Convenience Big Store: The world still needs the West’s power

19 August, 2021

In the headlines

President Biden says US troops could stay in Afghanistan beyond 31 August to evacuate Americans. "We're going to stay until we get them all out," he told ABC News. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says seven to 10 RAF planes are departing Kabul every day, and none has left empty. "The Taliban are letting our people through," he told BBC Breakfast, but "every hour counts". Vaccinated people who catch the Delta variant could be as infectious as an unvaccinated person with Covid, a scientist tells The Times. Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-delayed Cinderella has finally opened to rave reviews. The musical is "a blast", says The Guardian.

Comment of the day

An Afghan family at Kabul airport. Aykut Karadag/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The world still needs the West's power

"Hang in there, sisters!" Such was the advice to Afghan women from left-wing former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, following his observation that this week "liberal-neocon imperialism was defeated once and for all". He's right, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. The fall of Afghanistan follows a long line of failures, Iraq, Syria and Libya among them. And Varoufakis's feckless advice to Afghan women is "a succinct description of the only alternative to the liberal-neocon position", favoured not just by the left, but by all who believe military interventions "take too long and are too much bother". Western publics may feel reassured that America is no longer the world's policeman. But without policemen comes violence. The alternative to US power "has been Assad power, Putin power, Xi power and now Taliban power. The end of Pax Americana is proving to be the end of Pax."

It's odd Biden didn't realise that the small US presence in Afghanistan made it more secure. And just because the West can't protect human rights everywhere, that doesn't mean it can't protect them anywhere. America is full of heated debates about micro-aggressions committed by writers, but shrugs its shoulders over abandoning millions of women to brutal oppression. Similarly, left-wing British critics of immigration controls want to accept refugees, but oppose military action that might stop the creation of refugees in the first place. It just isn't enough to say: "Hang in there, sisters!"

Orwell foresaw the literary culture war

Poor Kate Clanchy, says Toby Young in The Spectator. In 2019 she published a well-received memoir about teaching poetry to disadvantaged schoolchildren. Now, two years later, she's being hounded by "offence archaeologists" on social media, who trawled through her book for "problematic" passages. "It was as if they'd discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun." Clanchy had described one child's "almond-shaped eyes" and another's "chocolate-coloured skin". Before long "a cry of 'Burn the witch' was echoing across Twitter". You'd expect that from the online mob, but "it pains me" to learn the Orwell Foundation has washed its hands of Clanchy. Last year it awarded her book a prize for political writing. Now it's acknowledging the "concerns and hurt" she caused. And, "in a particularly cowardly move", it dodged responsibility for giving her the prize, explaining that it was "awarded 'by a panel of independent judges... who make their own decisions as to the awards in each category'".

How ironic. No writer was more passionately opposed to censorship than Orwell – "he'd experienced it first-hand". Animal Farm was rejected by four publishers and its original preface took a further 30 years to see the light of day. It reads: "If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth..." What's more, Orwell knew it was the "literary and scientific intelligentsia" who always end up muzzling free speech. "The very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty," he wrote, "are beginning to despise it."

Noted

Airbnb will soon start to shoulder responsibility for violent crimes, including rape, that occur at its properties. There's currently a clause buried in the company's terms and conditions under which users sign away the right to sue it, says Olivia Carville in The Seattle Times. It has also spent millions of dollars on payouts to keep crimes out of the public eye. Airbnb says the change will take place when it updates its terms of service in the autumn.

Gone viral

A Twitter account called Love Island Art History is doing its best to counter the reality TV show's lowbrow reputation by presenting cast members alongside artistic masterpieces. This week thousands of people liked a side-by-side image of Chloe Burrows, a 25-year-old marketing executive from Bicester, and Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar. Even the National Portrait Gallery approved, tweeting: "An iconic portrait for an iconic Islander."

Books

When Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001, the author balked. It would "put off" male readers, he told a radio interviewer: book clubs are for girls. Winfrey promptly dropped his book and axed his appearance on her show, saying: "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict." Extraordinary, says Emily Gould in Vanity Fair. "No one has ever been told to f*** off and die more politely."

Tomorrow's world

Boston Dynamics's bipedal Atlas robots can jump, flip, perform parkour tricks and probably destroy all humans. But they also fall over, a lot. They get their jumps right "about half the time", their engineers admit in new behind-the-scenes footage. A few well-placed staircases may yet save us.

Life

The moment I met Sean Lock "I wanted to be his friend", says the comedian Harry Hill in The Guardian. Lock, who died this week from cancer aged 58, was a comedian's comedian. The last time Hill was on a stand-up bill with Lock, he stayed to watch his act. "I looked round and all the comics on the bill had come out to watch him. We don't do that for just anyone." Perhaps they liked his honesty. On panel shows he would howl with laughter if he liked a joke. If he didn't, he'd sit stony-faced. "Why don't you just fake a laugh?" asked Hill. "'I don't want to encourage them,' he replied with a grin."