His Excellency Myth

Vanished Polity of the Day: Angelcynn

2006-11-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 1004th anniversary of the St. Brice's Day massacre, when the sadly named Ethelred ("good counsel" in Old English) the Unready ordered the slaughter of every man, woman and child of Danish descent in England. This was, of course, to rid the land of the Danelaw, that strip of Mercia and Northumberland under Scandinavian control. A few Danes were eventually knocked off, including a notable noblewoman, but "what goes around comes around." Angered by the death of his sister Gunhilde, Sweyn I of Denmark launched one of the largest assaults upon the emerald isle in over a century.

The protracted struggle that followed the St. Brice's Day massacre led to the eventual depletion of English strength through the 11th century, allowing in 1066 the arrival of William of Normandy, and the elimination forever of Anglo-Saxon dominion over the land they so shaped.

Vanished Polity of the Day: the Galactic Empire

2006-10-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

With their foreign policy in shreds in the middle east, Bush administration officials are directing attention to another frontier: the final frontier. A new, robust galactic policy will propel American cosmonauts (and strategic interests) into the void.

Critics, however, have already rung alarm bells, with The New York Times pouring icy water on Bush's 'macho' interstellar vision. Where in the past the language of international cooperation governed any discussion of space, nationalist grand strategy looms large in US statements:

In this new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.

Speaking a few years ago, Bush compared the expeditions of American astronauts to the continental trek of the 19th century explorers Lewis and Clark. Their enterprising spirit of discovery, Bush insisted, remains a guiding light for American space adventurers today.

Of course, the exploration of Lewis and Clark paved the way for the boots and wheels of American Manifest Destiny, turning a fledgling coastal nation into a continental empire. Increasingly jingoistic in its tone, the American space strategy does little to dissuade images of galactic imperium.

And we all know what happens to a Galactic Empire. The combined weight of throat-gurgling space bears, midget jungle monkeys, anti-fascist republicanism and Harrison Ford was enough to take its most famous incarnation down. At its peak, the Galactic Empire was a hyper-totalitarian machine, swiftly imposing order and brutal efficiency: a far cry surely from the America of today, which already grapples with overstretch, a tenuously hollow economy and uncertain domestic politics.

Yet the Empire sprung from mundanely republican roots, a federalism gone wrong. Without Chubaka, the rise and fall of the American space project will not be nearly as epic as that of its Galactic counterpart. But it will be hairy.

Vanished Polity of the Day: the Kingdom of Poland

2006-10-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, Poland exists today. But only FOR NOW. History has taught us how it is Poland's wont to drift in and out of the proverbial rubbish bin. The sledded Polacks have unfortunately been smote innumerable times in the last milennia. Who knows how long it will be before historical instinct kicks in, and one of Poland's irrascible neighbours (bad luck to be sandwiched between the Germans and the Russian orbit) decides to ride roughshod over its cities and intelligentsia.

Thus on the 540th anniversary of the Second Treaty of Torun, it seems only fair to remark upon a highlight in Polish history, when it was actually on the winning side of its frequent battles. The Peace of Torun brought to an end the so-called Thirteen Years' War, fought between the erstwhile Kingdom of Poland and the Germanic order of the Teutonic Knights. For over a hundred years, the Poles had been bludgeoning away at the Teutonics over access to the Baltic Sea. When, in 1454, ambitious, mercantile Prussian cities decided to throw off the Teutonic yoke, the ante had been clearly upped.

After another 13 years of bludgeoning and bloodshed, the Prussian Teutonics submitted to the Poles, ceding control of a number of territories and cities to the expanding Polish kingdom (which itself remained, nevertheless, under the titular suzerainty of the Holy Roman emperor).

The Poles shouldn't gloat, however. It seems that everybody esle was too distracted to intervene against them. The late medieval world took a look at east central Europe, and shrugged its shoulders.

Nevertheless, Poland emerged from the rubble as an enlarged and important player on the European stage, which it would remain for a few centuries. Above is the improbable map of its achievements. Yes, that's Poland in the red dress. Looking snazzy.

There goes the neighbourhood...

2006-10-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

The largest real estate deal in American history was agreed this week when Met Life sold its stretch of rent-controlled housing in lower New York City for $5.4 billion. Built for returning WWII-vets, Stuvyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village remained for the rest of the century as one of Manhattan's lower-middle/middle class redoubts. But as property prices in the city continue to skyrocket, their demise - however improbable before - became inevitable. As lamented previously, the eradication of socio-economic diversity in NYC threatens to convert a once lively, bubbling world city into a vaccuous playground for the denizens of finance.

Vanished Polity of the Day: the Pattani kingdom

2006-10-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

Under the rule of its now deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand crept closer to the brink of communal chaos. The restive Muslim Malay south had descended into such a state of unrest that some commentators saw the region as the another front in the eternal war-on-terror.

Yet the coup led by Gen. Sonthi (a Muslim from the south) has gone some way to ease those fears. One hopes that Thailand, with its bottomless reserve of eager-to-please touristic charm, will manage to bridge the difficult divide between the nation and its minority Muslims. Surely, massages were meant to be enjoyed (and conducted) by all citizens, regardless of race or creed.

Today's vanished polity of the day is Pattani, an ethnic Malay kingdom which converted in the 11th century to Islam. Its ongoing struggle with the Thai north ended with defeat at the hands of the kingdom of Ayodhya (named after, of course, the holy Hindu city in India) in the 13th century. Power and domination are in truth ephemeral beasts, and Pattani remained a functional beast under the loose reins of Thai suzerainty. It fought with smaller states to the south for control over the lucrative port of Malacca and its environs, even locking horns with the Portuguese. Yet by the 17th century, the Muslim Malays of those stretches of southeast Asia became vassals of the king of Siam. But the notion of an independent Muslim Malay state north of the isthmus was squelched not only by the Thais but by the British in the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909.

To this day, southern Thailand looks more to the islands and peninsulas of the spice-filled south and west, while the central heartlands gravitate north and west to its monumental cultural inheritance from India.

Vanished Polity of the Day: Byzas' colony

2006-10-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

With the awarding of the Nobel prize for literature to Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul - the writer's true love - has been much in the news. The city's ancient pedigree (coupled with its "layering" of empires, religions and languages) sends the imagination spinning off into dusky, amber-hued la-la land. It's a place of patriarchs and intrigue, incense and incest, pomp, grandeur and decline of universal proportions...

But when did it all begin? Not, as you may be told, with the establishment of Constantinople by the Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD. No, indeed, one must turn back the clock one thousand years to the year 667 BC, when the intrepid Byzas, a Doric Greek from the city of Megara, encouraged other Greeks to settle on the European side of the Bosphorus ("cow-ford" in ancient Greek), thumbing their noses at the Chalcedonians on the other bank. The colony prospered, taking advantage of its useful perch over sea traffic through the straits and land trade in and out of Asia minor. Its name, Byzantium, was taken from its storied founder.

One suspects that the old Byzantium, like its modern-day edition, was a hotbed of cultures. The name Byzas is likely more Thracian in origin than Greek, suggesting that the Aegeans weren't the only people involved in establishing the city. As the Byzantine Empire has long been the pet of Greek nationalist historiography, it wouldn't be surprising if future research shows Byzas' colony to be less Greek than originally supposed.

The town was largely destroyed in 196 AD by the rather severe Roman emperor Septimus Severus. Only in 330 AD, did the Roman emperor Constantine found "Nova Roma," which after his death was renamed Constantinople.

Cheating

2006-10-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

Below are copies of my posts on oD Today, the web-blog kept by the staff and editors of openDemocracy in London, where I am currently in indefinite exile. Though the future postings here won't necessarily mirror the exchanges there, overlap is sure to occur.

City That Never Sleeps®

2006-10-17T06:22:00.000-07:00

In cities, particularly ones as on-the-go as New York, change is the norm. People move out, people move in. Buildings go up, buildings go down. Change defines cities (and no city more so than New York), makes them exciting, offers an escape from the sameness and the doldrums of the hinterland. And change allows for that fuzzy and self-indulgent emotion so common amongst veteran city-dwellers, nostalgia.

Yet it's without any nostalgia that AA Gill savages what he terms the "New New York" in this month's Vanity Fair (currently the home of some of the best writing in the US). The New New York is a vaccuous playground for New New Yorkers, "bankers, fund managers, moneyed elite," who now threaten to make the city seem "like every other grubbily transparent financial hub in the world."

Ever the acerbic outsider, Gill doesn't waste breath on whistful evocations of the past, but ventures directly into the heart of the matter; his is not simply an aesthetic critique, but a curiously sociological cynicism. He gazes at the apartment buildings of the New New York, "the imported bendy-glass-and-steel erections," and wonders

Who's going to live here? Who are the new, insecure, design-anemic rich? "Lifestyle is the way a person distinguishes himself or herself. It is the artistry of living. … Nationality and class have been replaced by lifestyle." Don't take my word for it. That's coming from Ian Schrager, the Buddha of disco, the Confucius of the dirty weekend. Consider that statement: heritage, achievement, geography, and history are all passé. Over. "This is what I did with my nightclubs and hotels and I intend to do with people's homes." Imagine that: coming home and finding a shrieking gay Cuban bouncer with a clipboard on the door; three peroxided trust-fund brats with added silicone bits, all talking at once, locked in the bathroom; and a family from Idaho in town to see The Producers.

As someone who considers himself a New Yorker (and a New Yorker already guilty of nostalgia in his youth ), there is a note within Gill's relentless vitriol that hits home. New York is special for the proximity of differences - between well-off and the less-so, between peoples, professions, accents, languages and so forth - that make collisions an organic part of daily life.

Yet this New York is disappearing. It is being increasingly eroded by a yawning financial disparities that separate most of Manhattan and western Brooklyn from the rest of the city. True, the wealthy parts of the city are emptying themselves of character and distinction in favour of "imported cachet," but they have also never been wealthier, and, similarly, the poorer parts of the city have never been poorer. The wealthiest fifth of New York City earn 52 times (up from 32 times in 1990) as much as the poorest fifth, comparable to income disparities in Namibia. While residents of East Midtown boast an average family income in excess of $800,000, sections of East Harlem earn less than $8,000. Both poverty and wealth are entrenched in New York, and the gulf is widening in both financial and social terms.

What's true for New York is to some extent also true for the world. Globalisation has surely generated wealth and jobs where they were once sorely lacking. Yet the oft-heard refrain that globalisation is also breeding unprecedented income inequality is difficult to ignore. One wonders how different nostalgia for the old New York is from nostalgia for the old Singapore, or old Bombay. Walls are rising in the supposedly flat world; New New York is probably not just an abomination, but a microcosm.

What's in a number?

2006-10-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

What does absolute uncertainty look like? Does it have a shadowy shape, a doubtful smell, a quizzical voice... or perhaps a perplexing number?

Anybody following this week's release of the second Lancet report on Iraqi deaths will know that uncertainty, in fact, has two shadowy and perplexing numbers.

The first is 48,693, the second 943,000. And both represent the same thing!

After shocking the world in 2004 with their estimate of 100,000 Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers and statisticians returned to Iraq to widen and update their study. Their findings paint an image of Iraq steeped in an unprecedented level of blood. Over 650,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a result of the violence and circumstances of war, while the study still allows for a possible toll of nearly a million deaths – 943,000 (the minimum, they suggest, hovers about 400,000).

In this post-communist world, the spirit of enterprising competition rules over all fields, and even body counts must market themselves against one another. The Lancet report's chief competitor, Iraq Body Count (IBC), has remained the body count of record since its inception in 2003, referred to by journalists, policy-wonks and even politicians. Though IBC initially emerged out of the peace movement – to counter US general Tom Franks' curt admission that "we don't do body counts" – its estimate of the maximum number of civilian deaths of 48,693 (as of 12/10/06) has been described as "conservative" even by right-wing US daily The Washington Times.

The fresh Lancet report will add new fuel to the claims of IBC's left-wing critics, who allege that the body count has fallen into the service of the establishment and ceased to reveal anything meaningful about the situation in Iraq. Such criticism – however acerbic and strident – is difficult to refute when even the right-wing doubtfully diagnoses IBC's estimate as "too low". IBC came to fruition in a time when much of the US (and the world) had yet to think seriously about the civilian consequences of the invasion. Times have changed, and perhaps IBC has outlived its moment.

But what to do with these vastly, dastardly different numbers: 48,693 and 943,000?

Some would safely say the truth lies somewhere in between. But it is not. If anything, these figures (and the gulf between them) are a measure of how abstract the Iraq war has become to its outside viewers. Media coverage of ongoing violence in Baghdad has lost all shape, dissolved into the same images: the distant pans from the roofs of the Green Zone, the smoking car, the shattered mosque, raging mobs, crying mothers, children playing football amidst rubble. With journalism a nearly impossible profession in Iraq, real, deep perspectives are scarce for interested observers. The battle of the numbers has much more to do with how outsiders struggle to impose meaning on events in Iraq than Iraq itself. Such numbers and statistics are but the bones of a fleshless corpse.

Japanese nationalism: abominable or trendy?

2006-10-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

The rise to power this week of Shinzo Abe, Japan's new prime minister, has spread ripples of concern through the global press. Abe's commitment to "hawkish conservatism" in shaping a more assertive Japanese foreign policy foreshadows a new dawn for militarism in the Land of the Rising Sun. Once feared for its cars, Japan under Abe threatens to resurrect its bristling guns... or, at least, its samurai brashness. Listen, for instance, to the rumbling in Martin Jacques' column in today's Guardian. Jacques insists that Japan's reluctant apologies and Abe's unrepentant silence on WWII are a recipe for regional fracas:

"The Japanese ruling establishment has long fought shy of coming to terms with the country's role in the war. The most that it has uttered is a formulaic apology that Koizumi again repeated after the anti-Japanese riots in China last year. There has been nothing like the cathartic process that Germany has undertaken since 1945. Abe has even refused to endorse the ritualised apology that was first issued in 1995. It would appear that he sees little or nothing to apologise about.

The argument is not simply about history; it is crucial to Japan's relations with its east Asian neighbours. Japan's aggression in China and Korea remains a huge source of resentment in these countries; its failure to apologise only serving to intensify their sense of grievance. The election of Abe threatens to exacerbate these tensions."

I wonder, though, to what extent this new Japan - as, surely, it has become under the Blair-inspired guidance of Abe's predecessor Junichiro Koizumi - is responsible for its recent bouts of nationalism. What commentators see (and foresee) in Abe's Japan is not really an atavistic turn to the past, but a reflection of the zeitgeist of contemporary geopolitics.

Japan is, in a sense, surrounded by reinvigorated jingoists. Major players in Asia - India, China, South Korea - have all quickened to the nationalist pulse: Hindu chauvinists, chest-thumping capitalists, pro-nuclear activists all sing the praises of an "India Shining;" in east Asia, South Korea and China stake much of their national identity on the wounds of WWII, increasingly defining their nationhoods in opposition to Japan (the Chinese government did little to mitigate the great groundswell of rage in last year's anti-Japanese riots); in southeast Asia, the legacy of "Asian Values" lingers, instilling in its many adherents and spokesmen a sense of cultural and national distinctness. Across the ocean, the Bush administration has played on the symbols and heart-strings of American identity to an unprecedented degree. (And one could add more examples of current burgeoning nationalisms in regions of no direct import to Japan, be it in Central Asia, Spain, and so forth).

The truth is that, despite living in the squish-squashed era of globalisation, the "nation" has taken on added importance for many people (and governments) around the world. It is an undeniable trend of sorts, that though ugly (little good can ever come from modern-day nationalism, which almost always inures regimes in power from criticism), should not be seen as an isolated occurrence, the short-sightedness of one country, one party, or one 52-year-old recently-elected prime minister.

Jacques notes Abe's relative youth (at 52, he is the youngest ever Japanese PM, and the first to be born after The War) in a critical light, as if the lessons of the past are lost on this brash young pup. Perhaps Jacques would extend this criticism to Abe's newly-appointed cabinet, the youngest and most hawkish in recent Japanese history.

A more sensitive reading is required, further questions must be raised: when global power is increasingly fragmented, doesn't a sovereign Japanese state need the vigor and "youthfulness" of Abe's administration to stake its claim on an unsettled global stage? And can we blame it?

The battle of Antwerp: a politics of community or personality?

2006-10-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

In the country known as the home of European politics, local politics have taken centre-stage. This weekend's elections in Belgium saw broad gains for the far-right, anti-immigration party Vlaams Belang (VB) in the Flemish-speaking north. Old industrial towns and rural hamlets in Flanders swept the Vlaams into municipal power at the expense of parties in the ruling centre-left coalition. The nationalist party's gains (up from 14.9% to 20% of council seats in the province) have even forced admissions of gloom from PM Guy Verhofstadt and fuelled fresh reports of the rise of the right in Europe.

Yet VB's failure to make significant headway in Antwerp (Belgium's second city) is being heralded as a victory by its opponents and a product of the efforts of Patrick Janssens, incumbent Antwerp mayor. For the last five years, diverse Antwerp has been buffeted by communal politics and the volatile debate over immigration. VB, which already controlled one-third of the city's municipal council, was poised to strengthen its hold before this weekend's polls as the party (often compared to the Nazis and fascists) even appealed to the city's ancient Jewish community. Janssens, however, had other plans, leading a "rainbow coalition" that succeeded in checking the nationalists' advance; the Socialists overtook VB as the largest party in the city.

With VB slowed in Antwerp, we are told, Belgium's "political class" breathed a haggard sigh of relief. Janssens' success is not, however, a credit to the liberal old guard. What is striking about such results in Antwerp (and throughout Europe in recent years) is the extent to which populism and the cult of personality are jolting politics out of its slumber.

The battle of Antwerp, between the Vlaams and their opponents, was billed as a duel between the iconic Filip Dewinter (VB leader) and Janssens. In his "US-style" campaign, Janssens placed great emphasis on building an image of himself, deemphasising the importance of his party. Just as the VB rest on a platform of anti-immigration, Janssens, in effect, transcended party loyalties in his retaliatory platform of anti-anti-immigration.

Issue-based politics, distance from the petty affinities of established parties, and the magnification of the political individual – these are the symptoms of an undeniable resurgence of European populism.

Such politics definitively surfaced in the meteoric rise of Dutch firebrand Pim Fortuyn and later (albeit less directly) in the two-thirds majority Dutch rejection of the EU constitution. Though outside observers panned the Dutch as myopic for their No-votes, the referendum, in the end, damned not Europe but the bleak political landscape of the Low Country itself, filled as it was with innocuous leaders and stagnating parties. Pim Fortuyn, despite (indeed, as a result of) his prickly views, won popularity in life as a leader of convictions and originality. Even Dutch wary of his bluntness grudgingly admitted that Fortuyn – homosexual, outspoken, dog-walking – added spice, instilling excitement into the political scene. In death, he achieved a political martyrdom barely eclipsed by the slain (and equally cuddly) Theo van Gogh.

Like Dewinter and Janssens' Antwerp, Fortuyn's Rotterdam (a third of which's municipal seats were controlled by his party, just like the VB in Antwerp) was also a heated battleground for the forces of anti-immigration and anti-anti-immigration, and became a flashpoint for all Dutch politics.

It remains unlikely that any party or political campaigner defining itself around a single issue (i.e. immigration) will ever rise to the top of the parliamentary pile. But their impact on the immovable grey ladies of continental politics – Socialists, Christian Democrats, Liberals – is already assured. It will be more than interesting to see how the established parties cope not only with populist "movements" (be it the likes of the VB or Abu Jahjah's Arab European League), but with the populist "impulse".

Battle of the boer(at)s?

2006-10-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

More than paved roads, more than functioning healthcare, more than governmental transparency, every country must have a foundational epic film. As if robust economic growth was not enough, China boasts more than one recent example of this sort of cinema (the acrobatics and endlessly flowing fabric of Zhang Yimou's Hero come to mind). Thailand, too, joined the game with The Legend of Suriyothai, remarkable only for its ensemble of gold-laden, jewel-encrusted elephants. Bollywood's Lagaan, in which Rajhasthani peasants topple the British Raj by playing cricket, fulfilled the Indian desire for national celluloid "grandeur". England and New Zealand now share The Lord of the Rings, which evokes a mythical, primordial past for the former and draws in tourists for the latter. And Mali has an epic worthy of the brand: Souleymane Cisse's austere and beautiful Yeelen. Even places like Scotland (hardly a proper country) have their filmic myths of creation (though it fell to an Australian, Hollywood-based religious fanatic to make Braveheart for the Scots).

Enter Kazakhstan.

Though Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev may be rubbing elbows this week in Washington, another deal has already been struck between the Central Asian state and the US. Hollywood moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein have agreed to distribute Kazakhstan's attempt at the celluloid epic. Nomad has much in common with other epic films: a fragmented people unite under the lead of a lean, charismatic beau, who brings victory over the dusty, snarling invaders, not without saving the native princess, the immaculate (but saucy) essence of nationhood.

But there's a catch. Nomad is not your run-of-the-mill, smash-em-bash-em-save-the-day epic films. Because the film has been made almost entirely with government money. Because the opening and closing words of the film are Nazarbayev's. Because the real enemy of the piece is not the Dzungar tribe that rode so roughshod over the Kazakhs in the 17th and 18th century, but Sacha Baron Cohen, a 21st century comedian causing havoc with a film of his own.

By all standards, the Kazakh government's vigourous repudiation of Cohen's forthcoming Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazkahstan is a bit surprising. One does not recall official foreign ministry protests from Beijing after 55 Days in Peking, or four-page corrective supplements in the NYT and IHT issued by New Delhi after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or even a squeak from Mogadishu (or Baidoa, for that matter) after the release of the Somali-dehumanising Black Hawk Down. Nor have the Romanians responded with a film of their own to rebut stereotypes accumulated over the decades by the arcane Carpathian mountains and its fanged inhabitants.

Nonetheless, the Kazakh regime has chosen to delve into the world of popular culture with the incredibly heavy-handed (if not ham-fisted) gesture of Nomad. It all stinks of that typical authoritarian lack of imagination one associates with despots like Nazarbayev. The film and its surrounding rash of press coverage will serve only to paint the government of Kazakhstan in a more ridiculous light.

But one must feel a little sorry for Kazakhstan -- of all the backward, murky and fictitious eastern European states to litter western popular culture, it had the misfortune of being real.

And one must also question Cohen's persistence with the gag. There was a period in the life of Borat (particularly when Cohen took his character into the American south and uncovered the lively anti-semitism lurking within) in which his comedy approached the genius of Montesquieu's Persian Letters.

But it seems that everyone has forgot about that far better project (that is, using the lense of fictional "foreignness" to expose the absurdities of the familiar), and instead, we are left with two supposedly "competing" images, neither of which have anything really to do with Kazakhstan.

Mes que un joc?

2006-10-17T04:00:00.000-07:00

Please forgive the liberal titling in a language (Catalá) I can't speak, but those in the footballing know, however, will catch the point, and perhaps even the meek pun. The "beautiful game" is certainly més que un joc - more than a game. And in Iberia, where certain football clubs like FC Barcelona aspire to be més que un club, football routinely outsteps the pitch. Last weekend, as the Spanish national team blundered to defeat at the feet of Sweden, the unofficial "national" teams of Catalunya and Euskal Herria (Basque Country) played each other at Barcelona's Camp Nou in their first meeting in 25 years.

The match result (a 2-2 draw) was always secondary to the game's political endeavour. Like the would-be nations they represent, the selecciones Catalunya and Euskadi have long sought autonomy from the Spanish team, aspiring to - at the very least - a system of representation akin to that at work in the UK (where Wales, Scotland and co. play separately from "England" in a number of sports).

Football and politcs leak into each other till they become inseparable. In the boisterous stands, Pasqual Margall, president of the Catalunyan Generalitat, sat side-by-side with the Basque lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe. Nearly sixty thousand Basque and Catalan supporters crowded the stadium, brandishing their respective colours. The message was clear: partisans of the two most strident "sub"-nationalist peoples in the country bit their thumbs at tattered Spanish nationhood, whose representatives had just limped back from humiliation in Stockholm.

The match stoked the ire of Spain's madridistas and rightists, including top-ranking officials in el Partido Popular. The main television channel TVE1 and sports daily Marca refused to even mention the match. Such snubs will likely be interepreted as signs of success in Barcelona and Bilbao; the Castillian establishment is hurting.

Will a push towards separate Catalan and Basque football teams lead to other, more substantive separations? Perhaps. But as some commentators suggest, greater autonomy in football may siphon away nationalist energy and sap, in the long run, aspirations for real political autonomy.

(Image courtesy Gergraphic)

The elephant is actually in the room

2006-10-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

"The aim of our patrol," it seems, is no longer "a question rather droll." Researchers and conservationists have grown increasingly alarmed by the violent behaviour of elephants in recent years. Across Africa and India, incidents of Human-Elephant conflict have increased manifold. This week, for instance, a herd of elephants - grieving the loss of one of their compatriots - mounted nightly raids on villages in the Indian state of Jharkhand. Elephants have killed on average over 50 people a year for the past 12 years in the eastern state of Assam, many through meticulous execution-style gorings. Not only humans but other animals are feeling the pain of elephantine aggro and angst, with rhinoceroses particularly singled out for abuse. The phenomenon of pachyderm violence received mammoth treatment in The New York Times magazine this weekend. As a result of increased poaching, encroachment on their habitat, and environmental change, the article suggests that Colonel Hathi and his ilk are facing "nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture."