Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

It hasn't escaped your notice, of course, that the fascist "insurgents" in Iraq have taken a break from killing US troops. Their principal targets now are Iraqi election workers, candidates, local officials and police. What the Baathists and jihadists seek to prevent at all costs is a large turnout in Sunday's election. The very last thing they want is for the Iraqi people to take control of their own destiny. If the elections fail and a power vacuum ensues, those Iraqis who have put themselves on the front lines in an effort to build a decent society will be slaughtered like lambs. So, there's an awful lot at stake.

The desire for collapse in Iraq isn't confined to the terrorists, though. In a truly abysmal editorial, that once-respected journal of the American left, The Nation, embraces electoral failure. It's filled with this kind of sleight of tense: "As conditions deteriorated, it became harder for the Bush Administration to spin the upcoming poll to choose an Iraq National Assembly as a major step toward restoring security." Don't you love the word "poll" there with its trivial associations? It's disheartening to see The Nation trapped in such a rigid ideological corset. It's distressing to see it in denial and it's depressing to see that it's so dismissive of the reality in which Iraqis are literally dying to vote in a general election.

As the marvellous Iraq the Model blog has pointed out, what the fascists fear most is that the world will wake up one day and notice that what's happening in Iraq is not a war between Muslims and Western infidels, but one between reactionary Muslims with their suicide cults and progressive Muslims who want to bring their faith into the 21st century where the ballot and not the bullet will determine who governs. There's a life-and-death struggle going on now in the Muslim world and the first great battle in this ideological war takes place on Sunday in Iraq.

AUSCHWITZ: Continuing with our remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we present another diary entry from the 1940s. This one conveys the slow strangulation of society that marked the first phase of the Nazi plan that eventually led to genocide. The diarist is Edith Velmans:

1 July 1942 [Holland] "New measures again. Not only are we not allowed to cycle any more, we are not allowed to ride the trams either. We have to be off the streets by eight, and we are not allowed inside non-Jewish homes. Shopping is restricted for us to the hours between three and five p.m. It's a mess. I've moved back home. I couldn't stay with the Fernandes' [non-Jewish friends] any more. I did have a wonderful time there. At my last meal with them last night, I read them a poem of thanks I had written. We were all so moved and depressed because of the new measures, and crying so hard about everything, that we ended up sobbing with laughter. It was a comical tragedy, really."

Edith Velmans (1925-) enjoyed a carefree life until the summer of 1942 when it became clear that her family's Jewish background might be fatal. She escaped the death camps by spending three years in hiding with a Christian family in the south of Holland. Her diary, published as Edith's Book in 1998, tells of how she survived the war, after which she became a psychologist specializing in gerontology. She immigrated to the United States in 1957.