5:33pm
Christopher Hitchens, an admirer of Benny Morris, is still mulling over the deeply pessimistic op-ed that the revisionist historian published during the holidays:
To read Benny Morris is to be quite able—and quite free—to doubt that there should ever have been an Israeli state to begin with. But to see Hamas at work is to resolve that whatever replaces or follows Zionism, it must not be the wasteland of Islamic theocracy.
And an impassioned post from
South Jerusalem's Haim Watzman:
I would really like to punch Ismail Hanieh, the Hamas prime minister of the Gaza Strip, in the face. I would derive great pleasure from seeing every Hamas facility in Gaza reduced to rubble and every fanatical Islamic Jew-hater there blown to smithereens... I’ve done my time in the IDF and have a son in an elite unit. With my encouragement, my
...
Continue reading...
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5:21pm
Israeli troops on duty in Gaza. Photo: Matan Hakimi/Israeli Defence Force via Getty Images.
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1:11pm
Well, that was a strange experience. Part One of Steven Soderbergh's beautifully shot film about Che Guevara is painfully slow at times: after a while I almost felt I was trudging across the Sierra Maestra at the tail-end of a column of rebels. Jumping back and forth between the final years of Batista and a 1964 visit to Manhattan, the movie seems intent on rendering every last detail of Guevara's career, yet ends up telling us very little. Even Fidel Castro seems a cipher. So, in the end, I settled for admiring the editing, the acting, the locations - everything, in fact, but the film itself. I'll still go to see Part Two, partly because there's always the chance it will turn out to be an improvement, partly because it's rare to see a mainstream film turn its back on Hollywood conventions. But I won't build my hopes up. Continue reading...
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1:05pm
I had more luck with the opening instalment of "Playing Castro's Tune", Stephen Evans's sprightly and even-handed Radio 4 documentary about the history of the island's music and the intersection of politics and art. The first episode is still online - just.
Oh, and there's a useful review, by the FT's Latin American editor, of a new study of the twin leaders of the revolution:
I would...have preferred a more sceptical assessment of these two larger than life, driven personalities. Mythmaking, I fear, fosters the misapprehension, from which Latin America has long suffered, of the strong man, the caudillo, as a saviour. The idea that a Castro, a Chávez, or a Perón can alone resolve the complex problems of a modern society in the absence of a stable institutional framework, is an illusion.
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10:07am
And it's not just the effect of the recession, apparently. The Wall Street Journal discovers that American public opinion has shifted too:
For the first time in the 45 years since the creation of the New Hampshire state lottery kicked off a new era of gambling acceptability in this country, there is formidable resistance to the industry's future growth.
It seems all that optimistic talk about casinos regenerating neighbourhoods hasn't matched the reality:
In locale after locale, citizens are realizing that they were snookered by politicians' promises that casinos would provide a problem-free explosion in jobs and income from tourism...The reality is that gambling is a net economic and social minus...
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