"Ice Moon" by Jan Costin Wagner

I've just finished reading "Ice Moon" by Jan Costin Wagner. I have this urge perhaps stemming from my PhD studies to read just about anything I can find about Finland written English. This used to be just out of interest or to gain more knowledge of the country, now as often as not it's to see what other non-Finns have to say about Finland. Wagner is a German married to a Finn, and the book is set in Finland with just a couple of marginal scenes in Sweden and Germany.

It is crime fiction I suppose, but it was first published in German in 2003 and then translated into English (by the superbly named John Brownjohn) and published in 2006 so that makes it relatively early in the whole 'Nordic noir' thing. It doesn't have much in common with some of the big hits I've read of Scandinavian crime writing; for me at least it was more engaging as a love story than as a detective story. Although in this respect it does fit into the traditional literary Nordic gloom as one half of the loving couple has just died. We observe the love of the novel's main protagonist in his grief for his recently deceased wife.

It is a very quiet book. The murderer is quiet, his victims die silently, the Finnish police say little to each other and the hero of the story is cut off from the world by his grief. I don't think they even mention any police cars turning their sirens on. The first snowfall of winter comes during the book making the world even more silent. I don't think anyone draws their gun at any point, don't expect action or violence. Perhaps this is realism for a Finnish crime novel.

The author's prose is sparse, he doesn't dwell too much on describing the settings either natural or man-made. Naantali, where much of the action takes place, is one of the more interesting small towns in Finland but there is little description of it in the text. I've read a couple of books by Camilla Läckberg set in Fjällbacka, in Bohuslän on Sweden's west coast. I found the books slightly annoying, but she does do a good job of describing Fjällbacka and its environs. Wagner doesn't do this for Naantali or Turku - indeed if you haven't visited them you won't have much of an image of them after finishing Ice Moon. A novel should not feel the need to be tourist information for the place in which it is set, so for me a bigger problem was that the story's timeline didn't make much sense. It starts in summer and ends in winter, but there only seems to be a week or two passing in between. The murder cases seems to play out relatively quickly - the first murder is still very much being actively investigated when the second and then the third happens. The events in the novel feel like they take place in a couple of weeks, but somehow it goes from midsummer to the lakes being frozen enough to walk on. I've longed toyed with the idea of writing a novel set in Finland - 'write about what you know' and all that - and always felt that the passings of the seasons and how nature changes would be the backdrop to a story of people. I think that is what Wagner has tried but he seems to have set two different clocks that are running at very different speeds. More than a detective novel, Ice Moon is a character study and it feels a little too much like the changing seasons are just being used as a literary device to amplify this.

One other minor criticism also occurred to me, although it is only likely to be of interest to Finns or those who have made some attempt at learning Finnish; the main character's name: Joentaa. It sounded odd to me and I asked my wife, she said she it doesn't really mean anything and she's never heard it as a surname. A quick look on Finnish Google supports this, with nothing coming up except references to this book. Perhaps the author picked a surname that sounds Finnish but isn't really on purpose as it is an odd mistake to make when all the other names sound real.

Reading Orwell in (north)eastern Europe.

I don’t know why but I decided to read George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. Besides a few of his shorter essays, I guess I haven’t read any of his books since school. Anyway the following paragraph jumped out.

I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

He clearly holds the miners in awe but is also perhaps being somewhat modest. An odd thought struck me about how lucky Orwell was to be born British considering when he was born. Perhaps because I have read some excellent books this year that deal with the terror of Stalin’s rule (most notably “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder and, in fiction, Sofi Okasanen’s “Purge”) it crossed my mind that had Orwell been born in what became the Soviet Union, or indeed in many other places between Berlin and Moscow, he may well have had an opportunity to find out how correct his premonition was.

Ellroy in Afghanistan, or conspiracies we can believe in.

As I’ve no doubt tediously mentioned in the past, I’m a James Ellroy fan. At Christmas I bought his most recent book, Blood's a Rover. It is the third part of his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy – a sort of alternative history to American history in the 1950s and 60s. A couple of years ago I re-read the second in part of the trilogy, The Cold Six Thousand, and decided that it is one of my favourite books. I then decided I should re-read the first part of the trilogy as well, American Tabloid, so ordered at copy of my own realising I must have borrowed it from someone originally. I finished this re-read just a couple of days back: a dark and wonderful whirl of Cuban exiles, corrupt FBI men, killing-krazed klansmen, ridiculous and violent Mafioso, sleazy lounge singers and brutal gun slingers. Jack the hair, Bobby the dark knight, Fidel the beard, J. Edgar Hoover, Jack Ruby and his dogs all get walk-on roles. Everyone lies, everyone cheats, nothing is at it seems. Forces are in play and those who know about them have no wish to stop them. The denouement, of course, takes place at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, as shots ring out from the Texas book depository.

The vortex of interests and conspiracies are so richly entwined, having finished it I thought I might read the first and last chapters of The Cold Six Thousand for a third time, just to remind myself before diving in to Blood’s a Rover. Of course, it seemed silly to stop after just the first chapter so I’m now 100 pages and will re-read it all once more, just to really be warmed up for the final and supposedly masterful part of this dark trilogy. You just have to keep reminding yourself that this is fiction, and fiction from a depraved-if genius-mind, not history. We were talking about the Bildeberg conspiracy today, and how this old chestnut refuses to die. Probably sooner or later Google will lead a true believer to this post and they can tell me how I have been suckered by the deep forces of global Jewish bankers, space alien lizards or whatever their particular take is on how to explain this ridiculous world where far less goes to plan than the conspiracy theorists would have us believe. Ellroy’s story of Mob/CIA/Cuban exile complicity in the murder of a president is just that. A story. Maybe his story is going in the right direction, maybe it is not, but it remains a tale not history.

Conspiracies are easy ways to understand the world; if 9/11 was an inside job, we don’t need to bother ourselves with understanding how the duelling attempts at nation-building between the House of Saud and Shia clerical dictators of Post-Revolutionary Iran amplified, in different ways, old trends of Islamic radicalism. Or how the fuse was lit under those New York skyscrapers by US-USSR rivalry that turned the Cold War into a hot one in far off land that we cared little about when our soldier weren’t dying in the dust of Helmand province. All these things are beside the point if 9/11 was an attempt to deprive American citizens of their rights by dark forces inside their own government, or even simply insurance fraud by the buildings’ owner. Conspiracies give easy answers.

But Ellroy’s visions of conspiracy: opportunistic actors with get-rich-quick schemes or dogmatic idealists and a fuck-you attitude to those in their way, sometimes moving in parallel with those who share those interests, or who can be paid enough to pretend they do, does have parallels in the America of the modern world. When the Pentagon pays security companies that then pay-off the Taliban, or other dope-slinging Afghan warlords, to protect their Afghan trucks, you get into Ellroy territory. Add in an Afghan-American owner of one of those trucking companies (who just happens to also be son of the Afghan defence minister who is himself a former CIA-supported mujahideen) who on the side runs an influential Washington based campaigning group for US-Afghan relations and we are more Ellroy-esque. Scrape at the surface of that lobbying group a bit more and see that it was set up on the advice of one of the most influential Washington legal and lobbying firms and you can dig it hep-cats – très Ellroy. And let’s not forget that on the board of Mujahideen Jr.’s trucking firm sits one of the most respected former CIA old Afghan hands. And what with Langley subcontracting its worldwide hit squad plan to a shadowy mercenary company, with various 'interesting' Christian right political linkages, and we are just beaucoup Ellroy. But groove on this- it’s all for real.

1977 by David Peace

I've just finished reading 1977, the second book of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet. I've always had my suspicions about Yorkshire, but this is just ridiculous. Who ever knew - the inner circle of Hell appears to be the Leeds inner ring road. Here's my review, written in style as an homage to Peace, (who is in his own way writing an homage to Ellroy).

Whores and hopelessness, moor and murderers. Cups of tea and kicks to the head, chip supper and backhanders, racist plod prowl in their pandas. Rain washed streets that flow with blood, pints and fags in place of love. Forgiveness sought and never found, floral carpets blood stained brown, pain for no gain, corruption without interruption. A city drowning, it people fucked up, bodies dumped on wasteland abused and cut up. There is no salvation there is no heaven. This is Yorkshire, 1977.
I put it down in disgust.
I pick it up again.
I put it down in disgust.
I pick it up again.
I put it down in disgust.
I pick it up again.
I put it down in disgust.
I pick it up again.

So it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and there definitely aren't any sugars added, but if that's your bag, it's a hell of a book. In both ways.

Armenians: badass killerz or total geeks?

So I'm watching the Shield and the Armenians are back. In the criminal underworld of LA as depicted by the Shield, the Armenians are the 'other', not under control of anyone, not scared of anyone and not really understood by the locals, cops or criminals. If you upset them, they cut your balls off. If you really annoy them they cut your feet off and watch you bleed to death. They play the same role as the Russian Mafia do in many other crime series - an impenetrable and out of control force of berserkers who will do anything to anyone. Most ethnic minorities get their chance to be the bad guys in some US cop drama series eventually, so maybe it was just poor Armenia's turn to be cast as the baddie, but then I also happen to be reading White Jazz by James Ellroy at the same time. Despite being set in a L.A. half a century before the Shield, an Armenian crime family is at the heart of the murder, chaos and perversion once again. It appears there is a meme here and at least in SoCal, the lesson from popular fiction seems to be don't fuck with Armenians.

But then about the same time I was digging on the L.A. Armenian crime scene, the BBC had to come along and spoil all the hardass gangsterism with a documentary about the real Armenia - Armenian: the cleverest nation on earth. It appears that actually Armenians are all totally hardcore... errr... chess geeks.

“Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall” by Jarkko Sipilä. Long dark nights do not noir necessarily make.

On my way to Brussels last week I happened to notice in an airport book shop a recently translated Finnish detective novel – “Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall” by Jaakko Sippila. Although I’ve only read (and liked) the first two of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, I know there has been a bit of craze in recent years for Scandinavian crime fiction in the UK and US. For instance, I first heard Larsson reviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air and bought the first novel on that basis. So it seemed pretty cool to read a crime book set in my hometown and particularly one where the original Finnish version had won an award as the best crime novel of the year.

The book has been translated and published by a small, new American publishing house, started by Sipilä and his brother, and I wish them good luck in bringing more Finnish crime fiction to the English speaking world. But they still have some room for improvement. Not being good enough at Finnish to read the original is a bit annoying as it would be interesting to know whether it is the translation or the original Finnish that is a bit flat. With the book having won this crime novel of the year award, I presume it’s the translation because otherwise it doesn’t say much about Finnish crime fiction currently. Being translated primarily for an American market means that there were some slightly confusing American terms in there; it took me a second to remember that a “streetcar” is a tram and I’m not really sure if “half an ounce of meth” is a lot or not. It is not just that I'm used to British terms, but more that I’ve spoken English with Finns for over a decade and never heard one of them call a tram a “streetcar”. Likewise a Helsinki cop would have an even harder time than me working out what half an ounce is, so it just sounds unnatural for the word to be put in his mouth.

I guess these are really hard issues for a translator to resolve, but in Against the Wall, it seemed the translation never really did go one way or t'other. Things are half translated – the road Kehä I gets translated as “Beltway I” (despite the fact the Swedish name for it – remember Finland is bilingual so the signs say both – is ‘Ring I’, exactly what everyone, both Finnish and foreigners, call it in English). Yet the street where one of the characters lives is only half translated as “Tehdas Street”. This totally confused me: Tehdas means ‘factory’ and as I know that part of town I was trying to think where there is a “factory street” – completely forgetting the genitive of Tehdas turns the streetname in Finnish into Tehtankatu – a street name that EVERYBODY knows in Finland. Tehtankatu is the address of the imposing and rather intimidating bulk of the formerly Soviet, now Russian, embassy – a building that has long cast shadows over both the street and Finnish political life far more widely. So why does “Beltway” need a translations whilst Tehdas only needs half of one? Similar issues crop up through the book, which had me back translating words into Finnish so I could work out where or what in Helsinki was being discussed.

Having said all that, it is an enjoyable read if you like that sort of thing and anyone who knows Helsinki will enjoy spotting places they know. For example, my old local in Kallio – a dump admittedly, but a cheap one at that – appears to be where to go when trying to make contact with a contract killer. I never noticed this when I used to drink there but was probably distracted by cheap beer. I also, rather embarrassingly, realise I know most of the petrol station cafés of the greater Helsinki region and have eaten donuts in many of them. They pop up quite regularly through the book and the author even gets to note which serves the best coffee (personally I see myself as more of a donut connoisseur).

I think perhaps I was hoping for the book to say a bit more about modern Finland, being Finnish, and the like – like Steig Larsson’s distopian vision of modern Sweden. But Sipila isn’t that interested in this – it’s a detective story from a bloke who clearly know about how the Finnish police work. There are few nice snatches that hint at more – the modern Finland I know; a scene where a middle aged man can’t bring himself to hug his grieving grown-up daughter. Finns aren’t the most ‘huggy’ of nations. Helsinki is also dark and cold throughout the book, but also generally damp. In these days of warmer winters forget any tourist bureau bollocks of arctic winterscapes, at least down here in the south. The damp cold is a fitting background to a story of corruption and people trying to rip each other off. But don’t expect Against the Wall to make and deeper points, it sticks within a formula and keeps to the rules, even if the hero cop gently prods at the margins of acceptable behaviour.

It is may be not a fair comparison but I also read in the last few days 1974 by David Peace, the first book in his Red Riding Quartet. Peace is James Ellroy’s British acolyte, and a worthy one at that. That book drips with despair like, well, piss and shit would once thrown in your face by a corrupt rozzer in a cold interrogation cell. You may not actually enjoy reading that descent into hell but it is bracing to say the least. Peace’s world is one where there are no rules: as one of the policemen screams as he beats the “hero” half to death “THIS IS THE NORTH. WE DO WHAT WANT!” Maybe in the Yorkshire of 1974 but not in Sipilä’s Helsinki. The good guys are generally pretty decent, and they hold the line. The book may be more realistic but is less exciting as a result.

The Religious Right

"Fresh Air" from NPR has been doing a series of programmes over the last week all on the theme of presidential politics, in anticipation of the upcoming Democrat and Republican party conventions. One very interesting interview they re-broadcast was with Randall Balmer, a priest and researcher who is author of the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism and editor-at-large of Christianity Today. Balmer has written a book called God in the White House, which studies the surprisingly recent overt 'religionization' of American politics. I heard the interview when it was first broadcast in earlier this year, but was perhaps listening more carefully this time.

What really struck me was the somewhat bizarre nature of event that Balmer credits as the catalyst for the formation of what we now know of as the "Religious Right". Most presume it was Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal in the US. But that was in 1973 and, as Balmer points out, in 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the most conservative mainstream religious major organisations, actually passed a resolution supporting the right to legal abortions. Rather, Balmer argues, it was the rescinding of the tax exempt status of the evangelical Bob Jones University for its overt racism that led to the organization of the Religious Right. This was a drawn out legal process that was fought through the late 1970s and culminated in a Supreme Court decision in 1983 that supported the IRS's position against the university - basically that a racist organization could not be classified as "charitable" and therefore it could not qualify for tax-exemption as charities do. The Federal Government seen to be attacking a religious organisation, was the spark that lit the fire on right, bringing the evangelicals back into American politics for the first time since their defeat at the Scopes Trial in 1925, although he notes that it was actually the presidency of the born-again Jimmy Carter that actually set the wider stage for the reintroduction of overt religious language in American politics.

The university rescinded its ban on inter-racial dating only in 2000. It maintains a ban on homosexuality and has never re-applied for tax exemption.

Book about Egypt banned in Egypt

A few weeks ago I wrote a lengthy review of John R. Bradley's book "Inside Egypt". I just came across a newspaper article from a week or so ago that notes the book has now been banned in Egypt. This rather makes Bradley's point of the Egyptian regime's ideological vacuity, it stands for nothing but its own enrichment and survival and will suppress those that point this out.

“Inside Egypt” John R. Bradley.

“Inside Egypt” by John R. Bradley.

It’s too long since I’ve done a book review so I think I should mention John Bradley’s “Inside Egypt: the land of the Pharaohs on the brink of revolution”. I saw it sitting on a colleagues desk and asked if I could read, “yes” was the reply, “but do it quickly”. Well it has taken me two days so that says a lot for the readability of the book. I’ve not been to Egypt and this book unfortunately isn’t likely to make anyone go, unless of course you are a weird social scientist who is interested in political disasters. So, I’m more interested in going now than before.

Bradley paints a very bleak picture of a country failing. The regime has no ideology and stands for nothing except its own continuance, hence the Egyptian state is utterly corrupts and having no other way to rally the nation to its cause, uses violence to repress society instead. Bradley suspects this is unsustainable as, unlike say China, the regime is not bringing people out of poverty whilst denying them freedom. Actually it is doing the opposite, pushing the middle class into penury whilst ignoring the poverty stricken working and underclass.

He notes that Egyptian civil society is utterly beaten down, producing virtually no culture, despite the country’s immensely rich multi-ethnic and –religious heritage. Not even the corrupt super-rich are using their money to make anything beautiful or interesting: “In all but ethnically cleansed and culturally purged post-Nasser Egypt… even money has gone stale, producing for the rich only barren imitations of life elsewhere, and financing only the thugs’ indulgence in beating any individual expression to a pulp.” (p.55)

He argues that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is the greatest beneficiary of this oppression, as Mubarak has crushed all secular opposition. His view of the MB is that its rise is indicative of the malaise in modern Egypt, where demonstrations of public piety cover private spitefulness and corruption of the spirit. Bradley believes that they would just be a minor force if real democracy was allowed – noting although they took 20% of the vote in 2005 parliamentary elections, only 25% of the electorate could be bothered to vote in the heavily rigged elections and mostly consisted of committed supporters of the Brothers and then the state employees forced or obliged to vote for Mubarak’s NDP. Hence that 20% probably greatly overestimates their support in the country. He believes that the MB is true to its word that it is a peaceful organisation, yet at the same time is a clerically-fascist, sucking all the joy and celebration out of Egyptian heritage, and spreading sectarianism amongst different groups in the countries.

He argues that American policy of support to Egypt, the second biggest recipient of US aid after Israel, in return for its “cold peace” with the Jewish state is part of the problem. American support for democratic reform was both half-arsed and half-baked, and was abandoned immediately once it became apparent elsewhere in the Middle East that Islamists groups would win free elections in the current geopolitical climate. He quotes Hisham Kassem, a human right activist who was awarded a Democracy Award from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy in 2007. Kassem got to meet President Bush as a result, and Bush’s bemusement at being told how the current situation is building the MB’s support is telling: “we give your country $2 billion a year in order to keep it stable and prevent it from turning into a theocracy” Bush replied looking dismayed.

The book is very readable and cracks along at a fair pace, but isn’t perfect. The chapter on the Bedouin of the Sinai is basically a discussion of the Crisis Group report on the area. Crisis Group reports are generally excellent, but the other chapters show Bradley’s original reporting and feel for the country much more. His chapter on “Lost Dignity” is basically about old European women and European gay men coming to Luxor to find young Egyptian “studs” to shag. It’s really depressing but perhaps verges on the salacious. Bradley makes a decent case that it is representative of wider issues in the country, but in comparison to his horrific chapter on the endemic torture and violence in what passes for Egypt’s criminal justice system it seems like something of a smaller issue that just attracts disproportionate media attention as it involves sex and westerners.

Dodgy Engineers

(Please note, the pictured engineers are probably not dodgy at all) For anyone who has closely followed terrorism since 2001, or indeed before then, its always been blatantly clear that engineers are a right dubious bunch. Despite some of my best friends being engineers, you can see why: it's a mindset of neat organization, just ripe for a fundamentalist view of the world. Perhaps all engineers should be made to do a course on post-modern philosophy, or literary studies before they graduate. It might be safer for all of us. Malise Ruthven noted this correlation in his 2002 book, a Fury for God. He pointed out that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was not just an Islamic affair, the Communist students also revolted, but were later purged by the Islamists - but, anyway, the Islamist students virtually all came from the engineering, medical and natural science faculties at Tehran University, whilst the communists were from the humanities and social science faculties.

Anyway, I just noticed Foreign Policy magazine had an article on this earlier this year - called "Engineering Jihad". You can read most of it here - only the last paragraph is missing to non-subscribers and that only says that on top of a fundamentalism-ready mindset, in the Middle East there aren't enough jobs for engineering graduates, so you also get boredom and unemployment added to this unhealthy mix.

Stuff you find when looking for other stuff

I just found my spare camera battery that I had lost. Unfortunately I was looking for my still un-found mini bike pump at the time. You win some, you loose some. On a related note I was going to write about a BBC World documentary I just listened to about the kidnap of Norman Kember in the Iraq. I won't now as I really need to go to bed, but the story not told reminded me of that quote you see kicked around the internet - often on blogs and sites supporting the U.S. military:

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

It is always attributed to George Orwell, but when I first came across maybe five years ago and did a bit research on the quote, I couldn't find an accurate citation of where it came from and when he said it. I even heard Garrison Keillor attribute it to Orwell on Prairie Home Companion the other week, so when it came to mind tonight I thought I must now, some years later, be able to find a citation for it - but now Wikiquote and an Orwell site, both suggest it is apocryphal. The George Orwell FAQ site says this:

Rough Men

Did George Orwell ever say: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf?" Or: "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us?"

Not exactly. But he did make comments that were along similar lines. In his essay on Rudyard Kipling (1942), Orwell wrote: "[Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them." (Thanks to Keith Ammann for this). And in his 'Notes on Nationalism' (1945) he wrote: "Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." (Thanks to Parbety). Where the rough men crept in is anyone's guess.

So now we have that cleared up, I'll have to get back to Norman Kember, Anas al-Tikriti and the missing "rough men" of the SAS another night. And if you see a mini-bike pump lying around give me a yell...

Airport bookshops

Left or right, that choice - but no other choice - is yours

I have a tendency to buy books at airports. I hate getting stressed worrying about missing my flight so always end up at airports and hour or two earlier than I really need to be, just to be on the safe side. To kill time I’m as happy browsing the bookshops as anything else and invariably end up buying something from the non-fiction section. At airports where English is not the native language, they still often have a selection of books in English, but obviously a smaller selection that tends to focus on bestsellers. This leads to some very odd juxtaposition in the non-fiction section as you invariably seem to get the latest management guru book next to a Noam Chomsky tome. Why is this? Do the people who read the management handbooks also read Chomsky? It seems unlikely, but then if it is not the case this leads to the worrying conclusion that at least amongst my fellow book-buying travelers there are two tribes: the rapacious capitalists and the Chomskian far-left West-bashers. I'm not sure who it would be worse be squashed next to for a three hour flight.

The Republican War on Science - Chris Mooney. A Review.

I've had The Republican War on Science on my book shelf for about a year. I've been sort of put off reading because it looked a bit heavy. Not metaphorically, but rather literally. It's a big, fat hardback. Amazon market place is great because you can get American published hardbacks second hand or even new, for the same price as the paperback will cost in the UK, but months before it comes out in paperback. But it does mean I'm buying more hardbacks than ever before and somehow they take more mental effort to get stuck into, perhaps just because they take more physical effort to hold.

But Chris Mooney's book isn't heavy, it is actually perfectly readable even for some one like me whose science education did not go beyond the compulsory schooling level. He does not demand his readers know much about the subjects he deals with in advance, but he doesn't avoid actually discussing scientific issues either. Anyone who is an expert in any of the areas discussed might wish for more detail, but in many ways this is a book about the politics not about science. He outlines a few earlier dubious political uses of science in U.S. politics before the 1990s, most notably around the "Star Wars" programme of Ronald Reagan, but things really heat up with the rise of the Gingrich 'revolution' of 1994. He argues that one of the seminal acts of 'war on science' was the abolition of Congress' Office of Technology Assessments. The OTA was the in house, but independent, science research organisation for the Congress. I learned about it, and is abolition, a few years ago when I was looking at what "WMD" really means. Perhaps the best study on what threat nuclear, chemical and biological weapons really represent was done by the OTA in the early 90s. But Gingrich and crew did not like the policy implications of much of OTA's output, so killed the agency off. An odd appendix to this story that Mooney's book doesn't cover is that Gingrich himself has become one the leading Republican voices speaking out about the dangers of global climate change, and attacking the deniers in his own party. The climate change deniers do though form another central theme of the book.

Some of the obfuscation of science by the American right that Mooney outlines is impressive. Other bits are creepy. In the first category I would place legislation that was passed on "Data Quality Assurance". What could be more the scientific method than one scientist's peers assuring the quality of his or her data? But the legislation applied to federal agencies, making them reveal absolutely all data that they have based any regulation on to interested parties. Of course the idea came from business interests who could afford the expertise to critically examine and challenge all the data, and hence tie up new regulation in legal technicalities, basically limiting the power of agencies whose job it is to protect the environment or citizens' health. Clever, and not really that surprising that business interests that see their actions limited by regulation will resist that regulation.

In the creepy category I would put the "creation science" and religiously motivated questioning of many issues to do with reproductive rights and womens health. I had never heard of intelligent design maybe five years ago, but now it has arrived in the UK from the States and is popping up all over the world. Mooney's book outlines just how successful a couple of people in one think tank, the Discovery Insitute, and not a lab have been in creating a discourse that the religious right were just waiting for; managing to alter the public debate even though it has had basically no impact on science at all.

He raises interesting and fundamental questions about the role of scientists in politics, accepting that it is fundamentally undemocratic to raise them to the level of Platonic philosopher-kings: it is a bit like the military, they are the professionals, but they have to remain under civilian control. But just like a prime minister would be well advised to listen to her generals if contemplating military action, leaders should listen to the scientists, and not cherry-pick what they say. The situation in the US where scientists have been asked for their political views before being invited to join scientific committees in their area of expertise makes a mockery of seeking expert help for policy making.

Book backlog

Whenever I go to the UK, I come back with books. This time it was Christmas and I got a number as presents from my lovely family. But even when it's not Xmas, I still seem to return with a pile. The main factor is free delivery to UK addresses from Amazon.co.uk when you spend over fifteen quid - before I travel I order anything I want and have them sent to my Mum and Dad's then pick them up when over. Secondly, Tesco and Asda book price slashing - "The Golden Compass" in the pile cost something like £3.40, so it seemed worth the money to see if the book is as good as many say it is even if it's not the sort of thing I'd normally read. The CDs and DVDs are also ridiculously cheap, "Hot Fuzz" was a fiver which is only a bit more than it would cost to rent it for an evening here, or the same as seeing it in the cinema which I never got a chance to do. Thirdly, airport bookshops. I hate feeling stressed or rushed when flying so tend to leave more time than I really need at the airport. This I can happily while away in the bookshops, and the "Dunkirk" and "Generation Kill" are the results of doing that at Manchester yesterday afternoon.

So lots to read over the next few months! I will try to write some reviews here for anyone who is interested. Having a pile of unread books makes me feel a bit bad, like being greedy. But books never seem to really feel like unnecessary or conspicuous consumption. I read them all eventually. And as Oscar Wilde almost said; if there is anything worse than having a pile of unread books, it is not having a pile of unread books. Happy New Year to all.

Career choices for a new century

According to the Economist's review of the Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne new book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes rather bizarrely:

1% of young Californians say they expect to become “snipers”.

I haven't done the maths but I know that the Californian population is about the same as the UK - 60 million - and it is relatively young. Penn argues that 1% of population is a enough to make a significant trend.

From our department of corrections: A kind commenter notes I was hopelessly out on California's population - it's actually about 37 million and a big bit. So about the population of Poland then? I should google that shouldn't I? Otherwise I'm going to get some Polish commenter telling me I'm miles out again...

Oh I'm so good! You definitely want me to be on your pub quiz team. According to Wikipedia, the Polish population is 38.5 million, although from recent trips to the UK I reckon half of them are now working in British shops, hotels and other parts of the service sector - and definitely all the attractive young Polish women now seem to be in the UK (which can only be a great thing for British single blokes). I'm afraid I have no idea how many attractive polish women want to be snipers though.

Book review: "Pies and Prejudice" by Stuart Maconie

I’ve just finished reading Stuart Maconie’s “Pies and Prejudice: in Search of the North”. I grabbed it in WH Smiths at the ferry port in Dover as I was exiting England stage right last month. I bought it for a variety of reason. Firstly, I’ve always liked Maconie as a broadcaster, I knew as I read it I would have his dulcet Wigan tones in my head. Secondly, when I leave the UK I tend to get pangs of homesickness, so am willing to wade in some warm thoughts about a part of my homeland that I’m rather fond of. Thirdly, I had heard him talking about the book with Simon Mayo on FiveLive, and he had been recounting how he watched on Good Friday 2006, gobsmacked, “the Manchester Passion”: a reenactment of the resurrection of Christ, but moved to Piccadilly Gardens (for those not -ahem- lucky enough to have visited, this is a small square in the centre of Manchester, that serves as the central bus terminus and hangout for tramps, skaters, hoody-wearing wannabe-ganstas and other various riffraff). Additionally the glorious return of the saviour of man was accompanied by music by various great Manchester bands, of course culminating in the Stone Roses’ “I am the Resurrection”, although not before Tim Booth of James playing Judas got to sing the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. I’m really sorry I missed it, but having lived in Manchester, the cities audacity isn’t very surprising – after all, here’s a town that used a major terrorist attack as shortcut to some major urban regeneration. But anyway, that story alone made me want to read “Pies and Prejudice”. Indeed I’m listening to The Best of James as I write this in their hubristic honour.

It’s a nice book – laugh out loud funny in places – and reminiscent I think of Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Isle” in its affection for its subject. But it has a major flaw – its written for two audiences: Northerners who want to slap themselves on the back and say “aren’t we civilized these days even though we’ve kept our core values?” and Southerners (particularly Londoners) who basically think everything north of them is a bit crap and need telling. His first chapter is actually a tour of the South of England, just to show he knows that there is quite a bit diversity from the Essex wideboys to Devon shepherds, but there’s the thing: both Northerners and Southerners in their mutual sense of superiority totally forget the rest. I’ll leave the Scots and the Welsh to look after themselves, they’ve got their own governments after all, but the honour of the Midlands needs defending. Neither Northerners or Southerners know anything about the Midlands as a rule. They might be vaguely aware of Birmingham, but that will be about that. Having lived in Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and met people from all over the UK, it gets kind of dull hearing “so where are you from?”, “Worcestershire”, “Oh, right… errr… where exactly is that?” Don’t worry that Worcester is home to one of the finest cathedrals in Europe, or that Birmingham was the industrial centre of the world in the 19th century, or that Shropshire has some of the most beautiful rural scenery of anywhere in the UK, it’s the Midlands – who cares.

Northerners think they are hard done by because the London media types look down on them, but the defensiveness breeds its own superiority complex. My first move was from Worcestershire to Glasgow, hopping straight over “the North”. I know it’s the north of England, but when you look south from Scotland, all the bluff toughness over how cold and windy it is up/down there in “the North” looks a bit whiney. Moving to the second most northerly capital in the world, has only reinforced this view. Northerness is clearly a state of mind, rather than a geographical position, a point that Maconie makes well.

I’m still a bit suspicious of Yorkshire, they are far too much of a country for their own good, but as a whole the North of England is, if you avoid the chavs and scallies, a fine place. The CIA World Factbook entry on the UK describes it geographically as “mostly rugged hills and low mountains; level to rolling plains in east and southeast”. Most foreigners' image of England is based on the latter, but as all Northerners know, it is the former that really dominates, and that’s not just a state of mind. Take a drive up in the North Pennines, in its own way, it is a beautiful as anywhere in else Europe.

Book review: "God's Terrorists" by Charles Allen

It was the subtitle of this book that made me buy it - "The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of the Modern Jihad". I've been trying to understand more about modern Saudi political history, and how the official Wahhabi form of Islam in Saudi Arabia has produced both a very politically conservative form that is absolutely supportive of the Saudi monarchy and the Salafi-Jihadis who want the violent overthrow of the same royal family, and thought the book might have something to say on the background of this. I was to be disappointed.

"God's Terrorists" isn't a bad book, it's just 90% a different book to the one suggested by the cover. See the camels in the picture? And the head scarves? Doesn't that sort of suggest Arabia? But oddly this is a book about Imperial India. Allen is a respected historian of the Raj, and perhaps that should have been a clue, but I would say both the front cover and back cover blurb deliberately set out to suggest this is book about the roots of modern jihadi terrorism and not about Empire-era India. What the meat of the book is about is Muslim radicalism within British-India, generally known at the time as the "Hindustani Fanatics". This is a fascinating story in itself: the origins of this group were Indian Muslims who in the early 19th century had gone to Saudi Arabia and had been inspired by Wahhabi puritanicalism and brought their zeal back with them. They were somewhat involved in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, but this was not a Muslim thing in particular with Hindu regiments mutinying as well. They fled India to hide out in the mountains of the North West frontier, bringing British and Indian-native forces into various skirmishes and minor wars with Pashtun tribes of the India/Afghanistan border regions. The Pashtuns didn't think much of the British invading their lands, but they didn't think much of the Wahhabis either, with the Imperial forces sometimes doing deals with them to drive the fanatics out - much like the current Pakistani government at times tries to do, co-opting the tribes against various foreign al-Qaeda groups.

This is all very interesting but really didn't have much to do with what was happening in Saudi Arabia at the time. In fact Allen notes that the Deobandi school of Islam, the specifically South Asian school that began in India in 1866, was set up in opposition to the Wahhabi inspired Hindustani fanatics (p.206-7). The Deobandi school has an important role to play in the development of Pakistani Islamism, and more globally because of the influence of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, who along with Sayyid Qutb, was central to the development of modern Islamism. The Taliban are also described as Deobandi, although some say the claim is problematic.

There are some chapters that deal with Saudi Arabia, both the beginnings of the Wahhabi sect in 18th century and its more modern history, but they aren't anything I haven't read elsewhere and feel like a basic review of the known history, rather than an a fresh delve into primary sources - diaries, reports, statistical data - that Allen clearly has mastery of in the case of Raj-era India. Perfunctory would be the word. His descriptions of minor battles and skirmishes between the British and Indian Armies and the Pashtun tribesmen at the fag-end of the 19th century are well written military history. This is obviously Allen's 'thing', not Saudi Arabia. I'm pretty certain Allen had a book pretty much written just on Muslim radicalism during the Raj, but then his publishers suggested that if he gets the words al-Qaeda and Taliban in there a few times, and they put the word "terrorist" in the title, it would sell 20 times the amount that a military history of British Army skirmishes in the Hindu Kush a century ago. I bought it, so they were probably right. More fool me.

You will learn lots of things if you read this book. Just not what you expected.

Can this possibly be true?

"By the early twenty-first century, in Britain, there were ten civil servants involved in running sport; in France, 12,000".

From the The Sweet Enemy: The French and British from the Sun King to the Present by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, quote in "the Odd Couple" by Julian Barnes, his review of the Tombs' book, in The New York Review of Books March 2007 (p.4)

Update: I hadn't checked before as I was reading the paper version of the magazine over coffee this morning, but the whole review is available to read online.

"The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright

I've recently finished reading Lawrence Wright's excellent "The Looming Tower". It is the result of years of reporting and hundreds of interviews all around the world. Wright, a investigative journalist from the New Yorkers, paints a vivid pictures of what can be called loosely "the Islamist world" pre-9/11; a world of radicals and reactionaries, conservatives and revolutionaries, those obsessed with politics and those who only are interested in religion. This diversity is something that many still now in the West do not understand, or will not acknowledge. They don't know about the vicious infighting and attacks on each others' characters that the two leaders of the Egyptian radical groups that were active during the Afghan Jihad carried out. Ayman al Zawahiri leading Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman of the Gamaa Islamyia clearly loathed each other despite their supposed common purpose (p.138). Few would be interested to know that Hasan al-Turabi, the famous 'radical' Sudanese Islamist thinker and leader was radical in part because of his views on the importance of the emancipation of women - that women should vote, lead prayers and even fight - from a Koranic perspective. Few will know how at the end of the 80s and start of the 90s, there were major division in the foreign Mujahideen in Pakistan and Afghanistan between the Takfiri tendencies and the far more mainstream Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist organisation, but they were loathed by the Takfiris for their moderation and interest in democratic politics. Wright paints a nuanced picture of Abdullah Azzam, now often fetishized in Jihadi circles as a great leader of the Afghan Mujahideen. Wright notes that this man famed now for having been involved in setting up Hamas and wanting to bring the Jihad to Palestine after the defeat of the Soviets, was also hated by the Takfiri crowd in Peshawar, including increasingly al Zawahiri, who saw him as too attractive to young volunteers coming to fight in Afghanistan. They saw him as collecting support for the Muslim Brotherhood and hence taking away influence from their more violent and radical aims. Azzam also came to support in the Afghan civil war, as the Soviets left, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda just days before 9/11. Massoud resisted the Taliban in the late 1990s and because of this has been celebrated by some in the west, rather simplistically, as some kind of hero who withstood Islamic totalitarianism. But through the war with Russia and the civil war that followed, Massoud was a brutal warlord much like the others and just as interested in imposing his version of an Islamic state on Afghanistan. Azzam's support for Massoud was interesting as Massoud was a Tajik whilst his rival, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was a Pashtun and hence much closer to the Pakistanis with whom most the Arab volunteers were coordinating and it was his support for Massoud that most likely led to Azzam's assassination in 1989.

Its a great book, fascinating in it details yet still very readable. Journalism at its best.

The power of the news: more from Marr

On average, there are less people dying in wars than before; there is less inequality as more poor people are lifted out of poverty; and people are living longer than ever before. Nevertheless everyone tends to think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket (listen to AC Grayling discuss this with Andrew Marr and others on Radio 4's "Start the Week" here). Could it be that we just know more about all the crappy stuff that happens to other people in other places than before? It doesn't mean that this crappy stuff didn't happen in the past; it did and probably to a greater extent. It's just now we can watch.

That is the power of the media, and my second quote from Marr's "My Trade" sums this process up perfectly:

One story saying killer French bees are coming to get you might make you laugh. A dozen, over a few days, might make you scared. If you hear people have indeed died, and this is repeated, and similar stories recur the next spring, and the next, then you come to believe in killer French bees. Multiply that a thousand-fold to account for all the running stories in different papers and one begins to understand the power of the news. It takes a heroic, or insane, mind to stand outside it. (p.62)