Today was pretty Gaza-dominated on the site again. Over in the forums, Gaza-related threads are getting very long and heated. Just asn an example, Iron Mike posted this one on Hamas being the blame for the war, and it now has 110 replies. I think that Avi Shlaim's devastating history of Israel's post-1947 treatment of Palestinians should be read by all those in that thread. It is very powerful to hear this story told by "someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders."

We published on the economy too. Godfrey Hodgson celebrates the return of the economically powerful state, while Simon Zadek sees the hope for real accountability in capital allocation mechanisms. Simon links the solution of the financial crisis and the environmental crisis: both are failures to hold the powerful to account for all the consequences of their actions. I hope Simon is right. I feel that the solutions may be less technocratic than he seems to suggest---redesigning incentive systems is unlikely without a firm purpose, and that needs a strong, positive vision to take hold. On that, we could do better.

 There is a very moving story of vision in Jane Gabriel's interview of legend film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. He is interesting on the riots ... but also on the optimism of his own generation: 

" I belong to an older generation, a generation that believed that change was possible, that it was possible to change the world, that it was possible to open up a new path. My generation believed that it was possible not only to dream of a new world, but also to turn dreams into realities. It didn't happen. I think we are all carrying the shadow of disappointment and failure. "

 But read to the end. It is brimming with hope.

We have a huge amount of good material coming in. That's one thing crises do -- send thinking people to write. We don't have the capacity to transform all of it into publishable material. Hat tip to the volunteers in the publishing network without whom output would slow to a trickle!

Oh ... and yesterday's intruder on the Gaza box. He's now written suggesting some writers we might like to commission. That's an improvement in method :)

Back on the Front Page rota. During the long Christmas break, we had the "Best of" taking up the right hand side and occasional pieces on the left hand side. The crisis in Gaza started before we had planned to start active, disciplined publishing again. Paul Rogers wrote an analytical, clear and devastating assessment of the security aspects. The piece has attracted a great deal of commentary - polarised but serious.

Over the week-end I set up a Diigo group to collect must-reads on the crisis. I emailed the openDemocracy staff suggesting they add material to it. I added a few other people to the distribution list whom I thought would be doing some interesting reading on the crisis. I told everyone that whatever they tagged in the group would be reproduced in the "Gaza" box on the top right of the page.

Fine ... it all seemed to be working v.well. Until this afternoon, when I received a shocked email from a loyal reader: "I am writing to share my surprise (and disgust) at the fact that opening open democracy.net today to access a (fantastic) article about climate change I discovered a “gaza” tab on the right listing no less than 5 posts that are 100% pro Israel. Open Democracy had shown better balance than this in the past and I am deeply disappointed."

When I went to the tab, I indeed recognised none of the articles there. A bit of digging and I discovered that a certain Michael Bremmer had joined the diigo group and was posting this very unbalanced material. I have no idea who Michael Bremmer is. I tried a little sleuthing to see if I could figure who had let him into the group -- there was no simple way to tell. I presume that at some degree of remove, my email inviting a small number of trusted readers had somehow made its way to Michael Bremmer who immediately spammed the Gaza box. I think I fixed the leak and the box is now back to being something I am happy with.

Thank you to our concerned reader. Many eyes make light work, as Wikipedians know. The episode also made me realise how rapidly I could come to a sense of violation --- someone unwelcome had sneaked in and  left an illegitimate trace on the site. My heart goes out to all those who have had treasured domains hacked or otherwise taken away from them. 

 

Baghdad’s infamous Green Zone quietly slipped into Iraqi hands on the first day of 2009. The US embassy is moving to its new fortifications nearby and the hallmarks of American culture that sustained American troops–from Starbucks to Pizza Hut–have been re-exported. But as the US military relinquished control of the huge swath of Euphrates River frontage they have occupied since the spring of 2003, questions remained over how Iraqis will govern from the new Green Zone. Though the national security situation has improved dramatically, and is now completely under an Iraqi mandate, some analysts say insurgents will surely test the zone’s new owners. Big Think looks back on the history of the American-controlled Green Zone with three items: an excellent critique of the zone from the counter-insurgency experts at Small Wars Journal last May; the International Republican Institute’s 46-page “Visitor’s Guide to Baghdad’s Green Zone” (removed from centcom website but available at Wired); and a vivid account of Baghdad’s chaos in 2006 by Time correspondent Aparisim Ghosh. With the occupation in the process of being dismantled, at least militarily, conflict experts can begin to wade through the sea of analyses--spurious and valid--that pave the way to the history textbooks. A good starting place might be the comments of Michael Walzer, Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He spoke to Big Think about applying the theory of a just war to the Iraq debacle.

 

I was on my way to an exhibition and the sales yesterday - seeing the headlines on a poster about demonstrators at the Israeli Embassy, I changed my plans.  Only a small but furious crowd , no one I knew, no banner or posters identifying who anyone was, all united  by our righteous anger at the cruel and barbaric bombing of Gaza.

It is a strange and lonely place, to be of Jewish origin in such a situation, thinking of friends and family living in Israel, who also question the hubris and violence of their government. Difficult  also when one of the young men started shouting ‘Nazis!’, but he stopped when I quietly suggested that it was not a good slogan.
It is not difficult to understand his visceral rage and youthful urge to hurl the worst of all insults, and not difficult to understand why the boy wearing a combat jacket was clutching a home made catapult,  after the arrests and assaults the day before, it seemed best to just tell him to put  it away and warn him of possible trouble ahead from the police.

The media were out in force, they focussed on the young and angry , we the elderly and middle aged had gathered by now - alongside the miracle of London’s magical mixture ,veiled, unveiled old and young punky and respectable , Islamic men in long robes and an elderly Jewish man in a tweed hat who spoke with passion of the special responsibility that Jews carry - not to be merely spectators to barbarism and his urgent need to come and protest, he had a warm exchange with a young man by his side explaining why it was the Israeli State that must be condemned not the Israeli people.

It was bitterly cold but as I turned to leave I saw the amazing veteran Tony Benn, a retired British MP, who passionately opposed the dreadful war in Iraq, and has become a beacon of progressive thinking in the UK, at least 25 years older than me out at an edgy demonstration, in the freezing cold, an inspiring model for all of us -young and old.

We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so.

John Berger

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): In an uncharacteristically generous (mostly) response to Harold Pinter's death which attempts to make some necessary moral distinctions, Nick Cohen also writes this about opposing Saddam Hussein and the Iraq war.

I understood that he [Pinter] wanted the annihilator of the mountain people of Kurdistan to be left in power for good as well as bad reasons. I still could not and cannot understand, however, why he and all the liberals and leftists like him did not oppose America while supporting Kurd and Arab Iraqis who wanted something better than the Baathist gas canister or al-Qaida suicide bomb.

Most liberals and leftists did support the Kurds and Arab Iraqis. There was an ongoing debate about this in openDemocracy, for a start. Indeed, support for them led us to opposing the US invasion. It was a good judgement, not a moral betrayal. Cohen himself first opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and then savaged everyone who came out against the US invasion of Iraq as mindless anti-Americans. Today, supporters of the war who change their minds are regarded as wise while those who were wise are still tossed into a bucket with a casual dismissal. As John le Carré put it in his contribution to the oD debate at the time

Where’s the hurry? Iraq is a vile dictatorship, and Saddam is a monster who sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves. But there is ample time to consider how to unseat him before we plunge into this predatory and dishonest war. Leave the UN inspectors there. Convene Iraq’s neighbours. And consider for a moment where the will came from to make this war in the first place.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I never knew Harold Pinter, but I met him. He was funny and disconcerting. The first  time was at his and Antonia Fraser's house in Campden Hill Square for a meeting of what was known as the June 20th group. This was a gathering of left literary intellectuals which began in 1988 as an attempt to put some backbone into the Labour Party as led by Neil Kinnock. It was hosted by Pinter and John Mortimer, the latter a true Labour man. I spoke to them about Charter 88 which Pinter had promptly signed but which John Mortimer refused to support. I became a regular attender of the group which was scorned by the media for its well-heeled committment to socialism and the underdog. But it had a serious intent of providing a more self-confident hinterland for Kinnock to draw upon. He declined this, to the lasting weakness of Labour, in my view (but that's another argument). There was a bite and irony in Pinter's observations except when it came to politics. I recall sitting next to him when he assurred me with his characteristic intensity that Thatcher and her work was "fascist". I listened politely but couldn't accept the description however odious her polices were. Later we invited him and Antonia over to our flat in Covent Garden. I mainly recall him sitting in the armchair and pronouncing, "this is a pad". It made me laugh then and still does.

Denis Dutton at Arts & Letters Daily featured Theo Hobson's very interesting Milton piece and we got the spike in readership that comes from Denis' selection. I have written about the ALDaily effect, over here in relation to the unbundling of editorial roles that is happening all over publishing. If you go to the comments on the Milton piece, the 15 from Sunday are, I assume, from amongst the followers of Denis' recommendations. They are articulate, intelligent, opinionated---just the sorts of readers we love to have. Thanks, Denis!

Our own unbundling had a slight hic-up today. First, I spent a good part of last night restoring 2 new computers replacing the stolen ones. (Digression: my laptop had a Time Machine on an external hard-drive in the house. I got a total clone of the computer that was stolen in hours. Selina's had key files backed up on Mac's iDisk which was much less smooth restoring. Of course, iDisk is somewhat safer in that it is off-site. The lesson is that we should always be backing up both on and off-site, both complete mirrors and critical files).

Then there was a big ModernLiberty planning meeting -- exciting things happening there, more news soon. And finally our twice weekly physical group get-together... So it was great that the publishing team got  Sophie Roberts'  piece on the disappearances of civil society and opposition figures in Zimbabwe. She tells the history of Zimababwe's first post-colonial "dirty war" againstZapu-supporters and analyses disappearance as a tactic of putting people in a place that is beyond law. People disappear, and, this way, so too does accountability.

Tomorrow -- the traditionalism of the French Socialist party, three scenarios for Somalia ...

I added the Polymeme feed to the front page the other day. Polymeme was created by openDemocracy author Evgeny Morozov. It is Evgeny's own semi-automated news aggregator, and I had found myself selecting so many of Evgeny's stories in my "The World" entries that I eventually saw the web logic of this -- why not  spread the energy and just give Polymeme its own slot.

Evgeny has built a database of a huge number of sites and blogs which he has categorised into broad subject areas. Every day, his machine discovers which stories are being referred to by several of these sites. He then does a manual cull for the most interesting ones. The result is a very interesting and distinctively personal selection of news stories.

 

Yesterday's fron page plans did not all come together in time. There was the very nice surprise of having John Palmer's piece on the Irish referendum and the sureal spectacle of having Europe's leaders promise that they will not do any number of things that they never had the intention or the right under the treaty of doing. Palmer wonders whose victory it will be if the Lisbon Treaty does not get through before the UK Tories are in power with the ability to veto it.... Time is surprisingly short, and the Irish in a rather good negotiating position.

We did not have all the Stalin/Memorial pieces ready to go last night, and anyway it seemed as if the SWISH report and its extraordinary daglo picture --- this is described on flickr as a picture of a soldier concealing himself  with a smoke bomb after his vehicle is hit by an IED --- could spend a few more hours in the top slot. A strange notion of concealment ... maybe there is a metaphor there.

The Russian pieces should be ready to go tonight. The two together tell a very disturbing story. I hope that we see the Zimababwe article too.There has been very good discussion on Archibugi's Human RIghts piece - what exactly is the role of NGO's in improving governance?The immigration pieces we featured from OurKingdom last week continue to elicit important debate.

I had the nasty experience of having our house broken into last night. My laptop was stolen, as was Selina's (my wife's) ... So today has been a scramble of glaziers, police visits and all the while making sure that we do have backups of everything (and especially Selina's manuscript). I think we're going to be OK, but it is a long process getting the personal computing cloud back up and running.

I'm doing front page duty this week -- essentially, I look at what articles we have either coming up or published in different areas on the site and chair the process by which we decide some get highlighted on the front page.

I loved the solar thermal power station that we featured as an example of the kind of green infrastructure that will make for a good Keynesian stimulus and good green policy in Ralf Martin's very sensible squaring of the budgetary / environmental circle. Talking of which, William Sigmund and David Mackay are working hard to get "Energy Without Hot Air"ready for a group read. The goal is to have Chapter 1 up before the holiday break so that we can get started on some reading/annotating. One thing I thought about the book is that all the examples and numbers relate to the UK - the point is to make it very comprehensible in everyday terms. I wonder what it would take to localise the book to other places ... Might be a project to think about as we read.

I think we will put the Paul Rogers SWISH report into the front page slot today. We had a discussion in the office yesterday over whether it was in any way in bad taste to frame these SWISH reports as coming from security consultants to Al Qaida ... The worry is that this paints a view of the world as run by amoral, besuited consultants, each working as desk-bound mercenaries, and suggests a amoral, or at least morally totally relativistic world. Kanishk argued persuasively that Paul's pieces are of such sober sense and sound judgement that there was no possible interpretation of this kind. Reading this one, I have to agree. 

We have an excellent piece about memories of Stalinism in the Russia section which we will feature on the front page. The piece makes it very clear the ways in which history lives in the present, and how the present will become history that will continue to reverberate in society. This, of course, is a theme that is clear in the SWISH reports too, with their reminder of the time scale and relationship to history that radical eschatological movements adopt.

There is a really good Zimbabwe unsollicited submission in the pipeline. I hope we can get that ready for publication soon.

Nikos Konstandaras, managing editor of the Daily Kathimerini, offers his view on the events in Greece. His 11 December article "The sources of rage" can also be found here.

"The whole of Greece is shaken, an image of terrible violence has been projected to the rest of the world and we are all talking about the impasse into which our society has driven itself. How could one killing spark such an explosion?

It was natural that a police officer's killing of a 15-year-old boy would shake the country. And it is to Greece's credit that so many citizens - young and old - took to the streets to condemn the murder, to embrace the memory of the lost boy. As a nation we are used to the brutality of authority and to death - and so we honor life.

The police officer's bullets, though, set off an explosion much greater than one might have expected - an explosion that was just waiting for a spark.

The state, paralyzed and apologetic, stood aside. First it did not protect the child from the bullets, then it did not protect the citizens' property. It humiliated itself twice.

After so many years of theatrical rage, the self-proclaimed anarchists found legitimacy and vindication in the display of police brutality, and so they rampaged with impunity. But the greatest rage was displayed by the youngsters, by the mothers and fathers and everyone else who felt betrayed and unprotected. They saw that the impasses of the future are here already. For a society at the end of its resources, the killing was an act that distilled every betrayal and dead end that we fear. We see the fraudulent claim of "free" education, health and security, knowing that if we do not pay we will enjoy none of them. We see our politicians incapable of meeting the challenges of the times, looking only after their own interests as the rest of the world leaves Greece behind.

The citizens see. In democracy there is a tacit agreement in which the beast - the electorate - tolerates the government's weaknesses until the next elections. Provided those who govern fulfil the minimum of their obligations. Last Saturday, this agreement was shaken to its core."