Category: Uncategorised

Essential research into what happens when you lock children in fridges (via crooked timber)

[sorry to lower the tone from all the serious discussion of abortion and feminism going on everywhere else]

I know, I seem only to post about books here now. Sorry, but real life is fairly dull.

The Book Thief; Shampoo Planet

I did think of writing something about South Ossetia today – but it’s all guns and nationalism and games of chicken. I’m still hoping it’ll blow over in a few days, since even Russia isn’t stupid enough to get drawn into a full-scale war over this (are they?). Or will this be one of the times when public opinion is cheering on the army, and everybody has to keep on doing ridiculous things because they’ve started and don’t want to back down? Too grim to think about it; best go elsewhere for sensible comment.

*sigh*

Sometimes I hate the world.

After a mostly excellent week, I’ve spent Friday and today being both unproductive and extraordinarily tetchy. Result: I’m pissed at the world, and I’ll be spending tomorrow back behind a computer – possibly just as fruitlessly.

On the plus side, good books make things better…

Reviews (Imagined Communities and Techgnosis)

This may be obvious or false to the historians among you, but novel and interesting to me:

Nothing better illustrates capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag than colonial militaries, which were notoriously distinct from those of the metropoles, often even in formal institutional terms. Thus in Europe one had the ‘First Army’, recruited by conscription on a mass, citizen, metropolitan base; ideologically conceived as the defender of the heimat; dressed in practical, utilitarian khaki; armed with the latest affordable weapons; in peacetime isolated in barracks, in war stationed in trenches or behind heavy field-guns. Outside Europe one had the ‘Second Army’, recruited (below the officer level) from local religious or ethnic minorities on a mercenary basis; ideologically conceived as an internal police force; dressed to kill in bed- or ballroom; armed with swords and obsolete industrial weapons; in peace on display, in war on horseback. If the Prussian General Staff, Europe’s military teacher, stressed the anonymous solidarity of a professionalized corps, ballistics, railroads, engineering, strategic planning, and the like, the colonial army stressed glory, epaulettes, personal heroism, polo, and an archaizing courtliness among its officers.

[Benedict Anderson,

Imagined Communities

, p. 151]

I had high hopes for this (you can tell; it’s the first hardback I’ve bought in years). Maybe my hopes were unrealistic. Rashid is aiming squarely at the Western bestseller lists – which means he needs to cover a lot of background, and avoi frightening his readers with tightly-packed detail. I remember (misremember?) his previous books

Taliban

and

Jihad

as breaking new ground and pulling together otherwise-obscure facts. This is more a general history of what is already known – good for what it is, just not the

tour de force

I’d hoped for.

The focus is very much on high politics and personalities. As Rashid repeatedly points out, he is a personal friend of many key figures in Afghan politics, and his analysis of their foibles is interesting. But by concentrating on people, he downplays how much their actions have been constrained by institutions, economics, and culture. Doubtless this is better than the reverse – personalities

do

matter in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and many institutions exist only on paper. But in this book, events in Afghanistan seem determined almost entirely by powerful people doing stupid things – we don’t get to grips with why they do stupid things.

ETA: I was probably too harsh here. Some of Rashid’s themes – how deeply the ISI has continued to support the Taliban, how uncontrolled Helmand was before the British arrived – are, if not unknown, at least rarely given this much emphasis