Author: Mick Hartley

d why Vettriano should appeal to the Samizdata libertarians:

What he refers to as the ‘art establishment’ in this country is actually a tax-funded clique of ‘gatekeepers’ whose power rests on their self-defined status as members of an aesthetic order that is way above and beyond the ‘crass populism’ of genuine creative endeavour. This avant-garde elite live by their grip on state purse-strings and if you can find significance and ‘art’ in a jarful of pickled dogturds, so much stronger is your claim to membership of this ‘Priesthood of Understanding’.

It is in their interests to perpetuate the myth that without government funding there will be no art or culture. The success of Jack Vettriano is a standing refutation of that myth. Small wonder that they despise him.

This is good stuff, especially in the wake of the “fourth plinth” decision, a classic case of state funding where aesthetic criteria have been abandoned in the face of a tedious politically correct “statement”. However as was pointed out in one of the comments, much of the worst modern British art is collected by the private money of Charles Saatchi. Indeed modern art over the course of the 20th century was largely supported by wealthy individuals like Peggy Guggenheim, with the constant complaint that state-funded galleries were unable to compete with the prices being paid by private collectors.

Vettriano isn’t kitsch rubbish (Thomas Kinkade is kitsch rubbish), but I can’t pretend any great enthusiasm for his stuff. As another comment noted, he’s not unlike Edward Hopper, though with the alienation of Hopper replaced by a one-dimensional faded thirties romanticism.

If Vettriano is the best that the private sector can come up with, and “Alison Lapper Pregnant” the best that state funding can come up with, then the art world is definitely in trouble. But then we knew that already.

I posted about the disaster of Clissold Leisure Centre (in Hackney) last month. A comment from John Runtz has brought the “Not the Clissold Leisure Centre” website to my attention. Worth a look if you live in that area.

sed France of direct responsibility for the 1994 genocide of at least 800,000 people in the central African country.

His remarks reignited a bitter diplomatic row between Rwanda and France and threatened attempts to mark the 10th anniversary of the killings with dignity.

M Kagame claimed that the French government supplied weapons, logistical support and even senior military planners to the regime of militant ethnic Hutus responsible for the slaughter of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Diplomats and witnesses to the genocide have often accused France of tacit involvement, but Mr Kagame’s comments are the most explicit statement of the allegations.

He made them after a French police report, which took six years to prepare, blamed him for the shooting down of a plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda’s then president and an ethnic Hutu, on April 6, 1994.

Mr Habyarimana’s death sparked 100 days of mass killing in Rwanda. Most historians, diplomats and journalists believe that militant Hutus shot down the plane as a deliberate pretext for their premeditated slaughter.

Mr Kagame, an ethnic Tutsi, flatly denied any involvement in Mr Habyarimana’s death and launched a blistering counter-attack against France in an interview given to RFI, the French state-run radio station.

“The French supplied weapons; they gave orders and instructions to the perpetrators of genocide,” he said.

“The French were there when the genocide took place. They trained those who carried it out.

“They had positions of command in the armed forces who committed the genocide.

“They also directly participated in operations by putting up roadblocks to identify people by ethnic origin, punishing the Tutsis and supporting the Hutus.”

Journalists who covered Rwanda in the early 1990s reported that French peacekeepers appeared to side with the Hutu government and against the Tutsi-based Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Mr Kagame, which had been responsible for an armed incursion into Rwanda in 1990 from exile.

In at least one case, French troops moved United Nations peacekeepers away from a college where they were protecting 2,000 Tutsis. After the peacekeepers were moved, the Tutsis were slaughtered. Mr Kagame said the police report blaming him for Mr Habyarimana’s death was a politically motivated attempt to deflect blame from France.

Yes the man was despicable. He was the moral force behind the Hamas suicide bombers, and I can’t pretend that I have any regrets over his death. Equally the line on Channel 4 News, where the words “wheelchair-bound” and “spiritual leader” featured frequently, was nauseating. When the Israeli spokesman in Jerusalem responded to Jon Snow’s outrage by citing some of the atrocities for which Yassin bore responsibility, it was something that needed saying. But when the man went on to say that, now, at last, Israeli citizens could go about their lives more peacefully, he wasn’t fooling anyone.

Maybe Israel has become so hardened by its experience that it no longer cares about world opinion, but as well as a struggle for survival there’s the struggle for the moral high ground, and from that point of view Israel has shot itself in the foot here. So although I can appreciate what Oliver Kamm is saying here, I still have to disagree with his verdict that Jack Straw was being facile in his remarks, quoted here by the BBC:

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described the assassination of Sheikh Yassin as “unacceptable” and “unjustified”.

Mr Straw said he did not think Israel would benefit from an attack on an old man in a wheelchair.

World opinion of Israel will have sunk even lower now. We may say that world opinion is foolish, even that it’s tainted with anti-semitism, but it does nevertheless matter.

Justice may have been done, but I don’t believe that this has made Israel safer. Nor has it made it any easier for those of us who support Israel to argue its case in future.

Every week in the Times A.C.Grayling grapples with the major questions of our times from a philosophical point of view. This week the Great Man looks at terrorism.

It’s all perfectly reasonable, as you’d expect. What should our moral stance be towards the terrorists? Grayling decides that contempt is appropriate. Okay, I wouldn’t argue with that. What should our general attitude be? Well, the best thing to do is to carry on as normal. Wise words indeed.

The level-headed tone and impeccable reasonableness of Grayling’s writing show how through the application of clear thinking we can come to grips with this appalling threat.

Then we get to the end of the article:

Even if they get nuclear bombs (as doubtless they will) and set them off in the middle of some of our big cities, they will be able to kill only a minority of us, even if that minority numbers hundreds of thousands. We are 60 million in Britain, over half a billion in “the West”, six billion in the world: there is futility in the project of hatred that the bombers have launched. So the right attitude to take towards them is to recognise that their worst can never be more than a snowball thrown at a castle: the castle of our values and our freedoms.

So we carry on as normal, stiff upper lip and all, and the worst they can do – pshaw! – is set off nuclear bombs in our major cities. Should we perhaps attempt to fight back in some way? Grayling doesn’t say, but if it involves any change to our normal lives or our laws than the terrorists will have won, so it’s probable that he’s not in favour.

I don’t know, but somehow I’m left feeling a little less than reassured.

ver be repeated. The Conservatives backed the Government last year over the war because Iraq was a real threat to the peace of the region and it was in gross and manifest breach of UN resolutions.

“What would have been the consequences if we had waited until a direct threat was real and imminent until we acted? Would we have been in a position to counter it? How could we take the risk that we would find ourselves impotent?”

If the West maintained its resolution, Iraq would be a much better place than it was under Saddam. The terrorists who murdered innocent people in New York and Madrid would like nothing better than to see the Western alliance splinter and break apart.

“We won the Second World War because we fought side-by-side with America. We won the Cold War because we stood side-by-side with America. And we will win this War on Terror if we wage it side-by-side with America.”

I have to say, I’m impressed. The leaders of our two main parties have now both made firm commitments to the war against terror.

As we all desperately await some Muslim – any Muslim – prepared to stand up and condemn the atrocities committed in the name of Islam, this has to be good news:

British Muslims are planning a mass rally in Central London to demonstrate against all forms of terrorism. The Muslim Council of Britain, the largest umbrella group of the 2.5 million Muslims in Britain, is urgently consulting its members and mosques on proposals for a rally to underline Muslim condemnation of the Madrid bombings and al-Qaeda violence.

“We need to show that there is no difference of opinion among any of us in Britain — Muslim, Christian or whatever religion — in our stand on this. We are one and the same, and it is a common enemy that we are fighting,” Iqbal Sacranie, the council’s secretary-general, said.

He said it was important to show other Britons that British Muslims were doing something visible against violence. The council strongly condemned the bombings in Madrid but was hurt that its statement was not widely reported.

Mr Sacranie also condemned the abuse of politicial issues by al-Qaeda and other extremists who used them as justification for violence. “There can never be any justification for terrorism,” he said.

The organisers are hoping to include representatives from every mosque in Britain, as well as Muslim MPs, businessmen, professional leaders and academics. “Everyone in the community should be represented,” he said. The council is considering possible approaches to leaders of other religious groups to join in a demonstration against terrorism.

“The hearts of Muslims and all peoples of conscience go out to families of those whose loved ones have been murdered and those who have been wounded in these appalling atrocities. Our heartfelt condolences go out to the Spanish people at this time of shock and grief,” the council said after the Madrid bombings. Mr Sacranie and other members of the council have visited the Spanish Embassy to sign the book of condolences.

governing and opposition parties decided to suspend campaigning – but the government has already said that the election will go ahead as planned on Saturday.

Analysts have been saying that the election is too close to call, and our correspondent in Taiwan says that the shooting makes the result even more unpredictable.

Experts are saying that Mr Chen may now be propelled to a significant victory by a sudden wave of public sympathy.

The Times supplies more background with this article on Miss Taiwan (or, according to the China, Miss Chinese Taipei):

About 70 per cent of the island’s population is native Taiwanese, while the rest are Han Chinese whose families arrived from the mainland after the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek lost a civil war against Mao’s Communists in 1949.

For five decades, the KMT imposed a Chinese mindset on Taiwan in preparation for its eventual return to the mainland. Four years ago, long after it became obvious that Communist rule had became permanent, the KMT lost power to President Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has its roots in the predominantly native Taiwanese south of the island.

President Chen, a native Taiwanese, set out to create a local identity. The word “Taiwan” was added to passports next to Taiwan’s official name, Republic of China, and new maps were issued that showed the mainland as a separate country.

Most importantly, President Chen lifted the KMT ban on speaking Taiwanese in schools and instead made language lessons in the island’s native tongue mandatory in primary schools.

On the occasion of the publication of a new anthology, “Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War”, Clive Davis in the Times has an article that’s worth reading:

The literary classes often follow a party line, so no one should be surprised by their stance in a new anthology about the rights and wrongs of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War has contributions from the great and the good of the literary world, from Antonia Fraser to Paul Theroux and John le Carré. The co-editor, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, says that of 70 authors polled on the war, which started one year ago this week, at least 50 weighed in on the anti-war side, a dozen were broadly neutral, and only the meagre remnants supported George Bush and Tony Blair.

Wilson insists that the project was not conceived as an anti-war exercise, and points out that she and her husband and co-editor, Cecil Woolf, are on opposite sides of the debate. Extracts that appeared before publication gave a flavour of the arguments. David Hare denounced the mendacity of the Anglo-American allies; Nadine Gordimer skewered the West’s “subliminal racism”; David Guterson bemoaned the “blind greed” of American capitalism; Harold Pinter muttered darkly about a “gangster act” designed to bolster US plans for world domination. There was a sprinkling of pro-war voices, including John Keegan, D. M. Thomas and Alan Sillitoe, but few of them could be considered members of the Hampstead-Hamptons axis. […]

Fortunately for the population of Kuwait, perhaps, writers are not the legislators of our age. What was striking about the extracts was how few of the war’s opponents acknowleged the complexity of the issues at stake. David Lodge, grappling with questions of legality, proved one of the honourable exceptions.

From most of the others came the sound of righteous platitudes. David Hare’s indignation even led him to claim that the American President “lied when he pretended (Iraq) possessed nuclear weapons”. Since Bush had said that part of the war’s raison d’être was to prevent Saddam acquiring a nuclear weapon, this assertion seems odd, to say the least.

Most troubling of all was the collective inability to understand the forces driving American policy. The liberal intelligentsia spends an awful lot of time denouncing the actions of the Bush Administration, yet rarely bothers to analyse its philosophy. Neo-conservatism, to give the most obvious example, is the most fashionable word on everyone’s lips — the actor Tim Robbins flays into Richard Perle & Co in his satirical play Embedded, at New York’s Public Theatre — yet how many of the literati actually know what the term means? I sometimes suspect that salon critics like the term because it sounds thrillingly close to “neo-fascist”.

This story in the Times caught my eye:

A senior police officer has been nicknamed the Pied Piper after he accidentally started a nose-to-tail convoy of cars by inadvertently switching on a sign on top of his patrol car instructing those behind: “Follow Me.”

No fewer than five drivers had assumed that he must mean them before the inspector, who has not been named, realised what was happening.

Essex Police said that the officer was finally forced to pull up when he noticed the convoy of cars patiently following his every move at Great Totham, near Maldon, Essex. Some of them had, by then, been obediently shadowing the patrol car for several miles. […]

“He became aware that he had a number of cars following his every move and suddenly realised what he had done. He had to pull over and apologise to the other drivers for what had happened. Luckily they saw the funny side of it.”