We can ignore history at our own peril

Dileep Padgaonkar 

We shouldn’t turn to the past to compare or contrast it with the present in a mechanical fashion. That would be worse than odious: it would be misleading. But what we can and should do is to find out if the echoes of personalities, trends and processes that shaped events at a particular stage of history reverberate in our times. Such an exercise offers us a perspective that is all too often lost in the hurly-burly of daily life.

It took Adolf Hitler a good decade - from 1919 to 1929 -to gain control of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). During this period he had made a mark in Bavaria with his fiery speeches redolent with ultra-nationalist rhetoric targeted at Marxists – an umbrella term that included communists and social democrats, trade-unionists and intellectuals, artistes and gays and, above all, Jews. But in those years, as he pointed out time and again, he was content to be the drummer boy of an array of right-wing forces. And he seldom failed to point out that his was a petty bourgeois background ‘without name, special position or connection’ and that he had ‘come up from the bottom.’ He also made much of the fact that he had abjured meat and alcohol and that his private life was scrupulously chaste – a claim that is still a matter of speculation.

For all his talk of socialism, Hitler, in order to acquire a cachet of legitimacy that he desperately needed to fulfil his dream of wielding political power, befriended landed aristocrats and industrial barons. They were wary of him at first because of his claim to champion the cause of workers, farmers, petty shop-keepers and civil servants. But by and by they came around to Hitler’s view that the crises that plunged Germany into chaos after its defeat in the First World War could not be contained without a powerful leader who would impose iron discipline to cleanse the Weimar republic of corrupt, self-serving, ineffective and hedonistic elites including, in the first place, ‘Marxist’ politicians, intellectuals and artists.

What impressed them – as it needed impressed ordinary folk – was not only Hitler’s single-minded pursuit to avenge the defeat of WWI but also his skills as a consummate actor. His oratory, as Ian Kershaw notes in his splendid two-volume biography of the Nazi leader, mesmerised his listeners. It included ‘ the delayed entry into the packed hall, the careful construction of speeches, the choice of colourful phrases, the gestures and the body language.’ About the delivery of the speeches, Kershaw adds: ‘A pause at the beginning to allow the tension to mount; a low-key, even hesitant, start; undulations and variations of diction, not melodious certainly, but vivid and highly expressive; almost staccato bursts of sentences, followed by well-timed ‘rallentando’ (gradual decrease of speed) to expose the emphasis of a key point; theatrical use of the hands as the speech rose in crescendo; sarcastic wit aimed at opponents: all were devices carefully nurtured to maximise effect.’

Hitler himself acknowledged what drove him to such frenzy. It was the recognition that ‘masses are blind and stupid. What is stable in them is one emotion: hatred.’ The more he preached intolerance and hatred as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience ate out of his hands: hatred for rivals in his own party ranks and for political parties that stood in his way, hatred for minorities, hatred for liberals, hatred for Germany’s neighbours.  During these passages, as Kershaw writes, the crowds often interrupted him with cheers and shouts of ‘Bravo!’ followed at the end by a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil!’ 

The indoctrination of the masses, Hitler reckoned, was an imperative to realise his ambitions. He therefore laid great store by propaganda. He was the first politician in Germany to cut 50000 records of his speeches for nation-wide distribution and exploit the new technology of radio and the talkies to spread his message: something that was as effective then as the Internet is today. The message, however, has less to do with policies and programmes and more to do with rubbishing his ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ opponents on charges of acting at the behest of foreign, enemy forces who were hell-bent on striking at the roots of German nationalism.

That this approach worked is evident from the rapturous welcome he received on 24 February 1928 when, led by the stalwarts of his party, he declared that  ‘the Jew’ would have to be shown that ‘we’re the bosses here; if he behaves well, he can stay – if not, then out with him.’ Five years later, such rhetoric propelled him to absolute power with consequences that need no reiteration. But should students of history overlook the fact that statements along similar lines have been voiced against minorities in our own country before and after we got rid of colonial rule? And can one ignore the fact that the search of a ‘strong man’ to solve intractable problems led to rack and ruin in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s? 

Let me repeat: speaking about this past in Europe is not to harp on the situation in India today. Our political parties know that India is far too pluralistic to succumb to the lure of atavistic emotions, especially if one individual, or one family, claims to speak on behalf of one people, one nation and one culture. But we can ignore the developments in crises-ridden Weimar Germany at our own risk. We need sound policies, not sound bytes, reforms, not recrimination, debate, not demagoguery, a statesman, not a messiah.  

Pakistan and Israel are identical twins

India and Israel are often likened to each other, but it is Pakistan that Israel resembles the most

Much is made these days of the apparent likeness between India and Israel. Both are supposed to be modern democracies. Both, it is pointed out, are also fighting Islamic terrorism. But this is a superficial comparison. There is no dearth of modern democracies in the post-Cold War world, and no dearth of nations fighting Islamic terror either, post-9/11. For two nations to be considered alike, they ought to be similar in ways that are more fundamental and, at the same time, that also set them apart from other nations.

It is not India but Pakistan that shares a number of such traits with Israel.

Violent partition

Both Pakistan and Israel were carved out through partitions of historically and culturally unified territories within a year of each other: Pakistan in August 1947 and Israel in May 1948. Pakistan was created by splitting the Indian subcontinent, tearing asunder people who, while belonging to different religions, shared a common cultural heritage and had together fought their war of Independence. It created fissures even within ethnic communities — Punjabis in the west, Bengalis in the east and, a year later, Kashmiris in the north. The same happened when Israel was carved out of historical Palestine, dividing Arabs to the west of the Jordan river for the first time.

Two, neither partition was peaceful. Hundreds of thousands of people had to leave their homes in both instances to become refugees in what, just days earlier, had been their own land. Pakistan’s creation saw more than 10 million people migrate on either side of the border, many driven away by their neighbours. Nearly a million are believed to have died in the pogroms that ensued. While eloquent espousals of nationalism and patriotism poured out of leaders at bully pulpits, the slit throats of citizens spattered blood in the streets.

Israel’s creation was similarly gory. More than 700,000 Palestinians were hounded out of their homes by Zionist militias in what the Arabs have since called the Nakba, or catastrophe. Thousands perished. Many migrated to West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan and the Sinai; many others fled to Europe and the United States — places from where harried Jews had been moving to Palestine in preceding decades to escape persecution. One diaspora replaced another, and Arab became the new Jew of the West. The irony was profound.

Three, neither Pakistan nor Israel has clearly defined its borders since its creation. It’s not just that their neighbours don’t agree with them, but both these nations have themselves stopped short of stating precisely where they want their borders to be. While India categorically specifies the borders it claims in Kashmir, Pakistan’s position is ambiguous at best. It calls the portion it conquered in 1947-48 “Azad Kashmir” (Independent Kashmir), but Pakistan’s army exercises even more control over the lives of Azad Kashmiris than over the average Pakistani. It even has an Azad Kashmir Regiment — headquartered in Punjab.

Israel has also desisted from stating exactly how large or small it intends to be. For more than 20 years, even the Palestinian Authority has recognised the so-called Green Line — which defined Israeli territory until the 1967 war — as the international border subject to a two-state solution (that would create a Palestinian state). Israel itself, however, does not recognise the Green Line anymore. Nor does it say where it would draw its own Line, all the while grabbing more land in the West Bank for Jewish settlements.

Four, both Pakistan and Israel have fought wars of aggression against neighbours. The India-Pakistan conflicts of 1947-48, 1965 and 1999 were the result of Pakistani aggression. It also waged a proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a misadventure from which it is yet to dissociate itself. Israel’s wars are still more numerous. It attacked Egypt in 1956, Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on numerous occasions. Gaza remains under Israeli siege even today.

Dominated by religion, military

Five, being born in blood and bred in wars, both Pakistan and Israel have developed societies and polities that are dominated by religion and the military. The green uniform has been at the helm of Pakistan’s affairs for nearly half its independent history, and lords over politicians even when not formally in charge. Its hand has been strengthened by the appropriation of Islam as a political ideology, and the nation is effectively run by a nexus of generals and mullahs.

Israel’s military has similarly clawed its way into the heart of the nation’s society and politics in the name of protecting its Jewish character. Making a name for yourself in wars is the surest way to a successful political career, ministerial posts and prime ministership. Just like Pakistan, Israel seems to be run by a league of generals and rabbis.

Six, both Pakistan and Israel nurture exclusivist national identities, concerned more with who does not belong to them than with who does. Created as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has always treated Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims as second-class citizens. But that isn’t all.

Various categories of Muslims — migrants from India, Ahmadis, Shias, Baluchis and so on — have also found it difficult to integrate into Pakistani society and are perpetually blamed for all its social and political ills.

Israel was created as a homeland for Jews, and it treats Arabs as second-class citizens. But many Jews too — black Jews, Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Russian-origin Jews and so on — face rampant discrimination. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis of Jewish ancestry are simply not considered Jews by law and struggle to be a part of Israeli society.

Benedict Anderson has called nations “imagined communities,” comprising people who share a deep bond of unity even with those they have never met or do not personally know. But Pakistan and Israel exhibit an extraordinary lack of imagination in the construction of their nationhood. Exclusivist identities, religious chauvinism, military dominance and a history of belligerence have rendered them societies that are perpetually at war — with their neighbours and with themselves. Their own uncertainty over their borders betrays this existential insecurity.

That is where India differs from both these nations. Imagined as a country of infinite communities, we have largely remained true to this founding principle. Muslims running away from riots in Gujarat or Assam, Biharis fleeing persecution in Maharashtra and Northeasterners escaping prejudice in South India are still exceptions in a nation that culturally and constitutionally believes in diversity. This belief, more than anything else, is the source of our national identity.

Let us hope that is how, and who, we remain.

(Saif Shahin is a doctoral research scholar in political communication at the University of Texas, Austin, U.S.)

Circumcision is an affront to decent human behaviour

We rightly decry female genital mutilation. Why, then, are so many happy to condone the male equivalent?

• 
• • Catherine Bennett
  • The Observer, Sunday 22 July 2012

Rabbi Jonathan Romain. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Checking the official website, I can find no denial to date that would cast doubt on the claim, by rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, that the Queen chose to have HRH the Prince of Wales and his brothers, Andrew and Edward, circumcised. But perhaps that is to be expected: the rabbi said their circumcisions were common knowledge. In Charles's case, he told the BBC's Today audience, the "snip" was performed by a Jewish expert, or mohel, who later had the honour of reconfiguring the speaker's own private parts.

The hope, presumably, was that – particularly in this jubilee year – loyal listeners would accept that anything that is good enough for royal British knobs, particularly that belonging to the Duchy Originals magnate, cannot also amount, as a German regional court has decided, to "grievous bodily harm". While I wish the rabbi all the best, there seems no obvious reason why the royal family's traditional aversion to foreskins should prove any more influential than its passion for polo, corgis and homeopathic remedies. Particularly when, as the rabbi will know, secular circumcision has been declining in Britain, even among its principal enthusiasts in the upper classes, in the decades since doctors ceased to extol its allegedly "hygienic" effects, much cherished by Victorians. It was not only that they hoped to control lustfulness and avert a staggering variety of illnesses, the operation would further cleanse and tidy up a zone one supporter depicted, in 1890, as a "harbour for filth".

Admittedly, for a risible Victorian health obsession, male circumcision has done supremely well. While diagnoses of the vapours and melancholy have all but vanished, ditto the more recent fashions for tonsillitis and MPD, the official protection of non-therapeutic circumcision for cultural reasons has, in turn, licensed its religious supporters to advertise the ritual as a helpful and rational advance in disease control.

Rabbi Romain would not, I think, have risked some preposterous hints about "health reasons", as if divinely ordained amputation had an equally sound basis in current epidemiology, if the BMA did not still endorse the parental right to excise healthy bits of a male baby. Official guidance to British doctors has long been clear that "evidence concerning the health benefits from non-therapeutic circumcision is insufficient for this alone to be a justification". But parents, the BMA believes, should be entitled in this case "to make choices about how best to promote their children's interests".

In contrast, the controversial judgment by a regional German court, following a case in which a Muslim boy suffered a botched procedure, concluded that the "fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents". The boy could decide for himself, later, if he wanted to be circumcised.

Circumcision enthusiasts from usually contradictory faiths united to denounce a ruling that Germany's Central Council of Muslims described as a "blatant and inadmissible interference" in parents' rights. A German rabbi called it "perhaps the most serious attack on Jewish life in Europe since the Holocaust".

The German parliament has, perhaps understandably, voted to overturn Cologne's judgment and to protect the non-therapeutic – ie, pointless circumcision of male newborns – thus upholding, simultaneously, the wise choices of the British royal family, the Muslim tradition of khitan and the enduring authority of God's covenant with Abraham, as set out in Genesis: "He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant."

Unlike Romain's playful "snip" and the BMA's preferred "intervention", Genesis makes it clear with its no-nonsense "flesh" and "foreskin" that British circumcisers enjoy an unusual, anomalous freedom where children's bodies are concerned. Even smacking parents are restrained if their obedience to the Old Testament exhortation "he who withholds his rod hates his son" leaves more than transient redness. Properly, male circumcision should be categorised with a host of ritual crimes against children, including facial scarring and forced marriage, force-feeding and tooth extraction, which are usually summarised as harmful traditional practices and suppressed, whatever the religious or cultural arguments.

Parental rights have not, opponents of male circumcision often point out, been allowed to trump those of young girls in the case of its related barbarity – female genital mutilation – which is officially banned and denounced, even in its least-devastating manifestations, as an inexcusable assault on a child's physical integrity. Neither the prevalence of FGM nor the argument that prohibition will only force it underground has dissuaded the World Health Organisation from unequivocal condemnation. "FGM," it says, "is recognised internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women."

The extent of this cutting, which "has no health benefits", involves removal of "healthy and normal female genital tissue" and is associated with ideas about "unclean" sexual parts, is immaterial. "It is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children. The practice also violates a person's rights to health, security and physical integrity, the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right to life when the procedure results in death."

And the genital mutilation of a boy? The WHO has a separate, notably upbeat fact sheet about that. "Male circumcision is one of the oldest and most common surgical procedures worldwide," it notes, respectfully, "and is undertaken for many reasons: religious, cultural, social and medical." Here, it finds, the removal of healthy, normal genital tissue and violation of a child's rights and physical integrity for reasons often associated with sexual cleanliness can be a positive boon, now that circumcision may – or may not, given risk compensation – help contain HIV. For neonates, the WHO commends the Mogen clamp method and a local anaesthetic, adding that "a pacifier soaked in sucrose solution has been found to be effective in reducing fussiness in infants".

It can't only be because the Queen is a fan of trimming the sexual organs of non-consenting male minors that this practice, with its well-documented risks of infection and disfigurement, is still, in a culture of improving child protection, allowed to pass as unexceptional, even civilised behaviour. Some critics of circumcision speculate that the extraordinary contrast in the protection now extended, in theory at least, to the bodies of young girls and boys, relates to conventional expectations about female vulnerability and male endurance of pain.

Whether Genesis, the law or local culture explains the difference in approach, the original German judgment was right – children need protecting from it. Either the mutilation of children is wrong or, as many resentful supporters of FGM would argue, it is every parent's fundamental right to redesign their child's genitals.

This German circumcision ban is an affront to Jewish and Muslim identity

A German court has rejected identity and history in favour of a liberal concept of choice, but there's more to right and wrong

• 
• • Giles Fraser
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 July 2012 10.50 BST

'Circumcision is the way Jewish and Muslim men are marked out as being involved in a reality greater than themselves.' Detail of Circumcision of Jesus Christ by Pellegrino da San Daniele Photograph: Elio Ciol/Corbis

In November 2010, a Muslim doctor in Germany carried out a circumcision on a four-year old-boy at the request of his parents. A few days later the boy started bleeding and was admitted to Cologne's University hospital who reported the matter to the police. Last month, after a lengthy legal battle, a judge in Cologne outlawed male circumcision as being against the best interests of the child.

Muslim and Jewish groups have been understandably outraged. This week, Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel set herself against the court ruling by telling members of her CDU party that "I do not want Germany to be the only country in the world in which Jews cannot practise their rites." It beggars belief that a German chancellor ought to have to utter such a sentence.

Yet the circumcision of babies cuts against one of the basic assumptions of the liberal mindset. Informed consent lies at the heart of choice and choice lies at the heart of the liberal society. Without informed consent, circumcision is regarded as a form of violence and a violation of the fundamental rights of the child. Which is why I regard the liberal mindset as a diminished form of the moral imagination. There is more to right and wrong than mere choice.

Indeed, making choice the gold standard in every circumstance is to concede to the moral language of capitalism.

I was circumcised by the mohel when I was eight days old on my grandmother's kitchen table in St John's Wood. It wasn't done for health reasons. It was a statement of identity. Whatever is meant by the slippery identification "being Jewish" – my father is, my mother is not – it had something to do with this. Circumcision marked me out as belonging. Years later, when my wife objected to the circumcision of our new son on the grounds that it was cruel and unnecessary, I reluctantly gave way. Intellectually, I knew that there was little left of "being Jewish" to protect. After all, my wife was not Jewish and I had become a Christian priest. Halachically, it made no sense.

For all of this, I still find it difficult that my son is not circumcised. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim, himself a survivor of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, famously added to the 613th commandments of the Hebrew scriptures with a new 614th commandment: thou must not grant Hitler posthumous victories. This new mitzvah insisted that to abandon one's Jewish identity was to do Hitler's work for him. Jews are commanded to survive as Jews by the martyrs of the Holocaust. My own family history – from Miriam Beckerman and Louis Friedeburg becoming Frasers (a name change to escape antisemitism) to their grandson becoming Rev Fraser (long story) to the uncircumcised Felix Fraser – can be read as a betrayal of that 614th commandment.

And I have always found this extremely difficult to deal with. On some level, I feel like a betrayer.

As I argued in this week's Church Times, one of the most familiar modern mistakes about faith is that it is something that goes on in your head. This is rubbish. Faith is about being a part of something wider than oneself. We are not born as mini rational agents in waiting, not fully formed as moral beings until we have the ability to think and choose for ourselves. We are born into a network of relationships that provide us with a cultural background against which things come to make sense. "We" comes before "I". We constitutes our horizon of significance. Which is why many Jews who consider themselves to be atheists would still consider themselves to be Jewish. And circumcision is the way Jewish and Muslim men are marked out as being involved in a reality greater than themselves.

This, however, is a complete anathema to much modern liberal thought that narrows religious and ethical language down to the absolute priority of personal autonomy and individual choice. Liberalism constitutes the view from nowhere. Liberalism has no sense of history. And it is because the Cologne court had so little sense of history that it made such a ridiculous and offensive decision.

Brain drain or not, the right to emigrate is fundamental

S A Aiyer

Socialists like health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad won't admit it, but they rather liked the Berlin Wall. They think it's morally right to keep citizens captive at home, unable to migrate for better prospects. Azad has proposed not a brick wall but a financial one: he wants all doctors going to the US for higher studies to sign a financial bond that will be forfeited if they do not return.




Sorry, but the right to emigrate is fundamental. States can curb immigration, but not emigration. The UN declaration of human rights says in Article 13, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own." Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights incorporates this right into treaty law. It says: "Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own. The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those provided by law necessary to protect national security, public order, public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others." The public health exception relates to communicable diseases, not a shortage of doctors.



Hitler didn't give German Jews the right to migrate. Communist East Germany thought it had a right to shoot citizens attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union mostly had strict curbs on emigration, but allowed the mass exit of its Jews to Israel after the 1967 war in which Moscow backedthe Arabs. Moscow imposed a "diploma tax" on emigrants with higher education, to claw back the cost of their education. Israel often picked up the bill, leading to sneers that the Soviet Union was selling Jews. International protests obliged Moscow to abolish the tax.



Like the Soviets, Azad wants to claw back sums spent on educating doctors. Like East Germany, he seeks to erect exit barriers by denying Indian doctors a 'no objection certificate' to practice in the US. The right to emigrate does not enter his calculations: Azad does not want this azaadi!



Many Indians will back him, saying the brain drain imposes high costs on India. Well, all principles have some costs, but that's no reason to abandon them. Azad wants curbs just on doctors, but the principle applies to all Indians. Would India be better off if it had kept captive at home economists like Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati? Three Indian migrants to the US have won Nobel Prizes-Gobind Khurana (medicine) Chandra Shekhar (physics) and V Ramakrishnan (chemistry). Had they been stopped from leaving India, would they have ever risen to such heights?



Cost estimates of the brain drain are exaggerated or downright false. Remittances from overseas Indians are now around $60 billion a year. NRI bank deposits bring up to $30 billion a year. Together, they greatly exceed India's entire spending on education (around $75 billion). Even more valuable are skills brought back by returnees.



Remittances skyrocketed only after India made it easier in the 1990s for students to go abroad. One lakh per year go to the US alone. The number of US citizens of Indian origin has tripled since 1990 to three million, and the US has replaced the Gulf as the main source of remittances.



The brain drain has anyway given way to brain circulation. Youngsters going abroad actually have very limited skills. But they hugely improve their skills abroad, mainly through job experience, so returnees bring back much brainpower.



Indian returnees were relatively few during the licence-permit raj, because omnipresent controls stifled domestic opportunities. But economic liberalization has created a boom in opportunities of every sort, so more Indians are returning. Azad should note that the fast expansion of private hospitals has attracted back many doctors. Scientists, software engineers, managers and professionals of all sorts have flocked back. This carries a simple policy lesson: create opportunity, not barriers.



Millions of Indians will not come back. Yet they do not constitute a drain. They have become huge financial assets for India through remittances and investments.



They have also become a foreign policy asset. Three million Indian Americans now occupy high positions in academia, Wall Street, business and professions. They have become important political contributors, and two have entered politics and become state governors (Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley). Indian Americans have become a formidable lobby, helping shift US policy in India's favour, to Pakistan's dismay.



However, these are secondary issues. The main issue is human freedom. The UN declaration of human rights recognizes the right to migrate. This fundamental freedom has more value by far than the financial or foreign policy value of the diaspora. Never forget this in the brain drain debate.

India's Dharmic Tradition in contrast to Abrahamic Faiths Explained

Detox for the soul

Famous? Done something you regret? Not sure how to salvage your reputation? Just check into rehab, says Zoe Williams

Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

Jade Goody has gone into rehab, admitted for "depression and stress". "Jade has struggled since leaving the [Big Brother] house a week ago and learning that she has become the most hated figure in Britain," a friend told the Sun. I wish I had a friend who formed such succinct sentences. It makes you realise how much your own friends blether on. Here's the sequence of events, as I understand it: Jade calls Shilpa Shetty "Shilpa Poppadom" and "Shilpa Fuckawallah" and tells her she should spend time in "the slums"; she exits house; defends own reputation; realises she's on a sticky wicket; "collapses" with stress; is "told by GP that he was going to refer her to the Priory", but seems to have entered said institution under her own steam; is "now being monitored by doctors, while they decide what treatment to give her".This is a funny old business, isn't it? The stress-induced collapse is always so fishy. It's such an unusual response, when most people, under stress, just absent-mindedly eat ginger biscuits. In cases of rehab for addiction, where a person has got themselves into a fix from which they must, for their own wellbeing, be rescued and rehabilitated, doctors pretty much know what to do. "A heroin addict, you say? Let's monitor her while we decide whether or not to take away her heroin . . . Oh, depressive? You watch her pacing up and down, I'll just go and Google Prozac, see if that might work."
I hate to call anyone a fraud. It seems such a petty accusation, set against existing tabloid charges of "racist", "bully" and "fat". Celebrity stress is not exactly the most serious of medical conditions. It doesn't even sound that medical. You might just as well refer yourself to a creche.
I do not, however, think this is self-indulgence on Jade's part. Rehab, in this instance, is being used as a one-stop redemption shop. It's a neat mea culpa previously used by Mel Gibson, after his antisemitic outburst last August, when he asked a police officer if he was a "fucking Jew" and shouted "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world". Mel, of course, wasn't the first star ever to enter rehab - indeed, going into rehab on the advice of a doctor, or a judge, with handcuffs on is as old as the Hollywood hills - but Gibson illustrates neatly the more modern variant of self-referral. It is a way of atoning that you can do really very fast, and of course, it's not that much of a hardship either. You were never medically referred, so when you get there, doctors don't know what to do with you except watch you. And a lot of these people are actors. They are used to being watched. Mel said, after his curious explosion, "I am not a bigot; hatred of any kind goes against my faith." But naturally, this was not sufficient - words have never been quite vast enough to convey atonement, which is why in the olden days they used to make up Songs of Atonement.
It seems to be particularly in misdemeanours of bigotry that only residential self-flagellation will do - to complete the prejudice triptych, along with Jade's racism and Mel's antisemitism, Isaiah Washington, star of Grey's Anatomy, rehabbed himself for his anti-gay remarks (he called one of his fellow actors a "faggot".) He said, "I regard this as a necessary step toward understanding why I did what I did and making sure it never happens again."
The only thing that comes close to (actually, thinking about it, probably surpasses) bigotry for hot social shame is sexual harassment, for which Mark Foley institutionalised himself last year. The Republican congressman, who sent sexually inappropriate emails and messages to teenage boys, explained: "I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and other behavioural problems." It's rather American, isn't it, blaming alcohol for the fact that he couldn't stop badgering his staff for sex? In England, one might be tempted to respond, "Matey, we all like a drink, but I certainly don't employ 16-year-olds and then spend the day sexy-mailing them, even when I've had an absolute skinful."
So where did this come from, this self- disciplining (in the most literal sense)? I've seen the seeds of it in children; a friend of mine's kid will do a running commentary on his own naughtiness, finishing off with suggestions for an appropriate punishment, so that when he has really pushed it, and upset everyone, and ruined everybody's day, he'll shout, "Now I've been really bad! Oh, lock me in the car!" I don't, however, think Mel Gibson got the idea from my friend's naughty kid; on the contrary, it comes from the judicial system, in which - far more frequently in America, it must be said - stars are exempted from custodial sentencing by agreeing to a spell in Betty Ford.
There's a distinctly different tang to that kind of offence, though: Winona Ryder did rehab instead of prison for her shoplifting. She would never have had to redeem herself with us, her public, for such an offence, since a) nobody really minds a shoplifter - it feels like a nice, of-the-people crime, and b) she had already redeemed herself with her lovely Marc Jacobs court outfits.
Andy Dick (you know Andy Dick! You will find him in the not-very-famous-but-makes-lists-of-famous-people-with-addiction-problems-look-longer section of the library), Charlie Sheen, Nicole Richie . . . oh, there are tons of them. They were mainly addicted to painkillers. What this really rams home to me is how much better American painkillers are than ours.
The question remains: how much of an atonement is it when you admit yourself and you're not even really addicted to anything? What happens when you get to the Priory? Do they still go through your luggage and make you go to the group therapy, or are you allowed to just sit about looking glum? Doesn't that drive the proper addicts crazy? Is it like AA - do you still have to go round all your family and friends when you get out, apologising for the time you arrived at their wedding/ bar mitzvah [not that] drunk, [really not at all] whacked out on drugs, [no more] unreliable and flaky [than the next man]? And if it is rehab lite, must one go residential? Couldn't Jade have said sorry with a detox? Couldn't she just have given up wheat, then put out a press release? "I may be guilty of racism, but I've eschewed doughnuts in penitence and, by the by, beaten my bloat!" ·

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