Melanie Phillips
August 7, 2008
Has Bush forgotten his own doctrine?
Jewish Chronicle, 8 August 2008
In the world of diplomacy, things are often not what they seem. When it comes to the crisis over Iran, there is even more cause to be sceptical. Disinformation in such a stand-off is routine.
That’s not to say there is any doubt about Iran’s race to develop nuclear weapons. The regime is gloating at having faced down the international community’s deadline for halting uranium enrichment.
Recently, the Kuwaiti paper Al-Siyassa reported yet another ominous development: Iran is constructing a secret nuclear reactor in the al Zarqan region in order to avoid international oversight.
A nuclear Iran would threaten the existence of Israel and hold the rest of the world to ransom. Yet from all the signals coming out of Washington and Jerusalem, it seems that the Bush administration has decided not to confront Iran but to appease it.
Recent signs that this is so include its decision to station diplomats in Iran for the first time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979; its support for an Iranian stooge as president of Lebanon; and the procession of Israeli defence bigwigs flying to Washington to beg the Americans to support an Israeli strike on Iran.
Who knows? Maybe all these signals are but bluff and counter-bluff. But from the anguished noises coming out of Israel, I doubt that the US still agrees that a nuclear Iran is an unconscionable prospect. The Bush doctrine is dead and has been supplanted by its antithesis. Everyone is talking appeasement rather than pre-emption. Israel — which may conclude that it has no alternative but to attack Iran — appears to be left swinging in the wind.
The wider tragedy may be that a priceless opportunity for a realignment of the entire region is being squandered. The greatest fear of the Arab states is Iran’s growing power. But for the Arabs, if their mortal enemy isn’t defeated, they adopt the next best course — to make deals with it.
When they concluded that America would not attack Iran — as they had hoped it would — they started cosying up to it instead. This should not be mistaken for friendship. On the contrary, they hate and fear Iran and are constantly looking for ways out of the scorpion’s embrace.
That is why across the political spectrum in Israel there has been such interest in a possible agreement between Israel and Syria (which with Ehud Olmert’s fall now may be deader that the Monty Python parrot). Wise heads scoffed that this was merely a cynical ploy by Syria to gain brownie points from the West. And maybe that was so.
But the alternative view was that Syria was desperate to escape the clutches of Iran and so could have been peeled away into a deal with Israel — if it thought that the West would not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Other Arab states feeling similarly threatened might have (discreetly) followed suit.
If such a realignment was ever a possibility, that slim chance has now been scuppered by the Bush appeasement doctrine. This has given Iran its most precious asset — time — and reinforced its confidence that the West is weak and is being outmanoeuvred at every turn. And the Arab states have drawn their own conclusion.
Of course, the whole world is waiting to see what the new American president will do. But in the meantime, what is so disturbing about Britain is the absence of concern over the threat posed by Iran to Israel, the rest of the world or its own people.
Partly, it is because the British find Ahmadinejad too absurd to take the threat of such a messianic apocalypticist seriously. Partly, it is because having convinced themselves that ‘Bush/Blair lied, people died’, they refuse to believe any intelligence assessment of a threat to the West.
More terrible still, so effective has been the delegitimisation of Israel by the British intelligentsia and the media that a disturbing number of people in Britain are now quite indifferent to the prospect of Israel’s destruction.
Beyond that horrible fact lies the astounding indifference of progressive opinion to the persecution of the Iranian people at the hands of this tyrannical regime. Dissidents are being tortured and murdered. Homosexuals are being hanged. Women are being stoned to death. Bloggers are being threatened with mutilation or death.
So where is the outcry from British progressives? Where are the demonstrations, the leading articles, the savage newspaper columns? Where is the campaign to boycott Iranian institutions or commerce? Where is the support for Iranian dissidents and opposition parties?
Is there silence because the civilised, pro-Western, pro-Israel Iranian people do not fit the template of third world oppression?
War should only ever be a last resort. The dreadful fact about Iran, however, is that we have never begun to exhaust other possibilities but instead have shamefully looked the other way.
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August 6, 2008
The ‘Me’ in media
Literary Review, August 2008
Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain by Peter Whittle (The Social Affairs Unit 93pp £10)
In this short but insightful book, Peter Whittle pinpoints one of the most conspicuous but shallowly perceived phenomena of our times. The cult of celebrity is in itself hardly news. We live in a time when fame has arguably eclipsed even money — with which it is so often paired — as the most desirable attribute to be pursued.
Once-serious newspapers now devote acres of space to the activities of TV or rock stars. The lives and homes of celebrities are exhaustively opened up to us through Hello! and OK! magazines. So desperate are ordinary people to achieve their fifteen minutes of fame that they queue up to be publicly humiliated on cruel and voyeuristic TV game shows. Reality TV both constructs celebrity out of the mundane and ruthlessly cuts the famous down to size.
What Peter Whittle has grasped, however, is that modern celebrity is not characterised, as it was in previous times, by the idea of ‘them and us’, the sense of a curtain being lifted on a world ordinary people don’t share and which draws its glamour precisely from its inaccessibility.
On the contrary, the current obsession with fame actually represents a deeply narcissistic obsession with the self. What we worship most of all in the media are the first two letters of that word. Celebrities represent a star-studded mirror which mesmerises us because we imagine that in it we can see ourselves.
This is because the modern cult of fame derives from a culture in which the individual has become the centre of the universe: the sun around which everyone and everything else must revolve. With external authority now considered an affront to the self along with the religious doctrines that imposed it, morality and culture have been systematically privatised and relativised so that no one’s values or lifestyle can trump those of anyone else. Every individual is thus a hero to himself.
If everyone is special, however, it follows that no one is special. So people can achieve fame even if they have no particular talent or have achieved nothing of distinction. They can be famous simply for being famous. Indeed, our super-egalitarian culture tells us that elitism is a bad thing; the very idea of a hierarchy of values offends our most cherished belief that no one can be judged inferior to anyone else.
So since we can no longer look up, instead we look down. Entertainers such as the stars of Little Britain are feted for representing the dismal and degraded; the more dysfunctional the life of the celebrity — Amy Winehouse springs to mind — the more she is adored. With so many of us living wrecked or chaotic lives, it comforts us to see people who, despite similar problems, manage to be fashionable, wealthy or successful.
Princess Diana was of course the most conspicuous example of this trend — someone who embodied and seemed to transcend difficulties with which we could identify, on the basis of a life that we confidently imagined we knew as intimately as our own. But of course we didn’t. All we know of such a life is the image the celebrity herself — or the media — has constructed for us. Our subscription to celebrity culture is our entry ticket to Planet Virtual Reality.
As Whittle observes, it is children who think that the world revolves around them — and our culture ensures that they never leave that solipsistic state. The education system’s obsessive wish that everything children are taught has to be ‘relevant’ to their lives means that rather than leading children to understand the world around them, it merely confirms in them what they already know. So they cannot grow outwards and upwards to proper adulthood.
At the same time, they are treated as premature adults by a grown-up world that will not discipline them on the basis that they must make their own ‘choices’ about how to behave and ensures that they never fail at anything in case this destroys their ’self-esteem’.
They grow up into an adult world that is deeply infantilised. Everything is all about ‘me’. The therapy culture is devoted to getting in touch with the child within in order to actualise the repressed self. Everyone is obsessed with remaining perpetually young, at least as far as face-lifted, Botoxed appearance is concerned.
Private emotion has been replaced by mass exhibitionism, in order to make public statements about what nice people we are. But the public displays of grief following the deaths of famous strangers actually express sentimentality and false emotion: you can’t grieve for someone you don’t know, and to think that you do means you don’t know what real grief or love or emotion actually are.
This leads straight on to indifference, or worse, towards other people. Another of Whittle’s insights is that much contemporary antisocial behaviour is designed to put on a show. ‘Look at me misbehaving’ says the drunken yob. Any remonstration with the youth putting his feet up on the train seat produces outrage, and even violence, since the remonstrator is at fault for daring to encroach on the miscreant’s personal space.
One further question arises from this book — which is why fame is so important to us. It’s hard not to conclude that, although (or because) we have made ourselves the centre of the universe, our lives are hollow and empty. We seek validation from others for our lives. ‘Look at me’, we say, ‘and then I will know I am worthy; only then will I know I exist.’
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Posted by Britannia Radio at 06:48