by Alex Evans | Apr 1, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence
Well, that’s what Jenny McCartney argues in the Sunday Telegraph, anyway. McCartney argues that although stabbings of the kind that have dominated headlines in recent weeks remain extremely rare, there’s still no getting around the fact that “our children lead those of all the industrialised nations, by some distance, in teenage pregnancy, early and unprotected sex, smoking and drinking”, with obesity rapidly emerging as an additional concern.
But, she continues, beyond a shared emphasis on the importance of parental responsibility, Labour and Conservative policy on what to do about all this diverges sharply. Where the Conservatives “appear keen to return direct responsibility for bringing up children to parents, the extended family and the wider community of responsible adults, such as teachers”, Labour has developed proposals for a much more statist approach: a new, computerised ‘Children’s Index’.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 28, 2007 | Conflict and security
Jimmy Carter’s NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski makes a strong critique in the Washington Post of the way the ‘war on terror’ has been framed. He writes:
The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own — and can become demoralizing… We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.
All of which points neatly back to Adam Curtis’s outstanding The Power of Nightmares on BBC2 in 2004: a superb three part documentary discussing the parallels between the neoconservatives and salafi Islamists. Curtis says at the end of the last episode:
This story began over thirty years ago, as the dream that politics could create a better world began to fall apart. Out of that collapse came two groups: the Islamists and the neoconservatives. Looking back, we can now see that these groups were the last political idealists, who in an age of growing disillusion tried to reassert the inspirational power of political vision, and give meaning to people’s lives. But both have failed in their attempts to transform the world and instead, together, they have created today’s strange fantasy of fear, which politicians have seized on: because in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, the fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.
All three episodes are – finally – available on Google Video. Required viewing if you missed it first time around.
