid. She is inhibited and impatient (often both at once) and she fears sick things: fallen fledglings, injured cats. Someone else always has to pick them up. Her ex-husband preferably, who is bluff and easy with illness, who would carry the Son, as a six year-old, casually around the hospital in his arms, the tubes draped jokily but handily over his shoulders—talents he is now wasting on a new, completely well, wife and child.
“She should be dead,” says the Son. “Like in nature. I mean if that baby was born in a primitive tribe she’d be dead in seconds.”
“So would lots of people,” says the Mother. “So would I.”
“I would,” says the Son. He raises his fists to his forehead, surveys the puncture wounds inside his elbows, and adds: “I’d be the deadest.” The Mother sighs. Once, the Son was prodigious and original, and the Mother was daffy and whacky, and they were on the same side: now they seem doomed to partake in endless EFL oral exams, with the Son taking the part of the difficult student, the one with the nose stud.
“You were a perfectly healthy baby,” she snaps.
“Not really,” says the Son. “Only apparently. I was born with it, remember. My tumour. That’s what the new guy reckons.” Oncology is a new favourite subject. So is genetics, and blame. The Mother decides not to meet the Son’s eye.
“Anyway,” she says, “we’re not primitive.”
“No,” says the Son, leaning back on his pillows. “We’ve got the technology now. And cos we have the technology, we have to save her. The baby. I mean the doctors and people, when a baby like that is born, they have to save her. It would be wrong to ask them not to save her, I can totally see that, cos then they would be like murderers.”
“And?” says the Mother.
“So then the person they save is not dead, but sometimes they’re not alive either. Like they need the technology to keep them going? Like they can’t be properly alive, but no one knows what to do with them? Not Dead. See?”
The Mother wakes up. She scents danger. She leans forward, and the Son fixes her with his shining eyes.
“I see them everywhere. You know? Not just in the hospital. Some of them are in disguise, but I can spot them. Like they have a little shiny outline round them, like in a game on a screen. They pixellate, Mum, they pixellate at me. Like: there, there, there. Shouldn’t really be here. You, you, you. Not really here. Me, me, me. Not-Dead.”
“No,” says the Mother, loudly, unsurely, “you’re alive.”
“I’m not dead,” says the Son, “because of the Machine, but where am I alive?”
“In your mind,” says the Mother. “You’re alive in your mind, that’s the thing. The life of the mind.”
Because the Mother believes this most sincerely. And so, during the long while they have to wait for the plasma and the trolley, for the Machine and the nurses, the Mother babbles about Robert Louis Stevenson, also sickly, also bookish. Then she enumerates to the Son the titles of all the books he loves the most, all the books they’ve read together, their favourite episodes, and, after a while, the Son says: “You know White Fang? I was thinking about that. I think it’s like a prequel to Call of the Wild. White Fang is Buck’s grandfather. You can work it out. There are, like, all these little clues.”
Then he curls down on the pillows, and chatters on about the great dog Buck, and how he is actually fulfilling the White Fang’s dream or maybe, like, the call of his genes when he runs into oblivion in the Canadian woods, and daringly the Mother takes his hand and folds it inside her own and remembers how soft it was when he was a little boy, really as soft as a petal, the curved veined petal of a magnolia in its brief springtime brilliance; and all the while the baby breathes in its tubing, its arms abandoned by its sides, its ribcage moving up and down with exaggerated depth in its pink covers, like a giant, disconnected, heart.
***
Three weeks later, they are in Acute General. They can’t be in a single room, because of the price of nurses. Because nurses have to watch him, now. Because, yesterday, the Son unplugged his Machine and watched silently as his life blood was pumped to the floor. And where was his Mother? His Mother was on her way to the library, that’s where, because her Son had said “Go and find a job, a life of your own,” that’s why. She was nearly there when she turned and sprinted back. She doesn’t know why.
Now they have pumped pints of blood back into his veins, now they have re-inflated his internal organs and wheeled him out of the ICU. Now the Mother and Son are going to have their first conversation. The tubes are out of his throat, but they seem to be in hers. They are in a bay with the curtains drawn. Acute General. Anyone could overhear.
“It was an impulse, Mum,” he says, to the ceiling tiles, his voice hoarser than ever. “One of those things. Try not to fixate, OK?”
“How can it be an impulse?” hisses the Mother, furiously, “to bypass six security systems?”
“Oh, I worked out how to do that ages ago,” carols the Son. “Sort of like chess. You know?”
The Mother taught the Son to play chess herself. Yes, she can see how he could do that: work it all out. And already, just two moves in, the Mother starts to weep, and the Son looks at her, then away.
“The thing is Mum,” says the Son, picking his nails, “You got it wrong.”
The Mother is prepared to accept she has got many things wrong. Which one, though?
“Robert Louis Stevenson?” says the Son. “Remember? He just wasn’t that ill, Robert Louis Stevenson. He could walk. He got to have sex. He grew fucking up. Mum. Not…” the boy gestures at his feet, sticking up in a little tent of blanket half-way down the bed.
The Mother slumps out of her chair and puts her head on the end of the bed. She is thinking about her love for her son. It was born at the same time as him, and she is not in control of it. She imagines it as very strong and not at all intelligent, something that moves about in the dark and grabs things. It has claws and tiny eyes, like a lobster.
“But your transplant,” says the Mother, “it could be anytime. Next month.”
“Yeah.” says the Son, “Exactly.” And they both remember the last transplant.
“What about me?” says the Mother, after a while. “What would I do without you? How would I feel?”
The Son sighs deeply. “Mum,” he says, “You have to see, don’t you? You have to see that I can’t be responsible for that?”
Paediatrics, again. They’ve been called in for the transplant. The Son beckons to the Mother conspiratorially.
“Look,” he whispers, “it’s the Not-Dead baby.”
The Mother peers through the gap in the curtains. In the opposite bay, flanked by machinery, is a cot and a pink-clad shape.
“Are you sure,” says the Mother, “it’s the same one? That was months ago. Wouldn’t she have grown?”
“Mum,” says the Son, “Haven’t you learnt anything? Of course she wouldn’t grow.”
Now a woman stands up, and draws the curtains of the bay. In the slice of light they glimpse the shadow of her belly.
“I hope she didn’t see us,” says the Mother.
“Did you see her?” hisses the Son “Pregnant! Holy moly!” and he collapses theatrically flat against his pillows. The Mother finishes pulling out her sofa bed, and lies on it. Her Son is staring at the ceiling, and has not re-plugged the iPod.
“Is it bad that she’s pregnant?” she says, after a while. In Paediatrics, there are pictures on the ceiling: Piglet and Pooh, walking into the sunset.
“No,” says the Son, “but it’s weird.”
“How weird?”
“Well, that baby is going to die. The Not-Dead one. I think it has Edwards Syndrome. I looked it up. So that baby will die, and then, just at the same time, she’ll have a new baby. And then what will they think?”
“Maybe,” says the Mother, though it is a bothering thought, “they’ll think they’ve got a new baby to love?”
“Yeah, and maybe they’ll think the old baby got a new body? You know? Transmutation of souls?”
“Would that be bad?”
“Not like, Hitler bad, but it is fucked up. Because, what I think is, your soul doesn’t exist. Your mind doesn’t, even. Your mind is a bit of your body.
It’s just the same. That’s what the Prozac tells you, Mum. See. Look at us. We’ve taken the pills, and they’ve changed our bodies, and that’s changed our minds. Here we are, having the transplant, happy campers. Different souls. See?”
“Yes,” says the Mother, who has brought Zopiclone with her and is about to take one, “I do see that. I see that point.”
“I’m going to put the light out now,” says the Son, and does. In the dark he says, in his Dalek voice from way back, from his Doctor Who phase,
“Tomorrow, I get my transplant. Then, I start to grow. I am on drugs that make me optimistic, so this is easy. Good night, mother-unit.”
The Mother’s pillow smells of rubber. The wall next to her head is padded vinyl. When the Son was little, she would lie here in Paediatrics and tell him they were camping out, in the Dormobile, lost in the French countryside. She tries to tell herself one of these stories now, but can only think of the Son’s illness, the long road, the many forks, and how, at each one, they have borne inexplicably left, further and further down B routes, nearer and nearer the sea. Recently, several people have told her that the Son owes her his life, but the Mother doesn’t feel that at all. It is she who owes him his, in the same way you owe a child a good picnic, when it is your idea to set out, and you who forgot the map, and now you are lost and there is no hope ever of the rain turning off.

A SPIKE ON THE GRAPH

This is a new hospital, in the city where the Son now goes to university. The Mother had to get a taxi and a plane and another taxi; she had to ask at two reception desks; a junior doctor met her at the second and is now trotting beside her; he is saying the crisis has peaked, and new antibiotics and best foot forward, hopefully; but she can hardly hear him for the fire-doors swing-swinging in her head; and here they are: Cardio-Respiratory.
The Son is already stable. He is sitting up in bed, attached to, for him, a minor amount of apparatus. He will always be small, but his cheekbones are good, he is bonily handsome. “Lollypop head,” he says, of himself, “I should be on TV.” There are girls, now, and here is one beside him, importantly holding his hand. She has blonde hair in plaits and liquid dark eyes and an animated, elegant, deer-like way of holding her head and back. The mother makes the mistake of automatically discounting her and sinks on to the bed, her mouth open, her hands stretched out, her body pulsing forward, ga-ga-ga-ga, my dearest love.
“You don’t need to worry!” cries the Girl, “He’s come through! They never saw such a spike in the graph!”
And the Son gives the Mother a quick lift of the eyebrow and an embarrassed smile. He raises his hand but it is encumbered with tubes and with the Girl’s hand. He is about to drop out of college and marry the Girl; he is going to live on an organic farm with a group of medical emergency survivors called The Saved; he is going to give up meat, alcohol, and irony and assume white robes and quasi-Zen belief; he is going to surrender to the leadership of a tall, wintery, ex-kidney-patient named Attila; he will tell his Mother that he is dedicated to the celebration of the moment and meditation and macrobiotics and this is why she cannot visit him or speak on the phone; he will explain that all this is done with his free will and is legal and not a cult and that Attila has plenty of experience with private detectives; the resulting period of constant acute tension and mourning will last more than three years; and though his gesture may start as an embrace, it ends as a flat-handed, popish, stop-sign.
SAVED
A third hospital. This ward is Acute Assessment. Here is the Mother who has just sat down, and here is the Wife on the opposite chair. The Son is propped up on pillows with his eyes shut. His hair has come out in tufts, now, and his skin is yellow-green and mottled like slipware. Now he is thin as a November guy.
The Son opens his eyes. Something has happened to them: they have curdled or solidified, gone from beer, full of yellow lights, to toffee. It must be the Wife’s fault. The Son doesn’t greet the Mother. He says to her:
“It’s the baby. I can’t stand the baby.”
“What baby?” says the Mother.
“His baby,” says the Wife, pointing to a toddler playing in a shaft of sunlight on the other side of the ward. The light catches the filaments of his hair. A path of trembling air opens up between the Grandmother and that little dandelion head.
“He wants juice,” says the Son, “Then he wants milk. Then he spills it on the floor. Then he howls. I mean, is that reasonable? Does it strike you as reasonable behaviour?”
“When did you have the Baby?” says the Mother/Grandmother.
“Don’t you mean why?” says the Son.
“He’s fourteen months,” says the Wife, “He was born at the Farm. A water birth.” She makes a calm blank face and looks straight at the Mother, as a cat turns towards its enemy the blind spot between its eyes.
“I’m taking Jaybird back to the Farm now. OK?” she says. But the Son has his eyes shut. Too late, the Mother runs after the Wife, and at the ward door she puts her hand briefly on the Baby’s head and tries to smile but it comes out as a moan.
The Son opens his eyes for his mother. “They think I have a brain tumour,” he says. “They’re really pretty sure. Maybe even more than one brain tumour, they’re going to do a scan. Then they might want to do chemo but I can’t be bothered, I mean what’s the point, do you think?”
“Is that why you’re angry with the Baby?” said the Mother. She knows this doesn’t come first, but the heat of the Baby’s head is still burning in her palm. The trout, love, is thrashing in her chest.
“How should I know?” said the Son. “How can anyone know that, Mum?” And then he vomits on the floor, and fits, and his Mother, still squeamish after all these years, doesn’t know where to touch him and presses the alarm above the bed and the doctors come, dozens of them, more than even she has ever seen.
In Oncology, the Mother is shown images of the tumours. There are three: bore holes or storm systems or black beetles in the bright contour maps of her Son’s brain, and the consultant wants to operate or at the very least shrink them with chemo or radio. The Son is refusing all treatment, but, as the consultant says, he is not himself and should perhaps be sectioned.
“No,” says the Son, to the consultant, “This is really me. This is actually how angry I am. I am actually this angry with hospitals. I really do hate you. You are not doing anyone any good and I do not give you permission to put your fingers in my brain.”
But it is true he is also angry with everyone else. He can’t remember why he asked his Mother to come, and keeps shouting for her to be taken away. When Attila arrives, in his clean white nightie, carrying Tupperware boxes, the Son refuses to let him lay on hands, and calls the proffered macrobiotic curry a “cow-pat.” The Mother, watching from the next bay, smirks, and in a whirl of white, Attila catches her arm in his hairy hand.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he says, as the Mother blinks into his large-boned, plain face, “About laughing. My roshi had a tumour in his arm. He watched it grow, and he said to it ‘tumour, you will be the death of me.’ And then he laughed at the tumour. At first, we could not understand, but then we laughed with him, and after some days of laughing the tumour shrank and disappeared. I saw this with my own eyes. Now, laughing woman, will you laugh with me?” The Mother is shaking her head but Attila opens his big bearded mouth and laughs, mirthlessly and loudly, showing his teeth, big as a donkey’s.
“Holy moly” says the Son, and pulls his blanket over his head.
This, to the Mother, demonstrates that the Son is sane. But next, in comes the Wife, with the Baby (the Baby has a chemical effect on the Mothers’ vision whereby he is illuminated and everything else turns greeny-orange, like an old TV screen) and the Son turns his back on them and buries himself in his pillow. When the Baby tries to tug it off with his little plump hands, calling “funny dada,” the Mother witnesses the Son knock the Baby over on the lino, and in the stramash that follows, the screaming, fits and forcible injections, she coldly thinks that perhaps the Son should be sectioned, after all.
Now the Mother sits by the Son’s bed while he sleeps. When he wakes, his eyes are clear.
“You were right,” said the Son, “We shouldn’t have had him.”
“I didn’t say that,” she replies, “How could I? I wasn’t there.”
“You didn’t need to be,” he says, “I internalised your response.”
It is indecent, how much this pleases her.
“But you love him,” she says, hopefully, “The baby?”
“I expect so,” says the Son, “but I’m letting him down. You see?”
“Yes,” says the Mother, “It’s a terrible feeling.” But the Mother is smiling, because she is still looking into her boy’s eyes. Over the years, she has lived with many imaginary versions of the Son—a spry, unmarried one, most recently—but also a heavy-limbed footballing boy, also a big lad who picks up her bags at the station, easily, as if they were empty, also a grown man who lifts her off her feet, tight to his cashmere chest, and all of them have had these eyes, eyes with gold lights, with pinpoints of the true dear dark.
“Because this time,” says the Son, “I am going to die. And you have to let me. You really do.”
In the hospice, the tumours eat the Son’s brain rapidly, like chalk cliffs eroding in a storm. Things fall off: houses, people. So, when the Wife comes in, the Son turns to her and smiles, and her face opens in joy.
“Hello,” says the Son, “Have you come to visit me?”
“I brought Jaybird,” she says, indicating the child.
“Is he yours?” he says.
The Wife leaves the hospital at once, the Baby like luggage on her shoulder, and gets in a taxi, the Mother at her side all the way, pleading. “It isn’t you he’s forgotten,” says the Wife, and the Mother feels a goldfish flick of pleasure.
The tumours eat words, but for a long time they are unable to devour music. So, round the Son, everyone sings: “Food Glorious Food” and “Dance for Your Daddy.” For, in a single night, the tumours have swallowed 15 years of bad feeling against the Father. The Mother has called him, and he has come, salt-and-pepper haired, now, prosperous and contented and wearing sports shirts the Mother would never, not in a million years, have allowed him. In he strode and picked up his Son in his arms and the Son, barely audibly, started to hum “my bonny laddie…” Everyone, even the case-hardened hospice workers, wept.
The tumours cannot eat chess, and for as long as the Son can lift the pieces, the Mother plays with him. It induces healthy synaptic activity, say the doctors, and she should keep it up. The doctors do not think the same of White Fang, but the Mother reads it aloud anyway. There are pathways in the brain, she thinks, for her sledge and its dog. Deep down in the brain stem is a pebble which is the Mother and the Son, and this is where they are headed. The pebble is ivory and has an embryo etched on it, curled. “Speed Bonny Boat,” sings the mother to that embryo, “You Are My Sunshine.” All those sad songs.
One tumour is an electric storm: it shakes the Son’s body like a tree. Another tumour picks him up like a pillow and doubles him over and squeezes vomit from him. The third tumour sends his eyes back into his skull looking for something. Together, the tumours take him by the throat and he can’t swallow.
The Wife returns, with the indefatigable Attila. Attila says they have come to let the truth of the Son’s death colour their lives, and the Wife says nothing. No, they won’t bring the Baby. This is a decision the Farm has collectively made. The Son’s face is frozen now, anyway, so who knows who he knows? The Wife wipes it, and sits by him. All her hairstyles connote innocence, or Princess—Rapunzel, Hebe, coronet—and she has grown out of them, all at once, and not noticed.
More and more of The Saved gather and chant in the day room. The hospice complains, so Attila negotiates duties for them: vase-filling, visiting the unvisited. The Father sits among them, incongruous in his golfing jumper, helping with vases, holding his daughter-in-law’s hands, conversing with Attila. He is exactly Attila’s height and build, the Mother notes, their heads bend together above all the other heads, the tallest trees. The Father’s eyes are constantly wet, he is tireless, the anger, as Attila points out, is all on the Mother’s side.
If the Mother were more open to The Saved, and to spiritual meaning in general, she would not be so isolated. It is the Mother’s choice to walk this narrow path of unbelief, and to sit alone with the Son in the depths of the night. She knows it, and when, long after language started to leave him, she hears the Son say, “What people forget when they are afraid of dying is that when you die, you are ill. So you don’t mind really. Being ill is shit,” she tells no one. After all, maybe he didn’t really say that. Maybe she has just internalised his response.
The Saved and the Father agree on a plan. The Wife brings the Baby to the hospice garden. The Saved lift the Son out of bed and carry him, stiff and light as a charred log, outside. They hold him under the cherry tree and chant their mantras, the Father loudest of all on the Oms, while the Wife, a garland on her lovely head, helps the Baby stroke his cheeks with a bunch of blossom. The Mother watches all this from the hospice window, longing for the Baby, weeping, thinking she should have been asked.
But, when he does die, it is the Mother beside him. What happens is: he stops breathing and the Mother isn’t frightened, after all. One eye is open, and one shut, and she reaches across and closes the open one. There, now, Jonathon. The eyelid is warm and soft as a silk scarf left in the sun, but there is nothing living now in the hard round of the eyeball, not the least tick or twitch of life.
Then she stands up. Her name is Julia. It is nearly dawn. She goes out to the day room where her ex-husband and Attila and The Saved are sleeping, in their white robes, like so many discarded petals. She was going to tell them something, the thing she has learned, but already it is draining from her, disappearing like water poured over sand, and she lets them sleep on and just sits down.

The Future of European Democracy

By Thomas Darnstädt
Card-carrying Europeans reacted in dismay to a recent far-reaching ruling on the EU's Lisbon Treaty by Germany's Constitutional Court. But the judges have in fact done Europeans a huge service by tackling the issue of how democracy can work in the era of supranational institutions.
( Read more... )

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video

The police story changed as the evidence against them mounted.  The occasions where protesters smashed windows appear contrived too, with banks of press photographers ready and waiting, and police video cameramen inside the bank poised to capture the breaking of a window at the Royal Bank of Scotland, by hooded "protesters" who, I suspect, will never be apprehended.

There appears to be no regard for civil liberties - particularly the right to conduct a peaceful protest - under New Labour.  The Labour Party, in opposition, were appalled and vociferous in their condemnation of police brutality during the Miners Strike of the early 1980's, which they directly attributed to the orders Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.  Now, the agents of the state are at it again, presumably so nothing will spoil PM Gordon Brown's Obamic Moment? 

It doesn't really add up.  There are those in the Metropolitan Police who know they can get away with murder, because they pulled it off with no apology in the case of Jean Charles Menezes. That set a frightening precedent.
 
Ironic that the police were grassed by a banker, whose interests they were supposedly there to protect. 

Weekend Edition
January 9-11, 2009

Why Hamas is Not the Issue
Gaza: History Matters
By ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN

Mohammed, age six, marched with determination to his bedroom, put on a record of the Fatah marching song, picked up a wooden toy rifle and marched out to the balcony. He pointed the rifle to the sky where minutes ago, Israeli planes flew over dropping bombs on Palestinian refugee sites. Mohammed told me he wanted to be a pilot so he could fight Israeli warplanes. “But Mohammed, the Palestinians do not have planes.” “I don’t care, I will fight them whatever way I can.” Was a resistance fighter born this minute or was he a “future terrorist”? (Beirut 1973)

How does one explain the horrific fate that has befallen caged Gaza – a land saturated with rubble and body parts – carpet-bombed by air, invaded by ground, attacked by sea? Put to the test of history, Israeli “explanations” fail the credibility test.

History matters. Israel conquered and occupied Gaza (along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem) in 1967. Hamas was an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers. In Gaza, it provided a network of social welfare institutions supporting the poor. During the first Palestinian Intifada (literally “shaking off” the occupation), a Hamas resistance military wing was formed. Israel and the US favored and met with Islamic Hamas leadership as a counterforce to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Fatah faction then dominant in the Intifada. As Hamas later strengthened, Israel reversed the process.

History matters. Palestinians have consistently resisted Israeli dominance over their lives. Gazan resistance has been especially problematic for Israel. In the 1970s, before Hamas, Ariel Sharon was charged with “pacifying” Gaza. Sharon imposed a brutal policy of repression, blowing up houses, bulldozing large tracts of refugee camps, imposing severe collective punishment and imprisoning hundreds of young Palestinians.

Domination and colonialism are contrary to the United Nations Charter. The legitimacy of struggle for self-determination by peoples under colonial and foreign domination was reaffirmed in U.N. General Assembly resolution 2787 (December 6, 1971). As others before them, Palestinians have and do exercise the legal and moral right to resist.

History matters. In 2005, Israel withdrew its illegal colonial settlers from Gaza. Israeli scholars Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron noted in a Counterpunch article at the time that the primary motive of the evacuation of the settlers was to remove them from harm’s way in anticipation of an intensified future mass attack on Gaza.

History matters. After Hamas won elections in 2006, its leadership accepted a two-state solution based on the pre-war June 4, 1967 borders, but this was unacceptable to Israel. Earlier, Israel destroyed secular Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Arafat for failing at Camp David in July 2000 to comply with its demands to accept permanent Israeli control over Palestinian life and land confined in enclaves. Hamas became the new challenge to Israel’s vision.

The facts of history affirm that Israel will not accept a sovereign Palestinian state on any part of historic Palestine. Hamas is not the issue. All Palestinian leaders sooner or later, secular or Islamic, are declared unacceptable partners for peace no matter how much they concede to Israel. That Israel hides behind the “Hamas Islamic threat” today to destroy it as a potential partner is becoming transparent.

Today, Palestinian Authority President Abbas’s Fatah “security force” is used against Hamas supporters on the pretense that Abbas could be accepted by Israel as a satisfactory “partner” but for Hamas. Both before and after Hamas won the 2006 elections, Abbas fared no better than Arafat though he conceded more. In fact Jonathan Cook’s new book, Disappearing Palestine,” describes the persistent Israeli strategy to achieve the diminution of Palestine. Nonetheless Abbas continues to comply with Israeli/US demands, faulted by his people and humiliated by his keepers.

The picture changes when history matters. Treating Israeli war crimes as historically detached events, unrelated to its Zionist ideology and militaristic strategy to control all of Palestine, becomes more transparent each day.

Israel has a choice: by accepting Palestinian rights under international law now and jettisoning its exclusivist ideology and militarism, Israel secures the future of its people in a shared Israel/Palestine; or by continuing its present policy of ruthless repression of indigenous Palestinians and denying them self determination, it cultivates an intensified and unyielding native resistance. Israel has always chosen the latter. Will President-Elect Obama have the courage to help Israel embrace the first?

Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston

Posted Jul 22, 2006, this documentary provides a useful point of comparison with today's coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza, which has been widely blamed on the Palestinians in the mainstream media:

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=50287

Strange happenings in Baghdad, as the outgoing Dubya suffers “the worst insult in the Arab world”—assault by footwear. The foot being the lowest part of the body, this is as bad as it gets, apparently; it takes me back to a cheerful montage of images from Iraq in 2003, when Iraqis seemed to be queuing up to rub the soles of their shoes against portraits of the vanquished Saddam. Now every journalist and blogger can polish up their pearl of wisdom one more time and explain, pace Wikipedia, just how profound the contempt this gesture indicates is.

I’m interested, though, in a rather more pragmatic question: just how effective is it to insult someone in an alien cultural idiom? Bush, naturally enough, looked bewildered, but he ducked speedily and seemed none the worse for wear afterwards. Gordon Brown, I suspect, would have stolidly absorbed the blows; Obama would probably have caught one shoe in each hand before throwing them across the room for three points into a waiting waste-paper basket. But none of them, surely, would actually have been offended. The message would have come across much more clearly if the journalist had done something more traditionally American, like casting aspersions on the president’s parentage, motor vehicle, football team, taste in music, or pretzel-consuming ability; while simultaneously performing a thoroughly international gesture for emphasis.

After all, it’s common courtesy to research the ways of foreign visitors so that one doesn’t accidentally offend them. By the same logic, it’s surely common sense to research the ways in which one can cause maximum offense to foreign visitors. In America and Britain, footwear-lobbing (not to mention wellie wanging) is a jolly, even a folksy, kind of sport, like Morris dancing or buffalo chip throwing: more likely to raise a smile than hackles, with the possible exception of a well-aimed high heel. Then again, were George Bush to invite his critic to join him in lobbing a few Texan buffalo chips, I imagine the Iraqi would soon be begging for shoes…

Next Saturday world leaders meet in Washington to discuss new rules for the global financial system (though little will be achieved with President-elect Obama absent). So far, thinking about this matter has scarcely got beyond calls for better banking regulation: a microeconomic issue that is doubtless important but misses the main economic plot. The Bretton Woods system of 1944 was set up to "promote a stable system of exchange rates". This system has gone. But any new agreement, will need to be equally ambitious in addressing the problem of exchange rates, because the prevailing "non-system" has played a major role in the wild credit boom that has led to the financial crisis.

The old system broke down because creditor countries such as Germany and France found it more convenient to accumulate dollar reserves than revalue their currencies. This enabled the US to run balance of payments deficits financed by printing treasury bills. But since these were ultimately exchangeable for gold, the system was unstable and came crashing down in 1971, leaving a world of floating exchange rates.

It is now east Asian countries, especially China, that have accumulated US treasury bills, paid out to finance current account deficits - recently running at $700bn a year. Asia's savings glut has its counterpart in the consumption glut of western states such as the US and UK.

This destructive conjunction can be traced to two interrelated projects of Asian governments. One was to accumulate US dollar reserves to insure against a repeat of the capital flight of 1997/8 and to avoid the humiliating conditions that the IMF imposed for rescue packages. The second was to keep exports growing rapidly to boost employment and growth. Exchange rate undervaluation, prohibited in 1944, was the policy weapon used. Asian governments intervened massively to buy dollars and resist market pressure for currency appreciation. Moreover, they "sterilised" their dollar purchases, preventing domestic price increases that would have eroded their export competitiveness. So balance of payments adjustment was blocked.

The excess Asian savings have been shovelled into housing bubbles in both the US and Britain - not directly, but by enabling our governments to pursue expansionary monetary and fiscal policies that stoked up credit expansions. In this way the global imbalances have contributed directly to the meltdown. For the past 10 years the US has, in effect, had no budget constraint. And what was true of the country as a whole was true of all those companies and individuals who piled up debt on the back of inflating asset prices. The IMF was marginalised because its central purpose, which was to prevent these huge imbalances from occurring, had been negated.

Two lessons follow from this story. First, a way must be found of meeting countries' reserve needs for crisis insurance, while avoiding the use of national currencies as international reserves. The simplest way would be to activate and build upon the IMF's ability to create special drawing rights as an international reserve asset. The IMF might also become an international asset manager, pooling countries' reserves and making them available to deficit countries.

Second, the global exchange rate system must help rather than hinder the correction of excessive imbalances. Ever since the IMF articles were amended in 1978, each country has been allowed unilaterally to choose any exchange rate regime that suits its goals and circumstances. We have ended up with a free-for-all that is radically flawed from a systemic viewpoint. The US and Europe are floating but the Japanese and Chinese currencies, as well as those of a number of other Asian countries, are undervalued, but closely tied to the US dollar.

Undervaluation may make sense for a small nation but it is dangerous collective nonsense if practised by a key country or by several significant countries. In the next quarter-century, as emerging countries catch up with the west, large exchange rate changes will be in response to fast productivity growth. Smooth realignments are unlikely if the free-for-all continues. It is crucially important, therefore, that the major countries agree on a common exchange rate system that promotes balance of payments adjustment. (Small countries tend to follow one or other major country.) A fixed rate between major currencies is one possibility, provided sterilisation is disallowed. But it would involve a loss of monetary independence - probably politically unacceptable as well as economically painful and inefficient. So the major currencies - the dollar, the yen, the euro, the yuan - will have to float. But unmanaged floating can lead to prolonged and manifestly insane exchange rate movements (for example the US dollar bubble in 1984/85) that can themselves cause macroeconomic instability.

That leaves only two realistic options. Exchange rates between major currencies could float in unmanaged fashion most of the time, but with occasional policy cooperation and coordinated intervention to prevent gross misalignments. Or more ambitiously, the major countries could decide to practise managed floating of a structured kind. They could periodically agree on exchange rates that are appropriate for global adjustment, intervention being permitted only to influence market exchange rates in the direction of the agreed rates. It is no good relying on the IMF. The organisation has to be led by a group of key economies that have significant weight in the world economy (currently the US, Europe, Japan and China).

The most we can expect of Saturday's conference will be an agreement to increase the liquid resources at the disposal of the IMF. Exchange rate reform will have to wait on the end of the crisis. But it is important to start thinking about it now.

Archeologists from the British Museum visited the historic site of Ur, Iraq, this weekend; the visit was part of an assessment of various archeological sites for damage and looting.

When Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon in 539BC he must have been quite taken by the Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel and the palaces of cedar, decorated in gold and bronze.

Contrary to the standard operating procedure for invaders of his day and age, instead of laying waste to the place Cyrus set an example for the future by allowing his new possession to prosper, respecting its religion and cultural heritage.

Instead of shock, awe.

More than 2,500 years later, some of the surviving glories of what is considered to be the capital of the ancient world are to go on show at the British Museum, London, in an exhibition which opens on Nov 13. Visitors to “Babylon, Myth and Reality”, will see 100 objects, predominantly from the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar (605 – 562BC), including glazed panels from the Ishtar Gate, one of the entries to the fabled city, and enamelled lions from the walls of the Processional Way.

These remains are almost mythical, but what might make an even more profound impression on visitors will be the section of the exhibition devoted to the reality of the five years since the Second Gulf War.

What it highlights is the “carelessness” of the troops who set up camp on the site of the ancient city in May 2003 and proceeded to cause incalculable damage to the ruins and the relics that lay beneath.

The exhibition has already been shown in Berlin and Paris but, surprisingly, neither capital made anything of this cultural tragedy. The British Museum, however, pursuing its now familiar, eye-catching policy of relating the past to the present, as it did with Persia in 2005 and the Emperor Hadrian earlier this year, is not afraid to mix politics with pottery.

John Curtis, the keeper of the department of the Middle East at the British Museum, visited Babylon before the invasion and several times since, in a flurry of dramatic helicopter rides and a border dash, complete with highway robbers demanding antiques at gunpoint.

“It’s the same as the other shows in that we look at Babylon and what it means to European thought and tradition,” he says. “What makes ours different is that there is much more focus on Babylon today.”

Mr Curtis was one of the first to ring the alarm bells about the post-invasion vandalism. Not a man prone to exaggeration, as long ago as Dec 2004 he nevertheless filed a report saying: “It is regrettable that a military camp of this size should have been established on one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain.”

He listed the damage, including the digging of trenches, the building of a landing zone for helicopters that flattened the ground, deep ruts from vehicles and fuel leakage. Pieces of pottery and cuneiform inscriptions were found in banks of spoil and in the soil used to fill sandbags.

Nothing has happened since to change his sense of outrage.

“There is no excuse for what happened,” he says. “It was totally unnecessary. I have asked for a full-scale international investigation into the damage done to the site during its occupation by coalition forces.”

He has no time for the suggestion that this type of institutional vandalism is an inevitable consequence of war.

“The fact is that when Babylon was made into a military camp the war had already been won,” he says. “I don’t think it was necessary to establish a camp there at all. Maybe they did it because it has the same strategic advantages that made Babylon a capital city in the first place – on the banks of the river, on an intersection of routes and on slightly rising ground – and it was in an area which lies 90km south of Baghdad which had already been fenced to protect the site, so it was very convenient.

“But there is obviously no special advantage in making a camp there, because when the coalition closed the base down at the end of 2004, after all the controversy about the damage, they were quite happy to do so, even though it was at the height of the insurgency.”

It was not “political or deliberate”, he believes. “I’m a great believer in conspiracy theories but in this case it was just incompetence.”

The problem, he says, was that the coalition forces did not have archaeologists or other experts embedded who knew about Iraqi history or culture.

“That’s a retrograde step from even World War Two, when the troops in Italy and North Africa did have experts who were put to good use. It compares poorly with World War One, too, when there was much less destruction even though there were vast numbers of troops.”

More than 30,000 British troops – mainly Indians – died during the Mesopotamian campaign in the First World War, fought against Ottoman forces led by German commanders and waged chiefly to protect British interests in one of the world’s first oil refineries, at Abadan.

Donny George, an Iraqi archaeologist who was director of antiquities in Baghdad before leaving the country in Aug 2006, after receiving death threats against him and his family, insists: “The invasion troops knew that this was the city of Babylon. I believe that the original decision to have an army there was to protect it but then they thought it was a wonderful place for a camp and, little by little, it was developed into a very big base.”

He says that in April 2003, before the invasion, “American archaeologists gave the military the co-ordinates for thousands of archaeological sites. So they knew where they were, they had the names of the sites, everything. The damage could have been avoided.”

For Mr George, the exhibition has an important message to convey: “It is very important to explain that whatever the aims of the military were, they have done this damage to the country. Not only to Babylon but to the history of mankind.”

In addition to the destruction caused by the occupying forces, as many as 16,000 objects were looted from the Museum of Iraq in Baghdad alone, although about half have since been returned. Many were hidden away by Mr George in reinforced storerooms.

“I think the looting was organised,” says Mr Curtis, “but I don’t think it was organised by western criminal gangs or the Mafia, as some have suggested, but by local sheikhs and their tribes.

“It’s a huge problem trying to track the artefacts down. We don’t have much information about how much was dug up, who was doing the selling, how things were transmitted abroad and which market things ended up in.”

Since Dec 2004 the site has been protected by elements of the Iraqi paramilitary Facilities Protection Service but, says Mr Curtis, “The damage has been done. It has taken until now for a proper assessment to be agreed on and we are waiting for Unesco to draw up a management plan so that things can be put right.”

The US Senate has allocated some money and there is a proposal that the World Monuments Fund and the Getty Foundation should become involved. Nevertheless, “it will all take a long, long, time”, says Mr Curtis.

The Babylon exhibition itself is, of course, steeped in irony; that it is possible at all is thanks only to what amounts to European looting from another age. There are some valuable finds still in Baghdad, such as glazed brick panels, tablets, terracottas and jewellery, but they are, inevitably, trapped in Iraq and cannot form part of any exhibition staged abroad. Consequently, everything in the show will have come from the collections of the Louvre in Paris, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and the British Museum.

In May 2002, the Iraqi archaeological department demanded that artefacts removed by German archaeologists at the beginning of the last century should be returned. Mohammed Aziz Selman al Ibrahim, an official of the ministry of culture, said at the time: “I have anger, but what can we do? I appeal to the German government to give back our antiquities to Iraq.” Nothing was forthcoming.

Much of the Ishtar Gate, excavated between 1899 and 1914, was lifted and taken to Berlin, where it was reconstructed in 1930 and where it stands today. The Germans took many other treasures, including all but two of the 120 golden lions on the friezes which lined the Procession Way. Both the French and British also removed the spoils of their excavations.

Having created Iraq, which became a state in Nov 1920, the British imposed a monarchy on the new country but retained control until the Thirties. Under the country’s first Antiquities Law of 1922, it was decreed that foreign archaeologists should split their finds 50-50 with Iraq. Nevertheless, the proceeds of excavations by the colonial powers were often removed in bulk – such as the two shiploads said by some to have been removed by Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist and political officer, and which allegedly ended up in Britain.

Bell was a vivid character who worked with TE Lawrence and the British government’s Arab Bureau to create Iraq out of the post-First World War carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. In a letter home, written as she worked on creating the new borders imposed on the region by the victorious western allies, she wrote: “I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week. He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.”

The consequences of her “creation”, of course, reverberate today.

Nevertheless, Bell had a genuine love for the region and its history, and founded The National Museum of Iraq, an act that helped to make her an object of veneration to some when she died in Baghdad in 1927.

In her life she had encouraged the youthful nation to exploit the glories of Babylon as part of a British-orchestrated exercise in nation building.

Saddam Hussein also understood Babylon’s symbolic value and in 1985 started rebuilding the city on top of the ruins. To the dismay of archaeologists, he inscribed his name on many of the bricks in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar, and in glorification of himself. The inscriptions proclaimed: “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq”.

“My complaint about Gertrude Bell,” says Mr Curtis, “is that she is one of the great imperialists and the notion of drawing lines through the map to create new countries irrespective of tribal allegiances or history has led to a lot of the problems we have today.”

Nonetheless, despite the mistakes of empires – past and present – he is cautiously optimistic that, like him, visitors will come away from the exhibition with the feeling that things will improve for Iraq.

Mr George, speaking from his exile as visiting professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, says: “I believe that this kind of exhibition and the material that is being shown will help to show people that Iraq is not a desert, not a place where people live in tents and have camels, but a great civilisation.”

Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called "Literary Censorship in England" which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm, except that it never appeared, in which he points out "look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free, democratic England, it’s not all that different", and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force, and then he gives a two sentence response which is not very profound, but captures it: He says, two reasons - first, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear but second, the whole educational system from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don’t say.  

( censorship and shifting democratic ideas... )