Horner's Corner

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Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Negating the truth about the Nakbah — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1948 — has been a staple of Jewish-nationalist propaganda as long as I can remember: As a youngster in Habonim, I was told bubbemeis tales about foolish Arabs marching off into the wilderness like zombies after being hypnotized by radio broadcasts urging them to leave; a “miracle” on a par with the parting of the Red Sea that ostensibly gave the Zionist movement the “land without a people” about which it had fantasized. It should have been painfully obvious that this was a preposterous self-serving myth (which even then didn’t account for the fact that the ethnic cleansing was sealed by Israel in one of its founding laws that denied the right of any Arab absent from their property on the day of Israel’s creation to return to that property). But to suggest anything less than a miraculous conception and bloodless birth for the state of Israel was to deny its “legitimacy”, we were told. As international pressure grows for an historic reckoning between Israelis and Palestinians, the frenzy of denial and negation has intensified. Suddenly, Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, even though to do so requires that Palestinian refugees simply sign away their birthright, erase their history and identity. Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the effort by members of Israel’s parliament to outlaw commemoration of the Nakba.

More here.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson (1896)

Fast Tube by Casper">Watch the football! – David Mitchell

The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold

When spring’s young sunshine bathes their trunks in gold,

So rich, so beautiful, so past the power

Of words to paint–my heart aches for the dower

The pencil gives to soften and infuse

This brown luxuriance of unfolding hues,

This living luscious tinting woodlands give

Into a landscape that might breathe and live,

And this old gate that claps against the tree

The entrance of spring’s paradise should be–

Yet paint itself with living nature fails:

The sunshine threading through these broken rails

In mellow shades no pencil e’er conveys,

And mind alone feels fancies and portrays.

I like the way the art/nature theme takes on a political, yet still entirely ‘natural’ turn towards the end: Clare is thinking of the enclosures that had driven so many like him from the land – their land. Worth remembering next time you are walking in the countryside and see a ‘private property’ sign blocking off a copse or woodland path.

(Paintings of trees by John Sell Cotman, apart from ‘The Cornfield’ which is by Constable (1826) -immediately below; photograph by  CH)

“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)

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Alain Badiou in Libération

It becomes increasingly clear that it’s always the citizens who lose, as the crisis showed it amply. Why does society give the impression of being powerless, unable to react and thus require another model?

The current difficulty is that it is very hard to resist and react within the existing political and institutional framework. It would be necessary to invent both the means of reacting and the contents of this reaction. That will take time, but I remain convinced that it is possible.

Do you think, as Jean-Luc Mélenchon affirmed yesterday evening at Serge Moati’s, that the state of public freedom these last few months is “rotten” in France, under the action of the government and of the president?

Certainly. A whole part of the policy of Sarkozy produces a reduction in public freedoms. There is an increase of controls, aggravation of sorrows, and open attacks against the institutions charged with defending these freedoms. There is no longer any doubt that Sarkozy’s conception of a head of the State is basically an authoritative and repressive conception.

More here

It’s in Sienna, late medieval – quite different in many ways from contemporary work being done in Florence. The message has some force for us today: are we closer to the ideal city of the Renaissance, itself inspired by Plato and Aristotle: where the Good finds its habitus?

Or does the vision of bad government seem all too familar? the place of discord, of avarice and untamed animal passions? Your call..

Wasn’t that bloke on the front bench recently…?

‘There is  no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’ – Thatcher. This is the neoliberal vision of negative freedom -do as you please, but don’t interfere with my freedom.

And this, I submit, is where erasing the concept of the citizen and replacing it with the consumer gets us. The Common Good? that can go hang.

All that prating about ‘values’ from the Tories and the New Labour placemen and women came to this. As far as they’re concerned the way you tackle the effects of  ‘antisocial behaviour’  is with ASBOS and privatised cleaning companies. I wonder what it would be like to have a government that could connect causes to effects? or had some vision?