“This is a very dangerous signal from the government — that the secular opposition doesn’t have the same opportunity to exist or grow as the Islamist movements… In spite of the government talking about reform, secular leaders are in a very bad situation.”

— Hafez abu Saeda, president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, decrying the recent arrest and conviction of Egyptian opposition candidate Ayman Nour.

Nour, 41, was charged and sentenced yesterday to five years imprisonment on charges of forgery when he allegedly faked signatures when founding his party, the opposition Tomorrow (Ghad) Party. Although Mubarak recently won Egypt’s first contested elections in a landslide — with accusations of voter intimidation, cheating, and outright forgery rampant — Nour and his Ghad party (whose base is largely secular and better educated, and would therefore likely be more appealing to Western governments in comparison to its Islamist counterparts), along with the Islamist opposition, were widely popular.  The December 24th conviction on charges of forgery will put Nour forever out of the presidential elections, since those with any criminal record are barred from running for the office.  Nour, jailed in January on the forgery charges, has recently been on a hunger strike as a demonstration against his treatment while incarcerated.  Nour, a diabetic, has been hospitalized as a result of his hunger strike.  

Mimi Hanaoka

There was a boy who dreamt
a paper horse.
He opened his eyes,
and the horse was gone.

About a white horse
the boy dreamt again;
seizing it by the mane …
Now you won’t get away!

Barely had he caught it,
when the boy woke up.
His fist was closed.
The horse flew away!

The boy became serious,
thinking that a dreamt horse
was not real.
And he never dreamt again.

But the boy turned into a young man,
and the man fell in love,
and to his beloved he would say:
Are you real, or not?

When the man grew old
he thought everything was a dream—
the dreamt-up horse,
and the horse which was real.

And when death came,
the old man to his heart
whispered: Are you a dream?
Who knows, did he ever wake up!

From “Parábolas”

Era un niño que soñaba
un caballo de cartón.
Abrió los ojos el niño
y el caballito no vió.
Con un caballito blanco
el niño volvió a soñar;
y por la crin lo cogía …
¡ahora no te escaparás!
Apenas lo hubo cogido,
el niño se despertó.
Tenía el puño cerrado.
¡El caballito voló!
Quedóse el niño muy serio
pensando que no es verdad
un caballito soñado.
Y ya no volvió a soñar.
Pero el niño se hizo mozo
y el mozo tuvo un amor,
y a su amada le decía:
¿Tú eres de verdad o no?
Cuando el mozo se hizo viejo
pensaba: todo es soñar,
el caballito soñado
y el caballo de verdad.
Y cuando vino la muerte,
el viejo a su corazón
preguntaba: ¿Tú eres sueño?
¡Quién sabe si despertó!

About the poem: Composed in a deceivingly simple language styled on popular aphorisms, the eight poems Antonio Machado titled “Parábolas” (“Parables”) appeared in their final version in the 1917 collection Campos de Castilla (Fields of Castile).

Jan Vihan Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

In the last few weeks, the relationship between Germany and the United States faced a test.  It failed.  U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Berlin for the first high-profile meeting with the new coalition government.  Serious questions about the secret CIA prisons in Europe and Germany’s role in facilitating their operation were already on the agenda.   The publication of the story of the abduction of Khaled el-Masri in The Washington Post forced this issue into the discussion as well.

The story has been in the German media and various other outlets for some time.  In 2003, el-Masri claims he was abducted from Macedonia by U.S. officials after being arrested by Macedonian police.  From there he was shipped to Afghanistan, held incommunicado and subjected to imprisonment in inhumane conditions.  As it turned out, el-Masri was mistakenly held and later released.  To avoid exacerbating problems in the relationship between Germany and America stemming from Germany’s refusal to support the invasion of Iraq, the two governments agreed to keep the issue quiet.  It turns out that various actors in the German government were complicit in the act, creating a furor in the Bundestag.  States have a fundamental responsibility to protect their citizens from these types of incidents, and the public outcry in Germany is forcing the government to take action.

This comes at a time when a warming of the relationship between Germany and America seemed likely.  After weeks of negotiations following inconclusive election results, the accession of Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats to the German Chancellorship was gratifying to the American government.  The former Chancellor, silver-tongued Gerhard Schroeder of the Social Democrats, had enraged Washington with his decision to campaign on a pledge to keep Germany out of the Iraq adventure.  The changeover from left to right political control seemed as if it might make a partial return to the prior understanding between Berlin and Washington possible.

Facing the threat of the Soviet Union and the partition of Germany after WWII, the United States and Germany formed strong ties, with Germany playing the part of junior partner.  On various occasions throughout those years, American policy and German public opinion diverged quite substantially, just as they did over the invasion of Iraq.  Most contentious perhaps was the argument over the placement of nuclear missiles in Germany during the Reagan administration, which engendered massive protests.  However, each time a disagreement arose, German leadership chose to side with the American government rather than its own population, recognizing the importance of the United States in the battle with Soviet communism.  When this threat dissipated, it seemed only a matter of time until events forced a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship.  This happened in 2003.  Germany moved along a scale from a position much like Poland, generally supporting American initiatives, to one more like France, in which the government will oppose American actions if it seems in their best interests.

Although complete rapprochement is improbable, America had its best chance with Angela Merkel, a conservative and market-oriented politician from the East.  Raised under communism, she may be more likely to see the security relationship between the two countries as crucial.  Free-market conservatives also have a natural affinity for America’s less regulated capitalism.  

However, closer ties would likely have required quiet and slow steps.  The German population is still strongly against the war in Iraq and American positions regarding terrorism and global warming are broadly unpopular.  A quick survey of articles in Der Speigel shows this is not the case.  Instead, the incident has blown up, even threatening the cohesiveness of the German Grand Coalition.

Instead of a partial rapprochement, we are seeing the solidification of a more distant relationship, with Germany independently asserting its strength as a mid-range power and a voice for Europe, and the United States helpless to do anything other than accept this as the new reality.

Pete DeWan

“On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate. She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”

University of Bath academics conducting research on the roles of brands among children ages 7 to 11 found that Barbie dolls are frequently singled out for decapitation, scalping, burning, and microwaving. Instead of cultivating maternal instincts or inspiration among its consumers, Mattel’s Barbie dolls seem to bring out “violence and hatred” — possibly because they are too old for the dolls but possibly also because Barbies represent some form of cultural excess. Dr. Nain stated, “The girls almost always talked about having a box full of Barbies. So to them Barbie has come to symbolise excess. Barbies are not special; they are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected…”

While Barbie dolls have long been the target of feminism and gender equity advocates (and even, on some occasions, of vigilantes and mad scientists), Barbie hatred has always previously been seen as an adult phenomenon. Dr.Nairn’s research suggests that Barbie’s pert plastic breasts may also represent more than merely a doll to the children who covet her.

llouison

“As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world,” writes Orhan Pamuk, commenting on the international furore over his recent statements about the contested Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks and Turkey’s subsequent arraignment of Pamuk on charges of having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”

Pamuk sparked the controversy with his comment to a Swiss newspaper in which he claimed that “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” referring to the Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915 during their forced march out of Anatolia.  Pamuk faces trial and up to three years in prison for his statement. Pamuk’s trial was suspending minutes after it was convened on last Friday, on the basis that the Justice Ministry must approve the case before it proceeds further.

Turkish and Armenian historians differ in their accounts of what happened in 1915. It is a fact that Armenians were driven out of eastern Anatolia, their ancestral homeland. It is also a fact that many Armenians died during this forced march out of Anatolia. The unresolved question is whether this incident — what amounted to a death march for the Armenians — was planned and orchestrated by the Ottoman government. The traditional Turkish answer to the Armenian accusations of state-sponsored massacre has been that the Armenians, with the backing of czarist Russia, rebelled against Ottoman rule. The deaths that resulted from the resultant conflict in 1915 must be placed in their appropriate historical context of World War I and the twilight years of the soon-to-be-abolished Ottoman Empire.

Cemil Cicek, Turkey’s Justice Minister, is responding tetchily to the disapprovingly watchful eye of the EU, but he must surely know that there is no faster way to ruin Turkey’s bid to join the European club than imprisoning an internationally acclaimed author for what the EU considers and exercise of his freedom of speech in order to address the issue of state-ordered genocide.

Mimi Hanaoka

Wind sweeps through the desert,
along the sand is chasing a hat,
chased it into a shrub,
an old, black hat.

Where is the head,
which wore the hat?
Was it black, was it fair?
To whom did it belong?

Who was he, disappearing in the desert?
Where was he coming from, and to where was he headed?
What troubled him,
that he walked alone in the desert?

Only blown-over footprints,
an old hat in the shrub.
No one will understand,
no one will find out.

Klobouk v křoví

Vítr vane pouští,
po písku žene klobouk,
zahnal ho do houští,
starý a černý klobouk.

Kdepak je ta hlava,
co ten klobouk nosila,
byla černá či plavá,
komu asi patřila.

Kdo to v poušti zmizel?
Odkud šel a kam?
Jaký to měl asi svízel,
že byl v poušti sám?

Jen zaváté stopy,
starý klobouk ve křoví,
nikdo nic nepochopí,
nikdo se nic nedoví.

About the poem:“Hat in the Shrub” was composed in 1934 by the artistic trio Ježek, Voskovec, and Werich as a theme song for a play performed in their own Osvobozené Divadlo (Liberated Theatre), the most playful and daring cultural institution in the interwar Czechoslovakia.

Listen to the Pražský Hradčanský Orchestra interpreting the song:

Jan Vihan Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was the first book in a series by celebrated British author C.S. Lewis who was stated as saying he never wanted a live-action film made from his fantasy series.  Speed up fifty years when Disney decided the Narnia books would make a great film franchise a la Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books, besides Lewis’ wishes.  In Disney’s defense, Lewis probably would be singing praises with this incarnation of his book since his idea of effects circa 1959 consisted of shooting small spiders and making them look like giant killers.  Visual effects have come a long way, baby, and I’m sure Lewis would be as awed by what the effects wizards were able to put up on the screen as today’s audiences.

It boggles the mind to think of the sheer volume and complexity of the effects that bring animals to life and create new half-breeds such as centaurs, fauns, and other eclectic beings.  It’s amazing just knowing that Aslan, the Lion of the title and central figure of the story, had over twenty layers of fur to make him seem as real as possible and, in my opinion, they achieved that very fete.  In this day when digital effects are used quite frequently in all films, it is interesting to note that an epic film such as Narnia requires many different companies working in tandem to achieve what is needed to bring the story to life.  For instance, Sony Pictures ImageWorks was in charge of animating the beavers and making Mr. Tumnus’ feet that of a goat; Rhythm & Hues Studios created the big battle scenes, and Industrial Light & Magic handled many other elements that when brought together create a whole new world.

A film can have all the greatest effects in the world that razzle and dazzle, but if they don’t service the story, they are all a waste and simply a sideshow.  Fortunately, Narnia is a captivating fantasy that moves one emotionally and entertains the mind.  If it is a movie geared more to kids than King Kong, the other big effects film out now (see my review), so be it for it can be as equally enjoyable for both children and adults.

Narnia could be considered Lord of the Rings: Light as it captures many of the same elements as JRR Tolkien’s (a fellow Oxford cohort of Lewis) trilogy, but it does so purposely in order to tell a story from a real child’s perspective (or, in this case, four siblings’). Thus, the story is more relative to a kid than a view from a totally made-up being such as a Hobbit.  Where Tolkien wanted to take you away to a whole new world, Lewis’ aim was to make you keep one foot back in reality.  He also wrote the Narnia books as half fantasy and half allegory to help teach a spiritual message to children, but Disney, even though they’ve taken advantage of marketing to Christian audiences, has kept this film from being preachy, and the spiritual elements are those that you could claim are in other fantasy films, such as Star Wars.  Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is pure, fun entertainment for the entire family but with none of the cheesiness that comes with many family entertainment films.  It may not spring a cult following like the LOTR tales, but with many more books to base films on, it will certainly be a fun and fantastic world to visit every couple of years.

Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, and Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan, is now appearing nationwide and makes a great holiday treat for the entire family or for all of you with a little kid inside.

Rich Burlingham

The debate over the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act has been heating up over the past several weeks.  Senators are busy making overblown speeches about the nature of America.  Pundits throw factesque invective at each other.  Some, call them the security-minded, think we haven’t done enough.  Others, call them the liberty-minded, claim that increased law enforcement powers are a step too far.  The rhetoric has mostly been about values and principles, and those political conflicts are notoriously difficult to settle.

A better option is to begin with some pragmatic questions.  All can agree that there is some tradeoff between civil liberties and security.  Without taking a principled position, we can ask how much extra security we are getting for the liberties lost.  It’s one thing if the FBI takes library records and ends up preventing New York from getting nuked and quite another if it’s only for harassing teenagers who want to read The Anarchist Cookbook or Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.  For me, that’s where it starts getting personal.

About twenty U.S. citizens and permanent residents who could plausibly be connected to anti-American terrorism have been captured in the last four years.  Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was tortured by the Saudis into confessing that he had some conversations with a now dead man about assassinating Bush.  Some members of the Lackawanna Six seem to have spent a couple weeks at a training camp before finding the whole thing too dirty and distasteful.  Lynne Stewart helped pass some information along for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.  James Ulaama and friends proved their stupidity with discussions of a possible training camp in rural Oregon.  The smart militant would of course go to Montana.  Yasser Hamdi and John Lindh were caught in Afghanistan, Hamid Hayat attended a camp in Pakistan, and Soliman Biheiri provided funds to the suspiciously named Muslim World League.  Jose Padilla has his own story, but we would need to resurrect Foucault for a proper narration.  Finally, Iyman Haris, a man described by his wife as unbalanced, has withdrawn his guilty plea for providing sleeping bags to Al-Qaeda.

That’s four years of the PATRIOT Act and other assorted intrusions on the Constitution.  That’s all.  Even if we make the doubtful assumption that all charges are true, the civil liberties of 290 million Americans are being eroded to catch a few blowhards, poseurs, and garden-variety thugs.  This isn’t the Justice League of America.  New York has not been saved.

Let’s be practical.  We should start the discussion with an agreement that the provisions do not apply to American citizens and permanent residents.  Perhaps more surveillance is appropriate for visa holders, perhaps not.  The FBI should definitely take a second look at shady characters with expired student visas for flight schools.  Regardless, narrowing the scope of the argument would make it a lot easier to resolve.  Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be nearly as good for Senators needing sound bites for the evening news.

Pete DeWan