Bollettino


Casualty report for today: a sniper killed an American soldier in Baghdad -- an incident that has received a surprising amount of news space. Perhaps it is gradually dawning on the news agencies that post-hostility Iraq is full of... hostility. Still no discussion of the condition of American troops in Iraq -- by all accounts they are very bad. The military is forced to recycle tired troops into campaigns of local repression; at the same time, the troops are being used in various "reconstructive" projects for which they are not trained, and for which, frankly, there is a huge pool of Iraqi labor. And still, there is not a peep about this from the Dems.



Now let's talk about archaeology.



There's a startling story in the Guardian about the putative looting of the National Museum. This story, for the belligerents, has assumed the same function as the story of Jessica Lynch, for the anti-belligerents: an example of suspicious media hype. In brief, the first accounts of looting at the Museum stated that there was a huge loss, and these reports got amplified through the usual channels -- like NPR. In Sunday's Washington Post NPR's favorite lachrymose source, John Malcolm Russell, a professor of art history in Boston, acknowledges that he wept a little too copiously over the losses:

"For two weeks after the looting I must have been known as the weeping archaeologist, regularly breaking into tears on air when asked to describe my favorite things lost in the looting, pieces I have come to cherish in more than two decades of visits to the museum. As it turns out, some of my favorite things are still missing."

I remember him comparing the loss to the burning of the library of Alexandria. The Wash Post article is a little bizarre -- Russell keeps referring to his favorite pieces, "some of my favorite things" - as though he were the Bernard Berenson of Babylon, or that woman in the Spoils of Poynton. The National Geographic, god bless em, mounted a loss survey which showed that the real looting was at various important Iraqi sites outside of Baghdad.

LI interpreted the re-interpretation of the National Museum looting as proving that Saddam was, at least, prescient enough to secure his nation's stuff against the assaults of bombs. There is one fact in this mess that is beyond dispute -- or at least it hasn't been disputed so far: the US military refused, in the first days of the Baghdad occupation, to guard the museum. So one figures that the looting was, ultimately, profitless to the profiteers because the staff of the museum was vigilant and smart. But the Guardian article disabused me of this confidence. This was, after all, Saddam's Iraq. In the end, dictatorial regimes depend upon a complicity in corruption that is positively fractal, seeding mirror images of the central debasement in little cells of activity all throughout the society. The looting seems to have several levels, one of which might just be the sale of various pieces by higher ups in the Museum directoriat to various international dealers. In particular, the Guardian fingers the director, Dony George:

"Iraq's national museum, home to many priceless artefacts which were thought to have been looted after the fall of Baghdad, has been plunged into a new crisis because of a revolt by staff. More than 130 of the 185 staff of Iraq's state board of antiquities office in Baghdad, which runs the museum, have signed a petition demanding the resignation of its directors.

Staff said they believed that some of the thefts from the museum were an inside job. They also accused Dony George, the board's head of research, of arming them and ordering them to fight US forces."

The news we get from Iraq, and the way we interpret it, reminds me of that Kafka story, At the building of the Chinese Wall. The narrator of that story observes that the wall's piecemeal construction seems counter-intuitive, especially in the face of its ostensive purpose: to guard against the invasion of the Northern People. He also observes that, in the South, the Northern People are only known through old books and tales. He adds that even if they invaded, the South is so far away that the horsemen of the North would die trying to get to the South. And then he contemplates the intersection between distance, power, and knowledge:

"If you ask me, one must inquire among the people, since it is among them that the kingdom has its final supports. Here I can clearly only speak of my own home. Outside of the Field Gods and the beautiful, seasonal ceremonies that fullfill the requirements of our worship, we think only of the emperor. But not the present emperor; or rather, we would think of the present emperor if we knew him, or knew anything specific about him. Of course, the curious among us are always trying to learn something about these matters, but curious as it may sound, it is hardly possible to learn anything -- for it can't be learned from pilgrims, even if they traverse distant lands, and it can't be learned from neighboring villages, or even ones further off, and it can't be learned from ships, even the ones that sail not only our own streams, but the sacred distant rivers. One hears a lot, but one can't really comprehend a lot. Our land is so great, no folktale spans its borders, and even the sky has a hard time spanning it -- and Peking is only a point, and the emperor's palace only a point within that point. The emperor as such manifests his greatness through all the structures of the world. But the living emperor, who is a man like any other, probably lies on his richly appointed bed -- or possibly it is a narrow and small bed. He stretches out his limbs like us, and he is very tired, he yawns with his tenderly drawn mouth. But how are we supposed to know anything about it -- when here we are, thousands of miles to the South, bordering on the Tibetan highlands. And besides, if a report happens to reach us, it will arrive much to late, it will be, in all likelihood, obsolete by the time we hear of it. The emperor is surrounded by a sparkling, and yet somehow obscure, mass of courtier bureaucracies-- evil and hostility garb themselves in the clothes of friends and servants -- the counterwieghts of the Empire, always trying to knock the emperor from the scale with poisoned arrows. The Emprie is imortal, but individual emperors fall and decline, even whole dynasty sinck lower, in the end, and breath their last. From these struggles and sorrows the People never learn anything, like those who come to late, or like strangers in the land, who have wandered down to the end of winding side paths and sit there, quietly eating their little messes, while their masters are at that very moment being executed in the center of the town square.

Bollettino

Lawrence Osbourne in the NYObserver remarks, acidically, on the Che mystique. Now, LI would welcome a withering look at that mystique, since it has done nothing but put lefty causes back in Latin America -- the emphasis on gesture instead of goal, the poetry of action promoted above the prosaics of providing, well, a decent system of production, etc., etc.

But Osbourne isn't after a Casteneda like critique. No sir. According to Osbourne, we are about to witness a fad for Che, with Hollywood bringing out a version of the Motorcycle Diaries. Much as a doctor prepares a shot to prevent infectious diseases, Osbourne loads his article with the hygenic doses of anti-communist rhetoric, applying them to that 'totalitarian terrorist" Che. Osbourne quotes every righwingers favorite historian, Robert Conquest, who quotes the British ambassador to the effect that Castro was a loveable rogue, while Che was a murderous hypocrite.

He also includes this graf:

"Of course, it was Che�s role in the Cuban Revolution that turned him into the poster boy we all know. But it was a quixotic participation in many ways. Che was known inside the revolution as a strict disciplinarian, ready to sign death warrants and mete out sundry brutalities. And yet, for all that, he was spectacularly ineffective. From 1961 to 1965, Che was Cuba�s Minister for Industries; before that, from 1959 to 1961, he was the head of the national bank. Both stints ended in farce."

Well, murderous hypocrisy, eh? Perhaps we should look to what our good old US of A was offering as the alternative to Che's death warrant signing (really? signing death warrants during an insurgency isn't a common thing -- but if Osbourne thinks Che was death warrent happy after the installation of Castro's government, he is surely misinformed) -- so we went to Brazil. A happy land in which, in 1964, a coup was staged. A coup that drove out commie symp president Goulart, who was elected (just because the people make a mistake, as Henry the K. once said, disguising his death warrants as policy positions, is no reason not to correct it), with the US making its own position known by sending the U.S. Navy to lurk off the coast. Here's a summary of a book on the subject, one of the few in English:

"Unlike its role in Chile from 1970 to 1973, the U.S. role in Brazil in 1964 was more subtle. The U.S. Air Force was ready with six C-135 transports and 110 tons of small arms and ammunition, and a "fast" Carrier Task Group was ordered to take positions off the Brazilian coast. They weren't needed because the U.S. had been subverting labor groups, reform-minded populists, and big media for many months, while pumping up the police and military. The coup was almost bloodless since everyone knew it was unstoppable; the military took over and Goulart fled to Uruguay. Most of the blood came later -- by the time this book appeared [1977], Brazil had a well-deserved reputation for political repression and torture."

Perhaps Mr. Osbourne (who writes about the CIA installing an "amenable" regime in Guatamala) should put down one of his Conquest books -- fascinating as they no doubt are -- and bone up a little bit about who killed whom in Latin America. The BBC has intermittently covered a story not covered at all in the NY Observer -- the discovery of mass graves in Brazil. The press, which has recently rushed to the mass graves in Iraq, might want to make a world tour. It would certainly make for interesting stories:

"In 1990, a mass grave containing 1,200 bodies was discovered on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo. It is thought that most of these were poor people and vagrants, but political dissidents were also buried there. Now British scientists are helping to identify the bodies, which are believed to date from the days of military rule, which ended in 1985."

Ah, but these were the processed deaths of responsible military men, Rumsfeld types, not the 'terrorist" punks of Castro's outback band. Probably -- I'm just gonna make a wild guess here -- no death warrent was wasted on those 1200. Brazil has an organization dedicated to researching the disappeared, but there are still currents that long for the good old days -- as Osbourne, who knows the only good terrorist totalitarian is a dead one, will no doubt be ;leased. Back in 1996 the courts found that the military government had, uh, caused the deaths of two leftist guerrillas. Brazil News reported on the incident with a revealing little quote from an officer:


"The Brazilian military didn't like the decision. Some of them, in anonymous comments, called it a "historical toad," but apparently they didn't have any other choice but to swallow the Justice Ministry's decision that guerrillas Carlos Marighella and Carlos Lamarca were murdered by the military dictatorship in a situation where had no way of defending themselves. Until now, the official version was that Marighella, leader of ALN (National Liberating Action) and former Army captain Lamarca, the leader of VPR (Revolutionary Popular Vanguard), had been killed while resisting arrest. Lamarca was killed in 1971 in Bahia and Marighela in 1969 in S�o Paulo. Now the families of both will receive a state pension. After the decision by the Justice Ministry's Special Commission on Political Dead and Disappeared People, retired deputy-captain Jair Bolsonaro, probably expressing the feelings of some of his colleagues in the military, commented: "Our mistake was not having eliminated all the traitors, including President Fernando Henrique Cardoso."

A remark Mr. Osbourne might well mumble a version of (if only Batista had crushed that little cockroach shit!) when he's munching his popcorn, watching Che's exploits on the screen this winter.

Bollettino

LI remembers reading about Willi M�nzenberg long ago, in his teen years, when LI was an ardent student of the National Review, absorbing its manichean conservative politics, its columns from old European tacticians of dubious ancestry, its wonderful, at that time, cultural pages -- Hugh Kenner, D.Keith Mano -- and generally getting an education. The National Review is still around, but it has become a trashy travesty of what it used to be. Today's teen would be better advised to go to National Enquirer for an education than Buckley's mag. Alas.

In any case, M�nzenberg's name often came up among the knowing Anti-Commy Euro set. He was, supposedly, the great genius of propaganda -- Stalin's right hand man -- friend to Gide and Yagoda, or was it Beria? -- and maker of fine, cynical phrases about the Western Intellectuals that he lassoed into making Oh-ing and Aw-ing sounds about the Great Soviet Experiment. Stephen Koch has written his biography in the high manner of the Right -- that is, with a rather unbalanced choice of adjectives (borrowed, it would seem, from the strained vocabulary of 1900 era adventure stories) gradually skewing the very possibility of exposition. Like a novel or a poem, a history can mean more than its style -- but not too much more. There's an essay by Koch about his biographical subject at the online archive of the New Criterion . Here's a typical passage, as ripe as Limburger cheese:

"Among Lenin�s men, the bond that held Dzerzhinsky, Radek, and Stalin together is an affiliation of the very greatest interest. Taken in their ensemble, they represent three of the essential strands that bind the knot of the terror state. Dzerzhinsky was the true believer, the sanctified fanatic of absolute state power. Stalin on the other hand was its ultimate politician, its grand tactician and bureaucrat. Radek was the new state�s propagandist and apologist, the creator of its intellectual rationale, the man who fabricated its �human face,� and much of its lie."

Now, in the context of his essay, Koch is only in 1915, with Lenin in Switzerland, showing Trotsky introducing the budding evil genius, Munzenberg, to the satanically bearded one; the evil trio are, very properly, nowhere in sight. This is because the terror state only exists as a glimmer in the eye -- Czarist Russia, at the moment, was doing its best to live up to the standards of the incompetent authoritarian state by facilitating the slaughter of a couple million of its peasants in its war against Germany. But prolepsis, in mannerist history, is fate; and context is some whimpy liberal thing made up by fellow travelers. So Radek, whose affiliation with Stalin is arguable; and Dzerzhinsky, who died before Stalin took power, are thrown together as partners merely because they fulfill Koch's need for dramatic functionaries. Incidentally, Koch displays another of the traits of the right wing Anti-Commie by attributing to his villains such amazing powers that it is a wonder that we won the Cold War without some real life equivalent of Spider Man fighting on our side -- or was Ronald Reagan secretly half arachnoid? According to Koch, the young Munzenberg had already formed several networks and penetrated the Vatican. Amazing. What these networks, in 1915, were doing, who they reported to, remain pesky questions for Koch, but ones unlikely to find speech bubbles in the heads of his convinced readers.

Willi M�nzenberg is in our thoughts this morning because one of his great inventions, supposedly, was the "trip to the future." He would arrange, or one of his multiple organs would arrange, a trip to the Soviet Union by some bigwig Western intellectual -- H.G. Wells, Lincoln Steffens. It was after such trips that the Oh-ing and Aw-ing would commence -- the comparison of the Soviet's Shining Heights to Capitalisms gloomy depths. If Munzenberg were alive today, he would be startled by how much easier things are today, propaganda-wise. Today's Bush-ite has no need to go to Iraq -- has no need to consult journalists who are in Iraq -- has no need to even dispute stories, or pay attention to stories, about Iraq. So the story of the missing WMD are explained away as being, after all, an unimportant part of the Bush rationale for getting us into Iraq; the official cessation of hostilities, announced by Bush with great pomp and fanfare in the first week of May, and undermined since by an increasing casualty rate and daily attacks on US troops, warrants not a thought; and the spike in military operations (in combination with Bremer's increasingly weird announcements, for all the world as if Iraqi was some small satellite of the U.S. instead of a liberated country) hum away in the distant background.

Saturday, Knight Ridder journalists Tom Lasseter and Drew Brown penned a nice piece summing up the last week. Here's the first three intro grafs:

"RAWAH, Iraq - Hassan Ibrahim walked the narrow space between the fresh graves and shook his head. There were 78, some of them packed with more than one body, with rocks as markers. The air stank of death. The names of the dead were written on paper and folded into soda bottles stuck in the ground.`

`This town was safe before the Americans came here and made a lot of blood,'' said Ibrahim. ``Is this the democracy they were talking about?''

The graves were all that remained after U.S. forces struck a suspected terrorist training camp 5 1/2 miles from town Thursday, raking the earth with missiles and machine-gun fire."

So it goes. In this country, by the fine stroke of declaring the War over, Bush seems to have silenced any discussion of the on-going War. Certainly you hear nothing from the Dems. They are, supposedly, riven by conflicts over whether to examine the reality, or lack of it, of the WMD threat. Seriously, LI doesn't care that much. We care that Bremer is heading the US committment in Iraq in a fatally wrong direction. We care that no Dem is questioning a strategy that has taken a turn towards sporadic, heavily lethal repression -- a strategy that we believe is sowing the seeds of disaster for Americans in Iraq. There are still options, still ways of avoiding the drift into becoming the third party and target in the country. Unfortunately, Dems would just as soon forget that the War happened, making them complicit in the War that is happening. The NYT ran an interview Saturday with Adnan Pachachi, one of those Iraqi elder statesmen who has not been rubbing shoulders with Chalabi. The Bush people are aggressively deaf to Pachachi; they shouldn't be. Here are two grafs from the interview:

"Mr. Pachachi said that military sweeps through civilian areas with mass arrests, interrogations and gun battles, intended to suppress the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military command, were inflaming sentiments against the American and British occupation.

He predicted that if such sweeps continued, they would be "exploited by the Baathists," and he added, "It would be much better if we didn't have these operations.'"

Now this is not just an issue for Dems -- it is an early warning that the vampiric drip drip of American blood is going to turn into a daily, Vietnam like thing if Bremer and his kind aren't stopped in their ambition to "reform" Iraq. It is needless to say that we were against the war; but since the fall of Baghdad, we've been impressed with the degree of goodwill shown towards America by Iraqis; this goodwill stems from the collapse of Saddam's machinery of repression. This is all the more impressive in the face of the massive casualties incurred by the Iraqis during the hostilities. But the bungling of Smilin' Jay Garner, and the petty tyranny of Bremer, are obviously dissipating that good will, as we re-install our own version of repression. The question is: to what end? We believe that the Bush people want to institute their version of "free enterprise" in Iraq, which is why we are the sole principalities and powers in the place right now. This is unworthy of one drop of blood, Iraqi or American. Meanwhile, the Peace Movement is on a wild goose chase after the WMD lies. Resentment does not make for good politics -- defeated in the effort to prevent the war, the Anti-War people understandably want a recount. But actually, this will simply further obscure what is happening in Iraq right now.

Not that we really expect serious consideration to be given to the more salient problems in Iraq right now by anybody on either side. These are simply our woodnotes wild, pipings at the gates of despair.

Bollettino

"There was no attempt at deconfliction at all," he added, using the military term for avoidance of duplicate effort. -- Wash Post


A sea, a sea of bad news this morning, spanning the globe, from the odious Tom DeLay in D.C. -- a man who, unlike many a democratic presidential candidate, has no trouble telling Bush to screw off when he feels like it -- Bush wanted him to make some limp-wristed liberal gesture like giving a tax break to (gasp) the poor, so DeLay obliged by embedding it in an impossible tax break for those poor who make 150 thou a year -- to our non-battle, in non-hostile Iraq, which just killed, according to the Times, 100 Iraqis in battles somewhere around Kirkuk, to another non-battle with Iraqi forces that attacked a tank column, in which 27 Iraqis were killed. Or maybe they were non-Iraqis in the first battle. Of course, given our super embedded media, we really don't know much about what is happening with these things -- the miltary has decided to pull the plug on info, until they've licked it into whatever shape they want the press to spoon it out to the rest of us as, and the press is content to do its patriotic duty. In their story on these events, the NYT published a figure of 40 American casualties since the Bush declaration of non-hostility. It is amazing how the newspapers can't seem to make a count of such a seemingly simple thing. Nor is there any investigation of the rather suspicious 'accident' figures.

Let's be clear, as our beloved Defense Secretary might put it. The War is entering a second phase. Is this phase going to be peaceful? No. Is this phase going to lead to a pattern resembling the retaliatory cycle between Palestinians and Israelis. Yes. Yes but. This isn't an inevitability. J-Lo Bremer has been in alarming commandante mode the past two weeks. He has, for instance, decided to ban writing that conveys an "anti-american" tone, or a "pro-Ba'athist" tone. He has put back the moment in which Iraqis will rule their own country into the middle distance, from whence it appears likely to be the "light at the end of the tunnel", to quote a beloved cliche from our last big war. Meanwhile, there are persistant and worrisome patterns in the tone from the Bush team that originally planned the invasion. George Ward, who works at the comically named U.S. Peace institute -- an appendage of the Pentagon, mainly, which war planned 'post-hostile' Iraq -- pens an op ed piece in the NYT today that, along with assuring us that everything is hunky-dory in our temporary colony, advances this proposition: "The long-term goals in Iraq now are public security, a transition to a representative system of government and the creation of a free-market economy." Where, one wants to know, does that last little item come from? And what does it mean? If it means what LI thinks it means -- privatizing Iraqi oil, and distributing it to American oil companies -- than the team is clearly whacked. No blood for oil was an anti-war slogan that was, admittedly, exaggerated. But if the George Wards of the administration are truly pursuing the goal of "creating a free-market economy" -- as if it is our business to create any such thing in Iraq -- then the slogan will be verified, and definitely the verification will be in blood.

Where, in the friendly scenario outlined by Ward, is the takeover, as quickly as possible, of Iraq by Iraqis? LI thought, and thinks, that for all the D.C. chestbeating about America being an empire, the American people won't bear a colony -- especially as it serves nobody's interest, and drinks American blood. The vampiric drip drip of casualties is the worrisome noise in the background. The press has the idea that Bush's triumphalism has entered every heart, and that we are all overjoyed by the guy. I don't think so. I think that nobody but a circle of policy makers around Rumsfeld is going to be happy about a war to install 'free enterprise' in Iraq.

Bollettino

"If we credit what should seem the most authentic of all records, an oration, still extant, and delivered by the emperor himself to the senate, we must allow that the victory of
Alexander Severus was not inferior to any of those formerly obtained over the Persians by the son of Philip. The army of the Great King consisted of one hundred and twenty thousand horse, clothed in complete armor of steel; of seven hundred elephants,
with towers filled with archers on their backs, and of eighteen hundred chariots armed with scythes. This formidable host, the like of which is not to be found in eastern history, and has
scarcely been imagined in eastern romance, ^49 was discomfited in a great battle, in which the Roman Alexander proved himself an intrepid soldier and a skilful general. The Great King fled before his valor; an immense booty, and the conquest of Mesopotamia, were the immediate fruits of this signal victory.

Such are the circumstances of this ostentatious and improbable relation, dictated, as it too plainly appears, by the vanity of the monarch, adorned by the unblushing servility of his
flatterers, and received without contradiction by a distant and obsequious senate. Far from being inclined to believe that the arms of Alexander obtained any memorable advantage over the Persians, we are induced to suspect that all this blaze of imaginary glory was designed to conceal some real disgrace.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall



"Brief gun battles erupted when American forces surrounded this belt of rich green farmland, created by a broad curve in the Tigris River, early Monday, American commanders said. Four Iraqis died, four Americans were wounded and 375 Iraqi men were detained, the Americans said.
�
The American assessment is that Tikrit, Kirkuk and Baiji, which are farther north of Baghdad, are relatively secure. But the American military command has been concerned about resistance in a swath of territory around the towns of Balad, Taji and Baquba, roughly 30 miles north of Baghdad. Only several hundred Americans have been patrolling them.
Gauging the intensity of the surge in attacks has been difficult. American military officials disclose the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq but do not routinely publicize every attack on American forces. Military officials declined a request this week to produce figures totaling the number of attacks on Americans forces over the last six weeks."

And so this seems that as the fabulous Weapons of Mass Destruction recede ever further into the intelligence fictions where they were manufactured, the War, which has been declared over and done with, rumbles less fabulously, and much less reported, in the background. Could it be that all this blaze of imaginary glory is designed to conceal some real disgrace? Could it be that our own obsequious legislatures are letting an incompetent chief get away with both the destruction of the government's ability to carry out its domestic functions and the misgovernment of a not quite fully conquered territory, with the vampiric sucking of American and Iraqi blood, every day, reaching our ears merely as a distant rumor?

Naw. Too improbable.

Bollettino

Casualty counts: "At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation.The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll if it is ever tallied is sure to be significantly higher."

Hobhouse

The extraordinary things you can find on the Internet. John Cam Hobhouse is a name that will be familiar to any Byron devotee. He was the occassion for some of Byron's best, because most spiteful and most explicit, letters. Well, there is a site that is putting up his diary. A rum thing, as Hobhouse himself might have said. Mr. Roast Beef in Venice is pretty funny. The first entries, which describe a circumcision with all the fuss of a man who is both a prude and bears a strong prejudice against Jews -- Hobhouse's snooty anti-semitism is of a very English kind - is a complete hoot. We recommend it. Here are a couple of grafs from it:

I went to the circumcision room � the rabbins were not to be known by their dress, nor did I make out that any ceremony had commenced, when two men in plain clothes sat down next to each other and sung recitative out of two little books, talking to each other and the company at intervals. Presently two enormously stout fellows threw strips of silk over their shoulders, and one, sitting down in a chair, put three or four pillows on his knees. The instruments were in a dish prepared � a sort of thin prong to hold the prepuce over the glass and prevent the latter from being cut, a sharp thin knife, a pair of scissors and a lancet, together with some balsam and a rag. The poor little red child, only eight days old, was brought in � the singing continued between the two who now stood up and approached the man with the pillows � the infant being stripped below was then laid on the pillows � the rabbins stood by and sung � the operator in half minute threw the prepuce, a considerable piece of flesh, in the plate, and I saw the infant covered with the blood. He screamed violently � the operator then ran his thumbnail violently round between the teguments of the [ ]ended rim of the flesh and sucked the parts. Owing to some mistake, the wine with which he was to wash his mouth was not ready, and was at last given to him in some confusion by the rabbins, who still continued their mummery and recitative, the child screaming and the father crying in the corner.

A Jew told Lewis [ Monk Lewis, staying with Byron at that moment] that the fault of the family was troppo di sensibilit�15 � the operator then powdered the wounded part and then covered it with a balsamed rag and powdered it again � then bandaged it up raw and bloody and delivered the child to a nurse. The singing ceased, and the men pulled off their silk and the ceremony was declared over.

The foreskin was carefully preserved in a bottle, and became the trophy of the operator who I understood had 800 such, and would bury them with him. Lewis, however, supposed that the prepuce is buried with its original owner. We made enquiries, and found that any man may operate who has served an apprenticeship and has suffered his thumbnail to grow to a proper length. I was shown a thumbnail then in a state of pupillage for the purpose: long, dirty.

This is a brutal ceremony � lasts longer than I thought and is more bloody � and I should think, painful. It is the height of indecency to ask women to assist at it. My young ladies, the doctor�s daughters, told me that the moment the child was taken out of the room � on a signal given, all the women cried, or seemed to cry, and continued until the young Jew was brought back. The name is given on this occasion. The conversazione lasted for some time � afterwards cakes and chocolate and water dashed with aniseed were handed round and the ladies and gentlemen began again to mix and to make merry upon the morning�s exploit. I came home and read a little, dined, walked out by myself in the evening � supped at Byron�s � read Tales of my Landlord at night."

Hobhouse has always been simply a name to me. The site is devoted to Hobby-O. As is evident from the diary, although prudish, Hobhouse was not a man to blanche at a description. He wanted Byron's memoirs published -- but of course they were burnt by the odious Thomas Moore, sentimental fig eater that he was. LI, in this age in which the forces of progress have once again joined up with the forces of puritanism to try to ban everything that can be construed as unhealthy (such as smoking in bars -- a ban which we trust, here in Austin, is on its way to being overturned, thanks to the defeat of Margot Clarke for City Council), while of course hypocritically ignoring what is really unhealthy - namely, the conditions in which our meat is slaughtered, or our petrochemicals are woven into useable molecular patterns down there in Cancer Gulch in Louisiana, or the way in which each American citizen drains as much energy from Gaia in a year as a sperm whale -- anyway, LI has a lively sympathy for figures who live in ages of transition between a dominant proper appreciation of the body's appetites and a dominant abhorrence of same, finds Hobhouse an interesting figure. The diary entries on the web were supposedly repressed when his diary came to be published:

"John Cam Hobhouse�s diary is one of the two major texts written about Byron by his contemporaries which has (July 2002) still to see the full light of day � though it is about much more than Byron, for Hobhouse became, as he cast off his Byronic shackles, a significant political figure in his own right. The sections on his two Napoleonic French excursions � on both of which he went without Byron � are worth books in themselves. His weeks in Newgate, just before he was elected MP for Westminster, will be included. However, the extent to which he played Sancho to Byron�s Quixote - Pylades to Byron�s Orestes - Hal to Byron�s Falstaff - Horatio to Byron�s Hamlet - Celia to Byron�s Rosalind � cannot be exaggerated, and will have justice done to it."

Go to it, reader. Download. Enjoy.

Bollettino

Further thoughts on Israel and Palestine.

As we said before, we doubt that the roadmap to peace is either a roadmap, or one that leads to peace. The problem, as we see it, of Israel and Palestine is that both are states claiming legitimacy as representatives of a mystical ethnic group: the Jews, on the one side, the Palestinians, on the other. This isn't to say that ethnic division isn't sufficient for the claim of nationhood - this would be way too unrealistic. Our point, rather, is that ethnic purity is not a claim that a nation can put forward - at least, a civilized nation. We've seen this war fought before - in 1860, in the U.S. - in 1939, in Europe - and in the innumerable small skirmishes that make up the resistance to apartheid, in South Africa.

Martha Nussbaum wrote a famous essay on the cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism - at least it was famous in the 90s. She references the cynic, Diogenes, as the first man who said he was a citizen of the world - and she digs into what that meant for the Stoics, who adopted it during the eclipse of Greek state-nation power. The stoic ideal had, of course, a tremendous influence on the humanists, and on the philosophes. Since the Bush White House is supposedly bursting at the seams with eager Straussians, perhaps they will want to plunge into their copies of Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace - a sort of cosmopolitan manifesto, insofar as Kant was capable of writing a manifesto. The first two points are interesting:

1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War"; and 2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation" One can take the last point as the typical reactionary defense formation of the small German states in the face of the threat of Prussia - or France. But Kant, who is a thoroughgoing philosopher, binds the second point to the wording of his more famous categorical imperative. Just as the duty forbids treating a person as an object, so, too, the usurpation of the power of one state by another is a violation of a state's subjective autonomy: it is to treat the state as a thing: "A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived."

We've never thought Kant's argument about thinghood, and its morally low status, was very convincing; but we recognize its resonance with the whole moral thematic of liberal politics. Actually, if it wouldn't entail a long detour, we think we could make a convincing case for cynical thinghood as the moral basis of cosmopolitanism -- but never mind that. The thing to hold in mind here, qua Israel and Palestine, is that enforced respect which, at least, allows the cosmopolitan moment. Practically, that would mean the building of certain transnational institutions between Palestine and Israel, such as a court that could fairly try both the encouragers of suicide bombing and the killing of civilians by soldiers. This would provide another route for retaliation, instead of the routes followed by both parties, as in today's paper -- and tomorrow's, and tomorrow's...

LI doesn't believe our suggestion is going to be followed, of course � we hasten to say that. But we do think a real peace plan would address the causes of hostility, instead of endlessly bargaining settlers against the repression of terrorists. Finally, there's a lot to be said for Kant's sixth point:

"6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins (percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason (perduellio) in the Opposing State";
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum). War, however, is only the sad recourse in the state of nature (where there is no tribunal which could judge with the force of law) by which each state asserts its right by violence and in which neither party can be adjudged unjust (for that would presuppose a juridical decision); in lieu of such a decision, the issue of the conflict (as if given by a so-called "judgment of God") decides on which side justice lies. But between states no punitive war (bellum punitivum) is conceivable, because there is no relation between them of master and servant."

Oops. The Straussians aren't going to like that phrase about there being "no relation between them of master and servant." Kant, as always, goes too far! Out with the guy -- let's get another court philosopher. How about Tom DeLay?