Entrevista da 2ª- Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães
Secretário-geral do Itamaraty diz não haver ideologia no trabalho do ministério e nega antiamericanismo no governo Lula, mas manda recados sutis aos EUA
Para embaixador, política externa é só "pragmática"
ELIANE CANTANHÊDE
COLUNISTA DA FOLHA
DEPOIS DE atravessar os quatro anos do primeiro governo Lula falando muito para dentro do Itamaraty e pouco para fora, o embaixador Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães deu uma rara entrevista em que nega antiamericanismo no governo e classifica a política externa de "pragmática e não ideológica". Não deixou, porém, de mandar recados
sutis aos EUA. "Um mundo melhor", segundo ele, "será aquele em que as promessas de desarmamento se realizem, os preceitos do Direito Internacional sejam obedecidos pelas grandes potências, as diferenças econômicas entre os Estados se reduzam e o meio ambiente seja preservado". Por exigência dele, as perguntas foram feitas por escrito e respondidas por e-mail. Segue a íntegra da entrevista.
FOLHA - O ex-embaixador em Washington Roberto Abdenur declarou que há "um substrato ideológico vagamente anticapitalista, antiglobalização, antiamericano, totalmente superado" na política externa brasileira. O sr. concorda?
SAMUEL PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - A política externa do presidente Lula, conduzida pelo ministro Celso Amorim, é pragmática e não ideológica; é a favor do trabalho sem ser contra o capital; compreende que a globalização apresenta oportunidades mas também riscos para os países subdesenvolvidos; é a favor do Brasil e não contra qualquer país. Como o próprio presidente e o ministro não se cansam de repetir, a política
externa desperta o interesse e desfruta do respeito de todos os países, ricos e pobres; do Ocidente e do Oriente; da América do Sul e do Norte, o que se reflete no grande número de presidentes, primeiros-ministros, chanceleres, autoridades e empresários que vêm ao Brasil e desejam nossa cooperação política, econômica e social.
FOLHA - Os críticos da política externa afirmam que o Brasil tem uma participação há anos estacionada em 1,4% da economia norte-americana, perdendo milhões de dólares em negócios por conta de um suposto antiamericanismo. Como é possível menosprezar o principal mercado do mundo?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - O aumento da presença da China no mercado americano fez com que, no período de 1999 a 2006, nas importações americanas, a participação do Canadá caísse de 19% para 16,9%; a do Japão, de 12,8% para 7,9%; a da Alemanha, de 5,3% para 4,9%; a da França, de 2,5% para 2,0%. Ao contrário, a participação do Brasil cresceu de 1,1% para 1,4%, refletindo o aumento de nossas exportações de US$ 10 bilhões para US$ 24 bilhões. São as empresas brasileiras que exportam: elas não menosprezaram o mercado americano, nosso principal comprador, e tiveram todo o apoio do governo brasileiro em seu esforço.
FOLHA - O sr. é uma espécie de símbolo do suposto antiamericanismo, inclusive por ser ferrenho adversário da Alca. Convém ao governo brasileiro mantê-lo no segundo cargo na hierarquia do Itamaraty? O objetivo é justamente marcar posição?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - O cargo de secretário-geral das Relações Exteriores é de livre nomeação do presidente Lula, por indicação do ministro Celso Amorim. Cabe ao presidente e ao ministro, naturalmente, decidir sobre o que convém.
FOLHA - A Alca acabou, e o chanceler Amorim dizia que o importante era a OMC. Mas as negociações na OMC também empacaram. Onde o Brasil está errando?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - As negociações na OMC estão em pleno andamento e há grandes expectativas. O Brasil tem tido papel central nessas negociações na liderança do G20 [grupo de 20 países em desenvolvimento liderado por Brasil e Índia] e em entendimentos com os interlocutores dos Estados Unidos e da União Européia. As perspectivas de uma conclusão positiva para o Brasil são maiores do que em qualquer outro momento.
FOLHA - A adesão da Venezuela ao Mercosul tem sido duramente criticada, pois seria uma forma de transformar o bloco em uma ponta-de-lança contra Washington, ou pelo menos num palanque para o presidente Hugo Chávez atacar Bush. O bônus da adesão compensa o ônus?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - O comércio entre o Brasil e a Venezuela passou de US$ 880 milhões em 2003 para US$ 4,1 bilhões em 2006. Empresas brasileiras fazem grandes investimentos e constroem hidrelétricas, linhas de metrô, pontes, represas e sistemas de irrigação na Venezuela. Todos os membros do Mercosul estão de acordo quanto à
adesão da Venezuela. O Mercosul é uma união aduaneira e não um bloco político de oposição a qualquer outro país e muito menos aos EUA, que, aliás, percebem isto perfeitamente.
FOLHA - Pelo menos na retórica, Chávez está ganhando aliados na região, como os presidentes Evo Morales, da Bolívia, e Rafael Corrêa, do Equador. É um novo pólo de poder?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - Cada país da América do Sul tem o direito de cooperar com os demais países sem que isto signifique a formação de pólos de poder. Qualquer pretensão hegemônica de qualquer país encontra grande resistência dos demais, e a forma natural de influência é o exemplo, o que supõe relações de parceria, como as que o Brasil tem desenvolvido com cada país da América do Sul, com excelentes resultados.
FOLHA - De outro lado, o governo Bush praticamente escolheu o Irã como novo alvo, digamos, das preocupações norte-americanas. Esse será um tema do encontro Lula-Bush em 9 de março? O que o Brasil tem a ver com isso?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - A agenda do encontro dos presidentes ainda não está definida. O Brasil, que tem a sexta maior reserva de urânio do mundo, domina a tecnologia de enriquecimento de urânio e tem uma demanda interna importante por energia, defende o direito de todos os países de desenvolver a tecnologia nuclear para fins pacíficos, desde que respeitados fielmente os compromissos internacionais. Nossa posição na AIEA se pauta por este princípio e pela preferência pelo diálogo como forma de solucionar impasses.
FOLHA - Há duas versões no governo e no Itamaraty: uma de que o sr. é decisivo para a formulação da política externa; outra de que, na verdade, é o grande executivo que está "botando a casa em ordem". Qual a verdadeira?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - O presidente formula e dirige a política externa com o auxílio do ministro. Ao secretário-geral cabem as tarefas definidas pelo decreto 5979/2006, que são assessorar o ministro na execução da política e na orientação da secretaria de Estado e das missões no exterior.
FOLHA - Por que o sr. participou dos primeiros palanques do presidente Lula na campanha do segundo mandato, mas de repente sumiu?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - Todo cidadão brasileiro tem o direito, e até o dever, de participar da vida política de seu país.
FOLHA - E por que o sr. decidiu impor livros de sua própria preferência para os diplomatas que estejam sendo promovidos ou assumindo missões no exterior? Qual o viés desses livros? E porque o ministro determinou o fim da prática?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - Gilberto Freire disse: "O livro do sr. Álvaro Lins sobre o Barão do Rio Branco é um destes livros que desde as primeiras páginas nos dão o gosto raro de contato com uma obra monumental". Celso Furtado, sobre Bielschowsky, disse: "Considero "Pensamento Econômico Brasileiro" o mais importante trabalho já realizado para caracterizar e apreciar o considerável esforço produzido entre nós a fim de resgatar o Brasil das armadilhas do pensamento ortodoxo". Roberto Campos, ex-embaixador em Washington, sobre Bielschowsky, disse: "Erudito, objetivo e correto. "Pensamento Econômico Brasileiro" é referência indispensável, por sua análise
balanceada e percuciente das controvérsias ideológicas da época". Rubens Ricupero, ex-embaixador em Washington, sobre o livro de Moniz Bandeira disse: "É uma obra original, uma autêntica história conjunta das relações diplomáticas do Brasil e da Argentina durante 133 anos. Tem razão, assim, o historiador americano Frank Mc Cann, ao apresentá-la como "leitura indispensável". Não conheço, nem creio que exista,
outro trabalho desse fôlego, cerca de 680 páginas, que cubra de modo tão completo e analítico o período contemporâneo". Sobre "Chutando a Escada", de Ha-Joon Chang, professor de Cambridge, na Inglaterra, Charles Kindleberger, um dos maiores economistas americanos, disse: "uma crítica estimulante dos sermões dos economistas da corrente dominante dirigidos aos países em desenvolvimento." O aperfeiçoamento
dos diplomatas é uma necessidade constante. A leitura de três ou quatro livros não poderia jamais modificar o modo de pensar de qualquer diplomata, mas pode trazer informações importantes. O ministro Celso Amorim considerou que a celeuma provocada não justificava a energia despendida.
FOLHA - O que se deve esperar de um bom diplomata? E de um diplomata brasileiro no mundo atual?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - De um bom diplomata se espera que defenda e promova os nteresses de seu país. De um diplomata brasileiro se espera que defenda e promova os interesses do Brasil, de acordo com os objetivos da política externa definidos no Art. 4º da Constituição Federal, em especial a independência nacional, a não-intervenção e a
autodeterminação, e com a orientação do Presidente da República.
FOLHA - Como o Brasil pode interferir para que o mundo seja melhor? Aliás, o que seria, a seu ver, um "mundo melhor"?
PINHEIRO GUIMARÃES - O Brasil pode contribuir para a preservação da paz, para o desenvolvimento econômico e social, para a construção da democracia na esfera internacional, de tal forma que cada sociedade, observados os preceitos fundamentais de autodeterminação e não-intervenção inscritos na Carta da ONU, possa prosseguir em sua evolução histórica.
Um mundo melhor será aquele em que as promessas de desarmamento se realizem; em que os preceitos do Direito Internacional sejam obedecidos pelas grandes potências; em que as diferenças econômicas entre os Estados se reduzam; em que o meio ambiente seja preservado; em que os direitos humanos, políticos, econômicos e sociais sejam
respeitados; em que a pobreza e a miséria sejam abolidas; em que cada indivíduo possa desenvolver todo o seu potencial. Com esses objetivos, o presidente Lula e o ministro Celso Amorim têm defendido a democratização das instâncias internacionais de decisão, como o Conselho de Segurança da ONU e o G-8.
terça-feira, fevereiro 27, 2007
terça-feira, fevereiro 20, 2007
189) Um debate sobre o Islam e o multiculturalismo
Um debate sobre o Islam
Dossiê composto por
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Em 20 de fevereiro de 2007
Link: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1173.html
Acesso em 20 Fev 2007
Signandsight.com
“Let’s talk European”
2007-02-05
Mr Buruma's stereotypes
Turkish German author Necla Kelek responds to Ian Buruma in the debate on multiculturalism and integration in Europe.
French philosopher Pascal Bruckner accused Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash of propagating a form of multiculturalism that amounts to legal apartheid. His fiery polemic unleashed an international debate. Below Necla Kelek stakes out her position.
Reading his response to Pascal Bruckner's essay "Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?" one is tempted to say to Ian Buruma, "If only you had kept quiet!" He clearly felt himself caught out, and despite his insistence to the contrary, his reply only leads him further into the swamp of cultural relativism. If Mr Buruma were alone in his views, one might have left things as they were and simply referred the reader to Bruckner's essay, a response to Timothy Garton Ash. But both Ash and Buruma are quite typical in their argumentation, and virtually exemplary in their politically dubious cultural relativism.
Both make ample use of stereotypes. The first is: "Islam is diverse." Buruma writes, "Islam, as practised in Java, is not the same as in a Moroccan village, or the Sudan, or Rotterdam." That may be true in the details, but not in the fundamentals. For Buruma, however, the details justify criticism that is as devastating as it is false. He maintains that one cannot make generalised statements about Islam, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does. That is a rather astonishing statement from a man who is an academic at Bard College in New York, and a professor of democracy and human rights. With that brief assertion, Mr Buruma attempts to reduce the West's confrontation with Islam to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's personal problem.
Islam is a social reality. Despite all differences of detail, in its writings and its philosophy it constitutes a cohesive view of mankind and the world. Let us look at the question of human rights and women's rights, for example. In those areas, Muslims are very united indeed. On August 5, 1990, 45 foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the highest international secular body in the Muslim world, signed "The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam." In that document, Muslims from around the world expressed their common attitudes towards human rights. It was intended as an appendix to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Cairo Declaration is not binding under international law, but it illuminates the global attitude of Islam with respect to fundamental rights. The fact that it constitutes a minimal consensus, rather than an extreme view, makes it all the more illuminating.
The most important statements of this document are to be found in its two final articles:
Article 24: "All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia."
Article 25: "The Islamic Sharia is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification [of] any of the articles of this Declaration."
And in contrast to the UN Declaration, the Cairo Declaration's preamble states that the members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference reaffirm "the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah, which God made the best nation that has given mankind a universal and well-balanced civilisation..."
Unlike in democratic constitutions, there is no talk here of the individual, but rather of the Ummah, the Community of the Faithful, the collective. As a logical consequence, the Cairo Declaration acknowledges only those rights specified in the Koran and, in keeping with Sharia, regards only those acts so judged by both the Koran and the Sunnah to be criminal. Article 19 of the Declaration states: "There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Sharia." Article 2 Paragraph D maintains: "Safety from bodily harm is a guaranteed right. It is the duty of the state to safeguard it, and it is prohibited to breach it without a Sharia-prescribed reason." That would be the case, for example, according to the Koran's Sura 17, Verse 33: "And kill no one, for God has forbidden killing, except when you are entitled to do so"! The Koran also says: "When a person is killed unjustly, the nearest relation has authority to take vengeance." What is that if not a blessing on blood vengeance by Muslim foreign ministers?
Equal rights are not proposed in this Declaration. Rather, in Article 6 it states: "Woman is equal to man in human dignity" – in "dignity" not in rights, since the Koran's Sura 4, Verse 34 stipulates: "Men are elevated above women, for God has placed them so by nature." Thus men are given authority to exercise social control over and to denigrate women, as is made clear by Article 22 of the Declaration: "Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia" – that is, the Koran, issued in the seventh century of the Christian calendar and still binding for Muslims today.
And so it continues. Islam is declared the One True Faith, and "no one in principle has the right to suspend ... or violate or ignore its commandments, in as much as they are binding divine commandments, which are contained in the Revealed Books of God and were sent through the last of His Prophets... Every person is individually responsible – and the Ummah collectively responsible – for their safeguard." So states the Cairo Declaration. That statement not only runs contrary to human rights in general, it is an indirect justification of vigilante justice. Mr Buruma is aware of this problem; he writes about a case of such vigilante justice in his book, "Murder in Amsterdam".
The Islamic states formulated this Declaration to assure themselves of their own unity. Beyond that, it is also a political programme designed to defend the identity of Islamic culture against capitalist globalisation. The Sharia is declared to be the basis of that cultural identity. And criticising that is supposed to be Ayaan Hirsi Ali's personal problem?
But Mr Buruma has still more stereotypes up his sleeve. The next one: Islam is a religion like any other, or all religions are equal (or equally awful?). This time it is aimed against his critic, Pascal Bruckner. Mr Buruma writes: "In another typical fit of exaggeration, designed to tar by association, Bruckner mentions the opening of an Islamic hospital in Rotterdam and reserved beaches for Muslim women in Italy. I fail to see why this is so much more terrible than opening kosher restaurants, Catholic hospitals, or reserved beaches for nudists."
I can tell you, Mr Buruma, why Italian beaches reserved for Muslim women are "so much more terrible." Unlike kosher dining or a case of the flu requiring hospitalisation, the beach is a Muslim attempt to bring about change. Whether it is headscarves or gender-specific separation of public space, political Islam is trying to establish apartheid of the sexes in free European societies. A Muslim hospital is fundamentally different from a Catholic hospital. In a Muslim hospital, patients are separated according to gender. Men may be treated only by men, women only by women. Muslim female nurses, for example, may not wash male patients, they may not even touch them.
In Germany a growing number of doctors complain of Muslim men trying to prevent their womenfolk from being treated, or even examined, by male physicians in hospitals. I know of Muslim women who are permitted to visit a doctor only when accompanied by their son. In Islamic hospitals the husbands decide whether a caesarian will be carried out, or whether their wives may have themselves sterilised after bearing four children. A recent article (excerpt in English here) in Le Monde gives the startling details. And not long ago the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet carried a news story about a woman radiologist in Istanbul who refused on religious grounds to examine a young man who had been injured in his lower body. That is terrible, Mr Buruma.
Love of one's neighbour is as alien to the Muslim religion as pastoral care. But that is another matter. I regard it as tasteless to denigrate the work of Catholic nuns by this "all religions are alike" relativism. It seems Mr Buruma does not know whereof he speaks when he speaks of Islam. The Islamic propagators of beaches and hospitals and mosques are not concerned with humane issues nor with religious categories. Their objective is to establish the vertical separation of men and women within democratic societies.
Buruma's third stereotype goes: Critics of Islam are denunciators. He writes that Hirsi Ali's "denunciations" are not very "helpful". Would he also consider citing historically proven cases, such as Mohammed's marriage to the six-year-old Aisha, whom he then bedded at age nine, among the "not very helpful denunciations"? In her book "The Caged Virgin", Hirsi Ali speaks of this in order to criticise the Islamic sexual morality which developed post-Mohammed. In Mr Buruma's view, she should not have done so because as an "avowed atheist" - next stereotype - she could not contribute to the reform of Islam. Another astonishing position for an academic specialising in human rights and democracy.
Cultural relativists prefer not to hear about arranged marriages, honour killings (25 deaths in Istanbul last year alone) and other violations of human rights. These things are burdensome. What else can it mean when Mr Buruma writes: "Condemning Islam without taking the many variations into account, is too indiscriminate." If Mr Buruma wants to take a serious look at the disregard of "variations" in the Muslim world, he's set himlsef a large task. To cite just one out of many possible examples: What to do with all the women living in the over 60 countries where Sharia law oibtains, who are not allowed to marry without a Wali, that is, without the permission of a parent or guardian? Where are the variations there, Mr Buruma?
Mr Buruma boasts that he knows the world of South Korean rebels. But the Muslim world appears alien to him, and the values of Western society relative. Thanks to Pascal Bruckner, he rightly fears for his intellectual reputation. The fact that in his reply to Bruckner he tried to rescue that reputation at the expense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not make matters better. It didn't work, Mr Buruma.
*
The article originally appeared in German on Perlentaucher on February 5, 2007.
Necla Kelek was born in Istanbul in 1957 and moved to Germany at the age of 10. Her books include "Die Fremde Braut" (The Foreign Bride) about arranged and forced marriages of Turkish migrants, and "Die verlorenen Söhne" (Lost Sons) about the socialization, violence, and faith of Turkish-Muslim men.
Translation: Myron Gubitz
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Complemento em 20 Fev 2007
Point de vue
En finir avec le multiculturalisme
Pascal Bruckner
LE MONDE, 19.02.07
Les ennemis de la liberté se recrutent d'abord dans les sociétés libres, chez une partie des élites éclairées qui dénient le bénéfice des droits démocratiques au reste de l'humanité, voire à leurs compatriotes, si ceux-ci ont le malheur d'appartenir à une autre religion, à une autre ethnie. Il suffit pour s'en convaincre de lire deux écrits récents, le livre d'Ian Buruma On a tué Theo Van Gogh (Flammarion, 2006) et la critique de ce même livre par le journaliste et universitaire anglais Timothy Garton Ash parue dans le New York Review of Books.
Ian Buruma cache mal son agacement pour l'engagement de la députée néerlandaise d'origine somalienne Ayaan Hirsi Ali, amie de Theo Van Gogh, elle-même condamnée à mort et dont la critique du Coran l'embarrasse. Timothy Garton Ash est plus brutal encore : pour lui, apôtre du multiculturalisme, l'attitude d'Ayaan Hirsi Ali est à la fois irresponsable et contre-productive. Son verdict est implacable : " Ayaan Hirsi Ali est aujourd'hui une courageuse et légèrement simpliste fondamentaliste des Lumières."
Dans le cas précis d'Ayaan Hirsi Ali, elle-même excisée, vouée à un mariage forcé et qui s'est échappée d'Afrique pour trouver asile aux Pays-Bas, l'accusation est d'abord fausse : la différence entre elle et Mohammed Bouyeri, le meurtrier de Theo Van Gogh, c'est qu'elle n'a jamais préconisé le meurtre pour faire triompher ses idées. Les seules armes dont elle use sont la persuasion, la réfutation, le discours. On reste là dans le cercle de la raison raisonnable et non dans la pathologie du prosélytisme. L'espérance de faire reculer la tyrannie et la superstition ne semble pas relever d'une exaltation malsaine. Mais Ayaan Hirsi Ali a commis, aux yeux de nos gentils professeurs, un crime impardonnable : elle prend au sérieux les principes démocratiques.
Ian Buruma, non sans perfidie, dénie à Ayaan Hirsi Ali le droit de se référer à Voltaire : celui-ci aurait affronté l'une des institutions les plus puissantes de son temps, l'Eglise catholique, quand elle se contente d'offenser " une minorité vulnérable au coeur de l'Europe". C'est oublier que l'islam n'a pas de frontières : les communautés musulmanes du Vieux Monde qui s'adossent sur plus d'un milliard de croyants, traversés de courants divers, peuvent devenir l'aile avancée d'une offensive intégriste ou donner au contraire l'exemple d'une religiosité plus conforme à la mesure. Ce n'est pas une mince affaire, c'est même l'un des enjeux majeurs du XXIe siècle !
Isolée, promise à l'égorgement par les radicaux, contrainte de vivre entourée de gardes du corps, Ayaan Hirsi Ali doit en plus subir, comme Robert Redeker, ce professeur de philosophie français menacé de mort par des sites islamistes, les sarcasmes des grands esprits et des donneurs de leçon. Les défenseurs de la liberté seraient donc des fascistes, tandis que les fanatiques sont dépeints comme des victimes !
On oublie qu'il existe un despotisme des minorités rétives à l'assimilation si elle ne s'accompagne pas d'un statut d'extraterritorialité, de dérogations spéciales. On leur refuse ce qui a été notre privilège : le passage d'un monde à un autre, de la tradition à la modernité, de l'obéissance aveugle à la décision raisonnée. La protection des minorités implique aussi le droit pour les individus qui en font partie de s'en retirer sans dommage, par l'indifférence, l'athéisme, le mariage mixte, l'oubli des solidarités claniques ou familiales, de se forger un destin qui leur soit propre sans reproduire ce que leurs parents leur avaient légué.
La minorité ethnique, sexuelle, religieuse, régionale n'est souvent rien d'autre, en raison des offenses subies, qu'une petite nation rendue à son angélisme, chez qui le chauvinisme le plus outrancier n'est que l'expression d'un légitime amour-propre. Le chantage à la solidarité ethnique, religieuse, raciale, la dénonciation des apostats, des félons, des "bougnoules de service", des "Oncle Tom" et autres "Bounty" servent de rappel à l'ordre pour les récalcitrants éventuels et brisent leur aspiration à l'autonomie.
Il n'est donc pas surprenant que la réprimande de nos intellectuels s'exerce à l'endroit d'une Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rien ne manque au tableau que Timothy Garton Ash dresse de la jeune femme, pas même un machisme suranné : seule la beauté de la parlementaire hollandaise, son côté glamour expliqueraient, selon lui, son succès médiatique et non la justesse de ses attaques. Timothy Garton Ash ne se demande pas si l'islamologue Tarik Ramadan auquel il adresse des dithyrambes enflammés ne doit pas lui aussi sa renommée à son physique de play-boy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, il est vrai, déjoue les stéréotypes du politiquement correct en cours : Somalienne, elle proclame la supériorité de l'Europe sur cette région de l'Afrique ; femme, elle échappe au destin d'épouse et de mère ; musulmane, elle dénonce ouvertement l'arriération du Coran. Autant de clichés bafoués qui font d'elle une insoumise et non une de ces insurgées en toc comme nos sociétés en produisent à la pelle.
Les Lumières appartiennent au genre humain tout entier et non à quelques privilégiés nés en Europe ou en Amérique du Nord, qui se permettent en plus de les piétiner comme des enfants gâtés, d'en refuser la jouissance aux autres. S'il est un multiculturalisme légitime tant qu'il reste modéré, sa version anglo-saxonne n'est peut-être rien d'autre qu'un apartheid légal où l'on retrouve les accents attendris des riches expliquant aux pauvres que l'argent ne fait pas le bonheur : à nous les fardeaux de la liberté, de l'invention de soi, de l'égalité entre les sexes, à vous les joies de l'archaïsme, des abus reconvertis sous le beau nom de coutumes ancestrales, le mariage forcé, le voile, la polygamie.
Et si la dissidence des musulmans britanniques venait non seulement du rigorisme de leurs leaders, mais aussi de la perception confuse que les égards dont ils bénéficient de la part des autorités manifestent une forme subtile de dédain, comme si on les jugeait trop arriérés pour accéder aux bienfaits de la civilisation ?
Il existe enfin un argument qui milite contre le multiculturalisme pur et dur à la britannique : de l'aveu même des gouvernants, il ne marche pas. Non content d'avoir été pendant des années la terre d'asile du djihad, avec les conséquences dramatiques que l'on sait, le Royaume-Uni doit admettre, aujourd'hui, que son modèle social, fondé sur le communautarisme et le séparatisme, ne fonctionne plus. On a beaucoup raillé l'autoritarisme français lors du vote sur le voile islamique qui interdisait aux femmes et aux jeunes filles de le porter à l'école et dans les locaux administratifs.
Comment expliquer alors que, en Grande-Bretagne, en Hollande, en Allemagne, des responsables politiques, choqués par la généralisation de la burka ou du hidjab soient tentés à leur tour de légiférer sur ce sujet ? Les faits sont cruels pour les temporisateurs qui enjoignent l'Europe de se plier à l'islam plutôt que l'islam à la civilisation européenne : plus on cède au radicalisme des barbus, plus ils durcissent le ton.
A dire vrai, les positions d'Ian Buruma et de Timothy Garton Ash sont dans la droite ligne de leurs gouvernements américain et britannique (même s'ils les désapprouvent politiquement) : la faillite de George W. Bush et de Tony Blair dans leurs guerres contre la terreur vient aussi de ce qu'ils ont privilégié le terrain militaire au détriment du débat d'idées.
Or la mobilisation en faveur d'un islam européen éclairé est capitale : l'Europe peut devenir un modèle, un foyer de rayonnement pour la réforme de ce monothéisme dont on espère qu'il sera gagné un jour, à l'exemple de Vatican II pour les catholiques, par l'autocritique et l'examen de conscience. Encore faut-il ne pas se tromper d'interlocuteurs, ériger en amis de la tolérance des fondamentalistes qui usent de la dissimulation, investissent la gauche et l'intelligentsia pour avancer leurs pions et s'épargner l'épreuve de la laïcité.
Pascal Bruckner est écrivain, essayiste. La version intégrale de ce texte est consultable sur le site : signandsight.com
Pascal Bruckner
Article paru dans Le Monde, édition du 20.02.07
==============
Complemento em 21 Fev 2007
A critic of Islam
Dark secrets
The Economist, Feb 8th 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali blames Islam for the miseries of the Muslim world. Her new
autobiography shows that life is too complex for that
SAY what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she fascinates. The Dutch-Somali politician, who has lived under armed guard ever since a fatwa was issued against her in 2004, is a chameleon of a woman. Just 11 years after she arrived in the Netherlands from Africa, she rode into parliament on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, only to leave again last year, this time for America, after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum.
Even the title of her new autobiography reflects her talent for reinvention. In the Netherlands, where Ms Hirsi Ali got her start campaigning against the oppression of Muslim women, the book has been published under the title “My Freedom”. But in Britain and in America, where she now has a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, it is called “Infidel”. In it, she recounts how she and her family made the cultural odyssey from nomadic to urban life in Africa and how she eventually made the jump to Europe and international celebrity as the world's most famous critic of Islam.
Read as a modern coming-of-age story set in Africa, the book has a certain charm. Read as a key to the thinking of a woman who aspires to be the Muslim Voltaire, it is more problematic. The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam.
Ms Hirsi Ali's father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the first Somalis to study overseas in Italy and America. He met his future wife, Asha, when she signed up for a literacy class he taught during Somalia's springtime of independence in the 1960s. The family's troubles began in 1969, the year Ms Hirsi Ali was born. That was also the year that Mohammed Siad Barre, a Somali army commander, seized power in a military coup. Hirsi Magan was descended from the traditional rulers of the Darod, Somalia's second biggest clan. Siad Barre, who hailed from a lesser Darod family, feared and resented Ms Hirsi Ali's father's family, she says. In 1972, Siad Barre had Hirsi Magan put in prison from which he escaped three years later and fled the country. Not until 1978 was the family reunited with him.
As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali's mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin's cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman. Despite her adventurous spirit, in Yemen and later in the Gulf she found herself drawn to the stern Wahhabi version of Islam that would later clash with the more relaxed interpretation of Islam favoured by Ms Hirsi Ali's father and many other Somalis. She and Hirsi Magan fell out not long after the family moved to Kenya in 1980. Hirsi Magan left to join a group of Somali opposition politicians in exile in Ethiopia and did not return to his family for ten years.
Ms Hirsi Ali says her mother had no idea how to raise her children in a foreign city. She frequently beat Ayaan and her sister, Haweya. Although they and their brother, Mahad, attended some of Nairobi's best schools, Haweya and Mahad dropped out early on. Ms Hirsi Ali herself meanwhile fell under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some of the best passages in the book concern this part of her life. As a teenager, Ms Hirsi Ali chose to wear the all-encompassing black Arab veil, which was unusual in cosmopolitan Nairobi. “Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority,” she writes. Even as she wore it, Ms Hirsi Ali was drawn in other directions. She read English novels and flirted with a boy. Young immigrants of any religion growing up with traditional parents in a modern society will recognise her confusion: “I was living on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honour; and there was Sister Aziza and God.”
Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia's civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.) She has since justified those lies by saying that she feared another kind of persecution: the vengeance of her clan after she ran away from an arranged marriage.
However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger. The subsequent uproar nearly cost Ms Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship, which may be the reason why she is careful here to re-state how much she feared her family when she first arrived in the Netherlands. But the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya's sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.
Mental illness, abortion, failed marriages, illicit affairs and differing interpretations of religion: much as she tries, the kind of problems that Ms Hirsi Ali describes in “Infidel” are all too human to be blamed entirely on Islam. Her book shows that her life, like those of other Muslims, is more complex than many people in the West may have realised. But the West's tendency to seek simplistic explanations is a weakness that Ms Hirsi Ali also shows she has been happy to exploit.
Dossiê composto por
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Em 20 de fevereiro de 2007
Link: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1173.html
Acesso em 20 Fev 2007
Signandsight.com
“Let’s talk European”
2007-02-05
Mr Buruma's stereotypes
Turkish German author Necla Kelek responds to Ian Buruma in the debate on multiculturalism and integration in Europe.
French philosopher Pascal Bruckner accused Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash of propagating a form of multiculturalism that amounts to legal apartheid. His fiery polemic unleashed an international debate. Below Necla Kelek stakes out her position.
Reading his response to Pascal Bruckner's essay "Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?" one is tempted to say to Ian Buruma, "If only you had kept quiet!" He clearly felt himself caught out, and despite his insistence to the contrary, his reply only leads him further into the swamp of cultural relativism. If Mr Buruma were alone in his views, one might have left things as they were and simply referred the reader to Bruckner's essay, a response to Timothy Garton Ash. But both Ash and Buruma are quite typical in their argumentation, and virtually exemplary in their politically dubious cultural relativism.
Both make ample use of stereotypes. The first is: "Islam is diverse." Buruma writes, "Islam, as practised in Java, is not the same as in a Moroccan village, or the Sudan, or Rotterdam." That may be true in the details, but not in the fundamentals. For Buruma, however, the details justify criticism that is as devastating as it is false. He maintains that one cannot make generalised statements about Islam, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does. That is a rather astonishing statement from a man who is an academic at Bard College in New York, and a professor of democracy and human rights. With that brief assertion, Mr Buruma attempts to reduce the West's confrontation with Islam to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's personal problem.
Islam is a social reality. Despite all differences of detail, in its writings and its philosophy it constitutes a cohesive view of mankind and the world. Let us look at the question of human rights and women's rights, for example. In those areas, Muslims are very united indeed. On August 5, 1990, 45 foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the highest international secular body in the Muslim world, signed "The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam." In that document, Muslims from around the world expressed their common attitudes towards human rights. It was intended as an appendix to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Cairo Declaration is not binding under international law, but it illuminates the global attitude of Islam with respect to fundamental rights. The fact that it constitutes a minimal consensus, rather than an extreme view, makes it all the more illuminating.
The most important statements of this document are to be found in its two final articles:
Article 24: "All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia."
Article 25: "The Islamic Sharia is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification [of] any of the articles of this Declaration."
And in contrast to the UN Declaration, the Cairo Declaration's preamble states that the members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference reaffirm "the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah, which God made the best nation that has given mankind a universal and well-balanced civilisation..."
Unlike in democratic constitutions, there is no talk here of the individual, but rather of the Ummah, the Community of the Faithful, the collective. As a logical consequence, the Cairo Declaration acknowledges only those rights specified in the Koran and, in keeping with Sharia, regards only those acts so judged by both the Koran and the Sunnah to be criminal. Article 19 of the Declaration states: "There shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in the Sharia." Article 2 Paragraph D maintains: "Safety from bodily harm is a guaranteed right. It is the duty of the state to safeguard it, and it is prohibited to breach it without a Sharia-prescribed reason." That would be the case, for example, according to the Koran's Sura 17, Verse 33: "And kill no one, for God has forbidden killing, except when you are entitled to do so"! The Koran also says: "When a person is killed unjustly, the nearest relation has authority to take vengeance." What is that if not a blessing on blood vengeance by Muslim foreign ministers?
Equal rights are not proposed in this Declaration. Rather, in Article 6 it states: "Woman is equal to man in human dignity" – in "dignity" not in rights, since the Koran's Sura 4, Verse 34 stipulates: "Men are elevated above women, for God has placed them so by nature." Thus men are given authority to exercise social control over and to denigrate women, as is made clear by Article 22 of the Declaration: "Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia" – that is, the Koran, issued in the seventh century of the Christian calendar and still binding for Muslims today.
And so it continues. Islam is declared the One True Faith, and "no one in principle has the right to suspend ... or violate or ignore its commandments, in as much as they are binding divine commandments, which are contained in the Revealed Books of God and were sent through the last of His Prophets... Every person is individually responsible – and the Ummah collectively responsible – for their safeguard." So states the Cairo Declaration. That statement not only runs contrary to human rights in general, it is an indirect justification of vigilante justice. Mr Buruma is aware of this problem; he writes about a case of such vigilante justice in his book, "Murder in Amsterdam".
The Islamic states formulated this Declaration to assure themselves of their own unity. Beyond that, it is also a political programme designed to defend the identity of Islamic culture against capitalist globalisation. The Sharia is declared to be the basis of that cultural identity. And criticising that is supposed to be Ayaan Hirsi Ali's personal problem?
But Mr Buruma has still more stereotypes up his sleeve. The next one: Islam is a religion like any other, or all religions are equal (or equally awful?). This time it is aimed against his critic, Pascal Bruckner. Mr Buruma writes: "In another typical fit of exaggeration, designed to tar by association, Bruckner mentions the opening of an Islamic hospital in Rotterdam and reserved beaches for Muslim women in Italy. I fail to see why this is so much more terrible than opening kosher restaurants, Catholic hospitals, or reserved beaches for nudists."
I can tell you, Mr Buruma, why Italian beaches reserved for Muslim women are "so much more terrible." Unlike kosher dining or a case of the flu requiring hospitalisation, the beach is a Muslim attempt to bring about change. Whether it is headscarves or gender-specific separation of public space, political Islam is trying to establish apartheid of the sexes in free European societies. A Muslim hospital is fundamentally different from a Catholic hospital. In a Muslim hospital, patients are separated according to gender. Men may be treated only by men, women only by women. Muslim female nurses, for example, may not wash male patients, they may not even touch them.
In Germany a growing number of doctors complain of Muslim men trying to prevent their womenfolk from being treated, or even examined, by male physicians in hospitals. I know of Muslim women who are permitted to visit a doctor only when accompanied by their son. In Islamic hospitals the husbands decide whether a caesarian will be carried out, or whether their wives may have themselves sterilised after bearing four children. A recent article (excerpt in English here) in Le Monde gives the startling details. And not long ago the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet carried a news story about a woman radiologist in Istanbul who refused on religious grounds to examine a young man who had been injured in his lower body. That is terrible, Mr Buruma.
Love of one's neighbour is as alien to the Muslim religion as pastoral care. But that is another matter. I regard it as tasteless to denigrate the work of Catholic nuns by this "all religions are alike" relativism. It seems Mr Buruma does not know whereof he speaks when he speaks of Islam. The Islamic propagators of beaches and hospitals and mosques are not concerned with humane issues nor with religious categories. Their objective is to establish the vertical separation of men and women within democratic societies.
Buruma's third stereotype goes: Critics of Islam are denunciators. He writes that Hirsi Ali's "denunciations" are not very "helpful". Would he also consider citing historically proven cases, such as Mohammed's marriage to the six-year-old Aisha, whom he then bedded at age nine, among the "not very helpful denunciations"? In her book "The Caged Virgin", Hirsi Ali speaks of this in order to criticise the Islamic sexual morality which developed post-Mohammed. In Mr Buruma's view, she should not have done so because as an "avowed atheist" - next stereotype - she could not contribute to the reform of Islam. Another astonishing position for an academic specialising in human rights and democracy.
Cultural relativists prefer not to hear about arranged marriages, honour killings (25 deaths in Istanbul last year alone) and other violations of human rights. These things are burdensome. What else can it mean when Mr Buruma writes: "Condemning Islam without taking the many variations into account, is too indiscriminate." If Mr Buruma wants to take a serious look at the disregard of "variations" in the Muslim world, he's set himlsef a large task. To cite just one out of many possible examples: What to do with all the women living in the over 60 countries where Sharia law oibtains, who are not allowed to marry without a Wali, that is, without the permission of a parent or guardian? Where are the variations there, Mr Buruma?
Mr Buruma boasts that he knows the world of South Korean rebels. But the Muslim world appears alien to him, and the values of Western society relative. Thanks to Pascal Bruckner, he rightly fears for his intellectual reputation. The fact that in his reply to Bruckner he tried to rescue that reputation at the expense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not make matters better. It didn't work, Mr Buruma.
*
The article originally appeared in German on Perlentaucher on February 5, 2007.
Necla Kelek was born in Istanbul in 1957 and moved to Germany at the age of 10. Her books include "Die Fremde Braut" (The Foreign Bride) about arranged and forced marriages of Turkish migrants, and "Die verlorenen Söhne" (Lost Sons) about the socialization, violence, and faith of Turkish-Muslim men.
Translation: Myron Gubitz
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==========
Complemento em 20 Fev 2007
Point de vue
En finir avec le multiculturalisme
Pascal Bruckner
LE MONDE, 19.02.07
Les ennemis de la liberté se recrutent d'abord dans les sociétés libres, chez une partie des élites éclairées qui dénient le bénéfice des droits démocratiques au reste de l'humanité, voire à leurs compatriotes, si ceux-ci ont le malheur d'appartenir à une autre religion, à une autre ethnie. Il suffit pour s'en convaincre de lire deux écrits récents, le livre d'Ian Buruma On a tué Theo Van Gogh (Flammarion, 2006) et la critique de ce même livre par le journaliste et universitaire anglais Timothy Garton Ash parue dans le New York Review of Books.
Ian Buruma cache mal son agacement pour l'engagement de la députée néerlandaise d'origine somalienne Ayaan Hirsi Ali, amie de Theo Van Gogh, elle-même condamnée à mort et dont la critique du Coran l'embarrasse. Timothy Garton Ash est plus brutal encore : pour lui, apôtre du multiculturalisme, l'attitude d'Ayaan Hirsi Ali est à la fois irresponsable et contre-productive. Son verdict est implacable : " Ayaan Hirsi Ali est aujourd'hui une courageuse et légèrement simpliste fondamentaliste des Lumières."
Dans le cas précis d'Ayaan Hirsi Ali, elle-même excisée, vouée à un mariage forcé et qui s'est échappée d'Afrique pour trouver asile aux Pays-Bas, l'accusation est d'abord fausse : la différence entre elle et Mohammed Bouyeri, le meurtrier de Theo Van Gogh, c'est qu'elle n'a jamais préconisé le meurtre pour faire triompher ses idées. Les seules armes dont elle use sont la persuasion, la réfutation, le discours. On reste là dans le cercle de la raison raisonnable et non dans la pathologie du prosélytisme. L'espérance de faire reculer la tyrannie et la superstition ne semble pas relever d'une exaltation malsaine. Mais Ayaan Hirsi Ali a commis, aux yeux de nos gentils professeurs, un crime impardonnable : elle prend au sérieux les principes démocratiques.
Ian Buruma, non sans perfidie, dénie à Ayaan Hirsi Ali le droit de se référer à Voltaire : celui-ci aurait affronté l'une des institutions les plus puissantes de son temps, l'Eglise catholique, quand elle se contente d'offenser " une minorité vulnérable au coeur de l'Europe". C'est oublier que l'islam n'a pas de frontières : les communautés musulmanes du Vieux Monde qui s'adossent sur plus d'un milliard de croyants, traversés de courants divers, peuvent devenir l'aile avancée d'une offensive intégriste ou donner au contraire l'exemple d'une religiosité plus conforme à la mesure. Ce n'est pas une mince affaire, c'est même l'un des enjeux majeurs du XXIe siècle !
Isolée, promise à l'égorgement par les radicaux, contrainte de vivre entourée de gardes du corps, Ayaan Hirsi Ali doit en plus subir, comme Robert Redeker, ce professeur de philosophie français menacé de mort par des sites islamistes, les sarcasmes des grands esprits et des donneurs de leçon. Les défenseurs de la liberté seraient donc des fascistes, tandis que les fanatiques sont dépeints comme des victimes !
On oublie qu'il existe un despotisme des minorités rétives à l'assimilation si elle ne s'accompagne pas d'un statut d'extraterritorialité, de dérogations spéciales. On leur refuse ce qui a été notre privilège : le passage d'un monde à un autre, de la tradition à la modernité, de l'obéissance aveugle à la décision raisonnée. La protection des minorités implique aussi le droit pour les individus qui en font partie de s'en retirer sans dommage, par l'indifférence, l'athéisme, le mariage mixte, l'oubli des solidarités claniques ou familiales, de se forger un destin qui leur soit propre sans reproduire ce que leurs parents leur avaient légué.
La minorité ethnique, sexuelle, religieuse, régionale n'est souvent rien d'autre, en raison des offenses subies, qu'une petite nation rendue à son angélisme, chez qui le chauvinisme le plus outrancier n'est que l'expression d'un légitime amour-propre. Le chantage à la solidarité ethnique, religieuse, raciale, la dénonciation des apostats, des félons, des "bougnoules de service", des "Oncle Tom" et autres "Bounty" servent de rappel à l'ordre pour les récalcitrants éventuels et brisent leur aspiration à l'autonomie.
Il n'est donc pas surprenant que la réprimande de nos intellectuels s'exerce à l'endroit d'une Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rien ne manque au tableau que Timothy Garton Ash dresse de la jeune femme, pas même un machisme suranné : seule la beauté de la parlementaire hollandaise, son côté glamour expliqueraient, selon lui, son succès médiatique et non la justesse de ses attaques. Timothy Garton Ash ne se demande pas si l'islamologue Tarik Ramadan auquel il adresse des dithyrambes enflammés ne doit pas lui aussi sa renommée à son physique de play-boy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, il est vrai, déjoue les stéréotypes du politiquement correct en cours : Somalienne, elle proclame la supériorité de l'Europe sur cette région de l'Afrique ; femme, elle échappe au destin d'épouse et de mère ; musulmane, elle dénonce ouvertement l'arriération du Coran. Autant de clichés bafoués qui font d'elle une insoumise et non une de ces insurgées en toc comme nos sociétés en produisent à la pelle.
Les Lumières appartiennent au genre humain tout entier et non à quelques privilégiés nés en Europe ou en Amérique du Nord, qui se permettent en plus de les piétiner comme des enfants gâtés, d'en refuser la jouissance aux autres. S'il est un multiculturalisme légitime tant qu'il reste modéré, sa version anglo-saxonne n'est peut-être rien d'autre qu'un apartheid légal où l'on retrouve les accents attendris des riches expliquant aux pauvres que l'argent ne fait pas le bonheur : à nous les fardeaux de la liberté, de l'invention de soi, de l'égalité entre les sexes, à vous les joies de l'archaïsme, des abus reconvertis sous le beau nom de coutumes ancestrales, le mariage forcé, le voile, la polygamie.
Et si la dissidence des musulmans britanniques venait non seulement du rigorisme de leurs leaders, mais aussi de la perception confuse que les égards dont ils bénéficient de la part des autorités manifestent une forme subtile de dédain, comme si on les jugeait trop arriérés pour accéder aux bienfaits de la civilisation ?
Il existe enfin un argument qui milite contre le multiculturalisme pur et dur à la britannique : de l'aveu même des gouvernants, il ne marche pas. Non content d'avoir été pendant des années la terre d'asile du djihad, avec les conséquences dramatiques que l'on sait, le Royaume-Uni doit admettre, aujourd'hui, que son modèle social, fondé sur le communautarisme et le séparatisme, ne fonctionne plus. On a beaucoup raillé l'autoritarisme français lors du vote sur le voile islamique qui interdisait aux femmes et aux jeunes filles de le porter à l'école et dans les locaux administratifs.
Comment expliquer alors que, en Grande-Bretagne, en Hollande, en Allemagne, des responsables politiques, choqués par la généralisation de la burka ou du hidjab soient tentés à leur tour de légiférer sur ce sujet ? Les faits sont cruels pour les temporisateurs qui enjoignent l'Europe de se plier à l'islam plutôt que l'islam à la civilisation européenne : plus on cède au radicalisme des barbus, plus ils durcissent le ton.
A dire vrai, les positions d'Ian Buruma et de Timothy Garton Ash sont dans la droite ligne de leurs gouvernements américain et britannique (même s'ils les désapprouvent politiquement) : la faillite de George W. Bush et de Tony Blair dans leurs guerres contre la terreur vient aussi de ce qu'ils ont privilégié le terrain militaire au détriment du débat d'idées.
Or la mobilisation en faveur d'un islam européen éclairé est capitale : l'Europe peut devenir un modèle, un foyer de rayonnement pour la réforme de ce monothéisme dont on espère qu'il sera gagné un jour, à l'exemple de Vatican II pour les catholiques, par l'autocritique et l'examen de conscience. Encore faut-il ne pas se tromper d'interlocuteurs, ériger en amis de la tolérance des fondamentalistes qui usent de la dissimulation, investissent la gauche et l'intelligentsia pour avancer leurs pions et s'épargner l'épreuve de la laïcité.
Pascal Bruckner est écrivain, essayiste. La version intégrale de ce texte est consultable sur le site : signandsight.com
Pascal Bruckner
Article paru dans Le Monde, édition du 20.02.07
==============
Complemento em 21 Fev 2007
A critic of Islam
Dark secrets
The Economist, Feb 8th 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali blames Islam for the miseries of the Muslim world. Her new
autobiography shows that life is too complex for that
SAY what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she fascinates. The Dutch-Somali politician, who has lived under armed guard ever since a fatwa was issued against her in 2004, is a chameleon of a woman. Just 11 years after she arrived in the Netherlands from Africa, she rode into parliament on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, only to leave again last year, this time for America, after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum.
Even the title of her new autobiography reflects her talent for reinvention. In the Netherlands, where Ms Hirsi Ali got her start campaigning against the oppression of Muslim women, the book has been published under the title “My Freedom”. But in Britain and in America, where she now has a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, it is called “Infidel”. In it, she recounts how she and her family made the cultural odyssey from nomadic to urban life in Africa and how she eventually made the jump to Europe and international celebrity as the world's most famous critic of Islam.
Read as a modern coming-of-age story set in Africa, the book has a certain charm. Read as a key to the thinking of a woman who aspires to be the Muslim Voltaire, it is more problematic. The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam.
Ms Hirsi Ali's father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the first Somalis to study overseas in Italy and America. He met his future wife, Asha, when she signed up for a literacy class he taught during Somalia's springtime of independence in the 1960s. The family's troubles began in 1969, the year Ms Hirsi Ali was born. That was also the year that Mohammed Siad Barre, a Somali army commander, seized power in a military coup. Hirsi Magan was descended from the traditional rulers of the Darod, Somalia's second biggest clan. Siad Barre, who hailed from a lesser Darod family, feared and resented Ms Hirsi Ali's father's family, she says. In 1972, Siad Barre had Hirsi Magan put in prison from which he escaped three years later and fled the country. Not until 1978 was the family reunited with him.
As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali's mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin's cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman. Despite her adventurous spirit, in Yemen and later in the Gulf she found herself drawn to the stern Wahhabi version of Islam that would later clash with the more relaxed interpretation of Islam favoured by Ms Hirsi Ali's father and many other Somalis. She and Hirsi Magan fell out not long after the family moved to Kenya in 1980. Hirsi Magan left to join a group of Somali opposition politicians in exile in Ethiopia and did not return to his family for ten years.
Ms Hirsi Ali says her mother had no idea how to raise her children in a foreign city. She frequently beat Ayaan and her sister, Haweya. Although they and their brother, Mahad, attended some of Nairobi's best schools, Haweya and Mahad dropped out early on. Ms Hirsi Ali herself meanwhile fell under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some of the best passages in the book concern this part of her life. As a teenager, Ms Hirsi Ali chose to wear the all-encompassing black Arab veil, which was unusual in cosmopolitan Nairobi. “Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority,” she writes. Even as she wore it, Ms Hirsi Ali was drawn in other directions. She read English novels and flirted with a boy. Young immigrants of any religion growing up with traditional parents in a modern society will recognise her confusion: “I was living on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honour; and there was Sister Aziza and God.”
Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia's civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.) She has since justified those lies by saying that she feared another kind of persecution: the vengeance of her clan after she ran away from an arranged marriage.
However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger. The subsequent uproar nearly cost Ms Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship, which may be the reason why she is careful here to re-state how much she feared her family when she first arrived in the Netherlands. But the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya's sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.
Mental illness, abortion, failed marriages, illicit affairs and differing interpretations of religion: much as she tries, the kind of problems that Ms Hirsi Ali describes in “Infidel” are all too human to be blamed entirely on Islam. Her book shows that her life, like those of other Muslims, is more complex than many people in the West may have realised. But the West's tendency to seek simplistic explanations is a weakness that Ms Hirsi Ali also shows she has been happy to exploit.
domingo, fevereiro 18, 2007
188) O Brasil se perdeu no caminho...
O futuro não veio
Antônio Machado
Correio Braziliense, Domingo, 18 de fevereiro de 2007
Feriadões como o Carnaval inspiram muita gente a voltar à origem e visitar o passado, o lugar onde nasceu, cresceu, deu o primeiro beijo. Faz bem tonificar o espírito pela leitura da trajetória já percorrida. A coluna fez o mesmo após topar com o futuro que devia ter começado lá no passado, e não chegou, assistindo a uma palestra, dias atrás, marcada para discorrer sobre os novos tempos do país.
O verbo para descrever o Brasil que vem à frente deveria estar no futuro. Mas o palestrante o colocou, propositalmente, no passado. E com isso entronizou a dramaticidade necessária para se entender o fracasso da geração que vive agora seu apogeu — a nossa geração — em um ambiente certamente menor que o sonhado na adolescência, entre os anos 50 e 70, que teria levado o país, mantida a mesma marcha, a hoje ostentar a segunda maior renda per capita do mundo.
Não cabe mais a pergunta clássica de divã: onde foi que erramos? A não ser que ela sirva para recuperar o caminho e trazer de volta o futuro. Acompanhemos pelos slides de Ricardo Amorim, diretor de Pesquisa e Estratégia em Nova York do banco alemão WerstLB, onde o futuro se perdeu. A economia cresceu à taxa média anual de 7,1% de 1950 a 1970. Depois, foi perdendo o pique: crescimento médio de 3% na década de 80, 1,8% na de 90 e 2,7% de 2000 a 2006.
No mundo, desde 1980, só a América Latina e o ex-bloco de países socialistas do Leste Europeu, mas não a Rússia, cresceram menos que a média. Leste Europeu, 2,2%. América Latina, 2,5% (Brasil, 2,4%). Países ricos, 2,7%. África, 2,8%. Oriente Médio, 3,3%. Ásia, 7,3% (China, 9,7%). O baixo crescimento aos que ficaram para trás deixou seqüelas, mais sérias aos que se deixaram prostrar.
No Brasil, explica a grave patologia social expressa pelas cenas de barbárie trazidas pelo noticiário: o crescimento da força de trabalho, de 2,7% ao ano, foi recorrentemente menor que a criação de empregos, função direta do vigor da atividade econômica.
É a evolução da renda per capita mais que o crescimento do PIB o que explica a deterioração geral do país, apesar do aumento mais que proporcional, no período, dos programas de distribuição de renda – recurso de última instância de um Estado que não consegue prover o ambiente propício para a expansão dos negócios e, dessa dinâmica, a criação de empregos e aumento da renda. Como estamos nesse quadro? Mesquita responde: no 142º lugar entre 177 países de um ranking de crescimento per capita nos últimos 10 anos.
País perdeu o sonho
O Brasil era do futuro, no passado. Se o crescimento médio das décadas de 50 a 70 (7,1%) tivesse se mantido, a renda per capita hoje seria 3,1 vezes maior, atingindo US$ 27,3 mil (pelo critério da paridade de poder de compra, PPP). Seria superior à da Espanha.
Vale comparar também com a China, que até meados da década de 80 tinha um PIB menor que o do Brasil, além de exportar badulaques. Hoje, caminha para ser a 2ª potência econômica do mundo depois dos EUA. Se tivéssemos crescido desde 1980 no mesmo ritmo que a China, 9,7% ao ano, compara Mesquita, a renda per capita já estaria em US$ 49,7 mil pelo mesmo critério da PPP, e seria a 2ª maior do mundo. Em suma: cinco vezes e caqueirada maior que a real.
Fomos ficando para trás. No ranking do Banco Mundial, com base no câmbio calculado pela paridade de poder de compra (que é o melhor para captar o poder aquisitivo efetivo que o câmbio de mercado), estamos atrás de Botsuana, país insulado na África do Sul, Irã dos aiatolás e a ilhota-estado de Tonga. Entende-se por que a sociedade se vira como pode e reclama socorro. Mais da metade da mão-de-obra vive na informalidade, sem carteira assinada. As periferias e os morros pagam milícias para ter proteção. Compram produtos piratas em camelôs que proliferam como formiga. Extraem dentes, porque cuidá-los já é luxo, em clínicas não fiscalizadas. Fazem justiça com as próprias mãos ou a encomendam em botequins.
A resposta é nossa
O que quer dizer isso? Que falta Estado, entendido como polícia, justiça, saúde, educação. Mas abunda na propaganda oficial. Desde o futuro que não chegou, houve de tudo: governantes ineptos, muita política econômica errada e condições externas ruins, mas que não foram melhores para os outros. Agora, os ventos voltam a soprar a favor e as condições da economia nunca foram tão favoráveis. O que vai ser? Acho que desta vez nós é que deveríamos dar a resposta.
Em oito anos dos dois mandatos do governo passado o país sofreu o efeito de cinco grandes crises financeiras no mundo e foi à lona por três vezes, caindo no colo do FMI para evitar a bancarrota.
O desafio de enfrentar um Estado disfuncional foi empurrado à base de doses maciças de aumento de impostos (pouco mais de 20% do PIB para 36%) e contratação de mais dívida para pagar compromissos que a sociedade podia pedir, exigir, mas que sugaram os recursos para crescer e o ímpeto empreendedor. Se ele nunca fora decisivo no Brasil, como o é nos EUA e está sendo no renascimento da Ásia, pior ficou com o agigantamento da burocracia pública e dos custos para mantê-la. O governo Lula fará a reconciliação do futuro que se perdeu no passado com o presente se tiver visão de estadista.
O plano pró-crescimento foi um bom começo do segundo mandato, já que o primeiro foi mais do mesmo. Mas é preciso se superar. Não é entrando no jogo miúdo dos partidos que saberá o que fazer. Se não enfrentar o parasitismo incrustado no Estado, melhor esquecer.
Antônio Machado
Correio Braziliense, Domingo, 18 de fevereiro de 2007
Feriadões como o Carnaval inspiram muita gente a voltar à origem e visitar o passado, o lugar onde nasceu, cresceu, deu o primeiro beijo. Faz bem tonificar o espírito pela leitura da trajetória já percorrida. A coluna fez o mesmo após topar com o futuro que devia ter começado lá no passado, e não chegou, assistindo a uma palestra, dias atrás, marcada para discorrer sobre os novos tempos do país.
O verbo para descrever o Brasil que vem à frente deveria estar no futuro. Mas o palestrante o colocou, propositalmente, no passado. E com isso entronizou a dramaticidade necessária para se entender o fracasso da geração que vive agora seu apogeu — a nossa geração — em um ambiente certamente menor que o sonhado na adolescência, entre os anos 50 e 70, que teria levado o país, mantida a mesma marcha, a hoje ostentar a segunda maior renda per capita do mundo.
Não cabe mais a pergunta clássica de divã: onde foi que erramos? A não ser que ela sirva para recuperar o caminho e trazer de volta o futuro. Acompanhemos pelos slides de Ricardo Amorim, diretor de Pesquisa e Estratégia em Nova York do banco alemão WerstLB, onde o futuro se perdeu. A economia cresceu à taxa média anual de 7,1% de 1950 a 1970. Depois, foi perdendo o pique: crescimento médio de 3% na década de 80, 1,8% na de 90 e 2,7% de 2000 a 2006.
No mundo, desde 1980, só a América Latina e o ex-bloco de países socialistas do Leste Europeu, mas não a Rússia, cresceram menos que a média. Leste Europeu, 2,2%. América Latina, 2,5% (Brasil, 2,4%). Países ricos, 2,7%. África, 2,8%. Oriente Médio, 3,3%. Ásia, 7,3% (China, 9,7%). O baixo crescimento aos que ficaram para trás deixou seqüelas, mais sérias aos que se deixaram prostrar.
No Brasil, explica a grave patologia social expressa pelas cenas de barbárie trazidas pelo noticiário: o crescimento da força de trabalho, de 2,7% ao ano, foi recorrentemente menor que a criação de empregos, função direta do vigor da atividade econômica.
É a evolução da renda per capita mais que o crescimento do PIB o que explica a deterioração geral do país, apesar do aumento mais que proporcional, no período, dos programas de distribuição de renda – recurso de última instância de um Estado que não consegue prover o ambiente propício para a expansão dos negócios e, dessa dinâmica, a criação de empregos e aumento da renda. Como estamos nesse quadro? Mesquita responde: no 142º lugar entre 177 países de um ranking de crescimento per capita nos últimos 10 anos.
País perdeu o sonho
O Brasil era do futuro, no passado. Se o crescimento médio das décadas de 50 a 70 (7,1%) tivesse se mantido, a renda per capita hoje seria 3,1 vezes maior, atingindo US$ 27,3 mil (pelo critério da paridade de poder de compra, PPP). Seria superior à da Espanha.
Vale comparar também com a China, que até meados da década de 80 tinha um PIB menor que o do Brasil, além de exportar badulaques. Hoje, caminha para ser a 2ª potência econômica do mundo depois dos EUA. Se tivéssemos crescido desde 1980 no mesmo ritmo que a China, 9,7% ao ano, compara Mesquita, a renda per capita já estaria em US$ 49,7 mil pelo mesmo critério da PPP, e seria a 2ª maior do mundo. Em suma: cinco vezes e caqueirada maior que a real.
Fomos ficando para trás. No ranking do Banco Mundial, com base no câmbio calculado pela paridade de poder de compra (que é o melhor para captar o poder aquisitivo efetivo que o câmbio de mercado), estamos atrás de Botsuana, país insulado na África do Sul, Irã dos aiatolás e a ilhota-estado de Tonga. Entende-se por que a sociedade se vira como pode e reclama socorro. Mais da metade da mão-de-obra vive na informalidade, sem carteira assinada. As periferias e os morros pagam milícias para ter proteção. Compram produtos piratas em camelôs que proliferam como formiga. Extraem dentes, porque cuidá-los já é luxo, em clínicas não fiscalizadas. Fazem justiça com as próprias mãos ou a encomendam em botequins.
A resposta é nossa
O que quer dizer isso? Que falta Estado, entendido como polícia, justiça, saúde, educação. Mas abunda na propaganda oficial. Desde o futuro que não chegou, houve de tudo: governantes ineptos, muita política econômica errada e condições externas ruins, mas que não foram melhores para os outros. Agora, os ventos voltam a soprar a favor e as condições da economia nunca foram tão favoráveis. O que vai ser? Acho que desta vez nós é que deveríamos dar a resposta.
Em oito anos dos dois mandatos do governo passado o país sofreu o efeito de cinco grandes crises financeiras no mundo e foi à lona por três vezes, caindo no colo do FMI para evitar a bancarrota.
O desafio de enfrentar um Estado disfuncional foi empurrado à base de doses maciças de aumento de impostos (pouco mais de 20% do PIB para 36%) e contratação de mais dívida para pagar compromissos que a sociedade podia pedir, exigir, mas que sugaram os recursos para crescer e o ímpeto empreendedor. Se ele nunca fora decisivo no Brasil, como o é nos EUA e está sendo no renascimento da Ásia, pior ficou com o agigantamento da burocracia pública e dos custos para mantê-la. O governo Lula fará a reconciliação do futuro que se perdeu no passado com o presente se tiver visão de estadista.
O plano pró-crescimento foi um bom começo do segundo mandato, já que o primeiro foi mais do mesmo. Mas é preciso se superar. Não é entrando no jogo miúdo dos partidos que saberá o que fazer. Se não enfrentar o parasitismo incrustado no Estado, melhor esquecer.
quinta-feira, fevereiro 15, 2007
187) Um problema grave: o desaparecimento das loiras...
Les blondes risquent-elles de disparaître?
La chronique de Jean-Luc Nothias.
Le Figaro, 14 février 2007
Cette rumeur reprend forme à chaque fois que l'on évoque ces caractères en précisant qu'il y a des gènes "dominants" et des gènes "récessifs". De quoi s'agit-il ?
LA QUESTION revient régulièrement sur le devant de la scène : le gène (ou les gènes) à l'origine des cheveux blonds (ou des yeux bleus) risque-t-il un jour de disparaître ? La rumeur reprend forme à chaque fois que l'on évoque ces caractères en précisant qu'il y a des gènes « dominants » et des gènes « récessifs ». De quoi s'agit-il ?
Il faut savoir que notre génome (quelque 25 000 gènes) est présent en double exemplaire dans chacune de nos cellules. Chacune des deux copies est portée par 23 chromosomes (il y en a 46 en tout). Mis à part la paire de chromosomes qui déterminent le sexe (XX pour la femme, XY pour l'homme), les 22 autres paires sont composées de chromosomes jumeaux. Donc, chaque gène est présent en deux exemplaires. L'un d'eux vient du père, l'autre de la mère.
Prenons le gène responsable de la couleur des cheveux. Bien que déterminant la couleur dans tous les cas, il peut contenir différents messages : cheveux noirs, blonds, bruns, châtains, roux... Pour qu'une personne ait les cheveux blonds, il faut que le gène « cheveux blonds » soit présent en deux exemplaires. Donc qu'il ait été donné à la fois par le père et par la mère. Si tel n'est pas le cas, si par exemple l'un des exemplaires est « cheveux blonds » et l'autre « cheveux bruns », c'est ce dernier qui imposera la couleur. La personne sera brune.
Voilà pourquoi on parle de gène dominant. Et c'est le choix du nom de son « inverse », le terme « récessif », qui induit des ambiguïtés dans le langage courant et qui évoque le recul. D'où la tentation logique de dire qu'un gène récessif aura tendance à disparaître. En fait, ce n'est pas du tout le cas.
Comment un gène « vit-il » au sein d'une population ? Il est possible de modéliser, avec des équations, les fréquences des gènes et de leurs différentes formes, dans la population et dans sa descendance. On s'aperçoit ainsi que, très vite, des équilibres vont apparaître et se perpétuer. Ainsi, 10 % des Irlandais sont roux mais 40 % sont porteurs du gène et sont susceptibles de le transmettre. En France, 5 % de la population sont roux, 10 % blonds, 50 % châtains...
Reprenons l'exemple des cheveux bonds et des bruns et d'un père et d'une mère qui possèdent chacun un exemplaire du gène blond et un du gène brun. Ils sont tous les deux bruns, mais ont une chance sur quatre d'avoir un enfant blond et trois chances sur quatre d'avoir un enfant brun. Cela signifie que les gènes, qu'ils soient dominants ou récessifs, ont tous le même pourcentage de chance de se transmettre. Ce qui ne veut pas dire que ce couple ne pourra pas, par exemple, avoir deux enfants blonds. Mais à l'échelle de la population, statistiquement, on retrouvera, dans ce cas, trois enfants bruns pour un blond.
Un éclairage sur l'histoire humaine
La situation est bien sûr plus compliquée dans la réalité. D'une part parce que la couleur des cheveux n'est pas déterminée par un seul gène. D'autre part parce qu'il n'y a pas que deux couleurs de cheveux. Et d'une manière plus générale, un gène peut, ou non, constituer un avantage dans une situation ou dans un environnement donné. L'exemple de certaines maladies génétiques héréditaires est à ce titre révélateur.
Un exemple en est la drépanocytose, une maladie des globules rouges. Il faut avoir les deux copies du gène concerné modifiées pour être malade. Peu de sujets atteints atteignent l'âge de la reproduction. Cependant, le gène malade reste présent à une fréquence importante dans la population. C'est que les porteurs sains, ceux qui n'ont qu'une des copies du gène atteinte, résistent mieux au paludisme que le reste de la population. Cet « avantage » fait que le gène malade reste présent à des niveaux élevés (une personne sur cinq dans certaines régions d'Afrique).
Étudier la répartition des différentes formes d'un même gène éclaire également l'histoire humaine. Ainsi, l'étude des groupes sanguins (A, B et O) au niveau mondial raconte les migrations et les « fusions » de populations. Par exemple, la fréquence du gène codant pour le groupe A est supérieure à 25 % dans les populations d'Europe et de Turquie, et décroît en allant vers le Sud-Est asiatique.
Certaines populations locales affirment leur particularité à travers ces groupes sanguins. Les Islandais ont une très forte fréquence du groupe O (75 %). On l'attribue au fait que les conditions de vie très dures auraient plusieurs fois provoqué de très fortes réductions de populations, entraînant ces fluctuations aléatoires de la fréquence des groupes sanguins. Une autre particularité se trouve au Pays basque qui présente la plus faible fréquence d'Europe du groupe B (2 %). Cela résulterait du fait que les Basques sont issus d'un mélange unique entre un pool génique provenant de populations prénéolithiques européennes et celui de populations néolithiques d'origine indo-européennes. La persistance de leur singularité est aussi un message rassurant à destination des blonds et des blondes.
La chronique de Jean-Luc Nothias.
Le Figaro, 14 février 2007
Cette rumeur reprend forme à chaque fois que l'on évoque ces caractères en précisant qu'il y a des gènes "dominants" et des gènes "récessifs". De quoi s'agit-il ?
LA QUESTION revient régulièrement sur le devant de la scène : le gène (ou les gènes) à l'origine des cheveux blonds (ou des yeux bleus) risque-t-il un jour de disparaître ? La rumeur reprend forme à chaque fois que l'on évoque ces caractères en précisant qu'il y a des gènes « dominants » et des gènes « récessifs ». De quoi s'agit-il ?
Il faut savoir que notre génome (quelque 25 000 gènes) est présent en double exemplaire dans chacune de nos cellules. Chacune des deux copies est portée par 23 chromosomes (il y en a 46 en tout). Mis à part la paire de chromosomes qui déterminent le sexe (XX pour la femme, XY pour l'homme), les 22 autres paires sont composées de chromosomes jumeaux. Donc, chaque gène est présent en deux exemplaires. L'un d'eux vient du père, l'autre de la mère.
Prenons le gène responsable de la couleur des cheveux. Bien que déterminant la couleur dans tous les cas, il peut contenir différents messages : cheveux noirs, blonds, bruns, châtains, roux... Pour qu'une personne ait les cheveux blonds, il faut que le gène « cheveux blonds » soit présent en deux exemplaires. Donc qu'il ait été donné à la fois par le père et par la mère. Si tel n'est pas le cas, si par exemple l'un des exemplaires est « cheveux blonds » et l'autre « cheveux bruns », c'est ce dernier qui imposera la couleur. La personne sera brune.
Voilà pourquoi on parle de gène dominant. Et c'est le choix du nom de son « inverse », le terme « récessif », qui induit des ambiguïtés dans le langage courant et qui évoque le recul. D'où la tentation logique de dire qu'un gène récessif aura tendance à disparaître. En fait, ce n'est pas du tout le cas.
Comment un gène « vit-il » au sein d'une population ? Il est possible de modéliser, avec des équations, les fréquences des gènes et de leurs différentes formes, dans la population et dans sa descendance. On s'aperçoit ainsi que, très vite, des équilibres vont apparaître et se perpétuer. Ainsi, 10 % des Irlandais sont roux mais 40 % sont porteurs du gène et sont susceptibles de le transmettre. En France, 5 % de la population sont roux, 10 % blonds, 50 % châtains...
Reprenons l'exemple des cheveux bonds et des bruns et d'un père et d'une mère qui possèdent chacun un exemplaire du gène blond et un du gène brun. Ils sont tous les deux bruns, mais ont une chance sur quatre d'avoir un enfant blond et trois chances sur quatre d'avoir un enfant brun. Cela signifie que les gènes, qu'ils soient dominants ou récessifs, ont tous le même pourcentage de chance de se transmettre. Ce qui ne veut pas dire que ce couple ne pourra pas, par exemple, avoir deux enfants blonds. Mais à l'échelle de la population, statistiquement, on retrouvera, dans ce cas, trois enfants bruns pour un blond.
Un éclairage sur l'histoire humaine
La situation est bien sûr plus compliquée dans la réalité. D'une part parce que la couleur des cheveux n'est pas déterminée par un seul gène. D'autre part parce qu'il n'y a pas que deux couleurs de cheveux. Et d'une manière plus générale, un gène peut, ou non, constituer un avantage dans une situation ou dans un environnement donné. L'exemple de certaines maladies génétiques héréditaires est à ce titre révélateur.
Un exemple en est la drépanocytose, une maladie des globules rouges. Il faut avoir les deux copies du gène concerné modifiées pour être malade. Peu de sujets atteints atteignent l'âge de la reproduction. Cependant, le gène malade reste présent à une fréquence importante dans la population. C'est que les porteurs sains, ceux qui n'ont qu'une des copies du gène atteinte, résistent mieux au paludisme que le reste de la population. Cet « avantage » fait que le gène malade reste présent à des niveaux élevés (une personne sur cinq dans certaines régions d'Afrique).
Étudier la répartition des différentes formes d'un même gène éclaire également l'histoire humaine. Ainsi, l'étude des groupes sanguins (A, B et O) au niveau mondial raconte les migrations et les « fusions » de populations. Par exemple, la fréquence du gène codant pour le groupe A est supérieure à 25 % dans les populations d'Europe et de Turquie, et décroît en allant vers le Sud-Est asiatique.
Certaines populations locales affirment leur particularité à travers ces groupes sanguins. Les Islandais ont une très forte fréquence du groupe O (75 %). On l'attribue au fait que les conditions de vie très dures auraient plusieurs fois provoqué de très fortes réductions de populations, entraînant ces fluctuations aléatoires de la fréquence des groupes sanguins. Une autre particularité se trouve au Pays basque qui présente la plus faible fréquence d'Europe du groupe B (2 %). Cela résulterait du fait que les Basques sont issus d'un mélange unique entre un pool génique provenant de populations prénéolithiques européennes et celui de populations néolithiques d'origine indo-européennes. La persistance de leur singularité est aussi un message rassurant à destination des blonds et des blondes.
quarta-feira, fevereiro 14, 2007
186) A estratégia de grande potencia da Russia
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT 02.13.2007
Russia's Great-Power Strategy
By George Friedman
Most speeches at diplomatic gatherings aren't worth the time it takes to listen to them. On rare occasion, a speech is delivered that needs to be listened to carefully. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave such a speech over the weekend in Munich, at a meeting on international security. The speech did not break new ground; it repeated things that the Russians have been saying for quite a while. But the venue in which it was given and the confidence with which it was asserted signify a new point in Russian history. The Cold War has not returned, but Russia is now officially asserting itself as a great power, and behaving accordingly.
At Munich, Putin launched a systematic attack on the role the United States is playing in the world. He said: "One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way ... This is nourishing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons." In other words, the United States has gone beyond its legitimate reach and is therefore responsible for attempts by other countries -- an obvious reference to Iran -- to acquire nuclear weapons.
Russia for some time has been in confrontation with the United States over U.S. actions in the former Soviet Union (FSU). What the Russians perceive as an American attempt to create a pro-U.S. regime in Ukraine triggered the confrontation. But now, the issue goes beyond U.S. actions in the FSU. The Russians are arguing that the unipolar world -- meaning that the United States is the only global power and is surrounded by lesser, regional powers -- is itself unacceptable. In other words, the United States sees itself as the solution when it is, actually, the problem.
In his speech, Putin reached out to European states -- particularly Germany, pointing out that it has close, but blunt, relations with Russia. The Central Europeans showed themselves to be extremely wary about Putin's speech, recognizing it for what it was -- a new level of assertiveness from an historical enemy. Some German leaders appeared more understanding, however: Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier made no mention of Putin's speech in his own presentation to the conference, while Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, praised Putin's stance on Iran. He also noted that the U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic was cause for concern -- and not only to Russia.
Putin now clearly wants to escalate the confrontations with the United States and likely wants to build a coalition to limit American power. The gross imbalance of global power in the current system makes such coalition-building inevitable -- and it makes sense that the Russians should be taking the lead. The Europeans are risk-averse, and the Chinese do not have much at risk in their dealings with the United States at the moment. The Russians, however, have everything at risk. The United States is intruding in the FSU, and anideological success for the Americans in Ukraine would leave the Russians permanently on the defensive.
The Russians need allies but are not likely to find them among other great-power states. Fortunately for Moscow, the U.S. obsession with Iraq creates alternative opportunities. First, the focus on Iraq prevents the Americans from countering Russia elsewhere. Second, it gives the Russians serious leverage against the United States -- for example, by shipping weapons to key players in the region. Finally, there are Middle Eastern states that seek great-power patronage. It is therefore no accident that Putin's next stop, following the Munich conference, was in Saudi Arabia. Having stabilized the situation in the former Soviet region, the Russians now are constructing their follow-on strategy, and that concerns the Middle East.
The Russian Interests
The Middle East is the pressure point to which the United States is most sensitive. Its military commitment in Iraq, the confrontation with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oil in the Arabian Peninsula create a situation such that pain in the region affects the United States intensely. Therefore, it makes sense for the Russians to use all available means of pressure in the Middle East in efforts to control U.S. behavior elsewhere, particularly in the former Soviet Union.
Like the Americans, the Russians also have direct interests in the Middle East. Energy is a primary one: Russia is not only a major exporter of energy supplies, it is currently the world's top oil producer. The Russians have a need to maintain robust energy prices, and working with the Iranians and Saudis in some way to achieve this is directly in line with Moscow's interest. To be more specific, the Russians do not want the Saudis increasing oil production.
There are strategic interests in the Middle East as well. For example, the Russians are still bogged down in Chechnya. It is Moscow's belief that if Chechnya were to secede from the Russian Federation, a precedent would be set that could lead to the dissolution of the Federation. Moscow will not allow this. The Russians consistently have claimed that the Chechen rebellion has been funded by "Wahhabis," by which they mean Saudis. Reaching an accommodation with the Saudis, therefore, would have not only economic, but also strategic, implications for the Russians.
On a broader level, the Russians retain important interests in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. In both cases, their needs intersect with forces originating in the Muslim world and trace, to some extent, back to the Middle East. If the Russian strategy is to reassert a sphere of influence in the former Soviet region, it follows that these regions must be secured. That, in turn, inevitably involves the Russians in the Middle East.
Therefore, even if Russia is not in a position to pursue some of the strategic goals that date back to the Soviet era and before -- such as control of the Bosporus and projection of naval power into the Mediterranean -- it nevertheless has a basic, ongoing interest in the region. Russia has a need both to limit American power and to achieve direct goals of its own. So it makes perfect sense for Putin to leave Munich and embark on a tour of Saudi Arabiaand other Persian Gulf countries.
The Complexities
But the Russians also have a problem. The strategic interests of Middle Eastern states diverge, to say the least. The two main Islamic powers between the Levant and the Hindu Kush are Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Russians have things they want from each, but the Saudis and Iranians have dramatically different interests. Saudi Arabia -- an Arab and primarily Sunni kingdom -- is rich but militarily weak. The government's reliance on outside help for national defense generates intense opposition within the kingdom. Desert Storm, which established a basing arrangement for Western troops within Saudi Arabia, was one of the driving forces behind the creation of al Qaeda. Iran -- a predominantly Persian and Shiite power -- is not nearly as rich as Saudi Arabia but militarily much more powerful. Iran seeks to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf -- out of both its need to defend itself against aggression, and for controlling and exploiting the oil wealth of the region.
Putting the split between Sunni and Shiite aside for the moment, there is tremendous geopolitical asymmetry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia wants to limit Iranian power, while keeping its own dependence on foreign powers at a minimum. That means that, though keeping energy prices high might make financial sense for the kingdom, the fact that high energy prices also strengthen the Iranians actually can be a more important consideration, depending on circumstances. There is some evidence that recent declines in oil prices are linked to decisions in Riyadh that are aimed at increasing production, reducing prices and hurting the Iranians.
This creates a problem for Russia. While Moscow has substantial room for maneuver, the fact is that lowered oil prices impact energy prices overall, and therefore hurt the Russians. The Saudis, moreover, need the Iranians blocked -- but without going so far as to permit foreign troops to be based in Saudi Arabia itself. In other words, they want to see the United States remain in Iraq, since the Americans serve as the perfect shield against the Iranians so long as they remain there. Putin's criticisms of the United States, as delivered in Munich, would have been applauded by Saudi Arabia prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But in 2007, the results of that invasion are exactly what the Saudis feared -- a collapsed Iraq and a relatively powerful Iran. The Saudis now need the Americans to stay put in the region.
The interests of Russia and Iran align more closely, but there are points of divergence there as well. Both benefit from having the United States tied up, militarily and politically, in wars, but Tehran would be delighted to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq that leaves a power vacuum for Iran to fill. The Russians would rather not see this outcome. First, they are quite happy to have the United States bogged down in Iraq and would prefer that to having the U.S. military freed for operations elsewhere. Second, they are interested in a relationship with Iran but are not eager to drive the United States and Saudi Arabia into closer relations. Third, the Russians do not want to see Iran become the dominant power in the region. They want to use Iran, but within certain manageable limits.
Russia has been supplying Iran with weapons. Of particular significance is the supply of surface-to-air missiles that would raise the cost of U.S. air operations against Iran. It is not clear whether the advanced S300PMU surface-to-air missile has yet been delivered, although there has been some discussion of this lately. If it were delivered, this would present significant challenges for U.S. air operation over Iran. The Russians would find this particularly advantageous, as the Iranians would absorb U.S. attentions and, as in Vietnam, the Russians would benefit from extended, fruitless commitments of U.S. military forces in regions not vital to Russia.
Meanwhile, there are energy matters: The Russians, as we have said, are interested in working with Iran to manage world oil prices. But at the same time, they would not be averse to a U.S. attack that takes Iran's oil off the market, spikes prices and enriches Russia.
Finally, it must be remembered that behind this complex relationship with Iran, there historically has been animosity and rivalry between the two countries. The Caucasus has been their battleground. For the moment, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a buffer there, but it is a buffer in which Russians and Iranians are already dueling. So long as both states are relatively weak, the buffer will maintain itself. But as they get stronger, the Caucasus will become a battleground again. When Russian and Iranian territories border each other, the two powers are rarely at peace. Indeed, Iran frequently needs outside help to contain the Russians.
A Complicated Strategy
In sum, the Russian position in the Middle East is at least as complex as the American one. Or perhaps even more so, since the Americans can leave and the Russians always will live on the doorstep of the Middle East. Historically, once the Russians start fishing in Middle Eastern waters, they find themselves in a greater trap than the Americans. The opening moves are easy. The duel between Saudi Arabia and Iran seems manageable. But as time goes on, Putin's Soviet predecessors learned, the Middle East is a graveyard of ambitions -- and not just American ambitions.
Russia wants to contain U.S. power, and manipulating the situation in the Middle East certainly will cause the Americans substantial pain. But whatever short-term advantages the Russians may be able to find and exploit in the region, there is an order of complexity in Putin's maneuver that might transcend any advantage they gain from boxing the Americans in.
In returning to "great power" status, Russia is using an obvious opening gambit. But being obvious does not make it optimal.
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Russia's Great-Power Strategy
By George Friedman
Most speeches at diplomatic gatherings aren't worth the time it takes to listen to them. On rare occasion, a speech is delivered that needs to be listened to carefully. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave such a speech over the weekend in Munich, at a meeting on international security. The speech did not break new ground; it repeated things that the Russians have been saying for quite a while. But the venue in which it was given and the confidence with which it was asserted signify a new point in Russian history. The Cold War has not returned, but Russia is now officially asserting itself as a great power, and behaving accordingly.
At Munich, Putin launched a systematic attack on the role the United States is playing in the world. He said: "One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way ... This is nourishing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons." In other words, the United States has gone beyond its legitimate reach and is therefore responsible for attempts by other countries -- an obvious reference to Iran -- to acquire nuclear weapons.
Russia for some time has been in confrontation with the United States over U.S. actions in the former Soviet Union (FSU). What the Russians perceive as an American attempt to create a pro-U.S. regime in Ukraine triggered the confrontation. But now, the issue goes beyond U.S. actions in the FSU. The Russians are arguing that the unipolar world -- meaning that the United States is the only global power and is surrounded by lesser, regional powers -- is itself unacceptable. In other words, the United States sees itself as the solution when it is, actually, the problem.
In his speech, Putin reached out to European states -- particularly Germany, pointing out that it has close, but blunt, relations with Russia. The Central Europeans showed themselves to be extremely wary about Putin's speech, recognizing it for what it was -- a new level of assertiveness from an historical enemy. Some German leaders appeared more understanding, however: Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier made no mention of Putin's speech in his own presentation to the conference, while Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, praised Putin's stance on Iran. He also noted that the U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic was cause for concern -- and not only to Russia.
Putin now clearly wants to escalate the confrontations with the United States and likely wants to build a coalition to limit American power. The gross imbalance of global power in the current system makes such coalition-building inevitable -- and it makes sense that the Russians should be taking the lead. The Europeans are risk-averse, and the Chinese do not have much at risk in their dealings with the United States at the moment. The Russians, however, have everything at risk. The United States is intruding in the FSU, and anideological success for the Americans in Ukraine would leave the Russians permanently on the defensive.
The Russians need allies but are not likely to find them among other great-power states. Fortunately for Moscow, the U.S. obsession with Iraq creates alternative opportunities. First, the focus on Iraq prevents the Americans from countering Russia elsewhere. Second, it gives the Russians serious leverage against the United States -- for example, by shipping weapons to key players in the region. Finally, there are Middle Eastern states that seek great-power patronage. It is therefore no accident that Putin's next stop, following the Munich conference, was in Saudi Arabia. Having stabilized the situation in the former Soviet region, the Russians now are constructing their follow-on strategy, and that concerns the Middle East.
The Russian Interests
The Middle East is the pressure point to which the United States is most sensitive. Its military commitment in Iraq, the confrontation with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oil in the Arabian Peninsula create a situation such that pain in the region affects the United States intensely. Therefore, it makes sense for the Russians to use all available means of pressure in the Middle East in efforts to control U.S. behavior elsewhere, particularly in the former Soviet Union.
Like the Americans, the Russians also have direct interests in the Middle East. Energy is a primary one: Russia is not only a major exporter of energy supplies, it is currently the world's top oil producer. The Russians have a need to maintain robust energy prices, and working with the Iranians and Saudis in some way to achieve this is directly in line with Moscow's interest. To be more specific, the Russians do not want the Saudis increasing oil production.
There are strategic interests in the Middle East as well. For example, the Russians are still bogged down in Chechnya. It is Moscow's belief that if Chechnya were to secede from the Russian Federation, a precedent would be set that could lead to the dissolution of the Federation. Moscow will not allow this. The Russians consistently have claimed that the Chechen rebellion has been funded by "Wahhabis," by which they mean Saudis. Reaching an accommodation with the Saudis, therefore, would have not only economic, but also strategic, implications for the Russians.
On a broader level, the Russians retain important interests in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. In both cases, their needs intersect with forces originating in the Muslim world and trace, to some extent, back to the Middle East. If the Russian strategy is to reassert a sphere of influence in the former Soviet region, it follows that these regions must be secured. That, in turn, inevitably involves the Russians in the Middle East.
Therefore, even if Russia is not in a position to pursue some of the strategic goals that date back to the Soviet era and before -- such as control of the Bosporus and projection of naval power into the Mediterranean -- it nevertheless has a basic, ongoing interest in the region. Russia has a need both to limit American power and to achieve direct goals of its own. So it makes perfect sense for Putin to leave Munich and embark on a tour of Saudi Arabiaand other Persian Gulf countries.
The Complexities
But the Russians also have a problem. The strategic interests of Middle Eastern states diverge, to say the least. The two main Islamic powers between the Levant and the Hindu Kush are Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Russians have things they want from each, but the Saudis and Iranians have dramatically different interests. Saudi Arabia -- an Arab and primarily Sunni kingdom -- is rich but militarily weak. The government's reliance on outside help for national defense generates intense opposition within the kingdom. Desert Storm, which established a basing arrangement for Western troops within Saudi Arabia, was one of the driving forces behind the creation of al Qaeda. Iran -- a predominantly Persian and Shiite power -- is not nearly as rich as Saudi Arabia but militarily much more powerful. Iran seeks to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf -- out of both its need to defend itself against aggression, and for controlling and exploiting the oil wealth of the region.
Putting the split between Sunni and Shiite aside for the moment, there is tremendous geopolitical asymmetry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia wants to limit Iranian power, while keeping its own dependence on foreign powers at a minimum. That means that, though keeping energy prices high might make financial sense for the kingdom, the fact that high energy prices also strengthen the Iranians actually can be a more important consideration, depending on circumstances. There is some evidence that recent declines in oil prices are linked to decisions in Riyadh that are aimed at increasing production, reducing prices and hurting the Iranians.
This creates a problem for Russia. While Moscow has substantial room for maneuver, the fact is that lowered oil prices impact energy prices overall, and therefore hurt the Russians. The Saudis, moreover, need the Iranians blocked -- but without going so far as to permit foreign troops to be based in Saudi Arabia itself. In other words, they want to see the United States remain in Iraq, since the Americans serve as the perfect shield against the Iranians so long as they remain there. Putin's criticisms of the United States, as delivered in Munich, would have been applauded by Saudi Arabia prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But in 2007, the results of that invasion are exactly what the Saudis feared -- a collapsed Iraq and a relatively powerful Iran. The Saudis now need the Americans to stay put in the region.
The interests of Russia and Iran align more closely, but there are points of divergence there as well. Both benefit from having the United States tied up, militarily and politically, in wars, but Tehran would be delighted to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq that leaves a power vacuum for Iran to fill. The Russians would rather not see this outcome. First, they are quite happy to have the United States bogged down in Iraq and would prefer that to having the U.S. military freed for operations elsewhere. Second, they are interested in a relationship with Iran but are not eager to drive the United States and Saudi Arabia into closer relations. Third, the Russians do not want to see Iran become the dominant power in the region. They want to use Iran, but within certain manageable limits.
Russia has been supplying Iran with weapons. Of particular significance is the supply of surface-to-air missiles that would raise the cost of U.S. air operations against Iran. It is not clear whether the advanced S300PMU surface-to-air missile has yet been delivered, although there has been some discussion of this lately. If it were delivered, this would present significant challenges for U.S. air operation over Iran. The Russians would find this particularly advantageous, as the Iranians would absorb U.S. attentions and, as in Vietnam, the Russians would benefit from extended, fruitless commitments of U.S. military forces in regions not vital to Russia.
Meanwhile, there are energy matters: The Russians, as we have said, are interested in working with Iran to manage world oil prices. But at the same time, they would not be averse to a U.S. attack that takes Iran's oil off the market, spikes prices and enriches Russia.
Finally, it must be remembered that behind this complex relationship with Iran, there historically has been animosity and rivalry between the two countries. The Caucasus has been their battleground. For the moment, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a buffer there, but it is a buffer in which Russians and Iranians are already dueling. So long as both states are relatively weak, the buffer will maintain itself. But as they get stronger, the Caucasus will become a battleground again. When Russian and Iranian territories border each other, the two powers are rarely at peace. Indeed, Iran frequently needs outside help to contain the Russians.
A Complicated Strategy
In sum, the Russian position in the Middle East is at least as complex as the American one. Or perhaps even more so, since the Americans can leave and the Russians always will live on the doorstep of the Middle East. Historically, once the Russians start fishing in Middle Eastern waters, they find themselves in a greater trap than the Americans. The opening moves are easy. The duel between Saudi Arabia and Iran seems manageable. But as time goes on, Putin's Soviet predecessors learned, the Middle East is a graveyard of ambitions -- and not just American ambitions.
Russia wants to contain U.S. power, and manipulating the situation in the Middle East certainly will cause the Americans substantial pain. But whatever short-term advantages the Russians may be able to find and exploit in the region, there is an order of complexity in Putin's maneuver that might transcend any advantage they gain from boxing the Americans in.
In returning to "great power" status, Russia is using an obvious opening gambit. But being obvious does not make it optimal.
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domingo, fevereiro 11, 2007
185) Ialta: conferencia de 1945 decide fim da Alemanha nazista
The New York Times, Feb. 11, 1945
President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement during World War II.
Big 3 Doom Nazism and Reich Militarism; Agree on Freed Lands and Oaks Voting; Convoke United Nations in U.S. April 25
YALTA PARLEY ENDS Unified Blows at Reich, Policing Spheres and Reparations Shaped FRANCE TO GET ROLE Broader Polish, Yugoslav Regimes Guaranteed -- Curzon Line Adopted
By Lansing Warren
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Pacific War Role for Soviet Hinted: Date of United Nations Parley Follows 'Denouncing' Time of Russo-Japanese Treaty
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Manila Trap Shut; Luzon Is Crossed: U.S. Forces Unite to Squeeze Capital as Armored Push East Reaches Coast
Red Army Is at Bober River After 16-Mile Gain in Silesia WPB Takes Charge Of Match Output
Monday Meat Ban Flouted Again; Cafes Exhibit and Serve Steaks
Elliott Roosevelt Made Brigadier By Senate 53 to 11, on War Record
Washington, Feb. 12 -- Allied decisions sealing the doom of Nazi Germany and German militarism, coordinating military plans for Germany's occupation and control and maintaining order and establishing popular governments in liberated countries were signed yesterday by President Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill near Yalta in the Crimea, the White House announced today.
The conference, held in the summer palace of former Czar Nicholas II on the black Sea shore, also called for a United Nations security conference in San Francisco on April 25.
The parleys, hitherto shrouded in secrecy except for a brief outline of the agenda issued Feb. 7, were held day and night from Feb. 4 until the final signatures were affixed. The announcement did not refer to President Roosevelt's future movements except that he had left the Crimea.
Main Points of Accord
Major decisions of the conference include:
(1) Plans for new blows at the heart of Germany from the east, west, north and south.
(2) Agreement for occupation by the three Allies, each of a separate zone, as Germany is invaded, and an invitation to France to take over a zone and participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission.
(3) Reparations in kind to be paid by Germany for damages, to be set by an Allied commission. The reparations commission, which will establish the type and amount of payments by Germany, will have its headquarters in Moscow. [Secretary of State Stettinius and Ambassador Harriman arrived in Moscow Monday.]
(4) Settlement of questions left undecided at the conference at Dumbarton Oaks and decision to call a United Nations conference at San Francisco April 25 to prepare the charter for a general international organization to maintain peace and security.
(5) Specific agreements to widen the scope of the present Governments in Poland and Yugoslavia and an understanding to keep order and establish Governments in liberated countries conforming to the popular will and the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
(6) A general declaration of determination to maintain Allied unity for peace.
German People Apart
The statement announced common policies for enforcing unconditional surrender and imposing Nazi Germany's doom. The document draws a distinction between the Nazi system, laws and institutions, the German General Staff and its militarism, which will be relentlessly wiped out, and the German people.
"It is not our purpose," it declared," to destroy the people of Germany, but only when nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the community of nations."
Until this conference the Allies had laid down no iron-clad program for the control and complete reorganization of Germany. Military plans will be made known only "as we execute them," said the statement, and the surrender terms "not until the final defeat has been accomplished."
Coordinated administration and control has been provided in a central Control Commission, which will be established with headquarters in Berlin. Part of its work will be to insist on the destruction of all German military equipment, elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production, the punishment of war criminals and the wiping out of all Nazi institutions from the German economic and cultural life.
The document mentioned no discussion of plans in the Far eastern theatre of the war or any understanding with the Soviet Union for entry into the war against Japan, but the fact that the date for the United Nations conference, April 25, comes one day after the date determining of a renewal of the Russo-Japanese agreement was remarked as significant.
That San Francisco had been chosen as the site for the next security conference of the United Nations, along with the date, aroused considerable interest here because of the city's remoteness from the European theatre of war and its position nearer the Far Eastern theatre.
New Cabinet Indicated
Special dispositions with regard to Poland include the widening of the present Provisional Government to include other democratic leaders in Poland and abroad.
The agreement sets the Polish eastern boundary, with a few alterations in favor of Poland, along the Curzon Line and recognizes that Poland must acquire substantial territory in the north and west but leaves these decisions to the peace conference. This is the first official mention to confirm the Allies' contemplation of a general peace conference.
With regard to the conflict for power in Yugoslavia the Allies have agreed that Marshal Tito and Dr. Ivan Subasitch shall set up the Government they have proposed but to include former members of the Parliament who did not collaborate with the enemy.
These Governments, it is provided, will be succeeded by those formed in conformity with desires expressed in popular elections and in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. The statement does not deal specifically with the situation in Greece or other countries but declares that the conference also made a general review of other Balkan questions.
Fascism to Be Uprooted
In a declaration on the liberated areas, the Allies announced the intention of consulting in the interests of the liberated peoples and to cooperate in rebuilding the national economic life in these countries. Vestiges of nazism and fascism are to be destroyed, and the Allies will cooperate to establish internal peace, carry relief and form interim governments broadly representative in the Axis satellite states as well as in liberated Allied countries.
An important feature of the international security discussions was contained in the announcements that the three powers had reached agreement on the disputed question of voting procedure, which prevented completion of the work at Dumbarton Oaks. No indication of the solution was given.
The three Chiefs of State were assisted by their Foreign Ministers, chiefs of military staffs and numerous other experts, as was the case in the previous three-power meetings. Besides Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., President Roosevelt was accompanied by Harry L. Hopkins, his special assistant, and Justice James F. Byrnes, Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
Other United States delegates included W. Averell Harriman, Ambassador to the Soviet Union; H. Freeman Matthews, the State Department's Director of European Affairs; Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of Special Political Affairs, and Charles E. Bohlen, assistant to the Secretary of State.
Throughout the Conference President Roosevelt occupied apartments in the former palace of the Czars. Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were housed in separate establishments near by.
Three women were with the delegations. Though they did not participate in the discussions, they were received as conference guests. They were Mrs. Anna Boettiger, daughter of President and Mrs. Roosevelt; Mrs. Sarah Oliver, daughter of Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the Ambassador to Moscow.
President Roosevelt's party also included Edward J. Flynn of New York, who did not attend conference meetings but was invited as a personal friend when Mr. Roosevelt learned that he was planning a visit to Moscow.
Leahy Also in Party
Others in the President's personal party were Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President; Mr. Byrnes, Vice Admirals Ross T. McIntyre and Wilson Brown, Maj. Gen. Edwin M. Watson and Stephen Early, the President's secretary.
President Roosevelt, whose movements have been obscured by censorship for more than three weeks, left Washington for the Crimea conference almost immediately after his inauguration ceremonies on Jan. 20. The details of the voyage were not made public, but it was revealed that the President met Prime Minister Churchill on the island of Malta, which the British and American delegations reached Feb. 2. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill made a prolonged exchange of views and there were formal discussions between the British and United States Military chiefs of staff.
President Roosevelt left Malta the night of Feb. 2, going by air direct to Yalta, where he was met by Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, who extended greetings for Marshal Stalin.
The Presidential party proceeded along the Black Sea shore two miles southwest to Livadia, where stands the magnificent Summer Palace.
Meetings began the next day on the arrival of Marshal Stalin, who flew from his headquarters on the Russian front, where the Silesian Offensive was just getting under way. The delegates met either in committees or as a group. Besides daily meetings of the three heads of Governments and the Foreign Secretaries, separate meetings of the Foreign Secretaries and their advisers were held daily.
The Foreign Secretaries arranged for regular conferences every three of four months. The meetings will be held in rotation in the three capitals, the first to be called in London after the San Francisco meeting.
At the close of the conference President Roosevelt presented to Marshal Stalin a number of decorations awarded by the United States to military men in the Red Army. Those to be decorated will receive the rank of commander in the Legion of Merit. They include Marshal Alexander M. Vasilevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; Air Chief Marshal Alexander A. Novikoff, commanding general of the Red Air Forces; Gen. A. K. Repin, Chief of the Soviet Military Mission to the United States; Lieutenant General Brendal, Lieutenant Colonel Krolenko, Major General Levanovich, Major General Slavin, Deputy Chief of the Red Army Staff, and Colonel Byaz.
The decorations were given in recognition of distinguished services in connection with their cooperation in American Air Force shuttle-bombing operations in Germany.
The first news of the historic consultation at Yalta was issued at the White House by Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant to the President, who opened his announcement to the impatient correspondents with the statement: "This is it."
Announcement of the Allied report on the conference made in the Senate was greeted with cheers, which continued while the upper house adjourned.
President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement during World War II.
Big 3 Doom Nazism and Reich Militarism; Agree on Freed Lands and Oaks Voting; Convoke United Nations in U.S. April 25
YALTA PARLEY ENDS Unified Blows at Reich, Policing Spheres and Reparations Shaped FRANCE TO GET ROLE Broader Polish, Yugoslav Regimes Guaranteed -- Curzon Line Adopted
By Lansing Warren
RELATED HEADLINES
Big 3 Agreement Lauded by Hoover: 'Strong Foundation' for New World, He Says -- Austin Asks Bipartisan Planning
Pacific War Role for Soviet Hinted: Date of United Nations Parley Follows 'Denouncing' Time of Russo-Japanese Treaty
OTHER HEADLINES
Roosevelt Presses World Money Plan: He Asks Congress for Action on Monetary Fund and on Bank of Reconstruction
Cleve, Pruem Fall: Allies Capture Two Key Westwall Positions in North and Center: Opposition is Light: Germans Draft Women for Volkssturm -- New Clashes Reported
Manila Trap Shut; Luzon Is Crossed: U.S. Forces Unite to Squeeze Capital as Armored Push East Reaches Coast
Red Army Is at Bober River After 16-Mile Gain in Silesia WPB Takes Charge Of Match Output
Monday Meat Ban Flouted Again; Cafes Exhibit and Serve Steaks
Elliott Roosevelt Made Brigadier By Senate 53 to 11, on War Record
Washington, Feb. 12 -- Allied decisions sealing the doom of Nazi Germany and German militarism, coordinating military plans for Germany's occupation and control and maintaining order and establishing popular governments in liberated countries were signed yesterday by President Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill near Yalta in the Crimea, the White House announced today.
The conference, held in the summer palace of former Czar Nicholas II on the black Sea shore, also called for a United Nations security conference in San Francisco on April 25.
The parleys, hitherto shrouded in secrecy except for a brief outline of the agenda issued Feb. 7, were held day and night from Feb. 4 until the final signatures were affixed. The announcement did not refer to President Roosevelt's future movements except that he had left the Crimea.
Main Points of Accord
Major decisions of the conference include:
(1) Plans for new blows at the heart of Germany from the east, west, north and south.
(2) Agreement for occupation by the three Allies, each of a separate zone, as Germany is invaded, and an invitation to France to take over a zone and participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission.
(3) Reparations in kind to be paid by Germany for damages, to be set by an Allied commission. The reparations commission, which will establish the type and amount of payments by Germany, will have its headquarters in Moscow. [Secretary of State Stettinius and Ambassador Harriman arrived in Moscow Monday.]
(4) Settlement of questions left undecided at the conference at Dumbarton Oaks and decision to call a United Nations conference at San Francisco April 25 to prepare the charter for a general international organization to maintain peace and security.
(5) Specific agreements to widen the scope of the present Governments in Poland and Yugoslavia and an understanding to keep order and establish Governments in liberated countries conforming to the popular will and the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
(6) A general declaration of determination to maintain Allied unity for peace.
German People Apart
The statement announced common policies for enforcing unconditional surrender and imposing Nazi Germany's doom. The document draws a distinction between the Nazi system, laws and institutions, the German General Staff and its militarism, which will be relentlessly wiped out, and the German people.
"It is not our purpose," it declared," to destroy the people of Germany, but only when nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the community of nations."
Until this conference the Allies had laid down no iron-clad program for the control and complete reorganization of Germany. Military plans will be made known only "as we execute them," said the statement, and the surrender terms "not until the final defeat has been accomplished."
Coordinated administration and control has been provided in a central Control Commission, which will be established with headquarters in Berlin. Part of its work will be to insist on the destruction of all German military equipment, elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production, the punishment of war criminals and the wiping out of all Nazi institutions from the German economic and cultural life.
The document mentioned no discussion of plans in the Far eastern theatre of the war or any understanding with the Soviet Union for entry into the war against Japan, but the fact that the date for the United Nations conference, April 25, comes one day after the date determining of a renewal of the Russo-Japanese agreement was remarked as significant.
That San Francisco had been chosen as the site for the next security conference of the United Nations, along with the date, aroused considerable interest here because of the city's remoteness from the European theatre of war and its position nearer the Far Eastern theatre.
New Cabinet Indicated
Special dispositions with regard to Poland include the widening of the present Provisional Government to include other democratic leaders in Poland and abroad.
The agreement sets the Polish eastern boundary, with a few alterations in favor of Poland, along the Curzon Line and recognizes that Poland must acquire substantial territory in the north and west but leaves these decisions to the peace conference. This is the first official mention to confirm the Allies' contemplation of a general peace conference.
With regard to the conflict for power in Yugoslavia the Allies have agreed that Marshal Tito and Dr. Ivan Subasitch shall set up the Government they have proposed but to include former members of the Parliament who did not collaborate with the enemy.
These Governments, it is provided, will be succeeded by those formed in conformity with desires expressed in popular elections and in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. The statement does not deal specifically with the situation in Greece or other countries but declares that the conference also made a general review of other Balkan questions.
Fascism to Be Uprooted
In a declaration on the liberated areas, the Allies announced the intention of consulting in the interests of the liberated peoples and to cooperate in rebuilding the national economic life in these countries. Vestiges of nazism and fascism are to be destroyed, and the Allies will cooperate to establish internal peace, carry relief and form interim governments broadly representative in the Axis satellite states as well as in liberated Allied countries.
An important feature of the international security discussions was contained in the announcements that the three powers had reached agreement on the disputed question of voting procedure, which prevented completion of the work at Dumbarton Oaks. No indication of the solution was given.
The three Chiefs of State were assisted by their Foreign Ministers, chiefs of military staffs and numerous other experts, as was the case in the previous three-power meetings. Besides Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., President Roosevelt was accompanied by Harry L. Hopkins, his special assistant, and Justice James F. Byrnes, Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
Other United States delegates included W. Averell Harriman, Ambassador to the Soviet Union; H. Freeman Matthews, the State Department's Director of European Affairs; Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of Special Political Affairs, and Charles E. Bohlen, assistant to the Secretary of State.
Throughout the Conference President Roosevelt occupied apartments in the former palace of the Czars. Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were housed in separate establishments near by.
Three women were with the delegations. Though they did not participate in the discussions, they were received as conference guests. They were Mrs. Anna Boettiger, daughter of President and Mrs. Roosevelt; Mrs. Sarah Oliver, daughter of Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the Ambassador to Moscow.
President Roosevelt's party also included Edward J. Flynn of New York, who did not attend conference meetings but was invited as a personal friend when Mr. Roosevelt learned that he was planning a visit to Moscow.
Leahy Also in Party
Others in the President's personal party were Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President; Mr. Byrnes, Vice Admirals Ross T. McIntyre and Wilson Brown, Maj. Gen. Edwin M. Watson and Stephen Early, the President's secretary.
President Roosevelt, whose movements have been obscured by censorship for more than three weeks, left Washington for the Crimea conference almost immediately after his inauguration ceremonies on Jan. 20. The details of the voyage were not made public, but it was revealed that the President met Prime Minister Churchill on the island of Malta, which the British and American delegations reached Feb. 2. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill made a prolonged exchange of views and there were formal discussions between the British and United States Military chiefs of staff.
President Roosevelt left Malta the night of Feb. 2, going by air direct to Yalta, where he was met by Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, who extended greetings for Marshal Stalin.
The Presidential party proceeded along the Black Sea shore two miles southwest to Livadia, where stands the magnificent Summer Palace.
Meetings began the next day on the arrival of Marshal Stalin, who flew from his headquarters on the Russian front, where the Silesian Offensive was just getting under way. The delegates met either in committees or as a group. Besides daily meetings of the three heads of Governments and the Foreign Secretaries, separate meetings of the Foreign Secretaries and their advisers were held daily.
The Foreign Secretaries arranged for regular conferences every three of four months. The meetings will be held in rotation in the three capitals, the first to be called in London after the San Francisco meeting.
At the close of the conference President Roosevelt presented to Marshal Stalin a number of decorations awarded by the United States to military men in the Red Army. Those to be decorated will receive the rank of commander in the Legion of Merit. They include Marshal Alexander M. Vasilevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; Air Chief Marshal Alexander A. Novikoff, commanding general of the Red Air Forces; Gen. A. K. Repin, Chief of the Soviet Military Mission to the United States; Lieutenant General Brendal, Lieutenant Colonel Krolenko, Major General Levanovich, Major General Slavin, Deputy Chief of the Red Army Staff, and Colonel Byaz.
The decorations were given in recognition of distinguished services in connection with their cooperation in American Air Force shuttle-bombing operations in Germany.
The first news of the historic consultation at Yalta was issued at the White House by Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant to the President, who opened his announcement to the impatient correspondents with the statement: "This is it."
Announcement of the Allied report on the conference made in the Senate was greeted with cheers, which continued while the upper house adjourned.
184) Aquecimento global: a controversia continua...
Aquecimento global: Afinal, quem tem razão?
Fonte: Gazeta do Sul – Santa Cruz do Sul, 5 de fevereiro de 2007
Site: www.gazetadosul.com.br
Autoridades científicas disseram que aumento da temperatura do planeta pode causar catástrofes, mas há grupos de pesquisadores que contrariam essas afirmações
Quando cientistas de 130 países ligados ao Painel Internacional sobre a Mudança Climática (IPCC) se reuniram em Paris, no último dia 2, e apresentaram um relatório com dados assustadores sobre o aquecimento global, uma pergunta ficou no ar. As secas que dizimaram a produção agrícola ou chuvas excessivas e as altas temperaturas seriam sinal de que o fim dos tempos se aproxima?
Para os pesquisadores a resposta é sim e a causa de tudo isso seria a ação do homem. No mais completo relatório sobre clima, eles fizeram previsões pessimistas para os próximos cem anos e afirmaram que se não forem adotadas medidas eficazes há riscos de as águas dos oceanos cobrirem cidades costeiras e a falta de chuva acabar com a agricultura.
Mas o relatório que colocou em alerta as principais autoridades mundiais pode não passar de uma mera especulação. É isso que defendem alguns meteorologistas que, baseados em dados históricos, fazem afirmações contradizendo a teoria apocalíptica lançada do IPCC. Para eles, embora o aquecimento global seja um fato irrevogável, não há provas suficientes para justificar tanto alarde em torno do assunto.
Não se trata de amenizar os riscos, mas sim de levar à opinião pública um contraponto para uma questão que ganhou repercussão mundial e alimenta as mais mirabolantes especulações. O que os meteorolgistas querem é dizer que períodos de aquecimento excessivo ou de calores ocorreram ao longo dos séculos e nem por isso o mundo acabou. As opiniões são divergentes, mas abrem margem para uma questão. Quem, afinal, tem razão? A Gazeta do Sul ouviu defensores das duas teses e mostra o contraste de argumentos.
O QUE DIZ O RELATÓRIO
- 95% do aquecimento global é causado pelo lançamento na atmosfera de gases como o carbônico.
- A temperatura da Terra teria aumentado de 13,78 graus, há um século, para 14,5 graus.
- Há 125 mil anos, a temperatura chegou a 18 graus. O nível do mar teria subido até seis metros.
- Até 2100 o aquecimento global pode fazer com que a temperatura chegue a 16,5 graus.
- O aumento das emissões de gases causaria o derretimento do gelo do Ártico elevando o nível dos oceanos.
- Ventos, chuvas intensas e ciclones serão mais fortes, elevando o risco de destruições.
- O volume de precipitações, nas regiões mais secas, no entanto, tende a diminuir. Pelo menos 3,2 bilhões de pessoas podem ser atingidas por esse problema, que afeta, hoje 1,1 bilhão de habitantes.
- Espécies da flora e fauna seriam extintas por não conseguir se adaptar às mudanças climáticas.
- No Brasil a Floresta Amazônica corre risco de desaparecer com o aumento das temperaturas em torno de 4 e 8 graus e redução do volume de chuvas.
- O Sul do País sofreria tornados e furacões. A agricultura seria prejudicada e a economia também.
Outras matérias:
10/02/2007 Comportamento do clima é natural
10/02/2007 Situação tende a se agravar mais
10/02/2007 As soluções quase impossíveis para o megaproblema
Fonte: Gazeta do Sul – Santa Cruz do Sul, 5 de fevereiro de 2007
Site: www.gazetadosul.com.br
Autoridades científicas disseram que aumento da temperatura do planeta pode causar catástrofes, mas há grupos de pesquisadores que contrariam essas afirmações
Quando cientistas de 130 países ligados ao Painel Internacional sobre a Mudança Climática (IPCC) se reuniram em Paris, no último dia 2, e apresentaram um relatório com dados assustadores sobre o aquecimento global, uma pergunta ficou no ar. As secas que dizimaram a produção agrícola ou chuvas excessivas e as altas temperaturas seriam sinal de que o fim dos tempos se aproxima?
Para os pesquisadores a resposta é sim e a causa de tudo isso seria a ação do homem. No mais completo relatório sobre clima, eles fizeram previsões pessimistas para os próximos cem anos e afirmaram que se não forem adotadas medidas eficazes há riscos de as águas dos oceanos cobrirem cidades costeiras e a falta de chuva acabar com a agricultura.
Mas o relatório que colocou em alerta as principais autoridades mundiais pode não passar de uma mera especulação. É isso que defendem alguns meteorologistas que, baseados em dados históricos, fazem afirmações contradizendo a teoria apocalíptica lançada do IPCC. Para eles, embora o aquecimento global seja um fato irrevogável, não há provas suficientes para justificar tanto alarde em torno do assunto.
Não se trata de amenizar os riscos, mas sim de levar à opinião pública um contraponto para uma questão que ganhou repercussão mundial e alimenta as mais mirabolantes especulações. O que os meteorolgistas querem é dizer que períodos de aquecimento excessivo ou de calores ocorreram ao longo dos séculos e nem por isso o mundo acabou. As opiniões são divergentes, mas abrem margem para uma questão. Quem, afinal, tem razão? A Gazeta do Sul ouviu defensores das duas teses e mostra o contraste de argumentos.
O QUE DIZ O RELATÓRIO
- 95% do aquecimento global é causado pelo lançamento na atmosfera de gases como o carbônico.
- A temperatura da Terra teria aumentado de 13,78 graus, há um século, para 14,5 graus.
- Há 125 mil anos, a temperatura chegou a 18 graus. O nível do mar teria subido até seis metros.
- Até 2100 o aquecimento global pode fazer com que a temperatura chegue a 16,5 graus.
- O aumento das emissões de gases causaria o derretimento do gelo do Ártico elevando o nível dos oceanos.
- Ventos, chuvas intensas e ciclones serão mais fortes, elevando o risco de destruições.
- O volume de precipitações, nas regiões mais secas, no entanto, tende a diminuir. Pelo menos 3,2 bilhões de pessoas podem ser atingidas por esse problema, que afeta, hoje 1,1 bilhão de habitantes.
- Espécies da flora e fauna seriam extintas por não conseguir se adaptar às mudanças climáticas.
- No Brasil a Floresta Amazônica corre risco de desaparecer com o aumento das temperaturas em torno de 4 e 8 graus e redução do volume de chuvas.
- O Sul do País sofreria tornados e furacões. A agricultura seria prejudicada e a economia também.
Outras matérias:
10/02/2007 Comportamento do clima é natural
10/02/2007 Situação tende a se agravar mais
10/02/2007 As soluções quase impossíveis para o megaproblema
183) Biocombustiveis: uma chance para o Brasil
Biocombustíveis - a chance do Brasil
Suely Caldas
O Estado de São Paulo, 11/02/2007
Em seu plano estratégico a Petrobrás faz uma aposta ousada: até 2011 ela vai suplantar os EUA e passará a ser líder mundial de vendas de biocombustíveis, com a produção nacional de etanol e biodiesel. Para alcançar essa meta a estatal já começou a agir: 1) Acaba de montar a empresa japonesa Nipaku, em sociedade com estatal Nippon Alcohol Hanbai, que vai comercializar o etanol brasileiro no Japão e em outros países da Ásia; 2) decidiu construir um alcoolduto de 600 km, entre a Região Centro-Oeste e São Paulo, para transportar o etanol até o Porto de Santos e daí exportar para o mundo; 3) além de duas plantas-piloto em produção, busca parcerias privadas para montar mais três fábricas de biodiesel e ampliar a produção em mais 150 milhões de litros; 4) neste momento intensifica as pesquisas técnicas para utilizar mamona e pinhão manso na produção de biodiesel.
“Aqui temos matéria-prima, cana-de-açúcar e oleaginosas, mercado combustível, logística de distribuição em todo o País, máquinas e tecnologia própria e uma indústria automotiva tecnicamente preparada para usar gasolina e álcool simultaneamente”, lembra o presidente da Petrobrás, José Sérgio Gabrielli. “E tem mais: 30 anos de Proálcool, 300 produtores e longa experiência em exportação colocam o Brasil na dianteira do etanol. Daí a atingirmos a liderança mundial não é nenhum sonho”, avalia Gabrielli.
Falar em liderança mundial e desbancar os EUA quando o presidente Bush lança o desafio de, em dez anos, substituir 20% da gasolina consumida nesse país por combustíveis renováveis pode até não ser sonho, mas se o Brasil fizer as coisas certas, o governo regular o mercado com regras claras, garantir que a expansão da lavoura de cana e de oleaginosas não se dê à custa de devastação de florestas ou da escassez e do encarecimento de alimentos. E é fundamental, indispensável, abolir o antiamericanismo ideológico, que, além de atrasado, como definiu o ex-embaixador Roberto Abdenur, é bobo, burro e contra os interesses do Brasil. Sozinhos, os EUA não têm condições de multiplicar por sete sua produção de etanol para suprir a substituição dos 20% de gasolina. Por isso o presidente Bush vem pessoalmente negociar com Lula parceria na produção de etanol, mirando a garantia de suprimento futuro dos EUA. A preponderância brasileira é reconhecida entre os norte-americanos, tanto que o o jornal The Wall Street Journal chamou recentemente o Brasil de “Arábia Saudita do álcool”.
Apesar das advertências do Protocolo de Kyoto, em 1997, a demanda por energia limpa no mundo pouco cresceu. Hoje, além de EUA e Brasil, só Alemanha, Suécia, Índia e Colômbia misturam álcool à gasolina e poucos outros países têm programas de produção de biocombustíveis em implementação.
Mas essa pasmaceira global pode mudar agora, com a divulgação do relatório da ONU sobre aquecimento global, que estarreceu o mundo. Diante do preocupante quadro descrito pelos cientistas, muitos países passaram a se preocupar com a saúde do planeta e de seus habitantes. A França, por exemplo, passou a vincular acordos comerciais a cláusulas ambientais. Essa demanda por energia limpa e o preço do petróleo acima de US$ 50/barril, sem dúvida, criam um novo mercado para fontes renováveis de energia e abrem uma enorme janela de oportunidades para o Brasil, que nesta corrida leva a vantagem de 30 anos de estrada do Proálcool e um programa de biodiesel em plena evolução.
Na última quarta-feira, o ministro Celso Amorim combinou com o subsecretário americano para Assuntos Políticos, Nicholas Burns, uma reunião, até o final deste mês - portanto, antes da visita de Bush -, entre Brasil, EUA, Índia, China, União Européia e África do Sul para discutir a padronização global para o etanol, etapa obrigatória para este produto virar commodity e ser negociado em Bolsas no mundo inteiro, competindo com o petróleo.
“Vamos liderar, sem nenhuma dúvida. No mundo inteiro há uma enorme curiosidade pelo nosso álcool porque, além de pioneiro, o Brasil é o único país no mundo com um programa massivo, que ocupa 40% do mercado de combustíveis.” Gabrielli exagera, é verdade. Mas o Brasil não pode perder esta chance.
Suely Caldas
O Estado de São Paulo, 11/02/2007
Em seu plano estratégico a Petrobrás faz uma aposta ousada: até 2011 ela vai suplantar os EUA e passará a ser líder mundial de vendas de biocombustíveis, com a produção nacional de etanol e biodiesel. Para alcançar essa meta a estatal já começou a agir: 1) Acaba de montar a empresa japonesa Nipaku, em sociedade com estatal Nippon Alcohol Hanbai, que vai comercializar o etanol brasileiro no Japão e em outros países da Ásia; 2) decidiu construir um alcoolduto de 600 km, entre a Região Centro-Oeste e São Paulo, para transportar o etanol até o Porto de Santos e daí exportar para o mundo; 3) além de duas plantas-piloto em produção, busca parcerias privadas para montar mais três fábricas de biodiesel e ampliar a produção em mais 150 milhões de litros; 4) neste momento intensifica as pesquisas técnicas para utilizar mamona e pinhão manso na produção de biodiesel.
“Aqui temos matéria-prima, cana-de-açúcar e oleaginosas, mercado combustível, logística de distribuição em todo o País, máquinas e tecnologia própria e uma indústria automotiva tecnicamente preparada para usar gasolina e álcool simultaneamente”, lembra o presidente da Petrobrás, José Sérgio Gabrielli. “E tem mais: 30 anos de Proálcool, 300 produtores e longa experiência em exportação colocam o Brasil na dianteira do etanol. Daí a atingirmos a liderança mundial não é nenhum sonho”, avalia Gabrielli.
Falar em liderança mundial e desbancar os EUA quando o presidente Bush lança o desafio de, em dez anos, substituir 20% da gasolina consumida nesse país por combustíveis renováveis pode até não ser sonho, mas se o Brasil fizer as coisas certas, o governo regular o mercado com regras claras, garantir que a expansão da lavoura de cana e de oleaginosas não se dê à custa de devastação de florestas ou da escassez e do encarecimento de alimentos. E é fundamental, indispensável, abolir o antiamericanismo ideológico, que, além de atrasado, como definiu o ex-embaixador Roberto Abdenur, é bobo, burro e contra os interesses do Brasil. Sozinhos, os EUA não têm condições de multiplicar por sete sua produção de etanol para suprir a substituição dos 20% de gasolina. Por isso o presidente Bush vem pessoalmente negociar com Lula parceria na produção de etanol, mirando a garantia de suprimento futuro dos EUA. A preponderância brasileira é reconhecida entre os norte-americanos, tanto que o o jornal The Wall Street Journal chamou recentemente o Brasil de “Arábia Saudita do álcool”.
Apesar das advertências do Protocolo de Kyoto, em 1997, a demanda por energia limpa no mundo pouco cresceu. Hoje, além de EUA e Brasil, só Alemanha, Suécia, Índia e Colômbia misturam álcool à gasolina e poucos outros países têm programas de produção de biocombustíveis em implementação.
Mas essa pasmaceira global pode mudar agora, com a divulgação do relatório da ONU sobre aquecimento global, que estarreceu o mundo. Diante do preocupante quadro descrito pelos cientistas, muitos países passaram a se preocupar com a saúde do planeta e de seus habitantes. A França, por exemplo, passou a vincular acordos comerciais a cláusulas ambientais. Essa demanda por energia limpa e o preço do petróleo acima de US$ 50/barril, sem dúvida, criam um novo mercado para fontes renováveis de energia e abrem uma enorme janela de oportunidades para o Brasil, que nesta corrida leva a vantagem de 30 anos de estrada do Proálcool e um programa de biodiesel em plena evolução.
Na última quarta-feira, o ministro Celso Amorim combinou com o subsecretário americano para Assuntos Políticos, Nicholas Burns, uma reunião, até o final deste mês - portanto, antes da visita de Bush -, entre Brasil, EUA, Índia, China, União Européia e África do Sul para discutir a padronização global para o etanol, etapa obrigatória para este produto virar commodity e ser negociado em Bolsas no mundo inteiro, competindo com o petróleo.
“Vamos liderar, sem nenhuma dúvida. No mundo inteiro há uma enorme curiosidade pelo nosso álcool porque, além de pioneiro, o Brasil é o único país no mundo com um programa massivo, que ocupa 40% do mercado de combustíveis.” Gabrielli exagera, é verdade. Mas o Brasil não pode perder esta chance.
quinta-feira, fevereiro 08, 2007
182) A campanha de Suez em 1956: passo decisivo na consolidacao do Estado de Israel
Artigo retirado do:
The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2007
The Second War of Independence
The Sinai campaign of 1956 established that Israel was here to stay.
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
WSJ, Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Fifty years ago, at dawn on Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Col. Ariel Sharon dropped into the Mitla Pass deep in the Sinai Peninsula, 25 miles from the Suez Canal. The action was the first phase in a plan secretly forged by representatives of France, Britain and Israel, triggered by Egypt's nationalization of the canal three months before. According to the scheme, the paratroopers' landing would provide a pretext for the French and British governments to order both Egypt and Israel to remove all of their forces from the canal area. The Europeans anticipated that Cairo would reject that ultimatum, thus allowing them to occupy the strategic waterway. Israel dutifully executed its part of the scheme, smashing the Egyptian army in four days and conquering all of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The Anglo-French armada, however, was late in arriving, and soon withdrew under intense international pressure. The Suez War--known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign, or Operation Kadesh--was over within a week, but the battle over its interpretation was merely beginning.
Numerous books and articles have been written about the Suez Crisis, the first post-World War II crisis to pit nationalism against imperialism, and the West against the communist bloc. Historians have long agreed that the invasion was an unrelieved catastrophe for Britain and France, precipitating their expulsion from the Middle East and their decline as great powers. By contrast, the first three decades after the crisis saw debate over Israel's fortunes in the war, with some scholars asserting that Israel had benefited from the destruction of the Egyptian army, the opening of the Straits of Tiran, and the strategic alliance with France. Starting in the 1980s, however, a movement of self-styled New Historians, dedicated to debunking the alleged "myths" of Israeli history, depicted the Sinai Campaign as no less disastrous for the Jewish state. "Israel . . . paid a heavy political price for ganging up with the colonial powers against the emergent forces of Arab nationalism," wrote Avi Shlaim of Oxford University. "Its actions could henceforth be used as proof . . . that it was a bridgehead of Western imperialism in the . . . Arab world."
Twenty years later, Shlaim's analysis of the 1956 war has become universally accepted in academia, and not only among revisionists. In a New York Times article marking the 50th anniversary of Suez, Boston University's David Fromkin, author of the widely acclaimed study of the origins of the modern Middle East, "A Peace to End All Peace" (1989), similarly portrayed Israel's victory as Pyrrhic. "Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism," Fromkin alleged, echoing Shlaim. "The more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought."
Those who have challenged the magnitude of Israel's victory in 1956, however, fail to take into account the incompleteness of Israel's triumph in its 1948 War of Independence. Customarily, states that win on the battlefield dictate the terms of the peace. But while Israeli forces had repulsed the invading Arab armies and compelled them to sue for truce, Israeli negotiators failed to transform that military accomplishment into a diplomatic device for ending the conflict. The armistice agreements that Israel signed with its four neighboring Arab states between February and July 1949 did not, for example, extend recognition or legitimacy to the Jewish state; nor did they endow that state with permanent borders.
Further complicating this anomalous situation, the agreements created various demilitarized zones of uncertain sovereignty along Israel's frontiers--at the foot of the Golan Heights, for instance, and in Nitzana, along the Sinai-Negev border. Most deleterious of all for Israel, the armistice did not provide for peace. On the contrary, the agreements allowed the Arabs to insist that a state of war continued to exist between them and the "Zionist entity." This state of war, the Arabs argued, enabled them to fire at Israeli settlements in the demilitarized zones, to conduct an economic boycott of the Jewish state, and to blockade Israeli ships and Israel-bound cargoes through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. Arab states engaged in a relentless anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, designed to prepare their publics for a "second round" with Israel, this time to annihilate it. Propaganda did not suffice for some Arab countries, however, like Syria and Egypt, which sponsored cross-border terrorist (Fedayeen) attacks like that which killed eleven Israelis at Maaleh Akrabim in March 1954.
For the Arab states, the Palestine War, as they called it, had never really ended. Yet they were not alone in regarding Israel as an impermanent and unwanted presence: The Great Powers--the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union--routinely treated Israel as a passing phenomenon and ignored its fundamental interests. Indeed, for the Powers, Israel was little more than what United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called "a millstone around our necks."
The period of 1948 to 1956 was one of profound upheaval in Great Power diplomacy in the Middle East. The United States was on the one hand striving to oust the old colonial powers, Britain and France, from the region, while on the other working with its European allies to prevent Soviet penetration. In response to the American threat, Britain and France sought to strengthen their alliances with local states--Britain with Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and France with Syria and Lebanon--by guaranteeing their security and selling them modern arms. Israel, which was in no Power's interest, was completely left out of these arrangements. Worse, Israel's clashes with Egypt in 1949 and Jordan in 1956 nearly resulted in direct conflict between the IDF and British forces.
Viewed antagonistically by both Britain and France, Israel was hardly valued as an asset by the United States. The Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower owed nothing to the Jewish vote, and was closely aligned with State Department Arabists and American oil companies active in the Middle East. Apart from parade items such as helmets and batons, the United States adamantly refused to sell arms to Israel, even laboring to prevent Israel from purchasing weaponry from its allies. Such transactions, the administration reasoned, would push the Arabs into the Soviet sphere and endanger vital oil supplies.
For their part, the Soviets had also thrown their support behind the Arabs. Though they had provided crucial diplomatic and military backing to the Jewish state in 1948, the Soviets, having secured their objective of ousting the British from Palestine, proceeded to change sides. By 1951, they were unremitting in their hostility to Israel, and after Stalin's death in 1953, the Kremlin adopted a policy of nurturing "bourgeois nationalist" regimes opposed to the West, such as those of Egypt and Syria.
America and Britain reacted to the Soviet threat by trying to organize Middle Eastern states into a regional defense organization similar to NATO. The alliance, known first as the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) and later as the Baghdad Pact, was to include Iraq, Jordan and hopefully Egypt. Israel, though it repeatedly petitioned for admission to the group, was continually rejected.
Moreover, while actively fortifying the Arabs, the Powers also implicitly upheld their own interpretation of the armistice. They refused, for example, to pressure the Arab states to end their economic boycott and blockade of Israel or to stem armed infiltration. Rather, they condemned Israel's attempt to establish settlements in the demilitarized zones, to send ships through the canal and the straits, and to retaliate against Fedayeen strongholds. They also opposed Israel's construction of a national water carrier that would transfer Galilee water to the Negev, thus facilitating the desert's settlement. The Negev, the Americans and the British determined in 1949, would eventually be detached from Israel and transferred to Arab sovereignty as part of a land-for-peace deal. Indeed, an Anglo-American plan, inaugurated in 1954 and codenamed "Alpha," called for the transfer of large swaths of the Negev to Egypt as a means of incentivizing it to join MEDO; the Egyptians, in turn, would grant nonbelligerency--not peace--to Israel. Though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected Alpha, American and British leaders were prepared to exert immense pressure on him to implement the plan should Cairo accept it.
Indeed, the Egyptians had long demanded the Negev as a land bridge between them and the Arab world. In secret meetings with Israeli diplomats after the armistice, Egyptian representatives repeatedly demanded that Israel forfeit all of the Negev--62% of its territory--as the price of ending the conflict. But the Egyptians were also express in stating that peace with the Jewish state was inconceivable for the foreseeable future. That position remained unchanged after the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952 and the ascendance of Col. Gamal Abd el-Nasser to power. Though Nasser continued the secret contacts with Israel, at one point even exchanging letters with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, at no time did he waver from the demand for all of the Negev, or change his rejection of immediate and full peace. In fact, starting in December 1954, Nasser embarked on a campaign to extend his primacy over the entire Arab world--an effort that required escalated hostility toward Israel and intensified opposition to the West. He proceeded to tighten the blockade and boycott of Israel, to order the Egyptian army to occupy parts of Nitzana, and to set up Fedayeen units to operate out of Gaza. He also declared war against the Baghdad Pact, rejecting Alpha and signing, in September 1955, the largest-ever Middle Eastern arms deal with the Soviet bloc.
This, then, was the regional and international situation that Israel confronted in the period before the Sinai Campaign. Surrounded by Arab states that were conducting acts of war against it--indeed, were arming themselves to obliterate it--Israel had no allies, no diplomatic support and no reliable supplier of weapons. Moreover, saddled with tens of thousands of new immigrants, many of them indigent, and a near-bankrupt economy in the wake of a devastating war that had killed 1% of its population, Israel was scarcely capable of maintaining its existence, much less of defending itself against Nasser, a regionally beloved and lavishly armed leader committed to its destruction. "O Israel! Weep . . . and await your end at any time now," declared the Egyptian-run Voice of the Arabs radio in 1955. "The Arabs of Egypt have found their way to Tel Aviv."
Israel's plight indeed seemed hopeless when, suddenly, in July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The event prodded the French, who had begun to view Israel as a possible ally against Nasser and his support for Algerian rebels, to open secret discussions on a joint operation in Egypt and undertake to arm the IDF. The French, in turn, urged the British to cease threatening the Israelis and join in the clandestine talks. The result was the Sevres agreement, named after the Paris suburb in which it was surreptitiously signed. According to the document, Israel agreed to commence hostilities against Egypt. One month later, Sharon and his paratroopers descended into the Mitla Pass and the Sinai Campaign began.
The fighting was brutal, but the Israeli forces succeeded in crushing Nasser's troops with their newly supplied Soviet arms, conquering all of the Sinai and Gaza, and reaching the Suez Canal. Though a combination of Soviet military and American economic threats eventually persuaded Ben-Gurion to evacuate these territories, in return he received American pledges for Israel's future defense, along with the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers along the border with Egypt and in Sharm al-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran. Finally freed of the danger of Egyptian attack and strengthened through commerce with Asia by way of the straits, Israel enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It took advantage of those years to absorb waves of new immigrants and to galvanize its civil society. Many Israelis who lived through that time remember the decade after 1956 as the most halcyon in their lives, and in their country's history. And though Nasser unilaterally evicted the U.N. force in May 1967 and again blockaded the straits, the security guarantees Israel had obtained from the United States in 1956, and the international commitments it received regarding the inviolability of its borders and shipping rights, proved essential to generating support for Israel in the Six Day War.
Equally important, at least, was the permanence that Israel achieved as a result of the Sinai Campaign. In the aftermath of the war, the Powers ceased to regard Israel as a temporary entity whose territory could be bargained off to the Arabs. There would be no more Alphas, no more attempts to deprive Israel of the Negev or of any other part of its sovereign land. Nor did the United States endeavor to block Israel's acquisition of modern arms, which continued to flow from France. Indeed, with French assistance, Israel built the nuclear reactor that endowed it with capabilities unequaled except by those of the world's greatest powers.
Finally, though Israel did, by virtue of its collusion with Britain and France, confirm the Arab charge that the Jewish state was little more than a beachhead for imperialism, in truth that charge exists far more in the minds of contemporary Western historians than in Arab thinking of the late 1950s. An examination of Arab broadcasts and newspapers from the period reveals no substantial change in Arab hostility toward Israel--it was absolute before the war, and no less total after it. Similarly, the war could not have lessened chances for the success of a peace process that simply did not exist and, according to Nasser, would not for many, many years.
Contrary, then, to the conventional wisdom in academic circles today, Israel emerged from the Sinai Campaign economically, diplomatically, and militarily strengthened. It had forged vital alliances and earned the respect, if not yet the affection, of the Great Powers, while also enhancing its citizens' security. The situation that existed after 1948, in which Israel was denied legitimacy, permanence, and such fundamental rights as safe borders and freedom of shipping, had ended. The 1956 war allowed Israel to realize, finally, the unfulfilled aspirations of 1948, and in this represents the culmination of Israel's fight for independence.
Mr. Oren is a senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a contributing editor of Azure and author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present" (Norton, 2007).
The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2007
The Second War of Independence
The Sinai campaign of 1956 established that Israel was here to stay.
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
WSJ, Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Fifty years ago, at dawn on Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Col. Ariel Sharon dropped into the Mitla Pass deep in the Sinai Peninsula, 25 miles from the Suez Canal. The action was the first phase in a plan secretly forged by representatives of France, Britain and Israel, triggered by Egypt's nationalization of the canal three months before. According to the scheme, the paratroopers' landing would provide a pretext for the French and British governments to order both Egypt and Israel to remove all of their forces from the canal area. The Europeans anticipated that Cairo would reject that ultimatum, thus allowing them to occupy the strategic waterway. Israel dutifully executed its part of the scheme, smashing the Egyptian army in four days and conquering all of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The Anglo-French armada, however, was late in arriving, and soon withdrew under intense international pressure. The Suez War--known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign, or Operation Kadesh--was over within a week, but the battle over its interpretation was merely beginning.
Numerous books and articles have been written about the Suez Crisis, the first post-World War II crisis to pit nationalism against imperialism, and the West against the communist bloc. Historians have long agreed that the invasion was an unrelieved catastrophe for Britain and France, precipitating their expulsion from the Middle East and their decline as great powers. By contrast, the first three decades after the crisis saw debate over Israel's fortunes in the war, with some scholars asserting that Israel had benefited from the destruction of the Egyptian army, the opening of the Straits of Tiran, and the strategic alliance with France. Starting in the 1980s, however, a movement of self-styled New Historians, dedicated to debunking the alleged "myths" of Israeli history, depicted the Sinai Campaign as no less disastrous for the Jewish state. "Israel . . . paid a heavy political price for ganging up with the colonial powers against the emergent forces of Arab nationalism," wrote Avi Shlaim of Oxford University. "Its actions could henceforth be used as proof . . . that it was a bridgehead of Western imperialism in the . . . Arab world."
Twenty years later, Shlaim's analysis of the 1956 war has become universally accepted in academia, and not only among revisionists. In a New York Times article marking the 50th anniversary of Suez, Boston University's David Fromkin, author of the widely acclaimed study of the origins of the modern Middle East, "A Peace to End All Peace" (1989), similarly portrayed Israel's victory as Pyrrhic. "Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism," Fromkin alleged, echoing Shlaim. "The more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought."
Those who have challenged the magnitude of Israel's victory in 1956, however, fail to take into account the incompleteness of Israel's triumph in its 1948 War of Independence. Customarily, states that win on the battlefield dictate the terms of the peace. But while Israeli forces had repulsed the invading Arab armies and compelled them to sue for truce, Israeli negotiators failed to transform that military accomplishment into a diplomatic device for ending the conflict. The armistice agreements that Israel signed with its four neighboring Arab states between February and July 1949 did not, for example, extend recognition or legitimacy to the Jewish state; nor did they endow that state with permanent borders.
Further complicating this anomalous situation, the agreements created various demilitarized zones of uncertain sovereignty along Israel's frontiers--at the foot of the Golan Heights, for instance, and in Nitzana, along the Sinai-Negev border. Most deleterious of all for Israel, the armistice did not provide for peace. On the contrary, the agreements allowed the Arabs to insist that a state of war continued to exist between them and the "Zionist entity." This state of war, the Arabs argued, enabled them to fire at Israeli settlements in the demilitarized zones, to conduct an economic boycott of the Jewish state, and to blockade Israeli ships and Israel-bound cargoes through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. Arab states engaged in a relentless anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, designed to prepare their publics for a "second round" with Israel, this time to annihilate it. Propaganda did not suffice for some Arab countries, however, like Syria and Egypt, which sponsored cross-border terrorist (Fedayeen) attacks like that which killed eleven Israelis at Maaleh Akrabim in March 1954.
For the Arab states, the Palestine War, as they called it, had never really ended. Yet they were not alone in regarding Israel as an impermanent and unwanted presence: The Great Powers--the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union--routinely treated Israel as a passing phenomenon and ignored its fundamental interests. Indeed, for the Powers, Israel was little more than what United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called "a millstone around our necks."
The period of 1948 to 1956 was one of profound upheaval in Great Power diplomacy in the Middle East. The United States was on the one hand striving to oust the old colonial powers, Britain and France, from the region, while on the other working with its European allies to prevent Soviet penetration. In response to the American threat, Britain and France sought to strengthen their alliances with local states--Britain with Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and France with Syria and Lebanon--by guaranteeing their security and selling them modern arms. Israel, which was in no Power's interest, was completely left out of these arrangements. Worse, Israel's clashes with Egypt in 1949 and Jordan in 1956 nearly resulted in direct conflict between the IDF and British forces.
Viewed antagonistically by both Britain and France, Israel was hardly valued as an asset by the United States. The Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower owed nothing to the Jewish vote, and was closely aligned with State Department Arabists and American oil companies active in the Middle East. Apart from parade items such as helmets and batons, the United States adamantly refused to sell arms to Israel, even laboring to prevent Israel from purchasing weaponry from its allies. Such transactions, the administration reasoned, would push the Arabs into the Soviet sphere and endanger vital oil supplies.
For their part, the Soviets had also thrown their support behind the Arabs. Though they had provided crucial diplomatic and military backing to the Jewish state in 1948, the Soviets, having secured their objective of ousting the British from Palestine, proceeded to change sides. By 1951, they were unremitting in their hostility to Israel, and after Stalin's death in 1953, the Kremlin adopted a policy of nurturing "bourgeois nationalist" regimes opposed to the West, such as those of Egypt and Syria.
America and Britain reacted to the Soviet threat by trying to organize Middle Eastern states into a regional defense organization similar to NATO. The alliance, known first as the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) and later as the Baghdad Pact, was to include Iraq, Jordan and hopefully Egypt. Israel, though it repeatedly petitioned for admission to the group, was continually rejected.
Moreover, while actively fortifying the Arabs, the Powers also implicitly upheld their own interpretation of the armistice. They refused, for example, to pressure the Arab states to end their economic boycott and blockade of Israel or to stem armed infiltration. Rather, they condemned Israel's attempt to establish settlements in the demilitarized zones, to send ships through the canal and the straits, and to retaliate against Fedayeen strongholds. They also opposed Israel's construction of a national water carrier that would transfer Galilee water to the Negev, thus facilitating the desert's settlement. The Negev, the Americans and the British determined in 1949, would eventually be detached from Israel and transferred to Arab sovereignty as part of a land-for-peace deal. Indeed, an Anglo-American plan, inaugurated in 1954 and codenamed "Alpha," called for the transfer of large swaths of the Negev to Egypt as a means of incentivizing it to join MEDO; the Egyptians, in turn, would grant nonbelligerency--not peace--to Israel. Though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected Alpha, American and British leaders were prepared to exert immense pressure on him to implement the plan should Cairo accept it.
Indeed, the Egyptians had long demanded the Negev as a land bridge between them and the Arab world. In secret meetings with Israeli diplomats after the armistice, Egyptian representatives repeatedly demanded that Israel forfeit all of the Negev--62% of its territory--as the price of ending the conflict. But the Egyptians were also express in stating that peace with the Jewish state was inconceivable for the foreseeable future. That position remained unchanged after the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952 and the ascendance of Col. Gamal Abd el-Nasser to power. Though Nasser continued the secret contacts with Israel, at one point even exchanging letters with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, at no time did he waver from the demand for all of the Negev, or change his rejection of immediate and full peace. In fact, starting in December 1954, Nasser embarked on a campaign to extend his primacy over the entire Arab world--an effort that required escalated hostility toward Israel and intensified opposition to the West. He proceeded to tighten the blockade and boycott of Israel, to order the Egyptian army to occupy parts of Nitzana, and to set up Fedayeen units to operate out of Gaza. He also declared war against the Baghdad Pact, rejecting Alpha and signing, in September 1955, the largest-ever Middle Eastern arms deal with the Soviet bloc.
This, then, was the regional and international situation that Israel confronted in the period before the Sinai Campaign. Surrounded by Arab states that were conducting acts of war against it--indeed, were arming themselves to obliterate it--Israel had no allies, no diplomatic support and no reliable supplier of weapons. Moreover, saddled with tens of thousands of new immigrants, many of them indigent, and a near-bankrupt economy in the wake of a devastating war that had killed 1% of its population, Israel was scarcely capable of maintaining its existence, much less of defending itself against Nasser, a regionally beloved and lavishly armed leader committed to its destruction. "O Israel! Weep . . . and await your end at any time now," declared the Egyptian-run Voice of the Arabs radio in 1955. "The Arabs of Egypt have found their way to Tel Aviv."
Israel's plight indeed seemed hopeless when, suddenly, in July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The event prodded the French, who had begun to view Israel as a possible ally against Nasser and his support for Algerian rebels, to open secret discussions on a joint operation in Egypt and undertake to arm the IDF. The French, in turn, urged the British to cease threatening the Israelis and join in the clandestine talks. The result was the Sevres agreement, named after the Paris suburb in which it was surreptitiously signed. According to the document, Israel agreed to commence hostilities against Egypt. One month later, Sharon and his paratroopers descended into the Mitla Pass and the Sinai Campaign began.
The fighting was brutal, but the Israeli forces succeeded in crushing Nasser's troops with their newly supplied Soviet arms, conquering all of the Sinai and Gaza, and reaching the Suez Canal. Though a combination of Soviet military and American economic threats eventually persuaded Ben-Gurion to evacuate these territories, in return he received American pledges for Israel's future defense, along with the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers along the border with Egypt and in Sharm al-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran. Finally freed of the danger of Egyptian attack and strengthened through commerce with Asia by way of the straits, Israel enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It took advantage of those years to absorb waves of new immigrants and to galvanize its civil society. Many Israelis who lived through that time remember the decade after 1956 as the most halcyon in their lives, and in their country's history. And though Nasser unilaterally evicted the U.N. force in May 1967 and again blockaded the straits, the security guarantees Israel had obtained from the United States in 1956, and the international commitments it received regarding the inviolability of its borders and shipping rights, proved essential to generating support for Israel in the Six Day War.
Equally important, at least, was the permanence that Israel achieved as a result of the Sinai Campaign. In the aftermath of the war, the Powers ceased to regard Israel as a temporary entity whose territory could be bargained off to the Arabs. There would be no more Alphas, no more attempts to deprive Israel of the Negev or of any other part of its sovereign land. Nor did the United States endeavor to block Israel's acquisition of modern arms, which continued to flow from France. Indeed, with French assistance, Israel built the nuclear reactor that endowed it with capabilities unequaled except by those of the world's greatest powers.
Finally, though Israel did, by virtue of its collusion with Britain and France, confirm the Arab charge that the Jewish state was little more than a beachhead for imperialism, in truth that charge exists far more in the minds of contemporary Western historians than in Arab thinking of the late 1950s. An examination of Arab broadcasts and newspapers from the period reveals no substantial change in Arab hostility toward Israel--it was absolute before the war, and no less total after it. Similarly, the war could not have lessened chances for the success of a peace process that simply did not exist and, according to Nasser, would not for many, many years.
Contrary, then, to the conventional wisdom in academic circles today, Israel emerged from the Sinai Campaign economically, diplomatically, and militarily strengthened. It had forged vital alliances and earned the respect, if not yet the affection, of the Great Powers, while also enhancing its citizens' security. The situation that existed after 1948, in which Israel was denied legitimacy, permanence, and such fundamental rights as safe borders and freedom of shipping, had ended. The 1956 war allowed Israel to realize, finally, the unfulfilled aspirations of 1948, and in this represents the culmination of Israel's fight for independence.
Mr. Oren is a senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a contributing editor of Azure and author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present" (Norton, 2007).
sábado, fevereiro 03, 2007
181) O anti-sovietico numero 1 (com muita honra): Robert Conquest
Da edição deste sábado, 3 de fevereiro de 2007, do The Wall Street Journal:
Today's Featured Article
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Anti-Sovietchik No. 1
Robert Conquest's is the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Saturday, February 3, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Those who were born in Year One of the Russian Revolution are now entering their 10th decade. Of the intellectual class that got its vintage laid down in 1917, a class which includes Eric Hobsbawm, Conor Cruise O'Brien and precious few others, the pre-eminent Anglo-American veteran must be Robert Conquest. He must also be the one who takes the greatest satisfaction in having outlived the Soviet "experiment."
Over the years, I have very often knocked respectfully at the door of his modest apartment ("book-lined" would be the other standard word for it) on the outskirts of Stanford University, where he is a longstanding ornament of the Hoover Institution. Evenings at his table, marvelously arranged in concert with his wife Elizabeth ("Liddie"), have become a part of the social and conversational legend of visitors from several continents.
I thought I would just check and see how he was doing as 2007 dawned. When I called, he was dividing his time between an exercise bicycle and the latest revision of his classic book "The Great Terror": the volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn. Its 40th anniversary falls next year, and the publishers need the third edition in a hurry. Had it needed much of an update? "Well, it's been a bit of a slog. I had to read about 30 or 40 books in Russian and other languages, and about 400 articles in journals and things like that. But even so I found I didn't have to change it all that much."
One of his lifelong friends, the novelist Anthony Powell, once wrote that all classes of Englishmen employ the discourse of irony and understatement. This would itself be an understatement of Mr. Conquest's devastatingly dry and lethal manner, expressed in the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny. His diffidence made me inquire what else might be keeping him busy. "My publisher wants me to do a book called 'How Not to Write About History,' and I thought, yes. Then I'm doing an essay on the importance of India, and something about the U.N. and internationalism."
I know that he used to serve in the British delegation at the U.N. But India? "My mother was born in Bombay, and I've always been impressed by how Indians have mastered English literature and culture." What about the collection of limericks that he's been promising for a while, in his capacity as the last remaining master of the form after the deaths of his other friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin? "I'm getting round to that, but there's first my latest collection of poems, which I'm calling 'Penultimata.' Didn't I mention it? Would you like a copy?" Yes, I would and--oh, what about the memoirs? "Starting tomorrow, when I'm finished with doing 'The Great Terror.' I'm going to try dictating them into this new machine . . . Liddie, what's it called?" Mrs. Conquest--a scholar of English who first told me that Henry James always dictated his novels--comes up with the name of the new voice-activated software. "It's called 'Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine.'" Golly. "Well, my handwriting's pretty bad and my typing is worse," says Mr. Conquest apologetically. That's true enough, as I know, but I can't help thinking that if "Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine" really works, and if it had been available in the 1960s, then the Soviet Union would probably have fallen several years before it actually did.
A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and--I forgot to mention--a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, "Harvest of Sorrow," is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. "There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized 'The Great Terror.' And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as 'anti-Sovietchik No. 1.' I must say I was rather proud of that."
Somewhere in the apartment is the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Mr. Conquest in 2005 at a ceremony which also featured Aretha Franklin and Muhammad Ali. I have a picture of him sitting next to the Queen of Soul, smiling demurely, having paid his own way to come to Washington. And it comes back to me that he rang me up on the day of President Bush's first inaugural. "Did you see that line in the speech about the angel that rides the storm? Any idea where it's from? I'm sure I know it."
I wasn't able to help, but I knew I would get a later call, which I duly did, identifying the line as coming from John Dryden. All part of the Conquest service. Like the limericks, some of which cannot be reproduced in a family-oriented newspaper but many of which are literary and intellectual mnemonic masterpieces. An instance? His deft compression of the entirety of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech:
First you get puking and mewling
Then very p---ed off with your schooling
Then f---s and then fights
Then judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers--then drooling."
Just as one can never imagine Mr. Conquest raising his voice or losing his temper, so one can never picture him using an obscenity for its own sake. A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was "a United Front against bulls--t."
For all that, his life has been lived among the ideological storms of the 20th century, of which he retains an acute and unique memory. He was himself a communist for a couple of years in the late 1930s, having been radicalized while studying in France and observing events in Spain. "I was even a left deviationist--my best friend was a Trotskyist and when King George V was crowned we decorated the college at Oxford with eight chamberpots painted in red, white and blue." He left the party after asking what the line would be if Chamberlain ever declared war on Hitler, and receiving the reply: "Comrade, it is impossible that the bourgeois Chamberlain would ever declare war on Hitler." This he found "oafish." "I didn't like the word 'impossible.' "
Wartime service in Bulgaria, which made him an eyewitness to Stalin's takeover of the country at the end, was proof positive. From then on, working as a researcher and later as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, he strove to propose a social-democratic resistance to communism. "I'd always been a Labour man and somewhat on the left until the 1970s, when I met Margaret Thatcher and she asked my advice." That advice--which translated into the now-famous "Iron Lady" speech--was to regard the Soviet system as something condemned by history and doomed to fail. If that sounds easy now, it wasn't then (though Mr. Conquest insists that it was George Orwell who first saw it coming).
Like many people with a natural gift for politics, Mr. Conquest finds that he distrusts those who can talk of nothing else. His affiliations are undogmatic and unfanatical (he preferred Tony Blair over Margaret Thatcher's successor John Major), and he does not bother to turn out at election times. "I'm a dual national who's a citizen of the U.S. and the U.K., so that voting in either place seems rather overdoing it." On the events of today he is always very judicious and reserved. "I have my own opinions about Iraq, but I haven't said a great deal about the subject because I don't know all that much about it."
How often do you hear anyone talking like that? If he had done nothing political, he would still have had a life, and would be remembered as the senior figure of that stellar collection of poets and writers--John Wain, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis--who became known in the Britain of the 1950s as "the Movement." Liddie Conquest happens to have written rather authoritatively about this group, though that's not how they met. "I was teaching at the University of Texas in El Paso and he came to give a poetry reading. But it wasn't until I met him later in California that something 'clicked,' as people like to say."
Mrs. Conquest might be described as a force of nature, and also as the wielder of a Texan skillet that yields brisket of a rare and strange tenderness; Anthony Powell in his "Journals" was again committed to understatement when he wrote of her engagement to "Bob" that "she is charming, and he a lucky man."
"I know you meet different lefties from the ones I know," he says, referring obliquely to some recent tussles between your humble servant and the Michael Moore faction. "But I've always been friends with what I call 'the good left.' " In the days of the old Soviet Union, he kept up a solid friendship with the radical Russian scholar Steve Cohen, author of a study of Nikolai Bukharin and husband of Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and admired his objectivity. "I helped out Scoop Jackson against Kissinger on the Soviet Jewish question. Pat Moynihan helped me get a job at the Wilson Center in Washington in the 1970s."
I remind him that I once introduced him to that other great veteran of the Bay Area, Jessica "Decca" Mitford, and that in the course of a tremendous evening she was enchanted to find that this dreaded friend of Mrs. Thatcher was the only other person she'd ever met who knew all the words to the old Red songbooks, including the highly demanding ditty: "The Cloakmaker's Union Is a No-Good Union," anthem of the old communist garment district. At the close of that dinner I challenged him to write her a limerick on the spot, and he gallantly and spontaneously produced the following:
They don't find they're having to check a
Movement of homage to Decca.
It's no longer fair
To say Oakland's "not there" She's made it a regular Mecca.
The old girl was quite blown away by this tribute, and kept the inscribed napkin as a souvenir.
An agnostic in religion ("did you know that Milton Friedman was an agnostic, too?") Mr. Conquest is likewise suspicious of anything too zealous or systematic in human affairs. He is also refreshingly empirical in his judgments. Asked why he, the great anatomizer and accuser of Stalinism, still regards Nazism as morally worse than the Gulag, he replies mildly but somehow irrefutably: "I simply feel it to be so." In his most recent books, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" and "The Dragons of Expectation," he goes beyond the usual admonitions against Jacobinism and more recent totalitarian utopias, and argues for "the Anglosphere," that historic arc of law, tradition and individual liberty that extends from Scotland to Australia and takes in the two largest multicultural democracies on the planet--the U.S. and India.
There was a time when this might have seemed quixotic or even nostalgic (at least to me), but when one surveys the wreckage of other concepts, and the increasing difficulties of the only rival "model" in the form of the European Union (of which he was an early skeptic) the notion seems to have a future as well as a past. One very much feels, as one also very much hopes, that the same can be said of the Grand Old Man of Stanford.
Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
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THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Anti-Sovietchik No. 1
Robert Conquest's is the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Saturday, February 3, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Those who were born in Year One of the Russian Revolution are now entering their 10th decade. Of the intellectual class that got its vintage laid down in 1917, a class which includes Eric Hobsbawm, Conor Cruise O'Brien and precious few others, the pre-eminent Anglo-American veteran must be Robert Conquest. He must also be the one who takes the greatest satisfaction in having outlived the Soviet "experiment."
Over the years, I have very often knocked respectfully at the door of his modest apartment ("book-lined" would be the other standard word for it) on the outskirts of Stanford University, where he is a longstanding ornament of the Hoover Institution. Evenings at his table, marvelously arranged in concert with his wife Elizabeth ("Liddie"), have become a part of the social and conversational legend of visitors from several continents.
I thought I would just check and see how he was doing as 2007 dawned. When I called, he was dividing his time between an exercise bicycle and the latest revision of his classic book "The Great Terror": the volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn. Its 40th anniversary falls next year, and the publishers need the third edition in a hurry. Had it needed much of an update? "Well, it's been a bit of a slog. I had to read about 30 or 40 books in Russian and other languages, and about 400 articles in journals and things like that. But even so I found I didn't have to change it all that much."
One of his lifelong friends, the novelist Anthony Powell, once wrote that all classes of Englishmen employ the discourse of irony and understatement. This would itself be an understatement of Mr. Conquest's devastatingly dry and lethal manner, expressed in the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny. His diffidence made me inquire what else might be keeping him busy. "My publisher wants me to do a book called 'How Not to Write About History,' and I thought, yes. Then I'm doing an essay on the importance of India, and something about the U.N. and internationalism."
I know that he used to serve in the British delegation at the U.N. But India? "My mother was born in Bombay, and I've always been impressed by how Indians have mastered English literature and culture." What about the collection of limericks that he's been promising for a while, in his capacity as the last remaining master of the form after the deaths of his other friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin? "I'm getting round to that, but there's first my latest collection of poems, which I'm calling 'Penultimata.' Didn't I mention it? Would you like a copy?" Yes, I would and--oh, what about the memoirs? "Starting tomorrow, when I'm finished with doing 'The Great Terror.' I'm going to try dictating them into this new machine . . . Liddie, what's it called?" Mrs. Conquest--a scholar of English who first told me that Henry James always dictated his novels--comes up with the name of the new voice-activated software. "It's called 'Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine.'" Golly. "Well, my handwriting's pretty bad and my typing is worse," says Mr. Conquest apologetically. That's true enough, as I know, but I can't help thinking that if "Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine" really works, and if it had been available in the 1960s, then the Soviet Union would probably have fallen several years before it actually did.
A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and--I forgot to mention--a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, "Harvest of Sorrow," is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. "There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized 'The Great Terror.' And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as 'anti-Sovietchik No. 1.' I must say I was rather proud of that."
Somewhere in the apartment is the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Mr. Conquest in 2005 at a ceremony which also featured Aretha Franklin and Muhammad Ali. I have a picture of him sitting next to the Queen of Soul, smiling demurely, having paid his own way to come to Washington. And it comes back to me that he rang me up on the day of President Bush's first inaugural. "Did you see that line in the speech about the angel that rides the storm? Any idea where it's from? I'm sure I know it."
I wasn't able to help, but I knew I would get a later call, which I duly did, identifying the line as coming from John Dryden. All part of the Conquest service. Like the limericks, some of which cannot be reproduced in a family-oriented newspaper but many of which are literary and intellectual mnemonic masterpieces. An instance? His deft compression of the entirety of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech:
First you get puking and mewling
Then very p---ed off with your schooling
Then f---s and then fights
Then judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers--then drooling."
Just as one can never imagine Mr. Conquest raising his voice or losing his temper, so one can never picture him using an obscenity for its own sake. A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was "a United Front against bulls--t."
For all that, his life has been lived among the ideological storms of the 20th century, of which he retains an acute and unique memory. He was himself a communist for a couple of years in the late 1930s, having been radicalized while studying in France and observing events in Spain. "I was even a left deviationist--my best friend was a Trotskyist and when King George V was crowned we decorated the college at Oxford with eight chamberpots painted in red, white and blue." He left the party after asking what the line would be if Chamberlain ever declared war on Hitler, and receiving the reply: "Comrade, it is impossible that the bourgeois Chamberlain would ever declare war on Hitler." This he found "oafish." "I didn't like the word 'impossible.' "
Wartime service in Bulgaria, which made him an eyewitness to Stalin's takeover of the country at the end, was proof positive. From then on, working as a researcher and later as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, he strove to propose a social-democratic resistance to communism. "I'd always been a Labour man and somewhat on the left until the 1970s, when I met Margaret Thatcher and she asked my advice." That advice--which translated into the now-famous "Iron Lady" speech--was to regard the Soviet system as something condemned by history and doomed to fail. If that sounds easy now, it wasn't then (though Mr. Conquest insists that it was George Orwell who first saw it coming).
Like many people with a natural gift for politics, Mr. Conquest finds that he distrusts those who can talk of nothing else. His affiliations are undogmatic and unfanatical (he preferred Tony Blair over Margaret Thatcher's successor John Major), and he does not bother to turn out at election times. "I'm a dual national who's a citizen of the U.S. and the U.K., so that voting in either place seems rather overdoing it." On the events of today he is always very judicious and reserved. "I have my own opinions about Iraq, but I haven't said a great deal about the subject because I don't know all that much about it."
How often do you hear anyone talking like that? If he had done nothing political, he would still have had a life, and would be remembered as the senior figure of that stellar collection of poets and writers--John Wain, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis--who became known in the Britain of the 1950s as "the Movement." Liddie Conquest happens to have written rather authoritatively about this group, though that's not how they met. "I was teaching at the University of Texas in El Paso and he came to give a poetry reading. But it wasn't until I met him later in California that something 'clicked,' as people like to say."
Mrs. Conquest might be described as a force of nature, and also as the wielder of a Texan skillet that yields brisket of a rare and strange tenderness; Anthony Powell in his "Journals" was again committed to understatement when he wrote of her engagement to "Bob" that "she is charming, and he a lucky man."
"I know you meet different lefties from the ones I know," he says, referring obliquely to some recent tussles between your humble servant and the Michael Moore faction. "But I've always been friends with what I call 'the good left.' " In the days of the old Soviet Union, he kept up a solid friendship with the radical Russian scholar Steve Cohen, author of a study of Nikolai Bukharin and husband of Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and admired his objectivity. "I helped out Scoop Jackson against Kissinger on the Soviet Jewish question. Pat Moynihan helped me get a job at the Wilson Center in Washington in the 1970s."
I remind him that I once introduced him to that other great veteran of the Bay Area, Jessica "Decca" Mitford, and that in the course of a tremendous evening she was enchanted to find that this dreaded friend of Mrs. Thatcher was the only other person she'd ever met who knew all the words to the old Red songbooks, including the highly demanding ditty: "The Cloakmaker's Union Is a No-Good Union," anthem of the old communist garment district. At the close of that dinner I challenged him to write her a limerick on the spot, and he gallantly and spontaneously produced the following:
They don't find they're having to check a
Movement of homage to Decca.
It's no longer fair
To say Oakland's "not there" She's made it a regular Mecca.
The old girl was quite blown away by this tribute, and kept the inscribed napkin as a souvenir.
An agnostic in religion ("did you know that Milton Friedman was an agnostic, too?") Mr. Conquest is likewise suspicious of anything too zealous or systematic in human affairs. He is also refreshingly empirical in his judgments. Asked why he, the great anatomizer and accuser of Stalinism, still regards Nazism as morally worse than the Gulag, he replies mildly but somehow irrefutably: "I simply feel it to be so." In his most recent books, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" and "The Dragons of Expectation," he goes beyond the usual admonitions against Jacobinism and more recent totalitarian utopias, and argues for "the Anglosphere," that historic arc of law, tradition and individual liberty that extends from Scotland to Australia and takes in the two largest multicultural democracies on the planet--the U.S. and India.
There was a time when this might have seemed quixotic or even nostalgic (at least to me), but when one surveys the wreckage of other concepts, and the increasing difficulties of the only rival "model" in the form of the European Union (of which he was an early skeptic) the notion seems to have a future as well as a past. One very much feels, as one also very much hopes, that the same can be said of the Grand Old Man of Stanford.
Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
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