Zero Dark Thirty -The normalisation of torture

When Maya, the film's heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, "If you don't talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel". Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms. Much more ominous is her partner, a young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken (lighting his cigarette and sharing jokes). There is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat. This is normalisation at its purest and most efficient – there is a little unease, more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, but the job has to be done. This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty.

DNA. The Future of Data

One night a few years ago, two biologists sat in a bar in Hamburg, discussing DNA. Ewan Birney, the associate director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, and Nick Goldman, a research scientist there, were wondering how to handle the tsunami of data flooding the institute, whose job it is to maintain databases of DNA sequences, protein structures, and other biological information that scientists turn up in their research—databases that are growing exponentially, thanks mostly to dropping costs and increased automation. The maintenance of all this data on hard drives was pressing their budget to the breaking point.

Being genomicists, they joked that DNA, which is incredibly compact, sturdy, and of course has a rather lengthy history of storing data, would be a better way to go. Joking, however, gave way to fevered napkin-scribbling, and soon, recalls Goldman, “We had to order another beer, and call for more napkins to write on.”

Three years later, the results of that bar stool inspiration have been published in Nature.

Leonard Cohen -part wolf, part angel

"Everyone here is fucked up and desperate,
That’s why they’re here. 
You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate."

"living in England is like living in a cabbage," Cohen gets to talking of Cuba, and the time, just after the revolution, when he was walking along the beach in his Canadian Army khaki shorts with his camping knife, imagining himself the only North American on the island, and got arrested as the first member of an invading force.

"So anyway, there I was, on the beach in Varadero, speculating on my destiny, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by sixteen soldiers with guns. They arrested me, and the only words I knew at the time were ‘Amistad de pueblo.’ So I kept saying, ‘Amigo! Amistad de pueblo!’ and finally they started greeting me. And they gave me a necklace of shells and a necklace of bullets and everything was great." 

An angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm

Cruelty has always been as disconcerting a part of his package as perversity.

 "I can’t stand who I am."

Leonard Cohen has always seemed, or tried, to inhabit a higher zone of sorts, and his parable-like songs, his alchemical symbols, and his constant harking back to Abraham and David and Isaac only compound the stakes. In trying to marry Babylon with Bethlehem, in reading women’s bodies with the obsessiveness of a biblical scholar, in giving North America a raffish tilt so that he’s always been closer to Jacques Brel or Georges Mousstaki than to Bob Dylan, he’s been trying, over and over, to find ceremony without sanctimony and discipline without dogma. Where else should he be, where else could he be, than a military-style ritualized training that allows him to put Old Testament words to a country-and-western beat and write songs that sound like first-person laments written by God?

"I feel," says Cohen, "we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood, a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior—at this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. And this Flood is of such enormous and biblical proportions that I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad." Of course, he can’t explain what he’s doing here. "I don’t think anybody really knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, ‘Where are you going—in the deepest sense of the word?’ you can’t really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of ‘What else would I be doing?’ Do I want to be Frank Sinatra, who’s really great, and do I want to have great retrospectives of my work? I’m not really interested in being the oldest folksinger around. "Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Well, I hated it when it was going on"—signs of the snarl beneath the chuckle—"so maybe I would feel better about it now. But I don’t think so.

“This is the only poem” from The Energy of Slaves by Leonard Cohen

I didn’t kill myself 
when things went wrong 
I didn’t turn 
to drugs or teaching 
I tried to sleep 
but when I couldn’t sleep 
I learned to write 
I learned to write 
what might be read 
on nights like this 
by one like me

Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Fails

The Hurt Locker’s story offered a microcosm of war that did not try too hard to address the larger subject of the tragic invasion of Iraq, and so a viewer had no cause to compare the film’s choices to a record of historical fact.

Zero Dark Thirty has the inverse shape: it is an epic history that the filmmakers try to compress into a microcosm, by telling the story of the decade-long bin Laden hunt, which involved many hundreds of CIA officers and military personnel, primarily through the experience of a single analyst, “Maya,” who is played by Jessica Chastain, and who is based on a real-life CIA employee whom Boal reportedly met. In the film, the personal story of Maya’s pursuit of bin Laden—which is original and convincing—is juxtaposed against explosive external events, such as the terrorist attack in London on July 7, 2005, and the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2008. As much as the filmmakers’ claims to journalistic method, this narrative approach—the summoning of recent, dramatic public events—invites the viewer into judgment about the film’s reliability.

The first problem in assessing Zero Dark Thirty’s fealty to the facts about torture is that most of the record about the CIA’s interrogation program remains secret, including the formally sanctioned use of waterboarding and other brutal techniques between roughly 2002 and 2006. So does the full record of theCIA’s search for bin Laden after September 11. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, as well as work by investigative journalists such as Dana Priest of The Washington Post, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Mark Danner in this journal, and Adam Goldman of the Associated Press, have brought forward some details about the CIA’s interrogation program. Yet the record remains riddled with gaps and unanswered questions.

Cornel West

Cornel West explains why it bothers him that Obama will be taking the oath with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s bible

Michael Haneke: There's no easy way to say this…

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning film Amour will strike some as brutal, as its elderly characters grapple with the indignities of ageing. The director proves a challenging subject to interview as he evades and obstructs – much like his films.
Michael Haneke likes to say that his films are easier to make than to watch. Cast and crew have fun, but he expects his audience to be disturbed, affronted, even sickened. "On the set I make jokes," he said when we met in Paris to discuss Amour, which deservedly won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. "I can't get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light."

Amour -Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or

The title is a challenge: not ironic, not celebratory, and yet somehow not complicated either. "Love" is boiled down to something elemental, something like survival, or perhaps the exact opposite, though calling it L'Amourmight have been to risk a pun. This is Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or winner and shows the director as a film-maker of incomparable seriousness and weight, and this is a passionate, painful, intimate drama to be compared with Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

La CIA: conexión Hollywood

“Al llegar vimos unos apaches”, asegura el oficial novato. A lo que John Wayne responde: “Si los vio, señor, no eran apaches”. Este famoso diálogo de Fort Apache resume la obsesión por el enemigo escondido, acechante y letal, ya sean indios, infiltrados comunistas como en la época de la Guerra Fría o terroristas islamistas, que ha marcado la visión de la seguridad de Estados Unidos y que ha sido trasladada tantas veces al cine. Tampoco es una casualidad que la operación para matar a Osama Bin Laden llevase el nombre del más famoso caudillo apache: Jerónimo.

La CIA y el espionaje siempre han formado parte de la cultura estadounidense pero este año, como ha quedado claro en los Globos de Oro que se entregaron la semana pasada, la pasión por la agencia ha superado todos los límites. Dos de los filmes de la temporada, Argo y La noche más oscura, la minuciosa reconstrucción de la caza y captura de Bin Laden, tratan directamente de la organización (y de Oriente Próximo, otra obsesión del cine político) y una de las series que más galardones recogió es Homeland, que va de los mismos temas pero desde la ficción. A diferencia del Reino Unido, donde los servicios secretos tienen una sólida tradición literaria que va desde clásicos como Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Lawrence Durrell o William Boyd, además de John Le Carré, claro, en Estados Unidos el espionaje tiene una tradición mucho más popular, está mucho más cerca de Jason Bourne que de George Smiley, hay mucho más cine que grandes obras literarias, con dos excepciones: El fantasma de Harlot (Anagrama), el novelón que Norman Mailer dejó inacabado en el que relata la historia reciente de Estados Unidos a través de la CIA, y La compañía (Paidós),de Robert Littell, otra rotunda y estupenda novela sobre el mismo tema. De hecho, El buen pastor, la película de Robert de Niro sobre el nacimiento de la CIA, fue escrita por Eric Roth cuando desistió en su imposible adaptación de El fantasma de Harlot.

Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’

A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between, Michael Haneke’s “Amour” takes a long, hard, tender look at an elderly French couple, Georges and Anne — played by two titans of French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva — in their final days. Set in contemporary Paris, it begins with the couple’s front door being breached by a group of firemen. One moves through the rooms, delicately raising a hand to his nose before throwing open several large windows. He may be trying to erase the smell that probably brought the firemen there in the first place and which has transformed this light, graceful, enviable apartment into a crypt.

Django Unchained -slavery western

Foxx plays Django, a slave in 1858, who on being transported through Texas in the bitter winter cold, has a fateful encounter with the extraordinary Dr King Schultz, a mysterious German former dentist played by Christoph Waltz with dapper and dainty eccentricity and smilingly faultless English. Django's new friend gives him a taste of freedom, but is astonished to learn of his connection with a fellow slave, a beautiful woman named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington); it is a mis-hearing of the name "Brünnhilde" given by her German masters. She is being held at the plantation Candieland in Mississippi, owned by the revolting racist and sadist Calvin Candie, unforgettably played byLeonardo DiCaprio. Somehow, and with Schultz's help, Django must get her out. His soul will never be unchained until he sets his love free and takes a terrible revenge on her oppressor.

Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’

The mythology of the frontier, from colonial times to the eve of the Civil War.
When you wipe away the blood and the anarchic humor, what you see in “Django Unchained” is moral disgust with slavery, instinctive sympathy for the underdog and an affirmation (in the relationship between Django and Schultz) of what used to be called brotherhood.

Democracy controlled by millionaires and billionaires

As Billion-Dollar Democracy shows, 32 multi-million dollar gifts outweighed the collective voice of 3.7 million individuals who gave individual and transparent campaign contributions to the candidate of their choice. Moreover, most did so under a veil of secrecy using shadow non-profit groups and shell corporations created specifically to launder political giving by masking the identities of financial sources.

“When a tiny group of wealthy donors fuels political campaigns, they get to set the agenda in Washington, and the rest of us are left to argue over that agenda.”

Quinoa, asparagus, North-South exchange

The quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there. It's beginning to look like a cautionary tale of how a focus on exporting premium foods can damage the producer country's food security. Feeding our apparently insatiable 365-day-a-year hunger for this luxury vegetable, Peru has also cornered the world market in asparagus. Result? In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable has depleted the water resources on which local people depend. NGOs report that asparagus labourers toil in sub-standard conditions and cannot afford to feed their children while fat cat exporters and foreign supermarkets cream off the profits. That's the pedigree of all those bunches of pricy spears on supermarket shelves.

Cornel West & the Occupy Wall Street Debate

The U.S. plutocracy and oligarchy.  The U.S. -the richest nation in the history of the world.  
Corporate criminality, jails and prisons.  Arbitrary rule of power.

Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change?

Saudi women are subjected to “virtual slavery, in which wives and daughters can be physically, psychologically, and sexually abused at the whim of male family members, who are protected by an all-male criminal system and judiciary.”

The Al Saud did not consolidate power until the third decade of the twentieth century; and important parts of Saudi society were highly developed (and not necessarily under Wahhabi control) at the time oil was discovered. In the Hijaz region on the western coast, there was a tradition of civil association going back for centuries. Before the Saudi conquest, the cosmopolitan Red Sea port of Jeddah had sizable populations of Indians and Europeans who together with powerful local merchants traded in spices and other goods; and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina had large corporations that drew revenues from Hajj services. In the 1920s and 1930s, these and other cities in the Hijaz had political parties, elected councils, and a flourishing press.

For its part, Aramco was far from a benign instrument of enlightened development, as the political scientist and historian Robert Vitalis has shown in devastating detail.⁴ Brutally exploiting the local population, it produced a workers’ movement in the 1940s and 1950s that at moments threatened to destabilize the country. Indeed, in the early years of oil, the structure of the monarchy itself was open to debate: at the beginning of the 1960s, King Saud, who had succeeded Abdul Aziz in 1953, briefly installed a reform cabinet that included several commoners and set out to establish some form of representative government.

Ahmed Mater/Athr Gallery, Jeddah

The Saudi artist Ahmed Mater’s Evolution of Man, 2010. Born in 1979 and trained as a doctor, Mater has said that artists must ‘reflect what’s happening around them. Not...what people already know.’

The reasons Saudi Arabia became the authoritarian US client state we know today—rather than the more pluralistic society this early experience might have foretold—is the subject of Sarah Yizraeli’s revelatory new study, Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia: The Crucial Years of Development, 1960–1982. A senior research fellow and Arabist at Tel Aviv University, Yizraeli has managed to penetrate Saudi society from afar in ways that have eluded journalists and scholars with more direct access. Although she is apparently barred from entering Saudi Arabia as an Israeli citizen, she has long had a following among specialists for her mastery of obscure Saudi and international source material. Significantly, she focuses not on the much-studied decades since 1979, during which an Islamist awakening pushed the regime to reassert its Wahhabi credentials and impose sweeping restrictions on cultural life, but on the largely neglected preceding era.

Intricate in its accumulation of detail and nuance, the story Yizraeli tells is nevertheless stark in its conclusions. During the 1960s and 1970s, exploiting its unprecedented oil wealth, Saudi Arabia was able to build with great speed a technologically advanced, economically self-sufficient welfare state. Far from a project driven by the US and Aramco, however, this radical transformation was masterminded by the royal family itself (above all by King Faisal, who after a power struggle succeeded Saud in 1964) and expressly designed to strengthen its rule and neutralize any pressure for political reform.

Described by Yizraeli as “defensive change,” this strategy involved creating a vast central administration that could co-opt competing factions of society even as it broke down traditional tribal loyalties. Crucial to the state were the assertion of the monarchy’s Islamic roots and the consequent need to separate economic development from political and religious institutions, which could not be tampered with; and the embrace of an ideal of broad consensus that served to isolate and marginalize proponents of more radical reforms.

Equally provocative is Yizraeli’s careful dissection of US policy beginning in the 1960s. Up to the early years of the Johnson administration, she observes, the State Department assumed that economic and social development was supposed to produce representative government, and put constant pressure on the Al Saud to open up the political system. “So consistently did the American Ambassadors to Saudi Arabia…highlight the issue of political and social reform,” Yizraeli writes, that at a meeting with then US Ambassador Hermann Eilts, Faisal “once responded by exclaiming: ‘Does the US want Saudi Arabia to become another Berkeley campus?’” But all this came to an abrupt end in the mid-1960s, when Washington began to take a paramount interest in curbing the spread of Nasserism and promoting the US-led industrialization that Faisal championed: “Stop pushing the Saudis on internal reform,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised Eilts, “the king knows what is in his own best interest.”

Thus King Faisal, the robust defender of Al Saud absolutism who by the early 1970s had thousands of political prisoners in his jails, quickly became seen in Washington as the ruler who “modernized the kingdom.” In effect, the US endorsed a state-building strategy that brought American companies such as Chevron, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin billions of dollars of contracts and investments while giving the monarchy and the religious establishment an ever-growing hold on Saudi society. This was a fateful decision. It fostered years of disregard for human rights and an abysmal record of stirring up violent jihadism, and both continue to this day.

Restorative justice

Baliga was born and raised in Shippensburg, Pa., the youngest child of Indian immigrants. From as far back as Baliga can remember, she was sexually abused by her father. In her early teens, Baliga started dying her hair blue and cutting herself. She thought she hated herself because of her outcast status in her community, in which she was one of the few nonwhite children in her school. But then, at age 14, two years before her father died of a heart attack, she fully realized the cause of her misery: what her father had been doing was terribly wrong.

Despite the torments of her childhood, Baliga excelled in school. As an undergraduate at Harvard-Radcliffe, she was fairly certain she wanted to become a prosecutor and lock up child molesters. After college, she moved to New York and worked with battered women. When her boyfriend won a fellowship to start a school in Mumbai, she decided to follow him while waiting to hear if she had been accepted at law school.

Baliga had been in therapy in New York, but while in India she had what she calls “a total breakdown.” She remembers thinking, Oh, my God, I’ve got to fix myself before I start law school. She decided to take a train to Dharamsala, the Himalayan city that is home to a large Tibetan exile community. There she heard Tibetans recount “horrific stories of losing their loved ones as they were trying to escape the invading Chinese Army,” she told me. “Women getting raped, children made to kill their parents — unbelievably awful stuff. And I would ask them, ‘How are you even standing, let alone smiling?’ And everybody would say, ‘Forgiveness.’ And they’re like, ‘What are you so angry about?’ And I told them, and they’d say, ‘That’s actually pretty crazy.’ ” The family that operated the guesthouse where Baliga was staying told her that people often wrote to the Dalai Lama for advice and suggested she try it. Baliga wrote something like: “Anger is killing me, but it motivates my work. How do you work on behalf of oppressed and abused people without anger as the motivating force?”

She dropped the letter off at a booth by the front gate to the Dalai Lama’s compound and was told to come back in a week or so. When she did, instead of getting a letter, Baliga was invited to meet with the Dalai Lama, the winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, privately, for an hour.

He gave her two pieces of advice. The first was to meditate. She said she could do that. The second, she says, was “to align myself with my enemy; to consider opening my heart to them. I laughed out loud. I’m like: ‘I’m going to law school to lock those guys up! I’m not aligning myself with anybody.’ He pats me on the knee and says, ‘O.K., just meditate.’ ”

Baliga returned to the United States and signed up for an intensive 10-day meditation course. On the final day, she had a spontaneous experience, not unlike Andy Grosmaire’s at his daughter’s deathbed, of total forgiveness of her father. Sitting cross-legged on an easy chair in her home in Berkeley, Calif., last winter, she described the experience as a “complete relinquishment of anger, hatred and the desire for retribution and revenge.”

After law school at the University of Pennsylvania, Baliga clerked for a federal judge in Vermont. “That’s when I first saw restorative justice in action,” she says. The second part of the Dalai Lama’s prescription would be fulfilled after all.

Albert O. Hirschman -Saber escuchar

"Muchas culturas -incluidas casi todas las latinoamericanas que conozco- valoran mucho el tener opiniones fuertes y preconcebidas sobre casi cualquier cosa, y en ganar las discusiones; en cambio, no valoran el acto de escuchar. Si lo hicieran, descubrirían que, en ocasiones, uno puede aprender algo de los demás. En este sentido, las culturas latinoamericanas están predispuestas a la política autoritaria, no a la democrática".