Beseiged, at Davos

The famous professor maintains that the Davos Man’s self-image as someone who transcends national boundaries is the source of a great and growing ‘‘disconnect’’ with his fellow citizens. The simmering discontents in the US over outsourcing to Asia point to the new faultlines.

But defenders of globalisation in the rich countries and those who are anxious about dissolving national identities mustn’t lose heart. The dreaded India-China takeover of the world simply may never come about, for one. Then, as Time helpfully offered, ‘‘it’s also entirely possible that the near future may see the pendulum of capital swing away from Davos Man-style globalisation. One counterpoint is Manila Woman…’’ The low paid migrant worker from Asia and elsewhere, who is holding up the British and US health care system, and who is quite unlike Davos Man in a crucial respect — she can be staunchly patriotic.

60 years later

The liberation of Auschwitz was marked this week. Those who were there still remember the silence that preceded and followed the liberation on January 27, 1945. The silence of death was followed by the silence of liberation. The rush of words in the world media this whole week, by eye-witnesses and commentators, only highlighted the continuing difficulty of breaking that silence, 60 years later.

With what words can one describe a horror that makes words like horror seem listless and wanting? ‘‘Such a colossal crime can be commited only if you mobilize the darkest of the soul’’ wrote Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld in the New York Times, ‘‘To imagine such darkness apparently needs a new language’’. Commentors vainly flailed about for empathy, with references to the tsunami and 9/11.

So is the effort to remember inevitably futile? Was the Holocaust an evil too great to understand, or remember? Should we just shrug off the obligation to remember, like Britain’s Prince Harry who recently sported the swastika in a fancy dress party?

In the Washington Post, columnist Richard Cohen voiced a fear that has haunted many: because we find it so difficult to understand Auschwitz, because we cannot reconcile it with our belief in our own innate goodness and that of God, we will let it slip from memory. With eyewitnesses becoming fewer each year, the Holocaust will become that statue or this memorial. It will become something that happened in the last century to other people. Prince Harry shrugged, and ‘‘someday, I fear, so shall we all and then — as it has in Rwanda and at Srebrenica — it will happen again’’.

In Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Jonathan Sacks, chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, insisted on the necessity to remember the lesson of the Holocaust: a society is as large as the space it makes for the stranger.

Target Iran

Could Bangladesh possibly be going the way of Afghanistan? In a long and anxious piece titled ‘The Next Islamist Revolution?’, the New York Times pointed to a growing ‘‘Talibanisation’’ in parts of Bangladesh, where religious violence is said to be filling the power vacuum.

And on Iran, pundits of the world media point to the warning signals: the verbal warfare between Tehran and Washington, US Vice President Dick Cheney’s comment on Inauguration Day that Iran’s nuclear programme put it ‘‘right at the top of the list’’ of world trouble spots, Seymour Hersh’s story in the New Yorker magazine saying the White House had authorised secret commando operations to identify targets inside Iran, the defiant-dismissive taunts in response from Iran’s powers that be.

In an editorial on January 27, the New York Times noted that Bush himself had said little, but that ‘‘these hawkish rumblings eerily recall the months before the American invasion of Iraq when some of the same officials pressed hardest for military action, while the president remained publicly uncommitted’’.