Just wanted to highlight some news about this book’s reception in Poland (“Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation” — reviewed here) The Polish State Prosecution might bring charges against its author for the ridiculous ‘crime’ of “insulting the Polish nation.” On which, and the controversy surrounding see here and here.

(Thanks to Rob for pointing to the review).

A few more reasons to like him, up over at Norm’s place.

Pop in regularly. It will do you good.

Here’s a new You Tube channel, which looks decent (all meanings of the word - including the one which annoys you), Democratiya TV.

To my knowledge, this is unprecedented.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, in an essay about Afghanistan written for the Toronto Globe and Mail, has quite properly called the bring-the-troops-home position as “almost more dismaying” than the opportunism of the fascist thugs preying upon on the people of Afghanistan. The troops-out position is a “misjudgment of historic proportions,” he writes.

Read it all here. Every sentence is right. Every single sentence.

It’s all about this.

If I die, or rather when I die, as the last ten seconds of consciousness slip away as the blood slows, I could reflect that while I would be taking leave of this wondrous world, I would be taking nothing with me. This isn’t the case with Marie Smith Jones, who is taking a language with her.

Marie Smith Jones, who worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded member of Alaska’s Eyak Indians and the last fluent speaker of their native language, has died. She was 89.
{…]
As the last fluent speaker, she worked to preserve the Eyak language, a branch of the Athabaskan Indian family of languages, said Michael Krauss, a linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who collaborated with her.
[…]
“With her death, the Eyak language becomes extinct,” Krauss said. In all, he said, nearly 20 native Alaskan languages are at risk of the same fate. He called them “the intellectual heritage of this part of the world. It is unique to us and if we lose them, we lose what is unique to Alaska.”

There is something poignant about being the last person to die who can speak a language, rather like a beautiful species of butterfly becoming extinct. Neither may be seen or heard by many people before they disappear, nor will there be a substantial effect on the world once they have left it, but their loss somehow seems important. As Steven Levinson, of the Max Planck institute for psycholinguists in the Netherlands, said:

“When a language dies, a whole world dies. It takes millennia to develop, and is an artefact that contains within it a whole culture. This is a tragedy.”