FROM SALON: A Different Take;
Paris isn't free -- and neither are we

Paris Hilton's strange celebrity hits a new nadir after Friday's chaotic perp walk. Will we ever be free from her now?
By Heather Havrilesky and Rebecca Traister
Jun. 09, 2007 Resistance is futile. You can avert your eyes, cover your ears, change the channel and close your browser, but you can't escape the truth: Paris Hilton has become an omnipresent cultural icon, a symbol of the depravity of our times, and thanks to Friday's sobbing, O.J.-level arrest spectacle, she's destined to remain at the forefront of that rushing flow of global news until we're all old and gray.
Earlier this week, though, there was a glimmer of hope: As Hilton began her 23-day stint in a Los Angeles jail (a sentence that had already been reduced by half), a nation joined hands and solemnly prayed that prison might be the one thing that could convince Hilton to put away the party dresses, close the cellphone, retire the baby-doll voice, put down the apple martini and go home. Together, we dared to dream that the dark realities of life in the big house would teach Hilton, once and for all, not only that drinking while driving isn't just bad publicity, it's a crime that endangers innocent people, but that we're tired of her face, and we want her to finally have the good taste to do what so many criminals and porn stars and flashers have done before, once they've had their comeuppance: disappear. Surely, Paris Hilton had the money and the resources and the good sense, at long sweet last, to finally make herself scarce!
So when the news came out on Thursday that Hilton was released from jail and sent home with a house-arrest ankle bracelet, after just three days, due to an unspecified "medical condition" that many have speculated is her deteriorating emotional and mental state, a great cry of protest rose up from the land. Why?! When our prisons are filled with men and women serving time for their crimes, why should one pretty young heiress walk free?
A member of the prison's medical team told the New York Post that Paris was let go because she was on the verge of losing it: "She was crying a lot ... She's in lockdown for 23 hours. She was depressed." Ah, yes. As opposed to the rest of those in our nation's prisons.
From that point on, even the least interested among us, who had averted our eyes and begged the universe to spare us the latest details of Paris' incarceration, couldn't help perusing the gory details: OK! magazine reported that Paris, upon release yesterday, began planning a major house party for last night. A friend of Hilton's (who told OK! about the party) allegedly said, "Paris has had an awful five days in prison ... She wants to see her friends and have fun. She's been punished enough already."
A fellow inmate reported that Paris cried continuously in prison, and was repeatedly pressing her "medical alert" button, summoning guards. The inmate also claimed that Paris was eating officer-level food, not regular mess. Paris' parents reportedly planned to visit her in the slammer this weekend, but her aunt Francesca Hilton told Us Weekly that "now, we will have to have a party" instead.
But television-viewing, tabloid-consuming proles weren't the only ones recoiling at these latest developments. Judge Michael T. Sauer, who originally sentenced Hilton to prison and specifically noted that she should not be allowed work furlough, work release, house arrest or other fame-based dispensations, was apparently angered by the news of her return home. By Thursday night, he'd called for a hearing Friday morning. And when he heard that Hilton had arranged to attend the hearing via teleconference, the judge ordered the sheriff's department to pick her up.
Which brings us to another media spectacle, perhaps the finest hour of Hilton's "poor little rich girl" performance yet: Friday afternoon helicopter footage shot Hilton being led, in handcuffs, to a police car, while paparazzi snapped photos of her in the back seat, sobbing. "This has got to be one of the worst, if not the worst day, of Paris Hilton's life," the anchor of Headline News intoned, while trial attorney B.J. Bernstein reminded us, over and over, that Hilton was just the unfair victim of a power struggle between a judge and a sheriff.
And once Hilton's hearing was over and she was returned to jail, the news was even more grim. "Paris Hilton left the courtroom in tears, screaming for her mother," a Headline News anchor told us, solemnly. "It was not a pretty sight."
Even after years of watching Hilton direct the media like her own obedient little phalanx of winged monkeys, it would take a coldhearted cynic to doubt that Hilton was experiencing real pain and anguish upon returning to prison. At the very least, we were witnessing a coddled child having a severe allergic reaction to the real world. Hilton could certainly be losing her doughnuts in a medically authentic way, since by all appearances, she's never been punished, never been forced to eat anything she doesn't like, never had to sleep anywhere uncomfortable or wear anything unflattering. While the rest of us are more than passingly familiar with deprivations and things not going our way, Hilton could actually blow a fuse from what would look, to an outsider, like a mildly unpleasant experience. That pea under a stack of mattresses might not bruise you. but you don't sleep on 5 million thread-count sheets, now, do you?
And when you consider the fact that she's protected by relatives who talk openly to the press about throwing a party to celebrate their insipid child being released from prison early after having driven drunk? It makes simple sense to assume that not only is she unapologetic for her crime, she's absolutely indignant about her punishment. The Associated Press reported that, "As Ms. Hilton was led away to await her trip back to jail, she turned to her parents and said, 'It's not right!'" You almost have to feel empathy for the girl, dragged off to endure flavorless food and sleepless nights on scratchy sheets, all the while fancying herself a pretty blond Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Let's just pray that those bad prison sheets scratch her tender white ass enough to get her out of our faces for good. Because we certainly didn't ask for this, either. No matter how the talking heads and pundits have tried to convince us that Paris is a reflection of our shallowness and stupidity as a culture, most of us have never wanted her to be a symbol of anything. Is the crotch flash an act of subversion, in which Hilton channels the paparazzi to put her image on every cover, from tabloids to respected newspapers alike? Is Hilton, like her understudies Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, just a frightened child, overwhelmed and intoxicated by all of the attention the media gives her?
We don't care anymore. And now she's become a symbol of something that bestrides her like a colossus, the inherent inequality and corruptibility of the criminal justice system -- which only means that the insanity will never, ever end. Paris Hilton's image will appear everywhere, across the globe, her every word will be broadcast to millions, this person who never did anything, who never had a marketable skill or talent to show for any of it, and who's never, in her short life, had a single interesting thing to say.
Even pointing that out has become hopelessly clichéd, infinitely repeated, until no one remembers what's real and what isn't. The most outraged protest will only melt into a hopeless morass of punditry and reactionary pronouncements, floating into the digital abyss with the rest of the pop cultural detritus: a TMZ headline, a mug shot from the Smoking Gun, a pilfered phone list, a nasty exchange transcribed for Gawker.
We are powerless. All we can do is pray that one day, Paris Hilton will show mercy on us all, and go away.
-- By Heather Havrilesky and Rebecca Traister

Remarks of former U.S. President Bill Clinton
Harvard College Class Day 2007, Harvard Yard
Thank you very much, Samantha, Stephanie, Chris, all the marshals, all the student speakers. Thanks for the gags and the jokes, and you know, when I got invited to do this, it was humbling in some ways. They asked Bill Gates to be the Commencement speaker. He's got more money than I do [LAUGHTER] and he went to Harvard. And I brought my friend Glenn Hutchins here with me, who's at his 30th reunion and he had something to do with overseeing the endowment and he explained that Gates was really, really, really rich and I was just rich [LAUGHTER]. And then I thought, well, the students asked me and that's good and besides, I don't have to wear a robe.
But I couldn’t figure out why on what is supposed to be a festive and informal day, you would pick a gray-haired 60-year-old to speak.
Following the great tradition of Al Franken, Will Ferrell [LAUGHTER], Borat or Ali G or whoever he was that day [LAUGHTER]. Conan O'Brien, that Family Guy person. What a tradition. So I did like Talladega Nights, however. Then I was reading all I could find out about the class and I thought well, they don't have any fun today. They already had fun. They had this class-wide Risk tournament around exam time [LAUGHTER]. And I understood when I heard the followership speech, I understood why you had that. Now you can all run for president. You played Risk. It's an eight-year Risk tournament. Then I thought well, maybe it's because you're about to name Drew Faust your next president, and I think women should run everything now [LAUGHTER]. And then I figure maybe it's just because Robin Williams and Billy Crystal turned you down [LAUGHTER]. But for whatever reason, we're here and I have had a really good time [LAUGHTER].
You've already heard most of what you need to hear today, I think. But I want to focus for a minute on the fact that these graduating classes since 1968 have invited a few non-comedians. First was Martin Luther King [APPLAUSE], who was killed in April before. I remember that very well because it was my senior year at Georgetown. He was killed in April, before he could come and give the speech. And Coretta came and gave the speech for him here. And you’ve had Mother Teresa and you've had Bono. What do they all have in common? They are symbols of our common humanity and a rebuke even to humorists' cynicism. Martin Luther King basically said he lived the way he did because we were all caught in what he called an inescapable web of mutuality. Nelson Mandela, the world's greatest living example of that, I believe, comes from a tribe in South Africa, the Xhosa, who call it ubuntu. In English, I am because you are. That led Mother Teresa from Albania to spend her life with the poorest people on earth in Calcutta. It led Bono from his rock stage to worry about innocent babies dying of AIDS, and poor people with good minds who never got a chance to follow their dreams. This is a really fascinating time to be a college senior. I was looking at all of you, wishing I could start over again and thinking I'd let you be president if you let me be 21 [LAUGHTER].
I'd take a chance on making it all over again if I could do it again. But I think, just think what an exciting time it is. All this explosion of knowledge. Just in the last couple of weeks before I came here, I read that thanks to the sequencing of the human genome, the ongoing research has identified two markers which seem to be high predictors of diabetes, which, as you heard, is a very important thing to me because it's now predicted that one in three children born in the United States in this decade will develop diabetes. We run the risk that we could be raising a first generation of kids to live shorter lives than their parents. Not because we're hungry, but because we don't eat the right things and we don't exercise. But this is a big deal. Then right after that, I saw that through our powerful telescopes we have identified a planet orbiting one of the hundred stars closest to our solar system, that appears to have the atmospheric conditions so similar to ours that life could actually be possible there. Alas, even though it's close to us in terms of the great universe, it's still 20 million light-years away. Unreachable in the lifetime of any young person. So unless there's a budding astrophysicist in the class that wants to get married in a hurry and then commit three generations and take another couple with him, we'll have to wait for them to come to us. It's an exciting time.
It's also exciting because of all the diversity. If you look around this audience, I was thinking, I wonder how different this crowd would have looked if someone like me had been giving this speech 30 years ago. And how much more interesting it is for all of us.
It’s a frustrating time, because for all the opportunity, there’s a lot of inequality. There’s a lot of insecurity and there’s a lot of instability and unsustainability. Half the world’s people still live on less than two bucks a day. A billion on less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry tonight. A billion people won’t get a clean glass of water today or any day in their lives. One in four of all the people who die this year will die from AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to dirty water. Nobody in America dies of any of that except people whose AIDS medicine doesn’t work anymore, or people who decline to follow the prescribed regime.
In the United States in the last decade, we have had six years of economic growth, an all-time high in the stock market, a 40-year high in corporate profits. Workers are doing better every year with productivity, but median wages are stagnant. And there’s actually been in all this so-called recovery a 4 percent increase in the percentage of people working full-time falling below the poverty line, and a 4 percent increase in the percentage of people working, who with their families, have lost their health insurance. It’s an unequal time. It’s an uncertain, insecure time because we’re all vulnerable to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to global pandemics like avian influenza. We all make fun of the modern media and culture all the time, but I thought it was interesting in my little house in Chappaqua, where I stay home alone rooting for the candidate [LAUGHTER], I watch the evening news in the last few months, and it’s interesting. Somehow, clawing its way through the stories of the latest crime endeavor in our neighborhood and whether Britney Spears’ hair has grown out or not, I have learned that there were chickens in Romania, India and Indonesia identified with avian influenza and that every chicken within three square miles, those unfortunate ones, was eradicated. On the evening news, competing with Britney Spears and crime. Why? That’s a good thing because of the shared insecurity we feel. You all saw it this week in all of the stories about the terrorist attack being thwarted in Kennedy airport.
Now remember a few months ago, everybody I knew was shaking their head when we found out that there was a plot in London to put explosive chemicals in a baby bottle to make it look like formula to evade the airport inspection. And every time I ask somebody, I said did you feel a chill go up and down your spine, they said yeah, they did. Because they can imagine being on the airplane, or in my case, I could imagine my daughter, who has to travel a lot on her job, being on the airplane. But here’s what I want to tell you about that. The inequality is fixable and the insecurity is manageable. We’re going to really have to go some in the 21st century to see political violence claim as many innocent lives as it did in the 20th century. Keep in mind you had what, 12 million people killed in World War I, somewhere between 15 and 20 million in World War II, six million in the Holocaust, six million Jews, three million others. Twenty million in the political purges in the former Soviet Union between the two world wars and one afterward. Two million in Cambodia alone. Millions in tribal wars in Africa. An untold but large number in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I mean, we’re going to have to really get after it, if you expect your generation to claim as many innocents from political violence as was claimed in the 20th century. The difference is you think it could be you this time. Because of the interdependence of the world. So yes, it’s insecure but it’s manageable.
It’s also an unsustainable world because of climate change, resource depletion, and the fact that between now and 2050, the world’s supposed to grow from six and a half to nine billion people, with most of the growth in the countries least able to handle it, under today’s conditions, never mind those. That’s all fixable, too. So is climate change a problem? Is resource depletion a problem? Is poverty and the fact that 130 million kids never go to school and all this disease that I work on a problem? You bet it is. But I believe the most important problem is the way people think about it and each other, and themselves. The world is awash today in political, religious, almost psychological conflicts, which require us to divide up and demonize people who aren’t us. And every one of them in one way or the other is premised on a very simple idea. That our differences are more important than our common humanity. I would argue that Mother Teresa was asked here, Bono was asked here, and Martin Luther King was asked here because this class believed that they were people who thought our common humanity was more important than our differences [APPLAUSE].
So with this Harvard degree and your incredible minds and your spirits that I’ve gotten a little sense of today, this gives you virtually limitless possibilities. But you have to decide how to think about all this and what to do with your own life in terms of what you really think. I hope that you will share Martin Luther King’s dream, embrace Mandela’s spirit of reconciliation, support Bono’s concern for the poor and follow Mother Teresa’s life into some active service. Ordinary people have more power to do public good than ever before because of the rise of non-governmental organizations, because of the global media culture, because of the Internet, which gives people of modest means the power, if they all agree, to change the world. When former President Bush and I were asked to work on the tsunami, before we did the Katrina work, Americans, many of whom could not find the Maldives or Sri Lanka on a map, gave $1.2 billion to tsunami aid. Thirty percent of our households gave. Half of them gave over the Internet, which means you don’t even have to be rich to change the world if enough people agree with you. But we have to do this. Citizen service is a tradition in our country about as old as Harvard, and certainly older than the government.
Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia 40 years before the Constitution was ratified. When de Tocqueville came here in 1835, he talked among other things about how he was amazed that Americans just were always willing to step up and do something, not wait for someone else to do it. Now we have in America a 1,010,000 non-governmental groups. Not counting 355,000 religious groups, most of whom are involved in some sort of work to help other people. India has a million registered, over a half a million active. China has 280,000 registered and twice that many not registered because they don’t want to be confined. Russia has 400,000, so many that President Putin is trying to restrict them. I wish he wouldn’t do that, but it’s a high-class problem. There were no NGOs in Russia or China when I became president in 1993. All over the world we have people who know that they can do things to change, but again, I will say to all of you, there is no challenge we face, no barrier to having your grandchildren here on this beautiful site 50 years from now, more profound than the ideological and emotional divide which continues to demean our common life and undermine our ability to solve our common problems. The simple idea that our differences are more important than our common humanity.
When the human genome was sequenced, and the most interesting thing to me as a non-scientist – we finished it in my last year I was president, I really rode herd on this thing and kept throwing more money at it – the most interesting thing to me was the discovery that human beings with their three billion genomes are 99.9 percent identical genetically. So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent? I mean, don’t we all? How much of the laugh lines in the speeches were about that? At least I didn’t go to Yale, right? [LAUGHTER] That Brown gag was hilarious. [LAUGHTER]
But it’s all the same deal, isn’t it? I mean, the intellectual premise is that the only thing that really matters about our lives are the distinctions we can draw. Indeed, one of the crassest elements of modern culture, all these sort of talk shows, and even a lot of political journalism that's sort of focused on this shallow judgmentalism. They try to define everybody down by the worst moment in their lives, and it all is about well, no matter whatever’s wrong with me, I’m not that. And yet, you ask Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bono to come here. Nelson Mandela’s the most admired person in the world. I got tickled the other night. I wound up in a restaurant in New York with a bunch of friends of mine. And I looked over and two tables away, and there was Rush Limbaugh [LAUGHTER], who’s said a few mad things about me. So I went up and shook hands with him and said hello and met his dinner guest. And I came just that close to telling him we were 99.9 percent the same. [LAUGHTER] But I didn’t want to ruin the poor man’s dessert, so I let it go. [LAUGHTER]
Now we’re laughing about this but next month, I’m making my annual trek to Africa to see the work of my AIDS and development project, and to celebrate with Nelson Mandela his birthday. He’s 89. Don’t know how many more he’ll have. And when I think that I might be 99.9 percent the same as him, I can’t even fathom it. So I say that to you, do we have all these other problems? Is Darfur a tragedy? Do I wish America would adopt sensible climate change regulation? Do I hate the fact that ideologues in the government doctored scientific reports? Do I disagree with a thousand things that are going on? Absolutely. But it all flows from the idea that we can violate elemental standards of learning and knowledge and reason and even the humanity of our fellow human beings because our differences matter more. That’s what makes you worship power over purpose. Our differences matter more. One of the greatest things that’s happened in the last few years is doing all this work with former President Bush. You know, I ought to be doing this. I’m healthy and not totally antiquated. He’s 82 years old, still jumping out of airplanes and still doing stuff like this. And I love the guy. I’m sorry for all the diehard Democrats in the audience. I just do. [LAUGHTER] And life is all about seeing things new every day. And I’ll just close with two stories, one from Asia, one from Africa. And I’m telling you all the details don’t matter as much as this.
After George Bush and I did the tsunami, we got so into this disaster work that Kofi Annan asked him to oversee the UN’s efforts in Pakistan after the earthquake, which you acknowledged today, and asked me to stay on as the tsunami coordinator for two years. So on my next to last trip to Aceh in Indonesia, the by far the hardest hit place, a quarter of a million people killed. I went to one of these refugee camps where in the sweltering heat, several thousand people were still living in tents. Highly uncomfortable. And my job was to go there and basically listen to them complain and figure out what to do about it, and how to get them out of there more quickly. So every one of these camps elected a camp leader and when I appeared, I was introduced to my young interpreter, a young Indonesian woman, and to the guy who was the camp leader, and his wife and his son. And they smiled, said hello, and then I looked down at this little boy, and I literally could not breathe. I think he’s the most beautiful child I ever saw. And I said to my young interpreter, I said, I believe that’s the most beautiful boy I ever saw in my life. She said, yes, he’s very beautiful and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters. And now they’re all gone.
So the wife and the son excused themselves. And the father who had lost his nine children proceeded to take me on a two-hour tour of this camp. He had a smile on his face. He never talked about anything but what the people in that camp needed. He gave no hint of what had happened to him and the grief that he bore. We get to the end of the tour. It’s the health clinic in the camp. I look up and there is his wife, a mother who had lost nine of her 10 children, holding a little bitty baby less than a week old, the newest born baby in the camp. And she told me, I’m going to get in trouble for telling this. She told me that in Indonesian culture, when a woman has a baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and everyone waits on her hand and foot. [LAUGHTER] She doesn’t get up, nothing happens. And then on the 40th day, the mother gets up out of bed, goes back to work doing her life and they name the baby. So this child was less than a week old. So this mother who had lost her nine children is here holding this baby. And she says to me, this is our newest born baby. And we want you to name him. Little boy. So I looked at her and I said through my interpreter, I said, do you have a name for new beginning? And she explained and the woman said something back and the interpreter said yes, luckily for you, in Indonesian the word for dawn is a boy’s name. And the mother just said to me, we will call this child Dawn and he will symbolize our new beginning. You shouldn’t have to meet people that lose nine of their 10 children, cherish the one they got left, and name a newborn baby Dawn to realize that what we have in common is more important than what divides us. [APPLAUSE]
And I leave you with this thought. When Martin Luther King was invited here in 1968, the country was still awash in racism. The next decade it was awash in sexism, and after that in homophobia. And occasionally those things rear their ugly head along the way, but by and large, nobody in this class is going to carry those chains around through life. But nobody gets out for free, and everyone has temptations. The great temptation for all of you is to believe that the one-tenth of one percent of you which is different and which brought you here and which can bring you great riches or whatever else you want, is really the sum of who you are and that you deserve your good fate, and others deserve their bad one. That is the trap into which you must not fall. Warren Buffett's just about to give away 99 percent of his money because he said most of it he made because of where he was born and when he was born. It was a lucky accident. And his work was rewarded in this time and place more richly than the work of teachers and police officers and nurses and doctors and people who cared for those who deserve to be cared for. So he’s just going to give it away. And still with less than one percent left, have more than he could ever spend. Because he realizes that it wasn’t all due to the one-tenth of one percent, and that his common humanity requires him to give money to those for whom it will mean much more.
In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody’s going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more. God bless you and good luck.

Turkey, Kurds and Paris Hilton

By Tony Blankley

THE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished June 6, 2007
Yesterday I googled "Turkey and the Kurds" and got 1,310,000 hits. Then I googled "Paris Hilton"andgot 45,800,000 hits. That seems about right. Who wouldn't prefer to reflect on the soft-porn potential of the spoiled, slinky, sexually incontinent, blonde heiress facing down the various titillating menaces of the prison shadows, rather than thinking about the prospect of yet another war in the Middle East. Although, if Paris had been sentenced to a Turkish prison we could have merged the two stories in a sort of updated "Thousand and One Nights" adventure with Paris in the part of Scheherezade, telling fascinating tales to stop her husband King Shahryar from killing her. In the updated version Paris would obviously sell her fascinating tales afterward for publicity and profits, rather than for her life -- as in the original. But, alas, the two stories have not merged, and it is a sad reflection on my misspent mental life that right now I'm one of the guys who actually does care more about the Turks and the Kurds than I do about Paris and her prisoners of love. But a bloody mess is on the cusp of getting bloodier in Iraq, and while events are not entirely within our control, we may be able to influence them. To summarize the situation: The terrorist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), has been harassing Turkey for decades allegedly on behalf of the approximately 15 million Kurds living in Turkey (about 20 percent of the Turkish population -- and with the highest birthrate of any ethnic group in Turkey). Currently, the Turks suspect (perhaps with justification) that some of the approximately 5 million Kurds living in northern Iraq are giving cover and help to the PKK terrorists. The Turks very plausibly fear that the Kurds (living more or less contiguously in Southern Turkey, northern Iraq, northeast Syria and northwestern Iran, as well as in Armenia and environs) want to form an independent state -- which state would strip Turkey of a fifth of its land and population. Thus, Turkey has strongly opposed a division or federalization of Iraq into a Kurd north, Sunni middle and Shi'ite south -- preferring a unitary Iraqi state. But the Kurds have been theUnitedStates' strongest ally in Iraq. Their Pershmerga military has kept their part of Iraq relatively peaceful. It is also the most prosperous. They are claiming their rights to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk (from where they had been forcibly removed by Saddam Hussein). The Turks fear that a richer, separatist or independent Iraqi Kurdish population helping the PKK commit terror against Turkish government and civilian targets is a strategic threat to Turkey. As a result, as Turkey has been reinforcing its troops along the border with Iraq and the powerful Turkish Army general staff stresses its readiness for a cross-border operation to crush the PKK, the Turkish foreign minister told a European Union meeting a few days ago that Turkey has every right to take measures against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq. Thus the crisis approaches. Both Turkey and the Kurds have been our historic allies. Since the Iraqi war started we have constantly asked Turkey to be patient with the Kurds and not to intervene in Iraqi Kurdish territory over the PKK (even though they are killing Turks in their terrorist attacks). So far they have complied. Meanwhile, we have asked the Iraqi Kurds not to assert any independence claims. So far they have complied. But events are unfolding dangerously. The Turkish Army -- as the ultimate defender of a secular Turkish culture and state -- is in an increasingly strategic public struggle with revanchist Islamist forces in Turkey. It is a real possibility that there may be a showdown or coup d'etat against the Islamist government by the Turkish Army this fall. Fighting the secular PKK is very popular in Turkey -- especially amongst religious Turkish people living outside the big cities. The PKK has recently drawn blood again. The army believes it could strengthen its domestic political position by crossing over the border and (they believe) "crush" the PKK. Thus the Turkish army has both a legitimate national-security concern and a political calculation for taking military action imminently. If they take such action, it might be a quick and successful suppression of the terrorist PKK. But there is a big risk that it will either fail in that regard, or will induce a broader Kurdish military response (or will fail because it will induce a broader Kurdish response). In that event the Turkish army will discover the "pleasures" of a Kurdish insurgency similar to our experience with the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad and environs. Moreover, if fighting and instability breaks out in the Kurdish north, it will have major negative economic effects on all of Iraq. So, the United States and the Europeans are again calling for Turkey to restrain itself. This time, that may not be enough. Just about the last thing we want to see is a Turkish/Kurd war to break out. We can no longer just ask Turkey to restrain itself. It is time to flop down on the side of American action to really pressure our Kurdish friends and allies to take such actions as will convince Turkey that military invasion is not necessary to stop the PKK terrorists from using Iraq as a base of operation. Whether U.S. troop movements up to the Iraqi-Turkish border are wise or foolish should be decided promptly by our smartest military and diplomatic people on the ground there -- and acted on promptly. We could easily get overtaken by dangerous events very suddenly.

Punishment time will come for the Republicans, Christians are starting to realize their faith has been used as a flim-flam by a bunch of "Old South" vulgarians..."

Word for Word They’ll Say Anything
Soviet-Style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation’
By SCOTT SHANE
HOW did the United States, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, come to adopt interrogation techniques copied from the Soviet Union and other cold war adversaries?
Investigators for the Senate Armed Services Committee are examining how the methods, long used to train Americans for what they may face as prisoners of war, became the basis for American interrogations.
In 2002, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon became concerned that standard questioning was inadequate for suspected terrorists and turned to a military training program called Survival, Evasion, Reconnaissance and Escape, or SERE. For decades, SERE trainers had exposed aviators and others at high risk for capture to Soviet-style tactics, including disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, and hours in uncomfortable stress positions. Sometimes the ordeal included waterboarding, in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation.
Some of those techniques have been used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret overseas jails for high-level operatives of Al Qaeda.
Many SERE veterans were appalled at the “reverse engineering” of their methods, said Charles A. Morgan III, a Yale psychiatrist who has worked closely with SERE trainers for a decade.
“How did something used as an example of what an unethical government would do become something we do?” he asked.
His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychiatry, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies. Written by doctors working as Defense Department consultants, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff, the article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information. SCOTT SHANE
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The article describes basic Soviet N.K.V.D. (later K.G.B.) methods: isolation in a small cell; constant light; sleep deprivation; cold or heat; reduced food rations. Soviets denied such treatment was torture, just as American officials have in recent years:
The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as “torture.” But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.
Interrogators looked for ways to increase the pressure, including “stress positions”:
Another [technique] widely used is that of requiring the prisoner to stand throughout the interrogation session or to maintain some other physical position which becomes painful. This, like other features of the KGB procedure, is a form of physical torture, in spite of the fact that the prisoners and KGB officers alike do not ordinarily perceive it as such. Any fixed position which is maintained over a long period of time ultimately produces excruciating pain.
Overt brutality was discouraged, as it was at American facilities:
The KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Communist principles and is contrary to K.G.B. regulations.
Closed trials and military tribunals were standard, as at Guantánamo:
Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court.
The Bush administration concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Qaeda detainees. Similarly, the Soviets argued that international rules did not apply to foreign detainees:
In typical Communist legalistic fashion, the N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or “confession,” it simply declared the prisoner a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.
Communist-style interrogation routinely produced false confessions:
The cumulative effects of the entire experience may be almost intolerable. [The prisoner] becomes mentally dull and loses his capacity for discrimination. He becomes malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate. By suggesting that the prisoner accept half-truths and plausible distortions of the truth, [the interrogator] makes it possible for the prisoner to rationalize and thus accept the interrogator’s viewpoint as the only way out of an intolerable situation.

TIME 5/31/07

Report and protest of US Torture

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.
This troubling disclosure was made in the blandly titled report, "Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse", which for the first time sets forth the origins as well as new details of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that led to scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere — techniques that some critics contend the Pentagon still has not gone far enough in explicitly banning. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the findings "deeply troubling," and signaled his intention to hold hearings later this year on the interrogation methods it describes.
The report, completed last August but only declassified and made public on May 18, suggests that the abusive techniques stemmed from a much more formal process than the Defense Department has previously acknowledged. By 2002 the Pentagon was looking for an interrogation paradigm to use on what it had designated as "unlawful combatants" captured in the "war on terror." These individuals, many taken prisoner in Afghanistan, were initially brought to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, although others were subsequently hidden away in CIA secret prisons or turned over to U.S.-allied governments known to practice torture. That same year, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo began using the abusive "counter resistance" techniques adopted from SERE on prisoners at the base, and according to the Pentagon report SERE military psychologists were on hand to help.
In response to fallout over the well-documented cases of prisoner abuse — which included prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation (visual and auditory), forced removal of clothing, exploiting prisoners phobias (notably fear of dogs), and threats against family members — the Pentagon began scaling back the use of SERE tactics in 2002 and eventually banned them altogether. The Army Field Manual, which serves as a primary guide for U.S. military interrogation, now specifically rules out the use of a variety of SERE-founded techniques including water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, as well as the use of dogs.
But critics remain concerned that the Pentagon's clean-up has not gone far enough. In the letter to Secretary Gates, dated May 31, 2007, the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights cites an appendix of the current Army Field Manual that "explicitly permits what amounts to isolation, along with sleep and sensory deprivation." The letter, signed by retired Army General Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former senior medical commander, and Leonard Rubenstein, the organization's executive director, also points out that the current Field Manual remains "silent on a number of other SERE-based methods (including sensory overload and deprivation) creating ambiguity and doubt over their place in interrogation doctrine."
In 2006, the Pentagon issued revised guidelines reducing the role of psychiatrists as members of U.S. military interrogation teams, partly in response to critics who contend that doctors, who take an oath as caregivers, should not be involved in non-therapeutic or abusive treatment. But the Physicians for Human Rights letter says that even the Pentagon's new and revised guidelines continue to call on military psychologists to play a central part in interrogations, which the group calls "dangerous" and inappropriate. The Pentagon says it has fully investigated all abuses and taken appropriate measures to prevent any kind of recurrence.
Even assuming that Pentagon reforms have succeeded in cleaning up the worst excesses of U.S. interrogations, a number of experts have grave doubts that current policies are either workable or effective. Members of the Intelligence Science Board, many of whom serve as consultants to the Pentagon, have recently argued that U.S. interrogation policy involves a grab-bag of outmoded techniques, many dating from the 1950s, that ignore lessons learned from law enforcement and lack cultural sensitivity to Arab and other foreign prisoners. The kind of insensitivity, critics might now add, that we once assumed only our worst enemies would show their foreign prisoners

Atheists with Attitude
Why do they hate Him?
by Anthony Gottlieb May 21, 2007
In the second century A.D., it was the Christians who were denounced as “atheists.”
Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent. A hen in Rome seemed to confirm that the Day of Judgment was near. On December 2nd, it made an extraordinarily loud cackle and produced an exceptionally large egg, on which could be seen a likeness of the comet, or so it was said. This added to the religious panic. But the comet also sparked a small triumph for rationalism. In the next few years, as Armageddon somehow failed to arrive, a stream of pamphlets across Europe and America argued that heavenly displays were purely natural phenomena. The skeptics won the day. From the eighteenth century onward, no respectable intellectual saw comets as direct messages from God—though there were still some fears that one might eventually hit the earth.
The felling of the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, brought its share of religion. Two populist preachers, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, called it divine punishment (though both quickly withdrew their remarks), and not only the bereaved prayed for help. But September 11th and its aftershocks in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere are more notable for causing an outbreak of militant atheism, at least on bookshelves. The terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of Islam, and they have been taken, by a string of best-selling books, to illustrate the fatal dangers of all religious faith.
The first of these books was “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, which was published in 2004 and was on the Times paperback best-seller list for thirty-three weeks. Then came “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, who has written popular books on the science of consciousness and on Darwin. Next was “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and Britain’s preëminent science writer. Harris joined battle again last year with “Letter to a Christian Nation,” which renewed his attack on Christianity in particular. And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Twelve; $24.99), by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.”
Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”
It’s possible to wonder, indeed, where plain speaking ends and misanthropy begins: Hitchens says that the earth sometimes seems to him to be “a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.” He certainly likes to adopt the tone of a bemused Martian envoy hammering out a report for headquarters. (We hear of “a showbiz woman bizarrely known as Madonna.”) In a curious rhetorical tic, Hitchens regularly refers to people whom he wishes to ridicule by their zoological class. Thus the followers of Muhammad are “mammals,” as is the prophet himself, and so are the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and St. Francis of Assisi; Japan’s wartime Emperor Hirohito is a “ridiculously overrated mammal,” and Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea’s current dictator, is a “ludicrous mammal.” Hitchens is trying to say that these people are mere fallible mortals; but his way of saying it makes him come across as rather an odd fish.
He is also a fallible one. After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa, which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.
Hitchens is on firmer ground as he traipses around the world on a tour of sectarian conflicts. He recounts how, a week before September 11th, a hypothetical question was put to him by Dennis Prager, an American talk-show host. Hitchens was asked to imagine himself in a foreign city at dusk, with a large group of men coming toward him. Would he feel safer, or less safe, if he were to learn that they were coming from a prayer meeting? With justified relish, the widely travelled Hitchens responds that he has had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad, and that, in each case, the answer would be a resounding “less safe.” He relates what he has seen or knows of warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in Ulster; Christians and Muslims in Beirut and in Bethlehem; Hindus and Muslims in Bombay; Roman Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; and Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians in Baghdad. In these cases and others, he argues, religion has exacerbated ethnic conflicts. As he puts it, “religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”
That’s more plausible than what Sam Harris has to say on the subject. He maintains that religious belief not only aggravates such conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows. This thesis suffers from a problem of timing: if he is right, why did Al Qaeda not arise, say, three hundred years ago, when the Koran said exactly what it says now?
One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different. For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.
So how is a would-be iconoclast supposed to tell exactly what the faithful believe? Interpreting the nature and prevalence of religious opinions is tricky, particularly if you depend on polls. Respondents can be lacking in seriousness, unsure what they believe, and evasive. Spiritual values and practices are what pollsters call “motherhood” issues: everybody knows that he is supposed to be in favor of them. Thus sociologists estimate that maybe only half of the Americans who say that they regularly attend church actually do so. The World Values Survey Association, an international network of social scientists, conducts research in eighty countries, and not long ago asked a large sample of the earth’s population to say which of four alternatives came closest to their own beliefs: a personal God (forty-two per cent chose this), a spirit or life force (thirty-four per cent), neither of these (ten per cent), don’t know (fourteen per cent). Depending on what the respondents understood by a “spirit or life force,” belief in God may be far less widespread than simple yes/no polls suggest.
In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps. He also worries about a poll that said that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in angels—by which, to judge from blogs and online forums on the subject, some of them may have meant streaks of luck, or their own delightful infants.
The Bible is a motherhood issue, too. Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.
The tangled diversity of faith is, in the event, no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms—Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point—are helping to sustain the whole. But, though the vague belief in a “life force” may be misguided, it’s hard to make the case that it’s dangerous. And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua? If there were no religion, it’s true, neither house of worship would exist. So perhaps we are just being asked to sway along with John Lennon’s “Imagine.” (“Imagine there’s no countries /It isn’t hard to do /Nothing to kill or die for /And no religion too.”)
When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover, who is the director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers. Still, Hitchens succeeds in compiling a list of evils that the faithful, too, should find sobering. Now that so much charitable work is carried out by secular bodies, religious ones have to work harder to keep the moral high ground. For the Catholic Church in particular—with its opposition to contraception, including the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, and the covering up of child abuse by priests—the ledger is not looking good.
Bertrand Russell, who had a prodigious knowledge of history and a crisp wit, claimed in 1930 that he could think of only two useful contributions that religion had made to civilization. It had helped fix the calendar, and it had made Egyptian priests observe eclipses carefully enough to predict them. He could at least have added Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and more than a few paintings; but perhaps the legacy of religion is too large a conundrum to be argued either way. The history of the West has been so closely interwoven with the history of religious institutions and ideas that it is hard to be confident about what life would have been like without them. One of Kingsley Amis’s lesser-known novels, “The Alteration,” tried to envisage an alternative course for modern history in which the Reformation never happened, science is a dirty word, and in 1976 most of the planet is ruled by a Machiavellian Pope from Yorkshire. In this world, Jean-Paul Sartre is a Jesuit and the central mosaic in Britain’s main cathedral is by David Hockney. That piece of fancy is dizzying enough on its own. But imagine attempting such a thought experiment in the contrary fashion, and rolling it back several thousand years to reveal a world with no churches, mosques, or temples. The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.
In the early days of the Christian era, nobody was fantasizing about a world with no religion, but there were certainly those who liked to imagine a world with no Christians. The first surviving example of anti-Christian polemic is strikingly similar in tone to that of some of today’s militant atheists. In the second century, it was Christians who were called “atheists,” because they failed to worship the accepted gods. “On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians” was written in 178 A.D. by Celsus, an eclectic follower of Plato. The Christian deity, Celsus proclaimed, is a contradictory invention. He “keeps his purposes to himself for ages, and watches with indifference as wickedness triumphs over good,” and only after a long time decides to intervene and send his son: “Did he not care before?” Moses is said to be “stupid”; his books, and those of the prophets, are “garbage.” Christians have “concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment.” Their injunction to turn the other cheek was put much better by Socrates. And their talk of a Last Judgment is “complete nonsense.”
There’s not much more where that came from, because within a couple of hundred years Christians became the ones to decide who counted as an atheist and was to be punished accordingly. Pagan anti-Christian writings were destroyed wherever possible. In truth, from the start of the Christian era until the eighteenth century, there were probably very few people in the West who thought that there was no God of any sort. Those thinkers who had serious doubts about the traditional conception of God—of whom there were many in the seventeenth century—substituted another sort of deity, usually a more distant or less personalized one.
Even Voltaire, one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power, was a man of deep religious feeling. His God, though, was beyond human understanding and had no concern for man. (Voltaire’s satirical tale “Candide,” which attacks the idea that all is for the best in a world closely watched over by a benevolent God, was partly inspired by a huge earthquake in Lisbon, which struck while the faithful were at Mass on All Saints’ Day in 1755 and killed perhaps thirty thousand people.)
Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.
In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.
Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.
In Paris, meanwhile, a number of thinkers began to profess atheism openly. They were the first influential group to do so, and included Denis Diderot, the co-editor of the Enlightenment’s great Encyclopédie, and Baron D’Holbach, who hosted a salon of freethinkers. Hume visited them, and made several friends there; they presented him with a large gold medal. But the philosophes were too dogmatic for Hume’s taste. To Hume’s like-minded friend the historian Edward Gibbon, they suffered from “intolerant zeal.” Still, they represented a historical vanguard: explicit attacks on religion as a whole poured forth within the next hundred years.
Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today’s militant atheists must sometimes wonder why religion persists. Hitchens says that it is born of fear and probably ineradicable. Harris holds that there are genuine spiritual experiences; having kicked sand in the faces of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he dives headlong into the surf of Eastern spirituality, encouraging readers to try Buddhist techniques of meditation instead of dangerous creeds. Dawkins devotes a chapter, and Dennett most of his book, to evolutionary accounts of how religion may have arisen and how its ideas spread. It’s thin stuff, and Dennett stresses that these are early days for a biological account of religion. It may, however, be too late for one. If a propensity toward religious belief is “hard-wired” in the brain, as it is sometimes said to be, the wiring has evidently become frayed. This is especially true in rich countries, nearly all of which—Ireland and America are exceptions—have relatively high rates of unbelief.
After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be. ♦

Eugen Weber, Authority on Modern France, Dies at 82
By ANDREW L. YARROW NY TIMES
Eugen Weber was a history professor and former dean at U.C.L.A.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said.
Mr. Weber’s accessible style made him popular among students, historians and the public in the United States as well as in France, where his books on modern French history are considered classics. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of students got their first taste of modern European history from Mr. Weber’s best-selling textbooks like “A Modern History of Europe” (1971) and “Europe Since 1715: A Modern History” (1972).
And he was a familiar, charming presence to Americans who saw his acclaimed 52-part lecture series, “The Western Tradition,” produced by WGBH in Boston for public television in 1989. It became the basis of a video instructional series with companion books that students have used ever since.
Mr. Weber wrote about French history and taught it in the United States for more than 40 years. He published more than a dozen distinguished books, which have been translated into more than half a dozen languages. He was a professor of modern European history at the University of California at Los Angeles, and his classes were so popular that he became a campus celebrity. A chair there was endowed in his name.
Mr. Weber was encyclopedic in his depiction of an era, a movement or a social trend, focusing more on the many facets of everyday life than on historical theories. History, he wrote in “Europe Since 1715,” was “not just the epic of collective deeds, but the tissue of the times; not just what happened, but to whom and how; not just wars and politics, the doings of a relatively restricted group, but the way people lived — humbler and middling people, and the rich as well — their food, their housing, the warp and woof of their existence.”
Mr. Weber’s work was admired in the country that so fascinated him. Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University and a leading writer on French history, once observed:
“On the whole, the French write their own history and write it with much sophistication. But occasionally they come across a foreigner who does it differently or better, and then, with much fanfare and generosity, they adopt him for their own. Such is the case of Eugen Weber.”
At least two of Mr. Weber’s works have become standard reading in France: “Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France” (1962), a history of the royalist movement, which dominated the French right from the Dreyfus Affair until 1940; and “Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914” (1976), an account of how a country that was still largely rural, “inhabited by savages” and a hodgepodge of cultures was transformed in the half-century after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
Mr. Weber maintained that before the 20th century, France was largely “a Parisian political project rather than a national reality.” Modern French identity, he said, was a relatively recent creation, a product of mass education, conscription and the coming of modern communications. After “Peasants” was published, Mr. Judt said, Mr. Weber’s thesis became the new orthodoxy.
Several of Mr. Weber’s books explored the development of right-wing nationalism in Europe. To Mr. Weber, nationalism had changed from a humanitarian, Enlightenment-based movement in the early 19th century into an angry, “tribal” and “exclusivist” movement in the 20th century. Despite its affinities with the historic right, the virulent, xenophobic and radical nationalism of the 20th century, he concluded, was statist and anti-individualistic.
In “The Nationalist Revival in France: 1905-1914,” published in 1959, Mr. Weber traced French right-wing nationalism from its royalist roots during the Third Republic beginning in the 1870s to the fascism of the Vichy regime in World War II.
Mr. Weber took a pragmatic approach to history. “Nothing is more concrete than history, nothing less interested in theories or in abstract ideas,” he once wrote. “The great historians have fewer ideas about history than amateurs do; they merely have a way of ordering their facts to tell their story. It isn’t theories they look for, but information, documents, and ideas about how to find and handle them.”
Eugen Joseph Weber was born in Bucharest, Romania, on April 24, 1925, the son of Sonia and Emmanuel Weber, an industrialist. At age 12, he was sent to boarding school in Herne Bay, in southeastern England, and later to Ashville College in the Lake District.
After graduating in 1943, he joined the British Army and was stationed in Belgium, India and occupied Germany. He rose to captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, one of Britain’s oldest regiments. After his service ended in 1947, he attended Cambridge.
While at Cambridge, Mr. Weber spent two yearlong interludes in Paris, studying at the Institut d’Études Politiques and teaching English at the suburban Lycée Lakanal. He fell for France, he said, “just as one falls into love.”
While in London he met Jacqueline Brument, who was taking classes in art history. They married in 1950. Mr. Weber always said that he wrote for his wife, who is his only immediate survivor.
Mr. Weber spent a year as a visiting lecturer at U.C.L.A. and decided in 1954 to move permanently to North America. He taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the University of Iowa before rejoining the U.C.L.A. faculty in 1956. The move began a tenure that was to last the rest of his life, interrupted only by visiting professorships and other academic work in France and the United States.
Mr. Weber helped to build the U.C.L.A. history department into one of the nation’s best. He was also dean of social sciences in 1976 and dean of the College of Letters and Sciences from 1977 to 1982.
Among his other books are “Paths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought From Romanticism to Existentialism” (1960); “Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century” (1964); “The European Right: A Historical Profile” (1965), which he edited and wrote with Hans Rogger, a colleague at U.C.L.A.; “France: Fin de Siècle” (1986); “The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s” (1994); and “Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages” (1999).
Mr. Weber was a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow and in 1977 was decorated with the Ordre National des Palmes Académiques for his contribution to French culture.
In his introduction to a book of collected essays, “My France: Politics, Culture, Myth” (1991), Mr. Weber admitted to having a mind that was “more like a jumbly hayloft than an orderly library.” Tireless in pursuit of detail, he delighted in sharing the fruits of a lifetime spent in provincial archives.
In a review of “My France” for The New York Times Book Review, Mr. Judt gave an example of Mr. Weber’s feel for France and his “richly textured sense of the complex otherness of the recent past” by noting his discussion of why it took “La Marseillaise” almost a century to emerge from a Strasbourg drawing room on April 26, 1792, as the battle song of the Rhine Army to become the French national anthem.
“Mr. Weber reminds the reader that in 1790 only about three million people could speak French; as late as 1893, about one-quarter of the population of 30 million still had not mastered the national language,” Mr. Judt wrote. “Small wonder that it took so long for the ‘Marseillaise’ to catch on — many of those trying to learn the words could not understand them.”