Month: January 2006

GDB: Benjamin Franklin

Inspired by Virtual Stoa’s Dead Socialist Watch, I’ve decided to start a regular feature commemorating the birthdays of the great figures of democracy.

And first up is Benjamin Franklin who was born 300 years ago today. Read about him at Wikipedia. Among other achievements, he founded the first independent colonial newspaper, the New England Courant, and was involved in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Hikikomori

The New York Times magazine has an interesting feature on hikikomori – the ‘shut-in’. These are Japanese teenagers (usually) who lock themselves in their room, away from human contact for years or decades. Is it a culture-specific phenomenon (like anorexia in the West), or could the same thing happen here?

Notes on Galloway

Just came across a section of George Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism” that perfectly sums up George Galloway:

There is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.