Blog

l 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.

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.

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.

ne 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”.

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.

st] 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.”

ree points: they demonized the Bush and Blair administrations, approved the diplomatic line of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, and communed with the pacifist movement. And journalists reported the war they would like to see rather than the war that was.

On the way some French coverage emphasised US brutality:

The American strategy of very quick efficient raids made the regime collapse. I think those journalists were so astonished, the only explanation they gave was that the GIs were brutal, they had no consideration for civilians. The best example of this is what Rémy Ourdan wrote about Saddam’s fedayeen. These were the dictator’s most oppressive guards, they were like his SS. Ourdan said the fedayeen didn’t fight because they were so frightened by the way the GI’s were killing everybody, and a lot of civilians, so the fedayeen didn’t want to defend them so the Americans wouldn’t kill so many civilians. It’s a joke.

The whole interview is worth reading, and has echoes with the way the war was reported in some quarters here.

ent Minister, said that there was no “moral, scientific or political authority” for the move and green campaigners said the leaked minutes showed that big business had triumphed over public opinion. […] “Why is the Government going ahead?” he asked. “It is not because of the science, it is because of the Bush Administration applying pressure and because of big companies like Monsanto who want to make a big profit out of cornering the world food supply. It has nothing to do with feeding the world.”

Ben Ayliffe, of Greenpeace, said: “Going ahead with GM would be a disaster for farming and the countryside. There are no rules in place to stop GM contaminating organic and non-GM crops.”

Tony Juniper, of Friends of the Earth, said: “The views of the British public count for nothing when it comes to looking after the interests of Tony Blair’s business friends.”

Those arguing for the benefits of GM food have got an uphill task, and surely one of the main reasons was the staggeringly inept way that the topic was first made the focus of public debate by Monsanto. The deal was this: they developed new strains of genetically modified crops, resistant to pesticides. Then the farmer could simply drench his fields with pesticide – purchased, along with the crop seeds, from Monsanto – and, lo and behold, the crops would be the only living things left. The future of agriculture!

I wonder, was a new technology ever introduced with such a disastrous piece of PR.

r_1_8_1/202-5403596-8940647″>Frederick Crews, Richard Webster, John Farrell and Allan Esterson, looked at the whole ghastly history in detail: the cocaine days; Freud’s awful realisation that all the sexual abuse he’d set out with such determination to uncover was – horrors! – purely a result of his suggestion, and – masterstroke! – the decision to blame it all on the wretched patients’ unconscious fantasies; the sheer fraudulence of his case histories; the setting up of a cult with followers, sacred texts, schisms….

What I particularly enjoy is the self-reflexive nature of it all, famously pointed out by Karl Kraus in the early days when he suggested that psychoanalysis is the disease of which it claims to be the cure. Dufresne has a nice line:

Another way to put it is that it is psychoanalysis itself that has infected the Western soul with penis envy, Oedipal conflicts, death drives and so on. For these ideas are not given to, and cannot be found in, the world. They must be created. Consequently, the death of psychoanalysis is itself the only cathartic event psychoanalysis was ever designed to deliver.

But there’s still much more to be written: was it pseudoscience, was it a cult, what exactly was going on here? The library shelves previously full of books on Freudian exegesis will now start filling up with books trying to explain how such a load of nonsense managed to occupy such a central place in the intellectual life of the 20th century.

em seem like the natural party of government after so long on the opposition benches. Otherwise his record is mixed at best and not obviously about to get better, with more tuition fee battles to come, problems with PFI hospitals, and perhaps worst of all a complete failure to get to grips with transport. The economy’s strong, but credit for that goes to Brown rather than Blair.

But it’ll be foreign policy where he’ll be mainly judged, and I imagine he thinks his record will in years to come be viewed favourably. He was instrumental in persuading Bill Clinton to act against Milosevic, and in the NATO intervention in Kosovo. He sent troops to Sierra Leone in a successful intervention against rebel forces. And finally, Iraq.

Iraq isn’t going to go away for Blair. It’s unlikely that there’ll come a point should he stay on – say in 5 years or so – when the Iraqis will have taken so well to democracy and freedom, and the situation in the Middle East will be so much improved, that his current critics will roll over and admit they were completely wrong. Nor is he ever going to change his mind. However bad things get in Iraq he’ll still be saying, as he did recently, that we should be proud as a country for what we did in Iraq.

But he must be getting to the point now where the game is barely worth the candle. A large proportion of the Labour party dislike him strongly, and despite the fact that he’s undoubtedly tougher than he was, and no longer expects everyone to love him, he still gives the impression, for a politician, of being thin-skinned. He must look at Bill Clinton with envy as he strolls around the celebrity speaking circuit. Or – more plausibly given his strong moral sense – he thinks there may be a role for him somewhat like Jimmy Carter’s, as a kind of roving ambassador.

For Labour generally it would make sense for Blair to go soon (not too soon, in case he’s seen as unable to take the pressure, but nearer the election). The Tories are currently more buoyant under Howard than they have been for years, but unless they tighten up their act it would be relatively easy post-Blair for Labour to burst their balloon, as their policies are all over the place. And after Blair much of the anti-war leakage to the Lib-Dems would reverse (especially if Robin Cook was given a cabinet post, but that would not be a happy outcome for Blair).

It would also make sense in broader terms, in that Blair set up the Labour government with a strong move to the right which was needed to make them electable, but now they’re seen as responsible they need to rally the troops with a touch of the tiller over to the Brown left. With relations with Europe now becoming critical, it also might be seen as a good time for the more sceptical Brown to take over.