One Shot at History

I find the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald fascinating. The more facts we know, the less of a complete picture we get of the guy. Ron Rosenbaum has a neat essay on the JFK assassination theorists in his big collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune, that (to me) forms a sort of trilogy with essays on Danny Casolaro and Kim Philby.

But this essay by James Piereson in Commentary contends that my Oswald-mosaic concept is bunk, and that LHO was set on killing JFK in response to U.S. attempts to kill Castro. More to the point, Piereson contends that most of the conspiracy-theorizing derives from the fact the LHO was a left-wing assassin:

Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist–an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.

Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.

Now that last paragraph is hearsay, as far as I’m concerned, but Piereson uses this idea of Oswald-denial as a springboard for the meltdown of liberalism. I find it pretty fascinating, but you know what I’m like.

Give it a read.

Or just write humorless comments about how big corporations are controlling our minds.

It’s good to be the Shah?

Human Events runs a long and implausibly candid interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah of Iran, who seems to be campaigning for U.S. backing for a ‘peaceful’ overthrow of the mullahs. Highlights include:

I’m against developing any weapons of mass destruction. I work to see the world develop a process of disarmament because otherwise it will be madness. If we build it, tomorrow the Turks will build it, then the Saudis want to build it, then the Egyptians want to build it. Believe me, in that part of the world, there’s some track record how stable the world will feel having a whole bunch of nuclear warheads in the hands of all these people. Forget it. I’d be the first one proposing a plan to reverse the cycle of proliferation.

Since when has Israel been a threat to anyone? Israel just wants to be left alone and live in peace side by side with its neighbors. As far as I’m concerned, Israel never had any ambition to territorially go and invade, I don’t know, Spain or Morocco or anywhere else. And let me tell something else about Iran: Unlike the rest of the Islamic or Arab world, the relationship between Persia and the Jews goes back to the days of Cyrus the Great. We take pride as Iranians of having a history where Cyrus was the most quoted figure in the Torah, as a liberator of Jewish slaves, who went to Babylon and gave them true freedom for them to worship and in fact helped them build a temple. We have a biblical relation with Jews, and we have no problem with modern day Israel. As far as regional politics, I believe, I think many Iranians believe so, that as much as Israel has a right to exist, so should the Palestinians. They have to work the problem between each other. And we have no business interfering, and we need to help get as much stability in the region.

The reason the regime was using Khatami as the smiling face talking about a dialogue of civilizations was just to buy time. The same way that in the nuclear race they played the game of buying time by saying we’re going to negotiate with Russians or we’re not going to talk to them—buying time. Three years of endless negotiations has produced nothing. Why? The regime gained an extra three years. All I’m saying is that now, when you look at the future, we have a delicate time frame within which we can bring about change.

Q: In your Iran, Mahmoud Abdullah, the Afghan who converted to Christianity, would have every right to do that and the state would protect him from retaliation by radical clerics?

A: God, I hope so. I hope so. Because if we are basing our constitution on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that’s one of the most fundamental rights that any human being should have. I’m sick and tired of hypocrisy and all this dubious attitude that is so typical of our region. If you believe in something you say it, you don’t fool around. I mean, that’s where I’m coming from. I haven’t lived 45 years of my life to fool around with these things. If I’m willing to lose my life for it, hell I’m going to fight for these rights, otherwise it’s not worth it. Frankly it’s not worth it! I might as well forget about Iran and become a citizen and live my life in this country. No. I want to have the same rights you have over here over there. That’s what I’m fighting for! Otherwise why bother?

This ties into a link that VM reader Faiz K. sent over this weekend, about a Canada-based Iranian blogger’s experiences visiting Israel for the first time (and blogging about it):

Israel never existed except when Friday prayers would finish their “death to” chants with Israel. Everywhere else, even on maps, Tel Aviv was the capital of the “Zionist Regime” or “Occupied Palestine”.

I believed that Israelis saw no distinction between Mr Ahmadinejad and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami of Iran, in the same way that Iranians could not differentiate Shimon Peres from Binyamin Netanyahu.

My biggest surprise was when I found myself with two other Iranians, completely randomly, on the same minibus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. I had no idea that Israel had the world’s largest proportion of Iranians in its population, outside Iran itself.

It was only then I could digest the fact that Israel’s President Moshe Katsav and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, despite their hardline stances against the Iranian government, were originally from Iran.

I’m working on a longish post about Dubai, city-states and Jane Jacobs, but I’m not sure how that’ll turn out. I’ll let you know.

You can’t fire me, I quit!

Fawaz Turki explains “How To Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper

What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government. The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.

[. . .] My first provocation was — horror of horrors — to criticize Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after he cracked down on human rights activists several years ago. My second occurred soon after the failure of the Camp David accords when I called for the resignation of Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.

My last was to write about the atrocities Indonesia had committed during its occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. For that transgression, my Saudi paper showed no mercy. I was out the door. No questions asked, no explanations given. You don’t write about atrocities committed by an Islamic government — even when they’re already documented in the history books — and hope to get away with it.

In other depressing news from the Islamic world, it appears my buddy the Brooding Persian is pulling the plug on his blog. I hope that’s not the case; while his posts could get insanely overlong, he offered me a vitally important perspective on life, politics and religion in Iran and on earth. And he also reminded me of the importance of The Iliad.

Um, Happy Easter?

Okay, probably not, if you read this column by Christopher Hitchens about that “Lost Gospel of Judas” controversy.

Since I don’t have a horse in this race, my opinion shouldn’t count for much, but if you’re dealing with the earthly incarnation of an ominpotent, omniscient divinity, then it’d be awful tough to betray him, since he’d know in advance what you were going to do. As such, I’ve always figured that Judas had his role to serve in the story, and that it didn’t exactly make him damnation-worthy.

But Hitchens explores that issue better than I could.

I knew it was the Coptics all along!

Here’s an article about the “Gospel of Judas,” replete with some great quotes:

“Whether or not one agrees with it, or finds it interesting or reprehensible, it’s an enormously interesting perspective on it that some follower of Jesus in the early Christian movement obviously thought was significant.”

“It really would be a miracle if Judas was the author of this document, because he died at least 100 years before it was written. It may yield some interesting insights, but there’s nothing here to undermine what Christians have believed throughout the centuries.”

“It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD. An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”

I hear the manuscript has a passage where he complains about Harvey Keitel’s portrayal of him in the Last Temptation.

My favorite passage in the article is the one that seems to exonerate the Jews from the crucifixion:

[The manuscript] is believed to be a copy of a still earlier Gospel of Judas, which may have been written about 150 years after Jesus’s death by Coptic scholars.

Moon Over Malaysia

Check out the Virtual Memories Podcast!

I’m headed to the BIO conference in a few weeks. It’s in Chicago this year, a city that I haven’t seen much of. I had a parenteral drug conference there in the spring of 2000, and enjoyed the environs and architecture. I’m hoping for a little more time to get out and explore this time. This trip will unfortunately be contrasted by another conference two weeks later in Anaheim.

The BIO conference is dominated by regional economic development councils, which are intent on bringing biotech companies and their manufacturing facilities into their areas. These EDCs have a lot of incentives to offer and different ways of enticing companies to set up shop. I wrote all about it in the April issue of my magazine; I’ll post a link to that piece when it’s available, in case you’re interested in the stuff I spend my days working on.

A lot of these EDCs want trade magazine editors to visit during BIO, so they can explain to us what their region has to offer. Sometimes this evolves into a trip to that region; that’s how my Sweden/Denmark trip in August 2004 happened. I’ve been to a few other sites as part of this process: Puerto Rico, Spokane, WA, Phoenix/Scottsdale, and probably some others that I’m forgetting. Generally, I’m too busy to travel on some many junkets, so I make the rounds at BIO and learn what I can about the regions.

Which leads me to the invite I received from a PR firm by e-mail today. They’d like me to sit down for an interview with the CEO of the Malaysian Biotechnology Corp., the government agency devoted to building a biotech industry in that country. It was a pretty gracious invite, and it’s flattering that the firm considers my magazine worth the interview-time.

But I looked at the invite for a few moments, thinking, “Malaysia . . . Malaysia . . . Oh, that’s right! They won’t let you into the country if you have an Israeli passport!”

I spent a few minutes researching to make sure that was the case (which led me to the previous Prime Minister’s anti-semitic comments from 2003). Yup! Malaysia doesn’t recognize Israel’s existence (but does recognize Palestine’s: whew!).

I was prepared to write off the invite then and there, but it occurred to me that Israel might have the exact same policy. You never know. I’d hate to be more of a hypocrite than I already am.

I ended up having to call the Israeli consulate to clear up the issue: Malaysians aren’t treated differently than any other nationality coming to visit Israel; they just need a visa like anyone else. I told the young lady on the phone about Malaysia’s policy. She said, “Ooh. That’s not nice.” We agreed that my mother wouldn’t be happy about it, either.

After that, I struggled to write the e-mail to the PR rep. I didn’t want to take on an adversarial tone, or imply that she was morally compromised by helping represent Malaysia. But I did want to express my point of view about what I wouldn’t meet with them. I went with

I know this is going to sound terrible, but I can’t in good conscience discuss the attractions of a biotech base in a country that would turn away most of my family at the border because of the passports they carry.

As near as I can tell, Malaysia has a blanket ban on entry by Israeli nationals (with case-by-case exceptions), and I’m afraid that I can’t publicize/promote a country with that policy.

If I have my facts wrong, please let me know ASAP.

Thanks,

Gil Roth

Now there’s only a problem if the MBC decides to start advertising. Still, it wouldn’t be as bad as taking an 8-page ad insert from Sudan, like the NYTimes did. I was hoping it would open with the banner: “Sudan: More than Genocide and Civil Wars!”

Check out the Virtual Memories Podcast!

Breathe with me

I’ve long contended that conspiracy theories are a substitute-religion for the disillusioned; it gives them the opportunity to believe in a Greater Power, even if it’s just a power for evil. I think this ties into that Orwell passage I quoted a few weeks ago.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has a great piece on the mainstreaming of paranoia:

The rise of the conspiracy theory points to an important shift in journalism and public debate. There has been a move from debating the substance of someone’s beliefs or behaviour to focusing myopically on the motivations behind them; from challenging individuals over their words or actions to trying to uncover some deep, dark ulterior motive. This has had a deadening effect on public debate. It replaces a critical engagement with political developments with a destructive neverending search for the secret agenda. And it means that no one is ever truly held to account for what they say or do. After all, if Blair is merely the puppet of dark neocons forces when it comes to Iraq, then how can we hold him up to public ridicule for what has happened there?

This is not investigative journalism; it is gossip.

Read more, if you dare.

In a barrel

Nice post by Andrew Sullivan, ripping up Stanley Fish for “post-modern claptrap”:

Yes, Fish has read Nietzsche, hence his homage in the sentence: “The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.” But this is a distortion of liberalism, as Nietzsche’s was. The defense of free speech is not a frivolous exercise, as Fish argues. In the context of a continent where artists and writers have been threatened with death and murdered for their freedoms, it is a deadly serious task. And maintaining support for the difficult restraint that liberalism asks of us — to maintain faith if you want, but to curtail its intolerant and extreme influence in the public square — is, pace Fish, not an easy or platitudinous path. It is the difficult restraint liberty requires in modernity. Fish, however, like many postmoderns, is skeptical of such ideas of liberty and, in a pinch, seems to prefer the Taliban’s authenticity to societies where writers dare to challenge religious taboos.

This cultural jiu-jitsu put me in mind of a passage from George Orwell’s great essay, Inside the Whale. I don’t think I’ve written about this passage before. Orwell has been discussing political trends among British writers: the modernists of the 1920s — whom he characterizes largely as fascists — and the Comintern-supporting writers of the 1930s. Since I can’t write anywhere near as well as Orwell, let’s just go with an extended passage:

[W]hy did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian Communism? Why should writers be attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible? The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself felt before the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilization had reached its Climax and “disillusionment” was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline — anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Fuehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God — Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the “Communism” of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.

Update: I zapped this post to Andrew Sullivan, who liked it enough to riff on it as his second Quote of the Day, and extend me a hat-tip! Much appreciated! New visitors: Enjoy the site!