Saddam Hussein was executed today.

More importantly, Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog has a fancy new website.

Fairytale of New York

The aftermath of last week's storm

A wind warning was in effect for the Greater Vancouver region last week. I was sitting at the computer during it and just past midnight I heard a tree crack and fall over. It was loud and so I looked out the front window and while all the trees along the street were blowing around, they were still all there. I eventually went to bed and didn't think much of the matter.

The following morning, as my mom was heading to work, she was chatting with the neighbor and he mentioned the tree in our backyard. My mom thought he was joking, but he insisted that he was serious. My mom looked in the backyard and, sure enough, a tree had fallen into it.

I went out back with my dad and took pictures of it today. Here they are. Apologies for their poor quality.

The tree actually did very little damage. You can see here that it only managed to knock out a single panel of fencing. It fell about twenty feet short of the house.



This is a view looking down the trunk to the root ball.



Here I am standing next to the root ball to give a sense of scale.



Standing against the rear of the root ball. You can get an idea of the size of it. The roots only seemed to descend about a foot or a foot and a half deep.




We were lucky. We didn't lose power and the damage was minimal. Elsewhere in the province was much worse.

I'm especially saddened by the damage done to Stanley Park. The CBC website has some pictures of the damage here. The images on the news last night were shocking--the park now looks like a logging camp. Because I imagine that most readers of this blog won't be familiar with the park, I'll explain. What makes Stanley Park special--and probably unique as an urban park--is that a large part of the park is dense forest. When I was younger, my parents would take my brother, my sister, and myself for walks around the Seawall, and even as I entered my teenaged years and was so embarrassed about being in public with my parents that I either walked well ahead of them or well behind them, the park itself always filled me with a sense of wonder. I think it's difficult to look upon massive trees that are sometimes hundreds of years old and not feel that. It's the same sort of primeval feeling of awe that I get when looking at a dark night sky: this feeling of insignificance, of realising that there are things far larger and far greater than individual lives.

Plans are already in place to replant, and one day Stanley Park will again be densely forested. It just likely won't be in my lifetime.

The anti-imperialism of fools

Shiraz Dossa, the Canadian professor who presented a paper at the Tehran Holocaust denial conference, is getting a serious and much-deserved pasting in the Canadian media.

In a letter to the Globe and Mail, Raymond Lahey, the chancellor of St Francis Xavier University--where Dossa is a professor of political science--writes that he is "certain that the Xavierian community is shocked that a faculty member should have taken part in this conference in any capacity." Sean Riley, the president of the university, has likewise condemned the conference on the university's website. In an editorial, also in the Globe and Mail (note: this link requires a subscription, but it is available for free on Norman Finkelstein's site), John Ibbitson says that Dossa is either lying or is an idiot if he didn't realise that the conference was a magnet for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. He also strongly suggests that Dossa be sacked.

Dossa, who "describes himself as an anti-imperialist and an admirer of left-wing U.S. scholar Noam Chomsky," said that "he was surprised that Canadians were alarmed by his presence at the conference." This summer he wrote a letter to his local paper about how the Canadian government shouldn't consider Hezbullah to be a terrorist organisation.

He also claims that he was "shocked" by the types of people who presented at the conference and calls them "hacks and lunatics".

Funny, because his course outlines suggest that he too is a hack and a lunatic who prefers ill-formed polemic to rational and critical academic inquiry. His attending this conference merely confirms that.

Dossa is entirely predictable. It's the same old boring anti-imperialist rubbish that the fools have been trotting out for ages. This is basic enemy of my enemy is my friend stuff. An article in the Socialist Worker makes the bankruptcy of this trope explicit:

For example, anti-imperialist movements in the Middle East today are led most prominently by organizations of political Islam. Hezbollah, an Islamist movement based in Lebanon, is widely regarded as the only viable force willing and capable of standing up to Zionism in the Middle East--some 80 percent of Lebanese support its right of armed resistance. In Palestine, the Islamist organization Hamas was elected to power precisely because it promised not to collaborate with Israel and its U.S. backers.

Socialists have to root for the defeat of U.S. imperialism, irrespective of the politics of forces leading the wars against it. If U.S. imperialism is the main oppressing force in a region, than the precondition for genuine liberation in the area is kicking out the imperialists.

Never mind that these movements beat women who don't cover their heads, execute gays, and crack down on trade unionists, it is always the Americans and the Israelis who are the "main oppressing force". Perhaps Dossa didn't realise that "kicking out the imperialists" put him firmly in league with theocrats, neo-Nazis, and other assorted fascists, but that's because he's ignorant, irresponsible, and is quite possibly soon to be unemployed.

I went away to see an old friend of mine

Here's something odd from Metafilter:

Young@Heart, who were recently the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, covering "Schizophrenia" by Sonic Youth.



Here's a video of the SY version, live in London in 87:

Missing Women in Ipswich and Vancouver

The BBC is now reporting that a fifth prostitute has been reported missing near Ipswich. Maggie O'Kane has an excellent piece over at Comment Is Free on the subject. She concludes that "[prostitutes] get murdered because their lives are held cheap and they are easy to kill. Usually, no one takes much notice. Only when there's talk of a serial killer do people get excited."

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, a jury is being selected for the trial of Robert Pickton, a pig farmer accused of twenty-six counts of first-degree murder. The victims were women--largely prostitutes--from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. I remember seeing stories on the television news at the time about the missing women. The women's friends and families pleaded for information about them and Downtown Eastside advocacy groups urged action, but it didn't seem like the police did anything. Perhaps they did conduct investigations, but there were no public reassurances that they were looking into the disappearances.

The police gave the overwhelming impression that the lives of prostitutes and drug addicts are worth less than those of other people. According to the CBC, a woman first went missing from the Downtown Eastside in 1983. Charges were laid against Pickton in 2002, but in the meantime, an additional 60 women had gone missing.

Sadly, this wasn't an anomaly. A report published by the Vancouver Downtown Eastside based Prostitution Alternatives Counselling and Education Society (P.A.C.E.) says that sex workers are murdered at 60 to 120 times the rate of the general female population. This report also bears out the observation that Vancouver police do treat violence against prostitutes differently than they do other women. I don't know what the statistics are like in other Canadian cities, the UK, or elsewhere, but it stands to reason that they don't depart significantly.

While it's great that Pickton is off the streets, we're fooling ourselves if we think that the streets are any safer. Violence is still endemic among sex workers. It's only when there's a gory, sensationalistic case that we notice it.

Of course the Holocaust happened, idiots.

A two-day conference debating whether or not the Holocaust happened opened in Tehran today. According to The Times, Iranian officials insist that the conference won't be a forum for anti-Semites or neo-Nazis.

The conference participants include former KKK leader David Duke.

No points awarded for figuring out what conclusion the conference is going to come to.

The Times is also reporting that Khaled Kasab Mahameed, who was due to speak at the conference, had his visa denied. Mahameed is a lawyer who runs a Holocaust museum in Nazareth. I've heard interviews with him on CBC radio over the past couple of days and one of his main points is that Arab and Muslim acknowledgement of the Holocaust is necessary for an Israeli/Palestinian peace. The sentiment is certainly worthwhile, though it seems unlikely that it would have made much of an impact.

In other news, the BBC reports that Iranian students heckled Ahmadinejad and burned his portrait when he gave a speech at a university.

UPDATE: Nasrin Alavi has a worthwhile piece about the trend towards democracy in Iran in openDemocracy.

Peter Tatchell on rape as a weapon of war

"This Sunday is Human Rights Day. To mark the occasion, there is a second Global Day for Darfur; this time focusing on sexual violence against women. In London and many other cities worldwide, people will be highlighting the mass rape of Darfuri women and the urgent need for UN peace-keepers to help halt the violence, both physical and sexual."

Read the whole article here.

There is further information on rape as a weapon in Darfur on Amnesty International's website here.

Tufeili: "Nasrallah is an asshole"

From today's Globe and Mail:

In a rare interview at his guarded compound in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Sheik Sobhi Tufeili criticized Hezbollah and the movement's current leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, for putting Iranian interests ahead of Lebanese ones in the country's flammable political standoff.

"The relationship of Hezbollah with Iran is [one of] complete, loyal submission," the bespectacled sheik said, a grey beard jutting out from his chin.

It's the thought that counts?

Anger over Dutch Srebrenica medal

'Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre have criticised the Dutch government for giving an insignia to UN peacekeepers who served in the city.

They said honouring Dutch troops who were charged with protecting the Muslim Bosnian enclave was "scandalous".

Nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Serb forces who overran Srebrenica in July 1995.

The Dutch government said the troops deserved recognition for their behaviour in difficult circumstances.

Presenting the insignia to some 800 soldiers from the Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) at a military barrack in Assen, Dutch Defence Minister Henk Kamp said they had been unjustly seen in an unfavourable light.

He said they were sent to Srebrenica on a mission impossible - without enough weaponry - and a limited mandate.

'Humiliating decision'

But survivors and relatives of the victims - who held protest rallies in The Hague, Assen and Bosnia's capital Sarajevo - condemned the move.

"This is a scandalous, shameful and humiliating decision. Victims and their families are additionally humiliated and offended," said Munira Subasic, head of the Srebrenica Women association.

"They [the Dutch peacekeepers] allowed Bosnian Serb troops to slaughter 10,000 people. Shame be on them," she said.

Srebrenica survivors are demanding an apology - and are suing the Dutch state for failing to protect them.

Many people say there still needs to be a proper political debate - over where the responsibility - really lies, the BBC's Geraldine Coughlan in The Hague says.

The government in the Netherlands resigned in 2001 after accepting partial blame for the genocide.'

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/6207254.stm



Our concept of heroism sure has changed, huh?

Why do progressive men hate women so much?

This blog is fairly young, and my contributions to it are even younger. As such, they so far seem to consist mostly of "stuff Anna thinks/rants about a lot," only now I have a forum in which to vomit them forward.

Along those lines, I was musing this morning about blog topics, and trying to understand why it is that some topics will garner 19083245 responses (see: Iraq, Israel, Iran, all those very sexy "I"s), and why some, such as this post about rape and asylum claims in the UK courtesy of the blog Pickled Politics, do not. That piece received 15 comments, which would be a deluge had it happened on this blog, but on that rather high-traffic one, was pretty modest. Of course, reading it made me feel queasy and tearful, but I didn't comment either, so I'm not going to pursue that line of inquiry much further.

I am, however, going to use it as a jumping off point to try and understand why, STILL, women's issues are not considered particularly "interesting" by many progressives. Here is my ranty list:

1. Privilege is a hard thing to give up. When you engage yourself in the struggle for ethical foreign policy, or labour rights, or whatever, you (and by "you" in this case I mean "you, often middle class male activist type") do not have to give anything up. Engage yourself in balancing the scales between men and women, and all of a sudden your side of the scale gets shaky too. Sorry, buddy. Even the most progressive of men get a little antsy once someone asks them to give up their own privilege.
   

2. Ye olde private and public sphere debate. Seriously, are we still stuck on this? Women's issues are generally too "private sphere" to be worth "serious" attention. (A sidenote to this: ever meet a progressive dude who can quote feminist theory but expects his girlfriend to clean up after him? Yeah, those damn seductive spheres again.)

3. For as long as I've been involved in feminist issues, I have been subject to the following argument: with all the horror in the world, with all the issues that desperately need our attention, isn't it a bit frivolous to take up the banner of women's rights? This makes me crazy. For one thing, perhaps it is my specially wired female brain that allows me to be concerned with many different issues at the same time--I can worry about genocide, foreign policy, labour rights, and women's rights all while baking a pie! Goodness, women are amazing. And furthermore, the idea that the issues women face: violence, rape, harassment, slavery, mutilation, gender-specific abuse in situations of war, genocide, dictatorship, reproductive rights, etc, are in any way lacking in urgency is a completely undefendable stance. We're talking about over 50% of the population facing epidemic-like amounts of physical/mental/sexual health problems. The only way I can imagine someone justifying that these issues are in any way secondary is through pure misogyny.

4. In a world where the vast majority of politicians and people of influence are still men (there's another "secondary" political issue for you!), women's issues are not at the top of anyone's agenda, and therefore not particularly sexy for activists to raise, because it's not going to get them butting heads with those bigwigs they have such hateful lust for. Read that blog piece linked above, re: rape and asylum, and you've got a two-way loser - politicians don't care about asylum seekers either, because they can't vote! Female asylum seekers? Not even on the radar. As progressive politics are so often a forum for the stroking of egos, only the issues which are high-profile enough to allow such a stroking are worth discussing.
   

I was going to wrap up this entry by reflecting on the coincidence that I've had this stuff on my mind today, which happens to be a national day of reflection on violence against women in Canada. December 6th commemorates the Polytechnique Massacre, which occured in my hometown of Montreal in 1989. On this day, a misogynist gunman entered a local polytechnic and killed 14 women for the crime of being women. This happened within my lifetime, and likely the lifetimes of anyone who reads this blog

I realised that this was no coincidence, however, because I wake up most mornings reflecting on misogyny and feminist issues. I do this because as a young woman living in England, rarely a day goes by that I am not harassed in some way (ranging from minor catcalls to more aggressive pursuit), that I do not encounter a woman who is struggling with residual issues from harassment/rape/sexual assault, that I do not feel unsafe in some way, that I do not read a news story in which I learn of the suffering of women elsewhere, and know that the only reason I am not subject to the same suffering is by virtue of the arbitrariness of where I was born. I attend a university that is notorious for letting harassment of its female students slide, that privileges male perspectives in its academic standards, that encourages an "old boys' club" environment in which dissenting with that world is seen as weakness. I don't feel that I have the luxury of finding women's issues boring.

Google "Marc Lepine" (the name of the December 6th gunman) and find the alarming number of supposed "men's rights" webpages which come to the defense of a mass murderer. One such sites (which I won't link to here as it would make me feel icky to think that this person thought that I was engaging in a debate with them), informs us that, "First, something often overlooked. Marc Lepine wasn’t trying to kill women. He was trying to kill feminists." Well, fair game, then?

Heavy metal and the avant garde (the real version)

As I mentioned on Monday, I picked up the new issue of The Wire over the weekend. Phil Freeman, in his interview with The Melvins, remarked that "Metal groups are often part of a secret avant garde, experimenting wildly to the utter indifference of everyone outside the headbanging ghetto," which has been a pretty constant theme in The Wire for the past few years, though was best articulated in Edwin Pouncey's primer on "subterranean metal" in issue 252. The crossover between heavy metal and experimental and avant garde musics is interesting to me, largely because I am a fan of both. Yet, I'm a bit hesistant to go as far as The Wire does and adopt metal bands into the avant garde.

I need to clarify some things here.

To readers not familiar with the various intricacies of heavy metal, I'm writing here nearly exclusively about death metal, black metal, doom, and grindcore. These subgenres have been picked up on because they are sonically extreme in a way that, say, Judas Priest isn't.

There is a tradition of avant garde artists incorporating metal and metal influences into their work. John Zorn's Painkiller and Naked City perhaps first brought metal into the avant garde. I can also think of the electroacoustic artist Louis Dufort's sampling of Gorguts vocalist Luc Lemay on 2000's Connexion and Francisco Lopez's treatment of death metal samples on Untitled 104. And when you delve into the "lower" depths of avant garde music, and the noise scene in particular, the impact of metal can't be underestimated. Lasse Marhaug of Jazkamer talks about getting music recommendations from Euronymous. According to Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel and Black Boned Angel:

An entire Slayer album could quite rightly be confused with a drone experience- a classic example of musical-info-overload to the point where WHAT they are playing becomes slightly irrelevant and the FEROCITY at which they play whatever they ARE playing becomes more important.

Interesting though this is, I don't want to get into this now. I'm more interested in is this notion of metal being a "secret avant garde". Granted, the distinction between metal and the avant garde isn't always clear, and there are groups such as Sunn0))) and Khanate that clearly and intentionally bridge that gap. Yet, for the most part, metal bands don't aspire to art. Sure, they may be aiming for some sort of sonic extreme in much the same way that noise artists do, but it's difficult to draw comparisons beyond that.

Let's face it: metal is dumb. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. When metal overlaps with the avant garde, this is due to naivety, not intention. If you doubt this, watch this interview with Fenriz of Darkthrone or read a metal magazine. There are a few examples of smart metal bands: Deathspell Omega is particularly intellectually robust, but this intelligence is wasted because their songs are effectively about Satan.

An obvious analogy here is with "outsider art", though this falls short. Metal (especially "extreme" metal) is well outside of the mainstream, but so is avant garde music. Moreover, there is a well-established and thriving metal subculture--you wouldn't find something similar with schizophrenic painters. But even so, it seems that the avant garde are resistant to simply accepting metal as being a dumb genre of music; they have to intellectualise it and make it fit in somehow with the free jazz ensembles, noisemakers, modern composers, and so on.

I suppose we need to ask if it's possible to have a naive avant garde. I'm not certain that this is possible, at least not in the way that "avant garde" is understood in music. I might explore this idea in a later blog.

Metal and the avant garde (the rough draft)

So I'm trying to put together a piece about heavy metal because I am a dumb hessian when it comes down to it. Well, except for the fact that I think about things too much.

So with regard to metal and the avant garde I have basically developed a scheme.

You have metal that is incorporated into the "high" avant garde, such as Louis Dufort's use of Luc Lemay (of Gorguts) in his electroacoustic works, Francisco Lopez giving the lowercase treatment to death metal samples instead of the usual environmental sounds, etc.

You have metal influences that are incorporated into the "low" avant garde, ie the noise scene. So basically Lasse Marhaug/John Hegre/Jazkamer, Kevin Drumm, Campbell Kneale and Birchville Cat Motel/Black Boned Angel, etc.

You then have metal that is easily taken up by the avant garde, but isn't intentionally so. You're basically talking your "extreme" metal here--black, death, doom, grind, and so on.

You then have your metal that is consciously arty. It crosses over with the above, but the doom of a Khanate is of a different order than the doom of a Skepticism.

I think there's a contrast between music that works with the body and music that works with the brain. The categories obviously aren't quite so distinct.

Why can't I just take bong hits and listen to Slayer like everyone else?

(an articulate version of this is to come)

Why I'm not better than you.

In his editor’s introduction to the current (September 2006) issue of The Journal of Genocide Research, Dominik Schaller hits the nail on the head in describing the way in which people react to genocide researchers. I have often jokes that I would like to make a short documentary film which would be a collage of “reaction shots” from people when I tell them I work on “memory of war in twentieth century Bosnia.” Most of the shots would look like this: the person pauses in their speech, tilts their head and opens their mouth slightly, and then utters something resembling a “whoa,” or a “huh.”

Schaller brings up the other inevitable reaction. Once the person has apparently regained their ability to speak from this Shocking! Revelation! a conversation inevitably ensues in which they eventually say something like, “Well, I am so glad that there are people like you out there doing work like this. I could never ever do it, but thank goodness there are people like you who can.” He then uses this as a platform in which to discuss the problematic relationship between genocide scholarship and activism, but that isn’t where I’m going with this.

Where I’m going is: Why not? Why am I special? Ever since my roots as an ultra-serious, anvil-esquely political, teenager, I have been obsessed with the problem of apathy. Apathy is likely actually a shitty throw-away word for what is a much more difficult issue, but let’s not talk definitions here. In many ways, this entry relates to the one I wrote about the Holocaust recently. I resent being special.

There is nothing special about people who study the worst that humanity has to offer. I promise you this. I resent the idea that these are a special class of people, and I think that this is a means of separating oneself, of distancing oneself from one’s responsibilities. Oh look, you have an excuse, you are “one of those people who can’t do that kind of work.” I have taken to replying by those statements by explaining that I am in no way “strong,” or particularly capable of staring trauma in the face. I have described fighting back tears while doing interviews, and the fact that several years into this kind of research, I am not yet even close to desensitized (again, as evidenced by the Holocaust entry.) I have no special skills, or talents, or psychological make-up that makes me more able to do this kind of work. All I have, apparently, is the mindset that I have no excuse not to.

Instead of rambling on about this in my usual “thinking out loud” sort of manner, I would like to direct everyone to the far more coherent Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence by Peter Unger. I haven’t read this work in a few years but I am reminded of it when I start meandering down this road. Unger looks at why we don’t participate more in trying to improve the world—he says that we tend to confuse our intuition with actual defendable morality. The idea that, “that would be too much for me” is suddenly a moral claim, enough to exempt us. The book is quite powerful in that it basically calls all of us out for hiding behind various platitudes and pretending they have any moral standing, and are not merely excuses with which we, well, excuse ourselves from our responsibilities as human beings.

Unger’s book was life-changing in the least trite sense of the word. It was so not because it made me cry or was just so beautiful, but rather because he made me much more critical about my reasons for participating and not participating. I am not as comfortable in my complacency anymore. I like it that way.

So to sum up:

Those of us who engage in particularly difficult topics do not possess any particularly distinctive skills, and to imply so is both frustrating, and;

A means of absolving oneself from one’s own responsibility, which, as some lovely philosophers very cogently argue, is one of the greatest setbacks in making people face up to their responsibilities to humanity.

I have had trouble writing this entry because I have no idea how to discuss this without sounding patronizing or preachy, but that’s my point: there’s no reason why I should be. And I hope I haven’t been.

A "liberal ideology of torture"

I had a couple of ideas for blog pieces today.

On Friday night I ran across a Loose Change quoting 9/11 conspiracy theorist at a party (I thought that people like this only existed on the internet, go figure) and was going to write about how 9/11 conspiracies are stupid.

After picking up the new issue of The Wire this weekend, I thought about writing something about the intellectualisation of heavy metal. The first paragraph of The Melvins interview in the issue says that "Metal groups are often part of a secret avant garde, experimenting wildly to the utter indifference of everyone outside the headbanging ghetto". It's an interesting thought, and one to which I'll surely return.

In any case, I was contemplating these two topics when I saw (via Harry's Place) that a new issue of Democratiya is online. I looked at it. Steven de Wijze reviews a book called The Torture Debate in America and seriously discusses "liberal torture". Holy fuck.

I didn't know that it was possible to put those two words together. It shouldn't be possible. What saddens me most about the article is how torture has become a subject for legitimate debate. Even if it ends up being the case that the opponents of torture win the debate and that we all agree that torture is abhorrent and not acceptable in any circumstances, I can't help but feel that we're still worse off for discussing it.

And even so, I think that de Wijze is wrong and that there aren't equally strong arguments on both sides. The article (and, I presume, the essays in the book) focuses largely on the ticking bomb scenario: there is a bomb about to go off in a crowded urban centre and the only way to locate and diffuse it is interrogating the bomber using torture. The problem with this, of course, is that this scenario perhaps works as a thought-experiment, but doesn't have practical use outside of that. Defending against this, de Wijze gives a real life example of the TBS, but then writes that "[it] is not clear from the newspaper report what techniques or form of questioning was used to elicit the information that prevented a suicide attack, but given the time scale and possible disastrous consequences of not obtaining this information, here we have a genuine actual example of a TBS." As Human Rights Watch reports, "coercive interrogation is far less likely to produce reliable information than the time-tested methods of careful questioning, probing, cross-checking, and gaining the confidence of the detainee. A person facing severe pain is likely to say whatever he thinks will stop the torture." So is the news report de Wijze cites an example of where torture is useful? It's impossible to say with the given information, but it stands to reason that torture wasn't used. And even if it was, it doesn't make torture a legitimate or effective method of obtaining intelligence.

When de Wijze is critical of the TBS, he tends to be a little bit glib about torture. For example: "the TBS says nothing about who to torture (the terrorist, his family, all possible suspects etc.), for how long (hours, days, months), or the kind of torture to be used (non-lethal torture-lite or medieval practices that result in irreversible physical and psychological damage)". I am especially uncomfortable with his distinction between "non-lethal torture-lite" and "medieval practices". What does "non-lethal torture-lite" mean? Tearing out fingernails with pliers? Electric shocks? Waterboarding?

Perhaps we should all read Jean Amery, himself a victim of torture, and lay this debate to rest forever:

And so in due course—in July 1943—he was arrested by the Gestapo for spreading anti-Nazi propaganda among the German occupation forces in Belgium. Améry believed he knew what was in store for him. He was widely read in the already substantial literature of the concentration camps. Whatever happened to him, he believed, would have merely to be "incorporated into the relevant literature, as it were." But nothing could prepare him for the experience of torture. Imprisoned in Fort Breendonk, Améry was interrogated by the SS for several days. His hands were shackled behind him, and he was suspended by his wrists from a hook in the ceiling ("there was a crackling and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten until this hour. . . . I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms, which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head"). Then he was beaten with a horsewhip. Although he told the Gestapo nothing useful, it was not because of heroic opposition. He confessed everything; he even invented political crimes; but he knew only the aliases of his comrades in the Resistance and had no real information to divulge.

[...]

Perhaps better than any other Holocaust writer, Améry shows that the liberal pillars upon which Western civilization rests are not dug very deep; they are merely taken for granted. Political freedom and human dignity are measured by what is "possible and humanly acceptable"; they are temporary and hastily constructed social arrangements which disappear at the first blow aimed at a prisoner. "[W]e can live," Améry says, "only if we grant our fellow man life, ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand." In the material security of our daily lives, we are unaware just how much we trust others to grant us life, and if not to ease our suffering at least not to cause it. But the victim of torture, the survivor of Auschwitz, has lost that trust forever. "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured," Améry concludes. (source)

Vlad and I got into quite an argument yesterday afternoon while baking hammer-and-sickle gingersnaps.

"Parents, Ira and Martha, decline to raise allowance from 3 to 5 dollars a week. It's now very clear they are becoming more and more bourgeois each day. How else can you explain that nasty incident at Macy's last week when, while shopping for a nice shirt for cousin Ari's bar mitzvah, Martha questioned the rationale of putting two security guards near the escalator? "I don't know what they are so worried about; it's not like we're going to steal anything," she sneered. Of course, though, she is stealing something: the soul and dignity of the working man."

Thank you McSweeneys for Ben Dwertman's "Selections from the Notebooks of Max Roosevelt, 15-year-old Socialist."

Good weekend reading!