Johann Hari

It’s when you look at the birth-pangs of a religion that you can see most clearly how it was invented not by some mystical “God”, but by human beings – usually for cynical reasons.

Look, for example, at the inventor of monotheism. The man who introduced to humanity the idea that there was One God was Pharaoh Akhenaten, some thirty-three centuries ago. (I’ve been thinking about him because you can see his likeness for the next few months in the gaudy exhibition at the Millennium Dome, excavated from the tomb of his son Tutenkhamun). Akhenaten declared that the sun-god Aten was the only true deity, and all other Gods must be discredited and denied. It was a crucial moment in human history, a radical break by a “heretic Pharaoh” with all preceding superstitions. At that moment, he first formed the idea that was later refined by Moses and Mohammed and Maimonidies (and that’s just the ‘M’s) until it became humanity’s most successful superstition.

But it was a lie – a political trick to maximise his power. Many Egyptologists now believe that Akhenaten only gave birth to monotheism because the priesthood of the rival god Amun was becoming too strong for the comfort of the royal house. At the very moment of its birth, monotheism was made up for the political convenience of man.

This shouldn’t surprise us. (Especially not here in England, where our state religion is not Catholicism thanks to the fluke of a fat man wanting a divorce). At the birth of every religion, you can see this crude self-interested trickery. In Christopher Hitchens’ brilliant new book ‘God is Not Great’, the traces the preposterous invention of Mormonism. My favourite example of a religion blatantly invented as a con is Scientology. Its bare-faced Messiah was a huckster called L. Ron Hubbard, a compulsive liar who declared in the 1950s, “If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion.” And how – by 1982, he was raking in forty million dollars a year.

Hubbard’s religious “discoveries” strangely shifted to suit his needs and whims. After psychiatrists condemned his theories as “nonsense”, he announced that psychiatrists were the root of all evil, “not just on this planet but from time immemorial.” He “discovered” that psychiatrists existed at the start of the universe, and they actually invented evil.

The same make-it-up-as-you-go-along can be seen in the works of Jesus and the ‘Prophet’ Mohammed. Look at the affair of the ‘Satanic Verses’, which many people wrongly assume was invented by Salman Rushdie. The tale of the Satanic Verses is in fact a historical event, extensively documented by the earliest scholars of Islam.

When Mohamnmed was starting out in Mecca, he was finding it difficult to keep all his diffuse followers on side and retain good relations with his Arab kinsmen. Some of them were particularly attached to a few of the old deities, so they resisted the new-fangled ‘there is no God but God’ spiel at the heart of Islam’s message. So one day, Mohammed had a convenient ‘revelation’, delivered by the Archangel Gabriel. He announced that you could worship three of the old Gods after all! Everyone was a winner, and peace prevailed.

But a few of Mohammed’s followers were puzzled. They remembered him saying the complete opposite only a few months before. How could God, through his messenger the Archangel Gabriel, contradict himself? Didn’t you say he was all-perfect and all-knowing? Panicked, Mohammed suddenly announced that clearly Satan had impersonated the Archangel Gabriel and dictated false messages to him. The passages saying polytheism was okay after all were swiftly dubbed ‘Satanic Verses’ and scrubbed from the record.

At its very birth, montheism was a con. Until we start demanding basic rules of rationality in human belief – like asking ‘Where is the evidence for your claims?’ insistently – we will keep falling for the transparently absurd inventions of the Akhenatens and the Mohammeds and the Hubbards.

You can comment on this post, and read the comments of others, here.

You can read my other articles opposing superstition here.

This week the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez touched down in London, to a blaze of slander and lies about his record so far. He will be dubbed “a military dictator”, a “caudillo”, a “murderer” and worse. Ah well – at least on this trip Elizabeth Windsor is unlikely to tell him to “shut up”, as the Spanish King snapped at him during a summit in Chile last week.

So before the misrepresentations begin, let’s establish some facts. Before Chavez was elected President in 1998, the country’s oil wealth was used exclusively to enrich a tiny white-skinned elite. The forgotten, darker-skinned majority were left to fester in barrios made of mud and rusting tin in the high hills that ring Venezuela’s cities. They could only peer down at a marble-white world they would never enter, except as cleaners and skivvies.

Chavez ran for President promising to spend the petro-dollars on them – and he kept his promise. In 2003, two distinguished private consulting firms carried out the most detailed study of economic change under Chavez in Venezuela. The results were astonishing. The poorest half of the country has seen their incomes soar by 130 percent after inflation. Access to clean water is up from 79 percent to 91 percent. Access to medical care is at unprecedented levels. In 1998, there were 1628 primary care doctors in the whole country. Today, there are 19,571 – an increase by a factor of ten.

I have seen the human stories that lie behind these sterile-soundings statistics. Last year, in the collapsing old barrios, I met women who had been drinking out of barrels of stale water all their lives, and now giggled with glee to have fresh running water in their homes. I went to clean new clinics where tens of thousands of poor people were seeing a doctor for the first time. I spoke to an old man who had been blind for twenty years. He had been given a cataract operation for free – and now he could see again. The oil wealth was suddenly being used to lift these people up, rather than keep them down – just as they demanded at the ballot box.

That’s why the people of Venezuela think their country has become more democratic under Chavez. According to Latinobarometro, the gold-standard for Latin American opinion polling, some 32 percent of Venezuelans felt satisfied with their democratic process in 1998. Today, it is 58 percent – more than twenty points ahead of the Latin American average.

But is there a danger Chavez will play into the hands of his critics, and become dictatorial after all? This suggestion will intensify over the next month, as we approach December 2nd – the date on which Venezuelans vote on his new proposals to amend the constitution. There are dozens of clauses: the working week will be shortened to 36 hours, extremely popular in a country where most work is back-breaking and tedious labour. There will be legal guarantees that private homes can never be expropriated by the government. Much more power will be devolved down to elected local councils.

But the most controversial clause is an end to the two-term limits on the Presidency. This means Chavez will be able to run again and again for the job of President, for as long as the people want him. There are cries that this will make him a dictator – but using this logic, Britain, France and Germany are dictatorships too.

So why the persistent claims that Chavez is a strongman? There are many bogus reasons to say this – and a few real reasons to worry.

Chavez is in a difficult position for any leader in a democracy: his country contains a vociferously, violently anti-democratic minority who are determined to overturn the will of the majority. Venezuela’s white elite have been astonished by their sudden loss of power and privilege. They were accustomed to seeing the country’s petro-wealth as their private preserve. They are supported by the US government, who are appalled their corporations have been suddenly asked by Chavez to pay their fair share – and by his attempts to spread this model abroad. From the moment Chavez was elected, they have fought to topple him.

First, they tried an economic siege: the Venezuelan rich went on strike. They locked the workers out of their factories and firms in an attempt to bring the country’s economy crashing down. It failed. So next they tried a recall referendum, gathering millions of signatures to rerun the election. Chavez prevailed again, with a bigger majority.

Then came their most dramatic move. In April 2002, they seized the Presidential Palace and kidnapped Chavez. Backed by the Bush administration, they immediately dissolved the parliament, the constitution, and the supreme court, and declared martial law. But the Venezuelan poor refused to watch their democracy die. They came out onto the streets in their millions – risking being gunned down – to demand Chavez’s return. The newspapers and TV channels refused to cover this, because their owners helped plan the coup. But the soldiers holding Chavez felt ashamed, and released him.

What do you do in a democracy when the owners of a free press militate to overthrow the democratic process itself? It’s a genuinely difficult question, and I don’t know the answer. I do know that if it happened in Britain – if Gordon Brown was kidnapped by a foreign-backed minority determined to end democracy, and ITV and Channel Four helped plan it – we would react in a much more stringent way than Chavez. He waited two years to deny a terrestrial license to just one of the channels that backed the coup, RCTV. Almost none of the coup plotters have been jailed. The newspapers are still free to be violently against Chavez, as they are almost all the time.

And yet… and yet… being kidnapped and nearly killed with the support of the US government has indeed had a radicalising influence on Chavez. At his best, Chavez cites social democratic thinkers like J.K. Galbraith. At his worst, he praises Communists like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. When I met up with Chavez last year, I was alarmed when he told me, “I don’t think in Cuba there is a lack of freedom of speech. There is no repression in Cuba… Is it true that by electing a President or Prime Minister every five years you have democracy? Is it because you have press and TV channels that you have freedom of speech?”

It wasn’t a rousing defence of liberal freedoms. Yet there has only been one hint so far that he could act on these thoughts: last year, he asked the parliament to vote to allow him to rule by decree on a dozen issues, for 18 months. These Castroite instincts plainly struggle within his chest against much more impressive ones.

Up to now, Chavez has offered a shimmering model of pro-poor democratic development, at the tip of the most unequal continent on earth. It would be a tragedy if – after extending real freedom in Venezuela, and saving hundreds of thousands of lives among the poor – Chavez did finally turn into the dictator his petrol-soaked enemies have painted him as.

You can read my interview with Hugo Chavez here, and some critical responses to it here.

You can read some of my other reports from Venezuela here, here, and here.

You can read my article about why I don't think anyone should revere Che Guevara here, and my take on Cuba's future here.

...with Kirsty Wark, Rachel Campell-Johnson and the amazing John Carey.

In the mid-1970s, a group of men who were untrained in economics – and, as it happens, borderline-insane – emerged in Washington DC and invented a whole new approach to economics. In the past, it had been thought that if you wanted to cut taxes, you had to ploddingly pay for it by either cutting spending or increasing borrowing. No more. This new group preached something called “supply-side economics”, which claimed that you could cut taxes, and increase public spending, and hold down borrowing and inflation, all at the same time. It’s easy, they said: if you cut taxes, the economy will grow even faster – and make up the difference!

The story of the supply-siders’ strange rise begins when three grey-suited men met in a swish Washington hotel in the gloomy aftermath of Watergate to turn this untested idea into a governing philosophy. They were: the economic consultant Arthur Laffer, the journalist Jude Wanniski, and Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff – a man called Dick Cheney. At the time, Laffer was merely a disgraced former advisor to the Nixon administration. He had lost his job after he made a series of wild and incorrect predictions that the economy would boom, and an investigation showed he had been using only four variables – compared to the thousands used by other economists. But getting his predictions hideously wrong did not put Laffer off. No – he decided he had uncovered the secret key to economic growth, one that had eluded all economists since the dawn of capitalism.

Trying to explain this idea to an eager Cheney, “Laffer pulled out a cocktail napkin and drew a parabola-shaped curve on it,” writes the liberal New Republic journalist Jonathan Chait. “The premise of the curve was simple. If the government sets a tax rate of zero, it will receive no revenue. And if the government sets a tax rate of 100 percent, the government will also receive zero tax revenue, since nobody will have any reason to earn any income. Between these two, Laffer’s curve drew an arc. The arc suggested that at higher levels of taxation, reducing the tax rate would produce more revenue for the government.”

The Laffer Curve became the supply-siders’ Sermon on the Mount, the core of their faith. For Cheney, it was “a revelation, for it presented in a simple, easily digestible form the messianic power of tax cuts,” Chait notes. “In that sloping parabola was the magical promise of that elusive politician’s nirvana, a cost-free path to prosperity: lower taxes, higher revenues.” He had discovered his “totalistic ideology. The core principle is that economic performance hinges almost entirely on how much incentive investors and entrepreneurs have to attain more wealth, and this incentive in turn hinges almost entirely on their tax rate.” It was an economic recipe for tax cuts for the rich.

Almost everyone else saw the idea as preposterous. George Bush Snr. dismissed it as “voodoo economics.” But a string of eccentrics, with no serious knowledge of economics, began to preach the gospel – and they were swiftly employed by Ronald Reagan’s burgeoning Presidential campaign. Most of these men were, it turned out, mad. The writer George Gilder – known only for a string of vehemently anti-feminist polemics – wrote a book called ‘Wealth and Poverty’, that was handed out like sweets by Reagan to staffers and friends. Nobody seemed to notice that at the same time that Gilder was co-inventing supply-side economics, he was also bragging about being a master of Extra-Sensory Perception. He explained he could receive messages from strangers without using any of his senses, bragging he had “hundreds of experiences” with psychics. “The trick,” he explained, “is that you have to have faith.” He applied the same evidence-free approach to his economic writing.

Similarly, the journalist Wanniski was hired as an economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, despite having no economic training or credibility. He was also fond of defending Saddam Hussein (who never gassed anyone, he insists to this day), Slobodan Milosevic, and the conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche, who says the Fabian Society is a secret drug-and-arms-smuggling gang. Nobody on Reagan’s team seemed to notice that supply-side economics was just as fevered a fantasy.

All academic economists warned them their vision was absurd. They pointed out that a passing glance at the evidence showed the falsity of claims that marginal tax rates are the sole or primary determinant of economic growth. From 1947 to 1973, the US economy grew by 4 percent a year – while the richest Americans paid a 91 percent top rate of tax.

As soon as it was put into practice, the predictions of supply side economics were shown, predictably, to be false. They insisted tax cuts for the rich would create more economic growth, and therefore pay for themselves. But straight after Reagan began to try it, deficits started to shoot up, past $100bn, then $200bn, as a vast hole was left in the nation’s balance sheet. Then, when Bill Clinton tentatively tried to reverse some of this horrifying damage by increasing the top income tax rate from 31 to 39 percent, the supply-siders made another set of predictions. It would destroy the economy, bringing on a recession, they insisted. Instead, the economy boomed.

And so it continued. When George W. Bush followed their advice and slashed taxes for the rich, the supply-siders insisted yet again that tax revenues would actually increase as the economy was super-charged by these new incentives, so there would be no need for spending cuts or increased borrowing. In fact, income tax payments fell to their lowest level as a proportion of the US economy since 1942, and the deficit soared to unprecedented trillions – a legacy that will poison American politics for generations. “It is impossible to think of how events could have turned out worse for them,” Chait notes, “short of God appearing on earth to denounce the Laffer Curve as an abomination.”

But something strange happened. Despite being proven flat-out wrong, supply-side economics did not disappear. Instead, it became the received wisdom of the Republican Party. It is now preached by every major Presidential candidate for the Grand Old Party. As Chait says: “The[se ideas] have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda.”

How? How did the preachings of these economic illiterates become the “common sense” of Bush and his successors? Chait gives a simple, compelling reason: “The lesson for cranks everywhere is that your theory stands a stronger chance of success if it directly benefits a rich and powerful bloc, and there’s no bloc richer and more powerful than the rich and powerful.”

Supply-side economics provided the ideological icing – a sweet-sounding rationale – for a straightforwardly corrupt programme whereby the super-rich bought the Republican Party, and in turn were handed vast tax cuts and lavish subsidies by them. As Chait argues, “The supply-siders taught the rich that economic growth hinges above all else on satisfying the desire of the affluent to grow even more affluent.” So the rich funded their think tanks and threw money at politicians who preached their message. The failure of all their predictions and policies didn’t matter, because from the perspective of the super-rich, it did work – they got their tax cuts.

Of course, the supply-siders claimed publicly that everyone benefited from their programme, not just their paymasters. Yet a memo wielded by Chait perfectly captures the insincerity of this. In March 2001, a coalition of business lobbyists arranged a march in Washington to support Bush’s massive supply-side tax cuts for the rich. They secretly circulated instructions explaining: “The theme involves working Americans. Visually, this will need a lot of hard-hats… the Speaker’s office was very clear in saying we do not need people in suits. If people want to participate, they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types, etc.” Hard hats were provided for the millionaire lobbyists to wear on the day, to give the impression they were ordinary Joes.

This shift to supply-side goodies for the super-rich has not been supported at any point by the ordinary Americans they were so carefully posing as. A Pew research poll following Bush’s election asked the American public what the budget surplus left behind by Clinton should be used for. The vast majority wanted to use it for Social Security or Medicare; only 17 percent picked tax cuts. Crucially, the Republicans know this too. In 2002, Bush’s political team privately instructed the Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill: “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes. It’s crucial that your remarks make clear there is no trade-off here.” This is a pure statement of supply-side economics, pretending there are no hard choices – you can cut and spend and laugh all the way to the Magic Bank.

Jonathan Chait has managed to do something extraordinary: he has written a book about economic theory that is both gut-bustingly funny and as compelling as a horror-story. ‘The Big Con’ has a dark relevance for British readers too. John Redwood, the man appointed by David Cameron to run his business and competitiveness strategy, tosses hardline supply-side myths around like confetti, and shadow chancellor George Osborne has declared: “We have a lot to learn from George Bush’s compassionate conservatism.” There is a chance the British people could yet be forced to surf the Laffer curve to economic disaster.

You can comment on this article, and read other people's comments, here.

You can read my other book reviews here.

When is it okay to beat, rape and stab a woman? When it is okay to call their victims “whiny”, “money-grabbing” and “bitches”? The obvious answer is – never. But that doesn’t seem to be the judgement we make, together, as a culture. No. If the wife-beater/rapist/attempted murderer can write novels, kick a ball, create songs or pose as a liberal politician, we treat their misogyny as an irrelevance or, worse, as a laddish affectation imbuing them with the testosteroney tang of authenticity.

You can see this by looking at four men – about as diverse as they come – who have been lauded as heroes: Norman Mailer, George Best, Tupak Shakur, and Bill Clinton.

For the past six days, we have been saturated with tributes to the “greatness” of Norman Mailer. Not just his work, but his life. He has been called “brave”, “determined to experience life’s richness”, “compassionate”, even “nice.” It is only noted briefly that he violently despised women. He said they are “low, sloppy beasts; they should be kept in cages.” He campaigned to halt every move to give women control over their lives, including birth control – because he said he wanted to retain the “thrill” of knowing the woman he was having sex with might later die in childbirth. He said that feminists wanted to “destroy men”, and wrote a bizarre 300-page book – ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ – to ‘prove’ it.

He acted on this hate. He beat his young wife Adele, punching her in the stomach when she was six months pregnant, and coercing her to have group sex with his friends. One night, in the middel of a party, he picked up a knife and stabbed her. He cut through her breast, only just missing her heart. Then he stabbed her in the back. As she lay there, haemorraghing, one man reached down to help her. He snapped, “Get away from her. Let the bitch die.”

Adele never really recovered. She developed pleurisy, and started hacking up black phlegm ten times a day. She was too scared even to press charges. She became an alcoholic, sank into poverty, and could never trust a man again. When, years later, she told her story in the book ‘The Last Party’, the reviews slapped her down. They called her “whiny”, “a shrill lush”, and “nauseating”. The subtext was: how dare this uppity bitch complain about Our Icon? Some even seem to subconsciously believe that stabbing her made him a better writer – as if one woman is worth sacrificing on the altar of “genius,” and it is churlish of her to keep stubbornly speaking.

(Of course, I believe an artist’s work should be assessed entirely separately to his personal life. If we discovered tomorrow that Shakespeare was a child molestor, King Lear would still be a masterpiece. But Mailer’s misogyny infests his work. As the feminist writer Kate Millett pointed out, his 1965 novel ‘An American Dream’ “is an exercise in how to kill your wife and be happy ever after.” It’s revealing that his only genuinely brilliant novel – ‘The Naked and the Dead’ – has no female characters.)

If Norman Mailer had said black people should be kept in cages, if he had said the civil rights movement wanted to “destroy white people”, if he had stabbed a black man in a racist fury, the first line of every obituary would mentioned it. So why is hatred of women taken less seriously?

It’s not only novel-writing that gets you off the hook: if you can kick a ball, we don’t seem to mind if you kick a woman. George Best first beat his wife Alex on her 25th birthday, when he punched her to the floor and kicked her six times in the chest and face. Then, on Christmas Day 2003, he gave her a broken lip and swollen face. "So what if she's in hospital? It's the best place for her," he snapped at the press the next day. When Paul Gascoigne admitted to having hospitalized his wife, Sheryl, "Bestie" leapt to his defence. “We all give the wife a good slap. I know I do,” he said. When Alex Best finally left him, the press swooped – to attack her. One typical columnist said Alex had "not done badly" out of him, and claimed Best and Gazza's only flaw was that "they are suckers for romance".

I can almost find traces of this impulse to look away in myself, when it comes to people who have done a few things I admire. The rap artist Tupak is now revered as the Messiah of the Ghetto, “a man who stood up for black people” with tracks that bordered on genius. So everyone wants to forget about a nineteen-year old girl called Ayanna Jackson. In 1993, he met her in a club and coaxed her back to his hotel – where he and his friends gang-raped her. At the trial, the judge called it “a brutal attack on a helpless woman.” Tupac didn’t “stand up” for her, he pinned her down and trashed her life.

And Bill Clinton? He has indeed been targeted by right-wing hit-machines, trying to take him out for his few liberal policies. And yet, and yet… Juanita Brodderick is an Arkansas nurse and supporter of the Democratic Party told NBC’s flagship show Dateline that in 1978 when she volunteered for his campaign Clinton lured her to a hotel room, raped her and tore her lip open by biting down on it. She has five witnesses who saw her wounds straight after the alleged rape. Broderrick has never profited from the story, and only told it after she was “outed” by one of the friends who heard the tale. She is only one of several women who have claimed without profit to have been sexually abused by Clinton in strikingly similar ways. As Christopher Hitchens has asked, “What are the chances that three socially and politically respectable women, all political supporters of Mr Clinton and none of them known to each other, would invent almost identical experiences?” (Clinton’s spokesman effectively said these women were liars.)

Why do we so carefully turn a blind eye to the bruised bodies of so many abused women? This selective blindness isn’t confined to news coverage; it informs our political life. Imagine if in Britain today, hundreds of thousands of men were being pinned down – in hotels, living rooms, and back-alleys – and anally raped by their ‘friends’ or acquaintances, and virtually nobody was ever punished for it. It would be one of the biggest issues in British politics. Yet it really does happen to women – so it is a third-tier issue, wheeled out once a decade.

This shrugging reaction to the stabbing and raping so enthusiastically carried out by these men is a reminder that millennia of misogyny aren’t wiped away in a few decades of progress. Lying dormant beneath the polite feminized surface, there is an atavistic belief that violence against women like Adele Mailer and Alex Best and Ayanna Jackson doesn’t quite count. “Let the bitch die,” Mailer growled, his hands covered in blood – and still we unashamedly applaud him to the grave.

You can comment on this (and read other people's comments) at here.

The Tutenkhamun exhibition of ancient bling in the old Millennium Dome – opening today – is doubly deceitful. The publicity material is dominated by an image that looks like the famous death mask of the boy-king, the one everyone flocked to see in 1971. But when you get there, you stumble around the exhibition, with its terrible eye-straining lighting and insufferable Egyptian pan pipes music piercing into every room – and you can’t find it. It’s not there. The closest thing is a tiny twelve-inch mini-version that was used to contain King Tut’s liver. They have blown it up to more than triple its size and stuck it onto the posters.

But that’s a minor deception compared to the exhibition’s poisonous flecks of political propaganda for a dictatorship. The exhibition catalogue is introduced with a letter from Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak (who is torturing dissidents in dank dungeons as you read this). She explicitly marshals King Tut’s tat for her own political ends. The work you are about to see, she explains, is “a symbol of what is possible when people work together toward common goals.” Egypt under the Pharoahs was a land “of harmony and prosperity” – precisely the words her husband uses to describe his own little tyranny.

In Mubarak’s parlance, “harmony” is the opposite of noisy democracy. “Working together toward common goals” is the opposite of people choosing their own goals freely. The exhibition follows this propaganda line, saying that “ordinary life in Ancient Egypt” was characterised essentially by small children stroking kittens and voluntarily creating shiny gold objects to their King. Obviously it would be absurd to condemn the Pharoahs for not introducing the Single Transferable Vote, but it is equally absurd to say the works on display are a symbol of what happens when people hold hands and sink Kum-By-Ya. These objects were crafted by slaves from materials seized by coerced labour. Far from “harmony”, we can assume that – like coerced labour and slaves everywhere, at all times – they rebelled and were beaten down, time and again.

There is something ugly about creating a shiny propaganda vision of ancient Egypt, to reinforce the slimy propaganda vision of a modern tyrant – and expecting us all to coo at how pretty it all is.

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