Mick Hartley

Moving On

There are quite a few interesting stories in the outside world. The crisis in Haiti; Zimbabwe's indoctrination camps; the LRA in Uganda with their worst atrocity yet; China getting nervous about democracy in Hong Kong, while demonstrations in Taiwan notch up the tension; Putin amassing more and more power to himself: the Democrat leadership contest in the US, plus the gay marriage furore - and in Iraq, there's the unfolding story of the UN oil-for-food scandal.

So what do we get in our Sunday broadsheets? It's all about Clare Short; Katherine Gun; was the war illegal? who was bugging who? and on and endlessly on. "Army chiefs feared Iraq war illegal just days before start" is The Observer line. The Sunday Times reports how Claire Short has vowed to bring down Tony Blair. The Independent - virtually a one issue newspaper now - has "Revealed: Attorney General changed his advice on legality of Iraq war". Turn on the BBC and either Robin Cook or Clare Short is being interviewed.

The line seems to be that the Iraq war keeps coming back to haunt Blair, but clearly that's only because these journalists - the liberal establishment - are determined the issue won't go away, especially after the Hutton Report wasn't to their liking. Clare Short is certainly out to destroy Blair, but she's helped by the fact that the press are right behind her.

At least the Sunday Times is aware of the problem:

Margaret Thatcher famously dismissed a critical question over the retaking of South Georgia in the Falklands with the words: “Rejoice, rejoice!” There is plenty of evidence from the polls that many voters are irritated by the constant digging around in the war’s entrails — a chattering-class issue — and would rather the prime minister also said “rejoice” and got on with other things. The war removed an evil dictator who was a danger to peace and, by demonstrating the West’s willingness to use force, probably helped delay the most dangerous threat the world faces: nuclear proliferation that could result in these weapons getting to Al-Qaeda. Mr Blair, however, is no Thatcher. His weakness is that he tries to be all things to all men. The war was one of the tough choices he keeps telling us about. One day he will have to tell his critics, particularly in his own party, to stop carping and accept that reality.

Much as he would love to tell the Labour party to stop carping, Blair's personal authority at the moment just isn't strong enough for him to do that.

Zimbabwe's Camps

From previews of Panorama's programme tomorrow (Sunday) night, it looks like Mugabe's Zimbabwe is even worse than we feared (via Tim Blair):

President Robert Mugabe's government has set up secret camps across the country in which thousands of youths are taught how to torture and kill, the BBC has learned. The Zimbabwean government says the camps are job training centres, but those who have escaped say they are part of a brutal plan to keep Mugabe in power.

Former recruits to the camps have spoken to the BBC's Panorama programme about a horrific training programme that breaks young teenagers down before encouraging them to commit atrocities.

A whole country is being brutalised, to keep Mugabe in power:

During covert filming inside Zimbabwe, Panorama also spoke to a camp commander who told the programme that youths in his camp had been sent to kill opponents of President Mugabe.

He said: "In the area I am covering I heard of two. My superiors instructed that the people must be eliminated."

What is more frightening is that President Mugabe now wants every Zimbabwean youth to undergo training. We have been told they will be used to intimidate political opponents in next year's elections.

The commander added: "These guys are going to be used by the ruling party to keep the opposition out of power."

Meanwhile (via Harry's Place):

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praised Zimbabwe's embattled President Robert Mugabe as a "freedom fighter," bestowing the visiting African leader with a replica of South American independence hero Simon Bolivar's sword.

"I give you a replica of liberator Simon Bolivar's sword," Chavez said Thursday after the two leaders signed an energy co-operation agreement.

"For you, who like Bolivar, took up arms to liberate your people. For you, who like Bolivar, are and will always be a true freedom fighter," Chavez said. "He continues, alongside his people, to confront the pretensions of new imperialists."

Gay Marriage

The best commentary I've come across so far on the whole issue of gay marriage is from Tammy Bruce in FrontPage magazine (via Fresh Bilge) - though for a whirlwind tour of all the issues, the comments to this post on Roger Simon's site pretty much cover every angle.

I respect the majority of Americans and their opinion that marriage should be defined as between one man and one woman. At the same time, as an American, I also believe that every American deserves the same rights and protections as every other. Most of you do, too. The very same polls that show how united Americans are against “gay marriage” indicate a majority approving of civil unions.

That doesn’t surprise me. It is consistent with the American belief that we can have fair play and equality while recognizing the need to honor traditional institutions. [...]

American society remains committed to equality, but it’s apparent that we don’t like the aftermath of taking our traditions for granted. So, yes, we’ve decided to maintain the idea of “marriage” as it has stood, while finding another way to guarantee the rights of gay people.

While this should actually be a relatively easy situation to resolve (heck, Bush, Kerry and Edwards all hold the same position—against gay marriage, for civil unions), all Hell seems to have broken loose—not only in San Francisco, but in Washington, D.C., as well.

On one hand you have the reckless law-breaking behavior of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom bestowing marriage licenses on gay couples. A few of my gay friends have voiced their support for this. I reminded these friends, who are also pro-choice, that Fresno, California has a pro-life mayor. How would they feel if that mayor decided to ignore the law and keep women from accessing their legal abortion rights?

Now, in Washington, D.C., the president has declared the need to amend the U.S. Constitution! Really now—that appears to be as much of a stunt as the rogue gay marriages in San Francisco. And this from a man (who along with Cheney) in the last election who said it should be a matter left to the states. It seems, though, only if the states do what you like. [...]

Gays ultimately need to stop looking to government for unconditional love and approval of who we are. Andrew Sullivan, a political commentator and writer many of you know and respect, wrote a piece for Time magazine where he actually equated governmental recognition of gay marriage as a necessary element to all gay people feeling accepted and wanted. He claimed that anything other than marriage will “build a wall between gay people and their own families.”

While his story was personal and moving, the argument was, frankly, nonsense, and representative of the general mentality among the gay elite. It also gives the government and other people’s opinions far too much power over the quality of our lives and effectively eliminates our own responsibility for our happiness.

So, effectively, the evolution of an acceptable solution, in terms of maintaining the notion of marriage as applying to heterosexual unions, but allowing for civil unions with equivalent rights for gay couples, has been derailed by those like Andrew Sullivan and San Francisco's Gavin Newsom, who want it all and want it now, otherwise they'll feel rejected and outcast. Unsurprisingly this has lead to a reaction by Bush - but what did they expect?

Occidentalism

Avishai Margolit and Ian Buruma have a piece in the NY Review of Books (via AL Daily) that's worth reading. The main theme of the article is the extent to which Western ideas - bad Western ideas - are inextricably intertwined with the pathologies we currently see in the Middle East: as indeed they were, in different ways, in Japan, in China, in Cambodia:

[T]he West is not at war with Islam. Indeed, the fiercest battles will be fought inside the Muslim world, not strictly between religionists and secularists, but between those who favor civil liberties and freedom of thought and those who wish to impose a theocracy. The religious revolution will have to be halted preferably not by outside intervention but by Muslims themselves. In fact, Western intervention often makes things harder for non-Western liberals, who will be seen as traitors slavishly following Western ways. There is indeed a worldwide clash going on, but the fault lines do not coincide with national, ethnic, or religious borders. Moderate Muslims in Indonesia and Pakistan are as much the targets of Islamist zealotry as Westerners. It is indeed the Westernizers in their midst who provoke the greatest rage among the religious revolutionaries of the Middle East and beyond. The war of ideas is in some respects the same as the one that was fought several generations ago, against various versions of fascism and state socialism. This is not to say the military war is the same, or that all the ideas overlap. In the 1940s, the war was only between states. Now it is also against a disparate, worldwide, loosely organized, mostly underground revolutionary movement.

The other intellectual trap to avoid is the paralysis of colonial guilt. It should be repeated: European and American histories are stained with blood, and Western imperialism did much damage. But to be conscious of that does not mean we should be complacent about the brutality taking place in former colonies now. On the contrary, it should make us less so. To blame the barbarism of non-Western dictators or the suicidal savagery of religious revolutions on American imperialism, global capitalism, or Israeli expansionism is not only to miss the point; it is precisely an Orientalist form of condescension, as though only Westerners are adult enough to be morally responsible for what they do. [...]

Where political, religious, and intellectual freedom has already been established, it must be defended against its enemies, with force, if need be, but also with conviction. What should be clear is that we have not been witnessing the Manichaean history of one civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of crosscontamination, the spread of bad ideas.

The UN and Anti-Semitism

A powerful denunciation of the UN by Anne Bayefsky in Commentary (via Instapundit):

The justifications that are typically given for turning a blind eye to human-rights violations in 95 percent of UN states are predictable enough. In 2003, teaming up to defeat a resolution condemning Russian behavior in Chechnya, Syria and China called it "interference in the internal affairs of that country." India said that "every state had the right to protect its citizens from terrorism." When it came to reproving Zimbabwe, South Africa objected to "naming and shaming," while Libya, complaining that the resolution was "an attempt to make the commission a forum to settle differences between countries," declared its preference for "the language of cooperation and dialogue."

How is it, one might wonder, that such reservations never give the UN a moment’s pause when it comes to the organization’s relentlessly one-sided prosecution of Israel—a democratic state with an independent judiciary that, unlike all these others, can point to a long and distinguished record of respect for human rights? The demonization of Israel would seem to be about something else entirely.

What that something is has become too clear to deny: over the past several decades, the UN has fashioned itself into perhaps the foremost global platform for anti-Semitism.

The leading agent of this process, needless to say, has been the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel’s supposed "partner in peace," in close cooperation with Arab and Muslim members of the UN. In presentations to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Palestinian delegates have repeatedly devised new variations on the medieval blood libel, accusing the Israelis of such things as needing to kill Arabs for the proper observance of Yom Kippur and of injecting Palestinian children with HIV-positive blood.

By Palestinians and others, Israelis are now routinely condemned with Nazi terminology—current resolutions speak of the "Judaization" of Jeru salem—or are themselves likened to Nazis. As the Algerian representative recently observed, in an especially memorable outburst:

"Kristallnacht repeats itself daily. . . . Israeli soldiers are the true disciples of Goebbels and of Himmler, who strip Palestinian prisoners and inscribe numbers on their bodies. . . . Must we wait in silence until new death camps are built. . . . The Israeli war machine has been trying for five decades to arrive at a final solution."

The nadir of the UN’s record in these matters was the conference on racism and xenophobia held under its auspices in Durban in 2001. It would have been bad enough if (as we have already seen) the event had simply refused to acknowledge the growing problem of anti-Semitism; but it went much farther, turning into a festival of hatred against the Jews.

Though the Durban conference concluded with a formal meeting of government representatives, its first half consisted of an NGO forum—a meeting, that is, of the various nongovernmental organizations purportedly devoted to combating racism. NGO’s play a key role in the UN system, with some of them receiving formal status, but here Jews have once again been singled out for discriminatory treatment. Over the years, attempts have been made to impede groups like Hadassah, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists from obtaining official accreditation. Durban gave some idea why.

At the conference’s NGO forum, the Arab Lawyer’s Union freely distributed books containing cartoons of swastika-festooned Israelis and fanged, hooked-nosed Jews, blood dripping from their hands. Another best-selling title was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hundreds of flyers were distributed with a picture of Hitler and the words, "What if I had won? The good thing—there would be no Israel." Appeals to the conference’s secretary-general, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, to demand the removal of this anti-Semitic literature went unheeded.

The NGO forum at Durban did sponsor a single event on anti-Semitism, but it was disrupted by an angry mob of protesters, shouting, "You are killers! You are killers!" A news conference the following day, called by a broad range of national and international Jewish organizations, was similarly interrupted, this time for the benefit of the TV cameras, and was finally called off.

As the NGO forum drew to a close, the Jewish caucus, like all the other caucuses, submitted provisions for the conference’s final document. The group’s contribution stated that anti-Semitism could take many forms, including the equation of Zionism with racism, the attempt to de-legitimize the self-determination of the Jewish people, and the targeting of Jews throughout the world for violence because of their support of Israel. When the time finally came for a vote, a representative of the World Council of Churches called for the deletion of this language; the Jewish caucus was alone in voting against the motion. Jewish NGO’s from all over the world walked out in protest, even as representatives of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights stood by in silence. No statement proposed by any other caucus was deleted.

Remembering Trauma

In the NY Review of Books, Frederick Crews discusses "Remembering Trauma", by Richard McNally (via AL Daily).

McNally's title Remembering Trauma neatly encapsulates the opposing views that, for a whole generation now, have made the study of trauma into psychology's most fiercely contested ground. Are scarring experiences well remembered in the usual sense of the term, or can some of them be remembered only much later, after the grip of a self-protective psychological mechanism has been relaxed? This is the pivotal issue that McNally decisively resolves.

To understand why this issue is so critical we need to go back to the early days of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. The story that Freud told, which became the standard line in psychoanalytic history, was that he was confronted again and again by stories from his neurotic patients of sexual abuse in infancy. At first he assumed that sexual abuse was rampant among the Viennese bourgeousie, but eventually realised with a flash of inspiration that these stories were all fantasies, and represented not memories but inner desires. Thus was psychoanalysis born.

In the 1980s Jeffrey Masson was given access by Anna Freud to the Freud archives in London, including the Freud-Fliess letters (Wilhelm Fliess was a Berlin neurologist who was in regular correspondence with Freud in the 1890s, and shared his passion for cocaine, fame, and bizarre theories). Regrettably for Anna Freud, Masson proved to be insufficiently impressed by the Freud legend, and in 1984 wrote "The Assault on Truth : Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory", which argued that Freud had simply chickened out on hearing all these tales of sexual abuse from his patients, realising that such unpalatable truths would not exactly help his struggling career. Masson argues that these tales were, as Freud first thought, actual memories. As the Amazon review puts it:

The Assault on Truth reveals a reality that neither Freud nor his followers could bear to face. Bracing in its honesty, gripping its revelations, this is the book that prompted Masson’s break with the psychoanalytic community–and launched his subsequent brilliant career as an independent thinker and writer.

Brilliant career may be putting it a little strong: after being engaged for a while to feminist Catherine MacKinnon, the guy now lives in New Zealand and writes books about animals. Nevertheless the damage had been done, though in retrospect it's not clear how much blame should be laid at Masson's door for what followed. Soon enough the whole recovered memory movement was in full swing, exemplified by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis's "The Courage to Heal", which suggested that if women felt depressed, unfulfilled, or had difficulty with relationships, they should consider the possibility that they'd been sexually abused as infants. Tens of thousands did, and headed along to therapists who - often through hypnosis - managed to persuade them that yes indeed, they did have memories of abuse, long suppressed, which the therapists managed after prolonged and highly lucrative sessions to drag out of them. Regrettably, once started on this course, and finding simple memory of abuse by fathers didn't quite provide the hoped-for catharsis, the patients would bring up ever more elaborate and implausible scenarios involving mothers, relatives, communities, satanic rituals, alien abductions, not to mention multiple personalities. Thus therapy, breaking away from psychoanalysis but maintaing the core belief in repression of trauma, continued the tradition of generating illnesses to fit its own needs. As Crews states:

[M]any psychotherapists, employing hypnosis, dream analysis, "guided imagery," "age regression," and other suggestion-amplifying devices, persuaded their mostly female patients to "remember" having been molested by their fathers or stepfathers through much of their childhood, in some cases with the active participation of their mothers. The "perpetrators" thus fingered were devastated, embittered, and often publicly shamed, and only a minority of their accusers eventually recanted. Many, in fact, fell in with their therapists' belief that young victims of sexual trauma, instead of consciously recalling what was done to them, are likely to develop multiple personalities. Disintegrating further, those unfortunates were then sent off to costly "dissociative identity" wards, where their fantasies of containing five, a dozen, or even hundreds of inner selves were humored until their insurance coverage expired and they were abandoned in a crazed condition. At the height of the scare, influential traumatologists were opining that "between twenty and fifty percent of psychiatric patients suffer from dissociative disorders"— disorders whose reported incidence plummeted toward zero as soon as some of the quacks who had promoted them began to be sued for malpractice.

The whole issue of course also spread out through the Eighties and Nineties into the satanic abuse witch-hunts which saw infant schoolteachers and day care workers imprisoned on ludicrous charges. Crews again:

In the 1980s, as McNally relates, day care workers risked prosecution and imprisonment on the coerced testimony of bewildered and intimidated three-year-olds who were prodded to "remember" nonexistent molestations. Meanwhile, poorly trained social workers, reasoning that signs of sexual curiosity in children must be "behavioral memories" of rape, were charging parents with incest and consigning their stunned offspring to foster homes. And most remarkably, whole communities were frantically attempting to expose envisioned covens of Satan worshipers who were said, largely on the basis of hypnotically unlocked "memories," to be raising babies for sexual torture, ritual murder, and cannibal feasts around the patio grill.

It would unfortunately be premature to say that those days are behind us, as the recent case of Anver Daud Sheikh highlights. For some US cases, where individuals remain in prison, Dorothy Rabinowitz' "No Crueller Tyrannies" is worth reading.

As the history of the early years of psychoanalysis is studied more closely it's become clear that Freud's founding myth is untenable, and Masson's revisionism simply compounds the mistake. Both these accounts only make sense if the patients' stories of early sexual abuse were freely forthcoming, but this is precisely not the case. Freud's theory of the genesis of neuroses required that the memory of sexual abuse be suppressed. In the strange hydraulic pressure model that Freud used, it was the repression of the abuse which manifested itself in the symptoms of the neurosis. It was of no use whatever to Freud to have patients who remembered being sexually abused. On the contrary, the memories had to be dragged out of them, and Freud is quite clear about this. They will resist, he said. They will strenuously deny that any such thing ever happened. What is required from the therapist is an absolute insistence on the central truth that abuse had occurred, and only when the patient accepted this, after long and wearying sessions, with the therapist using the full weight of his authority, could recovery begin.

In other words, the stories of infantile sexual abuse which Freud elicited, prior to his "breakthrough" understanding, were entirely constructions of the therapeutic situation, as were those elicited by recovered memory therapists more recently. McNally's book provides further evidence of the sand on which these theories are based. When empirical findings are scrutinised, there is no evidence that the required repression of trauma actually exists. As Crews concludes:

Remembering Trauma is neither a polemic nor a sermon, and McNally offers little counsel to psychotherapists beyond warning them against turning moral disapproval of pedophilia into overconfidence that they can infer its existence from behavioral clues observed twenty or thirty years after the fact. But another lesson is implied throughout this important book. Attention to the chimerical task of divining a patient's early traumas is attention subtracted from sensible help in the here and now. The reason why psychotherapists ought to familiarize themselves with actual knowledge about the workings of memory, and why their professional societies should stop waffling and promulgating misinformation about it, is not that good science guarantees good therapy; it is simply that pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm.

Libya & Lockerbie Again

After Libya had accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie crash, the Libyan Prime Minister is now denying that they had anything to do with it:

Libya's prime minister has said his country does not accept guilt for the Lockerbie bombing or the shooting of Wpc Yvonne Fletcher. Shukri Ghanem told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the issue over Wpc Fletcher was "settled". He said the country paid damages to relatives of Lockerbie bombing victims to "buy peace" and escape sanctions.

There were always strong doubts about the whole Lockerbie-Libya connection. It'll be interesting to see how this develops.

Propaganda & Dreams

I just bought a book called "Propaganda & Dreams", which has a great selection of photographs from the Thirties from both the US and the USSR. It's a fascinating period because photography was coming of age and heading out of the studios to record the world outside: the work of photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, depicting migrant workers, marked the beginning of photo-journalism.

It's also fascinating because the Thirties was the decade in which more than at any other time communism seemed plausibly to be the wave of the future. The 1929 crash had severely dented confidence in US capitalism, and the stories of heroic workers and successful agricultural reforms coming from the Soviet Union made a powerful impact. Photography only played a minor role in all this, but it still played its part.

Usually the writing in photography books is a waste of space. Clearly commissioned to bulk out the book a little and add some spurious intellectual weight, it normally just cobbles together a selection of cliches along the lines of, "unique vision", "questions our fundamental assumptions", and perhaps, if inspiration fails, "provides a searing indictment of our materialistic culture". It can also be a breeding ground for all sorts of post-modern wind, providing fertile ground for speculation on the relation between image and reality, and whether reality exists as such. So, I wasn't planning on reading the text here, but the inside leaf notes caught my eye:

The Nineteen Thirties: barefoot poverty in the Great Depression, breadlines, the Dust Bowl, Oakies migrating to a hoped-for better life out West. We have seen their faces in countless images, down-and-out American faces lodged for decades in a corner of our collective eye, the work of government photographers sent out to bring home the unadorned truth about their destitute countrymen. And in the Soviet Union, happy and healthy citizens are photographed at work and play, forging a new way of life and gazing heroically into the Socialist future. Soviet photographers, so the thinking goes, falsified reality, cynically serving a malevolent regime of collectivisation, terror, and show trials. American photographers, on the other hand, supposedly captured the raw reality of the Depression [....] Propaganda & Dreams shakes these assumptions to their core. In presenting never-before-seen pictures and looking afresh at familiar ones, this book challenges our widely held beliefs about the evocative era and indeed photography itself....

The book juxtaposes a number of similar scenes from the US and the USSR - pictures of workers in the fields, of people drinking, of hydroelectric dams - and argues that in both countries the pictures were used for a purpose, ie for propaganda, rather than reflecting reality. Therefore, apparently, photographers from both countries are engaged in similar enterprises, and the distinction between US and Soviet use of photography is exploded.

This is completely fatuous. Apart from that banality of the observation that photographers don't simply reflect reality, but have agendas of their own, we have to ask what the agendas were in these cases. The motives of the US photographers, by and large, were to bring to the attention of the American public the appalling conditions of life for so many poor people. Moreover independent magazines and newspapers in the States were often reluctant to publish government photographs, even given the high standard, because of fears of succumbing to propaganda. The motives in the USSR....well, for each photographer there was the simple question of survival: the book mentions in passing a certain Mezricher, who was declared a saboteur and Trotskyite by the press: "The saboteur contents of Mezhericher's articles and speeches, though cunningly hidden behind the screen of hurrah-revolutionary phrases, now leaves no doubt about their counter-revolutionary sense. This must be explained to the broad masses of photo workers." But the photographs themselves give the game away, knowing what we know now. Consider the picture "Dinner in the Kolhoz field, Ukraine" taken by Georgy Petrusov in 1934. Circles of peasants are seated in the centre of a huge field where the wheat has just been harvested. It's a scene of a community enjoying the bountiful rewards of labour. However, as the book does not tell you, but is surely of considerable significance to the way we might wish to view the photo, the years 1932-33 saw the height of the devastating famine in the Ukraine, in which about 5 million died.

So the authors of the book are asking us to believe that the situation of the US and Soviet photographers are largely equivalent, because both were using their photos in the interests of an agenda. In the one case it was to publicise the lot of the migrant workers in the South of the US, in the other it was to present an entirely false and benign image of a devastatingly brutal regime. They might as well have argued that they were equivalent because both used cameras. It typifies for me how a certain type of well-intentioned academic mind-set can completely miss the wood for the trees.

The afterword to the book entirely lives down to the general tone of academic writing about photography, which consistently and ponderously lectures us poor stupid readers, as though it was an entirely fresh insight, on the fact that photographs do not necessarily reflect reality.

The combination of documentary pictures with fabricated ideals represents the equivocal notion of truth in a variety of ways. Photographs may be staged or set up or they may be exact representations of historical events. They may use archives, texts, or props to build alternative views of history that question the relationship between truth and fiction. Scanning the archives of Soviet and American photography in the 1930s, we now rediscover a language that both preserves and alters our view of history because both memory and history strongly depend on such ambiguous representations. These images construct both propaganda and dreams for photographs, like memories, represent an illusion of the real world rather than the world itself.

In the middle of all that portentous verbiage, the deaths of millions somehow gets lost, pushed aside by the tedious mantra that "photographs, like memories, represent an illusion of the real world rather than the world itself".

Global Doom (updated)

The Observer brings us grim news:

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration [....].

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz [the authors of the report], the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said. 'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable".

Well he's not wrong there: it's completely unbelievable.

Some key findings of the report:

· By 2007 violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands inhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento river area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

· Between 2010 and 2020 Europe is hardest hit by climatic change with an average annual temperature drop of 6F. Climate in Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia.

· Deaths from war and famine run into the millions until the planet's population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope.

· Riots and internal conflict tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia.

Has anyone told the Dutch yet that in three years The Hague will be abandoned?

And it's all Bush's fault!

Update:

Tim Blair has more on this.

Belfast Teenagers

This article, in the Times, under the heading "On the streets where beatings are routine, terror is driving teenage boys to suicide", is genuinely shocking:

The two teenage boys planned to commit suicide together. But after a punishment beating by paramilitaries, Anthony O’Neill couldn’t wait. Last week he took a belt and hanged himself. At his graveside, his best friend, 17-year-old Bernard Cairns, said under his breath: “We were supposed to do this together . . . I’ll be with you soon.”

At Anthony’s wake, Bernard told his sister Bernie about their plan to commit suicide together. Then he climbed to the the top of scaffolding attached to a church above the Belfast ghetto where he grew up and hanged himself with his fleece jacket.

Anthony and Bernard are the latest in a spate of suicides that have claimed 13 young lives since January in North and West Belfast.

Both boys had been victims of paramilitary “punishments”. Two years ago, Bernard was abducted from a friend’s house, taken to a deserted spot and had a hole shot through both his shins. When Anthony’s turn came he was grabbed from his bed in the middle of the night and stuffed down a manhole. [....]

In May, another close friend, 18-year-old Philip “Pip” McTaggart, hanged himself with a length of hosepipe outside the Holy Cross Church where Bernard Cairns took his life.

Mr McTaggart was an ostensibly happy young man who had just started work in a job he loved. He killed himself a day after he smashed a car window belonging to a member of the INLA. It is thought that, fearing violent consequences, he pre-empted a paramilitary reckoning.

He knew what he could expect; just recently, a 14-year-old among his circle of friends was tarred and feathered then dragged from his home and shot through the back of the knee after the INLA accused him of being a police informer. The boy claims that the group’s leader has since threatened him with rape. [...]

In the Ardoyne, boys of 13 are approached as they play in the park and told they will be eligible for their first shooting come their next birthday. Teenagers who commit petty misdemeanours must brace themselves for the worst.

The “six pack” is a paramilitary speciality. It involves shattering the ankles, knees and elbows. The day Bernard Cairns had his legs permanently crippled, members of the INLA waited outside his house chanting: “Come out to play, Barney." [...]

Although the police do not keep figures on paramilitary-style attacks where both perpetrators and victims are of the same religion, many of those living and working in North and West Belfast’s traditionally violent areas, claim that they have increased. “Since the Good Friday agreement and the IRA ceasefire we’ve seen more shootings and beatings than ever before,” Dr McGarry [a local psychiatrist] said. “We’ve seen fewer people injured by bombs or beatings from the so-called ‘other side’ and more of these young fellows attacked by people of their own religion.

“These kids are growing up in a society where violence is acceptable, where you can go to the Sinn Fein or INLA office and they will tell you, yes, an attack is planned on your child.”