The helium-filled Inaugural

Scott Rosenberg on Dubya’s nauseating Inaugural Address:

“Empty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.

The world is a simple place to Bush. For him, ‘the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right’ is one that involves no hard calls. And since America represents freedom and freedom is eternally right, it must still be right even when it locks hundreds of people away for life without trial or it tortures prisoners in a war launched on a lie. We are the forces of freedom; we can admit no wrong because we can do no wrong.”

Sixty years on

Next Wednesday is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Tonight BBC2 screened a memorable film — Auschwitz: a musical memorial in which survivors told of they way they had played to save their lives, and great contemporary musicians played in the ruins of the camp.

In an earlier life, I worked on the New Statesman with Dick Crossman, the celebrated Labour politician, cabinet minister (in Harold Wilson’s government) and diarist and once, during a conversation about the Second World War, he told me an extraordinary story.

Photo from Spartacus Schoolnet

Crossman had served in the Psychological Warfare Department during the war and arrived at one of the death camps just after it had been liberated by the British army. After absorbing the initial shock, Crossman demanded that the commanding officer summon an army Film Unit to record what they were uncovering. The officer protested, arguing that they had much more important, humanitarian, work to do. Why did Crossman want a film crew just then. “Because”, Dick replied, “some day people will deny that this ever happened”.

Teardrops

A window decoration, shot against the evening light.

On this day…

… in 1972, in its Roe vs. Wade decision, the US Supreme Court legalised abortion in the US under certain conditions. Wonder if the judgment will survive Dubya’s second term.

… in 1905, Tsarist police and Cossack troops fired on 150,000 unarmed demonstrators who had assembled to petition the Tsar outside the Winter palace in St. Petersburg. Over a hundred demonstrators were killed and several hundred wounded.