Thursday, June 14, 2012

Egypt counts mistakes




From The New York Times
June 14, 2012

Revolt Leaders Cite Failure to Uproot Old Order in EgyptBy DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — They toppled a pharaoh, but now the small circle of liberals, leftists and Islamists who orchestrated Egypt’s revolution say they realize they failed to uproot the networks of power that Hosni Mubarak nurtured for nearly three decades. 


They were naïve, they say, strung along by the generals who seized power in their name.



“The system was like a machine with a plastic cover, and what we did was knock off the cover,” said Islam Lotfy, back then a rising star in the Muslim Brotherhood who had predicted that if they ousted the head of state its body would fall. The roots of the ruling elite were “much deeper and darker” than they initially understood, he said.



Even before Egypt’s highest court dissolved Parliament on Thursday, and its military rulers reimposed martial law, the once close-knit team of young professionals who guided last year’s uprising had been pushed to the sidelines of a presidential runoff between two conservatives: Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, and Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that was Mr. Mubarak’s main opposition.



Some said they had become too taken with their own fame, distracted by the news media’s attention, and willing to defer to their elders in the Mubarak-era political opposition. They failed to build a movement that could stand against either the Muslim Brotherhood or the old elite.



“We are the spark that ignites the world; we know how to inflame things,” said Ahmed Maher, 31, a leader of the April 6 Youth Movement and one of the early organizers. “But when we have a strong entity that can stand on its own feet — when we can form a government tomorrow — then we become an alternative.” He said his group was embarking on a five-year plan to start building such a movement.



Some said they almost welcomed the rise of Mr. Mubarak’s former protégé, Mr. Shafik, because his return could help them rally the public once again.



“When you think about it, the revolutionaries were never in power, so what kind of revolution is it?” said Sally Moore, an Irish Egyptian leftist who was at the forefront of a movement to boycott the elections.



Many of the young leaders say that in those early days they were too afraid of appearing to grab power for themselves. Some say they were just intoxicated by their victory over Mr. Mubarak. “You could say we just wanted to be happy,” said Asmaa Mahfouz, another early organizer.



Activists like her became celebrities overnight, she said, and some wrongly believed that appearing on television would spread their ideas and mobilize the public. “We didn’t understand that the media isn’t an alternative to the streets.”



All now say they were successfully manipulated by the military leaders.



“We were duped,” Mr. Maher of April 6 recalled. “We met with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces on Feb. 14, and they were very cute. They smiled and promised us many things and said, ‘You are our children; you did what we wanted to do for many years!’ ” Then they offered the same smiles and vague promises the next week, he said, and the next month after that.



Others fault the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old Islamist group, Egypt’s best-organized political force. Before Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, the Brotherhood lent its full support to a united front pushing for the presidential candidacy of the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, an inspiration and mentor to the young organizers. During the revolt in Tahrir Square, the Brotherhood became a pillar of the protests, its leaders taking their cue from the youth.



But since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, Brotherhood leaders have shown little interest in listening to the younger leaders or consulting with Mr. ElBaradei. Instead, the Brotherhood almost immediately began preparing for elections. With the generals, it backed a referendum scheduling parliamentary elections before the drafting of a new constitution.



“They betrayed us at the first corner and continue to betray us,” Ms. Moore said. The resulting timetable killed any hope of unity against the military among those mobilized by the revolt.



“Even though not many of the revolutionary movements got into the Parliament, they were still affected by the polarization,” Mr. Maher said. “They were accusing each other of treason, even among the youth groups.”



Mr. Lotfy, the Brotherhood’s former rising star, was expelled from the group and founded a political party, the Egyptian Current. It allied with the presidential campaign of the dissident Brotherhood leader Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, trying to combine an Islamist background with liberal positions on individual rights and social justice.



Mr. Lotfy called their centrist project the best hope to defuse the polarization between Islamists and secularists, but most of the liberals or leftists he worked so closely with at the start shunned their efforts because of their Islamist roots. He said he could no longer speak with Ms. Moore, a Coptic Christian who publicly defended the Brotherhood during the initial uprising, “because of the difference in backgrounds.”



“Egyptian liberals are not real liberals,” he said, accusing many former allies of “Islamophobia.”



Others in their circle say they still talk occasionally but cannot agree. Mr. Lotfy and Mr. Aboul Fotouh “still come from the Brotherhood world,” said Shady el-Ghazali Harb, a liberal who voted for a Nasserite socialist in the first round of the presidential race, to avoid either an Islamist or Mr. Shafik. “We cannot have our choice between true Islamists and not-true Islamists,” Mr. Ghazali Harb said.



He then joined Ms. Moore in pushing to boycott the election that is now in doubt altogether, hoping the effort would give rise to a broader movement in opposition to the Brotherhood and the old military-business elite.



“You don’t find a lot of people around us now,” Ms. Moore said. “And we are fighting on two fronts, which makes it difficult.”



Mr. Ghazali Harb said he and the others had fallen out of touch with perhaps their group’s most prominent member, Ziad el-Elaimy, who was elected to Parliament. Mr. Elaimy has receded from public view since he was censured by parliamentary leaders a few weeks ago for comparing Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the governing military council’s leader, to a donkey. Mr. Elaimy did not respond to requests for an interview.



“He disappears a little bit,” Mr. Ghazali Harb said, suggesting that perhaps Mr. Elaimy considered his seat in Parliament to be enough for now.



Many young activists who helped start the revolt are returning to Mr. ElBaradei. After he quit the presidential race, saying it was doomed under military rule, he is trying to organize a political movement for liberals opposed to Islamists and military-backed authoritarianism.



Mr. Lotfy, Mr. Maher and Ms. Moore, however, are each going separate ways. Whoever wins the presidency, all vow to keep fighting. “If it is Morsi, I will be in the opposition,” Mr. Lotfy said. “If it is Shafik, asylum.”









Thursday, February 23, 2012

Kashmir: The lynchpin of the Afghanistan problem

by on February 23rd, 2012

A few years ago, while still in college, I attended a talk by Robert Fisk, the Middle East Bureau Chief for The Independent in UK.
He was in his usual Fisk-ian form. Lambasting western journalists for their false equivalencies, he spoke passionately about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, recalled the atrocities committed in Iraq that he had had seen personally and basically painted a dismal picture for the future of the Middle East — one of eternal war and endless suffering.
Later on, I was lucky enough to get a few minutes with him alone, at which point I told him I was from Pakistan. He sighed as if a great burden had just descended down on him and gave me a knowing half-smile. I asked him about Afghanistan.
“We don’t read our history books.” he said. “The battles in Afghanistan, the war in Afghanistan, is not about about Afghanistan — it’s about Kashmir. Many of the Taliban come from Kashmir, and the Pakistan military and the ISI have boosted their support for the Taliban because they believe the Indians are backing [Hamid] Karzai. By allowing India to control to fate of Kashmir, we have not only helped Pakistan to disintegrate, but ensured that Pakistani forces will help the Taliban, and the war will continue in Afghanistan.”
Fisk isn’t the only one to have voiced these sentiments. In an interview on National Public Radio in Washington DC, Admiral Mullen in 2011 said concerning Afghanistan, “I think unlocking Kashmir, which is a very difficult issue on the Pak-Indian border, is one that opens it all up.”
Kashmir is the reason Pakistan started utilising militant groups as not only proxies, but more specifically as “weapons” against India, in what is commonly known in security circles as Pakistan’s “Bleed India” campaign.
The use of militant groups as proxies has gone ignored by the US despite constant attacks against India. During his tenure, Mullen tried to seek the necessary civilian solutions between the three nation states as the key to solving this problem for all countries, but the efforts were perfunctory at best.
“Engagements with the civilian leaders, engagements with the economic leaders, engagements in the region, I believe we have to continue to try to, all of us, figure out a way to work that as well,” Mullen observed.
The folly in this whole plan to this point, it is said, remains with India, whose constant refusal of outside intervention or mediation and framing the problem as an “internal issue.” The general consensus among many people is that the Indians need to come to the realisation at some point that they must finally show some flexibility in the Kashmir issue.
But that’s only half of the story. For nearly a decade, the US has done little in terms of concrete efforts to improve relations between India and Pakistan. And because of this the ISI still allows Afghan and Central Asian terrorist groups to operate from Pakistani soil and refuses to clamp down on the anti-Indian terrorist groups operating from the Punjab province, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which launched the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
US negligence of the realities of the region has allowed foreign militants to radicalise Pakistani Pashtun tribes. Yet Pakistani strategists still think they can crush the homegrown militants while maintaining the Afghan Taliban as a proxy force for a final settlement in Afghanistan.
But while America’s mistakes are many and mendacious, its biggest mistake is its failure to recognise — or its ignorance of — Pakistan’s masochistic obsession with India. It’s been a known fact for decades that Pakistan’s army has historically been consumed with Indian expansion in the region, and has taken the billions in aid from the US to channel into weapons system for the next confrontation with India at great domestic costs. General Ashfaq Kayani has readily admitted to his philosophy on security to be “India-centric.”
While all that may be true, Fisk said, it isn’t really about Indian inflexibility or Pakistani intransigence in supporting militants. In the end, he said, it’s about justice and injustice.
“American authorities need to engage with Pakistan on the issue of Kashmir, and play the even handed role, which they are not playing in Kashmir any more than they are playing in the Palestinian and Israeli conflict,” he said. “And the reason [US and Britain] let the injustices continue is simply because India is the largest burgeoning economy in that area. America and Britain see India as the main buffer state against China and therefore we will support what India wants in Kashmir — not what the people of Kashmir want, but what India wants.”
US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta who has been highly critical of Pakistan’s links with the Haqqani Network, has also recognised the Kashmir-Afghanistan linkage. During a Q&A in Washington last year, he admitted that Afghanistan, Pakistan and India are “all part of a very vital area, a very vital region and that an awful lot of history created incredible complexities and difficulties” for US efforts to bring India, Pakistan and Afghanistan together.
Panetta went on to say that, “we [US] have urged them [Pakistan] to work with India to try to resolve the issues along the border area, because ultimately, until that is done, we are going to continue to have a great deal of instability.”
The remark is a telling representation of the hands-off attitude the US has when it comes to Kashmir.
Before he was elected, Barack Obama suggested he would try to resolve the India-Pakistan rivalry, and the Kashmir dispute that fuels it. But of course, the chasm between campaign Obama and President Obama is where his presidency has lost the credibility he had garnered both in terms of domestic and foreign policy.
While the United States has remained silent on Kashmir, a new Indo-Pak rivalry has erupted over the battle for influence in a post-US-withdrawal world, manifested in terrorist attacks on Indian diplomats and road workers in Afghanistan and, Pakistan claims, Indian-sponsored unrest in Balochistan.
The dichotomy of US policy in the region is that in its attempt to be farsighted in its geopolitical chess game with Russia and China, it has rendered its short term policies to be myopic to the point of foolishness.
This, as Fisk said, “is the equation that turns sand into blood.”

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?
by January 30, 2012 (The New Yorker)
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

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The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

The first Sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change

guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012 22.55 GMT
We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.
The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution
by Faramerz Dabhoiwala

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Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.
When I stumbled on the subject, more than a decade ago, I could not believe that such a huge transformation had not been properly understood. But the more I pursued it, the more amazing material I uncovered: the first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced – the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, otherwise unnoticed by history, whose trials and punishments for illicit sex are preserved in unpublished judicial records. Most startling of all were my discoveries of private writings, such as the diary of the randy Dutch embassy clerk Lodewijk van der Saan, posted to London in the 1690s; the emotional letters sent to newspapers by countless hopeful and disappointed lovers; and the piles of manuscripts about sexual freedom composed by the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham but left unpublished, to this day, by his literary executors. Once noticed, the effects of this revolution in attitudes and behaviour can be seen everywhere when looking at the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It was one of the key shifts from the pre-modern to the modern world.

Since the dawn of history, every civilisation had punished sexual immorality. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church's view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray. By the later middle ages, it was common in places such as London, Bristol and Gloucester for convicted prostitutes, bawds, fornicators and adulterers to be subjected to elaborate ritual punishments: to have their hair shaved off or to be dressed in especially degrading outfits, severely whipped, displayed in a pillory or public cage, paraded around for public humiliation and expelled for ever from the community.
The reformation brought a further hardening of attitudes. The most fervent Protestants campaigned vigorously to reinstate the biblical death penalty for adultery and other sexual crimes. Wherever Puritan fundamentalists gained power, they pursued this goal – in Geneva and Bohemia, in Scotland, in the colonies of New England and in England itself. After the Puritans had led the parliamentary side to victory in the English civil war, executed the King and abolished the monarchy, they passed the Adultery Act of 1650. Henceforth, adulterers and incorrigible fornicators and brothel-keepers were simply to be executed, as sodomites and bigamists already were.
Of course, sexual discipline was never perfect. Men and women constantly gave way to temptation – and then had to be flogged, imprisoned, fined and shamed to reform them. Many others, especially the wealthy and powerful, escaped punishment. As was the case with other crimes, the full rigour of the law was never uniformly or consistently applied. All the same, sexual discipline was a central facet of pre-modern western society, and its unceasing promotion had a profound effect on ordinary men and women. Most people internalised its principles deeply and participated in the disciplining of others. There was no coherent philosophy of sexual liberty, no way of conceiving of a society without moral policing. It seemed obvious that illicit sex had to be combated because it angered God, prevented salvation, damaged personal relations and undermined social order. Sex was emphatically not a private affair.
So pervasive was this ideology that even those who paid with their lives for defying it could not escape its hold over their minds and actions. When the Massachusetts settler James Britton fell ill in the winter of 1644, he became gripped by a "fearful horror of conscience" that this was God's punishment on him for his past sins. So he publicly confessed that once, after a night of heavy drinking, he had tried (but failed) to have sex with a young bride, Mary Latham. Though she now lived far away, in Plymouth colony, the magistrates there were alerted. She was found, arrested and brought back, across the icy landscape, to stand trial in Boston. When, despite her denial that they had actually had sex, she was convicted of adultery, she broke down, confessed it was true, "proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin … and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice". On 21 March, a fortnight after her sentence, she was taken to the public scaffold. Britton was executed alongside her; he, too, "died very penitently". In the shadow of the gallows, Latham addressed the assembled crowds, exhorting other young women to be warned by her example, and again proclaiming her abhorrence and penitence for her terrible crime against God and society. Then she was hanged. She was 18 years old.

That is the world we have left behind. Over the following century and a half it was transformed by a great revolution that laid the ground for the sexual culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of our own day.
The most obvious change was a surge in pre- and extramarital sex. We can measure this, crudely but unmistakably, in the numbers of children conceived out of wedlock. During the 17th century this figure had been extremely low: in 1650 only about 1% of all births in England were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant, and about a quarter of all first-born children were illegitimate. It was to be a permanent change in behaviour.
Just as striking was the collapse of public punishment, which made this new sexual freedom possible. By 1800, most forms of consensual sex between men and women had come to be treated as private, beyond the reach of the law. This extraordinary reversal of centuries of severity was partly the result of increasing social pressures. The traditional methods of moral policing had evolved in small, slow, rural communities in which conformity was easy to enforce. Things were different in towns, especially in London. At the end of the middle ages only about 40,000 people lived there, but by 1660 there were already 400,000; by 1800 there would be more than a million, and by 1850 most of the British population lived in towns. This extraordinary explosion created new kinds of social pressures and new ways of living, and placed the conventional machinery of sexual discipline under growing strain.
Urban living provided many more opportunities for sexual adventure. It also gave rise to new, professional systems of policing, which prioritised public order. Crime became distinguished from sin. And the fast circulation of news and ideas created a different, freer and more pluralist intellectual environment.
This was crucial to the development of the ideal of sexual freedom. By the later 18th century, for the first time, many serious observers had come to take it for granted that sex was a private matter, that men and women should be free to indulge in it irrespective of marriage, and that sexual pleasure should be celebrated as one of the purposes of life. As well as reinterpreting the Bible, they found support in new ideas about the importance of personal conscience and in the laws of nature, which were regarded as more clearly indicative of God's will than the inherited dogma of the church and the text of the scriptures. In his 1730 work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, the Oxford don Matthew Tindal ridiculed traditional sexual norms as priestly inventions, no more appropriate to a modern state than the biblical prohibitions against drinking blood or lending money: "Enjoying a woman, or lusting after her, can't be said, without considering the circumstances, to be either good or evil. That warm desire, which is implanted in human nature, can't be criminal, when perused after such a manner as tends most to promote the happiness of the parties, and to propagate and preserve the species."
In a similar vein, the Rev Robert Wallace, one of the leaders of the Church of Scotland in the mid-18th century, wrote a treatise seriously commending "a much more free commerce of the sexes". By that he meant complete liberty for people to cohabit successively with as many partners as they liked – "A woman's being enjoyed by a dozen … can never render her less fit or agreeable to a 13th". As John Wilkes's 1754 Essay on Woman put it: "Life can little more supply / Than just a few good Fucks, and then we die."

It's no accident that all these early celebrations of the new sexual world were voiced by white, upper-class men. In practice, sexual liberty was limited in important ways. The bastardy laws continued to apply to the labouring classes: their morals remained a public matter. The new permissiveness towards "natural" freedoms also led to a sharper definition and abhorrence of supposedly "unnatural" behaviour. Homosexual acts in particular came to be persecuted with increasing violence: throughout the 18th century there were regular executions for sodomy. Even after 1830, when hanging for the offence was ended, thousands of men were publicly humiliated in the pillory, or sentenced to jail, for their unnatural perversions – Oscar Wilde's imprisonment with hard labour for two years in 1895 is only the best-known example.
Yet the general advance of sexual freedom and the expansion of urban life also fostered the development of an increasingly assertive homosexual sub-culture. Some of the most remarkable utterances of the 18th century were the first principled defences of same-sex behaviour as natural, universal and harmless. One night in 1726, William Brown, a married man, was arrested at a notorious pick-up spot with another man's hand in his breeches. When surrounded by hostile watchmen and challenged as to "why he took such indecent liberties … he was not ashamed to answer, 'I did it because I thought I knew him, and I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body'". That sodomy had been accepted by all the greatest civilisations of the world was one of the themes of the young clergyman Thomas Cannon's Ancient and Modern Pederasty (1749). "Every dabbler knows by his classics," he pointed out, "that boy-love ever was the top refinement of most enlightened ages." Arguments of the same kind were developed systematically by the Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister (1791-1840), who set down in her diaries the first full justification of lesbian love in English, and by Bentham, the most influential reformer of the age, who defended the rights of homosexuals in countless private discussions and over many hundreds of pages of notes and treatises.
Attitudes towards women's sexuality underwent similarly dramatic shifts. The idea that sexual freedom was as natural and desirable for women as for men was born in the 18th century. By the early 19th century, many feminists, socialists and other progressive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic decried marriage and advocated free love as a means to the emancipation of women and the creation of a more just society. Among those who held such views were Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Robert Owen and many Owenites, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the long term, this egalitarian way of thinking was to provide the intellectual foundation for women's sexual liberation more generally.
Yet more immediately the rise of sexual freedom had a much more ambiguous legacy. Women who were rich or powerful enough to escape social ostracism could take advantage of it: many female aristocrats had notoriously open marriages. But on the whole female lust now came to be ever more strongly stigmatised as "unnatural", for it threatened the basic principle that (as one of William III's bishops had put it) "Men have a property in their wives and daughters" and therefore owned their bodies too. Thus, at the same time as it was increasingly argued that sexual liberty was natural for men, renewed stress was placed, often in the same breath, on the necessity of chastity in respectable women.
The effects of this sharpened double standard can be seen everywhere in 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century culture. James Boswell's diary records the tragic story of Jean, the brilliant only daughter of Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the early 1760s, when she was only 16 or 17 and already married, she embarked on a passionate affair with Boswell, arguing to him that they were doing nothing wrong:
"She was a subtle philosopher. She said, 'I love my husband as a husband, and you as a lover, each in his own sphere. I perform for him all the duties of a good wife. With you, I give myself up to delicious pleasures. We keep our secret. Nature has so made me that I shall never bear children. No one suffers because of our loves. My conscience does not reproach me, and I am sure that God cannot be offended by them.'"
A decade later, when her husband divorced her over another affair, she declared "that she hoped that God Almighty would not punish her for the only crime she could charge herself with, which was the gratification of those passions which he himself had implanted in her nature." But her father, the scholar and moral authority, took the conventional view that adultery in a man "may happen occasionally, with little or no alienation of affection", but in a woman was unpardonable. After his daughter's divorce, he and Lady Kames exiled her to France and never saw her again.

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.
A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust. This was an unprecedented development. In all earlier times, women's direct intervention in public discussion had been very limited. Men monopolised every medium in which male and female qualities were prescribed and reinforced – fiction, drama, poetry, sermons, journalism and so on. But from the later 17th century onwards, women emerged for the first time as a permanent part of the world of letters. As playwrights, poets, novelists and philosophers, women influenced male authors, looked to one another, and addressed themselves directly to the public. And in much female writing about sexual relations, the bottom line was, as the teenage poet Sarah Fyge explained in 1686, that men were always trying "to make a prey" of chaste women. Male bluster about female lust was but to make women "the scapegoat" – it was men who constantly pressured and ensnared women, who were insatiable in their thirst for new conquests, and shameless in their commission. As the feminist Mary Astell put it bitterly in 1700, "'Tis no great matter to them if women, who were born to be their slaves, be now and then ruined for their entertainment". No woman could ever "be too much upon her guard".
None of these ideas was entirely new, but it was only from around 1700 that they came to be put forward publicly, in a way that discernibly changed the culture of the age. Especially influential in the long term was the role of women in creating the new genre of the novel, which by the middle of the 18th century had become the most influential fictional form and become a central conduit of moral and social education. Samuel Johnson noted in 1750 that women's breaking of the male monopoly on writing, and their "stronger arguments", had overturned the ancient masculine falsehood that women were the more fickle and lecherous sex.
All this explains why the first major novelists of the English language were so obsessed with seduction. Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison were the most sensationally popular and influential pieces of fiction of the 18th century, was a classic instance of the growing power of female viewpoints. For all its originality, the general approach and subject matter of his fiction owes an obvious debt to the stream of earlier novels about heroines courted, seduced, raped and oppressed, which had flowed from the pens of pioneering female writers such as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood and Elizabeth Rowe. A wide circle of women acquaintances, readers and correspondents helped him; in turn, his work presented eyewitness perspectives of respectable women under threat from rapacious superior men. Right through the 19th century, it is hard to think of many serious novelists who did not pursue the seduction narrative.

Equally important to modern ways of thinking was the increasing sexualisation of race and class. The presumption that lower-class and non-white women were less sexually restrained became a matter of both investigation and titillation. As sexual norms were increasingly held to vary according to race, class and sex, so the transgression of such boundaries (in reality and in fantasy) became ever more erotically charged. This was the origin of the great British obsession with sex and class, which equally affected homosexual passion. "We don't like people like ourselves," explains a middle-class character in one 1950s novel about gay lust. "We don't want anybody who shares our standards. In fact, we want the very opposite. We want the primitive, the uneducated, the tough." Even some of the most basic features of our sexual desire are therefore not natural and unchanging, but historically created. What we think of as "natural" in men and women, where the boundaries lie between the normal and the deviant, how we feel about the pursuit of pleasure and the transgression of sexual norms – all these are matters on which our current attitudes are fundamentally different from those that have prevailed for most of western history.
The new fascination with class and licentiousness helped to transform attitudes towards prostitution. The conventional view had been that prostitutes were the worst reprobates of all, deserving of the harshest punishments. But from the middle of the 18th century this perspective was matched, and often overshadowed, by the presumption that prostitutes themselves were ultimately the innocent victims of male lust and social deprivation. Vast efforts were poured into the foundation of asylums, workhouses and other charities for fallen women and girls at risk of seduction. Many contemporaries saw obvious parallels between black and white slavery. "What are the sorrows of the enslaved negro from which the outcast prostitute of London is exempted?" asked one late-Georgian activist. "A seducer or ravisher has torn them both, for ever, from the abodes of their youth … Is the bosom of the unhappy girl less tender than that of the swarthy savage?"
The rescue of fallen women, and the abolition of "white slavery", consequently became a craze to which some of the most prominent figures in public life devoted great energy. At the height of his fame, Charles Dickens threw himself into the foundation of a refuge for penitents, with the financial backing of the millionairess Angela Burdett-Coutts. His fellow novelist George Gissing tried (and failed) to redeem a young prostitute by marrying her himself. William Gladstone called the issue "the chief burden of my soul", and for decades, even while prime minister, roamed the streets at night attempting to save prostitutes.

The final notable feature of the first sexual revolution was the birth of a new kind of media culture, in which private affairs and personal opinions were given unprecedented publicity. The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity. The sayings and doings of famous courtesans now came to be routinely analysed in print, and their portraits were endlessly painted, engraved and caricatured. Many of them skilfully promoted themselves, keeping their names and faces in the public eye by publishing memoirs and publicising their image. By the middle of the 18th century, a visitor to any of London's print shops could have bought dozens of different portraits, in all shapes and sizes, of Kitty Fisher, Fanny Murray, Nancy Dawson and every other well-known lady of pleasure. Cheapest of all were tiny prints made to fit inside a gentleman's watch case or snuff-box, the mass-produced equivalent of portrait miniatures. For threepence, or sixpence "neatly coloured", a man could carry his favourite harlot around with him in perfect privacy, gazing upon her whenever he felt like it. The foundations of today's celebrity sex scandals were laid a long time ago.

The ultimate legacy of the first sexual revolution has been far from straightforward. In place of a relatively coherent, authoritative worldview that had endured for centuries, it left a much greater confusion of moral perspectives, with irresolvable tensions between them. That has been part of our modern condition ever since. What's more, as the history of the past few decades shows, its consequences are still unfolding, in different ways across different western societies. It is equally clear that the 18th century marked the point at which the sexual culture of the west as a whole moved on to a new trajectory.
In many parts of the world, by contrast, sexual ideals and practices reminiscent of pre-modern Europe continue to be upheld. Men and (especially) women remain at risk of public prosecution for having sex outside marriage. Often, the word of God is supposed to justify this. The Ayatollah Khomeini affirmed in 1979 that the execution of prostitutes, adulterers and homosexuals was as justified in a moral society as the amputation of gangrenous flesh. In some countries, imprisonment, flogging and execution by hanging, or even by stoning, continues to be imposed on men and women convicted of extramarital or homosexual relations. Even more widespread and deep-rooted is the extra-legal persecution of men and women for such matters. These are the same practices that sustained western culture for most of its history. They rest on very similar foundations – the theocratic authority of holy texts and holy men, intolerance of religious and social pluralism, fear of sexual freedom, and the belief that men alone should govern. How they help to maintain patriarchal social order is obvious; so too is their cost to human happiness. How durable they will prove to be remains to be seen.
(Extracted from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, to be published by Allen Lane on 2 February at GBP 25.00)

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Just 121m net users in India !

3 January 2012
It is estimated that as many as 121m people in India use the internet - while that's a big number it's still a relatively small proportion of the country's 1.2bn population.
The numbers using the web are predicting to rise at a fast pace in the year ahead.
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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

A Tale of Kashmir, War and The Elements of Business

A Tale of Kashmir, War and The Elements of Business

Riyaz Masroor

To a whistle-stop reader, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator may appear a great throwback to The Five Find-Outers and Dog. There is passing mention of The Famous Five (that is the most popular of children’s writer Enid Blyton’s mystery series) when the nameless protagonist is reminded of his friend Ashfaq’s wish to see all the five buddies cross over to Pakistan. Hold the novel up close and the work looks lot more than the kid-stuff, as few of Kashmir’s big writers tend to view it; it appears a great beginning of Kashmir’s English fiction writing.

Mirza has doubtless indulged in extravagance of emotion, which many would find little upsetting, but this indulgence, it seems, helps the author to doubly emphasize the climax, which is the most powerful refutation of state-backed violence and state-backed counter violence: May your bones rest in peace, after they are licked dry by rabid, man-eating wolves.

For its bold indictment of ‘war’ in Kashmir, extremely graphic portrayal of tragedies, inestimable depth and a dash of literary innovation, the novel would sit comfortably amidst Earnest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and more closely with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas. Mirza’s novel, first by any Kashmiri Muslim, seems a resounding invite that Kashmiris return to all the post-war English classics.

Captain Kadian carries a noticeable resemblance with Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, who is a brute ivory trader on a colonial mission in the interiors of Africa. Pairing literary texts in a review is not possible but an example seems befitting. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, hears of the colonist’s brutal ways from a Russian admirer: ‘There was nothing on earth to prevent Mr. Kurtz killing whom he jolly well pleased.’ See how Captain Kadian echoes Kurtz when he reprimands his Collaborator over the latter’s lurking guilt for wanton killings. ‘Forget it man, this is war, and these are elements of the business here.’ (Page 278).

This ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’ and the colossal losses accrued thereof are the main staple of Mirza’s storyline, much like fine threads that are entwined in an intricately woven Kashmiri carpet. The ‘grandest bed’ adored with a Kashmiri chain-stitch piece in Captain Kadian’s apartment is the subtle representation of these losses. One is reminded of Mr. Kurtz’s chamber where the glittering mats, woven by natives, decorate walls and windows.

These losses become even more manifest in the remark of Farooq’s father – his younger son crosses over to Pakistan and the elder one is brutally beheaded by army and the head flung into his compound – speaks to a village quorum.  ‘I had two sons, two…one ate the other, you say hai, hai…!’ (pp 199) This heart-aching statement seems to couch an unsettling question: Does revolution really eat its own children?

Set in a far-off LoC village, the novel has cast much-awaited spotlight on the life on border. Many in the world still assume LoC as a mere line on the map with no life, only skirmishes. The Collaborator tells us what life means when it is trapped in a 740 Kilometer long and 34 Kilometer wide Line of Control, where scores of villages exist, some of them divided between India and Pakistan, most of them weighed down by the ‘curfew within a curfew’. And, what it means when army is deployed to ‘cleanse this place of anti-f****** national elements’. This is valley strewn with skeletons, the Valley of death, defenselessly residing on the frills of Koh-e-Gam, the mountain of grief; or, Conrad’s Grove of Death. This, in the words of The Collaborator is a ‘no-man’s land – what happens here is off the record, means nothing to anyone.’ The Collaborator, it seems, is an attempt to unveil this invisible, off-the-record Kashmir; ‘truth stripped of its cloak of time’.

This moving story also provides greater insights into the aftermaths of an armed movement and the near-colonial response it evokes from its adversary. It depicts the desolation of a beautiful land after it gets virtually de-populated in the name of brining peace or liberation. Over a light talk between Captain Kadian and his boss ‘Mehrotra Sir’, The Collaborator’s muted response bemoans this tragic aspect: Things have improved, f****** sir. People have left. People are killed. No people, no trouble, isn’t it? A professional colonist, as was Conrad’s character Marlow, considers populated areas as ‘blank spaces’ – people don’t matter, spaces do. Blank spaces…

Through The Collaborator’s love-hate emotions for Pakistan, armed resistance and militant groups, one gets a faint sense of why the narrator is nameless. Now there is thrill being part of the movement, now the zeal begins to wear off; now he draws a distinction between ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ militants, now he is told ‘they are all the same’; now he wants to kill his tormentor , now he  learns Kadian is just a ‘blow’ of a ‘sister-f****** giant with countless limbs’.

The novel at times seems a shrill elegy punctuated with this bare sense of dilemma.  For instance, The Collaborator tells us, ‘Pakistan, that goddamn country a few kilometers across the border which is never at rest and will never let anyone else rest.’ But soon the indignation gives way to lurking prevarication, ‘I hate it when KD starts abusing Kashmir, Kashmiris or Pakistan…it’s difficult to maintain straight face when he does that.’ 

The protagonist’s flip-flopish attitude seems reflective of the constant ambivalence of Muslim Kashmiris regarding a host of issues. Are we Pakistanis? If not, why this repression by Indian forces? Besides, there are host of Should-Wes and Shouldn’t-Wes hemmed nicely between the lines. Every Kashmiri would find himself in front of a mirror or a ‘thought-sensor’ while reading these lines: Why can’t they have another war instead … a proper war …why can’t they just have proper go and finish this damned unfinished business once and for all…come, come my Pakistani brothers, come inside, come right inside and then stay, don’t you dare leave this time, stay and let me sleep.

The author seems in full control of the plot and the characters through all the chapters. While highlighting abject poverty of Khadim Hussain (the recluse recruiter for militancy who starts with his son) the author introduces a charming Sopore boy Rouf Qadri, who despite prosperous upbringing, is sucked into militancy following arson and massacre by troops.

That Hussain and Ashfaq and Muhammad and Gul would often bunk those post-prayer meetings in the newly built mosque is a nuanced projection of Kashmir’s traditional aversion to radicalism; the novel shows absence of this even among communities that live along LoC, closer to Pakistan.

 The whole point author seems to hammer is this: Pakistan, in her fatalist eagerness to ‘bleed India through Kashmir’ might have entailed a bonfire of people alaaw but the youth’s will to die owes itself to something else. Sadly, India through her ornamental peace missions has always failed, or wanted to fail, to kill this will to die in Kashmir even as this was easier than it would be in Palestine or elsewhere. Mirza has subtly reinforced this thought by pointing out the classic Bollywood numbers especially the ‘sultan of music’ Muhammad Rafi being the common favorite of both people as well as army.

Cover to cover, the novel gives out a long litany of losses and in the midst of every expression conveys, very forcefully, the dilemma of war-trapped people and their constant disdain for the ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’. The horrid hold this war has had on the collective consciousness of Kashmir is masterfully portrayed in the sequence where Firdous Ali’s little son starts marking his sister’s throat soon after Farooq’s beheading, leaving the girl in a fit of depression. Like that ill-fated child people in Kashmir have long been living on ‘Doctor Bijli’s Calmpose pills’, which only prepare them for tragedy, tragedy, and tides of more tragedy.

The chapter dealing with the foreign militants and their wrongdoings is enough to provoke introspection among espousers of the “cause” on both sides of the LoC. But the author has steered clear of the internecine battles among Kashmiri groups and their impact on youth psyche even as the novel is set in 1993, the peak of fratricide in Kashmir.

Matching the much admired style of Hemingway and Conrad, the author has employed multiple symbols to communicate the layered messages and his artful rebuttal of violence and counter violence. Death, blood, lacerated bodies and weapons are some important symbols besides water, fire, cold and sun. ‘Wind, wind and more wind’… ‘Cold air hung like a curse’… Cloud-bothered sun’…‘The sky had turned flaming red Qayamatuk Rang’ etc. A dagger-in-chest effect of grief, and what it means when bullet-ridden bodies crowd out flowers, is created when Khadim Hussain’s dead body is described as ‘red body’. 

Whatever the scales to adjudge a pure literary work, The Collaborator appears a standard war novel much like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind that recounts the American civil war or Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s – the only difference being those were written when the war was over, The Collaborator came up while the ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’ are going on.

 

(riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)