Ana the Imp

Witches and Goths

2010-01-06T16:28:00.001-08:00

I’m not sure how well-known the Goth band Inkubus Sukkubus are outside of England, indeed if they are known at all. But for me their music is something truly special, unique in the best sense of the word. I fell in love with the band when I was about thirteen, the same time when I fell in love with witchcraft itself, with the traditions, the magic and the wonder of witchcraft. Here are a couple of my favourite tracks. Wytches is particularluy good.

Wootton Bassett-the Pulse of my Nation

2010-01-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago a contact of mine happened to mention here that their was a Facebook page dedicated to protesting against the proposed march of an extremist group-one I refuse to name-through the streets of Wootton Bassett, a little town in Wiltshire, a town that has received the bodies of dead soldiers returning from Afghanistan. At the time he mentioned this it had around half a million members. I joined as 535,410. When I checked this evening membership stood at almost 666,666.

There are three points I would like to make here. First, I think that people have a right to protest no matter how repellent I happen to find the cause that they have embraced. I am opposed now to the war in Afghanistan and what I consider to be the fraudulent reasons that keeps our army in that wretched country. I also believe that the principal victims of the campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been local people, Muslims, mostly killed, I have to say, by other Muslims. So, yes, people have a right to protest against this war. The frontier comes when a democratic right to express a view turns into a gross and shabby provocation.

The second point is that I am deeply distrustful of sudden flash mobs, of internet campaigns, of what I think of as the Twitter charge. I’ve written about this phenomenon here. I have never joined in any of these mass virtual uprisings...until now. Why did I do so? Because that little town has been transfigured by the way in which it has received the dead, those boys, those beautiful boys. Every time I see them honoured on their silent return home I can’t help but cry. This is no affectation. I have before me a whole panorama of possibilities, of opportunities and challenges. I have a future of what seems to be endless time. Then I see some futures closed forever, futures of those even younger than I am. It winds me, brings me to understand that time is not endless, my time, their time.

Third, I come from a family with strong associations with the military. Politicians may be loathsome but soldiers do their duty; they go where they are ordered to go. Patriotism may be a traduced concept now in a nation that seems to have no clear idea of itself, but it lives if nowhere else in the fallen, in these boys whose remains process through Wootton Bassett, who are received with such quiet dignity and respect, beyond politics and beyond passion. To attempt to use this place to make a political gesture is ugly beyond comparison. More; so far as I am concerned it’s treasonable, an attempted show by people who owe this country everything and give it nothing.

So, for these reasons I added my name to the mass protest, I dare say joining with people who have less noble motives. It does not matter: I had to do it. I don’t think these things make any difference but it’s a kind of pulse, our pulse, my pulse. I am proud to be 535,410.

Making Martyrs

2010-01-07T16:03:00.000-08:00

One aspect of the career of Sir Thomas More-Saint Thomas More-that tends to escape popular attention was his enthusiasm for the persecution of heretics, because it is not at all in accordance with the saintly 'Man for all Seasons.'

In religious and intellectual terms More was highly orthodox. The primary message of Utopia, for example, is the need for order and discipline, not liberty. The society described is totalitarian, about as far removed from present day ideals of freedom as it is possible to get. This is a world where attempts to discuss public policy outwith officially allowed forums are punishable by death.

So, More placed great value on the attainment of harmony and on a strict hierarchy of order. All challenges to uniformity and hierarchy were perceived as dangers; and in practical terms the greatest danger, as he saw it, was the challenge that heretics posed to the established faith. The most important thing of all for More was to maintain the unity of Christendom. The Lutheran Reformation, with all of the prospects of fragmentation and discord, was for him a feared and fearful thing.

His own personal counter-attack began in the manner that one would expect from a writer. He assisted Henry VIII with the production of the Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a polemical response to Martin Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. When Luther replied with Contre Henricum Regem Anglie, with all of the venom and vulgarity of which he was capable, More was given the task of firing off a counter-broadside, which he did in Responsio ad Lutherum. Just as violent and as vulgar as Luther, this book deepened More's commitment to the forms of order and discipline outlined in Utopia. Heresy was a disease, a threat to the peace and unity of both church and society.

More was more than a writer: he was a lawyer, a political and one of the King's chief councillors, so he was able to give his hatred of heresy some practical direction. His early actions included aiding Cardinal Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books being imported into England. He also assisted in the production of a Star Chamber edict against heretical preaching. Further literary polemics appeared under his name; but his greatest opportunity came in October 1529, when he was appointed Lord Chancellor of England.

The task before him was simple enough "Now seeing that the king's gracious purpose in this point, I reckon that being his unworthy chancellor, it appertaineth...to help as much as in me is, that his people, abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from infection."

Heresy was a cancer, and could only be stopped by burning, of books and of people. In June 1530 it was decreed that offenders were to be brought before the King's Council, rather than being examined by their bishops, the practice hitherto. Actions taken by the Council got ever more severe. In 1531, one Richard Bayfield, a book pedlar, was burned at Smithfield. Further burnings followed. In The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, yet another polemic, More took particular delight in the execution Sir Thomas Hitton, describing him as "the devil's stinking martyr". The extraordinary persecution only came to a (temporary) stop when More resigned as Lord Chancellor in May 1532. It was the end of Utopia.

Gnawing at Bones

2010-01-07T15:45:00.001-08:00

I’ve always believed it wrong to perceive of Islam as a monolith. There are acute divisions with the faith community beyond the obvious centuries-old conflict between the Sunni and the Shiite. The Taliban represents not just a fundamentalist counter-attack on the west but a challenge also to all alternative paths in Islam, including Sufism, a gentler, more tolerant and far more spiritually-based tradition.

I’ve picked up on some of what’s been happening in Pakistan, things that have largely escaped attention in the west, from a reading of Spiritual Awakening, an essay by William Dalrymple in the Christmas edition of the New Statesman.

As a physical sign of its intolerance last year the Taliban blew up the shrine of Rahman Baba, a seventeenth century Pashtun poet and saint, at the foot of the Khyber Pass. For centuries poets and musicians had gathered here to praise the saint through their art. The rot began ten years ago when a Wahhabi madrasa was built at the end of the track leading to the Sufi shrine. Soon after the students took it upon themselves to halt the allegedly un-Islamic practices of the pilgrims. People were verbally abused and women told to stay at home. Occasional acts of violence followed. Of this the keeper of the shrine said;

Before the Afghan war there was nothing like this. But then the Saudis came with their propaganda to stop visiting the saints, and to stop us preaching ishq [love]. Now this trouble happens more and more frequently.

The end came in March 2009 when dynamite was placed around the dome, completely destroying the inner chamber. In a press release the Taliban blamed the shrine for opening its doors to women and allowing them to pray and seek healing there. Following this there have been other attacks on shrines in areas under the control of the Taliban. Still, if the Sufis of the North-West Frontier are in flight those in Sind are mounting a strong defence, both of their saints and their traditions. One female devotee put it this;

I sometimes feel it is my duty to protect the Sufi saints, just as they have protected me. Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis and Tablighis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is heresy. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the Prophet. Mullahs and Azazeel [Satan] are the same thing.

It seems to me that the best observation on the mind-set of the Taliban was made over two centuries ago by Shah Abdul Latif, another Sufi saint and poet:

Why call yourself a scholar, o mullah?
You are lost in words.

You keep on speaking nonsense,
Then you worship yourself.

Despite seeing God with your own eyes,
You dive into the dirt.

We Sufis have taken the flesh from
The Holy Quran,
While you dogs are fighting with each other.

Always tearing each other apart,
For the privilege of gnawing at the bones.

A New Generation

2010-01-06T16:49:00.000-08:00

I have never understood-I don’t want to understand-the passion shown among certain leftie circles for the beastly Castro regime in Cuba, as repressive and as loathsome as any other dictatorship of any other age, a regime that incarcerates, tortures and oppresses; a regime that sends people as diverse as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses to camps to be‘re-educated.’

Fidel, as much influenced by Adolf Hitler as by Karl Marx, possibly even more influenced in practical terms by the former, may no longer have his fingers directly on the wheels of power, but he’s still there in the background, haunting the meagre Cuban feast rather like the ghost of Banquo. He and his brother Raul, now the public face of the tyranny, look so old, so decrepit, rather like the system they nurtured. I have no doubt that they represent the wave of the past, soon to dash on the breakwater of history. And what is the wave of the future? I would like to think that was best pictured in the shape of the courageous and indomitable Yoani Sánchez, creator of Generación Y, a really super blog about the harsh realities of life in Cuba. http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy

I’ve mentioned Yoani before in a blog headed Generación Y -Exposing the Corruption of Castroism, where I mentioned that, unable to silence her, the authorities had her physically assaulted. Still she talks on under the most difficult of circumstances. The Generación Y blog was blocked in Cuba in March 2008 forcing her to ‘talk blind’. She now emails her contributions and pictures to friends abroad who then post them to the website, though she herself cannot see the results. Of this Yoani has said “There is no censorship that can stop people who are determined to access the internet.” This is the true wonder of the internet-it overcomes silence, it overcomes isolation, something that dictators have always relied upon in the past.

It is precisely because of the actions of the thuggish and frightened Cuban dictatorship that Generación Y, starting in the most unpromising circumstances, is now one of the most influential blogs in the world getting about a million hits a month. In 2008 Yoani was even named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, saying that “under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot; freedom of speech.” Recently Barak Obama himself responded in person to one of her posts.

One measure of her success is that her blog was attacked by Foul Fidel who ‘expressed his grave disappointment that there could be a young person in Cuba today who thinks as she does’. This came soon after she was awarded the 2008 Ortega y Gasset Prize. A response was published on Generación Y, a contribution from Reinaldo Escobar, Yoani’s husband:

The ex-president disapproves of the fact that Yoani accepted this year’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism, arguing that the prize is something that imperialism favours to blow its own horn. I recognise the right of this gentleman to make this comment, but I allow myself to observe that the responsibility implied in receiving a prize is never comparable to that of bestowing one, and Yoani, at least, has never awarded a medal to a corrupt person, a traitor, a dictator or a murderer. I clarify this because I remember perfectly that the author of these reproaches was the one who placed (or commanded to be placed) the ‘Order of Jose Marti’ on the lapels of some of the most terrible and undeserving men possible: Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Nocolae Ceausescu, Todor Zhikov, Gustav Husak, Janos Kadar, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Robert Mugabe, Heng Samrin, Erich Honecker and others that I have forgotten.

Yes, by their friends shall ye know them.

I know what Cuba is like. I’ve been there and I’ve seen how people live. I’ve met economists and other specialists who prefer to work as hotel porters because the gratuities they receive are the only way they can make a living wage. I see these things because I like to travel independently, not being bussed around in tour groups, going to hotels and resorts from which ordinary Cubans are banned. I’ve seen the harassment the people of Havana receive at the hands of the grey-shirted police, who stand on literally every street corner. It’s comforting to know that Generación Y allows the rest of the world to see these things also, to understand that freedom, the freedom to speak one’s mind without fear or intimidation, is the greatest right of all.

The Age of Outrage, or Irish Blasphemers

2010-01-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

Ireland’s new blasphemy law came into force at the turn of the year. So, if you intend to exercise your right to free speech, the right to criticise religion, just don’t do it there; for, if you do, you may very well find yourself poorer by 25,000 Euros.

My own position here is quite clear: I would never knowingly attack or denigrate the faith of others, never knowingly cause offence. But what is one to make of a law that defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion”?

I really don’t know the background here but I wonder if Irish legislators paused to consider that we live in an age of outrage, an age when people are all too eager to take offense against perceived insults, intentional or otherwise. What a backward step in this second decade of the twenty-first century for a European nation to attempt something as dangerously abstract as silencing people to protect ideas. I offer no apology for this because religion, all religion, is based on an idea or a system of ideas, some good, some bad, some dreadful.

I’m not an atheist, though my personal beliefs are quite subtle. I despise the likes of Richard Dawkins, an intellectual bully who seems to be advancing old intolerant absolutes in new clothing. I do, however, wish Atheist Ireland, an organisation set up to mount a challenge to this law, Godspeed! They have now published a book of twenty-five quotations guaranteed to cause outrage amongst the outrageable. (Yes, I know it’s a neologism; please don’t be outraged!).

Michael Nugent, the group’s chair, said that it would challenge the law through the courts if charged with blasphemy. In a civilized society, he said, people have the right express and hear ideas about religion even if other people find these ideas to be outrageous. Here are two of Atheist Ireland’s quotations to outrage you;

1. Also it has another name - The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies... But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy - he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered. He makes no distinction between innocent and guilty... What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it

2. There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all... Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require... It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or ‘surrender' as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

The first is by Mark Twain, describing the Bible, and the second by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens might be an easy target but who in their right mind is going to weigh into Mark Twain? :-))

Actually, I find the whole thing slightly amusing. I’m a little surprised that Atheist Ireland can’t also see the humorous side to this fatuous legislation. It’s really no more than a piece of legal window-dressing intended for the multi-cultural age, the age of supermarket faith, pick and choose as you will.

The Irish Constitution previously only offered protection to Christianity, a technical oversight that has now been made good. I assume the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions will have the good sense to ignore Atheist Ireland’s provocation, but what if the offended masses start beating down the door? The sensible thing here would have been to get rid of the anachronism of blasphemy legislation altogether and introduced some measure based on incitement to religious or racial hatred. Never mind: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it…unless you happen to live in Ireland.

Sin

2010-01-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

Sin is all about guilt, at least that’s what I thought until I dipped into Gary Anderson’s Sin: A History. I now know that it’s not about guilt at all: it’s about debt and indebtedness. It’s a singular feature of this book that Anderson has managed to make sin exciting, along with Old Testament exegesis!

Here the key to understanding is metaphor: that sin is a burden to be carried, a debt to be paid, a stain to be cleansed away. Anderson maintains that the way in which sin is understood and perceived determines the manner in which one deals with the consequences. There is in this, he continues, a revolutionary process at work.

In early Judaism sin as a burden to be carried was the dominant theme, expressed in the ritual of the scapegoat, sent into the wilderness carrying all of the transgressions of the community. The change here came in the period of Persian domination between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. The Aramaic languages now became part of religious discourse, opening up new metaphorical visions. Sin was no longer a burden to be expelled but a debt to be settled, rather in the fashion of an economic transaction. For the Israelites the Babylonian Exile became a way of paying off the accumulated debts of the past. Later the Christians were to perceive the sacrifice of Christ in similar terms, the price for centuries of human misdemeanor.

This change had major theological consequences. Human action was now central to the whole equation. It was no longer sufficient to expel sin as a collective into the wilderness and thus out of the sight of God, no, there now had to be acts of personal expiation. Imagine, if you will, divine debit and credit, where one is constantly obliged to pay close personal attention to the balance for fear of that ultimate letter from the celestial bank!

So, good works became an important way of staying in credit. But, perceived in these terms, a problem begins to emerge in the later Christian church; for if sin was a debt that could be paid alms could be given not just to the poor, rather an obsession in the later Middle Ages, but by a less direct route into the bank of the Church itself, which in return guaranteed remission. Thus came the paper indulgences, thus came a kind of spiritual inflation or debasement of the currency of salvation.

The Reformation began as a reaction against this kind of accountancy, swinging the pendulum away to the opposite extreme. Not only were paper indulgences worthless the notion of ‘good works’ went with them. God’s Grace, Luther and others argued, was inscrutable. One’s earthly actions, in other words, had no bearing at all on the divine calculus; one was saved or one was damned, and that was that! Let’s just imagine a world without sin, a world without fear, a world without debt, a world without regret, a world without sin. Yes, let’s imagine a Pagan world!

Englishman

2010-01-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

Over thirty years ago John Hurt played the young Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, a television drama. Now he has reprised the role in An Englishman in New York, a movie about Crisp’s later days in American exile.

Hurt is a consummate performer and he managed to capture something of both the exuberance and the loneliness of a man who had the misfortune to turn into a gay icon. There may be nothing wrong in being gay; there is everything wrong in being an icon! I offer that purely as a personal opinion, of course; the real Crisp seems to have made a profession out of it. His was an existence of affectation and gesture. It seems to me-and I have to be honest-that there was a terrible emptiness, a pointlessness to a life constantly well-presented rather than well-lived. Crisp lived not for others but through the eyes of others. I wear silk therefore I am.

He almost lost his halo, though, when, in one of his question and answer shows in the 1980s he described aids as a ‘gay fad’, a statement he refused to retract despite the negative impact it had on his career as a performer. He certainly came to regret this glib dismissal of one of the great modern crises of the gay community, later making donations to an aids charity.

The essential point here is really quite interesting. For all of his popularity, New York Crisp was really an anachronism, a man from a former age. Gay politics and gay living had moved beyond what he had to offer; himself and only himself. Indeed, the only hostility shown towards him, hostility with potential overtones of violence, was in a gay bar in Manhattan, full of odd pseudo-construction types known as ‘clones’, where he was desperately out of place.

Made for TV, this is far from being a great movie though it does give an enjoyable insight into the later life of a skilled showman and aphorist, a kind of second-class Oscar Wilde, at once glibly clever and patently shallow. John Hurt was excellent in the part, a straight actor who seems to capture his gay model perfectly, in manner and appearance!

Vincent in Word and Image

2010-01-05T16:51:00.001-08:00

I went to Amsterdam last year to visit Vincent and now Vincent is coming to London to visit me! A little later this month a new exhibition of his work opens in the Royal Academy, running until the middle of April. The exciting thing about this show, headed The Real Van Gough: The Artist and his Letters, is that some forty of his letters will also be on display beside sixty-five paintings and thirty drawings. For the emphasis, you see, is on the word as well as the image.

I confess that I don’t know that much about the life of Van Gogh apart from the usual stock images of troubled genius and ear lopper! I’ve never read a biography of the man, though I have tried to understand him as best as I am able through his intense, swirling and penetrating images; a world in motion, a world on fire.

It’s of particular fascination for me to discover that he also loved words, loved to write and express himself in writing. Words impacted on his imagination, on the creative power of his imagination, as well as landscape and people. “Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me”, he wrote, a sentiment he carried further, “One has to learn to read, as one has to learn to see and learn to live.”

Van Gogh read books with the same concentrated intensity that he used in painting. Besides his native Dutch he was also fluent in French and English, reading Shakespeare and Dickens in the original. His favourite Dickens’ novel was Hard Times which is the one that I happen to like the least! Still, I think that Vincent and I would have got on famously, for I also share his love of Flaubert and Maupassant.

More broadly, he seems to have been highly knowledgeable about most contemporary French fiction, reading all of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series and identifying closely with the author’s naturalism. Of these books he wrote to Wilemein, his younger sister, saying that they “…paint life as we feel it ourselves, and thus satisfy the need which we have, that people tell the truth.”

The truth is that Van Gogh as a communicator was too intense for most people in person; too intense for Gauguin, too intense even for Theo, his brother, an art dealer and his main source of financial support. His letters, then, were a way of channelling much of his manic energy into simple imagery and clear ideas, his only really successful mode of communication beyond his art. When he arrived in Arles in 1888, the beginning of his most creative period, brief and overwhelming, he wrote to Theo describing his wonder at his new surroundings;

I notice some magnificent plots in red earth planted with vines, with the mountains in the background of the most delicate lilac. And the landscapes under the snow with the white peaks against the sky as bright as the snow was just like the winter landscapes the Japanese did.

He wanted to paint as Zola wrote, in a natural way, showing life as it flowed around him;

The zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their first communion…the priest in his surplice who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the absinthe drinkers…

I’m certain that this exhibition is destined to achieve its aim, to give a more nuanced view of the man, of his work and of his creative intellect; the man beyond the stereotype of troubled genius and harvester of ear lobes. :-)

Bashing Boney

2010-01-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 had one small but significant effect: it ended a long-standing ban of political caricature in the country. There followed a remarkable and inventive flourishing all directed against the imperious little Frenchman, prints which a direct influence on the better known work of George Cruickshank and Thomas Rowlandson. The artist who had the greatest impact was Ivan Ivanovich Terebenev, whose work in this area I’m only now becoming aware of thanks to Mark Bryant, author of The Napoleonic Wars in Cartoons.

Traditional cartoon images in Russia came in the form of brightly coloured woodcuts known as lubok, featuring animals and mythological themes to pass comment on human activities. In 1720 they were effectively banned by new censorship codes preventing the publication of lubiki which were considered to be an attack on the Orthodox Church, the imperial government or the personal honour of an individual. The ban was lifted after Napoleon’s invasion, when traditional techniques came back into fashion, given a new edge by the influence of western drawing.

Terebenev was among the most creative of the new school, drawing almost fifty satirical prints lampooning the French in the years leading up to his early death in 1815. Carried across the country by printsellers, his work also appeared in journals, in book form and even on fine china. His best known work is Azbuka 1812 goda-A Gift to Children Commemorating the Year 1812-also known as Terebenev’s ABCs, an anthology of anti-Napoleon cartoons.

Such was his influence that his work was redrawn for the British market by Cruikshank, who produced several adaptations of the Russian originals. Trebenev’s 1814 Shepherd and Wolf, which depicts Alexander I as a shepherd holding Napoleon in the shape of a wolf by the nape of the neck while French generals run away was reproduced in England by Rowlandson, who substituted the Prussian general Blücher for the Tsar.

Terebenev had a long afterlife. After the German invasion of Russia in 1941 many of his anti-Napoleon cartoons were republished alongside cartoons mocking Hitler in a collection entitled Russia: Britain’s Ally, 1812-1942. In Russia itself the satirical magazine Krokodil might be said to have continued the lubok tradition reworked by Terebenev, producing parodies of Hitler and the Nazis far more savagely biting than anything ever drawn in the west.

An Execution

2010-01-04T15:50:00.000-08:00

I’ve been rather out of the loop so far as news is concerned, not really paying that much heed to what was going on in the outside world. The one thing that did catch my attention was a report on CNN about the execution of Akmal Shaikh in China for drug smuggling.

To begin with I should make it clear that I am opposed to the death penalty, which seems to me to be altogether barbarous no matter where it is carried out, and no matter by whom; in a democracy like America or in a dictatorship like China. In thinking of it I recall a passage in George Orwell’s essay "A Hanging":

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.

Yes, it is a terrible thing just as a slow death from heroin addiction is a terrible thing. But I offer no broader comment on the particulars of this case, for I do not know all of the circumstances. What I do know is that there are wider issues to be considered, issues that the Labour government with its usual bone-headed stupidity has completely overlooked. Akmal Shaikh was a victim of circumstances and of history, not just of law.

It was once said of the Kaiserreich, the old Germany of Wilhelm II, that it was Europe’s ‘adolescent empire’, an odd combination of aggressive self-assertion and a deep sense of inferiority. China is the ‘adolescent empire’ of the modern world, a country and a system still not at peace with itself. There is still the memory of being bullied by foreigners, of the unequal treaties which forced the Chinese to accept the import of opium, and of extraterritoriality, whereby foreigners were exempt from local laws, not finally lifted until the Second World War.

This is the historically sensitive area into which Gordon Brown and David Miliband were jackbooting: the more pressure they put on the Chinese authorities the more likely the outcome. And for Ivan Lewis, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth office, to declare after the event that China was failing in its ‘basic human rights responsibilities’ is of quite unbelievable stupidity. Has this benighted government only just discovered that there is something wrong with human rights in China?

Let’s be clear: China is governed by a corrupt Communist oligarchy that has no mind to the ‘human rights’ of its own people still less to those of ‘foreign devils.’. This is a country that, after Iran and Saudi Arabia, has the highest rate of judicial executions in the world. It’s absolutely meaningless to preach about ‘human rights’ against this background, Shaikh’s human rights or the human rights of the hundreds of ordinary Chinese executed every year. It’s almost as if Brown’s government is still living the world of the unequal treaties and extraterritoriality, silent on some deaths, vociferous on others.

The adolescent empire will continue on its path, heedless of the ‘voice of reason’, mindful ever of its own interests and the interests of no other. That is the one lesson that clots like Brown, Miliband and Lewis might have taken from the Copenhagen fiasco, even if they remain ignorant of the wider lessons of history

Voyages

2010-01-04T15:42:00.001-08:00

I confess I had never heard of Jorge Semprun, a prominent Spanish writer, politician and former government minister, until I picked up The Long Voyage (Le grand voyage), an autobiographical novel based upon his experiences in the Second World War. The voyage itself, a train journey, is the framework around which this astonishing narrative is constructed, as the author moves back through memory to times past and times future, always returning to a times present, a cattle truck packed full of men, a present which itself is only a memory. The Long Voyage is also available under the English title of The Cattle Truck which seems to me to miss the whole point.

I bought this book because I have a particular interest in Holocaust literature; it was simply another one in a series. But the reading was not quite as I expected. Translated from the original Spanish, the prose is simple, undemonstrative and superbly crafted. Still, this is no simple tale. In a sense there is no beginning, just as there is no end: the novel’s fractured chronology sifts from one event to another, back and forward across memory and time. The immediate voyage is a journey to Buchenwald; the longer voyage is a passage through fragments of the author’s life, a cross-section of seventeen years.

Manuel, as Semprun appears in the novel, is a Spanish communist who fled the country after the victory of Franco. He is later involved in the French Resistance against the Nazis under the code name of Gerard. In 1943 he was captured. He is imprisoned first in France before being transported with over a hundred other men to a destination ‘near Weimar.’ The truck is so crowded that the men are unable to sit down, let alone move around. The horror is compounded by the slowness of the journey, through five days and nights, a journey without food or water, a journey where even air is a premium.

During this time Manuel’s closest companion is a man only ever identified as the ‘guy from Semur.’ He seems strong and in control; he seems like a survivor. It comes as a jolt, then, when Manuel, shifting between events, simply says that the ‘guy from Semur’ was ‘left behind’ in the boxcar, that it was there that his particular journey came to an end. Later in the narrative we discover that he died on the last night, as the train approached Buchenwald, his final words to Manuel being “Don’t leave me pal.”

Yes, a terrible journey, but there are journeys even more terrible. One of Manuel’s experiences was witnessing the outcome of one that a group of Jews were made to take, even more packed and in the middle of winter. When their car is opened they are found mostly dead, either of hunger or of cold. The car is unloaded as if wood was being transported. And there are more terrible ends than that of the ‘guy from Semur’; the end of a group of Jewish children, beaten and torn apart by the SS and their dogs.

There are other conversations in this tapestry in time other than that with the ‘guy from Semur; conversations in the past and conversations in the future; in Spain, in Holland, in France and again in France. In one, after the liberation in April 1945, when the prisoners can wander around freely, Manuel visits an old lady whose house overlooks the camp, with a clear view of the crematoria. He asks her if she could see the flames in the evening, a rhetorical question, because there is no doubt that she could. Clearly frightened the woman tells Manuel that both her sons were killed in the war;

She throws the bodies of her two sons at me for fodder, she takes refuge behind the lifeless bodies of her two sons killed in the war. She’s trying to make me believe that all suffering is the same, that the dead all weigh the same. As a counter-balance for all my dead friends, for the weight of their ashes, she’s offering the weight of her own suffering. But the dead don’t all weigh the same, of course. No corpse of the German army will ever weight as much as the smoke of one of my dead companions.

“I hope so, I really hope they’re dead”…

I haven’t the strength to tell her that I understand her sorry, that I respect her sorrow. I understand that for her the death of both of her sons is the most atrocious, the most unjust thing in the world. I haven’t the strength to tell her that I understand her sorrow, but I’m happy that the German Army is wiped out. I haven’t the strength to tell her all that.

There is power in words, in the strength to use words; there is power in this remarkable book.

Back from Narnia

2010-01-04T15:23:00.001-08:00

I’m not quite sure what to say, what superlative to reach for, so let me just be boringly mundane: Val-d'Isère was wonderful; the skiing was wonderful, the people were wonderful and the company was wonderful, both those who came with me and those I crossed on the way.

I’ve skied in Italy and Austria in the past but this was my first time in France. The way I feel at the moment I don’t think I’ll ever ski anywhere else, anywhere other than beautiful Val-d'Isère, a magical mix of France and Italy with all of that super Savoyard architecture.

The valley itself links up with Tignes, forming the Espace Killy, with seemingly endless runs and possibilities, both on and off piste. The designated slopes are simply a terrific thrill at both the intermediate and advanced level, but to get the full experience of the place in the short time we had we hired a guide who took us to some super off-piste locations. There were points when I was amongst the trees, heavily laded with snow, that I was about to enter Narnia, to meet the Witch and the Lion!

My skiing itself gets better and better. Being there I simply had to have a go on the Bellevarde, the face run that was the setting for the 1992 Winter Olympics. I just imagined myself riding to glory in the tracks of Albert Ortleib!

We had some great dining experiences as well. There are several good restaurants including the Le Table de l'Ours and Le Savoyard, but the one I will remember most is La Fruitière, where I ate Crozet, Savoyard pasta, sitting on the roof of Europe. Well, that’s how it felt!

We met some wonderful Americans there, people with whom we more or less stuck together right through the New Year. I saw 2009 in with a wild group in Marrakech, where I took part in an impromptu party, an occasion that I thought could never be equalled. I have to say that I was wrong: this year it was exceeded! A happy New Year to one and all. :-)

Ana’s Christmas Message

2009-12-22T16:45:00.001-08:00

Since I’m now about to sign off for the season I just thought I would wish each and every one of you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Tomorrow I’m off to join the rest of my family in a beautiful old manor house in deepest Sussex for our traditional jollifications, a real English Christmas, the sort of thing that mother does so well. It’s not quite as Belloc describes it in his lovely essay A Remaining Christmas, but it’s not far off.

On the Feast of Stephen my boyfriend and I leave with some good friends for a spot of skiing in Val d'Isère, which will take me through the New Year, returning home on 4 January. So, I’ll leave you a seasonal offering from Loreena McKennitt, one of my favourite singers. Snow is a particularly lovely song. You may feel that you’ve had enough of the stuff lately but do listen. The lyrics are adapted from the poem of the same name by Archibald Lampman.

White are the far-off plains, and white
The fading forests grow;
The wind dies out along the height,
And denser still the snow,
A gathering weight on roof and tree,
Falls down scarce audibly.

The road before me smooths and fills
Apace, and all about
The fences dwindle, and the hills
Are blotted slowly out;
The naked trees loom spectrally
Into the dim white sky.

The meadows and far-sheeted streams
Lie still without a sound;
Like some soft minister of dreams
The snow-fall hoods me round;
In wood and water, earth and air,
A silence everywhere.

Save when at lonely intervals
Some farmer's sleigh, urged on,
With rustling runners and sharp bells,
Swings by me and is gone;
Or from the empty waste I hear
A sound remote and clear;

The barking of a dog, or call
To cattle, sharply pealed,
Borne echoing from some wayside stall
Or barnyard far a-field;
Then all is silent, and the snow
Falls, settling soft and slow.

The evening deepens, and the gray
Folds closer earth and sky;
The world seems shrouded far away;
Its noises sleep, and I,
As secret as yon buried stream,
Plod dumbly on, and dream.

Zapping Clouds

2009-12-22T16:35:00.001-08:00

I managed to catch that tub-thumping clot Hugo Chávez doing his bit in Copenhagen, looking every bit like the cheap gangster he so clearly is. He continues to ‘do his bit’ in Venezuela, his fiefdom, looking for scapegoats to explain away the miserable failure of his socialist tyranny, to explain away the fact that this oil-rich country is plagued by power cuts and water shortages.

There is a Chávez-style solution for the latter. Venezuelans have been told to stop singing in the shower, thus cutting down the time spent there. Meanwhile, El Comandante will fly with Cuban scientists, zapping clouds to make them rain. You think I’m joking? No, I’m not! He’s also warned Venezuelans to watch out for fat people, seemingly another cause of the country’s woes. The latter I take to be an indication that resources are being unequally distributed, the fatties getting more, a fair assumption when one looks at the presidential torso.

He’s a joke; his government is a joke, though some of his attempted scapegoating carries potentially serious consequences, including his admonition for the country to prepare for war with neighbouring Colombia. But the woes of Venezuela have nothing do with showering divas, fatties or Columbians and everything to do with the promotion of ‘Chavistas’ to important posts for which they are totally unfitted. Rubbish rots in the streets and inflation is now well into double figures. The inefficient command economy has encouraged a vibrant black market in a country that already has a horrific crime rate, with Caracas being one of the most violent cities on earth.

It’s the usual story with socialists and socialism everywhere, the usual story of geese and golden eggs, creating poverty where once was riches. To do this in a place like Venezuela really is some achievement. I suspect that Chávez would even turn El Dorado into the land of dust. Not much to sing in the shower about. :-))

Death on the Metro

2009-12-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

I’ve not long finished a truly beguiling article in the January issue of History Today, written jointly by Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle. Headed Murder in the Métro, it concerns the mysterious fate of one Laetitia Toureaux, found dying in May 1937 in a first class carriage with a knife through her neck, in what shows every sign of being a professional assassination. The crime caused a sensation at the time because it was the first ever murder in the Métro and because the French press played the crime up in lurid detail thereafter. Although heavily investigated at the time no witness was ever found and no convincing suspect was ever produced. It is a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

The death of Laetitia could so easily have been forgotten like so many others, then and since, as history and events quickly pass over such small and personal tragedies. But it’s a crime that casts a little light into some of the darker corners of pre-war French political life, to a world of violent intrigue, terrorism and counter-revolution.

Laetitia herself, who was twenty-nine years old at the time of her death, was found to have some very shady political associations. Of working-class background and Italian origin, she worked in a glue factory during the day though she clearly ambitious to improve her condition. She was a social climber slightly on the model of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. She also liked to socialise in some of the nightclubs in the more sordid parts of Paris, in places where she was known as ‘Yolande’ by the pimps and prostitutes. It was also in these places that she met men who shared her right-wing politics, the fascism she professed. At some point in 1936 she became the lover of Gabriel Jeantet, a wealthy intellectual with political ambitions and extreme right-wing views. But Laetitia was a dangerous commodity; for she was also a paid police spy, a mouche, to use the contemporary jargon.

In the January after her murder, with the case not that much further forward, the police began to suspect that her death had political overtones, that it was a professional assassination linked with the murder in the same year of Dmitri Navachine, a Russian economist, and Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two Italian anti-fascist exiles. The murders of the Navachie and the Roselli were traced to the extreme-right Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire, better known as the ‘Cagoule’ , the ‘hooded ones’, an orgnaisation violently opposed to the Third Republic and the then Popular Front government of Leon Blum. One of their aims was to overthrow the government by violent terrorist action. Jeantet, Laetitia’s boyfriend, was in charge of arms-smuggling operations.

In 1936 and 1937 the Cagoule was responsible for a series of crimes, including bombings in Paris and at least seven murders. On more than one occasion they attempted to assassinate Blum himself. Throughout France Cagoule militias stockpiled arms with the help and support of Mussolini’s Fascist government in Italy. Jeantet met Mussolini in person on a number of occasions and may have brought Laetitia with him on at least one of these occasions.

After an abortive attempt to start an anti-government rising in November 1937, a number of Cagoulards were arrested. Under interrogation two of them, Rene Locuty and Frenand Jakubiez, swore that the organisation was also responsible for the murder of Laetitia. According to their testimony she was killed by Jean Filliol, the Cagoule’s principal hit-man, because it had been discovered that she was a police spy. Even with such a solid lead the case was still closed, an action which the authors put down to the complex politics of France before, during and after the Second World War. The Cagoule leaders were simply too well connected to pursue for the murder of an Italian immigrant with, as the authors put it, a shady love life and a penchant for espionage.

So, on the face of it looks as if Laetitia was no more than the victim of her circumstances. Doubts remain, though, over the exact circumstances leading to her death. There is reason to suppose, as Finley-Croswhite and Brunelle suggest, that it was not the Cagoule but the Italian Secret Service that was responsible for her death. The Cagoule, as a terrorist organisation, had little in the way of subtlety; its crimes, including its murders were open and excessive. Its victims were stabbed, bludgeoned or blown up.

Laetitia, in contrast, was killed in a highly professional manner by a silent and anonymous assassin, who left barely a trace of blood before the police pulled the knife from the dying woman’s neck. At the time the police investigation discovered that she had fallen foul not just of the Cagoule but of the Italians. She was known to have inside knowledge of the plan to assassinate the Roselli. It was also known not long after that she was a police informer. The suggestion is that rather than trust the Cagoulards with her disposal-there had already been two abortive attacks on her-the Italians brought in their own operative. Again, though this was a reasonable conclusion, it was not pursued because of the sensitive diplomatic implications. Laetitia was a little person caught in big events, of no importance to anyone.

So, this poor women’s personal tragedy was caught up in the history and politics of France and Italy. After the war her story was forgotten at a time when France was going through a collective ‘memory loss’ over so many aspects of its recent past. After all, even people as highly placed and respected as Francois Mitterrand had close ties with many members of the Cagoule in his youth. The story of Laetitia, as the authors conclude, forms part of France’s refusal to come to terms with the interwar era when so many French people sympathised with extreme right wing politics, fascism and anti-Semitism. With the passing of this generation a new willingness has arisen to look afresh at the past.

Freya of the Witches

2009-12-22T15:31:00.000-08:00

Freya, the daughter of Njord and Herta, of the Sea and of the Earth, is the most beautiful and revered of the Norse pantheon, a kind of Viking Venus, with dominion over love, sex, pleasure and fertility. She also has dominion over death, magic, glory and-perhaps most important of all-over witches and witchcraft. From the moment of her arrival in Asgard, the home of the gods, she is immediately identified as a witch, teaching her fellow immortals how to craft charms and potions. It was she who introduced Odin to runes and shamanism.

Most of the other surviving Norse goddesses survive only as ‘wives. Freya, in contrast, answers to no-one. She was married but Od, her husband, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. She travels through the heavens in her independent course on a chariot pulled by two large gray cats, Bee-gold (Honey) and Tree-gold (Amber) said to embody her twin qualities of ferocity and fecundity. She also rides a boar into battle, as does her brother, Freyr. Her sacred day is Friday and her sacred number is thirteen. Hence the malevolent associations of Friday the thirteenth by the Christians!

The Christians held a particular fear of Freya and all she stood for, which paradoxically has meant she continued to have a far more vivid presence over time than many other Pagan deities. Constant condemnation, in other words, stopped her slipping into obscurity. In the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, she was even described as a ‘bitch goddess’ by one Christian in the debates leading up to the adoption of the new faith.

Freya was continuously denounced as a Queen of Witches, automatically branding women who revered her as practitioners of the art. But her cult proved particularly resilient. Snorri Sturlsson, the thirteenth century Icelandic chronicler, says that she was the most renowned of all of the goddesses, still worshipped in his day. Her last surviving temple at Magdeburg was destroyed by Charlemagne in the eighth century AD but amazingly as late as 1688 it was claimed that the ‘worship of Frau Venus’ was still live in the area.

Though banished from the mountain peaks of Norway but she continued to dance with her devotees in The Brocken, the highest peak of Germany’s Harz Mountains, where she presides over the annual Midsummer and Walpurgis festivities. She is among the most beloved of deities for Neo-pagans.

The Congress of Mice

2009-12-21T16:42:00.001-08:00

The past is a foreign country; they do things better there. Oh, yes they do. Anyone with any sense at all could have predicated that the massive jamboree at Copenhagen would be utterly pointless. There was never going to be any real substance but where was the style, where was the glamour, where was the panache? How utterly insignificant they all seemed, the leaders of our world, what silly little pygmies trying to cut a figure on the stage of history. What a joke the whole thing was, what a total scream, the place packed with polar bears representing one group of global warming fascists or another.

I loved Gerald Warner’s suggestion that Copenhagen was an attempt to recreate the Congress of Vienna with a cast of third-rate extras. The climate itself seemed to be laughing at them, showering England in snow and giving us the coldest December days in years! What a cast there was at the 1815 Congress: the great Prince Metternich for Austria; Castlereagh and Wellington for England, Talleyrand for France. Even Tsar Alexander of Russia, not the most intelligent of autocrats, casts a shadow like a colossus from the past across Obama, Brown and the rest of the vulgar and mediocre Copenhagen crew.

This congress of mice was never about saving the world, no, it was cheap and undignified haggling over money, over who gets what, with a touch of added blackmail, tantrums and phony histrionics. It was quite simply, as Warner says, about blatant greed and naked self-interest, the so-called developing world, which never seems to develop, attempting to extort as much as it can from rest; a modern form of Danegled that will go into the vaults of some dictator or corrupt politician-you chose; there are so many-to buy limos in countries that barely have roads.

Think also about the terminology these clots were using. Think about the precise meaning behind the phrase ‘legally binding agreement.’ Now ask yourself one key question: in what fashion can a sovereign state be ‘legally bound’ to cut carbon emissions or anything else for that matter? In what way would breaches of these ‘legally binding agreements’ be addressed? By sanctions? By war? The questions are rhetorical because I don’t know the answers and I’m reasonably certain the mice would not know the answers either, even if they had considered the questions.

The lie of global warming, the pseudo-science behind it, is without doubt the greatest scandal of our age, through it may take years before the world wakes to this simple truth. Meanwhile the warmists will continue to spread panic and despond as a way of pushing ‘green taxes’ ever higher, as a way of sucking the life out the western economy, of moving resources from the productive to the wasteful. But who is prepared to stand against this; who is prepared to challenge the bogus orthodoxy? None from the congress of mice, of that we can be certain.

Stalin and the Nudes

2009-12-21T16:32:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in a previous blog that I’m reading Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, an account of Stain’s Purge of the mid to late 1930s, the latest in a series of books I have read on the dictator’s life and career. I think, on a rough calculation, that I have now read more books and articles on Stalin than I have on Hitler.

While I cannot truly claim to know what motivated the latter I think I have a slightly better understanding of him than I do of the former. Stalin, I have to say, as a human being, remains a complete enigma. The core question, one I simply cannot answer, is why would such a man, cruel, vindictive and malevolent to a quite unbelievable degree, ever have embraced an ideology like Marxism, which, no matter how perverse, advances a model of human enlightenment and liberation? All I will say is that Stalin is a figure who can only be understood in the context of Russian history, in all of its grandeur and all of its tragedy.

Now a little piece in Saturday’s Telegraph complicates the picture still further. Stalin, I know, liked to doodle when he was thinking. What I did not know was that he took classical nude drawings and defaced them with messages ridiculing opponents and colleagues. These ‘art works’ have now gone on exhibition in Moscow.

On one of the nude male figures Stalin has written “Ginger bastard Radek, if he had not pissed against the wind, if he had not been angry, he would still be alive.” Karl Radek, a former Secretary of the Comintern and one-time supporter of Trotsky, was jailed for ten years in the second Moscow Show Trial but never emerged alive from the labour camps.

In a sketch of a bearded nude man Stalin has drawn a red inverted triangle over his penis with the comment “Why are you so thin?” According to experts the insult was specifically directed at Mikhail Kalinin, one of the dictator’s own circle, a nonentity who served as the nominal head of state from 1919 to his death in 1946.

I’m not sure what these drawings tell us other than perhaps to throw a little more light on the darker recesses of the tyrant’s psyche.

Mother Diana

2009-12-21T16:21:00.000-08:00

Diana, Mother of the Forest, is the one spirit most associated with witchcraft. Revered by the Romans and closely identified with Artemis, the Greek goddess, Diana is unique to Italy, originating, perhaps, with the Etruscans.

Although Diana has the same attributes as Artemis her associations with night, darkness and magic are much stronger. Also she lacks the virginal aspect of the Artemis cult, being much earthier in that particular respect!

In Celtic Europe the goddess was worshiped in the form of a log. Though revered by women she was also worshipped by men. Werewolves might conceivably be wolf-shamans or lunar priests dedicated to Diana.

Although Diana emerged as a local deity in Italy she became popular across Roman Europe, so much so that the early Christians saw her as one of their greatest rivals. So, when they achieved political power in the late Empire, Diana was one of the ancient deities most reviled.

Her association with witches meant that her name continued to be evoked during the great witch hunts of the medieval and early modern periods. She was described by the Inquisition as Satan’s bride. In 1487 Tomas de Torquemada, one of the most loathsome of all the Inquisitors, went a step further, saying that Diana was the Devil. Indeed another term used by the Inquisition to describe witches was the Society of Diana.

But despite the intensity of the persecution the devotion to Diana survived the Burning Times. Now she is among the most beloved of deities, central to the witchcraft tradition in Italy and elsewhere.

The Sun Still Stands

2009-12-21T16:03:00.001-08:00

Today, 21 December, marks the winter solstice, the shortest day, the heart of the ancient Germanic rite of Yule. It is the first day of winter and the Great Hunter God has been reborn. From tomorrow the earth begins to turn as we move by steady degrees to the summer solstice, the earth filling with new life. The sun still stands.

The Heimskringla, one of the great Norse sagas, describes how Yule was celebrated in the times gone by;

It was ancient custom that when sacrifice was to be made, all farmers were to come to the heathen temple and bring along with them the food they needed while the feast lasted. At this feast all were to take part of the drinking of ale. Also all kinds of livestock were killed in connection with it, horses also; and all the blood from them was called hlaut [ sacrificial blood ], and hlautbolli, the vessel holding the blood; and hlautteinar, the sacrificial twigs. These were fashioned like sprinklers, and with them were to be smeared all over with blood the pedestals of the idols and also the walls of the temple within and without; and likewise the men present were to be sprinkled with blood. But the meat of the animals was to be boiled and served as food at the banquet. Fires were to be lighted in the middle of the temple floor, and kettles hung over them. The sacrificial beaker was to be borne around the fire, and he who made the feast and was chieftain, was to bless the beaker as well as all the sacrificial meat.

It was also traditional to burn a Yule log on the eve of the solstice. The log itself has ancient sacred associations. In the Roman world Dian and Hera were once worshipped in the shape of a log. In the northern world the Yule log has opowerful associations with Frigg, the wife of Odin. The log is incorporated into fertility spells as well as spells for protection. Once burnt the ashes should be kept until the following Yule, as it is said to bring prosperity and protection from evil.

Anyway, a blessed Yule to one and all. :-)

Frustrated Citizen

2009-12-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

I saw Law Abiding Citizen over the weekend, a movie directed by F. Gary Gray. It tells the story of one Clyde Shelton, played by Gerard Butler, whose home is invaded by a couple of thugs who wound him and gratuitously murder his wife and infant daughter.

Although caught and put on trail one of the killers subsequently cheats the death penalty by giving evidence against the other, in a self-serving deal cut by Nick Rice, the prosecutor, played by Jamie Foxx. Shocked by this perceived betrayal, by this mockery of justice, Shelton pleads with Foxx to pursue the case against Clarence Darby, the informer, played by Christian Stolte, who is in fact the principal killer.

Rice, who remains emotionally unengaged in his professionalism, says that it does not matter what is right; it only matters what can be proved in court and that’s how the criminal justice system works. Shelton later sees Rice shake hands with Darby, convicted of third-degree murder, an action which compounds his sense of betrayal. This is a key scene and, in a sense, the beginning of the absurdity. I simply cannot conceive of Rice who, while coolly detached and methodical, is an essentially decent man, shaking hands with a character as loathsome as Darby, no matter the circumstances.

What follows, though ten years after, is a campaign of revenge, not just against the killers, but against the whole justice system, increasingly gothic, and increasingly ludicrous, in its intensity. The premise is good: that an ordinary citizen can be frustrated by the cynicism and compromises of the law. The conclusion is ridiculous: that this same citizen has the capacity and the expertise to turn the system inside out, hitting out at targets without proportion or discrimination.

The point of the movie was simply lost in an orgy of violence, some of it truly laughable in the total absence of verisimilitude. Shelton, in his desire for justice and revenge, becomes just as bad in his own way as Darby, the psychopath he captures and dissects alive.

It’s torture porn, violence for the sake of violence. All the sympathy I had for Shelton at the beginning was exhausted by the end. Still, it’s as well to see this movie as a kind of symptom, perhaps like the earlier Death Wish, a sign that the law is often perceived to be serving its own ends, not the ends of justice. The law was built to replace more primitive forms of revenge and vendetta. If it turns into a something else, a means by which people often escape the consequences of their actions through procedural loopholes and shabby compromises, then the urge for revenge and vendetta will once again take its place.

The Murdered Communist and the Headless Corpse

2009-12-20T16:22:00.000-08:00

I was fascinated to discover in reading The Telegraph on Saturday that prosecutors in Germany are reexamining the case of Rosa Luxemburg, the communist leader who was murdered by the Freikorps after an abortive rising ninety years ago. It’s now being claimed that her corpse was replaced at the time with that of another woman.

Coroners from the state prosecutors’ office in Berlin are to perform an autopsy on a headless corpse found in the basement of the city’s Charité Hospital. In 1919 what was alleged to be the remains of Luxemburg was found in the Landwehr Canal, four months after it had been thrown in. There was never a positive identification and the government of the day, anxious to prevent any political fallout at a sensitive time, rushed through the investigation, putting pressure on the forensic examiner to go along with the official line.

Michael Toskos, the Charité’s head of forensic medicine, says that the 1919 corpse was the wrong dimensions for Luxemburg, going on to say that the body the hospital has fits all the right descriptions. The 1919 body was buried in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery, along with that of Karl Liebknecht, at a spot where left-wing pilgrims gather in commemoration every 15 January.

The issue was so historically sensitive because although Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by a right wing militia it was acting on the authority of Friedrich Ebert, the Chancellor, and Gustav Noske, the Minister of Defence, both members of the mainstream SPD, the Social Democratic Party, who felt just as threatened by the extreme left. Captain Waldemar Pabst of the Freikorps' Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision, who gave the order for the execution, always maintained that his actions were specifically approved by Ebert and Noske. It was most certainly in their interests to have the aftermath dealt with in the most expeditious manner possible.

The question now remaining is that if the Charité corpse truly is Luxemburg who have the lefties been worshipping all these years; who is the unknown woman? We are never likely to know the answer.

The Artists and the Revolutionary

2009-12-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

When I was in Mexico city a couple of years ago one of the places I visited was La Casa Azul –the Blue House-in the suburb of Coyoacán, where Frida Khalo, the painter, was born and where she lived for so many years with Diego Rivera, her husband and Mexico’s greates muralists.

I also visited, not too far away, the house that Leon Trotsky lived in during the last part of his Mexican exile, where he was murdered with an ice pick, and in the grounds of which he is now buried. Both of these palaces are now museums. The Trotsky museum is particularly poignant in that the bullet holes from an earlier assassination attempt that same year can still be seen on the walls of one of the bedrooms.

The destiny of the artists and the revolutionary were closely connected. Trotsky, under permanent threat from the Stalinists, found refuge in Mexico after Rivera intervened on his behalf with President Lázaro Cárdenas. Once there he and Natalia Sedova, his wife, were accommodated by Frieda and Diego in the Blue House.

Frida had a brief affair with Trotsky in the summer of 1937, not long after he came to Mexico, sometimes suggested as the reason for his break with Rivera. But this did not come until the winter of 1938-39, while Frida was absent at an exhibition of her work in New York and then Paris.

The breach, according to Hayden Herrera, the author of Frida, was caused by a combination of personal and political differences. Rivera had an expansive personality, one that did not harmonise well with that of the didactic and humourless Trotsky. More and more the two men came into open disagreement, over the nature of the Soviet state, over trade union work, and over Rivera's support for Francisco Mujica's bid for the Mexican presidency.

But these disagreements in point of detail came down to one big thing: Riviera was simply not the kind of man who could fit easily within the narrow political and personal discipline demanded by people like Trotsky. He was, as he told the old Bolshevik, 'a bit of an anarchist', which is as good an assessment of his politics-and his personality-as any. In Paris Frida reported the breach in a letter to a friend "Diego has now fought with the Fourth International and told piochitas [Trotsky] to go to hell in a very serious manner." And as far as she was concerned he was completely right, despite their earlier relationship.

It was after this that Trotsky and Natalia moved to the house in Avenida Viena, a place that was effectively turned into a fortress. It was there in February 1940 that he wrote what was to become known as Trotsky’s Testament, which concludes by thanking his wife before descending in to whimsy;

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

Standing in that place, in the room where he was so brutally murdered it is possible to feel something of the personal tragedy of the man, of the tragedy of the history. But one has to reflect that, in his days of power, it was he who denied life to others, who acted in a brutal and oppressive fashion, a fashion that closed so many futures forever. Too much was sacrificed on that abstract alter to which he dedicated his life, the alter of a frightful idol. We all, each and every one of us, only ever live in a perpetual present. It is a terrible thing to destroy others in the name of a bloodless utopia.

The Magic of Mistletoe

2009-12-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

Mistletoe, for reasons that will become apparent as I proceed, is also known as Witch’s Branch or Witch’s Broom. Widely scattered from Northern Europe, parts of North Africa and all the way to Japan, it has long been considered to have magical properties wherever it is found.

It’s unique for one simple reason: it’s not a ‘plant’ understood to be an organic life growing on the face of the Earth. Rather it’s a parasite that attaches itself to trees, and eventually may suck the life out of them. In this sense the identification with witchcraft has distinctly megative connotations. The poisionous berries are also known in Geraman as ‘witches berries.’

Mistletoe was sacred to both the Romans and the Greeks, who believed that it originated from the lightning that struck the trees. It thus reprsesented life energy and generative, magical power. According to Sir James Frazer, authour of The Golden Bough, it was also sacred to Diana, Queen of the Witches.

It was nicknamed ‘thunderbroom’ by the Celts, uniting male and female sexual symbolism. It is the one plant most associtated with the magic of the Druids, who believed it inauspicious for mistletoe ever to touch the ground.

In Germanic tradition it was closely associated with the goddess Freya, bringer of love and fertility. The imagry here is complex, because there are two sides to Freya, light and dark: she brings life but she also brings death.

Because of its pagan associataions, and because of the skill required in its magical preparation, it became closely associated with witchcraft medicine and the magical arts in general. It’s really only on Christmas Eve that it becomes a stimulant for love and romance. :-)