What really happened to JFK and America in Dallas?

Good Easter News

This blog of a weekend--and if you are my one reader who has been following these posts, you'll know this--has a tendency to be somewhat gloomy. So I thought, this Easter weekend that I'd go looking for some news that shows that our descent to economic slowdown and permanent war need not be relentless.

The ineluctable features of the present world crisis remain, of course. The markets will keep falling, and the trillions upon trillions of dollars of funny money, debt and deficits run up by some of the world's most important economies will continue to have an effect. The Balkans will keep smouldering, and hatred will have its run in people's hearts. Climate change and energy deficits will continue.

However, it's not all bad tonight. I note good news from the Vatican to start with. One of Italy's most prominent Muslims, Magdi Allam, has converted to Catholicism. This is his personal decision, and I have no responsibility or wish to convert anyone. Mr Allam is a grown man and there is no echo of any forced conversion or triumphalism such as that that produced the Edgardo Mortara controversy to such bad effect in 1858.

If you are unfamiliar with that debacle, its origins lay in an 'emergency baptism' of a Jewish child (any catholic can baptise anyone in an emergency) which led to the Inquisition sending Papal State Police to Bologna to take the child to Rome. This did not go down well, to put it mildly, with the rest of Europe and the world, especially when Pius IX dug his heels in and declared that he did not care what the world thought.

Mortara himself resisted all calls in later life to resile from Catholicism and became a distinguished missionary under the spiritual name of Pio Maria. He did complain, in the slightly neurotic tones of fin de siecle Catholicism, that attempting to evangelise Jews was a bad idea though, and likely to upset the US Government.

Of much more interest to me is the way Magdi Allam, a subtle and intelligent man, identified hatred of Israel as the root of many of the evils of the Middle East.

It is a given on what describes itself as the 'Left' that Israel is in some way the fons et origo of Middle Eastern problems and that if Israel went away everything would start to resolve. This has always seemed nonsensical to me, given the multiple behaviours and agendas of regimes there, for whom Israel-bashing is quite convenient. For Allam, Israel is near the heart of things, but as he puts it, in this way;

``Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life. And I discovered that behind the origin of the ideology of hatred, violence and death is the discrimination against Israel. Everyone has the right to exist except for the Jewish state and its inhabitants,'' he said. ``Today, Israel is the paradigm of the right to life.''

That quote is lifted from a book Allam wrote in response to one of the Hamas organisation's thousands of death threats, which in this case may have done some good. Here's a link to the backspin website's discussion of Hamas' 'Death Industry'.

Nixon, at the end, had it right. Those who hate you, never beat you, unless you give in to hating. Hating feeds on itself and hatred destroys and rots the soul, even righteous hatred.

So someone can see the point, at least.

The other good news, in its way, is that a Taiwan crisis seems to have been forestalled. For reasons I've gone over again and again, I think that we discount the salience and importance of Taiwan, and of the model of increasing economic integration it offers the People's Republic, at our peril. Tonight, the opposition there won presidential elections. This ought to place a fairly strong roadblock in the path of those who want to use the Tibet crackdown to go on a further nationalist push, and sometimes small obstacles have big consequences.

One third piece of cheery news comes in the form of the state of Pakistan, which my regular reader will know (if the asylum allowed broadband access at Christmas) I follow quite closely. I'm sorry that I didn't post about it in the wake of the elections in February, but I was cheered by the New Statesman article here.

The elections in Pakistan, against all the odds, have brought people to an understanding that law and goodwill are the only way to defeat the sinister elements in the bureaucracy and the madmen in the mountains. As in India, Pakistan's democrats are ceasing to be wholly capable of portrayal as rich sneaky kleptocrats and other classes are getting a pop at leadership rather than an excuse to leave the country.

All good news. There is always hope, after all. I am still convinced that we are now in a descent pattern economically and that our societies are going to be very very sorely tested over the coming twenty years, but I thought I might celebrate the resurrection with some uncharacteristic optimism. Happy Easter everybody!

The picture at the top of this blog is of the 20-metre statue, Christ of the Ozarks, erected near Eureka Springs Arkansas in imitation of the Christ the Redeemer Statue in Brazil. Like everything in Arkansas, there are people who are just embarrassed about it. In this case, the reason is that the old Huey-Long-Share-our-Wealth man behind it, Gerald L.K.Smith was a sort of gumbo Nazi. He helped form the second Union party (the first being the Civil War one of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson in 1864) with the Chicago radio fascist priest Charles Coughlin. It's a nice sort of Lego Jesus to look at though, and reminds me of the Lego testament.