Johann Hari

The Arctic wind of a depression is colder with each passing week. There's still an air of unreality: can dole queues really swell and economies really shutter like they did in the history books? Is there a way out? It is here, in the falling darkness, that the differences between the main political parties – too narrow for too long – are becoming plain.

There is a deep disagreement between Labour and the Tories about what governments can and should do now. To understand this, we need to look at a seemingly esoteric debate between the parties about what happened in the last global depression. There are two contradictory stories about how the Great Depression ended. They provide dramatically different road maps for 2009 – so it's essential to figure out which is right. The winning side will determine your chances of losing your job and your home.

The dominant story in the public mind is of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success. It goes like this. Like Obama, FDR comes to power with the American economy haemorrhaging jobs. He believed that, if private industry is withering, the government has to take up the slack by large public spending programmes. He set millions to work preserving green spaces and rebuilding the country's infrastructure. He thought it was necessary to borrow and spend in the short term to prevent complete and more costly collapse later. Use government to counter the economic cycle, rather than leaving us all to drift out to sea on it.

This is Barack Obama and Gordon Brown's story too, as they launch their own fiscal stimuli. Brown says pointedly: "The great New Deal innovations shaped the future of progressive politics across the world." Their favoured analogy is of jump-starting a failing car, rather than let it whimper to a halt on the road.

But at the height of Reaganism, a small number of right-wing economists began to tell a different story about that time. They argued that the American people had been wrong: the New Deal actually made the Depression worse. By borrowing and spending so much, the government created a climate of uncertainty. This made investors hold on to their money – prolonging the despair. It didn't restore private investment, it "crowded it out". So in a depression, all government can do is cut back its own spending and wait for the business cycle to recover. The only effective way for government to hurry this along is a monetary stimulus: altering interest rates and the quantity of money in the economy in an attempt to increase demand.

This is David Cameron's view. His preferred analogy is of a household budget: you cut back your spending when times are hard, and so should the government. Anything else is waste. His Siamese twin George Osborne argues that "monetary developments were a crucial source of the recovery of the US economy from the Great Depression. Fiscal policy, in contrast, contributed almost nothing to the recovery before 1942". (In an attempt to find political cover, he has found a single anomalous Obama adviser who believes this, and quotes her). At the core of this case is a stark fact: unemployment was still at 13 per cent in 1937.

Which is true? The reality of FDR's rule is more complex than either story admits – but the lessons vindicate one set of principles resoundingly.

It's almost forgotten now, but FDR ran for election promising a balanced budget and big spending cuts. By the time he assumed the Presidency, however, public protests against the economic collapse were so huge that he was forced to change course and launch his public spending push. The result? Unemployment began to slide down from its 25 per cent peak.

But then, in 1936, FDR wobbled. He listened to the people making the fiscally conservative case and slashed spending. Unemployment rose again – producing the spike in unemployment that people like Osborne now perversely cite as evidence that the New Deal didn't work. But the reality stands. When FDR spent, unemployment fell. When FDR cut back, unemployment rose.

Yet perhaps the clincher is the answer to a bigger question: how did the Great Depression end? It didn't stop with Cameron's suggestion: slashed spending, slashed debt and slashed government activity. It ended with precisely the opposite: the vast fiscal stimulus of the Second World War. The government sent debt soaring to its highest levels in US history (until today) in order to spend more than ever before. It set up the longest boom in US history.

To check my understanding of the implications for British politics, I called this year's Nobel Prize-winning economist, Professor Paul Krugman. He told me he was "shocked" by hearing David Cameron's economic statements in favour of "tightening the government's belt" in a recession. "It's pure Herbert Hoover," he says. "In fact, it reminds me of Andrew Mellon [Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury], who said the [government] response to the Depression should be to 'liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, and liquidate farmers'."

Many of Cameron's statements are "just wrong", Krugman says. For example, Cameron says Britain can't afford a fiscal stimulus because we are going into the recession with the highest debt of any developed country. "But that's not true. Britain is at the lower end of the middle of developed countries [when it comes to national debt]. Less than the US, much less than Japan or Germany or Italy." He is worried by the incorrect lessons Cameron has drawn from the 1930s. "Renouncing a fiscal stimulus when private spending is contracting is strange. Governments have very few tools at their disposal, and Cameron wants to not use them." So are you saying our recession will be much worse if we follow Cameron's advice? "Yes. For sure."

This is our choice now. Obama and Brown will have to be pressured hard to make their stimuli much bigger, and to focus them less on propping up old corporations and more on building a new low-carbon economy. They will make many mistakes. But, as FDR put it, "Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference".

The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we “respect” religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him on the side of the religious censors.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated sixty years ago that “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people.” It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it “Western”, Robert Mugabe calls it “colonialist”, and Dick Cheney calls it “outdated.” The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it – but the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard against which to check ourselves. Until now.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants led by Saudi Arabia demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to “respect” the “unique sensitivities” of the religious, they said – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It said you can only speak within “the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community.” In other words: you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN’s Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he seeks out and condemns “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets”. The council agreed – so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who tried to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed “religious” is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah “will not happen” and “Islam will not be crucified in this council” – and Brown was ordered to be silent.

Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims. Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared it was “un-Islamic” and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi Arabia, the country’s most senior government-approved cleric said it was perfectly acceptable for old men to marry ten year old girls, and those who disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah.

To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim culture? Those women’s, those children’s, this blogger’s – or their oppressors’?

As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: “The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom.” Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.

Underpinning these “reforms” is a notion seeping even into democratic societies – that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of “prejudice” – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water, and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a ‘Prophet’ who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him. I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of “prejudice” or “ignorance”, but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality. If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.

But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has ‘faith’ that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It’s easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced.

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak freely.

An excellent blog that keeps you up to dates on secularist issues is Butterflies and Wheels, which you can read here..

If you want to get involved in fighting for secularism, join the National Secular Society here.

Check out this.

Before you die, would you rather pass through a torture chamber, or go peacefully at a time of your choosing?

That was the choice Dr Anne Turner – the subject of last night’s inspiring BBC film ‘A Death In Switzerland’ – faced. She was diagnosed at the age of 67 with a rare and untreatable brain disease. Anne knew was going to slowly lose her ability to stand, to speak, to swallow, and to breathe, one by one, month by month. She didn’t want to be locked inside a disintegrating brain, watching herself die. So went to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, with her family. They went for a trip on the lakes of Zurich, took in a Beethoven concert, dined in style – and then she swallowed a painless cocktail of barbiturates and slipped away.

More of us are going to face this dilemma than ever before – for benevolent reasons. Millions more are living into very old age, and we can be put back together after accident or illness better than ever. Anne’s story could become your story.

It is a scandal that you still cannot make her choice here, in Britain – especially since many dying people can’t comfortably travel. Some 82 percent of us support the right to an assisted suicide. Yet we are being blocked by a small, predominantly religious minority, who are hugely over-represented in Parliament and the public debate. That 18 percent have an absolute right to choose every inch of life, no matter how painful – but they don’t have the right to force it on the rest of us.

You own your body. You own your life. It should be up to you and your doctor how you end it, not the state. The nightmare-scenarios conjured by the opponents of euthanasia – that it will be a Shipman’s Charter, scything through the elderly for inheritances or just for fun – have been tested to destruction in the countries that have already legalised euthanasia. Every case is eagerly investigated by euthanasia’s enemies – and they haven’t found a single instance where this happens. Nor do doctors think they have been turned into “murderers”. Some 56 percent of British doctors want to be able to help patients who ask to die.

One day, you or I might be in Dr Anne Turner’s situation. Or worse: you could be increasingly immobilised and agonized, surrounded by relatives and doctors who can’t legally help you to end it. Do you want to wait until then before – too late – you demand your right to die with dignity?

This article was also accompanied by some shorter boxes by me:

I

As the hysteria over Jonathan Ross is revived yet again – do we really have to do this? – it’s fitting that Joe Orton’s corpse is twitching back to life. Anybody who thinks bad taste comedy is the affectation of a depraved younger generation should head for the fantastic production of ‘Loot’ at the Tricycle Theatre, or the new ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’ at the Trafalgar Studios starring Matthew Horne. The gags Orton wrote in the early 1960s are still shocking, ranging over Islam, rape and paedophilia. There were endless shrieks for him to be censored then – and now he is rightly regarded as a classic part of the English canon. I expect Russell Brand to be on the National Curriculum in the 2040s.

II

Every morning, I wander into a cratered wreck. At least, that’s how it feels when I trudge down into Aldgate East tube station. More than a year and a half ago, London Underground stripped out all the fittings and ripped down all the posters, leaving only dirty crumbling concrete and eerie low lighting. There are signs assuring us it will all be sorted out in the next month – dated early 2008. Do the renovations on the tube operate on the same time-scale as the electronic boards where trains are always one minute away – and take fifteen?

III

This week, Germaine Greer turns seventy – and I want to thank her. There are very few people who manage to crow-bar open human freedom a little further in their lives, but Germaine has. As one of the pioneers of feminism, she has had endless sludge thrown at her over the years. There was even a shameful comedy in London last year based on the time she was kidnapped and feared she would be killed. But this is a better country and a better world for her presence – for women, and men. Happy birthday, Germaine.

The tears are finally drying – the tears of the Bush years, and the tears of awe at the sight of a black President of the United States. So what now? The cliché of the day is that Barack Obama will inevitably disappoint the hopes of a watching world, but the truth is more subtle than that. If we want to see how Obama will change the world – for good or bad – we need to trace the deep structural factors that underlie US foreign policy, and tease out what he will do about them. A useful case study of these pressures is about to flicker onto our news pages for a moment – from the top of the world.

Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America, and its lofty slums 4000 metres above sea level seem a world away from the high theatre of the inauguration. But if we look at this country closely, we can explain one of the great paradoxes of the United States – that it has incubated a triumphant civil rights movement at home, yet thwarted civil rights movements abroad. Bolivia shows us in stark detail the contradictions facing a black President of the American empire.

The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has a story strikingly similar to Obama’s. In 2006 he became the first indigenous President of his country – and a symbol of the potential of democracy. When the Spanish arrived in Bolivia in the sixteenth century, they enslaved the indigenous majority and worked millions to death. As recently as the 1950s, an indigenous person wasn’t even allowed to walk through the centre of La Paz, where the presidential palace and city cathedral stand. They were (and are) routinely compared to monkeys and apes.

Morales was born to a poor potato-farmer in the mountains, and grew up scavenging for discarded orange peel or banana skins to eat. Of his seven siblings, four starved to death as babies. Throughout his adult life, it was taken forgranted that the country would be ruled by the white mestizo minority; the “Indians” were too “child-like” to manage a country.

Given that the US is constitutionally a democracy and its Presidents say they are committed to spreading democracy across the world, you would expect them to welcome the democratic rise of Morales. But wait. Bolivia has massive reserves of natural gas – a geo-strategic asset, and one that rakes in billions for US corporations. Here is where the complications set in.

Before Morales, the white mestizo elite was happy to allow US companies to simply take the gas and leave the Bolivian people with short change: just 18 percent of the royalties. Indeed, they handed almost the entire country to US interests, while skimming a small percentage for themselves. In 1999, an American company, Bechtel, was handed the water supply – and water rates for the poor majority doubled.

Morales ran for election against this agenda. He said that Bolivia’s resources should be used for the benefit of millions of bitterly poor Bolivians, not a tiny number of super-rich Americans. He kept his promise. Now Bolivia keeps 82 percent of the vast gas royalties – and he has used the money to increase health spending by 300 percent, and to build the country’s first pension system. He is one of the most popular leaders in the democratic world. In slums across South America, I have seen this pink tide rising through the barrios and favelas, where millions of people are seeing doctors and schools for the first time in their lives.

I suspect that a majority of the American people – who are good and decent – would be pleased and support this process if they were told about it honestly. But how did the US government (and much of the media) react? George Bush fulminated that “democracy is being eroded in Bolivia”, and a recent US ambassador to the country compared Morales to Osama Bin Laden. Why? To them, you are a democrat if you give your resources to US corporations, and you are a dictator if you give them to your own people. The will of the Bolivian people is irrelevant.

There is another layer of disagreement between Morales and US power. Bolivians have a widespread millennia-long tradition chewing coca leaves, or brewing them in tea: it’s a good way of keeping your energy up when you are doing grinding work at such a high altitude. But in the 1980s, the Reagan administration announced that this was contrary to the demands of the “war on drugs”. They trained and paid for elite white military units to forcibly “eliminate coca.” They rampaged across the Bolivian countryside destroying the crops of desperately poor people. Evo Morales – a coca farmer himself – saw them burn a peasant farmer alive, an experience he says “changed me forever.” He wants to legalize coca for private use – and he is supported by 80 percent of Bolivians.

For these reasons, the US has been moving to trash Morales. Latin America still lives in the shadow of its own 9/11: on September 11th 1973, Henry Kissinger and the CIA conspired to murder the freely elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, to stop his programme of democratic socialism from proceeding.

Over the past few years, the techniques have become a little less crude. By an odd quirk of fate, almost all of Bolivia’s gas supplies are in the east of the country – where the richest, whitest part of the population lives. So the US government has been funding and fuelling the hard-right separatist movements that want these regions to break away. Then the mestizos would happily hand the gas to US companies like in the good ol’ days – and Morales would be left without resources. The interference became so severe that last September Morales had to expel the US Ambassador for “conspiring against democracy.” This weekend, Morales is holding a major referendum on a new constitution for the country which will entrench the rights of the indigenous people.

Enter Obama – and his paradoxes. He is obviously a person of good will and good sense, but he is operating in a system subject to many undemocratic pressures. Bolivia illustrates the tension. The rise of Morales reminds us of the America the world loves – its yes-we-can openness and civil rights movements. Yet the presence of gas and coca reminds us of the America the world hates – the desire to establish “full spectrum dominance” over the world’s resources and send troops barging into their countries, whatever the pesky natives think.

Which America will Obama embody? The answer is both – at first. Morales has welcomed him as “a brother”, and Obama has made it clear he wants a dialogue, rather than the abuse of the Bush years. Yet who is Obama’s Bolivia advisor? A lawyer called Greg Craig, who represents Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada – the hard-right former President of Bolivia who imposed some of the most extreme privatizations of the 1980s, and is now wanted on charges of genocide in Bolivia for the massacres of indigenous protestors. Craig’s legal team says Morales is (yes) leading “an offensive against democracy.”

The structural pressures within the US political system that drove hostility to a democratic civil rights leader like Morales up to now have not dissolved in the cold Washington air. The US is still dependent on foreign fossil fuels to keep its lights on, the drug war bureaucracy will continue its senseless crusade, and US corporations still buy Senators from both parties. Obama will still be swayed by those factors.

But while this is a reason to be frustrated, it isn’t a reason to be cynical. Why? Because while he will be swayed by those factors, he will also subtly erode them over time. Obama has made energy independence – a massive transition away from foreign oil and gas, and towards the wind, sun and waves – the centre of his governing programme. If the US is no longer addicted to Bolivian gas, then its governments will be much less inclined to topple anybody else who wants to control it. (If they’re off oil, they’ll be much less invested in the Saudi tyranny and petro-wars in the Middle East too.)

Obama also says he wants to peel back the distorting effect of corporate money on the US political system. He is already less slathered in corporate cash than any President since the 1920s. The further he pushes it back, the more breathing-space democratic movements like Morales’ get to control their own resources. He also seems to be a less fanatical drug warrior than his predecessors, offering praise in the past for those who believe the US should concentrate on treating addicts at home rather than trying to burn and fumigate their supply from every forest or mountain on earth.

But we will see. If you want to know if Obama is really altering the tectonic forces that drive American power, keep an eye on the rooftop of the world.

Just click here.

(It's half an hour in on the Wednesday show)