Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

It was the practice in the days of the old Soviet Union, in the time of Stalin, to airbrush inconvenient people out of history; to remove all positive references to them from published texts and to remove their image from photographs, a sort of modern version of a process of 'cleansing' that the Romans referred to as Damnatio memoriae-the damnation of memory. Now there is a reverse process at work, a writing of oneself into history and its ben invented by Super Sarkozy, France's absurdly vain little president, Photo-Opportunity Man in person.

This week Europe celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, without doubt the great defining moment of post-war history. Bliss was it that dawn to be alive but to be there was very heaven. So, Sarko was there, Sarko had to be there on that night of nights, 9 November, 1989. He is so excited by his pivotal part in history that he even published a piccie of himself on Facebook, rushing at the said Wall with a pickaxe, almost as if he single-handedly responsible for releasing the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Seemingly, so the history goes according to Sarko, still only an MP at the time, he left Paris on the morning of 9 November in the company of Alain Juppé, the former prime minister, after hearing of "major developments in Berlin." He continues his illuminating story by saying that after they arrived in West Berlin they went strait to the Brandenburg Gate, "where a noisy crowd had gathered expecting the announcement the wall would come down."

Oops, not quite, dear Mouse. News of the immanent collapse of the Wall did not come until late on the evening of 9 November, so you could not have heard of this in Paris that morning, could you now? You and your pick-axe would have been there on your own because the actual hacking did not begin until the following day. But, honestly, if you have to tell a lie try to make sure that all of the angles are covered. Monsieur Juppé has said that he himself was in Berlin about a week after the great event. Investigation of the French press archives show that the two gallant Frenchmen did not in fact arrive in Berlin until 16 November. Did they come with pick-axes, I wonder?

Ah, Monsieur le Président, Stalin could have helped you in this rewriting of history, referring you, I feel sure, to the tactics employed by the NKVD. Is there a French version of this notorious security apparatus? No? Well, maybe you should stop trying to pretend that you are a bigger man than you are. Maybe you should be a little more precise and a little less vain. :-))

Killing, Noe Murder

A figure as controversial and devise in English history as Oliver Cromwell must have been the source of many murderous thoughts but the only assassination plot I am aware of is that conceived by Edward Sexby and Miles Sindercombe, and it came not, as one might expect, from the Cavalier and Royalist right, but from the Leveller and Republican left. Sexby and Sindercombe were, in effect, Cassius and Brutus in an English guise, determined on the destruction of the new Caesar. Sexby was to publish a pamphlet before his death, under the title Killing, Noe Murder, a detailed justification of tyrannicide.

Sexby, a former officer in the New Model Army, and an ardent republican, was the driving force behind the whole plot. He had been deeply angered by the coup of April 1653, which saw the end of the Commonwealth of England and the eventual elevation of Cromwell into the semi-regal position of Lord Protector. From this time forward Sexby plotted to remove the 'apostate', as he referred to Cromwell, by one means or another. His hatred of the English dictator led him into the oddest of alliances. In 1655 he left England after one of his intrigues went wrong, immersing himself in a variety of cloak-and-dagger schemes among spies and plotters of all kinds, even making contact with the court of the exiled Charles Stuart.

Sexby initially wanted to lead a military invasion of England, but realised that such a thing would never work in view of the military strength of the Protectorate; so the murder of Cromwell became the key part of his whole strategy, which was to create a political vacuum into which he and his colleagues could step. As he noted to a correspondent "either I or Cromwell must perish." To further his aims he even tried to persuade his Royalist contacts that he himself favoured a restoration of the ancient monarchy.

While in Flanders, Sexby made contact with Sindercombe, a former Leveller, and a man just as passionate in his hatred of the usurper. Sexby promised to provide arms, ammunition and money, and, in return, Sindercombe promised to arrange the assassination, returning to England in 1656. It was then that things started to go wrong, for one reason or another.

One scheme failed because Cromwell, whose usual practice was to leave town at the weekends for Hampton Court, decided to remain in Whitehall because of pressure of business. Others followed, which also came to nothing, either because of a failure of nerve or an absence of opportunity. As is usual with these things, the more people who became involved, the more difficult it was to keep matters secret, and John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary and spy-master, picked up the rumours.

As a last act of desperation, the plotters planned to burn the Palace of Whitehall, killing Cromwell and everyone else, guilty and innocent alike. In the fashion of Guy Fawkes, the terrorists-and it now seems fitting to use this word-planted a device in the palace chapel in January 1657. All the while they were being watched by Thurloe's men, who now made their move. Sindercombe eventually killed himself while a prisoner in the Tower of London, but not before revealing Sexby's part in the plot.

Not long after Killing, Noe Murder appeared on the streets of London, in justification of Sindercombe's actions, and arguing that if Cromwell really wanted to serve his country he should do so by dying as quickly as possible. Three hundred copies of this seditious pamphlet were seized in the city on 27 May alone. Sexby himself came to England in disguise, only to be captured, dying of disease in the Tower in January 1658.

His real legacy was in his theoretical defence of political murder, which still has some resonance today. For Sexby tyrants had placed themselves beyond the law, and therefore the scriptural precepts and ethical imperatives against murder no longer applied. In the place of God and the morality Sexby substituted political necessity. He did not invent political assassination; for that is as old as human history. He did, rather, provide a theoretical defence for the indefensible, and an abiding notion that, in certain circumstances, the ends will always justify the means.

Baba Yaga

I’ve been reading mythologies, fairytales and folklore since I was about six years old. I began with Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths in a version especially edited for children. I fell in love with the quarrelsome and all too human Greek Pantheon, from Zeus to Artemis, reading everything I could find. By the time I was eight I had graduated on to Homer!

These explorations stimulated my appetite for new sources of inspiration, new and different tales. I exhausted every library I could find, every anthology that was available, and I do not exaggerate! Oh, how I loved them all, the tales collected by the Grimm Brothers in Germany and Asbjørnsen and Moe in Norway, as well as Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. But the folk tradition that made the greatest impact on me was that of the Slav people, especially the Russians. And the one character in Russian tradition that both delighted and terrified me was Baba Yaga, the great witch herself, the greatest of all the witches.

Baba Yaga epitomises all of the ambiguity of witchcraft, of nature itself, perhaps, malevolent and benevolent by turns. She is for me the most perfect symbol of witchcraft, the most perfect avatar, standing in total contradiction to Wicca, that crypto-hippie cult. She is scary, yes, but she is also grand; she can be terrifically wicked but she can also be just and solicitous.

In Russian tradition Baba Yaga, though the ultimate boogie-woman, represents something more than witchcraft; she is also a residue from pre-Christian days, perhaps the Corn Mother herself, banished to the woods by the missionaries of the new faith. But there she stayed and never went away.

As an underworld goddess controlling life and death, Baba Yaga was the last hope for the infertile. She could also perform miracle cures. But approaching her carried considerable dangers; for she was just as likely to curse as to cure. Yes, she knows all of the secrets of nature, all of the sources of botanical healing. Knowing is one thing; revealing is quite another.

So, Baba Yaga is the Mistress of all Witches, the Primal Mother, nurturing and destructive. But unlike more traditional goddesses or semi-divine figures she was not at all remote, living, rather, deep in the forests of old Russia in a cottage named Izbusha, which stands by tradition on chicken legs. This cottage will move at Baba’s command; Izbushka, Izbushka! Stand with your back to the forest and your front to me.

Izbushka is a fearsome looking place, made of bones collected by Baba Yaga herself. Leg bones form the doorstep; a mouth with teeth serves as the lock; the fence is formed from bones toped by skulls. If one approaches at night the first thing to be seen is light glowing from the eye-sockets. Inside there is a large oven which symbolises the cycles of life, from birth to death.

If the house is fearsome the great witch is even more so. She has iron teeth protruding like the tusks of a boar. Her hands are tipped with claws and she wears a necklace of skulls. She comes through the air not on a broomstick but in a huge mortar which she steers with a pestle, sweeping away her traces as she moves.

It’s while seated in her mortar that she grinds out life and death, just like a Corn Mother. Her flight recalls that of the Goddess Diana on the wild hunt, except her companions are not women but by crows, ravens and owls. Again, according to some sources, she is also like Diana in that she represents the moon. In this form she eats her own body in a cannibal feast and then regenerates, regulating the fertility of women and of the earth.

The moon, the waxing and the waning of the moon, also gives an indication when it is safe to approach her and when it is not. When it is full her door is open, as the witch is replete, happy and pregnant. But when it wanes her womb and belly are empty. Those who approach then are likely to end as her next meal. :-)

Always approach the witch with caution and reverence; always approach with care and understanding. Or else!

Things Can Only Get Better

Commenting on Tony Blair’s backdoor bid to be President of Euroland The Economist says that he is opposed by the Tories because they ‘fear his clout.’ I rather thought it’s because we do not want this debased man to have any input into English politics ever again. We saw enough of him in the past; we know enough about him not to want him in the future.

He is a constant puzzle to me, I have to say; he has been since I first became truly politically conscious. It’s impossible to deny that he was the most successful Labour Prime Minister ever, winning three elections in a row. But for what, I ask? That’s the puzzle, at least after the first victory in 1997, which was built on the desire for change, built on the nadir of the Major government. What exactly did he achieve? Nothing, nothing that I can see. Sorry, that’s not true; his achievements were almost invariably bad or wretched, in both domestic and foreign policy.

I’m biased, you say; yes, I am; I freely admit this. But still, think about his record, think about the record of his government. ‘Education, education, education’ was his mantra at the outset. What has that brought? Why, decline, decline, decline; an abject failure in state schooling based on relentless dumbing down, an academic inflation of the worst kind. Who would not, if they could afford it, choose to escape so much of the comprehensive system in this country?

I also think Blair deserves to be ranked among the weakest of our prime ministers. His whole time in office was marked by a schoolboyish feud with Gordon Brown, his Chancellor, seething and resentful in the background, believing he could do better in the top job, totally unaware how ill-suited he was. The foundation of our present economic ills, the phoney debt fuelled boom, was set down in those years. Frightened to move him, or to sack him for disloyalty, and thus have him do a Sir Geoffrey Howe from the back benches, Blair allowed his second-rate colleague to ditch Prudence and embrace Profligacy.

And what an absolute phony Blair was in every way, the prime minister of spin and image; the Hello prime minster. I remember in my teens seeing a news broadcast from Downing Street, one where he came out in casual dress carrying a mug, which I think had ‘Best Dad’, or something or other written on it. That was the point when I though, oh gosh, what a fake, what a pathetic poseur!

But he has clout on the world stage, so says The Economist. According to David Miliband his cavalcade would ‘stop the traffic’, which I think gives perfect insight to this man’s perception of politics and people. Why does he have clout, exactly? Because he became George Bush’s poodle. What other explanation is there? He barked to order; he barked into Afghanistan and Iraq. He barked on the basis of a lie and then tried to cover that lie in the most despicable way. On the subject of lies there was a promise of a referendum on Europe, perhaps the biggest fraud of all.

So, all along the line the Labour government failed; on education, on immigration, on the economy, on Europe, on defence, on everything. Still, Blair won election after election, in 1997, in 2001 and in 2005. Why? Why? Why? My answer is simple: it was because of the curse of Margaret Thatcher. The abject and cowardly way she was stabbed in the back in 1990 was to haunt the Tory Party for years after, through the Major years and into opposition; through the time of William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. The Party seemed lost for an identity, lost for a proper sense of itself, caught by the dazzle of Blairdom. And that’s just the point; it was all just hype and dazzle. But the dazzle turned Brown and the future got bright. Things can only get better. :-)

Let Karzai Sink; Let our Soldiers Come Home

Five more of our soldiers have come home in coffins, five more in this pointless war, five more on the eve of armistice day.

I come from a family with a long military tradition. I grew up with the belief that it was wrong to voice any criticism when one’s nation was at war, because such criticism, justified or not, would inevitably be bad for morale, bad for the morale of our service people, who need every sign of support from home in the difficult tasks they are so often faced with. I was always deeply hostile to the war in Iraq because I saw the invasion of 2003 as a dangerous adventure, one that simply had not been thought through, one based on lies and dissimulation, though my criticisms were always political and historical in nature and direction.

I thought Afghanistan was different; I thought this was a war we had to fight, for all sorts of strategic reasons; I’ve argued this very point on other blogs. Not any more; my contributions on this subject have been growing increasingly hostile. Our troops are there to uphold the worthless Karzai government, to prop up a man recently ‘elected’ by ‘acclamation’. This is a fraud, no matter if he was congratulated by Brown and Obama on his ‘victory’; one would have to be blind not to recognise this process for what it is. Who, in the quietness of reflection, wants this murderous carnival to continue, to see more and more bodies return in a chain without end?

Those who read Christina Lamb’s article in The Spectator the week before will have noted that the various European powers-whose contributions have been largely worthless, anyway-are looking for an early exit. The Canadians intend to go by 2011. In the end perhaps only Britain and the United States will be left.

General McChrystal wants another 40,000 troops, and he may now get them, since Obama has deluded himself that the ends of democracy have been served. Reinforcement on that scale will take the total NATO strength to about the same levels as the Soviets at their peak. No matter. Double that number again and I am still convinced that ‘success’, however defined, will still be just beyond reach; the faster one runs, the faster it retreats. We would simply have the usual situation in guerrilla warfare, demonstrated time and again, from the Peninsular War to Indochina: heavily armed foreign troops isolated in cities and garrisons, islands in a sea of hostility.

Success; think about that very point, think about what it means, exactly what it means. When our soldiers took the district of Nad Ali last year, suffering casualties in the process, they promptly handed control over to the Afghan police. These same police at once set about raping local boys, a situation so bad that the people asked the Taliban to come back and protect them. Corruption at the periphery, corruption at the centre; this is the reality of ‘democratic’ Afghanistan, a country where even Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President’s brother, receives subsidies from the CIA, despite his involvement in the opium trade.

Let Karzai sink; let our soldiers come home. We must look to our immediate defences; it’s as simple as that.

Coming to London in 1700

Imagine yourself, if you will, as a traveller coming to London in the early 1700s. The first thing you would notice is the almost constant pealing of church bells. They were rung not just to summon the faithful, but to alert the community to a hanging-a popular spectator sport-or to a death, when it would toll nine times for a man, six for a woman and three for a child, followed even more sombrely by one stroke for each year she or he had lived. The bell was also a prompt for the 'searchers', the old crones employed by the parish "to repair to the place where the dead corps lies, and by view of the same, and other enquiries, to examine by what disease or casualty the corps died." They were on the look-out chiefly for signs of the plague, and their instant 'diagnosis' would then appear in the London Bills of Mortality.

London by 1700, with half-a-million people, was the largest city in Europe, and with no sanitary arrangements whatsoever. Those approaching from the countryside were first alerted to its presence by smell before sight. Heaps of human sewage was deposited by 'night-soil' men by the roadside. Walking through the streets the traveller had to be constantly alert to the sudden emptying of chamber pots out or windows into the 'kennels', or open-drains running down the middle of the street. Jonathan Swift describes these delightful depositories being blocked with "Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud, Dead Cats, and Turnip-Tops." If this was not bad enough our lucky traveller would have to breathe in air thick with sulphurous smoke from domestic fires and industrial furnaces. Those living near graveyards would also have to endure the stink of decaying corpses, buried just below the surface.

Having survived the baptism of stink and smoke, the said traveller was highly likely to contract some fatal disease soon after arrival. Malaria was commonplace, as was typhoid from the contaminated water-supply. Contaminated food was a major cause of dysentery. Poor personal hygiene meant that most people, high and low, had fleas and lice, even to be found in the gentleman's periwig. Smallpox was also rife-so called to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis, which was all too common among certain sections of the community. Tuberculosis, also common, was the cause of endless spitting and retching, both indoors and out. One in three babies died before the age of two; and of those who survived, half were dead before the age of fifteen. A great many of these unfortunates simply died of ignorance, with mothers using dirty coins to sooth the pains of teething, and forcing babies to eat solids.

Our traveller would have to find some means of supporting herself or himself quickly, for life was hard and there was no allowance for failure. Suicide was common, and the details of the deaths were eagerly reported by the hack press of Grub Street-"Yesterday morning a woman near White-chappel, who workt to a throwster in those parts, and earned 8 shillings a week, hanged herself in her lodging; but nobody can guess at the reason of her despair."

Welcome to London!

The Woes of Lemonade Joe

Here I am having another bite in a week that marks the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the end of European Communism

I think that it was Mikhail Gorbachev's tragedy that he truly believed that he could indeed reform the unreformable, to give fresh life to what was, in practice, a political and economic corpse. If you look closely at the history of the period you will see that he was acting on conclusions already reached by Yuri Andropov, his predecessor, who died before he could implement any policy changes. Alterations to the moribund system had to come, in one form or another. So, what went wrong? Well, let's have a look.

The first thing is that he was too ambitious: he opened so many doors that could not be closed again; to rooms within rooms, ever beyond. He began by looking for both political and economic change, whereas the wise thing would have been to renew the economy, the immediate area of concern, and leave political superstructures to a later date. He might, in other words, have adopted the kind of model being pursued with considerable success by the present Chinese administration. Attempting political and economic change at the same time was bad; it was far worse when one ran far ahead of the other.

In Gorbachev's case political reform proceeded well out of pace with the restructuring of the economy. To be more precise, the whole Soviet economy went into a state of freefall, while a growing sense of political freedom opened the whole apparatus of Communist rule to acute forms of criticism that Gorbachev could simply not control. It was a self-reinforcing process; the more living standards declined the more critical people became. For some the pace of change was too fast; for others it was not fast enough. There was no strategy; there was no road map; there was no coherence.

Gorbachev was also faced with the inertia and limitations of the whole system; an entrenched and sclerotic bureaucracy, and a population that over time had learned apathy as a mode of defence. The Secretary's attempt to appeal to 'the people' beyond the apparatus only increased hostility towards him within the Communist Party, just as his wider social and political initiatives often had risible consequences. I am thinking here of the anti-vodka campaign, intended to reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. All this did was to give an added spur to the black economy, and draped poor Gorby with the unfortunate appellation of 'Lemonade Joe.' Unpopular within the system, and unpopular without, he went on to attempt to ride all of the horses of the Soviet republics and the People's Democracies at the same time. Practically speaking, the whole thing was quite impossible.

Internal matters were made worse for Gorbachev by the falling world price of oil and gas, which reduced his room for manoeuvre still further. In international terms his initiatives looked increasingly desperate, particularly his moves towards disarmament, which further weakened the Soviet military-industrial complex, and only confirmed to western leaders that the U.S.S.R was in serious economic difficulties. The cuts in defence spending also failed to have the intended effect, with little in the way of realignment towards the consumer economy. Shortages remained a feature of the whole system, made worse when reduced subsidies led to a sharp rise in the rate of inflation. Many ordinary Russian people, particularly those on fixed incomes, were effectively priced out of the market altogether. And here the Roman historian Tacitus has some relevance: when it comes to a choice between freedom and security, between hunger and bread, there are few people who are satisfied to chew on abstractions.

Gorbachev certainly saw Communism as an ideal which could be renewed, in the same fashion that Christians throughout history have sought renewal in a return to the primitive faith. But Communism was-and is-The God that Failed. I think I should let the man himself have the final word;

When I became General Secretary, I admit that I was not free from the illusions of any predecessors. I thought we could unite freedom and democracy, and give socialism a second wind. But the totalitarian model had relied on dictatorship and violence, and I can see that this was not acceptable to the people... I wanted to change the Soviet Union, not destroy it. I started too late to reform the party, and waited too long to create a market economy.

How hindsight makes us all wise. :-)