Ana the Imp

How Are the Mighty Fallen

2012-01-30T15:28:00.000-08:00

I admire China; I admire the present Chinese government. Oh, please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that I admire communism; I don’t; I loath it, but it’s doubtful that the Chinese system has anything to do with communism in any meaningful ideological sense. No, as an idea it was effectively abandoned at the same time as the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia and China then took the high road to capitalism, chaotic for the former, controlled for the latter.

What I admire is the technique of realpolitik, the wholly Machiavellian outlook of the Chinese. This is likely to be their century not simply because of their economic power but because they play the game carefully, looking always to their own interests.

What a sense of humour Clio, the goddess of history, has, what an acute love of irony. There was America at the end of the Cold War, the only great power left in the world. There was Francis Fukuyama saying that history itself had come to an end, a humourless plagiarism of Sellar and Yeatman’s contention in 1066 and All That, published in the 1930s, that America was clearly Top Nation and history came to a .

But it didn’t, did it? America, the paramount power in 1991, has frittered it all away in one fruitless crusade after another, war after war, intervention hard upon intervention, the gift of the neo cons who have nothing at all to do with genuine conservatism or any kind of political realism. All they achieved was more and more spending with fewer and fewer results. Now the country has reached the lowest point in its history, the nadir, headed by the hopeless and incompetent Barack Obama, not a neo con just a con, a Marxist in Marxist clothing.

Now look at China, the communist capitalist super power. This is a country with the good sense to stand and stare, to consolidate its power, not waste it all away. This is the new empire, extending its influence over much of the developing world, particularly Africa, large parts of which are effectively a Chinese economic colony. I simply could not imagine the Chinese getting bogged down in a hopeless place like Afghanistan for a hopeless cause. I simply can’t imagine any country headed by an intelligent leader doing so, a leader with even the lightest grasp of history.

But America did, here, there and everywhere, taking the wolf by the ears, unable thereafter to let it go. Good sense and good politics would have kept America out of Iraq, a country which, no matter how repellent its dictator, kept a check on the regional ambitions of Iran. But good sense and good politics was not at a premium in the Bush Whitehouse; it has not been at a premium ever since. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle.

Brokeback Bureau

2012-01-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

I waited an age for one biopic only to have two come along at once! Well, almost at once. It’s not long since I saw Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a stunning performance in a less than stunning film. Now I’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio, one of my favourite actors, play J. Edgar Hoover in J. Edgar, a stunning performance in a less than stunning film.

Hoover, the long standing Director – Dictator might be a better word - of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is in many ways an even more controversial figure than Thatcher. A man of impeccable moral stature, the self-appointed guardian of all that was good in American life, he had no scruples at all in subverting civil liberties in pursuit of his particular ends. At his funeral then President Nixon said that he was;

…one of the giants…He personified integrity, he personified honour, he personified principle, he personified courage, he personified discipline, he personified dedication, he personified loyalty, he personified patriotism.

Oh, but how are the mighty fallen. He also, according to his many detractors, personified venality and corruption, a message that his been relentless hammered ever since, to the point where his legacy, his very real contribution to fighting crime and subversion using the latest techniques, has been obscured under a mountain of superfluous and vicious tittle-tattle.

J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a script by Dustin Lance Black, goes some way towards rehabilitation. It paints a more nuanced portrait of a complex and driven man. Still, it does not avoid the old canards, the wholly unproven contention that Hoover was a closet homosexual and cross-dresser.

That the old queen never came out is clearly the fault of his mother, a commanding performance by Judi Dench, who tells him that she’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son. A life of frustrated sexual tension lies ahead, touched on in Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), his long-standing deputy at the FBI.

My criticism here is that Hoover’s sexual preferences, whatever they were, are not that material to the story of his life and times. His principle relationship was not with Tolson or with Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), his life-long secretary and confidant, but with the FBI, the organisation which he created virtually single-handed, or rather shaped into a tough, modern crime fighting force out of the old amateurish and bumbling Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department.

I admire Eastwood as a director; I hugely admired movies as diverse as Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby. But I have to say that there is a falling off with J. Edgar, signs that he is no longer quite in command of the medium as he once was. The pace is uneven and too much of the story is taken for granted, particularly over the kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindberg, the aviator, a defining moment in the history of crime in America.

Incidentally, speaking of aviators, DiCaprio seems to slightly reprise his depiction of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Like Hughes his Hoover uses a handkerchief to clean his hands after he greets someone, another hint, presumably, of deep-seated personal neurosis.

On a more technical point it was a huge mistake to allow actors playing their young selves also to play their old selves, caked under ever more grotesque and ridiculous layers of rubber, to the point where they resemble puppets. This was an error avoided in The Iron Lady, where the young Margaret and the old Margaret are entirely different people. As J. Edgar cuts back and forward between the present and the past a considerable amount of time must have been spent in donning and discarding prosthetics!

It's a thoughtful film, though perhaps not thoughtful enough. Even so, setting the central performances to one side, it’s also a plodding and ponderous one, coming close to its subject, then skipping away. After some two hours I was no closer to understanding the real Hoover than I was at the outset.

The thing I found most frustrating was the failure to draw parallels between the Red Scare that swept America after the First World War, touched upon in detail, and more modern concerns and threats. The central question about Hoover’s career surely must the extent to which it is legitimate to subordinate civil liberties to national security in times of emergency, not his chaste and asexual personal affairs. Director and writer are to be commended for humanising the man, but, as another reviewer writes, they have in the process created a kind of bureaucratic version of Brokeback Mountain.

Nietzsche in America

2012-01-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

In an article I wrote about the infamous prosecution of John T Scopes (Monkey Trial, 14 October, 2009), an American teacher put on trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching the Darwinian view of evolution, contrary to local law, I made the point that Clarence Darrow, Scope’s defence attorney, was an enthusiast for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the biology of Charles Darwin.

He was influenced here by H. L. Mencken, a leading American journalist. It was Mencken who introduced the German thinker to America in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His Nietzsche came as an angry Moses, a prophet armed, ready to knock away the cosy nostrums of American life. The strong only grow stronger by despising the weak and, so far as Mencken was concerned, by despising Christian morality. The Scopes trial was an ideal opportunity to pour scorn on “booboisie”, the backward ignoramuses of the Southern Bible Belt.

That’s one American perspective on Nietzsche. Interestingly a totally different one was to come from another participant in the Scopes trial - William Jennings Bryant, a former presidential candidate, who acted for the prosecution. The year before he appeared at the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – this time for the defence -, both accused on the kidnap and murder of a teenage boy, for no better reason than to prove that they were Supermen, beyond all conventional notions of good and evil. At least that was Darrow’s argument, claiming that they were acting under the influence of Beyond Good and Evil!

Bryant won both cases, clear in the first (at least insofar as his clients escaped the death penalty), pyrrhic in the second. But perhaps his more immediate victory was over Mencken and Nietzsche. His view certainly was more in harmony with American thought, insofar as Americans thought of Nietzsche at all. After all, this was a thinker contaminated by association with German militarism, then even more contaminated by association with the Nazis. What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?

Actually these questions are not mine. They are posed by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, published by the University of Chicago Press at the end of last year. The answers she makes clear in the course of this lively, thoughtful and entertaining book. It begins with America and it ends with America; or, rather, it begins with American thought and ends with American thought. You see, when I was a teenager I was reading Nietzsche; when Nietzsche was a teenager he was reading Emerson!

It was in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that Nietzsche found a “brother soul”, as he puts it. Here was a thinker free from all inherited burden, a believer in the sovereignty of the self, full of scepticism about traditional morality and received religion. “The most fertile author this century so far has been an American”, he declared. Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it. I would simply add that Americans, in their various ways, have used Nietzsche to get closer to themselves.

To use the cliché, here is a man and a thinker who has been all things to all people. His admirers did not just include obvious social Darwinists like Mencken, but Emma Goldman and others on the left, who saw Nietzsche’s attacks on democracy and religion as a way of arousing the masses from their lethargy.

He was also admired by Jack London, a socialist whose views on the ‘degeneracy’ of the herd are not so far removed from those of Mencken. There is also Margaret Sanger, the high-priestess of American birth control, who read Nietzsche selectively, attracted to his views on Christian sexual ethics, ignoring his obvious misogyny.

That’s just the thing about Nietzsche and America – he has been read selectively, something the author herself is mildly guilty of, a point I’ll come to a bit later. He has been sanitised, if you like, made acceptable to an American audience, a democratic audience; an audience where every man, and woman, has the capacity for endless self-discovery. It’s the Superman as the ordinary man!

It’s true that his reputation suffered – unjustly – by association with the Nazis, but after the war America was given a new reading. Here was a soulful voyager for the existential age, an interpretation advanced – irony of ironies – by Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish scholar and translator who escaped to the States from Nazi Germany in 1939.

The American Nietzsche, as Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear in a dedicated chapter, is largely Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. I have to be frank and say it’s a slightly dishonest interpretation, more wholesome and less challenging than the raw original!

In some of the more bizarre readings I’m reminded of the character of Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, who, when accused of being an ape, said that apes don’t read philosophy. “Yes they do, Otto”, came Wanda’s response, “They just don’t understand it.” How else is one to interpret the view of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Movement, that Nietzsche thought “slave morality” was a good thing?!

One of my favourite chapters is devoted to the ‘fan mail’ sent by ordinary and unknown Americans and kept by Elizabeth, the philosopher’s Nazi-sympathising sister, a woman who did more to poison his legacy than any other individual. Some of theses missives are beyond eccentric. There is one letter of condolence sent after the philosopher’s death in 1900 by John I Bush of Duluth, Minnesota, who announced to Elizabeth that he was the Superman her brother had been looking for;

May you hereby have the consolation and delight to have lived long enough to know that the visions, prophecies, and hopes of your brother have been fulfilled to the very letter; for the author of this scribbling is the very man prognosticated in Zarathustra.

Bush, hmm; is there any connection here, I wonder?

Now, I said earlier that the author is slightly guilty over her own misreading. Her book, she claims, is less about Nietzsche than interpretations of Nietzsche. But if she begins with Emerson she also ends with Emerson by way of Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, all of whom have tamed Nietzsche to a degree, leaving out his more anti-democratic sentiments.

Yes, it’s Nietzsche by way of Emerson, a transcendentalist, free of the sarcasm and aggression so evident in his manner of thought and mode of expression. This is a philosopher for all seasons, a philosopher for an American season. It is perhaps a misreading, but who cares. I’m sure Nietzsche, the greatest of all of the great iconoclasts, would have loved it, as much as I loved this book, as much as I admire a country and a people who are continually striving for fresh and novel interpretations. It’s the very thing that keeps thought alive.

Restraint of Appeals

2012-01-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

Following my recent piece on the European Court of Human Right’s ruling that England should be a refuge for the huddled masses of foreign terrorist, yearning to breathe havoc, I read Following in Henry’s Footsteps?, a thought-provoking article by Stephen Cooper in the January issue of History Today.

We, as a nation, are the plaything of a supra-national power, a new Roman conglomerate, if you will. But this is not unique in our history; we have been here before, subject to the decrees and laws of an old Roman conglomerate.

David Cameron has talked in general terms about the repatriation of powers from Europe. Henry VIII, suffering from a little local marriage difficulty, did not just talk; he acted. He wanted a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his first queen, but in such matters the Vatican acted as the Supreme Court. Pope Clement VII was not inclined to go along with the royal wishes; he was not ‘simpatico to the direction of change’, as Tony Blair would doubtless express the point.

So, with the aid of Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister, the king cut the umbilical cord, the age-old link between the English and the Universal Church. He repatriated all legal powers to England in the 1533 Act of Restraint of Appeals. This had the effect of ending all appeals to Rome, allowing matters to be settled on the spot, declaring to the world that England was an empire, not subject to the rule of a foreign princes or courts. How wonderful!

The thing is, you see, up to that point England effectively had two legal systems; it had ever since the Norman Conquest. There was the common law of the land and there was canon law, the law of the Church. Two sets of laws meant two sets of courts, with the ultimate arbiter in all matters affecting canon law being the Vatican. This included all family law, issues pertaining to wills and, of course, marriage. This was the basis of Papal power in England, which by the early middle ages was considerable.

Papal interference got so bad that, in a deeply anti-clerical mood, Parliament enacted the Statute of Provisors and Praemunire in the reign of Edward III, which attempted to curb papal interference. But the two systems still remained in place until Henry’s marriage problems saw not just a break with the Roman Church but an amalgamation of law, or, if you prefer, the repatriation of law.

The Act of Restraint of Appeals had great significance in English history, far beyond offering Henry, as head on an independent English Church, a way of ending the Roman logjam. It was a declaration of political sovereignty, an Act of Parliament rather than a royal proclamation.

The danger in this usurpation of canon powers is that Rome would place the country under an interdict, as it had in the time of Innocent III, the great medieval pontiff, which put a rebellious King John firmly in his place – the papal pocket. To prevent this, the Act allowed for imprisonment of any priest who refused to perform the sacraments. More than that, the provisions of the fourteenth century Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire was brought to bear, threatening those who invoked the authority of the Pope with confiscation of property.

The Act was so successful that even during the Catholic reaction of Henry’s daughter, Mary, it was never repealed. For all her orthodoxy Mary remained Supreme Head of the Church, effectively the Pope in England. There were no more appeals to the Papal Curia, no more foreign laws.

If only we could have a new of repatriation, an Act of Restraint of Foreign Legal Stupidity, one that would serve the same purpose, one that would end the diktats of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.

We were warned, but too few were prepared to listen, warned of the approaching flood of alien law, set to drown our own inherited traditions. In 1975 the people in this country were deceived, deliberately so. They thought they were voting for an economic union, but the small print contained so much more.

The year before the referendum on membership of what was then the European Economic Community, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, in Bulmer v Bollinger observed –“When it comes to matters with a European element the Treaty is like an incoming tide. It flows into estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.”

History has been reversed. We are far more in thrall to the new Roman power than we ever were to the old. How I admire the audacity of Bluff King Hal. Henry! Thou should be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.

Some Animals are More Equal than Others

2012-01-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month the African National Congress, the ANC, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its foundation. This is the party of Nelson Mandela, terrorist come secular saint, that rules South Africa, the wonderful ‘rainbow nation’…or a sad cesspit of corruption.

The latter is the view of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the country’s other secular saint, who once observed that the ANC had stopped the gravy train only long enough to get on board. Actually he may have underestimated the problem, at least according to the writer Zakes Mda, who has said that the new South Africa is overtaking Nigeria in patronage and cronyism.

The ANC has been sadly misrepresented. In the good old bad old days of apartheid it was taken to be the face of black South Africa. In reality it was only ever the face of a self-interested and self-serving minority, one that hijacked a cause to advance its own ends. The old apartheid state was bad; the new rainbow state headed by Jacob Zuma, its corrupt, polygamous and laughable president, is not really that much better.

In some ways South Africa is a little like post-communist Russia, a place where a few well-placed individuals established a monopoly over the good things in life. It was a case of power not to the people but power to themselves. Almost two years ago I wrote an article in which I made the following points;

Socialism or capitalism, it really makes no difference, because the principal beneficiaries will always be the ANC nomenklatura. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, has accused Zuma and the ANC of corruption and the abuse of power. It’s easy to see why when some seventy million rand has been spent on perks; on grace-and-favour homes for cabinet ministers wives and families, and of course cars and more cars, the kind of gas-guzzling toys African leaders love.

Zille, the conscience of the nation, has faced death threats, been called a “filthy whore” and “an exponent of a new apartheid” for her outspokenness. But look beyond the villas of the ANC cadres, look beyond the houses and the cars, and one might easily conclude that there is no need for a new apartheid, for the simple reason that the old apartheid is still very much in place; that the new bosses look very much like the old bosses, except for the colour of their skin; that oppression and poverty feel like oppression and poverty no matter if the ruler is white or black. In many places people still live in squalid townships where the government fails to deliver on the most basic services, including clean water, sanitation and power. Protesters have been dispersed by riot squads using rubber bullets.

Under apartheid the black majority were second class citizens. They are still second class citizens. To deflect them from the miserable condition of their lives a scapegoat has been found, and the scapegoat is the vulnerable white minority, repeatedly blamed for all of the country’s problems by the black racist Julius Malema, onetime head of the ANC’s youth wing, a man who takes Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as a model. Yes, indeed; Robert Mugabe, who transformed one of the richest nations in Africa from a breadbasket into a basket case.

Richard Dowden wrote in the Spectator that the new South Africa is an archipelago of fortified islands of luxury in a sea of poverty. To be more precise, it is a fortified sea of black luxury amidst a sea of black poverty.

The ANC has become what it always was, not a party for the people but a party for itself, an elite determined to protect its own interests. In November of last year the nation’s parliament was told by Willie Hofmeyr, head of the Special Investigative Unit, that some five to seven billion dollars a year was being lost in corruption, negligence and incompetence in the public service. Not long after he was sacked.

Fearful of further exposure the government drew up the Protection of State Information Bill, a measure which effectively treats any investigation of official activity as spying, carrying a possible twenty-five year jail sentence.

Here we are eighteen years after the ANC came to power and South Africa has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The poor may be poor, miserably poor, but at least they have one comfort in their bleak lives – they no longer suffer from oppressive white rule. But, alas, the pigs are in the trough. All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

Independence for England!

2012-01-23T15:17:00.000-08:00

In 1290, following the death of Margaret the Maid of Norway, the Scottish throne fell vacant. With no generally acceptable candidate the Scots nobility turned to Edward I as an arbiter. Edward arbitrated alright, but at a cost. Scotland got its king, John Balliol, only to lose its freedom. As part of the deal Edward insisted that all appeals against the judgements of Scottish royal courts be reserved to his person, undermining the very thing that defines a sovereign state – the right to determine its own legal affairs.

England now finds itself in the same position; the country has lost the right over its legal affairs; the country has effectively lost its sovereignty and its independence. Last week the European Court of Human Rights decreed that the government cannot deport Abu Quatada, a notorious terrorist and hate preacher, a man once described as Osama Bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe, to his native Jordan, where he is wanted for conspiring to carry out bombings. The suspicion is, you see, that he will not get a ‘fair trial.’

So we have the trial instead, the threat of this appalling individual living free in our midst. At present he is being held in Long Lartin, a high security jail, but, if the judgement is allowed to stand, he could be released in three months, to join his wife and five children, all supported at the expense of the tax payer, and that expense so far has amounted to more than a million pounds.

These foreign judges, people with an outlook wholly alien to our traditions, accept assurances that Qatada will not be ill-treated in Jordan. But that’s not enough, oh, no; for some of the evidence to be used against him may, I say, may, have come from torture. This after the Law Lords in our own High Court of Parliament ruled that there was no proof that any of the evidence against Qatada had been obtained by torture.

So, on a supposition, we are left with the reality, a perpetual threat, one who will have to be monitored continuously at yet more astronomic expense. Can things, I ask myself, get any crazier? Yes, with these foreigners undermining our government, our parliament and the highest court in the land they can and they will.

In 1296, the Scots, having had enough of Edward’s legalistic tyranny, threw off the shackles and began a prolonged struggle for national independence, this with a fraction of the provocation we have suffered at the hands of Europe. It’s time England had its own war of independence, to begin with a referendum on membership of the European Union, an organisation and a tyranny of which I, for one, am heartily sick.

The Plague

2012-01-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

There are two movies which gave me some limited understanding, like an archaeological evaluation, of the tragic modern history of Algeria – The Battle for Algiers and Of Gods and Men.

On the face of it they are about two completely unconnected events. The first deals with an episode in the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962; the second with an incident in 1996, when a small community of French Cistercian monks, living in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains, were kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by mujahedeen guerrillas, fighting a prolonged and brutal war with the government.

The connection lies at a deeper level; it lies in the nature of French colonialism in Algeria and the reaction of the local people; it lies in the nature of the resistance movements created in the drive for national liberation; it lies in the nature of a particularly brutal war that, so far as France was concerned, at lest until fairly recently, wasn’t a war at all; in lies in forms of uncompromising extremism, in torture and murder as legitimate political techniques; it lies most particularly in the pursuit of power, to he seized and held at all costs.

In Algeria: France’s Undeclared War Professor Martin Evans, who has previously published on Algerian history, weaves the various threads together. It’s an exhaustive piece of work, looking deep into the prehistory of a conflict that stands apart from Africa’s other wars of liberation in the intensity of its brutality. It also draws attention to its lasting significance, an unhappy postscript.

For a long time the Algerian conflict, like Vichy and war-time collaboration in general, was a particularly sensitive area in French national consciousness, visited at some peril. How could it not be, given that over a million settlers, the so-called Pieds-Noirs, were obliged to resettle in metropolitan France after Algeria achieved independence in 1962? Full of bitterness and resentment against the right-wing government of General De Gaulle, they went even further to the right, forming an active constituency that would eventually become the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

That’s perhaps the central paradox of France’s Algerian conflict: it was started by the left and ended by the right. In 1956 Guy Mollet, head of the Socialist-led Republican Front government, ordered the army to begin ‘pacification’ operations against Algerian nationalists. Although himself opposed to colonialism on principle, he had a duty, as he saw it, to defend the civilising mission of the Fourth Republic against the fanatical and barbarous forms of Algerian nationalism. As so often the defence of civilization descended into the forms of barbarism allegedly being fought against.

Evans writes that Algeria was one of the longest and most difficult episodes in the whole decolonisation process. There is one simple reason for this: officially it wasn’t a colony at all; it was part of metropolitan France - it had been since the 1880s -, no different from Brittany or Normandy. It was an illusion, of course, a legalistic fiction, but one with particularly bloody consequences.

The civilising mission was always barbarous. From the outset in 1830 the French intrusion into what was then an Ottoman province was marked by savagery. This was a genocidal war, one of partial ethnic cleansing, which might usefully be compared with the American expansion in the West at the expense of the indigenous peoples. It is estimated that by the mid-1850s Algeria had lost almost half of its pre-colonial population of some four million people. That’s when the settlement was planted, with roots so deep that they could only be pulled up in extreme violence.

The difference between the French and American example is that there were never enough settlers; that strong as they were the native Algerians were stronger. Fighting a war against history and demography, the French settlers, unlike the American colonialists, could never go their own way, which meant that France could not go its own way either without difficulty; without the death of one republic and the birth of another.

The French were brutal, certainly but, as Evans shows, the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), their leading opponent, were just as brutal, not just towards the colonialists but towards rival nationalist movements, applying savage cruelty even to deviationists within their own ranks. Liberation for them was about achieving power, to be held at all costs, which was to lead eventually to their own ‘pacification’ campaign against the Islamists in the 1990s.

The French mission was always hopeless. It gave rise to the ‘long hatred’, one of the key themes, as the author argues, that led to the revolt of 1 November, 1954, a new plague, that Albert Camus, author of The Plague and himself a Pied-Noir, had not anticipated.

There had been a prologue several years before in eastern Algeria, when a hundred Pieds-Noirs were killed in violent demonstrations, their corpses afterwards horribly mutilated. In wholly disproportionate acts of retaliation, the French slaughtered thousands, destroying many villages. “Nothing could be the same again,” Evans writes, “Rural Algeria had confronted European Algeria, producing a society more polarised than ever.”

The war caused thousands of lives and has left an unresolved legacy that exists so far as today; in Algeria, where the FLN ensures that there is no end to the Arab Winter; in France, where the 2005 riots by alienated migrants showed that the country still suffers from the ‘Algeria syndrome.’ For De Gaulle Algeria was a millstone around the neck of France. It still is.

Evans is to be congratulated on splendid piece of research, lucid, scholarly and balanced. He unfolds a tale whose lightest word harrows up the soul. Once again the lesson of history is that we learn nothing from history, otherwise we would not have had other ‘civilising’ missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, other plagues.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise

American Disease

2012-01-17T14:23:00.000-08:00

When I take timeout I have to climb a mountain of emails on my return. It takes a while to catch up and to respond. But on this occasion there was one that quickly caught my attention and spurred my intellect.

Sent by a friend (thanks, Nobby!) who shares my general political outlook, it was a link to a YouTube video, a documentary about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the evolution of political correctness, with particular regard to the United States.

In The World Crisis, his book about the causes and course of the First World War, Winston Churchill, in a particularly memorable simile, wrote that the Germans transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia. Well, cultural Marxism and political correctness, its most toxic cell, were similarly transported like a plague bacillus from Germany to the United States.

Interested? I bet you are! I’ll make things a little bit clearer further on but first a word or two about the context, the medium, if you like, carrying the message. The presenter is William S. Lind, the former Director of the Centre for Cultural Conservatism, which doubtless means that some will dismiss the thesis without further consideration. That’s a pity, really, for there is real meat here, a thread into the labyrinth of the present American malaise.

The argument itself is simple enough: that Marxism in its classic form was a failure because the working class did not perform the walk-on part allotted to it in a turgid drama that went by the name of Historical Materialism. But the play did not die. Instead it was rewritten as a cultural critique of Western society and civilization as a whole.

The Institute for Social Research was set up in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany in 1924. Here a new hybrid was created as if on the island of Doctor Moreau, a melding of Marx and Freud. The basic theme here was that everyone was repressed by capitalism, politically and sexually, if only they knew it, if only they weren’t so beset by ‘false consciousness.’ With the ascent of the Nazis, a particularly virulent form of false consciousness, the School relocated in America, where its ideas were to have the greatest impact of all.

The documentary did not really tell me anything that I did not already know, either about cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School or the corrosive effects of political correctness in general. In reviewing Anthony Browne’s The Retreat of Reason, which examines the creature in a British context, I wrote;

The author identifies what might be referred to as the pre-history of PC. Although Marxism failed in both political and economic terms it made significant advances in the cultural arena, through universities and opinion-forming bodies, to the point where ordinary debate was contaminated by a new orthodoxy, one which amplified the perceived injustices done to minorities, even so far as silencing debate over uncomfortable issues.

The documentary therefore did not come as a revelation but it helped put things into a slightly sharper perspective, particularly in an American setting, where PC is overwhelming FC – factual correctness -, where, supported by a repressive totalitarian mindset, it has advanced to the point where liberty and free speech, those core American values, are in real danger.

The Frankfurters were quick to make an impact in the States, especially after the publication of Theodor Adorno’s book The Authoritarian Personality. In this fascism was freed from a specific set of historical and political causes. Instead it found a new home in the human psyche, in the psyche of the American people at large, who, according to Adorno, possess many of the traits associated with fascism. In other words, the supporters of traditional American culture and values are psychologically unbalanced, prone to the worst forms of sexual repression and authoritarianism.

So here, in short, we have what was to become the ideology of the counter-culture. Here we have, paradoxically, a new orthodoxy taking shape, which allowed all those who took a contrary view to be dismissed as ‘fascists’, people in need of analysis or ‘sensitivity training.’ Herbert Marcuse, who was to be the most influential of all the Frankfurters, added to the mix in Eros and Civilization, which condemned all established sexual norms, calling instead for ‘polymorphic perversity.’

While the old-fashioned working class, too wedded to the material benefits of capitalism, had been abandoned, a new carrier of Utopia was alighted on in the 1960s - the Politically Correct Coalition, a variety of fashionable causes and movements, which stormed campuses across America, in the process creating a new narrative, a new hegemony, one which continues to dominate contemporary discussion.

Know it or not, the carriers of the counter-culture, are under the direct influence of the Frankfurters, particularly Marcuse, not just in embracing ‘polymorphic perversity’ but in cudgelling any view different from their own. Free American society, Marcuse argued, was actually a deception. Instead he argued for something he termed ‘liberating tolerance’, another paradox, for the tolerance only extends to the politically acceptable.

It was tolerance for all views coming from the left; intolerance for all views coming from the right. While political Marxism killed free speech in Russia, cultural Marxism is killing free speech in America, rather ironic, don’t you think? That’s the legacy of Frankfurt; that’s the effect of a plague bacillus that continues on its course.

¡A mí la Legión!

2012-01-16T16:11:00.000-08:00

The Spanish Civil War is more surrounded by a fog of myth and misconception than any other single event in history. For the political left it has the aura of a crusade, to me a rather delicious irony.

Here, at last, so the narrative went, the working class were making a stand against the onward march of Anti-Christ. Many of the benighted individuals who volunteered to fight in the communist International Brigades went without the first clue of the realities on the ground, without the first clue about Spain or Spanish history. They went at the behest of an even greater tyranny, a tyranny more ruthless towards its ‘friends’ than its enemies, as many were to discover during the Barcelona May Days of 1937, so memorably described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia.

There were other volunteers, people who are not part of the martyrology because they chose the ‘wrong’ side; they chose to fight for Franco. I have in mind one particular individual, an Englishman by the name of Peter Kemp.

There is something wonderfully romantic about Kemp, something freebooting and uniquely English. He falls so easily into a buccaneering tradition, along with the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Lawrence of Arabia. Soldier, writer, adventurer, Kemp, was born in August 1915 in Bombay, where his father was a judge. Educated at Wellington School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he started to read for the Bar when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936.

Already alarmed by the menace of communism, Kemp, a High Anglican and self-styled Tory Radical, set off on the right direction, while Orwell, Auden, Spender, Hemingway and so many others set off on the left! In Spain he joined the Carlists, a royalist and legitimist faction within the Nationalist army, about as far removed from contemporary notions of fascism as is possible to imagine. The red-beret of the Requetés, the Carlist militia, a movement that harmonises so well with my own romantic and royalist vision, was just as important in the Nationalist camp as the blue shirt of the Falange.

Later he transferred to the Spanish Foreign Legion, where he rose to command a platoon, a unique distinction for a foreigner. He saw action on the Madrid front, in the Bilbao sector and in the great offensive of 1938 which drove the Republicans out of the Aragon area. Wounded several times, he stayed on duty until a mortar bomb broke his jaw that same year. Then Franco personally approved a long convalescent leave back in England. By the time he recovered the war was over.

His subsequent career was just as varied and distinctive. No fascist sympathiser, in the Second World War he served with distinction in the newly-formed Special Operations Executive, taking part in cross-Channel commando raids. In the Balkans he saw operations in Albania and carried out SOE missions in southern Poland. With the war in Europe coming to an end, he transferred to the Far East, helping to supply arms to French troops in Indochina, where they were fighting the Japanese, on the one hand, and the communist Viet-Minh, on the other.

Later still he was in Hungary during the anti-communist uprising of 1956, when he helped some students to escape into Austria from the advancing Russian forces.

In 1957 Kemp published Mine Were of Trouble, an autobiography covering his time in Spain. In the main this is an account of his military adventures, with little in the way of political apologetics. To the end of his life, though, he maintained that his cause was the just one, that communism was a far greater danger to Spanish civilization than the Nationalist right, far more conservative than fascist.

He also makes the unanswerable point that while Franco accepted Italian and German aid he never allowed them to direct his war in the way that the Republicans allowed the Russians to direct theirs, even importing the NKVD, the murderous Soviet security service, which used the opportunity to extend the Great Purge to Spain.

Kemp died in October 1993, having lived long enough to see the end of communism in Europe, the end of a struggle in which he, at the outset, had played a small but noble part. ¡A mí la Legión!

Bishops and Toads

2012-01-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

James Delingpole is one of my favourite journalists. He was in great form last month in the Telegraph, aiming several well-placed shots at the risible Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London and the third most senior clergyman in the Church of England.

Apparently the benighted bish visited the Occupy protestors on Christmas Day, handing out a box of chocolates in his munificence. These are people whose dirty presence (they certainly look dirty to me) has disfigured Saint Paul’s Cathedral for several weeks now, the worst kind of rent-a-mob lowlifes in their ugly little tents, like some kind of gypsy encampment.

The sooner they are off the better, one would have thought; the better for London, the better for Saint Paul’s and the better for the Church. But, no; Chartres has promised them a permanent memorial. With the chocolate came some saccharine: “The canons have been very imaginative and consulting with the protestors about how to leave a legacy of the protests. We are looking for honouring what has been said when the camp moves on.”

Is he married, I wonder? He reminds me of Bishop Thomas Proudie from Barchester Towers, the novel of nineteenth century clerical doings by Anthony Trollope. If so, he really should have a wife as indomitable as Mrs Proudie to put him in place, to draw him away from his embarrassing public absurdities.

Dear James might serve in the role, judging on the basis of his remarks, direct and to the point;

What’s particularly depressing about this episode is that Chartres is supposedly one of the Church’s more traditional senior clerics. If this is the line the Church’s reactionary old school is taking, imagine what insanities its more progressive elements are yearning to impose on us. Presumably they won’t really feel that justice has been done until St Paul’s has been razed to the ground and replaced by a permanent Anti-Capitalist Peace Camp.

Actually, I’m going to change gear completely here. I almost never read the comments that follow articles, written by so many jackals following a lion, petty, snarling and vicious. On this occasion I’m glad I did because there were truly excellent remarks by someone posting as Tayles. His point was quite simple, that the leftists are not opposing capitalist society as it really exists, but a fictionalised version that forms part of a broader narrative;

According to this narrative, the poor and the disadvantaged are victims of oppression and prejudice by the rich and powerful. Capitalism is the economic expression of this travesty, allowing the rich to hoard wealth at the expense of everyone else, who must make do with whatever crumbs the rich deign to brush from their table.

As he quite righty says this is rubbish. I would only add that it’s complete rubbish. Capitalism, unlike socialism, isn’t even a system; it’s freedom, it’s what happens when people are left to their own devices. Condemn economic liberty then one condemns personal liberty.

But the left-wing narrative, the narrative embraced by the Protest crowd, is far more satisfying for some, Tayles proceeds, portraying as a ‘mistake’ the kind of society that evolves when people are free to express their wants and needs. It condemns success as much as pardons failure, all gains, of course, being ill-gotten.

It’s a narrative that would turn the things upside down, granting wealth and power to those who, by their natural incapacity, would be denied these things. It creates, above all, a paradigm of good versus evil: “If you are a clergyman, a control freak, a metropolitan poser, an over-entitled layabout, or an envious toad, the left-wing narrative holds considerable appeal.”

Envious toads – how I love that! Returning to the Bishop I don’t think he envies very much at all; he’s just a trendy doing the trendy thing. Sadly the trendier the C of E gets the less relevant it becomes, less relevant to those who care, and irrelevant to those who don’t, like the happy campers.

However I’m feeling charitable enough in this New Year to offer Chartres and the canons suggestions for the prospective permanent protest memorial. I think a mountain of Starbuck cups might serve, cast in bronze, or an unmade tent in the style of Tracey Emin. I would favour the latter. Perhaps talentless Tracey might even be commissioned for the project? The Bishop might even be charitable enough to extend the principle of memorial to embrace the summer riots. A statue of a hoodie carrying away a TV would be good, a real anti-capitalist statement.

Iron in the Soul

2012-01-12T16:17:00.000-08:00

There is one compelling reason to see The Iron Lady – Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher. This is not acting; it’s almost as if an uncanny doppelganger has come to life, a performance which seems to clone the real-life Thatcher; her speech patterns, her mannerisms, her movements, her gestures; a fine observation of the finest details. This really is iron. The movie itself, though, is a little more like wood.

I have no hesitation at all in saying that Margaret Thatcher only stands comparison with Oliver Cromwell as the greatest commoner in British history. When people like Ted Heath, her immediate predecessor as leader of the Conservative Party, and John Major, her immediate successor, are long forgotten, her legacy will continue to inspire and divide. She will continue to be loved and hated: a Roundhead for the Cavaliers, a Cavalier for the Roundheads; there can be no indifference here.

Given that the subject is still alive, The Iron Lady, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, was always going to be a controversial film, all the more controversial because there is a strong focus on the alleged effects of Baroness Thatcher’s dementia. As a plotting device it works, at least up to a point, focusing in and out of the key events in her remarkable life. But the state of her mental health takes far, far too much time, crowding out so much of greater significance.

It’s a sympathetic portrait, certainly; it humanises a woman that so many have demonised, but it really casts her achievements somewhat into the shadows. The highlights are all there but presented in a rather shallow, episodic fashion, sung out, if you like, as political karaoke, appropriate enough, as Lloyd’s only other movie was the smash hit Mamma Mia.

The narrative is also rather confusing, events not coming in sequence. Moreover, Thatcher’s observation that a woman would never be Prime Minister in her lifetime was made in 1970, not after she became leader of the Conservative Party, when it stood to reason that a woman was likely to become Prime Minister if she managed to win a general election!

In so many ways The Iron Lady is more of a personal odyssey, the Journey of the Grocer’s Daughter, from hopeful dawn to sad twilight. As a biopic it simply does not stand comparison with Oliver Stone’s Nixon, which managed to humanise another controversial figure without skimping on the political substance. It’s also too ambitious in scope, far less focused than The Queen.

As a movie it’s really more about aging and loss than anything else, and it might be best appreciated on that level. It managed to beguile and infuriate me by turns; beguile because of the sympathetic intimacy; infuriate because I wanted so much more, wanted to understand just what motivated her to act and believe as she did. I simply got no proper sense of the real Thatcher, the woman within the politician, the politician within the woman.

The play on Alzheimer’s reminded me of Iris, the 2001 biopic on the life of the writer Iris Murdoch, all the more so as Jim Broadbent reprises his role as supportive partner in the midst of decline. In The Iron Lady he is there as Denis, Baroness Thatcher’s husband, except that he is not there at all, merely a ghostly companion in her own demented mind, the only person with whom she continues to share intimacies. Broadbent’s performance is dryly amusing, though perhaps a little too much of the amiable buffoon.

The flashbacks take us to Grantham and the early days of then Margaret Roberts, full of wide-eyed admiration for Alfred (Iain Glen), her grocer-come-politician father, a living representative of the kind of solid, unassuming virtues that made England the greatest nation of shopkeepers in history. Young Margaret is played by Alexandra Roach, another wonderful performance, second only to that of Streep. In what I thought the best scene in the movie we see her from above, freshly elected to Parliament in 1959, a flash of young and feminine blue in the midst of middle-aged masculine grey.

There are two other performances I would flag up, that of Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe, Baroness Thatcher’s onetime cabinet colleague and eventual political assassin, and Olivia Colman, who plays her daughter Carol with affection and devotion, receiving little in return from a mother who is too self-absorbed, a mother who clearly prefers Mark, her distant, and absent, son.

Still, with all of the wooden inadequacies, I came away from The Iron Lady with an even greater sense of affection for the best British peace-time Prime Minister; a woman who was tried time and again and not found wanting; a woman who had the guts and determination to see things through; a woman who had the courage to tackle fascist thugs, trade union bullies and European bureaucrats - enemies without and within - when nobody else did, certainly not the dead sheep and appeasers with whom she was obliged to share office. Her betrayal in the end was the shabbiest act in Conservative Party history, a political assassination from which it has taken two decades to recover.

A Party for All Seasons

2012-01-11T15:46:00.000-08:00

“There is properly no history; only biography,” so wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Robin Harris in The Conservatives: A History has remained true to this dictum, writing what is in effect a biography of the Conservative Party. Thomas Carlyle would have approved, inasmuch as it is an account of the great, and not so great, who have made their mark on one of the most remarkable and enduring political associations in history.

It’s a commendable piece of work, at once scholarly detached and polemically engaged, written by a man who is better qualified than most for the task, both as a historian and as a political insider. The author of an elegant biography of the French statesman Talleyrand, Dr Harris is a former Director of the Conservative Research Department, during which time he acted as Margaret Thatcher’s special adviser and speech writer. He is presently writing a biography of the former Prime Minister, to be published after her death.

It’s a slippery beast, the Conservative Party, almost impossible to define in terms of a core philosophy, anything beyond conservatism, that is, a reverence for established tradition and a suspicion of novelty. Disraeli famously said that England does not love coalitions but the Tories themselves are a kind of coalition of different interests, with the pattern shifting and changing over time. The truly remarkable thing is that what began as an alliance of rural aristocrats, ranged behind the crown, ended as party of the urban middle-classes; from Bolingbroke to Thatcher in several remarkable steps!

The Tory Party is a chameleon; it always has been, paradoxically committed to the way things are yet capable of quite revolutionary adaptations, unlike its great rival the Whigs, once the strongest contenders for the future, now cast well into the past. This is not because it represents some noble and enduring principle, no; it’s simply because it is a pragmatic force built for one thing and one thing alone – to win elections.

In his introduction Harris quotes from the resignation letter of James Purnell, a former Work and Pensions Secretary, sent to Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister, full of all sorts of risible and mawkish sentiments in reverence of the Labour Party – “We both love the Labour Party...We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing.” Harris’ comment on this is telling;

No Conservative politician at any stage of the party's history would have written such a letter. No one has ever pretended to "love" the Conservative Party. It is doubtful that even the most sentimental backbench MP would have claimed to "owe" the party "everything". Any serious Tory figure adopting such a pose would incur immediate ridicule. The Conservative Party exists, has always existed and can only exist to acquire and exercise power, albeit on a particular set of terms. It does not exist to be loved, hated or even respected. It is no better or worse than the people who combine to make it up. It is an institution with a purpose, not an organism with a soul.

Harris traces the origins of this ‘institution with a purpose’ back to the great constitutional and religious struggles of the seventeenth century, coming to a head in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Tories were the High Church Party, the party of insiders which, time and again, adopted outsiders as mentors and guides. Evolution and adaptation, that’s the key to a party that was Tory and then Conservative and then Unionist and then Conservative again.

The intellectual foundation of the modern party was laid, irony of ironies, by Edmund Burke, an Irishman, a Catholic-sympathiser and a Whig! Burke reacted against the horrors that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. So, too, from the ministry of Pitt the Younger onwards, did the Tories, reacting against the forms of abstract thought and utopian politics that had brought it on.

But reacting did not invariably mean reaction; it meant embracing change when change was unavoidable, often turning it to conservative ends. After all, it was the Tories, the High Church Party, who introduced Catholic emancipation; it was the Tories, the Party of the Landed Interest, who repealed the Corn Laws. It was the Tories who began by opposing extensions to the franchise only to extend it right down to the urban working classes. In Salisbury, the pessimistic aristocrat who hated the idea of democracy, they had a leader who created ‘villa Conservatism’, making the party a home for the new middle classes, a process from which so much electoral benefit was to be drawn in the course of the following century.

It was the Conservatives, the religiously orthodox, who were so brilliantly led by a converted Jew. It was the Conservatives, outwardly the most ‘sexist’ of all parties, who were to be the first to elect a woman as leader, a woman who went on to become the country’s most revolutionary Prime Minster. Paradox, hard upon irony, hard upon paradox – that’s the story of the Tories.

Harris writes with such brilliant insight. His is a story of personalities, each shaping the party in their own image. I’ve long taken the view that Disraeli’s vicious attacks on Sir Robert Peel after the repeal of the Corn Laws was born of ambition rather than principle, but Harris persuasively argued that Peel had been a bad leader, too remote from his party. To make one major change of direction without consultation – that over Catholic Emancipation - , is a misfortune; to make a second one – that over the Corn Laws – looks like carelessness. The comparison here is surely with Ted Heath, another remote and ill-omened leader.

The author has penetrating things to say about all of the party’s leaders. He’s particularly good on Disraeli, an organisational and political genius whose credentials as a reformer have been hugely exaggerated by posterity. His overriding concern, rather, was for the monarchy, the landed interest and national prestige. His zeal was for the greatness of England, as Salisbury, his successor as party leader, put it in a posthumous tribute.

Disraeli along with Salisbury, the longest serving Tory Premier, and Margaret Thatcher constitutes the author’s triumvirate of greats, a contention with which I have no argument. Winston Churchill, I also agree, is a case sui generis, a political maverick, whose reputation was surely only saved by Hitler! Party meant little to him, even less in the context of his wartime Cabinet, and on so many issues he was just as ‘unsound’ as Lord Randolph, his brilliant but mercurial father, too full of greatness, or a perception of greatness, for his own good.

I also agree with his lows, particularly his assessment of Harold Macmillan, the grossly overrated ‘Supermac’, whose irresponsible economic and social policies were to create a poisonous legacy for the party and the country. Disraeli famously said of Peel that he caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes. The same might be said of Macmillan, only in his case the clothes were those of the Labour Party. Harris writes of him;

By some definitions, and by analogy with Disraeli, he could just about count as a Tory. But, by no known definition was he philosophically speaking a conservative. This, through his legacy to the Conservative Party, was a problem – nor necessarily one that is extinct.

Indeed.

I love the author’s style, his liberal peppering of waspish and mordant wit. Some barbs made me giggle, particularly that delivered at Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Salisbury, his uncle, as party leader and Prime Minister. Balfour said that the Carlton Club, one of the well-springs of modern Conservatism, was a ‘beastly’ place, infested with political bores. Harris writes “When Balfour, or any other Conservative leader, lost the bores, he lost the party.” Similarly his verdict on Stanley Baldwin, the inter-war face of what I think of as Ostrich Conservatism, is absolutely spot on;

Baldwin won huge majorities. He just did not know what to do with them. At a deeper level, undoubtedly he reflected the mood of the times. This, in fact, was the problem. He reflected it too well. In Baldwin the country got what it wanted and, arguably, to stray into more disputed territory, it got what it deserved. But it did not get what it needed.

I wrote at the outset that The Conservatives is both a work of scholarly detachment and polemical engagement, the polemical element becoming ever more obvious as we move towards the present day. The final chapter is headed Cameron’s Party?, with a question mark that does not speak so much as shout! History’s judgement on David Cameron is indeed open – is he Peel or is he Heath or is he still the ‘heir to Blair’? We shall see.

The author is generally fair (his brickbats are thrown elsewhere), though I share his scepticism over the present modernising project, over what John O’Sullivan, writing in the National Review and elsewhere, describes as the “Dianification of Toryism”, promoting all sorts of trendy causes that no ordinary Tory voter gives a damn about. Conservatives will never win elections by pretending to be liberals.

The final paragraph of the final chapter simply soars;

Disraeli, the Jewish outsider who championed traditional institutions, Salisbury, the fastidious aristocrat who won over the bourgeoisie, and Thatcher, the woman who crushed the unions, the Argentinean Junta and most of the Cabinet, and restored the economy to health, are all, in their different ways, completely surprising. It matters to the country that the Conservative Party should retain its capacity to produce surprises, and so harness the eccentric, distinctive qualities of British national greatness.

This is an entertaining, engaging and lively book with so many highs. That only makes the occasional lows all the more irritating. For example, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the fifth Marquis of Landsdowne, who succeeded Salisbury as Foreign Secretary in 1900 (hitherto he had held this post in conjunction with that of Prime Minister), is never properly introduced, with the result that the index, presumably compiled by someone other than the author, conflates him with his grandfather, the third Marquis, a leading Whig politician.

Similarly, when Salisbury resigned from the premiership in July 1902 the author writes that “the Queen took Salisbury’s advice and asked his nephew [Balfour] to head the government.” Can this be Alexandra, wife of Edward VII and queen consort? Edward was indisposed at the time, ill in the aftermath of peritonitis, so I suppose it might have been Alexandra, though I wasn’t aware that consorts had that constitutional authority. It certainly can’t be Victoria, the only other Queen referred to up to this point, who died over a year before!

Once again this is me reading with the eye of an academic, ever attentive to detail, no matter how petty. Set against the overall value of a book that is bound to serve as a standard modern introduction to the history of the Conservative Party it’s of little substance, mole hills beside a mountain.

Black Mediocrity

2012-01-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

I see Diane Abbott, the Shadow Minister for Public Health, is in trouble again, shooting off her mouth. She’s part of the Labour Party front bench and, as I say, the Shadow…oh, wait a minute, I think that should be Black Minister for Health, out of the shadows! Yes, she’s Black, the caps used deliberately here, for she takes pains to play her race card, something she does repeatedly as an all round mouth and professional Black woman. (Italics give a spot of added emphasis, just in case the point had escaped you!)

Not known for her subtlety, her latest gaff, as you may very well know, was a bird-brained tweet on Twitter, where, in discussion with one of her followers, she made an obviously racist remark, a generalisation about the attitude of whites, or should that be Whites, or maybe Whites.

Responding to a comment from another black woman, to the effect that the term ‘black community’ was born of lazy thinking, Abbott wrote that she was playing into the ‘divide and rule’ agenda. “White people”, came the twit, “love playing divide and rule. We should not play their game.” It’s a tactic, she continued, as “old as colonialism.”

Now the little house collapses around her ears. With several brickbats flying in her general direction (a perfect little storm in the press!), she says that her words were ‘taken out of context’ and ‘maliciously interpreted’. It’s just so amusing when politicians reach for this stale phrase; it must be on the most thumbed page of their professional lexicon. Unfair! Unfair!; you’re taking my words out of context. I’m not at all sure what context her words should be taken in, other than that of her bird brain.

She’s since been forced to issue a weasel-like apology by Big Brother Ed, the leader of the benighted Labour Party. But she will not be prosecuted under race relations legislation, despite a number of complaints lodged with the Metropolitan Police. Now just imagine if Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, had made some off the cuff remark about black people. No, you have no need to imagine. And all poor Aiden Burley did was to hire a costume!

Abbott has history here, a pattern of stupidity all based on her Black perceptions of the world. I wrote about her on the My Telegraph blog in June, 2010, a piece I called Diane Abbott – hypocrite, certainly; racist, perhaps. This followed a broadcast of This Week, a late-night BBC news show, in which she appears as a regular guest. In defending her decision to send her son to an expensive private school, when her own party’s policy is against the independent sector, she said that “West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.” “So”, Andrew Neil, the show’s host, asked, “black mums love their kids more than white mums, do they?” Answer came there none, whereupon Neil went for the jugular;

Supposing Michael [Michael Portillo, the other regular] said white mums will go to the wall for their children. Why did you say that? Isn’t it a racist remark? If West Indian mums are as wonderful as you say, why are there so many dysfunctional West Indian families in this country? And why do so many young West Indian men end up in a life of crime and gangs? You didn’t want your son to go to a school full of kids who have been brought up by West Indian mums.

The paradox here, as I indicated at the time, is that she clearly does not believe that West Indian mothers are somehow better than other mothers, for she was prepared to buy her son a way out from a significant West Indian presence in her local comprehensive;

In doing so Abbott has freed him from the dangers of the gang culture that besets West Indian boys, something that she herself alluded to recently, a culture nurtured by worthless state schools. But it’s alright for others, the sink comprehensive and all that it leads to, alright for the benighted people who send this hypocrite, this champagne socialist, to Parliament. All black people are equal but clearly some black people are more equal than others.

On reflection I think that should be be all black people are equal but clearly some Black people are more equal than others.

Diane Abbot represents everything that is wrong with so much of contemporary and public life. I think of the great figures of the past that have walked through the corridors of Westminster and debated in Parliament, figures of stature, intellect and substance. Then I think of this woman, a small-minded, silly, tweeting pygmy; a Black mediocrity. You can take those remarks in any context you like.

Storm in a Fondue

2012-01-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

Here we are: it's the opening of Act IV in the drama of Ana! I got back yesterday from a wonderful skiing holiday in Val-d'Isère, right in the heart of French Savoy. I’ve been before; I was there two seasons ago, and I’m pleased to say that things remain much the same as they were. The skiing was good, the company was good and New Year was wild!

Actually, it’s not really the skiing I want to talk about; it’s something else altogether, a storm in a fondue. We spent one day at the nearby resort of Val Thorens. It was here that Aidan Burley, a Conservative Member of Parliament, attended a Nazi-themed stag party last month in the excellent ( I know: I've been!) Restaurant La Fondue in the centre of town.

One of the party, addressed by the rest as Himmler, wore a black SS uniform, which it turns out was hired by Burley himself. Various toasts were drunk to the Third Reich and Nazi ideology. The fall-out was sadly predictable: Burley was sacked from his post as Parliamentary aid to the Transport Secretary by David Cameron, the Prime Minister. In France, where it is illegal to wear Nazi uniforms, a preliminary investigation into the incident has been opened.

What is there to be said? For a figure in public life to be involved in this sort of thing clearly shows that he’s a bit of an idiot, one who has now wrecked a promising political career. But what a fuss about nothing. It was a stag party; people do the stupidest things; and when men are stupid they are really stupid. If anything it shows that the symbols of Nazism themselves have become a bit of a joke, dress for comic party antics, by appointment to Prince Harry!

Burley was there certainly but he wasn’t dressed like a Nazi, unlike the Labour's Ed Balls, now the Shadow Chancellor, who donned German uniform when he was a student. And this is a man who actually served in government!

It’s the hypocrisy that gets me most, the double standards. There was a long and pompous, blah de blah article by Martin Bright on the Spectator’s Coffee House Blog, of all places, having a go at Burley and “boorish Tory oafs” in general. In the course of this he makes a point of waving his own left-wing credentials when he was at Cambridge during the 1980s, the Thatcher years.

Yes, a time, I feel sure, when Che Guevara, Trotsky and Marx stared out from the walls of thousands of dirty bedsits, these avatars of an ideology and political practice in every way as abhorrent as fascism. More abhorrent, if the calculus of death plays any part in the assessment of such things. One respondent to the Bright article makes the same point;

Isn't this just another boring article illustrating the left's enduring fetish about Nazis? The Nazi Party and its acolytes were utterly destroyed over 65 years ago and its leading lights were killed or imprisoned. Either way Nazism was totally discredited as a creed while the architects of the left's monstrous (and in many ways greater) crimes suffered no such fate. Yet in the best traditions of Joseph Mccarthy, the UK left would have you believe that there are closet Nazis everywhere....in, under and on the bed. It's utter self-serving b******s which enables them to shift attention from the crimes committed by the left.

Nazism did not survive the Second World War, shovelled into the dustbin of history. Marxism did, mutating in a thousand forms, still trendily present in Labour and other socialist parties. There was never a proper summing up, no truth and reconciliation committee. Red flags and stars can still be displayed; swastikas can’t. Stalin is the fashion in Moscow and Mao in Beijing; Hitler the fashion nowhere. But when some overgrown schoolboy is seen in the company of Hilarious Himmler - oh, my, the horror, the horror. It’s springtime for Hitler and Germany.

Happy New Year. :-)

Making an End

2011-12-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

The subject of year end posts came up in Blog Catalogue. I’ve never written one for the simple reason that in the time that Ana the Imp has been in existence I’ve never been around at the year end, signing off just before Christmas. Well, here I am, close to the midnight hour; so, in the absence of anything else, here is my premier year end post!

In a Janus-style I look back and I look forward. Speaking personally, it’s been a good year for me, one of the best ever, though I feel a slight sense of guilt for saying so, with all the troubles in the world, troubles in so many lives. I’m conscious of how fortunate and privileged I am, able to do things that so many others can only ever dream of. But it’s the only life I will ever have and I simply must make the best use of it in the way that I see fit.

My year began in Austria, there on a skiing trip; it will end also with a skiing trip. I was in Paris at Easter, pursuing every romantic cliché that you can imagine and a few you probably can’t! Then there was Peru and latterly Egypt, more experiences that will leave an indelible impression on my mind, not just because of the marvellous monuments I saw but because the people I met, decent, lovely people, no matter their race, religion or politics.

But travel is not just about personal gratification; it’s about understanding a little more about the world, seeing the mountain, so to speak, through other eyes and from other angles. If at the end, if in looking back, I can say it was all worth doing, that I have no regrets and I would do it all again without changing a thing, then I will be satisfied. Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will - it's only action that can make a woman. I offer apologies here for a slight adaptation of the words of Goethe.

My personal development continues; my reading gets broader and my experiences deeper, my intellect more subtle, my judgements less harsh; well, not quite as harsh as they once were. I have so many people I am thankful for: my wonderful parents, old friends and new friends, here, there and everywhere. And of course there is you; yes, you know who I’m talking about, my ever faithful shadow.

I look forward into the year of the Maya, the year of great events, anticipated and projected. Do I think something cataclysmic is going to happen? No, quite frankly, I don’t, but even if I did what could I do, what difference would it make? If the world goes then I go with it, a happy fatalist.

I certainly hope for the sake of America, and for the free world as a whole, that Barack Obama goes. I care nothing about his race, his ethnicity, his religious beliefs and the ambiguity over his birth certificate; all of that seems utterly irrelevant. What is relevant is his complete incapacity for high office, the almost total absence of the qualities of steadiness and determination that are essential handmaidens of leadership. America seems to be drifting at the moment; and when America drifts we drown.

Turning closer to home I see the European Union, that unnatural monster, descending ever deeper into chaos, a farce played out in several unappealing acts. I find it difficult to express how much contempt I have for the sad mediocrities in the chanceries and palaces across the Continent. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, they are indeed a pathetic bunch. The sane thing is for Britain to get out of the club, something I hope to see one day.

On the subject of Margaret Thatcher the first film I intend to see in the New Year is The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep in the title role. I can’t think of anyone else I would choose for the part. The advance publicity I’ve seen looks good. If it helps understand one of the truly great figures of the last century then it will have served its purpose very well, even if it is a warts and all portrayal. There is indeed a price to be paid for power, and with the highs come the inevitable lows. Enoch Powell was absolutely right in his assessment of political careers.

Well, that’s it, that’s enough, my end of year report. I’m leaving for France on New Year’s Day for a week’s skiing. So, I’ll see you all over another border in time. Have a very, very happy New Year and may it bring everything that you would wish for.

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

Several Uneasy Pieces

2011-12-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

In its beginning was its end. Actually that’s not quite true; the Soviet Union came in with a bang and out with a whimper. Even so the two events were united, a long, slow motion curtain-call for the old Russian imperium. Aleksandr Kugel, a Russian theatre critic and editor, writing a few months after the Bolshevik coup in 1917 put the matter rather well;

The dying process has begun. Everything we see now is just part of the agony. Bolshevism is the death of Russia. And a body the size of Russia cannot die in one hour. It groans.

It certainly did groan, decade after decade, a body in terminal decline, a body destroyed by the most aggressive form of ideological cancer. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, made one fundamental error: he formed the belief that he was a doctor; in fact he was an undertaker; he tried to raise Caesar only to bury him. His twin medicines, glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring, only served to reveal just how bad the patient was, how terminal the condition. The benighted man finally opened to the truth, delivering a funeral oration on Christmas Day, 1991. It all ended with mealy-mouthed good wishes.

There are odd historical ironies here. Imperialism, according to Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism. His communist state was the highest stage of imperialism. In other words, the revolution of 1917 preserved in aspic what was in effect a Tsarist colonial structure built up over centuries. The Russian Slavs had taken up the white man’s burden, ruling over Kalmyks, Uzbeks, Chechens, Inuits, Tatars and patchwork of other nationalities, races and ethnic groups. As it was, the nationalities suffered the harshest colonial oppression at the hands of Stalin the Georgian, whose first post in the Soviet government was - another irony - Commissar for the Nationalities.

The house that Lenin built collapsed that Christmas Day in what is surely an event unparalleled in the history of anti-climaxes, but the aftershocks were quite devastating, the fall-out from this post-imperial scramble. Lawrence Scott Sheets, an American reporter working for Reuters and National Public Radio, witnessed the whole thing, his experiences now written up in 8 Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, which serves as a personal record; part memoir, part travelogue, part political analysis.

There are surely few regrets over the death of the Soviet Union; there must be lots over what followed - the crazy ethnic conflicts, the revival of quarrels sublimated for generations; the murders, the kidnapping, the anarchy, the criminality, the chaos and the terrorism. Then there was the flight into fresh forms of dictatorship in some of the new states, based on personality cults that might have embarrassed Stalin.

This terrible scattering left peoples and countries trying to establish a place for themselves, a sense of identity, a sense of belonging. With borders defined in the past by bureaucrats, taking little account of history or ethnic composition, the outcome was sadly inevitable – a series of racial and territorial wars that are thought to have cost the lives of up to 200,000 people.

It’s the pathology of upheaval, to use his own phrase, that Sheets writes about, in an intimate, honest and wholly revealing way. It was at its worse in the Caucuses, particularly in Georgia, whose post-Soviet history might very well serve as a case study in political lunacy. This was a place that went, as the author puts it, from being the crown jewel of empire to a failed state by steady stages. There was Eduard Shevardnadze, once a respected Soviet politician, fleeing from his homeland, the newly-independent country’s first president, in a ravaged, jet-fuel-dripping plane covered in bullet holes, the principle victim of the so-called Rose Revolution

Conflict, fissure and war were to follow, in a country so extreme in forms of behaviour that notices had to be posted in parliament reminding the legislators to leave their guns outside. What astonishes me most is that Georgia was once a serious candidate for NATO membership, with all its smouldering resentment against Russia, coming to a head in 2008. How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we might have been involved in a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing, as someone or other once said. :-)

The book concludes with the greatest horror of all – the Beslan Massacre of 2004, when a school in North Ossetia, the scene of a hostage crisis, saw the deaths of almost four hundred people, many of them children, caught in a vicious cross-fire between Chechen terrorists and heavy-handed government forces. Sheets is at his most poignant here, recalling how he gave a shocked teenager his phone so he could contact his sister. She was already dead.

“Feeling at best an interloper and at worst a tragedy speculator,” he writes, “I put my equipment away. Covering war and tragedy is a bit like exposing oneself to radiation. In carefully measured doses, it often poses few well-established health risks…Unlimited exposure over very long periods, however, is unwise for the mind and the soul.”

He stopped, I feel sure, just at the right time, for the process of fragmentation, as he warns, is by no means at an end. A return to these horrors was unthinkable, save for the fact that in Russia nothing is unthinkable, as Isaiah Berlin once wrote.

There is no analytical depth to Sheet’s book, no meta-narrative, but it cuts in a personal and revealing way, without fuss and burdensome detail, into several tragedies in several acts, staged all the way from Saint Petersburg in the west to Sakhalin Island in the east, all in eight uneasy pieces and more. It’s a story told with moving sincerity, one that goes far in helping to understand how a country evolved from a bureaucratic morass into an ethnic mess. I will never think of journalists reporting from the front line in the same way again.

Preserving Tradition; Preserving Liberty

2011-12-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

I was out on the Boxing Day hunt, the first time this great occasion on the hunting calendar has been unmarred by the weather for two years past. I was out with an estimated 300,000 people, attending 300 hundred hunts across the country. Some were there as riders; others just to enjoy the spectacle. I say the event was unspoiled by the weather; it was also unspoiled by the killjoys and snoopers, the dirty mac brigade who have marred previous occasions.

Of course we are no longer allowed by law to pursue the fox itself, ever since the ghastly Labour government of the ghastly Tony Blair (oh, how I would like to hunt him!) introduced the Hunting with Dogs Act in 2004, a piece of legislative spite based on the worst forms of inverted snobbery and incomprehension. Instead we now have to pursue an artificial trail, a ‘drag hunt’, a bit of a drag, really.

Oh, foxes are still killed aright, but they are fortunate if they are killed ‘accidentally’, getting in the path of the hunt. Otherwise these animals, defined as vermin, a danger to the rural economy, have to be killed in a variety of ways, including snaring and gassing, which only serves to prolong their suffering, a ‘mercy’ inflicted on them by those canting hypocrites who pride themselves on their dislike of animal cruelty.

The government of David Cameron is committed to holding a free vote on the possible repeal of the 2004 Act, when ‘time allows’. I rather fear that it’s not going to be allowed in the present Parliament. One understands that there are other priorities just at the moment, but one also has the feeling that the – foxy – Liberal Democrat tail is wagging the Conservative dog, or at least wagging Cameron.

In the meantime I’m delighted to see that George Freeman, a Tory MP, has come out suggesting that a parliamentary inquiry should be held to prove the case for repeal. Reported in the Telegraph he said;

I am pleased that the Government has committed to a free vote on the ban in its Coalition Agreement. But before we have that vote let’s set up a parliamentary inquiry to find out what effect the ban is really having. All the anecdotal evidence is that the ban is bad for animal welfare, bad for the countryside, bad for the rural economy and a waste of police resources. Let’s look at the evidence properly so we can decide on repeal on the basis of the facts rather than political bigotry and class war against the countryside.

Yes, let’s.

Anyway, my meet was a real John Peel occasion. It was such a delighted to be there, riding with mother and father and the other person who is closest to me in the whole the world. Yes, it was absolutely thrilling, to ride, to chase, to hunt, to be young and to be alive. I will continue to ride with the wind, to enjoy the freedom of the English countryside, to preserve an ancient tradition, to preserve liberty itself.

Please, no more Jingle Bells!

2011-12-22T16:32:00.000-08:00

There is a store on the west end of Edinburgh’s Princes Street near the Caledonian Hotel which sells Scottish-themed products, the sort of tartan tat that’s most likely made in China. I’ve never been in – I can’t stand this sort of thing – but I could not help but notice it on the two occasions when I walked past – it blares out pipe and drum music, horrible stuff really loud. It was bad enough for me, passing in moments; it must be intolerable for the staff, who have to listen to this ghastly racket all day long.

I have music in mind, or rather muzak, the sort of background noise that Wikipedia defines as elevator music, sounds on a cycle, an endless loop. In discussion recently I mentioned that one of the horrors of Christmas is that supermarkets (I have my local Tesco in mind) insist on pumping out seasonal noise, jolly tunes on the loop, tunes coming round time and time and time again.

I don’t know what they are attempting to do in this, put people in the mood, perhaps, for spending and happy times in Tesco. Well, it’s not working, at least so far as I’m concerned; I work on a different psychology. It makes me shop as quickly as I can, get what I need and get out before my ears are hammered by Frosty the Snowman yet one more time! It’s the people who work there I feel most sorry for, people who have no choice but to be beguiled by Frosty or Rudolf for as long as they are on shift. To my mind this constitutes the very acme of cruel and unusual punishment!

I had an experience of this once myself. I was in Havana over the Christmas and New Year period a few years ago, staying in the Hotel Parque Central, right in the heart of the city. The usual Christmas horrors were played from the bar by the roof-top swimming pool. I’m not much for sun-bathing (frying like a fry bores me!), which is just as well, as I would have gone quietly mad with that as a constant background. Swimming or lunching to this accompaniment was bad enough!

I finally cracked on 2 January. “Look”, I said to the barman in my broken Spanish, “Christmas is over. Can we please, please have some Cuban music, some salsa, anything but Jingle Bells?” And that was that, a sigh of universal relief.

I’m not Scrooge; I do enjoy some Christmas-themed music, just not the mass market stuff. What’s my favourite Christmas song, you may wonder? Why, it’s a fairy tale, a strangely poignant one. I do hope you all have the kind of holiday you most wish for yourself. :-)

One Martini

2011-12-21T15:53:00.000-08:00

Hotel standards vary hugely across the world and five stars does not always mean five stars. I’ve stayed in some wonderful places, formerly with my parents and latterly with lovers, friends and other travelling companions. I’ve been fortunate enough to tick off some of life’s ‘must does’ including relaxing in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the old wing that was blown up by Irgun in July, 1946, and enjoying a gin sling in Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the place where this famous cocktail was born.

I love cocktails; I love the tradition of the cocktail hour. My favourite is a champagne cocktail closely followed by a Pimm’s number one cup, though there are others I like when I’m in the mood, particularly a simple, or not so simple, dry martini. That’s the classic, that’s the drink by which all hotels should be measured, by their ability to mix a martini, not by stars.

The hotels I stayed in when I was in Egypt were all five stars by local assessment. They were generally good and the staff were highly obliging, always mindful of the prospect of baksheesh to make good the gap in their dreadful salaries, but my, oh, my, their martini standards were poor or non-existent!

Now, this is Egypt, a Muslim country, a country with a Muslim majority. Alcohol, while available, does not play a big part in the national consciousness. In future it may play no part at all, if the Islamist advance continues and the stricter forms of sharia law adopted. As it was I flew there and back with Egypt Air, which does not serve alcohol. My, all those hours without a snifter; how frustrating!

So, yes, alcohol is not that important. But one still expects a certain standard in international hotels, particularly those with a cocktail menu. There it was on the menu in Luxor, clearly stated - a dry martini. So, on this particular evening, having had enough of the gin fizz, I decided to have one. There was just one problem: I had to explain to the barman how it was done. Surely to goodness I’m not the first person even to have asked for this drink!

Perhaps the particular barman was a greenhorn? No, for none of his colleagues was any more knowledgeable. Basically I ended up mixing the drink myself, to the amusement of the other guests. It was done and it was good (I mix a fabulous martini!) There is just one problem; I like an olive in my drink, another essential the bar was without. “Just one moment, madam, and I’ll fetch some.”

Fine; off he goes and then he comes back, with a little dish of olives, green and black. One was pierced with a cocktail stick and added to my drink. For me it’s a little bonus at the end, eating my alcohol-saturated olive. I did, popped it in my mouth. But there were no hints of gin and vermouth; no, just a strong taste of vinegar. It was pickled. Definitely a one martini establishment.

The Year of Dickens

2011-12-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

David Lodge, writing in the December issue of Prospect magazine (Our Mutual Friend), has reminded me that this coming February marks an important event in the literary calendar – the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

A whole series of events are planned to mark the occasion, a torrent of Dickens, in publications, conferences, exhibitions, as well as new film and television adaptations of his work. A statue is also scheduled to be unveiled in Portsmouth in August, the town where he was born.

I’ve written before just how much I love his work (Adoring Dickens, May 27, 2010), so I expect to go, to see, to attend and to read as the mood takes me. The Museum of London is putting on a special exhibition about the writer’s links with the city. In so many ways he’s the chronicler of nineteenth century London, in good times and in bad. His is another human comedy. When asked why he was my favourite author I replied it was because I loved his Dante-like journeys through Victorian London, a great panorama, peopled with the most wonderful eccentrics; with the bad who are very bad and the good who are very good, archetypes one and all.

The BBC, who have produced some excellent adaptations of his novels in the past, are apparently planning several new screenings, including two of Great Expectations – a serial and a movie – and one of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I shall be particularly interested in the latter because the mystery was never solved, the novel a permanent enigma, unfinished at the time of the author’s death. Presumably some kind of resolution will be offered.

I have a number of previous adaptations on DVD, including two TV serials of Bleak House, a 1985 version starring Denholm Elliot as John Jarndyce and the 2005 version, which I watched at the time, broadcast twice weekly in a half hour, soap opera-style, format, as opposed to the usual hour long classic series format. The latter was particularly noted for the performance of X-Files Gillian Anderson in the role of Lady Deadlock.

Dickens' place in the imagination is now unshakeable, second only to Shakespeare. Even people who have never read him will almost certainly know of some of his characters, Ebenezer Scrooge most of all, as much a part of Christmas as Santa Claus. Indeed in A Christmas Carol Dickens might have been said to have invented the modern form of the seasonal holiday. In past time, before the seventeenth century Civil Wars, it was in part a religious holiday and in part an excuse for a drunken ruckus, represented by the slightly disreputable figure of Father Christmas (not at all like Santa!) and the Lord of Misrule. A Christmas Carol recreated it in the image of Victorian bourgeois respectability and homeliness, a time of feasting, family togetherness and fun, all of the most wholesome kind! God bless us, every one.

After his death in 1870 Dickens work went gradually out of fashion, at least among the high priests of literary taste. The process accelerated, as Lodge argues in his essay, after the First World War, a time of a revaluation of all Victorian values by a generation that left cosy sentimentality in the mud of Flanders. In Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust the protagonist is held captive by the mad and illiterate Mr Todd, who forces him to read the work of Dickens aloud until the day he dies. This particular fate was among the worst that Waugh could imagine, as his father, a past president of the Dickens Society, insisted on reading aloud to him and his brother.

In a brave new literary world, given to introspection, psychology and floating along on a stream of consciousness, there was no room for someone as playfully unconcerned with deeper motives and states of mind as the great Victorian bard. F. R Leavis in The Great Tradition, a seminal work of literary criticism, excludes Dickens altogether from the pantheon of English literature, on the snooty grounds that “…his genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests.”

But Dickens has endured. He has found a new and ever growing audience. Why? Simply because he is beyond all fashion; because he is so human, a true craftsman in words, a great shaper of the human spirit, a writer of boundless humanity and simple generosity. I’ve read most of his novels more than once, David Copperfield three times in all, finding fresh delights each time, hating Mr Murdstone just as much as I did on first acquaintance! Doubtless I shall read it and the others again. I may even, in future times, read them aloud to my own children. :-)

The Revolution Bare

2011-12-19T16:23:00.000-08:00

I saw lots of political graffiti in Egypt. I can’t read Arabic but I know it was political because it was often accompanied by an illustration or even some English text. In Aswan one wall had a depiction of Mina Daniel, a Coptic Christian killed by the army in October. It was close to one of Che Guevara, a figure with whom he identified, something I found out later.

There was something else, something that puzzled me, an image of a woman who appeared to be posing naked; she was certainly wearing stockings or holdups and her shoulders were bare, but the central part of her body was covered in Arabic text. Well, she was posing naked, an Egyptian woman, and I missed the storm it caused because I was in Egypt! Oddly enough it wasn’t reported on BBC or CNN, both afraid, perhaps, of the naked truth

Anyway, her name (you may know this already) is Alia el-Mahdi, a twenty-year-old student at Cairo University, who posted a full frontal nude picture of herself on Facebook, Twitter and her personal blog as a ‘revolutionary’ gesture. It’s certainly another interesting dimension of the ferment in the Arab world. Women in Libya are taking to wearing the niqab, now that they are free from the secular pressures of Colonel Gaddafi, and a woman in Egypt has found freedom in nakedness!

This is what she wrote on her personal blog;

Put on trail the artist’s models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise top forever rid yourselves of your sexual hang-ups before you direct your humiliation and your chauvinism and dare to try to deny me my freedom of expression.

Hmm, yes; it’s certainly a gesture of a sort, a brave one, given my knowledge of Egypt and Egyptian culture, but I’m not really sure what she hopes to achieve beyond ‘freedom of expression’; it certainly did not advance the revolution, just the contrary, judging by the results of the November elections, which saw mass support for the Islamists.

Alia is in every way untypical, even, I would hazard, of the most advanced sections of Egyptian opinion. She describes herself as an atheist and lives openly in Cairo with her boyfriend, a city where some women wear the niqab just to escape unwanted sexual attention. And, believe me, it’s bad.

I’m torn here between a certain admiration for her boldness and bafflement over her folly. Life in Cairo must have been difficult enough for someone like her. Now, with such a high public profile (she’s had over a million hits on her blog), it will be impossible, especially as a group of graduates in Islamic law are taking her and her boyfriend to court for ‘violating morality’, ‘indecency’ and ‘insulting Islam.’ If convicted she could face up to eighty lashes.

The graffiti I saw was a reproduction of her nude picture. It was beside the image of another woman, head shot only, a woman wearing a headscarf. This is Samira Ibrahim. She did not pose naked, no. She alleges that she, along with seventeen other women, was forced naked by soldiers last March and subjected to some intimate probing to determine if she was a virgin or not. She is now taking the military to court over the matter. The text on the wall contrasts the way in which this outrage was ignored while Alia’s antic has caused a huge media and public fuss.

There is certainly a serious point here, a point about hypocrisy, about the hypocrisy of Egyptian culture and society. Is this the way to make it, though? I simply can’t be sure. There seems to be an awful lot of me, me, me in this, empty self-promotion, shock for the sake of shock.

Alia has been criticised for her actions not just by the conservatives but by the liberals. A spokesman for the April 6 Youth Movement denied that she or her partner were members, saying they could not possibly accept “a girl who behaves like this” into their ranks.

Predictably she has attracted support from beyond Egypt, from the arbiters of liberal opinion, and from naked Israeli women, which is certainly not going to help. There is a tiresome piece – of course – in the Guardian by one Mona Eltahawy, a woman who clearly knows next to nothing about the nature of Egypt, conservatism or revolution. I wonder what she would have said if an English woman had appeared on the pages of the down-market Sun like this. Would her nudity still be ‘a weapon of political resistance’? I rather think not. Actually, Alia’s picture is not good enough for the Sun; it’s much more readers’ wives, the kind of amateurish thing favoured by some English porn magazines.

I find myself in agreement – the horror! the horror! - with a piece written by Nelson Jones in the trendy left New Statesman, a publication I normally think of as a retirement home for intellectual and political mediocrities. He said that the gesture was curiously old-fashioned, a harking back to the days when, as he puts it, “sexual liberation and nudity were part and parcel of revolutionary politics.” (Part and parcel; what a cliché!) It's awfully old-fashioned, that's true, trendy 60s stuff; Hair, OZ and the Age of Aquarius. Hey, let the sun shine in!

Yes, things have moved on and Egypt is advancing into a counter-revolution. Alia, in her own naked way, may have made that process just a little quicker.

The Mirror of Virtue

2011-12-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

On the first morning of my first full day in Egypt the first place I visited was the old Citadel of Cairo, with fortifications built by Saladin in the late twelfth century to protect it from the Crusaders.

I first came across this remarkable figure, an historical giant who stands across both the Muslim and Christian world, in the pages of The Talisman, Sir Walter Scott’s nineteenth century historical romance of the crusades, which I read in my early teens. In so many ways Saladin was the real hero of this book, a verray, parfit, gentil knyght, a Victorian recreation of a chivalric ideal.

Saladin has long been celebrated by his enemies, much more than his friends, even as far back as the Middle Ages. He seemed to be the very personification of a code of conduct that was more mythic than real, a reproach to his Christian opponents, who professed an ideal which they ignored in practice. Saladin here was the mirror of virtue. In Dante’s Inferno he is to be found in the mild first circle of hell, along with Homer, Euclid, Socrates and other virtuous pagans.

In contrast, he was a largely forgotten figure in the Muslim world, his reputation surpassed by Baibars, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt who was instrumental in bringing the Crusader presence in the Middle East to an end. He was only rediscovered in the late nineteenth century as an avatar of Arab nationalism, rather ironic considering that he was Kurdish.

Given that Saladin is a man possibly more wrapped in myth than any other it would take a bold person to attempt to disentangle the Gordian knot; to separate out fact, fiction and dewy-eyed romance. So, it was with keen interest that I opened the pages of Saladin, a biography by Anne-Marie Eddé, originally published in France in 2008. The new translation by Jane Marie Todd, published last month by Harvard University Press, was the first book I bought on my return from Egypt.

It’s a remarkable piece of work by a woman I can only describe as a historian’s historian. It’s well-argued, scholarly, and thoroughly researched book, rich in all sorts of detail. It’s also an excellent exercise in deconstruction or exploration. It does not demolish the myth of Saladin; it simply makes him, and it, more understandable.

Eddé, a specialist in Medieval history, begins with one basic question: how did this relentless jihad fighter come to be identified as valiant, generous and magnanimous figure among his former foes? Some truths are simply stated: Saladin was everything he was cracked up to be: he was pious and he was tolerant; he was a man of his word; he was a skilful soldier and an even more skilful politician; he was a patron of the arts and the sciences…and he was the world’s first spin doctor.

The Saladin myth, in other words, really begins with Saladin himself. In the complex religious and political world of twelfth century Islam he made his way to the top by selling himself, by advancing his own platform, by convincing others he was the man and this was his moment.

He was a deal-maker without parallel, moving by soft degrees to the point where he replaced the Fatimids with his own Ayyubid dynasty, uniting Egypt and Syria. He was a self-promoter, convincing much of the Muslim world that only he was capable of leading it against the threat posed by the Crusaders. He was pious, certainly, but he was no Osama bin Laden, no stupid fanatic. He could be pragmatic as occasion demanded, making bargains even with the enemy, all part of a bigger political game. Such was his success that he laid the basis for multiple interpretations of his life and actions, something the author explores with admirable skill.

Some of the details are fascinating, things I was not previously aware of. For instance, even in the midst of conflict, Saladin negotiated trade deals with Italian merchants, obtaining the wood, pitch and iron that enabled him to build the Egyptian fleet, no matter how hard the Papacy raged.

There is another truth here worth emphasising, that the Crusades themselves, from beginning to end, were a political disaster, which in the long run weakened and destroyed Christian power in the east, the power and integrity of the Byzantine Empire. Compared with such cynical ‘crusaders’ as Venice’s Enrico Dandelo it’s little wonder that Saladin is such a paragon, a true Christian gentleman!

Another virtue of Saladin is that it helps to give some understanding of what the Crusades looked like from a Muslim perspective, this movement of outlandish outsiders they generally referred to as the Franks. It was their beliefs that the Muslims found most perplexing, as one twelfth century Syrian document makes clear;

The most amazing thing in the world is that the Christians say that Jesus is divine, that he is God, and then they say that the Jews seized him and crucified him. How can a God who cannot protect himself protect others? Anyone who believes his God came out of a woman’s privates is quite mad; he should not be spoken to, for he has neither intelligence nor faith.

And for once my comment is to say no comment!

Saladin was of and beyond his times, a figure I personally would parallel with the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, another wonder of the world. Eddé certainly gives us a better sense of the man, as a politician as well as a soldier, an individual who was inevitably going to appear like Ozymandias to subsequent generations. She disposes of the exaggerations while still leaving us with a figure whose myth was in a traditional form, a simple narrative explaining a complex truth. Saladin was no icon; he was a man, but what a man.

I thoroughly recommend this book and I’m going to give it five stars. I should say, though, that its strength is in academic detail rather than narrative line; some people may be discouraged by her thematic arrangement. Notwithstanding this, Eddé’s approach is forensic and exhaustive, and on that level I really don’t think this book will ever be surpassed, either as a work of history or of biography.

Russia without Putin

2011-12-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

In my previous article I said that Russian democracy was a hollow façade, based not on respect for the people but on condescension and contempt. But the Duma elections earlier this month brought a major shift, a bloody nose for the Putin’s United Russia, “a party of crooks and thieves”, a title given to it by Alexi Navalny, a Russian blogger.

The crooks and thieves won but on a greatly reduced majority, with their share of the vote falling to under fifty per cent. This is all the more remarkable because the whole election was rigged, blatantly so. The principle followed here is based on one of Stalin’s maxims, that it is counting rather than voting that matters. But even positive counting and ballot rigging could not stand against an adverse tide; the ballot boxes could not be stuffed fast enough. According to independent monitors, the real figure for United Russia might be as much as fifteen or twenty points lower.

Putin has long been a puzzle to me. He’s a colourless apparatchik, a bureaucrat of little imagination and less charisma, Soviet man at his dullest. But at least he brought stability after the chaos of the Yeltsin years; and for Russians ‘managed democracy’ was far more tolerable than drunken anarchy. Managed democracy and stability is one thing; cronyism, corruption and stagnation quite another.

In my previous piece I said that Russia’s democratic institutions were a joke, that elections were no more real than they were in Soviet days. I now have to amend this view. Russia has spoken with a different voice. Politically speaking the country may be a little like the dull-witted giant of fairy tales, but even giants can be prodded too far.

Putin may long for the Brezhnev years (the former leader is promoted as a positive figure by his government) but things have changed. The present is a foreign country; we do things differently here. We do things differently in the age of instant communication, the age of the internet, the age of Twitter and Facebook. In Russia’s former days heterodox opinions circulated around a small number of people in printed samizdat. Now communication takes the form of an electronic hydra; cut off one dissenting view and dozens more appear. People had enough of United Russia.

The election was never going to bring real democracy; it’s open to question if the Russians even want such a thing, tainted as it is with past miseries, but it acted as a popular referendum on the party of Putin and the way things are being managed in Russia.

Putin has been highly effective in the past, promoting himself as a patriot and re-establishing national self-respect after the nadir of Yeltsin, but he has allowed the weed of corruption to grow to the point were it is a serious danger to Russia’s economic well-being and his own political future.

Russia is a gas giant. It depends on its natural resources. Its prosperity is tied into the price of energy. But so much of the national wealth is being siphoned off in shady deals that the budget will not balance if the price of oil does not remain high, which is unlikely given the world’s present economic woes. With foreign investors already being frightened away by graft, intimidation and a weak system of contract law, guarantees which guarantee nothing, the Potemkin mirage is already beginning to break up.

We’ve been here before, this predictable cycle of Russian history, where unresponsive and sclerotic governments buckle under tectonic pressures, Tsarist days and Soviet days, it’s all much the same. Putin is not yet ready to go the same ways as Nicholas II or Mikhail Gorbachev, but he has received a warning. If I can put the point another way, the Duma elections is his 1905, not his 1917 or his 1991.

He is likely to survive, at least for the present; he his likely to dump United Russia, too horribly tainted as a political vehicle, he is more than likely, given the system, to win the coming presidential election. But the system he stands atop of, the bureaucratic hydra based on a monopoly of power and wealth, a parasitic state, looks vulnerable.

December 2011 may be dress rehearsal for something bigger. “Russia without Putin”, demonstrators shouted on the streets of Moscow after the results were announced, before they were dispersed by the army. It may yet be.

Prince Putin’s Façade

2011-12-14T15:34:00.000-08:00

This is another article I wrote for Broowaha under the heading Putin’s Potemkin Democracy (subsequently stolen by a Russian English-language publication!). It was clearly written before the recent Duma elections and I intend to follow it up tomorrow with a fresh assessment of the new political realities in Russia in the light of the drubbing of United Russia, Putin’s party, at the polls.

A Potemkin village, if you’ve never heard of the expression, is one of the enduring myths of Russian history. The reference is to fake settlements, hollow façades supposedly set up on the orders of Prince Grigory Potemkin, chief minister of Catherine the Great, to impress the Empress when she toured the Crimea in the late 1780s, territory recently conquered from the Ottoman Turks. It was simply a way of increasing his political prestige.

I say it’s a myth but in Russia myths have a habit of fleshing out into a reality, which really is nothing more than a myth! In the 1930s various western intellectuals, a group more easily fooled than most, toured the USSR, there to be shown rich settlements, model factories, happy rustics and beaming workers, the whole thing a shabby lie hiding an ugly truth.

Now Russian democracy itself is turning into a kind of Potemkin illusion, an empty shell around an authoritarian core. I suppose I should be generous and say that some honesty has entered the system, that the illusion has been partially lifted. Dmitry Medvedev has been exposed for what he always was – a Potemkin President. He’s been there, sitting in the Kremlin, keeping the seat warm for Vladimir Putin, the once and future king.

Like the mummy, Putin, the present prime minister, is set to return, in deal worked out with his manqué some years ago; set to return, incidentally, after a ‘free and fair’ election to be held in March of next year. Yes, that’s the way they do things in the brave new Russia – the result is known in advance!

There is a kind of massive joke here, all at the expense of the people of Russia. They now know with a certainty that their democratic institutions are a joke, that elections are no more real than they were in Soviet days, that Medvedev was no more than a placeman, not at all the liberal reformer that many had supposed, a placeman that fifty million people were fooled into voting for in 2008.

It’s really the nature of the Russian state that’s at fault here, a state that has never come to terms with its past, a Model-T state, where you can have whatever colour you like as long as it’s black; you can have any president you like as long as its Putin. This is the state, as I pointed out in a review of Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and his Henchmen, that is effectively run by the apparatchiks of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, the colourless Putin its most typical example. Just imagine the FBI announcing the result of the American presidential election a year in advance! Yes, that’s Russia.

Vasily Grossman, a writer of unique and biting genius, wrote that Russians have a ‘slave soul’, that they are wedded by history to a long tradition of servitude. We really have to ask how much has changed since the days of Stalin. Yes, the terror has gone, the coercion less obvious, but the moral corruption is still in place, they still have a polity “unrestricted by law and based on force”, the definition Stalin gave of the dictatorship of the proletariat in The Foundations of Leninism. They have political system where a prime minister is inside a president is inside a prime minister, like a nest of Russian dolls.

Serfs they are, serfs they will remain, giving Putin a 50% approval rating, seemingly unaware that they are being treated with contempt, that the Kremlin justifies its actions by describing its own people as ‘mindless.’ There they are, a people without a civil society, without a mature tradition of law, abused and taken for granted by their political masters, like cattle.

Meanwhile the Potemkin democracy gets hollower by the day, creating clowns and clones, as a report in the Economist said, to keep up a pretence of democratic choice. Why bother, what’s the point, who’s being fooled? But this is a country much given to illusions, even when they serve no purpose at all. Myth simply becomes reality and then myth again, in and endless and pointless pavane, a dance with a meaningless destiny.

Europe's Perfect Storm

2011-12-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

What follows is an article wrote for BrooWaha. The subject matter is in part covered by my previous article on the great European fiasco (The Majority is Always Wrong), though I tailored this piece specifically for a North American audience. BrooWaha is in lockdown at the moment (there have been no fresh articles in two days), so rather than see it lost in a logjam I’m publishing it here.

Are you following events in Europe, the slow motion death of democracy? Yes, that’s what’s happening, all part of the continuing attempt to stabilise the troubled euro, all part of an attempt to restore the confidence of the financial markets in the benighted single currency.

The latest proposal, one that Britain opted out of, is to introduce more centralised control over the tax and spending decisions of the individual members of the euro-zone, some seventeen in all at present. European leaders, in their boundless wisdom, have suddenly discovered that one cannot have monetary union without fiscal union; or rather one can, if one wants to see the madness that has beset the whole vanity project over the past few months. And fiscal union has to involve some mechanism for overruling national governments.

No taxation without representation, was the battle cry of the American Revolution. It really does not matter who represents you in future; in practical terms they will be irrelevant, is the manifesto of Europe’s more perfect union. Just imagine if King George had agreed to all of the rebel demands in 1776. Yes, that’s fine; choose your government, elect your president, raise your taxes, but just make sure that the details of your national budget are sent to London so that we (the royal we, of course) can say yea or nay. There will be penalties if you don’t.

There is a terrible irony at work here, as I noted on my personal blog, an irony that sees countries like Greece and Poland, countries that struggled for centuries for national freedom, giving away the last traces of sovereignty to a new central power, a new Ottoman Empire or a new Soviet Union. Under the proposed arrangements it will not matter who or what the people vote for; the real decisions will be made not in Athens or Warsaw but in Brussels, not by elected politicians but by bureaucrats, a bloated and corrupt officialdom.

It would be wrong to assume that this sinister process has come about purely by accident, a by-product of the present financial crisis. Writing about the euro last month, Nigel Lawson, once the chief financial minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, mentioned a particular faction of Europhiles, people who had a different agenda all along;

They fully understood the dangers yet promoted EMU [European Monetary Union] precisely because a crisis could be overcome only by full fiscal and political union. For them, this was the objective. But such union is only practicable if it is the clearly expressed wish of the majority of the people of Europe; and that is manifestly not the case. Contempt for democracy has always been one of the least attractive characteristics of the European movement. It lies at the heart of the present crisis.

There is indeed contempt for democracy in this; that is not too strong a way of expressing the point. There is also a deep condescension among those charged with the responsibility of directing the whole European project from offices in Brussels, a belief that the process is too technical, too complicated for ordinary voters to understand. In the past when new treaty arrangements were rejected in national referenda they were simply repackaged in a different form and accepted without the inconvenience of the vox populi.

I’ve written before that Europe is now in a post-democratic age. The evolution towards a centralised, technocratic future just got faster. There is no repression, there will be no repression, other than repressive tolerance, allowing people to say all that they want, confident what they want will always be ignored. This is a recipe for political disaster, for a deeper political crisis that cannot be long delayed, a perfect storm. Remember, you read it here first.

Santa Wants a Ho

2011-12-12T15:41:00.000-08:00

A few years ago an attempt was made in Australia to stop Santa Claus giving his jolly Ho, Ho, Ho greeting to children, substituting Ha, Ha, Ha in its place, anodyne and wholly (!) without any kind of character or provenance. Why? Because ho is slang in America for, well, a ho!

That’s just the sort of thing that would be bound to upset every Australian girl and boy, just as it annoyed every Australian parent, many of whom were discovering for the first time what a ho was and what the jolly old, red-nosed (possible alcohol problem?) fellow was calling for.

Generally speaking Santa is a disreputable old man, don’t you agree? All parents should be warned against this December interloper. After all, with school teachers being subject to levels of background scrutiny that was formerly reserved for candidates for senior office, with schools being turned into mini-prisons, we still give this unvetted stranger completely free range, to come, go and do as he will.

Every alarm bell should be ringing over the actions of this ho-monger. Every year he commits an act of mass breaking and entering unparalleled in the history of crime. More worrying still, he urges children to be ‘good for Santa’, to be good boys and girls, seduced by promises of gifts. What’s his motive here?

Here we have a stranger, coming silently in the night, creeping into the bedrooms of children with material inducements; just how much more of this are we prepared to take? Why are questions not being asked? Are social service departments not concerned? Do something, before it’s too late! Oops, sorry, it is too late; centuries too late.

Alas, we live in a humourless age. I’m tempted to write a journal message to the future, in the style of Winston Smith from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a greeting to a hoped for time, a time free from the absurdity of Big Nanny and Political Correctness. Will such a time ever come? I have a feeling that things will get worse before they get worse still.

The attack on Christmas and the traditions associated with Christmas is as predictable and relentless as the season itself. We’ve seen it all here in England, with one local authority substituting a ghastly ‘Winterval’, and another referring to Christmas lights as ‘Luminos’, all to avoid offending those capable of taking offence.

The disease is spreading by degrees. This year a school in Stockton, California is reported to have placed an interdict on classroom displays of Santas, Christmas Trees and even Poinsettia plants for fear of upsetting people of other faiths. Bah! Humbug!

I’m sure there lots of other tiresome examples, of initiatives thought up by tedious people, the thought police of the PC brigade who would treat us all as infants. I imagine these joyless, sour and literal-minded types were just bad girls and boys in the past, those who never, ever got presents from Santa. Christmas is in the winter of their discontent. They want the world to be like Narnia, a place where it is always winter and never Christmas.

Meanwhile the old fellow is going quietly mad, locked away in the North Pole, not much given to ho ho ho-ing or even ha ha ha-ing. Maybe he should have another look at his contract, to check if there really is a sanity clause.

The majority is always wrong

2011-12-11T15:49:00.000-08:00

“Heavy fog in the Channel – Continent isolated”, so a headline in an unspecified newspaper at an unspecified time is alleged to have gone. True or not, it immediately came to mind when I read the reports that a mouse had roared; that David Cameron had said no to the latest scheme to shore up the crumbling euro. After surrendering so much over so many years we, as a nation, were finally fighting back.

Yes, he really did say no, exercising a British veto for the first time ever. We stand alone but we have, throughout our history, a proud tradition of standing alone against excitable French and German bullies. Personally I welcome the rediscovery of Splendid Isolation, a splendid policy for a splendid period in our national story.

This for me was a reverse Neville Chamberlain moment – there will be no appeasement, appeasement of the likes of France’s President Sarkozy, a man I find more laughable by the day, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s pig-like Chancellor.

Despite their differences the pair seem to blend into one another, the German woman and the French man, the pig and the frog - Merkozy, a monstrous synthesis that might very well have been tortured into existence on the Island of Doctor Moreau!

This is the Minotaur of the new European Union, a new Thousand Year Reich in the shaping, that looks set to end the forms of democracy and direct accountability that at least some on the Continent fought so hard to attain in the first place.

I’m going to come to this in a moment but first a few words on Cameron’s stand. It was all perfectly simple: he gave assurances to the government, his own party and the country beyond that he would not agree to a new European Union treaty that did not contain safeguards for Britain’s financial services industry.

This was hardly surprising, considering the amount of revenue the City of London generates for the Exchequer. But, no, Merkozy did not like this; the bumbling giant growled and slavered, whereupon David lifted his sling.

Now the other governments of the European Union, Britain apart, have to manage to form their ‘more perfect’ union in the best way that they can. All of them have agreed to a plan that that will allow for more centralised control of the tax and spending decisions of those countries that have the euro as their national currency, seventeen at the present. Why on earth those outside the euro have allowed themselves to be steamrollered into this is wholly beyond my comprehension.

Supposedly a way of introducing forms of fiscal discipline, the new arrangements effectively make a mockery of the last vestiges of national sovereignty. In future it really will not matter who the Greeks, the Poles or the Spanish vote for. The real decisions will be made in Brussels, not in Athens, or Warsaw or Madrid.

What irony there is in this; how strange it is to see history standing on its head. It makes a mockery of the Greek War of Independence, makes a mockery of that country’s struggle to re-establish itself after centuries of domination by the Ottoman Turks. And then there is Poland, a country served up as lunch time and again by the Germans and the Russians, a country that not so long ago freed itself from the one unrepresentative bloc only to cast itself into another, from Soviet Union to European Union. Democracy did not come easy to Spain, established by stages after the death of General Franco. It did not come easy but it’s going easy. At least Franco brought prosperity.

Setting the politics aside, the deal itself, another conjuring trick to reassure the financial markets, is little more than a promissory note – we will all be good girls and boys in the future. From the outset the euro was based on vanity, or the economics of the madhouse, I’m not sure which. It was based on the belief that it was possible to have monetary without fiscal union, that it was possible to bed down countries like Germany and Greece, the lion and the lamb, all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Now we are to have fiscal union, a European Super State. The horse may have bolted but at least we have shut the barn door at last, is that not something? Meanwhile the debt gets bigger and bigger.

As for Cameron, well, bravo, that’s all I want to say, other than to remind him of some words from Enemy of the People, the play by Henrik Ibsen, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone, and that a minority may be right; a majority always wrong.

The Midget and the Pig

2011-12-08T16:04:00.000-08:00

I laughed out loud on the flight to Cairo, causing some stares from across the aisle. I simply couldn’t help myself. I was reading Rod Liddle’s column in the Spectator, the one headed Go on Sarko, tell us another, a few gems from a supposedly off-the-record conversation between Nicholas Sarkozy, France’s comic opera president, and Barack Obama, giving a personal lowdown on a other world leaders.

Now, of all people, of all presidents living in glass houses, Sarko is the very last who should be throwing stones. This is a man, after all, so sensitive about his diminutive stature that he wears built-up shoes, who insisted that a studio audience on a television appearance was made up of people even smaller than he is, a man who stands on tiptoe when photographed beside Obama and his wife!

Obama’s opener was to ask Sarko which world leaders he really hated. He could hardly start with the American president himself; that would be too stupid even for the mighty midget. But his choice was in some ways just as startling: it was Angela Merkel, his partner in the present Paris-Berlin Axis, his fellow fiddler, playing as Europe burns.

“That German hag”, he let rip, “You know, I half believe those internet rumours that she was created from the frozen sperm of Adolf Hitler. And have you seen her at dinner? Watch later on. She eats like a dinosaur, cramming stuff into that fat German gullet like they’ve just abolished rationing. Keep an eye on the filet mignon, Barack.”

So, the next time you see the artificial smiles and the back-patting (how revoltingly predictable they all are) just remember these words, this curtain drawn aside. I expect they all hate one another, all of our benighted world leaders, not just Sarkozy and Merkel, that appalling double act, so stepped in hypocrisy and obvious mutual loathing.

Liddle, in his usual corrosive style, sums up the Midget with prefect accuracy, writing that there is something wonderfully music-hall about Sarkozy and his big French gob, gurning and spitting out globules of spite. It would be truly comic if the situation was not so serious, if this risible little clown was not the president of France, a man who reminds me of Henry’s Cat, who knew quite a lot about nothing and not too much about that. A little man with a tall wife; that, I predict, is how he will go down in French history.

Think of the laughable degeneracy here. Karl Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, said that everything in history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. His example were good – Napoleon I and Napoleon III. I have one problem, though, with the strength of this statement. Sarkozy is clearly the farce, but who in French history is his tragic predecessor, who is the first act? Come to think of it, French politics has been quite farcical for some time past. There is the tragic figure of Charles de Gaulle, of course, but it’s impossible to draw any comparison, however remote, between him and the present occupant of the Élysée Palace.

Oh, well, I shall have to dig deep, perhaps all the way back to the Third Republic to find a possible comparison for Sarko and even that may not be deep enough. Meanwhile I intend to keep a close eye on Chancellor Merkel’s table manners.

Brothers in the Wing

2011-12-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

“There are two groups trying to undermine the transition to democracy in Egypt – the Israelis and the Saudis”, so I was told by one of the most educated and informed people I met in the country, a Muslim of impeccable liberal outlook, a man who played an active part in the events that saw the departure of Hosni Mubarak in February. Both countries, apparently, are financing Islamist extremists.

“OK”, I said, “I can understand that an Egypt committed to a new path, an Egypt committed to free elections, representative government and human rights would seriously unsettle the antediluvian gerontocracy in Saudi Arabia, but Israel, why on earth would Israel want to see the advance of forces that most threaten its security, forces that are at best lukewarm to the 1979 peace treaty and at worst actively hostile?” “Because the victory of Islamic extremists would end all support for Egypt in America and the West.”

I did not push the point because I felt that we were moving on to the quicksand of conspiracy theory, ground in which even the strongest counter-arguments are certain to sink beyond recovery. But it was perfectly obvious to me that Egypt, taking this man as an avatar, the best of the best, is facing a deeply uncertain future; that liberal opinion, such as it is, is weak and confused, uncertain of the direction to follow, apprehensive about the outcome, looking to blame forces beyond its control.

Prior to the election the demonstrators in Tahrir Square were calling for the army to step down from the commanding position it has held ever since the fall of Mubarak, but there seemed to be no real idea of what was to come in its place, no idea how order would be maintained. It’s all very well to call for civilian rule. The real question is which particular group of civilians will rule?

I left the country on the first day of the first free parliamentary election that Egypt has seen in decades. On the plane home I read that day’s edition of the Egyptian Gazette, the country’s oldest English language newspaper. “Monday November 28 2011”, the leader declared, “will indeed emerge as a watershed…”

And so it is proving. An election that was generally fair, an election with a high turnout, an election where the result was not known in advance…and an election that has seen the advance that my Egyptian friend most feared, a victory for the Islamists, a double victory, by his lights, for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The simple truth is that the protesters of Tahrir are representative of not very much beyond themselves. There is a bigger constituency that sees things in far simpler terms. If you like they see things in black and white. Our benighted leaders, from Barack Obama to David Cameron, also saw things in black and white; that the fall of the old regimes was a preamble to democracy. But democracy is not a panacea and elections do not guarantee freedom. In Egypt one tyranny looks set to replace another, more frightful in every way – the tyranny of a majority.

Last Saturday the online version of the Egyptian Gazette reported on the early results of the ballot, showing that the Islamist parties are “sweeping to victory”, not just the ‘moderate’ Freedom and Justice Party, the political face of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the more hard-line Salafists, represented by the Al-Nur party and Al-Wassat, which calls for a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Liberal movements like the Wafd made a disappointing showing. In all Islamists won two-thirds of the votes cast and look set to dominate parliament when the whole process is finally complete. Their message was simple enough: non-Islamist candidates were ‘infidels.’ This is a black and white that a great many of the poorer Egyptians understand, those not of the educated middle-classes.

In February, right at the beginning of the Arab Spring, I wrote a piece called Reflections of the Revolution in Egypt, making the following observations;

I cannot myself say what the outcome will be, though not a stable western-style democracy, that much I will hazard. The Islamists in the Brotherhood may not be as strong as they were in Iran, but they are still a potent and organised force, in much the same manner that the Bolsheviks were a potent and organised force in Russia before their putsch in November, 1917… What do the Egyptians want themselves? For some time now polls have shown that they want democracy…but they also want sharia law, a glaring contradiction. The source of law can be God or it can be the people; it can’t be both. Will another Nasser emerge – could the country take more of the absolute misery that he inflicted on it? – or someone altogether more sinister, more brotherly?

February and November, there seems to be an unsettling historical symmetry here, Bolsheviks and Brothers. In the same article I also quoted from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, my favourite political testament by far. “The effect of liberty to individuals”, he wrote, “is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”

Are we now seeing what pleases Egypt, what pleases the ‘Arab street’? If so, I can only feel sympathy for the many tolerant people I met, Christian and Muslim, people like the friend I mentioned above. If he reads this I would only ask that he look more deeply at the issue, to reflect that if democracy in the sense that we understand it in the West is frustrated in Egypt it will not be the fault of the Saudis or the Israelis.

Brouhaha at BrooWaha

2011-12-06T15:46:00.000-08:00

I’ve been writing for BrooWaha, the American-based online citizens’ newspaper, since the end of May, so far contributing over seventy articles on a wide range of subjects, all of the things that reflect my varied interests, from politics to popular culture.

It’s a fine endeavour, an excellent platform for writers of all sorts, superbly run and managed by Tony Berkman and Angie Alainz, one I’m absolutely thrilled to be associated with. Besides writing for the general pool I also contribute a regular Tuesday column, Letters from Ana, chiefly touching on aspects of life in England, though occasionally ranging more widely.

Yes, as I say, I’m delighted to be associated with Broo, invited to participate by Cher Duncombe, the former editor, who was particularly helpful and encouraging. But, alas, there has been a little blood on the carpet of late, after a silly and self-regarding clique decided that they did not like the general direction the paper was taking. They left, now declaring their splendid isolation in a risible and pompous mood, full of inflated self-importance. Personally I feel that Broo is all the better for this cleansing of the Augean Stables.

I honestly could not care less about this childish gang, but what I do care about is the truth. I care when comments are made about me, inaccurate and lying comments by a – Scotch – bear of very little brain and even less understanding, a sort of pathetic journalist manqué. Oh would that my enemy wrote a blog! No mention is made of me by name, of course, (it’s all oblique references to a ‘right-wing writer’) and I’m not going to bother adding a link. I simply intend to return the compliment in a cryptic and crystal mood, just a way of shattering an ego made of glass!

I write in direct and uncompromising style; I write as honestly as I can, with as much integrity as I can, not seeking favour, not attempting to mollify in any fashion. If you can’t stand the heat get out of my kitchen. My articles are almost always opinion pieces based on a substratum of fact, pieces in which I advance my own political perspective, firmly set to the libertarian right.

Inevitably I attract enemies, the small-minded and the intolerant, people who cannot bear to see an alterative view, people who come at me like a blunt-witted hurricane (hurricane, yes, that’s the word!), stalkers of all sorts. It’s always the same wherever I go, wherever my footsteps take me, from My Telegraph to BrooWaha.

People are at liberty to challenge my opinions, something I welcome. What I can’t tolerate is gratuitous and distasteful abuse. If it comes in comments attached to my public articles, so be it; I have a personal policy of ignoring trolls and leave it to the site editors to determine if particular remarks should remain or not.

It’s quite a different matter when it comes to unsolicited personal messages, containing implied threats of all sorts. It happened on BrooWaha. The individual in question, also to remain nameless, was advised to back off, initially, as I understand it, by Ms Duncombe, the former editor, who asked me to let her know if there was any repetition of the problem. Some time after this he complained that he was not allowed to comment on my articles. He was then told by Tony Berkman that it was a matter of indifference to me whether he commented or not, as I would continue to ignore him.

That, as they say, is that. Actually, it wasn't; for further unsolicited messages were sent not long before I left for Egypt, with content that suggested unsettling forms of obsession, content that suggested, at least to me, that this person had serious mental health problems. Supposedly of the political left, he shows unbelievable levels of intolerance bordering on carpet-chewing hysteria. No surprise there, I suppose.

Duncombe having since departed, I reported the matter to Berkman in his capacity as editor-in-chief, for the first time ever revealing the full contents of a private message, partially because the abuse was directed at him as well as me, gibbering, incoherent stuff. The said person was immediately banned, a pity in a way, a pity when any community is diminished, though quite understandable in the light of his bizarre behaviour.

My attention was drawn to the blog I alluded to above, a sort of rambling hate piece, directed chiefly against Berkman. The Scotchman in question, another intolerant lefty (left-wing and tolerance are obvious contradictions), prides himself on ‘facts’, though his own ‘facts’ come in a highly selective form.

First, I was not brought to BrooWaha by Berkman but by Duncombe, following a published interview with me by the former on Blog Catalogue. Second, and more important, the alleged favouritism shown towards me by Berkman is a complete fiction. I have a good working relationship with him but he has never demonstrated any open bias beyond expressing a general agreement with some of the things I’ve written about. The protection he offers to me is such that is offered to all without favour.

The other thing I’m accused of is making derogatory comments about the banned contributor, including supposed suggestions that he was an anti-Semite. Rather odd, considering that I gave up reading his tiresome articles at an early stage and stopped addressing him directly on any subject. He was banned not for “exercising his right to free speech”, something I personally hold sacred, no matter how much I despise particular views, but because of the aforementioned personal abuse.

Maybe the sycophants who congratulated the Scotchman on his plodding skills will read this too, just for the sake of a spot of balance. It’s rather a pity that I no longer have the private messages in question because they reveal so much, meat for all sorts profiling insights. Still, good manners and a hatred of vulgarity in any form would doubtless have prevented me from publishing.

Oh what fun this is, what fools these mortals be!

A Perfect Read for a Perfect Moment

2011-12-05T15:37:00.000-08:00

I suppose it’s not a terribly good idea to read a crime thriller when one already knows the outcome. Half the fun, after all, is in the surprise, or in discovering that one is as sensitive to the clues as the sleuth! I came to Death on the Nile for the first time in no need of clues because I already knew whodunit from watching an old movie with Peter Ustinov in the role of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s ace French, sorry, Belgian detective.

I’m not a huge fan of traditional crime fiction. The only other novel by Christie that I’ve read is The Murder at the Vicarage, which was a little too twee for my taste. It’s odd, though, because I’ve hugely enjoyed the film and television adaptations of her work, engaging and escapist.

So, I knew that the book would be no mystery; I read it because I, too, was in Egypt, in the Cataract Hotel and sailing down the Nile. I read it, in other words, for the location and for the romance, if that’s the right word for a novel centring on a murder! The whole experience, the country and the novel, the country in the novel, the novel in the country, was hugely enjoyable.

This is not literature; it’s simple, uncomplicated stuff. The style is limpid if a little old-fashioned at points (the younger women are horribly patronised!) The characters are reasonably well-drawn, much better, I thought, than the shallow figures that populated The Murder at the Vicarage, and the plot very well constructed. I suppose that’s the thing about crime fiction, it’s much more about plot than people. I really can’t imagine Christie’s people having much in the way of an interior life, even Poirot for all his talk of ‘little grey cells.’

Death on the Nile carried me very nicely along the Nile. It was interesting to note the variations between the film and the novel. For instance, the scene in which a large stone almost kills Linnet Ridgeway, the chosen victim, comes at the temple of Abu Simbel and not at Karnak. It’s also interesting that the party were able to visit the temple straight from their cruise ship, no longer possible since the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Incidentally for those who have seen the movie and not yet read the book the latter is far more plausible. The movie is enjoyable enough, with some wonderful costume designs, but there are simply far too many suspects, just about every other passenger on the cruise ship apart from Poirot and Colonel Race, his friend. It’s less necessary to suspend disbelief, especially over the rather risible scene when everyone gathers together in one room while the detective eliminates them one by one prior to identifying the real culprit. Poor Poirot; he never, ever gets a break. Why on earth do people always insist on committing crimes in his presence, especially when they have previously identified him as the ‘famous detective’?!

I shouldn’t give too much away in spoilers, especially if you, dear reader, have neither come to the book nor seen the movie. Let me just say that the crime is truly monstrous, a young woman, rich and beautiful, a woman with everything to live for, is butchered not for love but for money, not for high passion but for low greed, killed by a man (he does not act alone in the conspiracy to murder) for whom love is not enough. The criminal, a shallow dilettante, is a kind of version of Sir Percival Glyde from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, less monstrous and more monstrous at one and the same time, if you understand my meaning.

The other interesting thing for me is that some things in Egypt have hardly changed at all. Death on the Nile was first published in 1937. There is a scene in Aswan where Poriot is walking down the streets, perstered all the way by touts. His companion tells him that it’s best to pretend to be deaf and blind. If you ever go to Egypt I urge you to follow this advice!

This isn’t really a review, more an appreciation of a book, of a time and of a country, a personal assessment in which the experience of reading and the experience of seeing came together in perfect harmony. Death on the Nile is far from being a great book, but I give it five stars, that judgement notwithstanding, simply because it now has an abiding personal meaning for me. I’m unlikely ever to read it again because it’s been absorbed into one of life’s perfect moments…and perfect moments should never be revisited.

Tale of a Sphinx

2011-12-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

I’m sure that you will agree that we all visit certain places in our imagination, places we may never see in reality, whether it be Memphis or the Moon. There is something more, though: the power of imagination is often greater than mundane realities; but sometimes the power is just too petty.

I’ve been lucky; I’ve seen some wonderful places in my life, places that mostly met with the impression formed in the eye of my mind. Egypt was different; Egypt exceeded all. My imagination is too little. The traces left by the past are too great. Shelly was wrong. The mementos of Ozymandias are everywhere. I looked on his works and was filled with awe.

I’m in danger of exhausting my stock of superlatives, so I’m going to let someone else speak for me. She is Amelia Edwards, an English artist and writer who visited Egypt in the nineteenth century. It was standing in the great hypostyle hall in the temple of Karnak in Luxor that some words by her put everything into proper perspective, some words I read to my companions;

It is a place that has been much written about and often painted; but of which no writing and no art can convey more than a dwarfed and pallid impression…The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one’s own dumbness, and littleness and incapacity, too complete and crushing.

It’s true, believe me, it’s true.

Egypt is such a contrast, a magnificent past and a not so magnificent present. Still, I met some wonderful people, including a highly knowledgeable local Egyptologist, full of hope for the future, hope that the promise of the February Revolution will be met. My natural disposition is one of caution to the point of cool reserve, but I could not fail to be impressed by their enthusiasm. I have things I have to say, though, things about the possible future of the country. I think it best if I to hold off on this for a day or so, a subject, possibly, for a Broowaha article.

My journey began as most journeys to Egypt begin, in the mad metropolis of Cairo! Incidentally – and thanks for all the emails and texts of concern – I missed the recent trouble in Tahrir Square, flying to Aswan a few days beforehand. I really only spent enough time in the city to visit the Museum, the Mosque of Mohammed Ali and the Pyramids to the south. More would have been excessive; more would have damaged my lungs and my temperament; for Cairo is the most congested city I’ve ever visited; the traffic is simply impossible.

Aswan, in Egyptian Nubia, is such a contrast, more relaxed, less demanding. Here one can really appreciate the beauty of the Nile, blue and utterly captivating. This was our base for a few days, on an island hotel. From here we set out across the Sahara to the great temple or Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. It was on a convoy, I might add, all complete with a police escort!

I’m looking out from the window of the bus at the passing Sahara, mile upon mile of sand and strange looking rocky outcrops, livened up by a growing number of watery mirages. I saw the beginnings of this great desert the day we visited the pyramids at Giza. It wasn’t at all what I expected, a sad disappointment of dirty, grey-looking sand, with shards of stone scattered around. But this is the wilderness as I imagined it, yellow and pure, vanishing into an impossible horizon. Day does not gradually evolve into night here; the division is sharp, first one condition and then the other.

Here, at Abu Simbel, I’m almost as far south as I can go in Egypt; not much further lies the Sudan. Here the ancient pharaoh still stares out in majesty, carved from the bare rock thirteen centuries before the birth of Christ. The temple is supposedly dedicated to the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty and Ptah but the more obvious dedication is to Ramesses himself, a silent guardian over Upper Egypt, a statement about naked power, a warning to the Nubian raiders who dared venture north. This is Ozymandius, king of kings.

Others have been here before me, some of whom have left their own mark, elaborate and painstaking graffiti that go right back to the early nineteenth century, modern cartouches that must have taken days to carve. It’s possible to see this elsewhere, on other monuments, this pathetic and pointless plea for immortality, a tradition that seems to have been started by the soldiers of Bonaparte at the end of the eighteenth century. Gustave Flaubert, on his own sojourn some fifty years after, remarked on the sad emptiness of it all;

In the temples we read the travellers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut in the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere – sublime persistence of stupidity.

Now back in Aswan, I had dinner in the Old Cataract Hotel. Yes, I was hungry but there was another reason for eating here. You see, I’m a complete literary groupie; I followed Hemingway to Havana, Somerset Maugham to Singapore and now Agatha Christie to Aswan! She stayed in the Cataract Hotel and it features in Death on the Nile, the crime thriller I started to read before leaving Cairo.

The place itself is wonderful, the staff attentive, the food marvellous. There was only one thing: it was draped in a tomb-like silence. We were the only guests. It was the same everywhere: people seemed to have been frightened away. The numbers are absent, good for us, bad for Egyptians trying to make a living from tourism. “There is no business”, we kept being told.

So, yes, I started Death on the Nile in Cairo but I finished it in true style sailing on the Nile! We journeyed north from Aswan to Luxor, two nights on the river. At Kom Ombo, where the ship moored briefly before sailing on into the night, there was time to visit the wonderful double temple, dedicated to Sobek, the crocodile-headed god, and Horus, the falcon-headed god of the sky, the avatar and progenitor of all of the pharaohs. We have passed through centuries since leaving Abu Simbel; for Kom Ombo was built in the time of the Ptolemys, the Greek interlopers who were to be the last dynasts of pharonic Egypt.

I’m running out of wind, not short of impressions, of further wonders to tell, but in danger of exhausting your patience. It’s all so much to take in, Karnak, Philae, Luxor and Dendera, temples, monuments, museums and tombs, treasures of all kinds. The Valley of the Kings and Queens defy words, with figures of gods, goddesses and earthly rulers as vivid in colour as they were when first painted some three thousand years ago. If you ever go do be sure not to miss the tomb of Ramesses VI. The great tomb of Nefertari, the favourite wife of Ramesses II, a wonder among wonders, unfortunately can only be visited by special permission and at eye-watering expense.

My final days in the country were spent relaxing, swimming, reading and dreaming in a hotel in Luxor, just trying to absorb the whole experience. Oh, and not forgetting a wonderful evening in a café, the only woman in the place, smoking a sheesa with some friends. :-)

Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave:
She stood Monadnoc's head.

Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame;
"Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am."

Traveller to an Antique Land

2011-11-09T10:45:00.000-08:00

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Friends, Romans, countrymen, as some of you clearly know, Ana is off on another adventure! I leave for Egypt on Saturday morning and will be away until close to the end of the month; so this is my last post for a bit. I've still got a huge amount to do, the usual last minute panic. Have I got this, have I got that, is my sun screen strong enough, should I take my shorts and risk another Egyptian revolution? My, my, the perils of travel. :-))

This is another important goal for me, planned now for an age. I have it all worked out, the best laid scheme of mouse and woman, which I really hope will not go askew! The political situation in Egypt earlier this year was a bit of a worry (how dare they plan a revolution around my travel plans?), but things seem to have settled down.

So, it’s off to Cairo initially, a few days there, first to say hello to Tutankhamen, thus avoiding the mummy’s curse, as well as having a peek at the Great Pyramid at Giza. Oh, how much I would love to shuffle my way to the top, just like Harriet Pringle in the televised adaptation of Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War! Will I be allowed? Possibly not, but interdicts and barriers are there to be overcome…in one way or another.

After Cairo we fly south to Aswan, our base for some further explorations: to the temples of Karnak and Luxor; to the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel; to the temple of Horus, the falcon god of the pharaohs, at Edfu; to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens; to Thebes, the ancient religious capital of Egypt, and the city of the dead; to here and to there and to everywhere. Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, there and back again, because my heels are nimble and light.

That’s it, then, for another few weeks. Look for me again, when the candle burns low.

The Rise and Fall of an Old Reich

2011-11-08T16:14:00.000-08:00

At the end of this week I’m leaving on a long planned trip to Egypt, one that will take me from the Great Pyramid at Giza in the north to the temple of Abu Simbel in the south, from Lower Egypt to Upper Egypt. And just to confuse you the former is the north and the latter the south! It’s the ancient Egyptian view of the world, you see, all upside down.

A lot of my extramural reading for the past while has been dedicated to books with an Egyptian theme, including Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Olivia Manning’s Levant Trilogy (what a super and sadly neglected writer she is) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, the first in the Cairo Trilogy. Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile is ready to be packed because I really want to read that sailing down the Nile. It will be yet another literary milestone for me, having read The Quite American in Saigon and Our Man in Havana in Havana!

But it’s the history of ancient Egypt that I really wanted to get close to. I know ‘bleeding chunks’ already; I imagine most people know something, even if it’s only smatterings about Tutankhamen, buried treasure and mummies curses! What I needed, though, was a decent overview, one that would take me through the whole spectrum of Egyptian history, which is precisely why I alighted on The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson.

This is a good book for a general audience, for people like me, coming to find a pattern in the pieces of a mosaic. The title is a little misleading, in that the Egypt of the pharaohs, beginning with the formation of the kingdom under Narmer in 2950BC, rose and fell and rose and fell and rose and fell, time and again. The wheel of history has never being better illustrated, from the Old Kingdom through the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom with several intermediate periods between.

Add to that over thirty dynasties then one begins to appreciate the sheer scale of things, the breathtaking passage of time. For me it really is sobering to think that over a thousand years separates Narmer from Ramesses II, the Ozymandius of Shelly’s poem; that Cleopatra, the final independent ruler of Egypt (actually from a dynasty of Greek interlopers), was as far removed from the founder as modern England is from the builders of Stonehenge.

At just over 500 pages Wilkinson tells his story well, in an easy and, at points, highly discursive manner. I dare say purists will find all sorts of faults but I enjoyed it. It’s the kind of book that leaves one wanting to know more, which is all to the good.

The story is a complicated one. The sheer number of rulers, dynasties, ups, downs, ins, outs and transitions tends to leave one a little breathless. I found myself continually turning back to the timeline, helpfully provided at the beginning, just to put people and events into context.

There are weaknesses. Given that religion played such an important part in Egyptian history a dedicated chapter on the main gods, forms of worship and patterns of belief would have been useful. It’s all there, certainly, but in quite a fragmented manner, scattered about like shards of pottery.

Still, all criticism aside, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt served its purpose and served it well. I now have a framework in my head which will allow me to put the traces and fragments I hope see on my travels in proper context. And that is exactly what I was looking for, a handy guidebook to one of the most beguiling phases in the history of civilization.

Take a Hot Maiden

2011-11-07T15:47:00.000-08:00

The British Library will be illuminating the dull winter months with a new exhibition of illuminations. These are not any old pictures; no, they are from the personal manuscripts of the kings and queens of England, going all the way back to the ninth century, to be shown in an exhibition called Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination.

The thing that fascinates me about this is that the illustrations in question, and the attendant text, were not simply intended as a diversion, or to focus the royal mind on less earthly pursuits, but as a sort of princely instruction manual, a list of dos and don’ts. Advice is given on whom to marry, what to eat and how to rule, all in the best possible royal tradition.

One of the most diverting, and amusing, is Secretum Secretorum, an adaptation of Aristotle’s avuncular advice to Alexander the Great. Dating from 1327, it was presented to the teenage Edward III by Walter of Milimete, a court cleric, and intended as a "guide to better kingship." Better kingship was certainly needed after the disastrous reign of Edward II, the king’s father, deposed and murdered, allegedly in a particularly gruesome manner.

Dear Walter, though, might have been in danger of an equally gruesome fate if some of the suggestions in his manuscript had been taken seriously. When it came to matters of the heart the text wags a misogynist finger: “May you never trust the works and services of women, and may you not commit yourself to them.” When one considers that the power on the throne at the time was Edward’s mother, Isabella, known as the She Wolf of France, who, with the aid of Roger Mortimer, her lover, had deposed and imprisoned her unfortunate husband, the cleric’s timing may not have been of the best.

In contrast there is 'the good woman', the sort of individual that the king would be wise to marry. She should be “beautiful in appearance, descended from a noble family, well-appointed in limbs, having an agreeable expression and an entire body well-adorned…you may have a majestic wife…with whom you may have sex as often, and when, you wish.” Now I expect Edward was waiting for that.

I’m so intrigued; I wonder if he followed the prescription given elsewhere for a stomach ache –“If you feel a pain or heaviness in your stomach and in your belly then the remedy is to clasp a hot and beautiful maiden or to place upon your belly a wide warm shirt”. Hmm, clasp a hot maiden or take a shirt - what a royal dilemma for a lusty prince. The belly ache, incidentally, is almost guaranteed by the culinary advice, which, amongst other things, suggests a delightful summer dish of veal and vinegar followed by sour apples.

Other details raise a smile with their unintentionally humorous pedantry. Nothing is omitted, even the best advice on how to sleep – “When…you have been restored by food…sleep mildly and rest for one hour upon your right side. Then turn to your left and upon that side finish your sleep, for the left side is cold and requires warming.” Yes, of course it does, but how would he know when his hour was up? Did he have a flunky ready by his side? “Wake up, your majesty; this side is done.” Not something, I think, guaranteed to improve the royal mood.

Other documents on show include the Regement of Princes, written by Thomas Hoccleve in the fifteenth century and presented to Henry V while he was still Prince of Wales. The prince was told that a “monarch is but a man for sure, and no matter how intelligent, he may err and sometimes make mistakes.”

Considering that Henry was to embark on a course of action that brought short term glory and long term disaster for the crown, it’s reasonable to assume that he was no more inclined to take advice from a commoner than any of his predecessors, especially commoners who give every appearance of veering between petty-minded, rule-obsessed bureaucrats and censorious busybodies!

The whole thing looks like being jolly good fun, provided always that you enjoy the pictures and ignore the advice, feeling sure that you are walking in royal footsteps from ages past.

A Lean and Hungry Look

2011-11-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

One simply knows what a political thriller entitled The Ides of March is going to be about: treachery and assassination in one form or another; it’s the fate of Julius Caesar, it’s the soothsayer’s warning, continually given and continually ignored; it’s all in the game of politics, the world’s second oldest profession.

There are no secrets to this movie: it’s a good old-fashioned morality tale, reasonably well scripted and very well directed by George Clooney, who also plays Governor Mike Morris, a Democrat hoping to secure the presidential nomination by notching up an important primary victory in Ohio, a bleeding heart-liberal enough to make bleeding heart’s bleed! He also happens to be a moral hypocrite. Ah, there’s the rub!

The Ides of March is about back-stabbing, yes, but it is also about the loss of idealism, the discovery of self-interest, the discovery that there is politics in playing politics. In the place of the white hope comes calculating cynicism, all explored through the central character; no, not through Governor Morris, but one Stephen Myers, his second best aide, brilliantly played by Ryan Gosling. Keep your eye on his steady metamorphosis, a joy and a revelation.

Based on Farragut North, a 2008 play by Beau Willimon, who worked on Howard Dean’s frustrated presidential bid, The Ides of March could easily have descended into a cliché about crushed dreams. That it did not is a clear measure of Clooney’s skill as a film maker. As drama, as a piece of theatre, it’s very well constructed, though not flawless, something I’ll come too a bit later. But the casting could not have been better, the acting impossible to improve.

For me the highlight here was Philip Seymour Hoffman as Paul Zara, Morris’ campaign manager and Myers immediate superior. I’ve loved Hoffman ever since I saw him perform the lead in Capote, the 2005 biopic based on the life of one of my favourite writers. Here he is no starry-eyed idealist like Meyers. No, he’s a hard-bitten realist but one with a strong ethical sense, loyalty being for him the highest virtue. In the end he becomes a victim, falling, Roman-style, on his sword, a sacrifice to the unscrupulous ambition of his subordinate.

Some of the minor performances are also very good, particularly Marisa Tomei playing Ida Horowicz, a reporter from the New York Times, whose friendship with Myers is as strong as her next scoop! At the beginning it is she who introduces a note of realism, warning Meyers that his hero will “let you down. They always let you down.” A message, I think, for contemporary America, or at least for all the people who were fooled for some of the time by Barack Obama.

I say that Meyers is an idealist but, in the best tradition of tragic drama, he has a flaw in his character, one that helps move the action along. The degeneration starts when he accepts an invitation to meet with Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the campaign manager working for Morris’ Democratic rival. Duffy wants to bring him over, though it all turns out simply to be a Machiavellian manoeuvre of a particularly clever kind. Meyers refuses but the meeting was sin enough, the details initially withheld from Zara. The serpent is now in the garden!

The weakness in the script, the artificiality, if you like, comes with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), an intern working on the campaign team. If we are in the garden she is Eve, she is the love interest and the temptress. Now if there is one person to stay clear of it surely has to be her. But Meyers does not and neither, for that matter, does Governor Morris. As a hook it was impossibly far-fetched. Wood’s character was completely unconvincing, oddly out of place in every sense. We are meant to believe that she is forward enough to proposition Meyers, though still naïve enough to be seduced into unprotected sex by Morris, with consequences to follow.

I suppose the part served a deeper purpose, though, exposing some of the priggish hypocrisy of American politics. In the end Meyers, now a thorough-going opportunist, even prepared to walk over the body of his lover, dead by her own hand, tells Morris in a key interview that the American electorate will tolerate lies, war and bankruptcy, but what they will not tolerate is “fucking the intern.”

In the end it’s Meyers who does all the fucking. You see, he wasn’t Brutus at all; he was Cassius, the man with a lean and hungry look. Now comes the big compromise and with that comes a deeper moral corruption. Morris in the White House will be Morris in a Whited Sepulchre.

The Ides of March is a serious film for serious people, a decent political thriller if a little lightweight at points, cerebral without being intellectual, engaging on a simple emotional level without being predictably trite. No, it’s not a great movie, but it is one that treats its audience with respect, refreshing enough in itself. Whether this was Clooney’s intention or not it’s story that should make us all a little distrustful of political purity, in whatever form it’s packaged and sold.

No Second No

2011-11-03T18:01:00.000-07:00

It's the most famous negative in Greek history – Epeteios tou Ohi, literally the Anniversary of the 'No', Ohi Day, celebrated every year on 28 October. It marks the occasion in October, 1940 when General Metaxas, then prime minister, rejected an ultimatum from Mussolini to allow Italian troops on Greek soil or else. He replied, in laconic Spartan style, with that single word - No!

The Euro crisis, a Greek tragedy by any measure, is now in its final act, bodies strewn across the stage, the chorus wailing in the background. Of the prologue I said over a year ago on another news blog that there was a wonderful, almost divine irony in the fact that Greece, of all places, turned out to be the Achilles' Heel of the European Union, the weak spot that may in the end lead to the death of the whole mad project of a one-size-fits-all currency.

And so it has proved. For weeks now one crisis summit of European leaders has followed hard upon another, the intervals between them getting shorter and shorter, the smiles at the end, as yet another 'solution' is announced, ever more artificial and forced. The political implication of the latest bail-out deal is something else I anticipated as long ago as February of last year:

What the Greek situation exposes is the absurdity of the whole Euro project. This was a crisis waiting to happen: a small, relatively poor country building an economy on unsupportable levels of debt but unable to manage that same economy because it is unable to mange the national currency. You see, a single currency could only ever be built successfully on a unified polity, where a central authority is able to manage just about all of those areas that fall under the prerogative of a sovereign state; where a central authority is able to advance some areas while neglecting others. The Greek crisis is set to expose not only the underlying political weakness of Europe of the Euro; it's also set to expose the limits of national freedom itself. A new bastard Union is likely to arise, increasingly authoritarian in tone; not just undemocratic but anti-democratic.

Yes, a new bastard, less perfect Union, fleshed out on Greek bones, predicated on the death of democracy, predicated on the demise of the nation itself; that's what's on offer; that's the final solution.

All this looked as if it was going to change, as if some resistance was about to be offered, as if Greece discovered something of its old spirit of defiance. In a remarkable development George Papandreou, the present Greek Prime Minister, looked as if he was set to take on the role of a greater Metaxas, offering his own people a say on the devil's bargain that he signed up to last week.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, panicked; in the chanceries and presidential palaces of Europe there was panic over this dire threat of democracy by democracy. Abide by the rules of the Brussels deal, pocket Napoleon shouted, or leave the eurozone, an ultimatum echoed by Angela Merkel, Germany's Brass Chancellor. She had her own unique spin here, saying that Europe's leaders would "not abandon the principles of democracy. We cannot put at stake the great work of the unification of the euro."

Hmm, is this 'great work' anything like that of her Iron predecessor, which saw the emergence of the German Empire in the nineteenth century? Then it was said that the smaller states forced into Bismarck's 'great work' were like the fleas uniting with a dog. Is Greece a flea to be united with the Franco-German dog?

It would seem so, because, under intense pressure, not stopping short of financial blackmail, Papandreou has backed down. It looks as if his government will be ousted in a confidence vote to be held tomorrow in the Greek parliament. It no longer matters, now that the referendum has been abandoned. He is no Metaxas, just a bewildered and unhappy little man. There will be no opportunity for a second no day.

The Greeks are certainly at a crossroads in the long history of their nation. Perhaps in future they may have cause to reflect ruefully on a few lines of Byron;

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free

The Raft of the Europa

2011-11-02T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Raft of the Medusa is probably the best known painting by Théodore Géricault, a nineteenth century French artist of the Romantic school. It’s an over the top, larger than life, extravaganza, though there is nothing at all extravagant or romantic about the story behind it.

It depicts the survivors from the Méduse, a frigate which sunk of the coast of Africa in 1816. Of almost a hundred people rescued from the shipwreck only fifteen were still alive when they were picked up almost a fortnight later, floating on a makeshift raft. Reduced to cannibalism, some of them had gone completely mad.

Oddly, or perhaps understandably, it was this voyage of the damned that came to mind in thinking about the latest, and almost certainly foredoomed, attempt to sail the Raft of the Europa to safety. There they all are, the seventeen of the euro club, wedded together by mutual interest, mutual antipathy and mutual hate. There they are, driven mad by hubris, feeding on the Greek corpse, with the Italian in the reserve, desperately hoping that they will be picked by some passing Chinese junk, the Yuan.

Are they mad or is it me? It must be me because I can see no sense at all in a country like Greece being on this voyage in the first place. Just think what would have happened in my insane world. The drachma would have hit a reef; the Greek economy would have sunk; the country would be forced to default on its debts, its credit rating hitting an all-time low.

Then the real rescue would have sailed by: the currency would be devalued; Greek exports would be competitively priced; tourists would flood in to a cheap and attractive location. Instead it’s the Raft of the Europa, an overvalued currency in an undervalued economy, a country being consumed by its partners. Are they keeping Greece afloat? No, of course not; they are keeping the lending institutions behind the whole crazy voyage afloat.

No, I’m not mad: the lunatics truly are in charge of the EU asylum. There is Spain, another country sailing on that Raft, looking as thin as Germany looks fat (this is a voyage in which some feed and some are fed upon), a country with levels of unemployment as bad as those which destroyed the Weimar Republic. Yet it’s politicians sail on, lacking the imagination to do anything else, overcome by a helpless and fatalistic mood, waiting for their turn to come.

Meanwhile we look on from the safety of our island, aware of new opportunities. Last Monday this awareness caused a little local difficulty in Parliament. You see, Comrade Dave Cameron, the Prime Minister, thought it would be a jolly good idea if the ordinary voters were allowed to determine some of the issues debated in the House of Commons, all part of the brave new Coalition vision. Back came the answer: more than 100,000 signed an online petition calling for a debate on whether there should be a referendum on our continuing membership of the European Union.

It’s a measure, really, of how angry people are with politicians and parties, the Conservatives included, who promised votes on Europe, most recently over the Lisbon Treaty, only to renege when in power.

Yes, it’s all very well to have debates on subjects one wants, but Cameron most assuredly did not want this debate at this time. All sorts of threats were issued against potential rebels in his own party. The vote was lost but a sufficient number of Conservatives held to their convictions, and not just the old Eurosceptic warhorses. It’s been a sobering experience for Dave and his sycophantic clique. The writing might be said to be on the wall.

Well, at least it is according to William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, who likened the MPs who voted for a referendum to graffiti artists. In the Spectator Charles Moore reminds us of the original Writing on the Wall from the Book of Daniel: “The Kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians.” The kingdom was divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. The time has come to take it back.

There is the bigger picture, of course, the ‘interests of the nation’. That’s something the Europhile Economist is always happy to preach about, the ‘interests of the nation’; that's something it is preaching about in the latest issue. OK, OK, we now know, it says, that the euro was a jolly bad idea (reminder to self: dredge up previous abject praise), “to give the Eurosceptics their due” (oh, how that must have hurt), but Europe is still a jolly good idea blah de blah de blah.

As for referenda, as for any attempt at direct democracy or voter participation in the political process, beyond, that is, as cattle prodded in periodic polls, the magazine’s Bagheot column helpfully reminds us of the words of Edmund Burke. In 1774 he told his Bristol constituents, after they sent him to Parliament, that while he would ‘rejoice’ to hear their opinions he would not take instructions from them. He was his own man, you see, not Bristol’s envoy; he would deliberate the ‘national interest’, not theirs.

“But today’s backbenchers”, the article proceeds in a pompous and condescending tone, “unmistakably rejected Burke’s lofty vision of representative democracy.” Is there any wonder that people are frustrated, that democracy is in danger, real as opposed to 'representative democracy', when that same ‘lofty vision’ means that their wishes are ignored time and again? It's the arrogance I find most outrageous here, the conceit that insists that the people, the many people, who take a view contrary to the Economist should be disregarded, should not have their views heard. No wonder this insufferably dull publication is full of supine admiration for the EU; it has an editorial outlook not that much different from the Eurocrats in Brussels. Is there a subsidy here, I wonder, some kind of kickback?

Never mind me; I'm just in a mood, a mood over that ‘lofty vision’ which took us into Europe in the first place; the 'lofty vision' that has locked us into a system based, it seems to me, on a negation of the popular will, a negation of any real notion of democracy, namely, that there should be a meaningful relationship between people and their representatives, between voters and platforms, between votes and outcomes. “Are Britain’s political leaders losing faith in representative democracy?”, Bagheot asks. Are the people losing faith in any kind of democracy? That would seem to be an altogether more pertinent question, one beyond the ken and comprehension of the Economist.

Meanwhile the Raft of the Europa sails on and the junk sails by, as Germany gnaws on the bones of Greece.

Mother of Darkness, Mother of Light

2011-11-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

Another year has past, another season gone. The witches gathered on the funeral hill, waiting at the feast, for the first winter’s day, the first winter’s sun arising in the east; for death has come for the summer time and to take the leaves of spring; Hecate, Nemesis, Dark Mother take us in.

The light has gone, the dark begins, but we still fire the darkness; I did fire the darkness. Once again we had a marvellous festival of the dead, we the living, all my sisters and all my brothers, together for another sabbat, Samhain-Halloween, the most important of them all, a celebration of the past, of the past united in the present and flowing on to the future.

I did something different this year, away from London, deep in the Surrey country. Sisters and friends joined me for a ritual, a celebration and a party, made all the more complete with a traditional bonfire. We give renewed power to the sun, to ourselves, through the winter days ahead.

I paid particular reverence to Hecate, the goddess of witches and of magic; of crossroads and new beginnings, new beginnings in new life; goddess of moonlight, of thresholds and of gates, looking in three directions at once. Although her main festival follows later in November, All Hallows is also of great significance to her, the night of the dark moon, the night of the wild hunt.

A wild journey, a wild hunt, a supper by the crossroads, a dedication by the Trivia, that’s what makes it all so exciting, these sacred nights, that sacred night past, rich in meaning, rich in significance. Bliss was it in that darkness to be alive but to be young, and a witch, was very heaven. Let’s fly! :-)

Belladonna and aconite
Give to me the gift of flight
Take me up, airborne in the night
In a dream, across the sky
A hundred-million miles high
Take me ever onwards in the night
Dark sisters join my night flight
See how far you can climb
Holt’s with us on this bright night
Ride with him ‘cross the sky
As a screaming horde
We cut the scape
The Devil’s Apple exacerbates
To the sabbat on a demon steed I ride
Across the astral plane we race
The universe my fingers trace
And I am lost forever in my mind

Heil Merkel!

2011-10-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

I wrote at the end of my most recent post on the European Union that I was utterly tired of my country being held hostage to German history. I had already hinted, in discussion with Chris Coffman, that this was something that I intended to write about more fully.

Botheration – my lightning has been stolen! Well, a bolt or two has been taken from the armoury by one Sir James Pickthorn, whose letter on the present mad muddle over the euro was published by the Daily Telegraph on Friday. I think I shall allow the parfit, gentil knyght to speak for himself;

The words of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, summoning the spectre of war if the euro is not saved show how out of date the European project is. The idea that France and Germany will restart the [Franco]-Prussian War, the Great War or Second World War is ridiculous. The message of these wars was and is that countries like being sovereign, and that democracy and free trade are valid ideals.

It isn’t an entirely new suggestion, of course, that we either have European integration or we have a German invasion of Poland. I’ve come across it several times before. I heard that tired old frump Shirley Williams, the moth-eaten Grand Dame of the Liberal Democrats, trot out the Europe or war formula. I came across it also in reading Edward Heath, Philip Ziegler’s biography of the wretchedly incapable prime minister who took Britain into Europe in the first place.

Williams and Heath belonged to a generation of post-war cowards, people who betrayed this country because they were afraid of Germany, afraid of the German past, afraid that a German past might very well be a European future without the discipline of a trans-national super state. They were, if you like, the deeper appeasers. Always they lacked the intelligence to see that old quarrels had been superseded by new global realities, or that Germany, having taken a bad road twice, the second time at such cost, was never going to take it again.

So Britain was seduced into the European ‘ideal’ by fear of Germany, by an act of abject moral and political cowardice that did not stop from hiding the full implications for national sovereignty in our accession to the Treaty of Rome. We have to go in, you see; otherwise the German wolf might get us. It was a fairy-tale for children. Yes, that’s exactly how I see Europe – a fairy tale for children. And always keep a-hold of Brussels nurse for fear of finding Berlin worse.

But if Heath and the like were afraid of the Big Bad Wolf of German revanchism the Germans were even more afraid of the Big Bad Wolf of German revanchism, judging by the words of that daft diva, Merkel – it’s Europe or it’s war; it’s the mad design of the euro or a mad design on Poland.

Where the evidence for this bogus historical nightmare comes from I’ve not the faintest idea but I am absolutely sick and tired of the damage it has done to my country, to our sovereignty and to our ancient political liberties. I become increasingly convinced that this nation was betrayed by Heath & Co, people who looked for guidance in the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup of history, only to find their own stupid reflections in the dregs.

I used to believe, a la David Cameron, that it would be possible to renegotiate the devil’s bargain concluded by Heath: that some restoration of sovereignty was possible in the repatriation of powers.

Things have gone too far for that; Europe is a bally, bloody mess which I personally want no part of, a mess politically and a mess economically. Let them get on with their own crazy projects, turning Greece into an outpost of the Fourth Reich, the Reich of complete mediocrity, hocking the Continent to China.

I sincerely hope in the course of my lifetime to see this nation take the bold move and get out altogether, which I feel would be the people’s choice if the people were allowed a choice. If that means that Germany will turn rapacious eyes east the Oder, too bad; that’s something that I shall just have to live with, that and the prospect of Adolf Merkel.

American Whispers

2011-10-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

I went to see The Help yesterday, the day it premiered in London. I imagine there is little point in saying this, but for those who have not seen it, or not heard of it (well, there might be a few!), it’s a comedy drama set in the segregated South of the sixties, based on Kathyrn Stockett’s novel of the same name.

It’s my kind of movie, one that deals with serious and interesting themes in an adult way, one that has a serious and interesting story to tell, one that’s so much more a shallow fest of special effects or tiresome thrills. I would have gone to see it at some point though perhaps not quite so soon, perhaps not with the same sense of curious urgency. Why, then, did I go with the premiere crowd? Simply because of an article in the Sunday Telegraph, one headed The Film Dividing America, written by Philip Sherwell. I’m going to come to that a tad later but first let me give you a straightforward review.

To begin I should say that I haven’t read the novel, so I have no standard for comparison, though I understand from comments elsewhere that the book is better, which is most often the case.

What I can say is that I thought The Help was a good movie, a lovely combination of melodrama and human interest with some sparkling comic touches. It’s not a great movie; the script is a little too flabby for that, and Tate Taylor’s direction a little less disciplined than it should be. But, my goodness, some of the performances are gold, none more so than that of Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, a black maid with attitude before people knew what attitude was!

It’s the ideal chick flick, my ideal chick flick, and not simply because the action is mostly set in a female world! I was beguiled by so much I saw. Yes, it’s mawkish; yes, it’s manipulative (all the best movies are); yes, it covers so much unpleasantness with a gloss of sugary sweetness. But I don’t care. The movie aims for the emotions and it’s right on target, inducing tears and laughs by turns. I cried, I laughed; it hit my target.

I saw it and I understood it as a perspective movie (hold that in mind; it has an important bearing on what I intend to say later), looking at a particular issue, the racism of the unregenerate South, from a particular set of social and interpersonal relations: that between black maids and their white mistresses.

To my mind the characters recreated some memorable figures from the storehouse of American culture. Minny, for me, was a more contemporary version of Mammy, the housemaid from Gone with the Wind. Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelen, played by Emma Stone, another sparking performance, is a grown up Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, and not just because she serves in the role of a narrator; she has the same intelligent detachment from the world around her.

Skeeter is both part of the privileged white society of Jackson, Mississippi, and yet outside of it, alienated by its callousness, including the callousness of her own mother, responsible for the dismissal of a much-loved maid. She perceives the racism that others do not, the hypocrisy and the cruelty that her contemporaries do not, all married, comfortably housed and wholly reliant on exploited black labour. She is most uncomfortable with the truly awful Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard - the character was awful; her depiction was excellent!), the Wicked Witch of the South, who’s Home Help Sanitation Initiative brings segregation into the home and workplace in the most degrading and humiliating manner.

It’s Skeeter’s alienation from the comfortable world of her upbringing, when the greatest influences, the nurturers and the carers, were the black housemaids, that leads to a new project: she, as a writer, will allow the submerged maids, the underpaid and exploited ‘help’ to speak for themselves.

From tiny voices a roaring storm grows. With some initial reluctance, the maids, headed by Minny, tell Skeeter their various stories, a stream that feeds into the wider consciousness of the day, increasingly shaped by the growing Civil Rights movement. The Help is a superbly acted and emotionally effective movie, an indictment of the old Jim Crow laws of the South, which still manages to be full of simple human warmth that overcomes even the deepest social and racial divides.

But it’s the movie that’s dividing America, so says the Telegraph. I actually think that’s a gross exaggeration. The American reviews I’ve read, both positive and negative, show no deep fractures that I can detect. There are highly critical voices mentioned in the article. There is Wendell Pierce, the star of The Wire and Treme, who has described it as “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, that it is a passive version of “the terror of the South.” Then there is Max Gordon, a New York-based writer, who said that it ignored the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings”, he told the Telegraph reporter, “it’s the comfortable Holywood take of the civil rights era.”

He’s quite right, of course: it’s not the South of lynchings and beatings, but neither is it Mississippi Burning. As I said above, it’s a perspective movie, a view of the past from a particular angle, of unequal and abusive power relations, which was surely far more typical of the times than lynchings and beatings.

The black actors, headed by Spencer, have come out in defence of the movie, criticising the laughable forms of political correctness, based on the assumption that there is only one way of looking at past injustice. I myself see the criticism as a form of maximalism – the insistence that only the big picture will do, that all history has to be gathered in an instant, that there are no small stories to be told. But there are, thank goodness, and there always will be, stories on a simple human level, stories that make for compelling cinema. I think that change does begin with a whisper, not a shout.

Obama and the American Nightmare

2011-10-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

In responding to a question on whether or not Barack Obama had shown great leadership I wrote as follows;

I think he is the worst, least competent, president in American history, an accolade I once awarded to James Buchanan but have since changed my mind. I think the buck stops everywhere but the Obama House. I think he shames the free world, which has long expected a lead from Washington, with his stunning incompetence. I think his capacity for high office is zero and counting downwards. I think he is a crypto-Marxist who has created a poisonous ideological atmosphere in the States, standing over a house divided almost as badly as it was on the eve of the Civil War. Do I think he has shown great leadership? Why, of course.

Taking out that final twist of irony that is exactly what I think. I could say that Obama was responsible for America’s present malaise, but he’s really too little a man for that, an individual of no real historic significance, beyond being the first black face in the White House. No, he is more of a symptom of a disease than the disease itself.

The nature of that, the nature of the disease and its pathology, I am really finding quite difficult to determine. But there is America, a crypto-Marxist as chief executive, an America whose business seems to be anything but business, an America where people can gather in one of the nation’s leading cities, decrying the very capitalism and enterprise which made it great in the first place. There, in New York, are the socially and politically suspect, playing at being Arabs, desperados in search of doles, the antithesis to everything that America represents, as bad, in their own way, as the communists and anarchists of the past.

At the end of his 1969 Silent Majority oration, Richard Nixon said of the war in Vietnam “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” Vietnam could not defeat America, the Soviet Union could not defeat America, Iraq could not defeat America, no power on earth could defeat this great country. Nixon was right: only Americans can do that; only Americans have done that.

I’m a historian; I like to draw parallels with the past. Every Empire declines, some more rapidly that others, but who would have believed that the American decline would have been so rapid. It’s just over twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States, Ronald Reagan at its head, as the preeminent power on the earth, the victor in the Cold War. It was the occasion for The End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s premature celebration of all that was good and true and noble.

Now here we are, here America is, in retreat across several fronts. It took Rome four hundred years to travel from the zenith of Augustus to the nadir of Honorius. It has taken America a mere twenty to go from the hopes of the age of Reagan to the mediocrity of the age of Obama.

Yes, Obama is a symptom; he’s not the cause, but his own weakness and incompetence has compounded the many problems confronting the nation. There is nothing inevitable here. The problems are bad but they are not intractable. The will and the vision are needed to overcome them; simple determination is needed, the ability to do what is necessary.

I take this point, this present time, to be the trough of American history. There is a way up but only when Obama is in the past, only when American can see this weak, incapable and fatuous man was the wrong choice at the wrong time. With a man like this history never provides a right time. Big, meaningless and windy speeches, head turning this way and then that, that’s the only trace that Barack Obama will leave behind, a silly and insincere voice in the depths of the American nightmare.

A Lesson on Smugness

2011-10-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

Last month the Sunday Times Magazine carried an interview with Rowan Atkinson, the comedian and rubber-faced gurner (from the verb ‘to gurn’; go on, look it up; it’s even on Wikipedia!), which I quickly read and just as quickly forgot. I’m not a fan of Mr. Bean, I never have been; there is too much of the holy playing-the-goat about the man, or, maybe, just the goat.

I did, however, take note of his comments on Church of England vicars, people he’s rather fond of parodying;

I used to think that the vicars I played, or the exaggerated sketches that were written about clerics, were unreasonable satires on well-meaning individuals but actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society…I believe that all the mud that Richard Curtis and I threw at (vicars) through endless sketches that we've done is more than deserved.

Well, there you are. Do I feel obliged to defend hard working clerics from Atkinson’s scatter-gun? No, not really; I’m sure they can defend themselves much more effectively than I. I don’t feel the need to say anything about them but I do need to say something about smugness, the smugness of millionaire comics.

You see, there are clerics and there are clerics. If you are familiar with Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series of novels, a chronicle of high and low politics in the nineteenth century Church of England, I feel sure you will remember the self-effacing Septimus Harding, just as you will remember the oleaginous Obadiah Slope. Of these two Atkinson for me is more of a Slope than a Harding, more of a self-promoting and pompous hypocrite than a man of simple emotions and sincere beliefs.

Yes, I can see Slope driving a $3million sporstcar, just as Atkinson does, or rather did, before he and it had an encounter with a tree in Cambridgeshire last month. But would a clerk in holy orders attempt to raze a decent house in Oxfordsshire and build a glass and steel carbuncle in its place? His neighbours are not at all pleased. Still, they have nothing to fear, he said, from “modern design”. Perhaps not, and I dare say they are a lot safer now that the Atkinson-mobile has been put out of commission.

So, here is a man living and lording in a fashion that most Church of England priests could never envisage, people who, as the Spectator said in a recent editorial, live humbly and dedicate their ministry to the lives of others without expectation of reward. Not so the profane goat, who feels able to comment in a wholly presumptuous, arrogant, smug and general way about clerics, regardless of their actual merits or demerits. Perhaps, considering the wealth he has made from his parodies, some kind of tithe might be in keeping, really just as a form of compensation, or as a tax on the mouths of self-righteous prigs.

Perishing Democracy

2011-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

I was recently reminded of the brave, bold words of Abraham Lincoln, delivered at the consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg in November, 1863. Then he said that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. It may not be perishing from the earth, but it’s certainly perishing in Europe.

Reflecting on this, I remember reading an insightful opinion piece on the Charlemagne page of The Economist on the mind, the collective mind, of the bureaucrats who run the European Union. I’m being disingenuous because no mention was made of a ‘collective mind’ – a ‘hive mind’ for the Trekkies among you-, that’s my particular spin. Rather the point was made that hard-line Eurosceptics believe that there is a Minotaur at the heart of the Brussels labyrinth plotting a dictatorship, which the author considers to be “cheap demagoguery.”

I certainly consider myself on the hard wing of scepticism when it comes to the whole European project (actually, no; I'm a Dawkins-style atheist), but I have never advanced that particular view. I believe, rather, that the Eurocrats, my preferred term, represent a new senatorial elite, a post-democratic elite; that they are, by this standard, just as much of a danger to democratic self-determination as the advocates of an old-style tyranny. They are the philosopher-kings, the guardians, of Plato’s Republic; the priests, if you prefer, of the sacred flame.

Their outlook, their attitude and, yes, their condescension, is based on the single guiding idea behind the Treaty of Rome and all that followed: nationalism is a ‘bad thing’ and democracy, insofar as it embraces nationalism, is not that desirable when it comes to advancing the interests of the Community as a whole; and the interests of the Community are their interests.

This credo of anti-nationalism carries distinct risks, at best making the Eurocrats push for higher levels of integration than most Europeans - and here I mean real Europeans - are willing to bear; at worst it makes them sound hostile to democracy. They are the philosopher kings after all; they know best. When the French and Dutch voted against the EU constitution in 2005 the view in the labyrinth was that it was nonsense to put such complex proposals to ordinary voters. They don’t hate democracy; they just equate democracy with selfishness and populism.

The only effective counterweight to this frightful condescension is a pan-European democratic movement, but nobody believes in that, or if they do they are most awfully self-deluded. As far as the European parliament itself is concerned I find myself partially in agreement with Charlemagne, who wrote;

The European Parliament is the great disappointment of the European project. It is the revenge of the B-team; an assembly lead by posturing second-raters dedicated, in their every waking moment, to grabbing new powers at the expense of national governments…ordinary voters have no idea who represents them in the parliament, or even whether the left or the right dominates there…As a result, the parliament has utterly failed to capture the public’s imagination.

I say partially in agreement because I’m not disappointed at all: the parliament is a joke; it will always be a joke, the biggest sinecure in human history, a retirement home for political mediocrities and clowns. It makes the idea of Europe look ridiculous, the idea that the Continent is more than a collection of nation states. And long may that continue.

That brings me back to the benevolent philosopher kings in Brussels, those people in the high castle who know what is good for us, who will deliver what is good for us, whether we like it or not. And what is not good for us is government of the people, for the people, by the people.

For God's sake let's do the sane thing and get out. I'm utterly tired of my country being held hostage to German history, this endless blue crucifixion. And on that hangs another tale entire. :-)

Wallis and the Shanghai Technique

2011-10-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

Wallis Simpson was guilty of four things: she was a woman, she was a commoner, she was a double-divorcee and she was an American. But, notwithstanding all these handicaps, she still managed to storm the House of Windsor. She shook the fusty old English establishment and she got her man, even when the man happened to be a king! The surprise here is even greater because there was something manly about this femme fatale.

I’ll come to this in a bit but first a word or two about a wholly compelling individual, a social climber, a sort of American Becky Sharp, the unscrupulous character from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, one who climbed high enough to catch the affections of the heir to the throne

In 1936 Edward VIII, who recently succeeded his father George V, made it plain to the English establishment, politicians and churchmen alike, that he intended to marry this double divorcee, his long-standing mistress, an unprecedented move. Oh, no, you are not, came the response, not if you want to remain as king. Oh, yes, I am, and I don't want to be king. Wallis and love came before throne and duty. Edward abdicated and, as Duke of Windsor, married his Duchess.

They were such an odd couple, the handsome and debonair prince and the gauche, angular and rather masculine Wallis. Look at her picture. She’s not just conventionally plain; she’s positively ugly. But what she lacked in looks she made up for in wit and personality. She also made up for it with other talents, at least according to long-standing rumours, talents acquired in some of the less salubrious fleshpots of old Shanghai.

It’s a subject taken up by Anne Sebba in THAT WOMAN: The Life of Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor. Among other things the author touches on, ahem, Wallis’ carnal expertise, including a speciality in oral sex, “which would not have been standard education for most British or American girls of the day.” No, it would not.

But there is, she goes on to say, a far deeper and darker secret, something that would account for her appearance and her personality. The suggestion is that she might have suffered from a condition now referred to as Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) or intersexuality, something that apparently affects 4000 babies each year in the United Kingdom alone. I can only describe this as nature not making up its mind, producing a child that is not quite one thing and not quite the other.

Accepting this argument - and I have to say there is a more than usually high level of speculation here - , Wallis was born a girl but with the male XY chromosome. Over time, as a baby with this condition develops, the build up of testosterone in the system produces physical characteristics more associated with males.

It’s also possible, the author further suggests, that Wallis was born as a pseudo-hermaphrodite, with the internal reproductive organs of one sex and the external organs of another. This is a matter incapable of any proof but apparently, and amazingly, although she was married twice before she met Edward she once told a friend that she had never had sexual intercourse with either of her husbands, refusing to allow anyone to touch her below what she referred to as her “personal Mason-Dixon line.”

Writing in 1958 the biographer James Pope-Hennessy said that she was one of the very oddest women that he had ever seen – “She is flat and angular and could have been designed for a medieval playing card. I should be tempted to classify her as an American woman par excellence were it not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.”

The whole thing is quite intriguing and I confess I am intrigued. But I’m also cautious, wary when people overuse expressions like ‘might have’, ‘would have’, ‘could have’ and so on. Sebba's’ thesis is fascinating but it relies overmuch on speculation and surmise rather than evidence. It can never be proved conclusively. The truth might be much simpler: that Wallis was just an ugly woman with charm enough to win a prince, that and the Shanghai technique.

She’s quite the fashion at the moment, dear Wallis, first a biography and now a movie. I’m so looking forward to seeing W. E., the new biopic directed by Madonna (that’s reason enough for going to see it!), scheduled for release here in January. The advance signs are not good, but – who cares? – I’m such a sucker for this sort of thing, with an almost endless capacity to suspend certain forms of disbelief.

Speaking for Franco

2011-10-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

I noticed from a report in the Times that there are plans to move the body of Francisco Franco, the one-time dictator of Spain, from its present position in the basilica in the El Valle de los Caidos - Valley of the Fallen – near Madrid. The former ruler is an embarrassment to the brave new Spain that has a tired old socialist government headed by Jose Zapatero in it.

A commission has been set up to decide if he should be exhumed prior to re-interment in the capital’s El Pardo cemetery. It will submit its report after the general election, scheduled for 20 November, which just so happens to be the anniversary of Franco’s death in 1975. With the right-wing Popular Party expected to win, the suspicion is that the possibility of a corpse eviction has been leaked; that – in combination with the electoral date itself – there is a subliminal message here: a vote for the right is a vote for Franco. Even those who have campaigned for justice for the victims of Franco accuse the government of using the mausoleum for electoral ends.

Meanwhile the decrepit relics of the International Brigades are set to gather in Madrid to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the formation of armed units that would have handed Spain to Stalin. One of these dinosaurs is quoted in the Times, saying that he fought because “he believed in democracy” and that “these things are still important to me and the Spanish today. There are still fascists who are against democracy.”

Yes, well, maybe there are, just as maybe there are some still around who remember the Barcelona May Days of 1937, when the communists and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, demonstrated their enthusiasm for ‘democracy’, events that George Orwell wrote about in Homage to Catalonia.

In the light of hypocrisy and body snatching I have decided to reinter one of my corpses, a piece I wrote on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Caudillo’s death. Here it is, slightly updated. Hold on to your hats!

Marcus Ana Speaks!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So it was with Caesar…so it has been with Francisco Franco, one time regent of Spain, one time Caudillo de España, por la gracia de Dios. This year marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of his death, and while the left-wing junta that governs Spain today has done its best to wipe out his memory, removing the last statue from Madrid in 2005, its time to say a word or two his favour.

General Franco happens to be one of my political heroes. There, I’ve said it: I’m a fascist. No, I’m not, but, then, neither was Franco. He was conservative, deeply so, part of a Spanish tradition of conservatism going right back to the early nineteenth century. It was his task, as he understood it, to preserve Spain, to preserve Spanish traditions, to preserve Christian civilization, to defend it against the communist subversion of the Popular Front.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: the Spanish Civil War is one of the least understood conflicts in modern European history, a source of left-wing mythology, evidenced by Ken Loach’s tedious movie (did he ever make a movie that wasn't tedious?) Land and Freedom. The war was not a simple struggle between left and right, between workers and ‘fascists’. It was a complex event best understood in the context of Spanish history as a whole rather than set against contemporary events in the rest of Europe. The red-beret of the Requetés, the Carlist militia, a movement that harmonises so well with my own romantic and royalist vision, was just as important in the Nationalist camp as the blue shirt of the Falange.

In the end the Falange, the ‘fascists’, if you prefer, though there were major differences between the Spanish and the German and Italian versions, were no more than an ideological and ceremonial gloss on Franco’s conservative dictatorship.

Do I then defend dictatorship? No, I do not but I think Franco was a historical necessity. If he had not begun the military rebellion in 1936, or if the Nationalists had lost the Civil War, the course of the Second World War might have been very different, no, let me be more precise: it would have been very different.

With the likes of that Stalinist apparatchik Dolores Ibárruri, the appalling La Pasionaria, in control of Spanish affairs Hitler would have had all the excuse he needed to invade after the occupation of France in 1940. With Spain gone Gibraltar would have gone. With Gibraltar gone the Mediterranean would have been an Axis lake. In that event the war would have taken a very different course.

Spanish ‘democracy’ under the murderous Popular Front was an illusion. Even without the intervention of the Nationalists the country was torn between gangs of anarchist thugs - people who specialised in the mass murder of priests and nuns - on the one hand, and the communists on the other, all presided over by a weak liberal centre. The government continued to depend on Stalin for political and military support. Even Julian Besterio, a moderate socialist politician, admitted at the time that if the Civil War had been won by the Republic the communists would have taken full control, which would have been a disaster “for every other element of our democracy.”

So, yes, Franco saved Spain. In his long rule after the conclusion of the war in 1939 he also brought peace and stability, the basis for the Spanish Miracle, the sustained period of economic prosperity from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. At the time of Franco’s death in November 1975 the rate of Spanish economic growth was second only to that of Japan.

I admire Franco as much as I admire Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; I admire him for all the reasons I have given. The fact that his memory was condemned by the European Parliament, the fact that the Polish MEP who spoke in his favour was shouted down as a “Nazi” – by a German socialist, ironically - simply adds to the mix. If the European Parliament condemned the Devil I would look for arguments in his favour.

Franco’s time is past but his country has every reason to be grateful for him and what he achieved. It’s thanks to him that Spain was not wrecked by the communists in the same way that they wrecked Russia and the lands of Eastern Europe.

Comrade Spart has the Floor

2011-10-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

I was amused to see that Private Eye, Britain’s leading satirical magazine, Britain’s only satirical magazine, is now fifty years old, an event celebrated at a bash recently in London’s Guildhall. Once the most irreverent publication on the newsstands it’s become – The horror! The horror! – a national institution, something of a kiss of death for a publication that is noted for it’s brilliant lampoons of all sorts of people, from pompous politicians to talentless celebrities.

I’ve been reading it on and off for years. It was a regular source of amusement when I was at school, the most irreverent and iconoclastic girl in the place! I simply loved the way it pricked so many overblown bubbles, with its trusty, rusty sword of uncomfortable truths.

I had my favourites among the brilliant lampoons. The Secret Diary of John Major, a former prime minister, used to send me into fits of giggles with its Adrian Mole style parodies. And then there was Tony Blair in what was surely his true vocation in life – a sanctimonious and trendy vicar. Even better was the paranoid bulletins issued by Comrade Gordon Brown, very much in a North Korean fashion.

Set these political parodies to one side. My absolute favourite spoof was Dave Spart, the humourless left-wing prig, representing some absurd organisation or other, like the National Amalgamated Union of Sixth-Form Operatives and Allied Trades.

Dave Spart, my goodness, what can I say about Dave Spart? Spart has to be experienced. Spart, whose dialectical diatribes ended in all sorts of grammatical absurdities, illogical knots and silly non-sequiturs. With his heavy, clunking and infelicitous style he just captures a certain type so perfectly. They get everywhere, these people, coming out with some Spartist claptrap or other about a hegemonic bourgeoisie…or hegemonic bankers!

Here is a prime example of Spart speech:

The right wing press have utterly, totally and predictably unleashed a barrage of sickening hypocrisy and deliberate smears against the activities of a totally peaceful group of anarchists i.e. myself and my colleagues, who demonstrated in non-threatening balaclavas, due to the cold weather, and carried heavy walking sticks to negotiate the cobbled streets. Ahem, eh, we were merely asserting our rights to forcibly occupy the citadels of capitalism and oppression, such as the Ritz, Fortnum and Freemasons and Ann Summers, the unacceptable face of the sexual and industrial complex, who objectify women as mere sexual chattels and thereby make themselves a legitimate target for peaceful acts of, eh, rioting and arson. Small wonder the fascist police blatantly did nothing to obstruct us in the smashing up of the hated cash point machines of global capitalism and the spray painting of the Nazi lions in Trafalgar Square, and thereby deliberately making us look bad, which is not surprising, given that many of the so-called anarchists were probably undercover police officers…, such as Steve, who I've never liked and did not want to join our collective in the first place.

A parody too far, do you think? Well here is an actual Spartist report from the Guardian newspaper, headed Politics as usual has failed. Students must take direct action by Michael Chessum and Jonathan Moses, published last November, criticising government education policy;

And mobilise we must. The coalition's proposals represent a nigh irreversible transformation of higher education, and the commodification of knowledge and learning...Dismissed as apathetic, our generation has suffered from unparalleled self-perceived impotence: its seminal moment, the Iraq war, saw the biggest wave of protest in recent British history – along with the clearest refusal of government to listen to it. What resulted was frustration among a growing and mobilised section of young people.

Spart on, comrades!

Yes, that’s the Spartists for you. They are individuals who observes Marxist theory to the exclusion of all else, often condemning most things in society and the world with meaningless far left-wing dogma, ending up in logical cycles and jumping to conclusions in the process. Such people claim to be progressive, but are as backward thinking, unimaginative, blinkered, hare brained and colourless as the leaders of the former Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe.

That’s indeed what I think, but they are not my words – they are a bit too Spartist in style and tone! No, it’s a definition of the type from the Urban Dictionary. That’s a sign that one has really made it into the big league – a definition in the Urban Dictionary!

Look out for the breed in all their risible absurdity, look out for their writing, always characterised by heavy, impenetrable paragraphs, sonorous and censorious, unleavened by any kind of humour, peppered with grammatical howlers and spelling mistakes. Ah, what would life be without the Spartists? They truly are a thing of fun and a joy forever.

The Weight of History

2011-10-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

I bought Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and his Hangmen six or seven years while I was studying modern Russian history in sixth form at school. I never read it, though, because it was squeezed out by another book published at about the same time – Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

My present fascination with the writing of Vasily Grossman persuaded me to turn to the long-neglected Raysfield for some additional background information on the nature of the Soviet state and the terror apparatus it spawned. I’m rather glad I did because this is a good book, though not a great one, a reasonably through treatment of the people and the institutions without whom Stalin could not have functioned in the way that he did.

It’s a set of mini-biographies, or perhaps pathologies is a better expression, of Stalin himself and the successive heads of state security, appointed after the Bolshevik coup in late 1917. They are there in all of their fanaticism and depravity.

Imagine, if you will, some kind of reverse Darwinian progression, with successive stages of moral, sometimes physical, degeneration. Imagine also a progress in inhumanity and cruelty that is a perfect echo of the progress and inhumanity of communism at large. Now picture the men; picture Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Cheka, the first in a long line of sinister acronyms, and then those who came after: Viacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrik Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria. These are the principal players, though the book also features some of those spawned in their shadows, even deeper levels of ugly depravity.

It’s also a biography of the institutions themselves and their evolution, from Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to MGB, to the FSB of today. These awful acronyms both display and hide so much. They are the cords in a binding wrapped ever closer around the body of Russia, tighter and tighter, as freedom was squeezed to death. The awfulness was there right from the beginning in the system created by Lenin; Stalin simply made it even worse, with the aid of his various hangmen.

I knew more about some of the men featured in this book than others, quite a lot about Dzerzhinsky, who, if he had survived, would almost certainly have gone the same way as Yagoda and Yezhov, men who supped too close to the devil, and nothing at all about Menzhinsky.

I thought of Yezhov, who presided over the hysteria of 1937 and 1938, which we now know as the Great Terror, as the individual with most blood on his hands, but the weight is heaviest on Menzhinsky, head of the OGPU at the time of forced collectivisation and a state-induced famine that lead to the death of millions. There is genocide here, ethnic-cleansing before the world had ever heard of ethnic cleansing. The urban terror, the Yezhovchina, of 1937 to 1938 was bad, but the rural terror of 1930 to 1933 was even worse.

Rayfield tells his story well, scholarly but with a strong seasoning of passion, though I do have serious reservations over some of his more dubious judgements. In Murdering the Old Guard, section six of the book, he says that Stalin was no more a communist than a Borgia pope was a Catholic. That’s a rather odd contention because the Borgia pope – I assume he is thinking of Alexander VI – was a Catholic, just as Stalin was a communist. The difference is the one was an aberration of a system of belief and the other its most refined expression. More seriously, I think his analysis of Stalin’s relations with Hitler both weak and seriously inaccurate at points, showing that his grasp of the twists in Soviet foreign and ideological policy is not quite as strong as it should be.

The conclusion, though, is superb. As he says, it is a paradox that Russia’s two greatest novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in all their work insisted that only by full confession could the crimes of the past be absolved and life become endurable again – “…yet today’s Russian state refuses to abjure Stalin and his henchmen.” Hardly surprising when that same state is run by a man who is by career and choice, as the author puts it, a successor to Yagoda and Beria, a state where “..the FSB has taken, in alliance with bandits and extortioners, the commanding heights of the country’s government and economic riches, and goes on lying to, and when expedient murdering, it’s citizens.”

How much worse the situation seems to have become since I bought this book, how much Russia moves in an ever downward spiral, crushed under the weight of its unrequited history;

Until the story is told in full, and until the world community insist that the legacy of Stalin is fully accounted for and expiated, Russia will remain spiritually sick, haunted by the ghosts of Stalin and his hangmen and, worse, by nightmares of their resurrection.

McGuiness’ Albatross

2011-10-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

In June of last year I wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph reader’s blog site, one headed Machine Gunn McGuiness – it’s time for some answers. It was written in the wake of the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when a number of people were shot dead by the British Army in Londonderry.

The Parachute Regiment was held to blame for that tragedy, but the responsibility was also thrown obliquely on Martin McGuiness, the public face of Sein Fein/IRA, a man for whom I have nothing but the deepest contempt. I concluded my piece with the following remarks;

There are, however, some more immediate questions to be answered by a man now in government in Northern Ireland; there are questions to be answered by Martin McGuiness, Deputy First Minister. The dead of Londonderry had to have their day and David Cameron was right to make the statement he did in Parliament. But that day has passed. Now I hope the Tory back-bench will ask some pointed questions when Saville is subject to more detailed scrutiny. Was it, perhaps, the custom, I have to ask, to walk around with sub-machine guns in Northern Ireland? Was McGuiness giving it some air or intending to practice for a knee capping or a dozen? It really is time for some toughness here, time to make Machine Gun McGuiness smirk on the other side of his face.

Not only is this man still smirking but he is attempting to smirk his way into the office of president of the Irish Republic in an election to be held towards the end of this month. But everywhere he goes he is followed by his own legacy, a legacy of IRA violence. This is a man who was imprisoned twice in the 1970s for membership of this terrorist organisation, the first time after being caught near a car containing 115kg of explosives and 5000 rounds of ammunition. And as the Saville Inquiry concluded, he was likely armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and probably used the weapon. He and his kind certainly contributed to the tensions which lead to the shootings.

He says he left the organistation in 1974, but as a recent Times report concluded, few believe this to be true. All the evidence suggests that he went on to become the IRA’s northern commander and the head of its army council. There are atrocities thereafter that he certainly knew of or approved, like the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing

Thankfully he is pursued by his murderous legacy even in the Republic, where people generally might be inclined to be more sympathetic. In Athlone he had an encounter with the son of an Irish soldier, who’s father was killed by the IRA in 1983, demanding to know who was responsible. Another uncomfortable encounter followed with the brother of an Irish policeman, killed in County Meath in 1984, who accused McGuiness of having his "family’s blood on his hands." The sister of Mary Travers, shot dead in Belfast in 1984, called his campaign "an insult to the victims of the IRA."

And so it is, to all the victims of the IRA, north and south of the border, north and south of the island’s religious and political divisions. He offers the usual weasel evasions, saying that he never killed anyone himself but refusing to say if he ordered others to kill. He says that he cannot remember the oath he took on joining the IRA. And if you believe that you will believe anything.

He is a liar, a coward and a killer, of that I have not the least doubt, one who hides behind the worst kind of hypocrisy and dissimulation. The past cannot be discarded, the past of a man like this, which he carries around his neck like a curse, the same curse as the Ancient Mariner.

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung."

De-crusading the Crusade

2011-10-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

It’s the kind of copy that most historians would kill for, not just a review of a forthcoming publication, but the forthcoming publication featured as a news story! And so it was on Friday, when the Times devoted a half page in its news columns to Peter Frankopan’s The First Crusade: the Call from the East, scheduled for publication in February. There it was, under the heading Historian lifts his sword against the accepted view of the First Crusade, truly splendid stuff.

Ben Hoyle, the paper’s arts correspondent, reporting from the Cheltenham Festival, even concludes with the imprimatur of Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author who ranges between Stalin and Jerusalem, who says that the new sojourn into the Crusades is “a missing part of the puzzle.” Well, yes, but there is one tiny problem – it’s nothing of the kind. I’ll come to this in a moment but first a few words on the basic thesis.

According to the press release issued by Harvard University Press, the publishers, Frankopan, director of the Centre for Byzantine Research at the University of Oxford, is “countering nearly a millennium of scholarship by emphasising the overlooked eastern origins of the crusades”. A thousand years of scholarship – my goodness; what a claim! Sorry, that’s a digression. The argument is that the whole thing was rather less about religion, less about crusades, if I can put it like that, and much more about politics, territory and power.

Though I’m far from being an expert on the crusades, that’s something I had already picked up on from a reading of Sir Stephen Runciman’s classic three volume study A History of the Crusades, slightly dated but still meaty, supplemented by John Julius Norwich’s History of the Byzantine Empire, another triple decker. Neither of these books overlooked the ‘eastern origins’ of the Crusades, the argument that is supposedly set to destroy the Thousand Year Reich of scholarship.

The process that led to the declaration of the First Crusade in 1095 began over twenty years before, in August 1071, to be precise, when the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated and captured by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert on the eastern fringes of the empire. Thereafter the Turks moved steadily westwards, overrunning most of Anatolia, now modern Turkey, and threatening Constantinople itself.

The loss of Anatolia was particularly serious because it was the main recruiting ground for an empire that desperately needed soldiers. Where were these to come from now but the Christian West? In this atmosphere of growing crisis the Emperor Alexis I Comnenos appealed to Urban II, the reigning pope. He simply wanted mercenaries. What he got was wholly unexpected and, in the end, wholly unwelcome – he got a Crusade.

Western Christians may have been dim but not so dim that they did not know that Jerusalem had been under Muslim occupation for over four hundred years. It was the new stories of Seljuk attacks on pilgrims, as much as Alexis’ appeal, that motivated Urban, present at Clermont in France for a church council. It was an ideal opportunity to assert his authority in the east as well as the west by proclaiming a great religious enterprise, one which captured the mood of the moment. God may have willed it; Urban certainly did.

Now I have no wish to be unkind, and one should be careful with publisher’s hyperbole, but if Frankopan is seeking to marginalise the religious fervour of 1095 to support his thesis then he is a fool. It’s a crucial part of the mix. How else does one explain Peter the Hermit and the fanatical crowds who followed him east? How else does one explain the large scale pogroms that followed in their wake, the Jews of Europe being a more immediate target than the Muslims of Asia?

It’s certainly true that the real Crusade, the professional Crusade, if I can put it like that, headed by professional soldiers, was a complex phenomenon. Religious enthusiasm was there, so, too, was land hunger, in what was essentially a Norman expedition, headed by landless younger sons, people who were to carve out counties, principalities and kingdoms in the Levant, from Edessa in the north to Jerusalem in the south. In the end, guided by the Normans, who had a well-established tradition of hostility to the Byzantines, the Crusaders were to be as much a danger to the integrity of the Eastern Empire as the Turks.

It’s all there – strategic desperation, religious fervour, ambition, political hostility, land hunger, all contributing to the complexity of the First Crusade. To abstract out one dimension, no matter how important, backed up by the claim that one is ‘overturning’ a thousand years of scholarship, is a step too far in hyperbole and self-promotion. This is not a missing part in the puzzle. It’s just some rather tiresome academic inflation.

Death Crosses the Rio Grande

2011-10-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

We have a serious problem with mass immigration in England. The United States, I know, has similar difficulties, with migration across the Rio Grande now at alarming levels.

Naturally enough, this kind of thing produces a backlash, especially in times of economic difficulties, a time when there are too many people chasing too few jobs. This is certainly the case in England. There is also, I have to say, an additional fear: namely, that we are allowing in too many people with traditions inimical to our way of life. Right across Europe there are concerns over the growth of Islamic fundamentalism.

That’s not something that affects the States, at least not to the same degree. But there is another alien tradition, I recently discovered, serving to deepen anxieties about immigration, going beyond concerns over mere numbers. It’s not just people who are coming in: Death is there also, riding on their backs – “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

It’s not some nebulous concept I have in mind, not some apocalyptic revelation; no it’s Santa Muerte – Saint Death -, the patron saint of Mexico’s drugs cartels. Illegal immigration may very well fuel xenophobia but, let’s be frank, death cults have a tendency to fuel it even more.

Santa Muerte is fairly typical of the religious syncretism found right across Latin America, combining Catholic with pagan traditions. The trouble is that this gruesome spectre, with its toothy grin and scythe, has the loyalty of a particularly vicious tribe of devotees, the pushers of a new kind of murderous Juggernaut.

The fear is real enough: that Mexico’s vicious drugs war is pouring over the border, not in part but in whole, a war that in a mere five year period has been responsible for some 35,000 fatalities. This is bad enough but the death cult gives the whole thing an even more alarming gloss. Santa Muerte is following the main narcotic routes throughout the US, from Arizona to New York. She was there in a tunnel discovered a few weeks ago, a tunnel some six hundred feet long running right under the border, looked over by a shrine to the saint.

People have every reason to feel worried by this phenomenon, a sign of a deeper malaise. By their very nature gangs are territorial and fissiparous, drug gangs more than most, but the Santa Muerte cult provides them with a perverse cultic and iconic focus, a possible basis for cooperation and unity. Writing of this in the Daily Telegraph Tim Stanley said;

The goal of these groups is to undermine democracy and govern autonomous secret societies through family, blood and religion. It’s a global trend. The Lord’s Resistance Army that slaughtered and raped its way across Uganda from 1987 to 2007 was led by a man who claimed to channel the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the culprit behind this apocalyptic criminality was the death of Communism, which deprived thugs and thieves of a secular ideology to justify their actions. Organisations like FARC and the Real IRA converted overnight to pushing drugs. But in Mexico, family and religion filled the vacuum left by the failure of socialism.

The assumption in Europe, particularly in the pages of the hyper-liberal Guardian, is that American fears over Hispanic immigration has been brought on by racism, nothing more, and that the country is on the threshold of a new Jim Crow era, a time when racial apartheid was law. But the truth, for once, really is pure and simple: mass immigration, coupled with the importation of malign foreign cults, represents a serious threat to American civic and political culture.

As the country faces a threat from without it also faces a new threat from within, brought on by a loss of confidence and direction, shown in the wave of populist, anti-business hysteria sweeping across the land, a canker spreading outwards from New York, given encouragement even so far as the Obama House. It’s worth reflecting on this, as we here in England also face a threat from an informal alliance between jihadists and anarchists. Santa Muerte, it would seem, has a long reach

A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

2011-10-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

It’s one of the most remarkable paintings in the whole of western art – it’s Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, sometimes known as The Arnolfini Wedding, painted in 1434. It’s one of my favourite paintings, one of the great draws in London’s National Gallery.

It’s remarkable in two senses: for the freshness of Van Eyck’s vision, the intensity of the detail, for the range of objects that might mean something, might have some symbolic significance, or might mean nothing at all, other than that they are objects in a well-appointed room. It’s remarkable also for its remarkable history, passing through the hands of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons into those of Joseph Bonaparte, whose bottom was placed on the throne of Spain by big brother Napoleon. Joseph, I was delighted to discover, was called Pepe Bottles – Joe Bottles - by his less than enamoured subjects, so known for his prestigious intake. Looted by a British officer from the dipso royal’s baggage after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813, the Arnolfini Portrait eventually made its way into the National Gallery.

More than any of this it is remarkable for its subject, a prosperous Flemish merchant couple, the first depiction of ordinary people, people who were not aristocratic or royal, just the middle class from the Middle Ages. It celebrates property, of course, it celebrates domestic comfort and wealth, as other paintings celebrate the landed wealth of the nobility.

But still there is a wonderful immediacy and homeliness to the painting; we know these people in their sheer ordinariness; we can identify with them as real human beings, not some grand statement about power. There is also an abiding mystery about this intense little oeuvre, a sense of otherness which raises all sorts of questions. It’s an enigma that's been taken up by the art historian Corola Hicks in Girl in a Green Gown: the History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait, sadly unfinished at the time of her death last year.

Beyond the fact that it’s a depiction of a merchant and his...his what, exactly? Is she his wife or his girlfriend? Is this a marriage or a betrothal? There is no certainty at all on the point, despite the misleading title. There is certainly a bond between the two, a couple who are, perhaps, already married, or who have simply announced a union to come. Is the lady in green pregnant, as so many have assumed from her bloated appearance? Would a pregnant paramour have been shown at such times in such a way? Why has the painter depicted himself in the mirror in the far wall? And why, as Hicks herself asks, does the man look like Vladimir Putin?

No, he's not Russian. He is, rather, a member of the powerful Arnolfini clan of Italian merchants, well-established in Bruges by the fifteenth century. Exactly who he is, though, and, even more intriguingly, who she is, the lady in green, has proved slightly more problematic, despite decades of speculation and art criticism. It may be one of two Giovanni Arnolfinis, though neither was married in 1434. So far as he is concerned it's certainly a fully-realised portrait of a particular individual (he was to appear again in the work of van Eyck), though she seems to be more of an ideal, a type reminiscent of the painter's Madonnas. Is she there at all, was she there for the sitting, or is she yet to come, not yet emerged from the shadows of the Platonic ideal, a future promise? Oh, and the celebration of fecundity may be no more than a celebration of cloth, another sign of the merchant’s wealth!

Hicks turns her thoughts to several themes, to the symbolism and the significance not just of the central act of union, but the surrounding paraphernalia - the dog - faithfulness? -, the mirror, the rug, the clothes, the glass in the windows, the furnishings, the single lighted candle and even the oranges by the window. Oranges, still a luxurious and expensive import, are another sign that Signor Arnolfini was a man of substance, a display of conspicuous consumption. They are also a reminder of Eve's gift to Adam, a fruit, interchangeable with apples, as the produce from the Tree of Knowledge. Even the bed is a sign of wealth, a sign that this was a man who could afford to put one in his front room! What we are looking at here is a celebrity couple, a kind of illustration from a fifteenth century version of Hello magazine, people who have made it and want others to know that they have made it, a bourgeois ideal!

The title of Hick's book is a clear nod in the direction of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa of the North, Johannes Vermeer's later masterpiece, another mystery about an unnamed woman, another intrigue, a wonderful vacuum filled by speculation and fiction. Likewise, we will never know any more than we do about the Girl in a Green Gown; we will never come a step closer to her and her individual destiny.

Hicks is good, but she is much better on the history than the mystery, which, paradoxically, I find quite pleasing. Some enigmas are best left as they are, to intrigue and perplex for all time. But the greater mystery is the artist himself, employed at the time of the Arnolfini Portrait as a painter in the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Why, and by what manner, did he come to see the world in such a radical and realist fashion, in a fashion completely different from the conventions of late medieval art? We simply do not know.

Meanwhile one central question remains: why does Arnolfini look like Vladimir Putin?

Treason by any other name

2011-10-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

In July 1940, while Britain was in deep in the darkest valley of the Second World War, a coruscating polemic appeared in print. This was Guilty Men, an attack on the forms of appeasement pursued since 1930, which had brought the country to this pass in its history. The author, one ‘Cato’, focused on a number of named politicians, headed by Neville Chamberlain, the former prime minister.

It was actually the work of collaboration between three people, including Michael Foot, a journalist and left-wing fire eater. There is a slight whiff of hypocrisy here, in that Foot, a future leader of the Labour Party, was himself a ‘guilty man’, opposing British rearmament in the 1930s. But the book still went a long way to demolishing the kind of dangerous political consensus that occasionally descends on even the most mature democracies, a consensus supported by ‘official’ news channels like the BBC, portraying critics of the prevailing orthodoxy as crackpots, outsiders and eccentrics.

Now a new Guilty Men has appeared. It’s a polemic no less important at this point in our history than its predecessor. As we look at the debacle in Europe, as we look at a crisis that was utterly and banally predictable over the euro, the one size fits all currency, the time has come to expose the guilty people, the guilty institutions, and the guilty publications who would have involved this country in the whole wretched fiasco, who saw our membership as the only course, as a foregone conclusion that only the mad opposed. We have a new ‘Cato’ collective, less coy than the first; we have Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver, whose devastating critique was published at the end of last month by the Centre for Policy Studies.

It premiers with an observation that I, for one, consider to be almost axiomatic;

Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merly right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age – they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

And how! This is a crisis that is set to run and run, as more and more German wealth is poured into a Greek black hole. Even on the sidelines we, as nation, cannot avoid the fallout from this financial and political lunacy.

Financial lunacy, yes, exactly, lunacy, as the authors of Guilty Men point out, that was supported for so many years by the Financial Times, a paper that pretends to be the leading economic publication in this country, with the emphasis now very firmly on pretends. It’s salutary to recall what this publication said of Greek entry into the euro in January 2001 – “With Greece now trading in euros few will mourn the death of the drachma. Membership of the eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability.”

One by one the authors pick out their targets, covering them with withering fire, from the Confederation of British Industries, an interest-group that seems to represent the interests of its own conceited bureaucracy best, to the Marxist-dominated BBC, an organisation which has nothing to learn from Dr Goebbels when it comes to the techniques of propaganda.

Betraying every principle of its charter, the BBC became a partisan player in the whole debate over Britain’s fiscal future. Programmes supposedly objective in content were heavily weighted in favour of comment from Europhiles. The pro-euro position was identified as the centre ground, the inference being that its opponents were outside reasonable limits, in the wilderness of political extremes.

Rod Liddle, at the time editor of the Beebs’s Radio 4 Today programme, said “The whole ethos of the BBC and all the staff was that Eurosceptics were xenophobes and there was the end of it. The euro would come up at a meeting and everybody would burst out laughing about the Eurosceptics.” He was even told in a meeting with one of the Corporation’s senior figures that he had to understand that “these people are mad.”

Who laughs now, I wonder; who now calls them mad?

There are named individuals among the guilty, a menagerie of has-beens, never-have-beens and loony tunes. These are my sentiments, alright, but they are not my words. No, they are the words of Andrew Rawnsley writing in the Observer in January 1999. There is only one small difference: his menagerie of has-beens, never-have-beens and loony tunes were the people who were warning that the euro was a foredoomed project.

Who were the people he described as ‘substantially sane’, you may wonder? Well, the wretched shower included Tony 'the Liar' Blair, Peter ‘Gay Lord’ Mandelson, Ken ‘Fatuous Belly’ Clarke, Michael ‘Judas’ Heseltine and Charles ‘the Soak’ Kennedy. Yes, that was his coalition of the ‘normal’.

I don’t like to go too far, but I am angry, angry at these guilty men, an anger which sees forms of treason in the way that they attempted to undermine the best interests of this country. I sincerely hope that future generations view them with as much contempt as the original appeasers, who, for all their faults, simply represented a national mood. What mood the new appeasers represented, beyond their own purblind venality, I have yet to determine.

If you enjoy watching fish wriggle on a hook, if you enjoy hubris brought low, if you enjoy shouting ‘I told you so!’ you will love Guilty Men.

Iran: the Republic of Iblis, the Republic of Death

2011-10-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

It’s over a year now since I first wrote about Sakineh Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for alleged adultery (Evil Law – 30 August, 2010). She’s still in prison though it seems unlikely that the sentence will ever be carried out, insofar as it’s possible to predict the actions of the vile clerical-fascist Iranian regime. The truth is that it has been sorely embarrassed by the international reaction to this barbarism, embarrassment that opens the door to another story about injustice and oppression.

It’s a universal principle of justice that people accused of crimes have the right to an effective defence, and I place the stress here on effective as opposed to some tame lawyer, who acts as an adjutant to the prosecution. Ashtiani’s lawyers had the courage to defend her to the best of their abilities, the reward for which has been torture and exile. Now the lawyer defending one of her lawyers has been forced to flee for his life.

Safe in an unnamed location in Turkey, Naghi Mahmoudi recently told the Times of the plight of his client, Javid Houtan Kian, formerly the junior barrister on Ashtiani’s defence team. The details are quite chilling. Even if Kian was released today, his lawyer said, “he would never be able to return to normal life because he’s suffered so much physical and mental torture.”

Although Mahmoudi agreed to represent Kian at the beginning of the year, it took several months of pleading before he was allowed to visit his client, being held in the prison at Tabriz. His reaction on seeing him was one of shock: Kain’s teeth had been smashed, his nose broken and his hands and feet showing signs of cigarette burns.

During the three hours the two were allowed together, always in the presence of a guard, Kian compiled a three-page description of the treatment he had received. He was beaten by up to twenty men at a time, as well as being doused in water and left in the freezing courtyard on winter nights. It’s not just his hands and feet that been burnt with cigarettes but also his genitalia.

No sooner had the interview concluded, with Kian pleading that Mahmoudi tell the world of his plight, than the transcript was confiscated by the prison governor, saying that it was all lies. The lawyer was also banned from returning to the prison, though he subsequently learned from others that his client’s condition had deteriorated still further.

Ever fearful for his own safety, and living under constant petty harassment, Mahmoudi decided he had to leave when he received a demand that he present himself at Tabriz, not even pausing to say goodbye to his mother. From his Turkish refuge he said “Lawyers have to defend people however dangerous the situation.” The danger reaches a unique level when the government abuses them merely for doing their job – “It’s a terrible and frightening regime. It doesn’t believe in the law or anything. The only thing they think about is keeping power.”

There is no law in Iran, there is no justice; there is no God, rather ironic when one considers that this is a country that conceitedly refers to itself as an ‘Islamic Republic’. It’s nothing of the kind; it’s the Republic of Iblis, the Republic of Death.

I judge therefore I am

2011-10-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

This is my response to a discussion on Blog Catalogue, under the heading “We are all racists”, the proposition being that we automatically judge people who are different from our own ‘tribe.’ My remarks are addressed to the poster.

Ana Speaks

I don’t suppose that you’ve ever heard of Enoch Powell, a British politician once almost universally condemned, even by his own Party, as a ‘racist’ because of his famously infamous Rivers of Blood speech, in which he gave warning of the possible effects of mass immigration. He was once asked in a television interview with David Frost if he was a racist, to which he replied;

It depends on how you define the word “racialist.” If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically No.

So, yes, by the first definition, I, too, am a racialist. I agree with the argument put forward in your post that we are all racialists to that extent. Beware always of the small-minded and stupid here; for all too often their denials of racism disguises the fact that they are racist in the second sense of Powell’s definition, a form of psychological compensation for their own worthlessness.

Where I differ from you is over the question of skin colour. I do not believe that there is a ‘black race’ any more than there is a ‘white race’. If I judge people it’s most often a cultural reflex rather any on the basis of deductions made on the basis of skin colour. If I entered an underpass and saw that the exit was blocked by a gang of youths it would make no difference at all to my level of apprehension if they were white or if they were black.

Did you ever see Crash, the 2004 movie directed by Paul Haggis? It’s really quite clever, exploring race prejudice on a whole number of levels, not just the obvious ones. Here, in London, some of the worst racism is not white on black, but black on black, with people from the West Indies hating people from Somalia.

There is also the wider question of prejudice, which can overlap with racial perceptions, though not always. I admit my own shortcomings here: I dislike gypsies because I have seen how gangs of East European Roma operate in London. They have no place here; I don’t want them; I don’t know anyone who does. Less specifically, I dislike fat people and I dislike the stupid, probably the first more than the second, because they have the power to do something about their affliction and chose not to. See; prejudgement in the purest sense!

We live in a complex world, too complex, in so many ways, to be taken in without forms of mental categorisation. I judge therefore I am. :-)

Tears Flow

2011-10-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

Vasily Grossman, as I wrote here quite recently, was a writer of unique genius, a great war correspondent and an even greater novelist. Earlier this year I read Life and Fate, a panoramic novel set in the Second World War. I don’t think I’ve ever been as overwhelmed by a work of fiction, at least not since I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s an astonishing tour de force, a description of people and places and events delivered with freshness and stunning insight. Even before I finished I offered the following comment;

As a novel it is also intensely honest, making no allowances for the ideological shibboleths of his day, so honest that the book was ‘arrested’, yes, arrested by the KGB in the early 1960s. Grossman was subsequently summoned to the office of Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, who told him that the book could not be published for another two or three hundred years, an act of extreme censorship coupled with a paradoxical recognition of its lasting importance. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West, where it was published and hailed as a work of genius.

Sadly Grossman was unable to enjoy his literary triumph: he died of stomach cancer in Moscow in 1964. At the point of his death he had no reason to suppose that Suslov’s prediction was not true, that it would take two centuries for his great work to emerge from the ideological shadows. But he was already working on another novel, a novel that could not have been published in the old Soviet Union in two millennia, never mind two centuries. This is Everything Flows, which I finished today in one feverish sitting, stopping only to top up my tea from the samovar.

Yes, Everything Flows is a novel, unfinished at the time of the author’s death, but it’s also a kind of testament, a political and philosophical indictment not just of the moral corruption of communism but of Russia itself, of that dark place in the Russian soul that forever eschews freedom in favour of slavery.

The criticism is trenchant. Life and Fate could be taken in large part as a demolition of Stalinism, an altogether more honest testament that Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. But Everything Flows goes deeper; it goes so far as Lenin, still sleeping away in Red Square, the supreme icon of national servitude. For a moment, for the briefest of seasons in the spring of 1917, Russia scented freedom. The path lay open. Russia chose Lenin, who came not to liberate the country but to refine and amplify the most regressive features of its history;

And so it was that Lenin’s obsession with revolution, his fanatical faith in the truth of Marxism and the absolute intolerance of any dissent, all led him to advance hugely the development of the Russia he hated with all of his fanatical soul…Did Lenin ever imagine the true consequences of his revolution? Did he ever imagine that it would not simply be a matter of Russia now leading the way – rather than, as had been predicted, following behind a socialist Europe? Did he ever imagine that what his revolution would liberate was Russian slavery itself – that his revolution would enable Russian slavery to spread beyond the confines of Russia, to become a torch lighting a new path for humanity?

Russian history, paradoxically, went into reverse. Stalin quickened the process, taking it as far as it would go, substituting freedom with the most abject forms of state worship, something that had not been seen since the days of Ivan the Terrible. By the 1930s, the time of collectivisation, the time of the Terror Famine, the time when the state deliberately starved millions of its own citizens to death, the Russian peasantry was more completely enslaved than it ever had been under the Tsars. It’s almost as if Alexander II, the Liberator, the man who ended serfdom, had never lived. That was the legacy of the Revolution.

There is a witness here, a man who filters these thoughts through his head. He is Ivan Grigoryevich. His freedom died earlier than most. Sent to the camps as a young man, he returns thirty years later, a ghost from the past, a husk of a ruined life. Stalin is dead but there has been no proper reckoning; there never will be a reckoning. Such reckoning as there is comes only as an act of moral and historical reflection.

There are those that Grigorivich left behind, like his cousin Nikolay, a mediocrity who prospered in a time of mediocrity and bad faith. This ghost is not entirely welcome, neither by Nikolay nor by his wife, both of whom remained ‘free’ insofar as freedom involved all sorts of shabby compromises. This is a theme, this guilt come resentment, that Solzhenitsyn was to take up in Cancer Ward. These are the little people, the beetle people, who prospered at the expense of those far more talented, who died or disappeared.

The novel ranges over some of the tragedy, looked at in simple human as well as grand historical terms. There is the tragedy of the Terror Famine, told by Anna Sergeyevna, Grigorivich’s lover, full of guilt for the part she played;

How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that the kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that the Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. I can see now that we are all human beings.

There is the tragedy of Vasily Timofeyvich, Ganna, his beloved wife, and Grishenka, their infant son, explored in a brief and incredibly poignant chapter, killed by starvation, lying in their hut over the winter, not separated even by death.

There is the tragedy of Masha, arrested in 1937 at the height of the Great Terror, madness within madness, simply for being married to a man that the state had declared guilty. Separated from her husband and her child, she was sent to the gulags, convinced that it was all a mistake, that her sentence would be revoked, that they would all meet again never to be separated. In the end hope died;

A year later Masha left the camp. Before returning to freedom, she lay for a while on some pine planks in a freezing hut. No one tried to hurry her out to work, and no one abused her. The medical orderlies placed Masha Lyubimova in a rectangular box made from boards that the timber inspectors had rejected for any other use. This was the last time anyone looked on her face. On it was a sweet, childish expression of delight and confusion, the same look as when she had stood by the timber store and listened to the merry music, first with joy then with the realisation that all hope had vanished.

This could have been an angry book, a bitter one; the anger caused by so much betrayal, the anger of history, the anger of an author whose life’s work had been frustrated. But it’s not; it’s a bold, moving and scrupulously honest book, a story told on a number of narrative levels, a story told with simplicity, insight and tremendous clarity. It stands as a noble testament. If you love Russia, if you love the past, if you love the truth, if you love freedom I urge you to read this. If you can do so without descending at points into tears then you have far greater powers of emotional control than I have, than I will ever have. Everything Flows is a great work of literature. It is an even greater tribute to the human spirit.

A Tale of Two Cities

2011-10-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged…the worst houses in the worst quarters of the town…The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these…quarters may readily be imagined.

Where is this do you think? Is it some third world city, perhaps? I’ll tell you in just a moment, but first let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of another city, in another place, in another time. The narrative goes like this;

The woman…crouches in the acrid fumes…tending the stock in her shop; the mangled remains of a wooden kitchen unit, broken microwave ovens, lengths of fire house and a meat slicer without a blade. To her right is one of…the largest dumps, spilling from its gates in a cascade of plastic bags. It stinks and is swarming with flies. To her left, written in huge letters, is the market’s slogan: a motto supposedly designed to give meaning to a life lived off rubbish…”If you don’t work hard today, tomorrow you will be working harder to find a new job!” It is unclear how she and her husband could work any harder. His day is spent trawling the city for the detritus of urban life. Hers is spent putting it into a state that might earn a few pennies…The woman, too nervous to give her name, describes life as “very difficult and without any feeling of security.” What little she and her family have could be bulldozed at any moment.

Yes, it’s two worlds, two times, two systems. It’s a tale of two cities; the first is London, described by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England. It’s a description of a city during the high noon of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s the bleak age of the bourgeoisie, as someone once described it, the time of Ebenezer Scrooge before the haunting. It’s a past time.

The second is the present time, not in the heart of a heartless capitalist state. No, it’s the condition of the working class in a worker’s state; it’s the condition of the working class in a communist state. This city is not London or Manchester; it’s Beijing.

The London of the 1840s had its chroniclers, not just political radicals like Friedrich Engels but moral radicals like Charles Dickens, who appealed to the conscience of his middle-class readers in such works as Oliver Twist, Hard Times and A Christmas Carol. Those who attempt a chronicle of Beijing in the second decade of the twenty-first century face dangers that past reformers never did. A Chinese Dickens, or a Chinese Engels, for that matter, would almost certainly end up in one of Beijing’s ‘black jails’, the secret prisons where critics of the system can be held for indefinite periods without trial or legal representation of any kind.

It was in one of these places that Ai Weiwei, the brilliantly unconventional artist who has become the conscience of the nation, ended up earlier this year, held for some eighty days, his family not even being told of his whereabouts. Nothing chastened, he has since written a kind of Tale of Two Cities, or a tale of two Beijings, the city of the obscenely rich and the city of the wretchedly poor, in a country where several hundred households are worth more than $100million, while 100 million have to manage on $100 a year.

Like Dickens he has drawn attention to the underbelly of the capital, the other city, a city choked by filth and pollution, a constant nightmare, as he put it, of violence, numbing abusiveness and fear. This is the city of the migrants, people little better than slaves, people without any kind of civic rights, people who can be removed on a whim, constantly at risk from the arbitrary violence of the authorities.

China, in its present state of social, political and economic development, is one of history’s oddest paradoxes. Not only does it have an economy based upon forms of rapacious capitalism that might even have shocked Engels and Dickens, but the abuses are also held in place by Communist oligarchy that allows no room for dissent, for any form of social conscience or reforming impulse, an oligarchy that exists for no other purpose than to perpetuate its own monopoly of power. Thus is the reality of modern China in this anniversary year, the anniversary of the revolution of 1911, which saw the fall of the last imperial dynasty.

There is anger in the country over various social abuses, anger which finds some outlet in social media sites, anger which deepens the paranoia of the authorities, ever fearful that individual fires may turn into a general conflagration, fearful that the Arab disease might be contagious.

But setting to one side the complaints given air on micro-blogging sites like Sina Weibo, most Chinese would seem to be largely indifferent to the plight of the migrant subclass. Given the appalling misery inflicted on the country in the time of Mao Zedong, people are content with new forms of relative prosperity, prosperity and a quiet life. Put it another way, there is no audience for Engels, for Dickens or for Al Weiwei. Reform, if it comes at all, is a long way in the future, or lost in the past.

Let them eat wind

2011-10-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

There are few things, I am happy to admit, that induce in me feelings of weariness and cynicism more quickly than endless lectures about global warming or climate change or responsible energy policy or a hundred variations on the theme from Bore Gore. It’s the new orthodoxy, the new Puritanism that threatens to submerge us all in a mood of guilt. Not I, not ever, no matter how much tiresome ‘science’ is trotted out. I once expressed my feelings in debate, and when I debate I take no prisoners;

Orthodoxy, that’s the key word, don’t you agree? Global warming has become a new religion. It’s part of that pessimism that has accompanied our species almost since the beginning of time, codified in religions like Christianity. There are precious few now who believe in Doomsday, in the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. So, no more ‘the end is nigh: repent!’ Instead we have ‘global warming is happening: repent!'

We have been taken far down the road of repentance in England. There is no debate; it’s now a matter of consensus across the political divide, with green taxes adding an ever growing burden to patterns of consumption, pushing the most vulnerable in our community ever deeper into fuel poverty. The time has come to fight back, against the onward march of taxes and windmills, a ghastly blight on our green and pleasant land.

Let me tell you how to do it. No, let Matthew Sinclair tell you how to do it. He does so in a highly effective fashion in Let Them Eat Carbon: The Price of Failing Climate Change Policies and How Governments and Big Business Profit From Them, an excellent little polemic. The arguments are tailored to an English shape but there are general policy principles that might as easily be applied elsewhere.

Sinclair’s premise is a simple one: ignore all the usual arguments about global warming. Instead focus on the climate change polices that have arisen on the back of all the theoretical gobbledygook. Just ask; do these things work, what difference do they make?

No difference at all, is the short answer.

Actually, that’s not quite right; government initiatives make a difference alright, but for the worse. Green taxes, the renewable energy option built into electricity bills, generates windfall profits for the energy companies and makes pricing altogether more volatile; bio fuels inflate food costs; renewable energy plans involve a huge waste of resources while making supply ever less secure; windmills transfer profits to the owners of land, transfer profits from the productive to the unproductive sector of the economy; and the only green jobs that are created are for bureaucrats and lobbyists. Oh, sorry, that’s not true: there are also the jobs that are created in the Third World, as companies, overburdened with costs and regulations, move elsewhere.

Sinclair concludes that not only will the various green policies adopted fail to reduce carbon emissions but they will also have the effect of creating a prolonged economic depression in the developed world. I suspect that the Chinese have a close interest here.

The title, incidentally, is a reference to Queen Marie Antoinette and her supposed comment about cakes as a substitute for the absence of bread. Here we are, the new peasants, taxed to perdition to support a distant and out-of-touch court, a new Versailles where all sorts of lobbyists, environmentalists and green activists gather to eat up the produce of the nation. As William Norton wrote recently in Prospect, unelected cartels run an irrational system that does not work even on its own terms but out of which they all do very nicely indeed.

Do I hear the sound of tumbrels? Wishful thinking, or I can only wish that our benighted politicians were not quite so stupid.

The Perils of Finn

2011-10-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

Here I am at the top of another mountain, having climbed Phineas Redux, the forth in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series. It’s really the sequel to Phineas Finn, the second in the set, though it follows on from The Eustace Diamonds, its immediate predecessor.

It was suggested that I read the Phineas novels back to back. But, closely related as they are, I preferred to follow the author’s own footsteps. I’m glad that I did because there is a reasonably important overlap with The Eustace Diamonds, one arising from the disreputable love life of Lizzie Eustace, which has a fairly significant impact on the fate of Finn!

The further I travel the more I warm to Trollope. I’ve come quite a way now from Can You Forgive Her?, the first in the set, where the author came across to me as something of an obsessive eccentric, particularly concerning the question of electoral reform. The ballot, oh the ballot, how tired I was of the ballot! With each step he seems to me to have become progressively more relaxed, less intrusive, more inclined to allow his characters to work out their own destiny in their own way, characters that have become ever more fully rounded.

And what characters they are. What a wonderful schemer Glencora Palliser is, generous to her friends but cat-like in the defence of her own interests, in the interests of her family and the inheritance rights of her son. Yes, Phineas Redux is a political novel, far more so than its predecessor, but it’s increasingly obvious to me that the politics of power and the politics of property, essentially the main theme of The Eustace Diamonds, are intimately related in Trollope’s mind, as they were intimately related in the mind of the Victorian upper classes. Wealth, political power, love, marriage, property and ambition are all dimensions of a complicated game of social advancement.

So, act two: enter Phineas, stage left. That is to say he has returned from Ireland, where his inconvenient wife has conveniently died. Sorry, that sounds a little more cynical than I had intended. ‘Our hero’, as the author refers somewhat irritatingly to his character, though not as much as the first time around, is suitably sobered, and matured, by the experience. The young man in a hurry is no longer in quite such a hurry.

Altogether he is more sober, more reflective, than he was in Phineas Finn, though to begin with no less ambitious. In the course of the novel he is destined to become more reflective still, being caught up in a personal crisis that bring a significant shift in his perceptions of political advancement.

I’m being cryptic but I think the point of a review is to whet the appetite of a potential reader rather than précis the plot! Let me just say that ‘our hero’ finds a way back into political life at a time when politics was money. Finn has no money but he has charm, he has good looks, he has intelligence and, most important of all, he has connections, particularly with the most politically influential people in the novel – the women! Most important of all there is Lady Glencora, now the Duchess of Omnium, and her circle, which includes the talented and enigmatic Madame Max Goesler.

In climbing the greasy pole one can scarcely avoid attracting enemies along the way, those who wish to climb faster. Finn’s enemy, and his potential nemesis, is Mister Bonteen, notwithstanding the fact that they both belong to the Liberal Party. Actually I think that it’s a general truism in politics: one’s opponents are on the other side; one’s enemies are on the same side. Rivalry, after all, rather than principle, makes for a deadlier hatred. Finn’s rivalry with Bonteen has the effect of frustrating his desire for office, undermined by a whispering campaign over his ‘soundness’. It was to be potentially even more deadly when Bonteen is found murdered and Finn finds himself in the dock of the Old Bailey on trial for his life.

It is not just ‘our hero’ who is brought back in Phineas Redux; all of the characters familiar from Phineas Finn are there. Apart from Glencora and Madame Max there is the Lord Chiltern, now married to Violet Effingham, once the subject of Finn’s own amorous interest; Lady Laura Kennedy, living apart from Robert, her morbidly religious husband, an archetype dour Scot, who descends steadily into madness and death as the novel proceeds; and Quintus Slide, the slimy editor of The People’s Banner, who attempts to destroy Finn with a series of insinuations about his relationship with Lady Laura.

The bond between Laura and Phineas, strong and stronger, on the one side, weak and weakening on the other, is one of the central tensions of the novel. He once loved her; he once proposed to her, a proposal that was rejected, though she loved him, in favour of wealth, wealth that was to be accompanied by misery. But just as Finn has outgrown her she has not outgrown him, descending into morbid forms of attraction, a contrast in every way with the practical Madame Max, who performs an invaluable service for him in his hour of greatest need.

I enjoyed this novel tremendously; I enjoyed the political and personal nuances and the interplay between them both. Trollope is a master of words, of character, of simple descriptive power, which shows in all sorts of ways, even so far as his treatment of the hunting themes, in which he excels. Come to think of it that’s another way of reading this book, as kind of fox hunt, with Phineas Finn at one point as the bigger quarry. He makes it safely to the covert - I don’t think I’m giving too much away in saying that - safe in the arms, and the wealth, of Madame Max.

So, yes, another literary Munro bagged; two more to go – The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children. Beyond that range I can detect The Chronicles of Barsetshire in the distance, another dimension of Trollope’s oeuvre and another dimension of Victorian politics.

But I’m going to take time out. I have a trip to Egypt coming up, so all of my extra mural reading is shifting in that direction. From a serial by Anthony Trollope I’m now beginning a serial by Naguib Mahfouz, taking me from nineteenth century England to twentieth century Egypt in one swift step. The road goes ever on. :-)

Il Duce and the Naked Princess

2011-10-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

There is a scene in Nixon, the biopic directed by Oliver Stone, recording the former president’s historic trip to China, accompanied by Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State. During an interview with Mao Zedong, Kissinger, whose reputation clearly travelled ahead of him, was pointedly asked how a fat man like him got so many women, rather ironic considering what we now know about the appalling red hypocrite. “Power, Mr Chairman”, he responded, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

I was reminded of this on reading recently about the sexual conquests of a fat, short and bald man – Benito Mussolini. These included Claretta Petacci, almost thirty years younger than Il Duce, loyal enough to join him in death. But now comes a surprise: evidence has been uncovered claiming that his mistresses also included Marie Jose of Piedmont, wife of Umberto II and the last queen of Italy.

There were certainly rumours of a relationship in the 1930s, when the Belgian-born Marie was still the crown princess. Evidence of a kind, I suppose, was provided by Petacci herself, who recorded in her diary that the princess made an attempt to seduce Mussolini, even swimming naked in his presence, which, so he assured his mistress, he found “repulsive.” Yes, sure.

The new evidence, if it can be considered as evidence, is really not that much more substantial. It comes in a letter from Romano, one of Mussolini’s sons, to Antonio Terzi, the former deputy editor of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Although written forty years ago it was only recently published in an Italian magazine. For some reason it was never used by Terzi, now dead, and only discovered when his own son was searching through his archives. In this Romano writes;

I can in good faith confirm that often in our house the relationship between my father and Maria Jose, both political and romantic, was spoken of, I can tell you with sincerity that my mother was considerably more explicit – between my father and the then princess of Piedmont there was a brief period of intimate relations, which I believe was then called off by my father.

All I can say is that the relationship may indeed have been ‘spoken of’ but this is just another rumour rather than conclusive proof. Besides the suggestion that there was a ‘political relationship,’ along with the romantic, tends to undermine the document’s credibility. Almost alone among the royal family, Marie was always sceptical of both Mussolini and Fascism. During the Second World War she was an important conduit between the Allies and the Axis power, a British diplomat going so far as to describe her as the only member of the royal family with sound political judgement.

Although this letter may enhance still further Mussolini’s reputation as a sexual predator, just it traduces the good name of the late Marie Jose, it adds nothing to our understanding of the man or the times. It may, though, just add a little to our understanding of the political psychology of a country which rather admires leaders with a certain macho reputation. How else does one explain the ability of Silvio Berlusconi to survive sexual scandal after sexual scandal, even so far as a certain Ruby the Heart Stealer? But that’s another story altogether! (Oh, if you must know Google this – Bunga Bunga and the Heart Stealer.)

Veni, Vidi, Vici

2011-09-29T15:53:00.000-07:00

I was ‘persuaded' (much pouting and nagging!)to go and see The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt’s sci-fi blockbuster presently wowing the masses. The thing is I’m not all that keen on this kind of hairy genre, all the less keen having, some time ago, seen Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, a risible remake of an 1968 original. I really did not expect much better than a silly script and actors prancing around in pantomime simian costumes.

How wrong I was; how good this movie is, making some serious points in a gripping and marvellously entertaining fashion. The special effects are a wonder to behold: I’m told that none of the apes were actually apes! The original movie, directed by Franklin J Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston, also had a serious point to make, though in that BCSE age– Before Convincing Special Effects – people striking pompous attitudes while dressed in gorilla and chimpanzee costumes makes it almost impossible to watch without laughing.

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a prequel, a foretaste of things to come, as the human world mutates into a simian one. It reflects the anxieties of this age, just as the 1968 movie did of that age. Then the preoccupation was with the big questions of racial discrimination and hatred, all against a background of nuclear Armageddon. Now the chief focus is on the dangers of biotechnology and genetic manipulation; the dire consequences, in other words, that could arise from humanity’s God-substituting arrogance.

The movie is not set in a possible future but a likely present, where animal experimentation has an accepted part to play, not only in the pursuit of science but also in the pursuit of profit. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist working for a pharmaceutical company in Calafornia, researching into a cure for Alzheimer’s, a noble task made all the more noble and immediate in that Charlie, his own father (John Lithgow), is suffering from the disease, eating away at his personality and his intellect.

Less noble is the experimentation on chimpanzees captured in the wild, one of whom, Bright Eyes, gets smart and smarter, and then – apparently –goes mad, after being used as a test subject for a new wonder drug. The director of the project (David Oyelowo), much less interested in humanity than profit, orders the destruction of all the chimps when the experiment goes wrong. There is one survivor, Bright Eye’s baby, whom Rodman smuggles out of the institute to raise as his own. This chimp he calls Caesar, a hint of things to come, of Rubicons to be crossed.

Caesar, the star of the show, is magnificently played by Andy Serkis, the Gollum of Lord of the Rings, cut down in ape dimensions. What I mean to say is that this is not his first outing in simian shape; that was in the 2005 version of King Kong. So, from super-sized gorilla to super-brained chimp went the devolution! Some of the best scenes in the movie involve the emotional bonding between Caesar and Charlie Rodman, both of whom continue to be subject to Will’s now illicit wonder drug experiments.

As Caesar matured from boisterous infant to surly and inquiring teenager I was reminded of some lines from Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden. Yes, this was Caesar, half devil and half child, the greater devil when he sees Charlie being attacked in the street, launching his own reprisal, which leads to his incarceration in a kind of ape San Quentin run by Tom Landon (Brian Cox) and his son Dodge (Tom Felton), who turn out to be an unlikable and cruel pair of ape-like humans.

The end result is a prison break come ape rising (Caesar as Spartacus!), with humanity, now suffering from a bloody nose (hold that in mind for a sequel; clearly an I am Legend super pandemic is on the way) getting a bloody nose from assorted chimps, gorillas and orang-utans in a battle on the Golden Gate Bridge. At this point you should be well immersed in species treason, urging on the apes, led by a now talking Caesar. Taking a final farewell with Rodman, his erstwhile foster father, he and his ape army disappear into the forests of California. Human hubris, callousness and cruelty have carried lethal repercussions.

Yes, sure, take this message, if you will, or simply see The Rise of the Planet of the Apes as an enjoyable piece of roller-coasting escapism, a high class low class movie, with ups and downs to thrill one by turns. Caesar came, Caesar saw; I was conquered.

The Mirror of Mediocrity

2011-09-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

Virtually the first column I make for when the Spectator thumps through my letterbox on Fridays is that by Rod Liddle, whom I once described as the thinking woman’s chav; yes, I’m the thinking woman and he is the chav! I may not always agree with what he says but he writes in a compelling, trenchant style, invariably telling it as it is, no punches held, no holds barred, no kicks disallowed.

Last month he wrote several pieces I most assuredly agreed with, all in the aftermath of London’s August madness. I’m thinking in particular of an article headed Our children urgently need less self-esteem. In this he takes his departure from the assumption that has haunted educational and social policy for decades, namely that there is no such thing as failure, that children, regardless of potential, or lack of potential, need more self-esteem. No, they do not, he wrote, they need to have the self-esteem sucked out of them because “they have way, way too much of it.”

It begins with schooling, or what passes for schooling in the abysmal public sector. Teachers are in retreat, more and more circumscribed in what they can do and say. They dare not tread on self-esteem. Children, Liddle writes, are not corrected when they misspell, not told that they are falling short of a standard because there is no standard for them to fall short of. Emphasis on hard knowledge is giving way to soft interpretation, to a gloss all too often of simple ignorance.

Apparently a former teacher wrote to the Spectator, complaining of the climate of lies in which “children believe that they can get away with anything.” In other words, if anything goes wrong in their lives it’s someone else’s fault: their teachers, or the police, or society. They are the victims of an educational philosophy based not on learning and the discipline of learning, not on what is right and what is wrong, but ‘bringing out’ even if what is brought out is arrant rubbish, all choices being equal. Here, Rod, speak for yourself;

This is a statement of what is wrong with our schools, but it is not much of one, and it exists alongside the insistence that any form of elitism must be wrong by definition, because all outcomes are sort of perfectly OK.

This is the kind of thing that really makes me mad, this lowest common denominator approach to life, the celebration of idiocy and the damning of excellence. I believe in elites; I do not accept for a moment that we are all born equal; some are meant to be lavatory cleaners just as others are meant to be rocket scientists.

We have, if you like, a kind of Brave New World which serves neither cleaners nor scientists, for all are reduced to a lumpy medium. There are no Alphas any more and no Epsilons; just a mass of undifferentiated Gammas. It’s the world of ever increasing academic inflation, a world in where university entrance is believed to be a right rather than a privilege, the world of Big Brother, and I mean the ghastly TV show, holding up the mirror of mediocrity, a reflection of what we have become

I’m offering Rod the final word with thanks for the inspiration, thanks for telling it like it is. Right on, comrade!

So by my reckoning the last thing we want is top raise the self-esteem of the inner city kids who might one day end up smashing down their local JJB Sports shop and nicking the trainers. None of the hooded imbeciles I heard seemed terribly short of confidence or self-assurance or self-esteem; it oozed out of them like pus, along with self-righteousness. They still do not think that they have done anything wrong; they are unfamiliar with the concept that something can be ‘wrong.’

The Manufacturer, his Wife, her Angel, and his Whore

2011-09-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

I’m about to write a review of a novel I finished at the weekend. First I want to say a word or two about book reviewers, or rather about the Grub Street hacks that George Orwell conjured up in his essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer. I’ve no idea if this is an accurate portrait or not, but the brush strokes are bold and the colours vivid.

There he is, that poor debased soul, paid by the word, sent a package of books, some of impossible length, all to be dissected within the tightest possible deadline. It’s important not to be too negative because the reviewer’s income, and part of the income of the paper or journal he writes for, depends on the goodwill of publishers and the indulgence of readers. So, out come the clichés, all marching to order:

Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases — ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc. etc.’ — will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go. Meanwhile another wad of ill-assorted, unappetizing books will have arrived by post. So it goes on. And yet with what high hopes this downtrodden, nerve-racked creature started his career, only a few years ago.

I rarely come to books on fist publication. By the time I buy my copy - most often in paperback - they have been gutted and filleted, with the choicest cuts laid out, as on a fishmonger’s slab, across the outside and inside covers. Nothing negative, you understand; no, it’s hyperbole here, superlative there, all slightly hysterical stuff about the best book ever written.

Sometimes it becomes laughable in the weight of sheer absurdity. A year or so ago I read The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell’s Second World War epic, a grossly overrated novel which one reviewer, in a transport of banal stupidity, compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Now I hold another in my hand, Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the book I've finished, a novel of Victorian times, which might conceivably have appeared under the title The Manufacturer, his Wife, her Angel, and his Whore. The reference here is, of course to The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, a movie directed by Peter Greenaway.

The praise is lavish, all the best fillets from the most glowing reviews. It’s ‘a cracking read’, ‘wildly entertaining’, ‘unbelievably pleasurable’, ‘a masterpiece’, ‘an epic’, ‘extremely sophisticated’, ‘alluringly readable’, and so on and so blah and so blah. Some of the reviewers are named, not all Orwell’s literary proletariat by any means.

Yes, I came late, and I confess a certain weary cynicism has set in, a strong temptation to shout “Look, see; the emperor has no clothes; he’s naked”, all in my childish naïveté. No, what I will say is that this is an indifferent big book, over eight hundred pages, with a good small book struggling to get out.

So, there you have it, the little girl’s view: The Crimson Petal and the White is overlong and overwritten, a simple theme that carries far too much weight, a Gothic cathedral without the flying buttresses. Careful; it might just collapse in on itself. Once the critical adulation and the hype have finally passed away I’m convinced that it will pass into the literary canon as just another good bad book.

I came to it lately, as I have said, and via a BBC adaptation shown earlier this year, which I enjoyed immensely. A reading of the novel managed to tell me little more than the Beeb dramatisation did in four hours, which might tell you something about self-indulgent writers and lazy editors!

My goodness, here I am, a few hundred words later and I’ve yet to say anything about the contents or the style of Faber’s magnum opus! It’s a Victorian novel; that is to say it is Victorian in style as well as in theme and content, the sort of leisurely exploration that might have been written in that age, though with forms of language and licence allowed by our less censorious times.

The author is present himself as a sort of tour guide, holding high his umbrella for the sheep, sorry, readers to follow on – “If you are bored beyond endurance, I can only offer my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death." Now, who could resist that? Actually, it isn’t really a ‘dirty book’, Bleak House free from Victorian forms of restraint. In some ways it’s quite coy, fucking quickly fucked, with none of the excess of the actual underground literature of the time.

For a big book there is surprisingly small cast. There is William Rackham and his wife, Agnes, mad, morbid and neurotic; Mrs. Rochester not dangerous enough to be confined in the attic. There is Sugar, the prostitute who becomes his mistress and then, with an abrupt fracture in verisimilitude, the governess of Sophie, his neglected daughter. There is morbidly religious Henry, William’s older brother, and Emmeline Fox, the widow on a mission, whom Henry wants to join in spiritual or carnal union, though he has difficulty in making up his mind which. Then there are the incidentals, like the rather sinister Doctor Curlew, Emmeline’s father, Mrs. Castaway, Sugar’s heartless mother, and Bodley and Ashwell, William’s disreputable friends, a sort of Mutt and Jeff act joined, seemingly, at the hip, the one as absurd as the other.

I persevered right to the end; I always persevere unless a book is truly dire. The Crimson Petal and the White is far from that; it’s just overblown and overhyped. Agnes is mad, though why she is mad, or the source of her mania, is never revealed. I actually lost all interest in her quite early on, and why Sugar felt compelled to read her tiresomely dull diaries quite escaped me.

It was on page 657 of the book where everything seemed to fall into place. Sugar, the Crimson Petal, is working her way through the said diaries, dairies that Agnes, the White Petal, has buried in the garden of the Rackham house –“She reads a page, two pages, two and a half pages, but the Agnes Rackham revealed in them is an intolerable irritation, a vain and useless creature whom the world would not miss for an instant if she were removed.” In my only marginalia I note that that would seem to be the key to the whole novel!

The more I write the more negative this is becoming, which wasn't really my intention when I started. Now I was tempted to write that The Crimson Petal and the White is a vain and rather silly book, but it’s not; it’s actually quite good in parts, rich in period detail, a tribute to better writers, better books and a better age. Faber is a good writer, just not a very good one, a good story teller, just not a very good one. To me his Victorian-tribute novel reads like the work of a kind of Daisy Ashford, trying to imitate an adult world with results that are both amusing and ever so slightly ridiculous. I agree with one of the reviewers on Amazon. I, too, would rather have Dickens, even without the swearing…and the fucking.

Don’t expect to see any of this across the dust jacket of a future edition!

Reflections on a Great Man

2011-09-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

On Mamayev Kurgan, the hill overlooking the Russian city of Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, there stands an enormous statue of a female figure wielding a sword, raised into the sky. This is The Motherland Calls, commemorating the epic struggle for national survival at the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the pivotal moments of the Second World War. On the wall leading to the mausoleum underneath the statue you will find carved in huge letters the following words;

An iron wind hit them in the face, yet still they came on. A superstitious dread must have seized the foe: ‘Were these men really mortal?’

Inside a Russian soldier answers in letters tooled in gold around the base of the dome;

Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.

Neither outside nor inside the monument will you find out who wrote these words. If you ask the guide they give a general answer or simply pretend not to know. Actually, they are the from In the Direction of the Main Attack, an article by Vasily Grossman, published in Red Star on 20 November, 1942, the day after the Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad began.

Grossman was one of the greatest of all war correspondents, particularly popular with the soldiers - officers and enlisted ranks - simply because he wrote in honest, straight-forward and gripping terms, free of bombast and the kind of inflated hyperbole usually favoured by the Soviet press. He had that rare talent only granted to the very best journalists – an understanding of the importance of detail, of the small significances overlooked by those who have been mesmerised by the ‘big picture.’

In addition he had a huge amount of personal integrity, a commitment to honesty and a commitment to the truth. It was this that lead to a steady distancing from the Soviet state, from a system based on ugly lies and blatant hypocrisy, moral corruption of the worst kind. That’s why his name is not mentioned on the Stalingrad monument, why he is still a figure that incites a degree of disapproval in Putin’s Russia, a country which, once again, sees virtue in the likes of Stalin and – for the love of God – Lavrenti Beria, the one-time head of the KGB, that jackal of the human race.

Grossman was so much more than a mere reporter. He is a great novelist in a country of great novelists. Last year I read Life and Fate, his master work set during and immediately after the Second World War. I was overwhelmed by the experience, not having previously been acquainted with any of his work, an omission I have since made good. This novel, one of sweeping vision, is now being serialised by BBC Radio in a week-long celebration of Grossman’s work.

During the war Grossman continually sought solace in Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. The title of his own novel is in deliberate homage to Tolstoy. What Tolstoy did for the Patriotic War against Napoleon Grossman did for the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Both men created Homeric epics for the age.

But of the two, though it some will consider it sacrilege to say so, I think Life and Fate is the greater, simply because the author is less intrusive, or less obviously intrusive, than Tolstoy, who offers extended and rather tiresome reflections on his own personal philosophy of history, interventions that interfere with the books narrative flow.

Life and Fate seems to me to be just as sweeping but a lot more human at the level of detail. It’s also the most biting indictment of Stalin and Stalinism that I have ever read or am ever likely to read. This was a book so explosive that it was actually ‘arrested’ by the KGB, notwithstanding the fact that it was submitted for publication during the period of Khrushchev’s so-called thaw in the early 1960s. But one copy remained undetected, finally being published in the West after Grossman’s death.

Although the reaction was initially quite muted, the reputation of the novel, and of Grossman as a writer, has grown steadily over the years. Life and Fate is not simply about war or politics or struggle or treachery or disaster or adversity or triumph; it’s a book which celebrates truth and kindness, held up as the greatest standard of all, greater than the smelly littlie orthodoxies, as George Orwell put it, that contended so hard in the last century for the human soul.

I Give you Che Juju

2011-09-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

I can remember the moment exactly, the moment when my suspicion of Nelson Mandela, the former terrorist who became South Africa’s living saint, spilled over into outright dislike. It was 2005, at the end of a Make Poverty History rally in London’s Trafalgar Square, where Bob Geldof, the boom town rat and abject acolyte, declared him to be president of the world. Seemingly the world agrees, at least in the shape of the United Nations, which launched 18 July, Saint Nelson’s birthday, as an international day in his honour.

If only Mandela could have done for the world what he and his cohorts in the African National Congress (ANC), a party seemingly set to rule in perpetuity, have done for South Africa. What did they do, what have they done? Why, drawing on the observation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they stopped the gravy train of corruption only long enough for them to get on.

If anything the situation for a great many in the black community is even worse than it was in the days of the old apartheid state. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but that’s OK because a lot of the rich now have black faces, so it must be better, this inequality of opportunity, this rainbow kleptocracy.

Yes, just as life gets better for President Jacob Zuma and his ANC cronies it gets worse for the majority of ordinary South Africans, black and white alike. Under the old regime infrastructural services for the black majority were bad, that’s true, but that has to be better than virtually no services at all; for no service is what they are getting.

Amazingly some 80% of South African municipalities are now bankrupt due to misspending spurred on by the demon of corruption. Power shortages and the abysmal state of repair of many of the public roads have made the problem even worse, all this in a country with crippling rates of personal taxation.

Somebody has to be blamed for this; some scapegoat has to be found. Not the corrupt, inefficient and venal ANC, absolutely not; rather there is an easier target, the target favoured by Julius Malema, head of the ANC’s Youth Wing. It is they who are to blame. Who are they, you may wonder? They are the whites, the people, according to Malema, who “stole our land”, who are “criminals and should be treated that way.”

Malema, widely known as Juju, was not so long ago the butt of national humour, after the school results of the ANC’s leadership were leaked on the internet, showing him to be particularly dim. Bad Juju may be an academic dud but he is not stupid. He’s managed to carve a nice little niche for himself as the ANC’s number one demagogue and rabble-rouser. He is the new voice of the townships, the voice of the dispossessed, labouring under the burden of frustrated hopes, labouring under the disappointments of a rainbow nation that has made them even poorer than they were under apartheid.

It’s no longer possible to blame past injustices for present wrongs; no, present wrongs are all the fault of white people, or those white people who still own businesses and farms. Malema, looking to the example of Zimbabwe, where his hero Robert Mugabe has all but destroyed a once flourishing economy, is calling for the expropriation of white-owned mines and land without compensation.

Some may consider this as all so much verbiage, but Malema, a power to be reckoned with, has been suggested as a future president of South Africa, even by the present incumbent. So, if you want to know South Africa’s future look to Zimbabwe’s present, look to the viscera of a goose, plundered in a futile search for a horde of golden eggs.

This radical, this darling of the masses, recently took to sporting a Che Guevara-style beret, declaring that “Cuban revolutionaries should be saluted. Because of their ideological clarity and willingness to fight, millions were released from colonial subjugation”. The huddled masses yearning for more of the good life, any of the good life, lap up this kind of stuff. But, as Rian Malan wrote recently in the Spectator, they are poorly educated and unlikely to know that an illiterate Johannesburg gardener earns more in a day than the average Cuban does in a month

Let’s look a little more closely at Che Juju, racist and revolutionary. Beret or not he is no aesthete, no paragon of virtue, no sea-green incorruptible. “He poses as such a figure”, Malan writes, “but in person he resembles nothing so much as a capitalist porker grown fat on shady dealings” Pretty much in keeping, then, with the tone being set by the rest of the ANC, South Africa’s oligarchy in perpetuity.

Apparently he earns around $5000 a month as president of the Youth League, a decent income, beyond the dreams of his rag-tag army, but nowhere near enough to explain his lavish life-style. Fiona Forde, an Irish journalist, recently published An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘New’ ANC, in which she details his considerable assets. He has more than eight known properties, including a farm and a $2million mansion in Johannesburg. He recently demolished one house valued at $700,000, to be replaced with one at an estimated cost of $2.8million, complete with a bunker (Hitler style?)

His expensive tastes run to designer suits, several Breitling wristwatches at $17,000 each and Luis Vuitton manbags. All gifts from friends, who also offer him the use of several luxury cars, he told Forde. Not friends and comrades from the townships, one assumes. This self-styled “economic freedom fighter” is now being investigated by the revenue services, the office of the public protector and the elite crime-fighting unit known as the Hawks.

On this evidence, and other examples like it, South Africa is a predatory state on its way to becoming a banana republic. That’s not my view, well it is, but they are not my words. They are the words of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

Ironically, while he makes life better for himself, Malema’s power-hungry demagogy is making life even worse for his benighted and resentful supporters. His rhetoric about nationalisation and property seizures is frightening off foreign investment. According to a recent UN report, South Africa’s share of foreign direct investment fell 70% last year from 2009. That same year it overtook Brazil as the country with the widest gap between rich and poor. Unemployment increases still further, particularly among the young; resentment increases, hatred increases; Juju, the ‘saviour’ of the poor, waxes fat and wealthy on the results

Meanwhile, at rallies, Malema and his supporters like a rousing chorus or two of Shoot the Boer, a song from former days which incites ‘hate speech’, so South Africa’s Equality Court ruled recently. But the singing goes on as, sadly, does the practice. In one of the most horrific examples, Attie Potgieter, a white farm manager, was stabbed and slashed more than 150 times, with implements as varied as a machete and a garden fork. The pathologist concluded that he had been “tortured to death.” His wife and three-year-old daughter were killed with a single bullet in the backs of their heads.

Potgieter and his family now join more than a 1000 others from white farming families who have been killed since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, on average 70 a year. These are the official figures. The true number is calculated to be closer to 3000. But that’s just part of the picture in a country that now has one of the worst crime rates in the world, a country were 21,000 people are murdered and 52,000 women raped every year.

That’s the world Nelson Mandela was president of in time past; that’s the world that Julius Malema may be president of in time to come. You may care to think of that next July when you celebrate, at the behest of the UN, the achievements of Geldof’s tawdry saint.

This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.