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Every dry morning in the summer of 2003, I used to walk, on the way to work, from the gravel path to the gravel path over the grass in a straight line. "Lines of desire" I thought. Then I thought The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman. Finally I thought The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and reached the office. I never read the book by Iris (Teekesselchen) Murdoch; I started cycling to work. It's been raining ever since.

I'd completely forgotten about this until just now on the radio the announcer translated the title of a piece by Biber (Teekesselchen) as "Sacred and Profane Fiddle Noise".

posted at: 13:33 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Nobel-prize-winning Bulgarian chemist Elias Canetti, and not only he, has suggested that Kafka's writing draws on his failed romantic relationship with a woman. For all the time he was Home Secretary, it never occurred to me that David Blunkett's bold experiments with the Kafkaesque might have had a similar psychological motivation. What about the asymmetric rules on extradition to the United States on suspicion of terrrr?

posted at: 20:16 | path: /OE | permanent link to this entry

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I always understood the title of Novalis's essay Die Christenheit oder Europa to mean Christendom, that is to say/alias/also known as, Europe, but seeing the title translated as Christianity or Europe, it sounds as if you can't have both.

Finnish distinguishes three words for "or", eli, vai and tai. Eli is, I think, the one Novalis is looking for.

posted at: 23:04 | path: /D/blue_flower | permanent link to this entry

Some last thoughts. The Federal Republic's banning of Nazi regalia wasn't the only anti-fascist measure taken after the Second World War. It's not as if the occupying powers brought back the Weimar constitution of 1918, after all. The Basic Law was designed to prevent the events of the 1930s happening again and promotes decentralization, human rights and the rule of law, which ought to be more effective than banning symbols.

The use of a ban on Nazi regalia would be in the constituencies. Some organizations go around knocking on people's doors with clipboards and polite conversation. Other organizations are less subtle. Whether anyone who's likely to be intimidated in that way was at the infamous Colonials and Natives party with the next Head of the Commonwealth but one (dressed as a leopard, according to the tabloids) is another matter.

Given that the response of both the Labour party in the present decade and the Conservative party in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the far right has included what Bill Clinton's strategists called triangulation, and that the present governing party in Australia relies on a house-trained, salonfähig version of the reviled One Nation party's programme, it's quite easy to imagine a hypothetical Home Secretary outlawing small far-right parties, suspending human rights legislation on the basis of a fictitious state of national emergency and getting up to God knows what in the hope of reconnecting young unemployed males to the political process while the courts struggle to catch up.

posted at: 22:33 | path: /EU | permanent link to this entry

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See Ian Black, in the Guardian, 2005-01-24.

The French diplomat quoted in the opening sentence is absolutely right. In a country where German history in bookshops is all about the Third Reich, with maybe one or two books about Hildegard of Bingen or royalty for the ladies and where the typical TV history programme has a title like "Was Hitler gay?" or "Hitler's other ball", I could go on, you might expect something of the horror to rub off, but to hear many Brits talk, even Brits with Dr before their names, you'd think Hitler's worst fault was his nationality. "At least I'm not German", sniff, is the attitude it promotes. How many people in Britain know the first thing about Germany before 1933 or after 1945?

I remember getting anti-semitic abuse from an older girl at primary school, and I'm pretty sure I'm not Jewish.

posted at: 21:53 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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I'm not suggesting that the BBC has a manual of house style which tells its readers, in the Europe section, how to distort, misinform and confuse, rather that the UK media, and the people who work in it, are so saturated with anti-EU propaganda that stating clearly what's going on in a story about the EU takes more time and thought than people are used to taking.

posted at: 20:00 | path: /EU | permanent link to this entry

Take a look at this story on the BBC news website. In case they change it, the first sentence under the title reads "The EU has been urged to ban the swastika because of its Nazi associations with hate and racism." So far, so, as far as I can tell, accurate.

Yet the link to the page on the right-hand side reads

Origins of the swastika
The EU wants to ban them

It's not clear whether whoever wrote this is reporting positive noises made by Franco Frattini, the Justice and Home Affairs commissioner, though he doesn't represent the EU as a whole, only the Commission, or is applying standard British press procedure and inventing a Brussels plot.

The link text should match the article. It's that simple. On reading the link carefully, it suggests that the EU wants to ban the origins of the swastika. This is, I fear, beyond the capabilities of the EU, even if the proposed constitution comes into effect.

I do find it amusing that the commissioner comes from one of the two member states with "post-fascist" far-right parties in government, and whose party (Forza Italia) has been working hard to rehabilitate Mussolini. He's had years of opportunity to fight against fascism, but this seems to be his first effort.

posted at: 19:32 | path: /EU | permanent link to this entry

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We had a note thanking us for our support of the "British Milkman". You've seen how fast milk floats go. What chance do we have of supporting a French Milkman?

posted at: 14:56 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

De Ultieme Hallucinatie in Brussels was closed when I turned up on a tram. But on attempting to alight I completely forgot whether the passengers getting off or the passengers getting on went first. There was an impasse until the people on the street pushed past. I only left the tram as the doors were closing.

posted at: 14:52 | path: /leplatpays | permanent link to this entry