An Empire of Lies

Why Our Media Betrays Us

by Jonathan Cook

Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role — if an inadvertent one — in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.
 
Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.

Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.

For the careful reader — and I stress the word “careful” — several disturbing facts emerged from the report.

One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.

Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony — given the stakes involved in launching a pre-emptive strike against another sovereign state — the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.

A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.

With Curveball’s admission in mind, as well as these other facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions — conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.

Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed Janabi’s story about WMD, however discredited it was, to justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option of “plausible deniability”.

Nonetheless, Janabi’s falsified account was vitally useful: for much of the American public, it added a veneer of credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of reason in the administration.

In other words, Bush’s White House used Curveball to breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam’s threat to world peace.

So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?

Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.

Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell’s presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration’s hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics — who are many and powerful — say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”

In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people — more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile.

There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it because it relates to an event of continuing and momentous significance.

Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.

We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider what, or who, constitutes “empire” today? Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US government and its army, comprising the world’s sole superpower.

Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.

Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.

In our globalised world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.

Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well its elite supporters around the world — including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East — are an integral element in that transnational elite.

The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:

– That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations;

– That we, in particular, and the global workforce, in general, are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation;

– That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom;

– That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom but also a major source of our happiness;

– That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet; and,

– That there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.

These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us — and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to western publics only — to describe the natural order.

The job of sanctifying these assumptions — and ensuring they are not scrutinised — falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power because, in fact, it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.

The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.

His confession has come too late — eight years too late, to be precise — to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.

That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.

Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.

But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” — or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it — for its own illegal and immoral ends.

Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.

In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders — those opposed to empire or its interests — are driven by base or evil motives.

It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as personifying the crazed or evil dictator — while other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s are described as “moderate” — opening the way for their countries to become targets of our own imperial strategies.

States selected for the “embrace” of empire are left with a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become an ally or defy empire and face our wrath.

When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.

For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.

This, of course, does not mean that the western media is Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it must remain within the relatively narrow confines of “reasonable” debate, a spectrum of possible thought that accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better, more moral, than them.

Similarly, journalists are rarely told — at least, not directly — what to write. The media have developed careful selection processes and hierarchies among their editorial staff — termed “filters” by media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky — to ensure that dissenting or truly independent journalists do not reach positions of real influence.

There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are competing elites and corporations, and their voices are reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost to the reporters’ independence.

Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly expanding — over the opposition of the elites and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.

The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-style freedoms.

An important question is: how will our media respond to this exposure, not just of our politicians’ hypocrisy but also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success. They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate, though still heavily constrained, than had been possible before.

The West’s version of glasnost is particularly obvious in the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign is really the opening up — slightly — of the media landscape to allow a little light where until recently darkness reigned.

This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour for access; and we must desert them, as is already happening, for better sources of information.

We have a window. And we must force it open before the elites of empire try to slam it shut.


• This is the text of a talk entitled “Media as a Tool of Empire” delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth international conference in Bethlehem on Friday February 25. 

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

The Genie is out of the Bottle

by Uri Avnery / February 19th, 2011

This is a story right out of 1001 Nights. The genie escaped from the bottle, and no power on earth can put it back.

When it happened in Tunisia, it could have been said: OK, an Arab country, but a minor one. It was always a bit more progressive than the others. Just an isolated incident.

And then it happened in Egypt. A pivotal country. The heart of the Arab world. The spiritual center of Sunni Islam. But it could have been said: Egypt is a special case. The land of the Pharaohs. Thousands of years of history before the Arabs even got there.

But now it has spread all over the Arab world. To Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen. Jordan, Libya, even Morocco. And to non-Arab, non-Sunni Iran, too.

The genie of revolution, of renewal, of rejuvenation, is now haunting all the regimes in the Region. The inhabitants of the “Villa in the Jungle” are liable to wake up one morning and discover that the jungle is gone, that we are surrounded by a new landscape.

When our Zionist fathers decided to set up a safe haven in Palestine, they had the choice between two options:

They could appear in West Asia as European conquerors, who see themselves as a bridgehead of the “white” man and as masters of the “natives”, like the Spanish conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonialists in America. That is what the crusaders did in their time.

The second way was to see themselves as an Asian people returning to their homeland, the heirs to the political and cultural traditions of the Semitic world, ready to take part, with the other peoples of the region, in the war of liberation from European exploitation.

I wrote these words 64 years ago, in a brochure that appeared just two months before the outbreak of the 1948 war.

I stand by these words today.

These days I have a growing feeling that we are once again standing at a historic crossroads. The direction we choose in the coming days will determine the destiny of the State of Israel for years to come, perhaps irreversibly. If we choose the wrong road, we will have “weeping for generations”, as the Hebrew saying goes.

And perhaps the greatest danger is that we make no choice at all, that we are not even aware of the need to make a decision, that we just continue on the road that has brought us to where we are today. That we are occupied with trivialities – the battle between the Minister of Defense and the departing Chief of Staff, the struggle between Netanyahu and Lieberman about the appointment of an ambassador, the non-events of “Big Brother” and similar TV inanities – that we do not even notice that history is passing us by, leaving us behind.

When our politicians and pundits found enough time – amid all the daily distractions – to deal with the events around us, it was in the old and (sadly) familiar way.

Even in the few halfway intelligent talk shows, there was much hilarity about the idea that “Arabs” could establish democracies. Learned professors and media commentators “proved” that such a thing just could not happen – Islam was “by nature” anti-democratic and backward, Arab societies lacked the Protestant Christian ethic necessary for democracy, or the capitalist foundations for a sound middle class, etc. At best, one kind of despotism would be replaced by another.

The most common conclusion was that democratic elections would inevitably lead to the victory of “Islamist” fanatics, who would set up brutal Taliban-style theocracies, or worse.

Part of this, of course, is deliberate propaganda, designed to convince the naïve Americans and Europeans that they must shore up the Mubaraks of the region or alternative military strongmen. But most of it was quite sincere: most Israelis really believe that the Arabs, left to their own devices, will set up murderous “Islamist” regimes, whose main aim would be to wipe Israel off the map.

Ordinary Israelis know next to nothing about Islam and the Arab world. As a (left-wing) Israeli general answered 65 years ago, when asked how he viewed the Arab world: “through the sights of my rifle.” Everything is reduced to “security”, and insecurity prevents, of course, any serious reflection.

This attitude goes back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement.

Its founder – Theodor Herzl – famously wrote in his historic treatise that the future Jewish State would constitute “a part of the wall of civilization” against Asiatic (meaning Arab) barbarism. Herzl admired Cecil Rhodes, the standard-bearer of British imperialism, He and his followers shared the cultural attitude then common in Europe, which Eduard Said latter labeled “Orientalism”.

Viewed in retrospect, that was perhaps natural, considering that the Zionist movement was born in Europe towards the end of the imperialist era, and that it was planning to create a Jewish homeland in a country in which another people – an Arab people – was living.

The tragedy is that this attitude has not changed in 120 years, and that it is stronger today than ever. Those of us who propose a different course – and there have always been some – remain voices in the wilderness.

This is evident these days in the Israeli attitude to the events shaking the Arab world and beyond. Among ordinary Israelis, there was quite a lot of spontaneous sympathy for the Egyptians confronting their tormentors in Tahrir Square – but everything was viewed from the outside, from afar, as if it were happening on the moon.

The only practical question raised was: will the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty hold? Or do we need to raise new army divisions for a possible war with Egypt? When almost all “security experts” assured us that the treaty was safe, people lost interest in the whole matter.

But the treaty – actually an armistice between regimes and armies – should only be of secondary concern for us. The most important question is: how will the new Arab world look? Will the transition to democracy be relatively smooth and peaceful, or not? Will it happen at all, and will it mean that a more radical Islamic region emerges – which is a distinct possibility? Can we have any influence on the course of events?

Of course, none of today’s Arab movements is eager for an Israeli embrace. It would be a bear hug. Israel is viewed today by practically all Arabs as a colonialist, anti-Arab state that oppresses the Palestinians and is out to dispossess as many Arabs as possible – though there is, I believe, also a lot of silent admiration for Israel’s technological and other achievements.

But when entire peoples rise up and revolution upsets all entrenched attitudes, there is the possibility of changing old ideas. If Israeli political and intellectual leaders were to stand up today and openly declare their solidarity with the Arab masses in their struggle for freedom, justice and dignity, they could plant a seed that would bear fruit in coming years.

Of course, such statements must really come from the heart. As a superficial political ploy, they would be rightly despised. They must be accompanied by a profound change in our attitude towards the Palestinian people. That’s why peace with the Palestinians now, at once, is a vital necessity for Israel.

Our future is not with Europe or America. Our future is in this region, to which our state belongs, for better or for worse. It’s not just our policies that must change, but our basic outlook, our geographical orientation. We must understand that we are not a bridgehead from somewhere distant, but a part of a region that is now – at long last – joining the human march towards freedom.

The Arab Awakening is not a matter of months or a few years. It may well be a prolonged struggle, with many failures and defeats, but the genie will not return to the bottle. The images of the 18 days in Tahrir Square will be kept alive in the hearts of an entire new generation from Marakksh to Mosul, and any new dictatorship that emerges here or there will not be able to erase them.

In my fondest dreams I could not imagine a wiser and more attractive course for us Israelis, than to join this march in body and spirit.


Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, and writer. Read other articles by Uri, or visit Uri's website.

Caravaggio's crimes exposed in Rome's police files

By David Willey
BBC News, Rome

Four hundred years after his death, Caravaggio is a 21st Century superstar among old master painters. His stark, dramatically lit, super-realistic paintings strike a modern chord - but his police record is more shocking than any modern bad boy rock star's.

An exhibition of documents at Rome's State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries.

Caravaggio: A killer whose patrons and friends included powerful cardinals

 
Caravaggio's friendships, daily life and frequent brawls - including the one which brought him a death sentence from Pope Paul V - are described in handwritten police logs, legal and court parchments all bound together in heavy tomes - and carefully preserved in this unique repository of Rome's history during the Renaissance and after.
 
The picture the documents paint is that of an irascible man who went about town carrying personal weapons - a sword and dagger, and even a pistol - without a written permit, boasting that he enjoyed the protection of the ecclesiastical authorities who commissioned some of his most famous works.

He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.


Tennis court battle

All these events are documented with eyewitness accounts in this collection of yellowing parchments - difficult to decipher for the non-specialist, but rich in contemporary detail for a skilled archivist.

The documents provide a completely new account of his most serious brawl in May 1606 in which he killed a certain Ranuccio Tommassoni. This brawl - just like a modern-day clash between warring gangs - was arranged in advance by eight participants who have all now been named.
 
Caravaggio and his three companions, one a Captain in the Papal army, met their rivals at a pallacorda court in the Campo Marzio area, where the artist lived. (Pallacorda was a game played with a ball with a string attached - an early form of tennis, which some older Romans still remember seeing played in the streets of the capital in the mid-20th Century.)

Some biographers have suggested that there may have been an argument over a woman, but the text of the court report suggests the quarrel broke out over a gambling debt. Caravaggio killed Ranuccio and fled the city.

One of Caravaggio's own supporters was seriously injured. Taken to prison, he was subsequently put on trial, and the new evidence emerges from the report of this trial.

Police Dossier - Artist Behaving Badly

• 4 May 1598: Arrested at 2- 3am near Piazza Navona, for carrying a sword without a permit
• 19 November 1600: Sued for beating a man with a stick and tearing his cape with a sword at 3am on Via della Scrofa
• 2 October 1601: A man accuses Caravaggio and friends of insulting him and attacking him with a sword near the Piazza Campo Marzio
• 24 April 1604: Waiter complains of assault after serving artichokes at an inn on the Via Maddalena
• 19 October 1604: Arrested for throwing stones at policemen near Via dei Greci and Via del Babuino
• 28 May 1605: Arrested for carrying a sword and dagger without a permit on Via del Corso
• 29 July 1605: Vatican notary accuses Caravaggio of striking him from behind with a weapon
• 28 May 1606: Caravaggio kills a man during a pitched battle in the Campo Marzio area

Early death

Caravaggio himself fled south to Malta and to Sicily where he received important new art commissions. The death sentence from Pope Paul V - whose portrait he had just painted - was imposed in absentia for this offence.

Assault with a Plate of Artichokes

Statement to police by Pietro Antonio de Fosaccia, waiter, 26 April 1604:

About 17 o'clock [lunchtime] the accused, together with two other people, was eating in the Moor's restaurant at La Maddalena, where I work as a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil, and I told him to smell them, which would easily enable him to tell the difference.

He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my moustache, injuring me slightly... and then he got up and grabbed his friend's sword which was lying on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it, but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint...

The documents also shed light upon Caravaggio's death at Porto Erole, north of Rome in July 1610. He did not die alone on a beach after escaping from his creditors and the police, as some of his biographers say, but in a hospital bed.
 
Only 38 years old, he was on his way back to the city from the south in the belief that his powerful friends had secured a pardon for his offences.

The documents that record Caravaggio's life in Rome are written in a mixture of Latin legal jargon and racy Italian vernacular that any modern Roman could easily understand.

They needed careful restoration, as parts of the parchment were breaking up - the acid in the ink literally devouring the pages.

A handful of sponsors including a local bus company and the Italian Land Rover distributors helped to fund the work. The Italian Culture Ministry has slashed budgets this year as part of Italy's austerity programme and libraries and archives have been particularly badly hit.

The restored files provide the historical context for the sellout show in Rome last year, when more than three-quarters of a million visitors queued for hours in stifling summer heat to see some 50 of the mad, bad and dangerous painter's works.

"A window has been opened into the past," said Federica Galloni, head of culture for the Lazio region at the opening of the new exhibition.

All the events described in the documents occurred within walking distance of one another in a small area of the city.

Caravaggio's haunts such as the Osteria del Moro (inn of the Moor) and Osteria della Lupa (inn of the she-wolf) are long gone, and the church of St Ambrose has been subsumed in a larger, more recent church on the Via del Corso.

But the narrow streets are still there, often clogged with parked motorbikes, but still dotted with medieval buildings that Caravaggio would have known. Walking along them, after visiting the exhibition, the vivid tales of the painter's rumbustious life linger in the imagination.

Document images courtesy of Italy's State Archive, and the Ministry of Culture. The exhibition continues until 15 May. Full details on the State Archive website.

Is Famine the New Norm?

by Jim Harkness
Policy innovations, For a Fairer Globalization

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

CREDIT: International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CC).

When global food prices spiked in 2007–2008, 100 million people were added to the ranks of the world's hungry, pushing the total number over 1 billion for the first time in history. Now, just two years later, we are seeing another food price hike, and more famine is likely to follow.
 
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently published its global food price index for January 2011. The agency's index was at its highest level (both in real and nominal terms) since the FAO started measuring food prices in 1990. Food riots have already begun in Algeria. As history repeats itself and the second major global food crisis in two years takes shape, it is vital that we learn the lessons of the first crisis, and address fundamental causes.

Food security depends on stable and predictable weather and markets, and access to resources, all of which have been knocked dangerously off balance in the past few decades. Since the 1970s, human-caused climate change has brought more frequent extreme weather events worldwide. Farmers who were used to dealing with the prospect of a lost harvest once every ten seasons now experience flood or drought or major pest infestations every second or third year. In 2010 and early this year, Argentina, Australia, China, Pakistan, and Russia have all seen extreme weather events disrupt their agricultural production.

The second source of instability is an increasingly chaotic marketplace. In the name of free trade, the U.S. government and the World Bank have spent the past three decades forcing open developing country markets to cheap imports, which undermined local food production. In a cruel irony, poor countries were also pressured to cut support for their own farm sectors, and even forced to sell off emergency food reserves, under the rationale that it would be more efficient to simply buy food on international markets.

By 2006, more than two-thirds of the world's poorest nations were dependent on food imports. Then came the wave of financial deregulation over the past decade, unleashing speculators into commodity markets, and creating index funds that tied together commodity market prices for food, oil, and metals like never before. But the leveraging, bundling, and "innovative instruments" that were supposed to reduce risk in these markets have had the opposite effect. The result has been a wildly volatile global food market, where factors unrelated to actual supply and demand often drive prices.

This global double whammy of climate and financial instability has not hurt everyone. Volatility is good for the biggest players. Many agribusiness companies are experiencing record profits now and did so during the last food crisis as well. There has been a spike in "land grabbing," in which large areas of arable land in developing countries are bought up by outside investors, and converted to non-food crops, including feedstocks for biofuels.

On the other hand, some African countries won't be hit as hard this time precisely because they insisted on boosting local production instead of relying on global markets. But for the most part, poor farmers are struggling in a hostile and volatile climate. No wonder famine has become the new normal.

If we truly consider world hunger to be an abomination, and not merely an investment opportunity, big changes need to be made. Nearly everyone from the World Bank to the UN to the G-20 recognizes the need to support small-scale farmers, particularly women, in countries facing hunger. Globally, 70 percent of the world's food is grown on farms less than two hectares (4 acres) in size, tended in large part by women.

Development aid, as well as developing country government policies, should focus on helping build the productivity and resilience of these farmers. Instead of leaving small farmers powerless in the face of global forces, we should build on the wisdom of traditional farming systems which combine the best of ecological science with on-the-ground farmer knowledge to encourage practices that reduce costly inputs, produce higher yields, and increase farm incomes. And food production for meeting domestic needs must take priority over cash cropping for export.

But there is much more to do. Countries and regions struggling with hunger need greater policy space at the national level to protect domestic food production, prevent dumping, and stabilize supplies. Some of their flexibility has been curtailed by World Trade Organization rules.

Food reserves should be reexamined as a key tool for addressing shortages, as well as for stabilizing food supplies and prices for farmers and consumers. Land grabbing must stop, and it is time again to support the redistribution of arable land to small farmers who will use it to grow food. Funding to assist developing country farmers in adapting to climate change is woefully inadequate.

Governments need to get serious about implementing rules to curb excess speculation. The U.S. financial reform bill known as Dodd-Frank is a good start, but Wall Street lobbyists are going full force to weaken it during the rulemaking process.

Destabilization of the global food supply over the past several decades can be undone. But that won't happen unless we learn from the past and support new approaches to improve stability and resilience in farming, markets, and food systems.

Jim Harkness is President of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Why the west is losing the battle for Arab hearts and minds

by James Purnell
NewStatesman

We must ignore the siren calls of fence-sitting cynics and forge a foreign policy based on our values.

The crowds in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia should be holding up replica Statues of Liberty. Instead, the west is losing the battle for Arab hearts and minds at the very moment they are winning their battle for democracy and freedom. I blame Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. I remember complaining to Jack Straw, when he was foreign secretary, about Cheney's extremism. Jack's riposte stayed with me: "If you think Cheney is bad, you should hear Scooter Libby."

Scooter Libby, Cheney's (very) right-hand man, became the most senior American official to be convicted of a government scandal since John Poindexter in the Iran-Contra affair. He then benefited from probably the most extraordinary use of a presidential pardon when Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence. This vignette of Bush-life is a microcosm of why the demonstrators aren't pro-American: because you cannot impose democracy and good government on other countries while abusing them yourself. A foreign policy based on values needs legitimacy.

Allies of weasel

Irving Kristol defined the neoconservatives as liberals who had "been mugged by reality". But Cheney and Rumsfeld weren't neocons. They were American hegemonists, dedicated to expanding American power by whatever means necessary. "Neo-heges", if you like. And those means included propping up anti-democrats abroad and cutting democratic corners at home.

Democracy caught up with them in the end. But then something odd happened. The world could have said that Bush's goal was right but his methods wrong, yet we seem to have retreated into a realist mush. I winced when Barack Obama failed publicly to back the "Green Revolution" in Iran - very pragmatic, but an uncomfortable contradiction of the idealism that makes him such a compelling leader.

In Britain, the Conservatives still seem traumatised by having to share the blame for Blair's war in Iraq (which I supported). They have retreated to the default realist Conservative foreign-policy stance that justified the Major government's refusal to intervene in Bosnia. The only concrete goal of our foreign policy now seems to be trade promotion.

This realist consensus tells us it is naive to want a foreign policy based on values. But Egypt and Tunisia give the lie to that - isn't it in fact naive to think despots can guarantee stability? We're told we can't risk the Muslim Brotherhood winning an election, but how do we generalise that rule? That no country where the Brotherhood exists can become a democracy?

In the Egyptian convulsion, the most depressing manifestation of US pragmatism came from an unnamed state department official who despaired that they didn't know who their candidate was now. But their candidate is staring them in the face. It's called democracy.Let me be clear: I'm not saying the revolution in Egypt justifies the war in Iraq. You can be for democracy but against war. It does, however, remove the worst arguments of each side. The worst part of the pro-war argument was its inconsistency: fighting for democracy in Iraq while refusing to recognise Hamas's victory in Gaza. If we want a foreign policy based on values, then we should promote democracy among our despotic "friends", among the allies of weasel as much as in the axis of evil.

The worst part of the anti-war argument was saying that we shouldn't champion democracy; that democracy and freedom were western values; that Muslims don't want to vote. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen all give the lie to that. Can we clear a space between those two extremes? Can we find a "direction of travel" policy where progress towards democracy is explicitly rewarded, and a drift away punished? That wouldn't entail invading every non-democracy. But it would mean that military intervention should be an option, in extreme circumstances.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has written of how, at the height of the Liberian civil war, four US warships appeared off the coast of the capital, Monrovia, raising the hopes of ordinary people: "Not only was Uncle Sam coming to save the day, he was there, in sight! Surely, he'd stop the bloodshed, they cried."

But the US government's policy in 1990 was that the resolution of this civil war was a Lib­erian responsibility. The warships passed by. A few days later, 600 civilians were massacred at a Lutheran church in the city being used as a Red Cross shelter.

Iraq and ruin

A direction-of-travel policy would mean protecting democracies. The development economist Paul Collier makes a simple proposal. "Should a government that has committed itself to international standards of elections be ousted by a coup d'état", he suggests, the US, France and Britain "would ensure that the government was reinstated, by military intervention if necessary".

Again, I'm not saying that Liberia or Sierra Leone is the same as Iraq, but they do shine a light on what was wrong in Iraq. It wasn't the desire for regime change. It wasn't the goal of promoting democracy. Nor was it UN resolutions - if we make the United Nations the sole judge of what is legal, we are making Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party our global appeal judges. Nor was it postwar planning, disastrous though that was. What was wrong in Iraq was legitimacy. We didn't convince the world, unlike in Kosovo or Sierra Leone. As a consequence, Iraq has weakened the case for liberal interventionism.

But events in Egypt have in turn weakened foreign policy realism. Foreign policy is about interests and compromises. There is, however, a huge difference between a foreign policy based on values, constrained by pragmatism, and one based on interests, sometimes not even constrained by principle.

A state of decline?

By Justin Webb
BBC News, Today programme

Is the US in a state of inescapable decline?

Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs: "American politics really is broken and has been broken for a long time"

Former State Department official Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations: "The United States is on an unsustainable course"

Francis Fukuyama: "There is no question that America's relative power has declined"

'Moby Dick' captain's ship found

US marine archaeologists have found the sunken whaling ship belonging to the captain who inspired Herman Melville's classic 19th Century novel, Moby Dick.

The remains of the vessel, the Two Brothers, was found in shallow waters off Hawaii.

Captain George Pollard was the skipper when the ship hit a coral reef and sank in 1823.

His previous ship, the Essex, had been rammed by a whale and also sank, providing the narrative for the book.


'Pretty amazing'

The remains of the Two Brothers were found by researchers from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), about 600 miles (965 km) north-west of Honolulu in the remote chain of islands and atolls.

The wooden vessel has disintegrated in the warm waters, but the researchers found harpoons, a hook for stripping whales of their blubber and cauldrons used to turn whale blubber into oil.

"To find the physical remains of something that seems to have been lost to time is pretty amazing," said Nathaniel Philbrick, an author and historian, who has been researching the Two Brothers, the Essex and their captain.

"It just makes you realise these stories are more than stories. They're about real lives."

The sinking of the Two Brothers was relatively uneventful compared with the Essex's run-in with the sperm whale in 1821.

After the Essex sank, Capt Pollard and his crew drifted at sea without food and water for three months and even resorted to cannibalism before they were rescued.

Pollard gave up whaling and became a night watchman in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

While Meville was inspired by Pollard's adventures, the unlucky seafarer's character is not thought to have been the basis for the novel's obsessive Capt Ahab.

The Freethinker - the voice of Atheism since 1881

Faith Wars: How holiness drives the Israeli-Arab conflict



by Peter Brietbart on the Temple Mount

Jerusalem is an overwhelming city. In the tradition of absurdist thought, nothing is truly meaningful, and any meaning has to be somewhat arbitrarily imposed onto the world. Jerusalem poses a significant empirical challenge to this notion: every stone of every street bursts with historical significance. It is overwhelming for the psyche to become aware of just how much history occurred in such a small place. It feels claustrophobic.
 
In my recent journey travelling through Israel and the Palestinian Territories, I visited this sacred city to discover more about the origins and causes of the Israeli-Arab conflict. My findings? Religion is a cause of it, sustains it, and makes everything worse.

The origin of the problem comes not from Zionism (the motivating ideology for a national Jewish home), but from the need for Zionism in the first place. One of the catchy, pseudo-left commentaries on the subject is that “Zionism is racism”. But this is only a half-truth, for Zionism is a response to racism. Writing in the early 20th century, Theodore Herzl saw a majority Jewish state as the only answer to the existential threat created by anti-Jewish bigotry – and he wrote this pre-holocaust.

So what, we might ask, fuels this existential aggression against the Jews?

Well, it was Catholic theology until the 1960s that the Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Christ. And of course, if they killed God, then they must be the enemies of goodness, and accordingly, the agents of evil. This simple line of reasoning fed into anti-Jewish sentiments from the Crusades to the Third Reich. Without this divine hatred, the Jews would have been able to live peacefully in the diaspora without needing a nation-state of their own.

But they did need one, and now they do have one. Israel’s existence is now a fact, regardless of how dubious the ethics of its foundation may appear to be. The Palestinian people have legitimate grievances, from the illegal annexation of east Jerusalem to the grotesque separation barrier, but it is doubtful that these injustices are a complete explanation of the politics of Hamas. A passage from the Hadith has made its way into the charter of Hamas that may illuminate my point: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” 41:6985. This is not anti-Israel rhetoric, but anti-Jewish rhetoric. Their opposition to Israel is not merely political, but holy. They are not fighting merely for an Islamic Palestinian state, but against a secular Jewish one. The origins of and justifications for anti-Semitism can be found proudly displayed in both Christian and Islamic texts. These two monotheisms made it necessary for the existence of a Jewish state in the first place.

Speaking to Haaretz editor-at-large Aluf Benn, he described the Israeli center-left as being made up of those who now place blame for the continuation of the conflict squarely with Israel and its policies. Those on the Israeli right, he says, are now those standing in the way of peace. Permanent residents of the political right – we naturally discover Orthodox and Messianic Jews – who consider both Israeli and Palestinian territories to be the divinely gifted property of the Jewish people, courtesy of Yahweh. As such, what need is there for a Palestinian state? Why pursue peace? The creator of the universe is on their side – why listen to the UN? The destruction of Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli settlements would be utterly unjustifiable, were it not for the pious self-righteousness induced by religious orthodoxy. Those who truly believe that the messiah will return when and only when the Jews have “reclaimed”their sacred homeland provide a solid powerbase to Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition. Any Israeli-Arab resolution will come in spite of, and not because of, the strong religious convictions involved.

But in assessing the situation, we must not view things too provincially – there is more being played for than Palestinian lands. Author and Israeli foreign policy expert Jonathan Spyer perceives the conflict to be driven externally by Iranian Islamism, which has much political credibility to gain from opposing Israel. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are funded, armed and trained by Iranian Islamic revolutionaries whose agenda is to see Israel destroyed and an Islamic empire re-established. Needless to say, if Iran’s nuclear capabilities are realised, Hezbollah will have few qualms in utilising them. As Hitchens neatly puts it, “What, when messianic groups acquire apocalyptic weaponry? What, when those who think the end of the world is coming get weaponry that could bring it about?”

The parties of God have made the Israeli-Arab conflict impossible to solve with their input. On the Jewish side are those who believe the land and its capital, Jerusalem, is their Holy Land, granted to them by an omnipotent being who occasionally grants territorial rights. Their callous indifference to the suffering of Palestinian families is all too typical of the faithful. On the Arab side are jihadi thugs hell-bent on murder, even if it kills them. So long as the land is Dar al-Harab and not Dar al-Islam, the poisonous forces of the Iranian Revolution will continue to threaten human rights, liberty and peace.

What the region needs more than anything else is secularism, rooted deeply in respect for human, and not divine rights. The conflict cannot be solved between those who are arguing over whose side their shared imaginary friend is on. All those pious men of God are now the greatest enemies of peace: Yahweh vs. Allah is an absurd match-up, and one in which the Palestinian people can only lose.

peter[at]freethinker.co.uk

Whaaaat?!... Oh, my word, hear that!

State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron

The [UK] prime minister has criticised "state multiculturalism" in his first speech on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism since being elected.

Addressing a security conference in Germany, David Cameron argued the UK needed a stronger national identity to prevent people turning to extremism.

He also signalled a tougher stance on groups promoting Islamist extremism.

But the Muslim Council of Britain said its community was being seen as part of the problem rather than the solution.

Mr Cameron suggested there would be greater scrutiny of some Muslim groups that get public money but do little to tackle extremism.

Ministers should refuse to share platforms or engage with such groups, which should be denied access to public funds and barred from spreading their message in universities and prisons, he argued.

"Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism," the prime minister said.

"Let's properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights - including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?

"These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations," he added.

Reacting to the speech, the Muslim Council of Britain's assistant secretary general, Dr Faisal Hanjra, said the government had failed to move the issue on.

He told Radio 4's Today programme: "It is disappointing. We were hoping that with a new government, with a new coalition that there'd be a change in emphasis in terms of counter-terrorism and dealing with the problem at hand.

"In terms of the approach to tackling terrorism though it doesn't seem to be particularly new.

"Again it just seems the Muslim community is very much in the spotlight, being treated as part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution."

Muslim youth group The Ramadhan Foundation said that, by singling out Muslims, Mr Cameron had fed "hysteria and paranoia".

Chief executive Mohammed Shafiq said: "British Muslims abhor terrorism and extremism and we have worked hard to eradicate this evil from our country.

"But to suggest that we do not sign up to the values of tolerance, respect and freedom is deeply offensive and incorrect.

"Multiculturalism is about understanding each others faiths and cultures whilst being proud of our British citizenship."

In the speech in Munich, Mr Cameron drew a clear distinction between Islam the religion and what he described as "Islamist extremism" - a political ideology he said attracted people who feel "rootless" within their own countries.

"We need to be clear: Islamist extremism and Islam are not the same thing," he said.

The government is currently reviewing its policy to prevent violent extremism, known as Prevent, which is a key part of its wider counter-terrorism strategy.


'I am a Londoner too'

A genuinely liberal country "believes in certain values and actively promotes them", Mr Cameron said.

"Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality.

"It says to its citizens: This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe these things.

"Each of us in our own countries must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty."

He said under the "doctrine of state multiculturalism", different cultures have been encouraged to live separate lives.

"We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values."

Building a stronger sense of national and local identity holds "the key to achieving true cohesion" by allowing people to say "I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am a Christian, but I am a Londoner... too", he said.

Security minister Baroness Neville-Jones said when Mr Cameron expressed his opposition to extremism, he meant all forms, not just Islamist extremism.

She told Today: "There's a widespread feeling in the country that we're less united behind values than we need to be.

"There are things the government can do to give a lead and encourage participation in society, including all minorities."

But the Islamic Society of Britain said the prime minister did not appreciate the nature of the problem.

Ajmal Masroor from the group told BBC Radio 5 live: "I think he's confusing a couple of issues: national identity and multiculturalism along with extremism are not connected. Extremism comes about as a result of several other factors."


P.S. Please NOTE that despite the generality of the principles of this "Litmus test" for "muscular liberalism", as proposed above by the conservative DeCameron, such as is the respect for "universal human rights", irrespective of one's gender, faith (or lack thereof), "equality before the law" (and of the means to accessing it, presumably!), "freedom of speech" etc., there is an eerie silence about other, equally important human rights referring to universal healthcare, education or food... To all of these and those omitted, another fundamental human right ought to be added by default: the human right to be the secular, critical agents of revolutionary change of any make-believe paradigm that has seemingly passed its sell-by-date.

The bitter taste of Yankee gratitude: "Laos Hmong leader Vang Pao denied Arlington burial"

With typical realism, arguably tainted by a fair amount of racist (sic!) considerations, the "gook" traitor Vang Pao has been denied by the US Army a "full military honours' burial" in the Arlington National Cemetery.


Gen Pao led a 15-year CIA-sponsored secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War and, when it was lost, led tens of thousands of his people into exile.

He died last month. The army's decision came as mourners attended the first day of a six-day funeral in California.

Gen Pao's friends said they would appeal to the White House.

"Obviously to everyone who is here today to honour Gen Vang Pao, this is very disappointing," said Congressman Jim Costa, who led a group of lawmakers to lobby for the general to be buried alongside US soldiers in Arlington.

"He is not just a hero to the Hmong people. He is a hero to those American men and women who served with him in Vietnam."

A spokesman for the Pentagon, Gary Tallman, said the request had been thoroughly reviewed but that the board had unanimously decided he did not meet the criteria for burial in the cemetery.


'Hmong father'

Military veteran Charlie Waters, a friend of Gen Pao's, said he had been given "a lame excuse that it would take the place away from an American serviceman".

"So we're appealing to the White House," Mr Waters told AFP news agency, adding that he had offered to give up his own plot.

It was not immediately clear where Gen Pao would now be interred.

Vang Pao died at the age of 81 in January in Fresno, California, a centre of the Hmong community in the US.

Tens of thousands of military and Hmong mourners have gathered in the city for his traditional funeral.

"We would not be here in this country without him," said Shoua Vang, 52, who had travelled from Illinois.

Vang Pao commanded thousands of guerillas in an American-backed force during the 1960s and 70s.

As a young man, he had fought against the Japanese during World War II, and with the French against the North Vietnamese in the 1950s.

But he was a controversial figure, deeply loved by many Hmong - an ethnic minority in Lao that complains of persecution - for his insistence on freedom from foreign domination.

Critics say that by allying himself with the US, Gen Pao caused his people untold suffering - something that he himself recognised.

In his later years, he was accused of supporting a new rebellion in Laos.

Former Central Intelligence Agency chief William Colby once called Gen Pao "the biggest hero of the Vietnam War".

New Statesman - In defence of the "C" word

by Laurie Penny

Men have so many words that they can use to hint at their own sexual power, but we have just the one. Let's use it and love it.

[Health Warning: as you'd expect, this piece contains language that some may find offensive. Proceed with caution.]


It is, according to Germaine Greer, the one word in the English language that retains the power to shock. This week, after the third BBC newsman in two months -- this time the revered Jeremy Paxman -- dropped the c-bomb on live television, it appears that the world's best-respected broadcasting operation is in the grip of a collective and extremely specific form of Tourette's syndrome, whereby presenters can't help but slip the worst word of all into casual conversation. One is reminded of those playground horror stories of cursed words, infectious words that, once read or overheard, niggle away in the forefront of your brain until, like poison, you're forced to spit them out, with deadly consequences. But what -- ultimately -- is so terribly offensive about the word "cunt"?

The word shocks because what it signifies is still considered shocking. Francis Grose's 1785 A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines "cunt" quite simply as "a nasty name for a nasty thing". All sorts of people have a problem with 'cunt', even those who normally considerthemselves progressive and enlightened: last week, for example, I was invited to speak at a public meeting where I happened to use the word in reference to a member of the audience.

Horrified silence fell in this roomful of hardened activists, followed a few seconds later by nervously appreciative laughter. The incident later exploded on the internet, with some complaining that I had had no right to use such a provocative and shocking word at a meeting; that the word is too aggressive, too graphic. These, for context, are people who are currently cheerleading calls for a general strike and/or the overthrow of the government, but they still consider a young woman saying "cunt" in public a little too, too much.

What is it about that word? Why, in a world of 24-hour porn channels, a world with Rihanna's "Rude Boy" playing on the radio and junior pole-dancing kits sold in Tesco, is the word "cunt" still so shocking? It's a perfectly nice little word, a word with 800 years of history; a word used by Chaucer and by Shakespeare. It's the only word we have to describe the female genitalia that is neither mawkish, nor medical, nor a function of pornography. Semantically, it serves the same function as "dick" or "prick" -- a signifier for a sexual organ which can also be used as a descriptor or insult, a word that is not passive, but active, even aggressive.

There are no other truly empowering words for the female genitalia. 'Pussy' is nastily diminutive, as if every woman had a tame and purring pet between her legs, while the medical descriptor "vagina" refers only to a part of the organ, as if women's sexuality were nothing more than a wet hole, or "sheath" in the Latin. Cunt, meanwhile, is a word for the whole thing, a wholesome word, an earthy, dank and lusty word with the merest hint of horny threat. Cunt. It's fantastically difficult to pronounce without baring the teeth.

It is this kind of female sexuality -- active, adult female sexuality -- that still has the power to horrify even the most forward-thinking logophile. Despite occasional attempts by feminists such as Eve Ensler to "reclaim" the word cunt as the powerful, vital, visceral sexual signifier that it is, the taboo seems only to have become stronger. Media officials avoid it with the superstitious revulsion once reserved for evil-eye words, as if even pronouncing "cunt" might somehow conjure one into existence. The BBC wouldn't be in half so much trouble if James Naughtie had called Jeremy Hunt MP a "prick" or a "wanker" or a "cold-blooded Tory fucker".

For me, "cunt" is, and will always be, a word of power, whether it denotes my own genitals or any obstreperous comrades in the vicinity. The first time I ever used it, I was 12 years old, and being hounded by a group of sixth-form boys who just loved to corner me on the stairs and make hilarious sexy comments. One day, one of them decided it would be funny to pick me up by the waist and shake me. I spat out the words "put me down, you utter cunt", and the boy was so shocked that he dropped me instantly.

Ever since then, "cunt" has been a cherished part of my lexical armour. I use it liberally: in conversation, in the bedroom, and in debates. I only wish I could hear more women saying it, more of us reclaiming "cunt" as a word of sexual potency and common discourse rather than a dirty, forbidden word. If the BBC continues its oily pattern of vulgar logorrhoea, I'd like to hear Julia Bradbury saying it on Countryfile. I'd like to hear Kirsty Young saying it on Desert Island Discs.

Men have so many words that they can use to hint at their own sexual power, but we have just the one, and it's still the worst word you can say on the telly. Let's all get over ourselves about "cunt". Let's use it and love it.