The Virtual Stoa

Norm reminds us that yesterday was the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Someone pointed out to me the other day just how many key dates in twentieth century German history fell on November 9 (or, as we might say, the European 9/11). Stupidly, I hadn’t noticed this pattern before:

1918: The abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of the Republic.

1923: The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch.

1938: Kristallnacht.

1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall.

It’s a remarkable sequence.

A chap called Peter Watt has just emailed me to tell me that he’s the new general secretary of the Labour Party. But rather than tell me who he is or why he has the right experience to be the GS of the LP, he tells me that his mum is very proud of him. So if anyone’s got the slightest idea about who this chap is, please use the Comments.

I may as well get this not-especially-surprising opinion of mine into the open.

Blair’s made it clear that he disagrees with Parliament on what he takes to be an important matter of national security, and he seems to have contempt for the majority in Parliament which voted against his government’s plans. He chose not to seek a compromise with MPs that was there for the taking, which means that he was choosing yesterday to put his personal authority at stake in the crucial vote. In the circumstances, it’s not enough just to wander around muttering about how he hopes MPs don’t “rue the day” they voted the way they did.

There’s no reason to think there isn’t a stable majority in Parliament to stand behind a Labour government that is slightly less hostile to civil liberties than the current executive, slightly less keen on franchising out the public sector to the highest bidder, and slightly less keen to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Americans on dealings with the rest of the world.

Blair can now quit on a point of principle (and he badly needs a decent exit strategy of his own), and the Labour Party can set about sorting out a new leadership that can run the country in the time remaining between now and the next General Election.

(Oddly enough, Polly Toynbee has published an article on why Blair shouldn’t resign, which offers a number of good reasons as to why he should, and none as to why he shouldn’t, which is peculiar.)

Do any Stoa readers think there’s any merit at all in the “Well, the police have asked for 90 days, and so we should give it to them” argument, which we’ve been hearing on permanent loop over the last few days?

Over here. It’s a good list, and I’m only sorry that Oxford’s Andrew Smith didn’t manage to find a way onto it.

UPDATE: The full voting list is in Hansard. I’m also sorry to see my old undergraduate contemporary Kitty Ussher voting with Mr Blair’s mob, too.

Dead Socialist Watch, #126: Canaan Banana, first President of independent Zimbabwe, born 5 March 1936, died 10 November, 2003.

Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, born 19 December 1906 in Kamenskoye (now Dneprodzerzhinsk), died 10 November 1982.

It’s very old, and quite well known, but I suppose it’s conceivable that there’s some Virtual Stoa reader out there who’s never read Paul Jennings’s “Report on Resistantialism”. So, if you’re that person, here it is.

I wrote not so long ago that I quite liked the new Le Monde-sized Guardian, but preferred the French paper’s six columns to the Anglo rag’s five. And now Le Monde has had a makeover, reducing the column-count to five, and generally making the paper look more like tehgrauniad. Gah.

Leo Huberman, American socialist, founding co-editor of Monthly Review, born 17 October 1903, died 9 November 1968.

What Monty Python Sketch Character are you? [via]

Étienne Cabet, French utopian socialist and author of Voyage en Icarie; born in Dijon, France, 1 January 1788, died St Louis, Missouri, 8 November 1856.

You can read up on the story of the Gunpowder Plot over here, at Wikipedia, or use the Guardian’s nice little graphics show; the BBC has a sensible-looking “what if it had succeeded?” page or two; there seems to be quite a lot over at gunpowder-plot.org, the people at spartacus.net have their own telling of the tale, and the busy bees at the Parliamentary Archives, no less, have produced two versions of the story, for children and for adults. If I’ve missed any other good links, please add them in Comments.

As I reported three years ago, which is a long time in the World of Blogs, there used to be a theory floating around a subsection of my mother’s family that we were descended from one of the Gunpowder Plotters - two of whom were called Wintour, with my Catholic maternal grandmother’s maiden name being Winter - but this page makes me think it’s probably not true.

Sen Katayama, alternatively Sugataro Yabuki, founding member of both the American and the Japanese Communist Parties; born in Japan, 1859, died in the USSR, 5 November 1933.

It had to happen. I’ve created one of those nifty frappr maps for this blog, in a vain attempt to demonstrate that not all of the people who glance at this blog live in Oxford or London.

Go and add yourselves, readers of the Stoa, especially if you, um, don’t live in Oxford or London…

One carpet, two kittens:

Lucio Colletti, Marxist philosopher turned Forza Italia deputy, born 8 December 1924, died 3 November 2001.

From the US Department of Justice:

ALMOST 7 MILLION ADULTS UNDER CORRECTIONAL SUPERVISION BEHIND BARS OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE IN THE COMMUNITYWASHINGTON, D.C. — The number of adults in prison, jail, or on probation or parole reached almost 7 million during 2004, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The number has grown by more than 1.6 million adults under correctional authority control since 1995.

The nation’s total correctional population was 6,996,500 in 2004, of which 4,151,125 were living in the community on probation; 1,421,911 were in a state or federal prison; 765,355 were living in the community on parole; and 713,990 were in jail, according to the BJS report on probation and parole. At year-end one in every 31 adults were under correctional supervision, which was 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population…

Wow. [via]

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian poet, born 5 March, 1922, murdered 2 November, 1975.

UPDATE [7pm]: There’s a recent article on his murder over here.

UPDATE [9pm]: And here’s another one.

George Bernard Shaw, Fabian socialist; born 26 July 1856, died 2 November 1950.

“Most people will tell you that Communism is known in this country only as a visionary project advocated by a handful of admirable cranks. Then they will stroll off across the common bridge, across the common embankment, by the light of the common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street, and into the common Trafalgar Square, where on the smallest hint on their part that Communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by the common policeman, and hauled off to the common gaol.”

That’s from “The Impossibility of Anarchism”, a talk from 1891,
published in Socialism and Individualism, 1911, p.42.

(See here for the relevant precedent.) I’m delighted to report that Enkidu is out of his bandage-and-stupid-cone set-up. What we hoped was his final bandage slipped off quite by accident on Sunday, and he was very happy to have a reasonably functioning paw back again; he went to the vet yesterday to decide what we should do, and the upshot of that was that he went for his x-ray a bit earlier than planned; and the x-ray showed that there’s bone again where there used not to be bone; and so he doesn’t have to wear the bandage-and-cone anymore.

We have been asked to keep him pretty much confined for the next couple of weeks, as the paw’s still a bit vulnerable, and the more rest he gets over the next few days, the less likely he is to have an accident that might snap the bone again, so he’s not quite out of the woods. But he seemed to dislike the bandage-and-cone far more than he dislikes being up in the attic, and he shouldn’t have to go to the vet again, so I’m quite pleased, and I think he is too.

Pictures to follow, on Thursday, as usual.

UDPATE [2pm]: Here’s a picture, with the relevant paw in the foreground: when the bandage came off, the leg was pretty scraggy after being in a bandage for three-and-a-half weeks, but half an hour of determined kitten-washing has made an enormous difference:

Normal service to resume.