Spaghetti Dialectics

Have you heard of a movie called 1900?  If not, it’s a 1976 Italian extravaganza, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  I say it’s Italian but the leading parts are mostly taken by an international cast, chiefly American.  Apart from France's Gerald Depardieu – amazingly young and thin looking – there is Robert de Niro – also amazingly young looking -, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster. 

Was this, I wonder, a time when their careers were in the doldrums?  Perhaps they still had to make a name for themselves?  No, no, that can’t be true.  Lancaster was a cinematic veteran at the time.  Well, maybe he just wasn’t getting the parts anymore.  Better to star in spaghetti dialectics rather than nothing at all!

Yes, that’s what we are dealing with, a lengthy Marxist soap opera, tedious if it wasn’t so risibly ridiculous.  I knew Marxists were dim but I had no idea just how dim.  Watch it if you have the time or the inclination.  I did by invitation and I had such a fun time.  

It’s a side-splitting pastiche of Italian history from 1900 – hence the title – to 1945 and beyond.  As I say, the lead parts are mostly taken by foreigners, but the director has managed to dig up some wonderful grotesques to masquerade as the poor suffering peasants.  Looking at them it’s almost as if, Pygmalion-style, he has managed to bring a lot of gargoyles to life!

This, dear readers, is a tale with a moral, an everyday story of proletarian folk.  It begins with the birth of two boys into entirely different strata of society.  Oh, but not at the same time, you understand; for when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?  First comes the peasant, one Olmo, born into a rather revolting clan known as the Dalcos.  Olmo – eventually to be filled out in adulthood by Depardieu – is destined to be a horny handed son of toil.  Actually, no, he’s destined to be a self-righteous and sanctimonious prig. 

After him into this world is thrown Alfredo Berlinghieri, the grandson of the padrone, the landowner, destined to be padrone himself one day and destined to be Robert de Niro.  1900 is their story, the story of Olmo and Alfredo, a story of an impossible friendship of social unequals, or an impossibly funny friendship.  These two will negotiate in their separate ways through the currents and eddies of twentieth century Italian politics. 

The real excitement comes after the First World War.  Olmo goes to the front, of course, and Alfredo stays behind, of course.  Well, he also serves who only stands and stares.  Into the mix comes a certain Attilia (note the name) Mellanchini, whom Alfredo’s father has employed as a foreman.  Now we have Donald Sutherland measuring up to what must surely be the most bizarre and grotesque part in his whole acting career. 

This Mellanichi, you see, is set to become the community Blackshirt.  Oh, but not just that; he also turns out to be a sadist and a sexual pervert.  Into Marx comes Freud, which I assume is the director’s own particular dialectic, the Bertolucci factor.  The important thing is that he is a bit of an epiphenomena, no more than the creature of the padrone, without a thought or a political instinct of his own.  He is hired, if you like, in 1922 and fired in 1943, hired by the father and discarded by the son, those wicked capitalists who take up fascism when it suits them and discard it when it does not.  Simple!  Oh, I should say that the friendship between Alfredo and Olmo does nothing to stop the former allowing Attila the fascist and his gang giving the latter a good kicking at one point.  You see, it’s the class struggle in action! 

Wait!  I completely forgot to mention Regina (Laura Betti), the poor relation to whom the Berlinghieris extend their condescending charity.  She turns out to be as weird sexually and in every other sense as Attila, with whom she takes up (naturally), proving to one and all that fascism was brought into the world as a vehicle for poor relations and perverts!  Ah, Regina, how I felt for her when Alfredo introduces his glamorous French wife Ada, a touch of exotic chic by Dominique Sanda.  How will she manage, the embittered Regina muses, among the pigs, the shit and the Dalcos?  Yes, well, give me the pigs over the Dalcos any day! 

On we go thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a merry Marxist march.  At this point I’m desperately trying not to identify with the fascists (I’m no sex pervert), especially when Attila and his merry band start shooting peasants for whistling the Italian communist anthem badly out of tune.  Obviously these people are no more than rather sensitive music critics. What a pity Olmo wasn’t around, having previously made good his escape after pelting the unfortunate Attila with horse manure.  Sex pervert, yes; coprophile, no.

He turns up again, unfortunately, in 1945, a partisan and a communist; sorry, he was that all along, a socialist with holes in his pocket.  Now he is back, ready to do justice.  Attila has already been pronged and butchered – serves him right – but not before he shouts to Regina, his wife of some years, that their children will reap what has been sown on this day.  And now I call to mind the recent remark by the Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s comeback kid, that maybe Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all.  A positive saint, I would say, compared with the Dalcos of this life.

Olmo does justice to his old friend the padrone, who is executed...no, not really, only symbolically, by a kangaroo court of peasant grotesques.  Where did the director dig up that munch munch woman – from the local cemetery, perhaps?  The padrone is dead; Alfredo Berlinghieri lives, proving that he is dead.  Confused?  Don’t be, for the padrone is not dead at all.  The struggle goes on, and there is Italy in the last century, after which history came to a full stop, or a Berlusconi, whichever your preference is.  Anything, anything, but a Dalco.   

Incidentally this is not movie review.  I’m just having a spot of fun, Ana’s delicious dialectical dance. :-)

Laughing at Dinosaurs

No Joke

The Art of Donald McGill is one of George Orwell’s most brilliant and perceptive essays.  It’s a dissertation on the naughty British seaside postcard – now I think a thing of the past -, on forms of ribald humour that most likely escape people who are not native to these islands.  Towards the end he makes the following observation;

I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.

When the author was writing the common people may very well have responded to the pompous and the high-minded in the fashion described.  They may also have done so in their millions, but if they did they did it, by and large, privately and in isolation from one another, especially if their destinies were governed by despots. 

Now it’s different; now we have Twitter, millions of raspberries blown in the face of the latest absurdity from those formerly used to public reverence.  It’s a form of freedom that manages to transcend the limits imposed on everyday expressions of dissent.  Even those who live in authoritarian states, at least where tweeting is allowed, can express a view reasonably free from detection. 

I was thinking of this on reading about the latest absurdity by Saudi Arabia’s morality police.  Yes, the country has a morality police, bearded auxiliaries employed by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.  They are more familiarly known to Saudis as Hayaa.  In Damam on the Kingdom’s Gulf Coast they recently marched into an education exhibition featuring models of dinosaurs, turned off the lights and ordered everyone out.

The reason for this heavy-handedness is unknown.  Perhaps because it was being held in a shopping mall, one of the few places that Saudis of both sexes are able to mix publicly, something that’s bound to attract the attention of these absurd guardians of rectitude.  But no sooner had the exhibition been closed a new Arabic Twitter hashtag, @Damam-Hayaa-Closes-Dinosaur-Show, appeared.  Before long it was attracting dozens of theories, many of them hilarious, some of them ribald.

Perhaps, one went, there is a danger that people will start worshipping dinosaurs instead of God.  No, said another, it’s only a temporary measure until such time as the male and female dinosaurs have been separated.  The real problem, said a third, was that a female dinosaur had been caught in public without a male guardian. 

Some Twitters saw it in political terms – “It’s not as if we don’t see dinosaurs in newspapers and on TV in the government every day.” Another suggested that it would be better to go after the dinosaurs in gilt-trimmed cloaks, a form of dress favoured by senior sheiks.

For still more it was all about sex.  One of the exhibits depicting a dinosaur riding on the back of another was declared to be sexually suggestive, an obvious example of a Westernising influence.  “I confess”, one penitent declared, “I saw a naked dinosaur thigh and felt aroused.”  Another attempted to enlighten the Hayaa – “No, no, that long thing is a tail.” 

A great many challenged the real dinosaurs – the religious police themselves.  “They worried that people would find the dinosaurs more highly evolved than themselves.”  Another wrote, “Hello Stone Age.  We have some of your people – can you please come and collect them.” 

How true it is that laughter is the best weapon against the killjoys, the moralists and the dogmatists of this life, all those who take themselves so seriously that they simply can’t be taken seriously. 

May the (Gay) Force be with you

England is turning towards the Dark Side! Details of the 2011 census, published last month, reveal that the number of people who identify themselves as ‘Jedi Knights’ has fallen by more than half since the census of 2001. The Force, sad to say, is weakening, with a mere 176, 632 classifying their religion as Jedi compared to over 330,000 light sabre wielders ten years ago. Master Yoda, noting the trend, said “Concerning, this is. Look for the Sith Lord, we must.”

Yes, indeed, the trend is alarming, though it is encouraging to note that Jedi still tops the “alternative faith” stakes, only behind Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in popularity. They are well ahead of the true Dark Knights, the Satanists, who managed a mere 1,893 adherents, and the Scientologists, with only 2,418 Thetans. My, my, that's all, despite Tom Cruise.

But the prophet who must be most pleased by the figures is Master Richard Dawkins, the atheist-in-chief, whose religion is clearly the fastest growing, with as many as 14,000,000 people in England and Wales of no faith. On the contrary, dear ones; your faith offers the greatest certainties of all!

Mainstream Christianity is still top of the pops, though the number of people identifying themselves as such has fallen from seventy-two to fifty-nine per cent since 2001, leading to claims that their number could fall below fifty per cent of the population in six years time.

The other downward trend is in marriage. It seems that gays have fallen in love with that venerable institution when everyone else is falling out of love. For the first time since the national census was founded in 1801 married couples are in a minority. Never mind; soon the homosexuals will come and make up the numbers.

Now there is a thing.  We had decade after decade of gay liberation, a mighty struggle that brought forth…a pathetic mouse.  Gay marriage is now a flag ship Tory policy, Prime Minister David Cameron waving his little rainbow flag.  Gay love and gay marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Oh, but there are dissenters, and they are not all Christian fundamentalists.  There is Rupert Everett, a gay actor or an actor who is gay, who said recently that he loathed heterosexual weddings;

…the wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce ten years later, is just a waste of time in the heterosexual world.  In the homosexual world I find it, personally, beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster. 

Not so, says Cameron, who hopes that gay couples, all complacent and middle aged, will soon form the backbone of the modern Tory Party, a new rainbow county set.  Who else, one has to ask, is left?   

Meanwhile, back in the heterosexual world, the Daily Telegraph reports that Sir Paul Coleridge, a High Court judge who started the Marriage Foundation campaign group to promote the institution, said the decline in the number of married couples was a “worrying” trend likely to lead to more family break-ups. He has previously described the scale of family breakdown as a “complete scandal” and warned that people were “recycling” partners instead of trying to fix their marriages.

Oh, well, recycling is the great trend of the age, bed-hopping non-Christians leading the way. This, I have to say, includes Pagan and Wiccans like myself, behind the Jedi, yes, with a professed 68,386 adherents, but making a steady ascent. The beauty of my religion is that it has no rules, other than to take pleasure in pleasure. When we start to follow gays into a parody of Christian marriage I really will know that the game is finally up; that knitting, bring and buy sales, a semi in the suburbs, the rotary club, dogs, slippers and the Tory Party is all that remains. 

May the Force be with you, in whatever shape it comes.

Brave New America

Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World is, depending on your point of view, a description of a soulless technocratic nightmare or a prescription for a far more rational society.  Personally I’m inclined to the latter.  What a good idea it would be to control the world’s population.  What a good idea genetic engineering would be.  How much happier we would all be as citizens of the World State.  The lower castes, the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons, all created in decanting bottles to be of lower intelligence, would be content in their modest and mediocre lives.

It’s just a beautiful dream.  We could not possible create such a rational world, a world devoid of thought, reflection and insight; a world devoid of such unsettling things as freedom.  Or could we?  I was delighted to read that educators in the United States have taken a major step forward in creating a more streamlined society. 

Apparently such unnecessary and inharmonious modern classics such as J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are to be dropped from the school curriculum by 2014.  Instead the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons will be able thrill to Recommended Levels of Insulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency or, if that’s too exciting, Invasive Plant Inventory by California's Invasive Plant Council.  Yes, I know, not much in the way of plot or human interest but – ask yourself – do the lower orders really need these things?  They are just so unsettling for the humdrum, for those who aimed low in life and missed.

The new school curriculum for this brave new American world will come into force in 46 of the 50 states, making it compulsory that at least seventy per cent of the texts studied should be non-fiction.  A new generation is to be raised on informational handbooks.  It’s all part of a scheme to ensure that Americans are ready for the workplace, assuming the workplace ever comes. 

The new standards are apparently backed by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.  It’s also backed by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Apparently it’s intended to help pupils develop the capacity to write factually and accurately, far more useful in the workplace than Shakespeare.

That’s it; that’s the key.  Employment in Obamaland has been so high because people are wrongly adapted.  Think how frustrated employers must be, think how frustrated Bill and Melinda must be, when job applicants come along reciting Whitman or Longfellow but know nothing at all about invasive plants or insulation. 

Plato and Aristotle and the rest of those all Greek fossils got it completely wrong.  Education should not be about encouraging curiosity or developing fully rounded human beings.  It should be about indoctrination, streamlining and targeting.  The aim should be to ensure that the clones are undifferentiated, all fit for purpose.  It’s about ensuring that the ordinary remain ordinary, sub all expectations.

Meanwhile the Alphas for wholly unexplained reasons send their offspring in ever increasing numbers to private schools, those insulation and invasive plant free zones.  There they can continue to wile their time away uselessly musing on Shakespeare.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

Slumdog Britain

A Red Extravaganza

I didn’t watch the Olympic opening jamboree on Friday; I had more important things to do.  Besides, I can’t stand Danny Boyle, the man who orchestrated the whole thing, that train-spotting slum dog millionaire.  I have now, though; I caught up with it this afternoon on iPlayer. 

Why?  First, because I was bemused by the hysterical onslaught on Aiden Burley, the Conservative Member of Parliament who dared to tweet his disapproval.  Second, because the Sunday Telegraph, which I had always taken to be a conservative and Conservative newspaper, published an article by Dan Hodges, a tiresome Labour Party hack, pouring more dead dogs on the unfortunate Burley.

What, I asked myself; did I buy the hyper-liberal Observer by mistake?  No, sure enough, it was the Telegraph.  I popped over to the Sunday Mail website, hoping for some right-wing sanity, only to be greeted by a copy of a counter-tweet by that fat idiot John Prescott.  This is a man who proved that stupidity and an inability to master the rudiments of proper spoken English is no bar to high political office. Yes, there he was, saying to Burley “That opening ceremony made me proud to be British.  Your tweet made me angry that you are too.” 

I’m getting well ahead of the story here.  What was Burley’s crime; what did he say that caused such an explosion of drivel?  In two chirps simply this: “The most leftie opening ceremony I’ve ever seen – more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state.  Welfare tribute next?  Thank God the athletes have arrived.  Now we can move on from that leftie multi-cultural crap.  Bring back the red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones.”

And that was the stone around his neck, by which free speech was drowned like a puppy. He has now attempted to backtrack, silly man, saying that he was talking about the way the show was handled, not multiculturalism itself.  Look, Aiden, in the rare chance that you ever read this, never apologise and never, ever give the idiots a second chance to bite.  Multiculturalism is indeed a lot of tosh. Our Prime Minister said as much not so long ago, though using a more mealy-mouthed form of words, as did Nicholas Sarkozy, the former president of France.  

So, as I say, in order to form a more perfect opinion, I watched the whole thing this afternoon.  What did I think?  Why, that it was a soggy porridge of leftie multi-cultural crap.  OK, let me be completely fair, like the curate’s proverbial egg it was good in parts; in other parts it was really rotten.  I liked some of the early routines, which were very well choreographed, and I thought the Industrial Revolution sequence was excellent. But in total, as a depiction of our people and our nation, the whole thing was a sad joke.

My goodness, all those not so subtle and not so subliminal Marxist metaphors, what a scream!  How lovely to see, apropos of nothing at all, Boyle's onstage proletariat forming themselves, North Korean-style, into the badge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, presumably a celebration of a communist-inspired front that would have left this country defenceless in the face of a serious Soviet threat. At the next moment they were a star. The only thing missing was the hammer and cycle.  

Then there were the dancing nurses and the bouncing patients, a tedious and lengthy tribute to the National Health Service, that ‘much loved’ institution, a sequence that might usefully serve in future as a crazy party political broadcast for Ed Millipede and his gang, a sort of Medicine in Wonderland.  And did you know that twentieth century British history seems to have begun with the arrival of the Empire Windrush from the West Indies, carrying lots of black immigrants?  Well, it did, in the gospel according to Boyle.

I looked in the midst of the universal praise for Boyle, coupled with the demonisation of Burley, for some sanity and, thank goodness, I found it, a blog by Douglas Murray in the Spectator (The Olympic opening satire), an organ clearly still to be overtaken by the onward surge of political madness.   As he says, any foreigner watching this farce must have thought that the NHS was our national religion.  Yes, it really should have been followed by another lengthy montage in praise of welfare, maybe with gyrating dole recipients.  The problem with this is that most of them are too obese to dance.  A shabby socialist hymn, that’s the only way I can describe Boyle’s extravaganza, one in which the Queen herself was induced to take part in a particularly embarrassing James Bond parachute sequence

As we moved towards the finale the whole thing became positively infantile, particularly the music tribute, a cross section of our ‘cultural richness’ put together by a moron in a hurry.  For me Murray really hit the spot with these cogent words;

My main fear is that a young person from elsewhere in the world – better educated, but possibly lacking our sense of humour – might take it all literally. They may have learned of a Britain which was a serious country and produced many of the world’s greatest writers, leaders, thinkers and artists. After watching last night’s ceremony they will realise that Britain is in fact a country which, though once inhabited by hobbits, is only around fifty years old and stuck in a state of permanent adolescence. This will make them doubt their teachers and probably end up becoming anarchists.

Overall the spectacle made me cringe.  Only the likes of Prescott could be proud of this idiotic farrago.  If I thought Boyle had any intelligence at all I might have been impressed by his satirical abilities, his Jonathan Swift-like capacity to make fun of absurdity.  But he has none.  This travesty was for him the literal truth of our country.  It’s shaming that so many seem to have been seduced by his socialist agitprop.  I expect Boyle to be awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour, second class, any day now by our Dear Leader, Comrade David Cameron.  

Dreaming on a Midsummer Night

This has always seemed like a magical time of year to me, Midsummer, the Solstice, Litha, whatever one wishes to call it; it has ever since I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eight years old. The Sun is now in the sign of Cancer, my birth sign, the sign of the Moon. The magical forces are now at the height, and Robin Goodfellow puts a girdle round the Earth!

Midsummer Eve itself, St John's Eve, is a major holiday for witches and all who love them, all who love the old power and the ancient ways. Traditionally it was a fire and water festival, a central feature of which was ritual baths and bonfires. The bonfires themselves were closely linked with water, lit as they were on the shores of streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Midsummer marks the convergence of the Sun and the Moon. The Sun, now at its height, has entered Cancer, the great water sign, the only sign ruled by the Moon, the only sign ruled by Artemis, Diana and Hecate, the lunar goddesses. All those who share the sign of Cancer with me are collectively the Children of the Moon, hunters, witches, flyers and lovers.

This was a time when witch-hunters of the past claimed that witches rode out to meet Satan, whereas the real witches, not the monsters of imagination, simply gathered to renew their sacred bond with the earth, to celebrate its bounty and fertility. It was a time also for gathering magical plants, a time when they were at their most potent. Russian witches use to harvest those which grew on the top of Bald Mountain, considering them to be the most powerful on Earth.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is by far my favourite Shakespearean comedy, light of touch and light of heart, rich in all sorts of magic, a world of fairy visions.  And it just so happens that one of favourite paintings touches on the very same themes.  It’s The Fairy Raid: Carrying off a Changeling on Midsummer’s Eve by Joseph Noel Paton, a nineteenth century Scottish artist who painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style.  He is better known for The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania but for me The Fairy Raid is just sublime.  The technical proficiency is astounding but there is far more here.  This is a vision that could only have come of a true love of the Realm of Faerie. 

Magic, love and fruitfulness, these are the things Midsummer Eve and the Solstice are about; this is what they will always be about. All hail to thee, Children of the Moon.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Getting Ready for Zombie Armageddon

OK, then; you’ve covered every contingency for the coming zombie apocalypse.  You have a good supply of food and water stored away.  You have your armoury all prepared; a shotgun or several and perhaps a collection of power tools and other useful implements.  You are an island; you are Legend.  Stop; think again; this is not the best way to save yourself or humanity from the contagion!

If you are taking this threat seriously – and who does not? – you really should have been in the town of Cheltenham in the west of England last week to hear Doctor Austin, a Theoretical Zombiologist (yes, that’s right), speak at the annual science festival.  Dr Austin, head of the Zombie Institute for Theoretical Studies (ZITS), was most illuminating.  “There are a lot of misconceptions about zombies”, he said, “If a zombie does appear, people need to treat them as a person with an illness.”

Right.  There are other things that you might not be aware of; in fact I’m virtually sure you are in total ignorance, as was I.  Do you think that zombies have rotting flesh?  Well, you are wrong.  The thing is, you see, if they did they would, well, not see.  They would, in other words, decompose quickly beyond their ‘best before’ rampage date.  Dr Austin rightly pointed out a zombie whose eyes had been eaten by maggots would not get very far.  He went on to say that;

Once you become a zombie you will live for three to six months.  The time will vary depending on age weight and whether you live near people with chainsaws. 

The good doctor continued in this vein, explaining that the apocalypse will be spread by biting, a practice the scientific literature agrees that zombies are particularly keen on. There would seem to be obvious similarities to rabies.  Hey, but hold on a minute; other zombie symptoms, shuffling, moaning and generally not caring much about one’s appearance, suggests another comparison.  Yes, indeed; we are in the realm of Variant CJD, more popularly known as Mad Cow Disease.  In future it may very well be called Mad Zombie Disease, MZD for short.

Actually, all kidding aside, ‘Dr Austin’, who mostly lectures to schoolchildren, was making serious points about biological science.  The zombie format of his talk was really just a hook to get people interested in different aspects of virology;

Usually when you lecture on illness someone in the audience might have had it, or been affected.  Because there are no zombies at the moment, no one is going to be upset and say, “Oh, my mum died of that.”

At the moment?…hmm; what on earth is he going to talk about when they do appear?  I suppose werewolves or vampires might serve as a possible alternative.  On second thoughts it probably won’t matter.  After all, we will be far too busy careering through the streets or hiding away in attics to attend science festivals, no matter how illuminating.  

On further reflection I’m not at all sure about Dr Austin’s credentials, or with what authority he speaks on behalf of ZITS.  He says that there are no zombies at the moment, which leads me to suppose that he might very well be a zombie himself.  If I could only rid myself of that unhappy thought I would gladly take him by the hand and lead him through the streets of London.  I’ll show him something that’s bound to change his mind. 

I judge therefore I am

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. :-)

Sound and Fury

I spent the Christmas of 2005 with some friends in Moscow, an experience I’ve written about previously (Ana in Moscow). I’m returning to the subject because I’ve found the programme for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera by Dmitry Shostakovich based on the story by Nikolai Leskov. We saw it on Christmas Eve, performed by the Bolshoi Company, though sadly not in the big theatre, which was under repair at the time, although the little theatre is splendid enough. My theatre was not Bolshoi but Menshoi!

I’m so glad to have found these notes which I thought I had lost. There they were, tucked away among various papers and old magazines, the notes of the twenty-seventh performance since it first opened in Moscow in 1935. It was a tremendous production of a brilliantly innovative piece of work, throbbing, vital and impassioned; expressionism at its purest.

Ever since 1934, when it premiered in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, it had been thrilling audiences in Russia and beyond. It marked Shostakovich, who was only twenty-six when he completed the score, as one of the authentic artistic geniuses of the whole Soviet period. Unfortunately for him genius, in the sense of free expression of natural talent, was about to die.

There was one person that the opera did not thrill – Stalin. On the night of 26 January 1936 he came to the Bolshoi with his entourage, comfortably placed in the government box. The composer, who had intended to travel to Archangel on the White Sea for a performance of his First Piano Concerto, received a call from Yakov Leontyev, the director of the Bolshoi, with the news. According to an account later set down by Mikhail Bulgakov, the novelist, Shostakovich rushed to the theatre “white with fear.” He had reason to be fearful; for the dictator, lackeys in tow, ostentatiously walked out before the final act.

Two days later an unsigned editorial appeared in Pravda under the title Muddle Instead of Music. Crude, vulgar and spluttering in its incoherence, the authorship has been in question ever since, though the polemical style suggests that it was penned by Stalin himself, or ghosted under his close direction. Whatever the source, it came in the form of a ‘directive’, that is to say that it was the opinion of the Communist Party itself, something beyond question. Sorry, it could be questioned, assuming one had a penchant for suicide.

“The music”, the author shrieked, “grunts, pants, moans, the better to depict the love scenes as naturally as possible. And ‘love’ is smeared throughout the opera in the most vulgar form.” The composer's use of “petty-bourgeois formalistic contractions” was held to constitute a ‘political transgression.’ The assassination in words goes on in this tone, till it reaches a chilling crescendo –“This is playing at things beyond reason that can only end very badly.”

This was a dangerous time. All of Russia was listening to the overture of a new production: the Great Terror was in its opening stages. Later that year the first of the Moscow Show Trials was to open. Soon millions would be swept away, guilty, most often, of no greater crime that being alive at a particularly malevolent period in history.

To be an artist, young and alive was not very heaven; it was often a death sentence. So many went into oblivion, poets like Osip Mandelstam and writers like Isaac Babel. For months after the Pravda article Shostakovich lived in his own personal hell, fearful of the night-time knock on his door; for that’s when they came, in the night, most often in the early hours of the morning. His opera had already been ‘disappeared’. It was to be decades before the original version appeared again on the Russian stage.

In the end the composer survived, though by what caprice is impossible to say. He survived, yes, but only by performing the most abject acts of personal obeisance, including subtitling his Fifth Symphony, full of all of the ‘right’ political and cultural noises, as A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism. This was the age of denunciation, of all sorts of betrayals, of oneself and of others.

I was there in Moscow, happy to be alive, happy to see Lady Macbeth alive and flourishing in a new Russia, happy that Stalin and the whole Soviet system had been consigned to oblivion. I was happy to take delight in that wonderful mad sensual muddle, that thumping music, full of electric sexual charge.

But there is a lasting casualty of that Pravda attack. Shostakovich was never to write another opera; Lady Macbeth was never to have a successor. Stalin, the petty pace of all mediocrities, creeps in to the last syllable of recorded time. Still, his was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Thankful for Thanksgiving

My goodness, what a day it’s been, what a day I’ve had. It was Thanksgiving, the American harvest festival. The roots allegedly go all the way back to the first Thanksgiving celebrated by the Pilgrim Fathers, though as a national holiday it really only extends back to a proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

There was actually a political reason for this, one, I note, that does not appear in the Wikipedia article on the subject. It shifted the national focus away from those nasty rebel cavaliers in the South to the earnest puritans of the North! The thing is the much lauded Pilgrim fathers were not the first white settlers in North America, an honour that belongs to the community established at Jamestown in Virginia, clearly not something that Lincoln wanted to draw too much attention to, given the circumstances of the time.

Anyway, my family, as English as they come, celebrate Thanksgiving also, always held on the last Thursday in November. I came down from university specifically for the occasion, bringing some homesick American friends with me, to join others, friends and colleagues of mother and father. We had a splendid time, fourteen of us to dinner, the traditional Thanksgiving feast of turkey and all the lovely American trimmings, all washed down with an excellent Californian vintage. And for pudding, what else but pumpkin pie! Actually, I made this myself. It's one of my favourite puddings, something I really enjoy preparing. Pastry handmade, mind you, no dreadful supermarket elastic! The turkey is no hardship so close to Christmas because we, by our own tradition, always have goose, pheasant or capon then, or occasionally fresh salmon for a change.

So, why, you might ask, does an English family take part in an American festival? Well for one thing we in England have long lost or own harvest festival tradition, rather a pity in so many ways. But more to the point mother and father lived in America for a long time before I was born. In fact it’s where they met for the first time. Our family has so many American friends and, as I've said previously, I spent a great deal of time travelling backwards and forwards to Georgia when I was growing up. It seemed natural to adopt Thanksgiving as our holiday also, which only helps to brighten up November, the most dismal month on the calendar. So thank goodness for Thanksgiving. What about the 4th of July, you may ask, do we celebrate that also? No, we are still English and that might be going a tad too far! What would King George think? :-)

Now I’m tired, emotional and off to bed!

Welcome to England, your Holiness

I am not a Catholic, but I grew up in a Catholic tradition; I grew up in the tradition of High Anglicanism, for which I retain a lingering affection, for the bells and the smells, for certainties presently being undermined by the intellectual confusion and the moral relativism of the leadership of the Church of England.

I went through a particularly pious phase in my mid-teens, a time when my imagination was being stimulated by the moral dilemmas explored in the novels of Graham Greene. It was a time when I seriously considered the possibility of taking that final step, of 'going over to Rome', even discussing the possibility of taking instruction from the priest attached to my school. I was only persuaded against it after some vigorous intervention from my parents, both staunch Anglicans, who even threatened to involve certain bishop, a close friend of the family! It worked, though I have since gone in other spiritual and religious directions, something, when it comes to my family, I rather keep to myself!

I mention this as a preamble to some things I would like to say about the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to this country, the first official visit by the head of the Catholic Church. I personally welcome this, welcome any attempt to heal the fractures in the Catholic tradition brought on by the Reformation. I welcome it all the more because of a ruthless press campaign focusing on the perceived failures of the Catholic Church over the appalling issue of the clerical sexual abuse of children. Yes it is appalling, but it seems to me that the press and television come not as doctors hoping to destroy a cancer but as undertakers hoping to carry off the patient, the patient being the Church itself. It's a campaign that gives solace to militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, heading a new legion of intolerant absolutists, advancing a new religion without meaning or without solace but just as certain in its secular dogmatism.

I have considerable respect for the present Pope, a quiet and reflective man. He does not have the charisma or the air of sanctity of his predecessor but there is so much wisdom to his message, both simple and profound, a message drowned out by the trumpets of misinformation and ignorance. To attempt to portray him as the head of a vast conspiracy of child rapers is malevolent in the extreme. Long before the present media frenzy over this issue he was at the front of a campaign in the Curia to compel the Church to face up to what he called the "filth" of clerical sexual abuse.

But I don't want to focus on this; I want to focus on Benedict as a man of ideas, a man deeply concerned by the growth of forms of relativism, cultural uncertainty and simple bad-faith that threaten not just the Church but the whole of Western civilization. What I propose to draw on here is a super piece in the current issue of Prospect by George Weigel (Britain can benefit from Benedict), in which he touches on some of the arguments the Pope advanced when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger. I don't want to overcomplicate matters but Benedict takes a position contrary to that advanced by Oswald Spengler, the grand ayatollah of cultural despair, in The Decline of the West. It really is true: civilizations do not die in a pre-ordained Hegelian path; no, they commit suicide. And that's what we in Europe and the Americas are doing: we are committing suicide.

As Weigel says, the key to grasping Ratzinger's analysis is to see that "he thinks of Europe's contemporary crisis of cultural morale as a matter of self-destruction." In an address to the Italian Senate in 2004 he said with absolute precision, so far as I am concerned, that it is impossible not to notice a self-hatred in the Western world that is strange "and can even considered pathological." While it is praiseworthy to open to foreign values, he continued, the West "sees in itself only what is blameworthy and destructive and is no longer capable of perceiving what is great and pure."

The problem is that our understanding of European history, of the European mind, is clouded by a kind of blindness or, if you prefer, a cultural amnesia. It’s as if in looking back through the past we can see no further than the eighteenth century Enlightenment, to the so-called Age of Reason. Yes, it's a hugely limiting view, a hyper-secularist reading of the past, as Ratzinger put it, in which black legends of Christian perversity dominate the historical landscape. But at a time when the Classical inheritance was in danger of being lost European civilization was in part saved - as those who watched Dan Snow's documentary on the subject will understand - by Christian monasticism. It was the monks of Ireland, of Iona and of Lindisfarne who were the agents of cultural rebirth, tiny seeds of a mighty tree. I would add that the story of England, English history itself, began with a monk- Bede of Jarrow, to whom I at least cannot be other than hugely grateful. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People remains one of my favourite books.

Ratzinger's argument gets even more subtle, touching on dimensions I had never considered. It was Christianity, he argues, that initially suggested and defended the separation of Church and State, something prized by contemporary secularists. Pope Gregory VII, one of the greatest of the Medieval pontiffs, staked so much on this essential point, refusing to give way to the Emperor Henry IV's attempt to turn the Church into a department of state. So the history of European culture is impossible to contemplate without the church, without the influence of the church, an alternative to naked secular power.

It should not be assumed that his argument is anti-Enlightenment in the way that so much of the Enlightenment argument was anti-religion, far from it. Rather rationalism, on its own, is not enough to sustain confidence in reason, a wonderful paradox. For Ratzinger, Western civilization is sustained by three-legs, legs that might be labelled 'Jerusalem', 'Athens' and 'Rome'; by notions of individual uniqueness and value, of rationality and of law. If Jerusalem goes Athens is uncertain; if Athens goes Rome -the rule of Law- will inevitably follow. Look at Ratzinger's own Germany, the experience of his own life-time, where the Weimar Constitution, constructed on perfectly rational principles, was overwhelmed by atavistic nationalism, a flight from morality, from religion and from reason.

In the same year that he spoke to the Italian senate, Cardinal Ratzinger also took part in a debate with Jurgen Habermas, the doyen of post-war German radical philosophy, in which he argued that the prime cultural imperative of the time was to recognise the necessary relationship "between reason and faith and between reason and religion." It's a way of combating the nihilism, the scepticism and the relativism that have done so much to undermine a proper sense of ourselves, of who we are and where we are going. I agree that, in terms of historical development, we are now at the same stage as the late Roman Empire. Cardinal Ratzinger put it thus;

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future...There is a clear comparison between today's situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted.

But there is no inevitability here. As I said, he rejects Spengler's thesis, which always seemed to me to be a form of Marxism for the petty-bourgeois, hardly surprising when he and Marx more or less drew on the same philosophical sources, the same tiresome teleology. Instead the Pope urges that the revitalisation of our culture through creative minorities and exceptional individuals, the very anti-Spenglerian argument put forward by Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History. How absolutely delightful to discover that at least one person is reading and drawing inspiration from Toynbee!

For Benedict, as Weigel stresses, the Catholic Church is one of those "creative minorities" in twenty-first century Europe and throughout the West. It has to have a certain sense of what it is, of what its purpose is, what its mission is, of ridding itself of the corruptions against which the Pope has been arguing for so long. It means putting behind the "liberalism" in religion so deplored by John Henry Newman. I simply can't take issue with this, because religion surely is about clarity of direction, of clear and simple messages. After all, just as liberalism eats away at civil society, reducing it to a confusion of relativism, where one idea or practice is as good as another, so liberalism and drift have eaten away so much of the Church of England, leaving a husk, grand and sad at one and the same time.

Yes, we all need faith, faith in ourselves, faith in our culture, faith in our civilization. For all its faults simply cannot imagine Europe without the Catholic Church. Oh, but I can, a Dawkins Europe, a Europe sinking faster into a quicksand of doubt and destruction.

Welcome to England, your Holiness.

Hair today

Salvador Dali had a wonderfully subversive sense of humour. It found outlet sometimes in the most unlikely things. Take political banners, those displaying the Big Brother, larger than life phizog of some hero or other. It was once the fashion in communist parades, or in student demonstrations, for participants to carry these things, often showing their secular saints in profile in a kind of apostolic succession.

I’m sure you can picture the sort of thing I mean. It begins with a heavily-bearded Karl Marx, then and even hairier Friedrich Engels, then Lenin with his moustache and goatee, followed by Stalin with just the moustache, ending with a bare-faced Mao Zedong. It was one of these ghastly things that Dali took, adding the title underneath The Rise of Marxism Corresponding to the Decline in Facial Hair.

I wrote some reflections on this myself a couple of years ago. Now I’ve been inspired to return to the politics of hair by a recent article in The Economist (Taking it on the chin). One would have had to been away for decades in space not to know that hair has acquired a political and cultural symbolism, meaning different things to different people. And it’s not just the facial fuzz, the kind of thing that so excites fundamentalist mullahs.

In North Korea, Kim Jong-Il, himself sporting a fairly outrageous barnet, was so concerned by male hairdos that a television campaign was launched called “Let’s trim our hair in accordance with our socialist lifestyle.” Hmm, yes; knowing what I do about the ‘socialist lifestyle’ in North Korea I would have thought everyone, women as well as men, would immediately have gone for total baldness, the slaphead look.

It’s outrageously funny, yes, but there are some places where the politics of hair can be lethal. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, men sporting beards were in danger of having them ripped out by the roots, because this was taken as a sign of opposition to the new overlords, who never went beyond the Ba’athist moustache al la Saddam. Following the Coalition’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, when hair became Shiite, many barbers were murdered, accused of giving haircuts that were “too Western” or “too un-Islamic.”

There are places in the world where men are actually ordered to grow beards as a sign of Islamic piety, Afghanistan under the Taliban being the most obvious example. Even so, as I understand it, there is no firm rule here, practice varying from place to place across the Islamic world. In Iran, interestingly enough, while the ayatollahs get upset about hairdos that are too ‘Western’ (men are even taken from the streets to appear before religious courts), they are surprisingly liberal when it comes to face nests.

Actually, on the latter point, I suspect that there are good genetic and historical reasons for this. Iran was invaded by the Mongols in the Middle Ages, and a large part of the population is of Mongolian descent. The problem is people of this particular racial stock tend to be a bit challenged when it comes to face follicles. Just compare the fulsome efforts of Ayatollah Khameni, Iran’s present Supreme Beard (no descendent of the Great Khan, he), with the pathetic attempt of former president Rafsanjani!

The one sure thing is that the more popular beards become in Islamic societies and communities the less popular they are in places fearful of growing Islamic influence. Just imagine the reaction if someone like, say, Abraham Lincoln stood for office today, even with his relatively modest growth. And when it comes to our own Lord Salisbury, then just forget it! But this is not just Western or Christian beard-a-phobia. Hindu India does not like it much either. Recently a Christian college’s ban on Muslim beards was upheld by a Hindu judge, not normally sympathetic to Christian causes, with the remark “We do not want Talibans here.” Well, quite.

Before I conclude you might want to know how I feel about beards personally. Let me say, on a frivolous note, I was kissed by a bearded apparition at a student party a couple of years ago, taken by surprise when I was just a tincy-winsy tipsy. I honestly can’t begin to describe the sensation, other than to say it felt as if a mop had been thrust into my face or as if I was being embraced by Cousin Itt. Never again!

Savages

The notion of the 'savage in all of us' is an ancient one, finding a place in European thought all the way from Plato to Conrad and beyond. Consider Montaigne's essay on cannibals, in which he says that the civilized Frenchmen of his generation during the Wars of Religion are more savage and more cannibal than all the warrior tribes of Brazil:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine...than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

As for the dangers and paradoxes in the mission of imperial civilization one could do no better than heed the words of the eponymous hero of "Gulliver's Travels";

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not wither; at length a boy discovers land from the top-mast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, they are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the king, they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a title of Divine Right. Ships are sent out at the first opportunity; the natives driven out and destroyed, their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust; the Earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: And this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people.

Who exactly, one has to ask, are the Yahoos and who are the Houyhnhnms? And is the savage no more than a response to savagery? Yes, the Yahoos are Swift's satire on a depraved humanity. But what of the Houyhnhmns who, in the midst of their wisdom and cultivation, discuss the possibility that the Yahoos should 'be exterminated from the face of the Earth’?

Yes, there are lots of questions and no easy answers.

Masked Balls

Masked balls? I simply love masked balls, both exciting and dangerous! They were certainly a great favourite in the eighteenth century, precisely because of the challenge they offered to the accepted conventions of the day. Their popularity was even the occasion for a minor 'moral panic', with The Spectator announcing in an issue of 1711 that "Fishes are caught with Hooks, Birds are ensnared with Nets, but Virgins with Masquerades." So, there you have it!

They only really began to catch on in England in the early 1700s, in imitation of the Italian fashion. The earliest were in fact advertised as 'in the Venetian manner.' The first large-scale public masquerade was that organised by James Heidegger in London's Haymarket in 1708. From that point forward they became the new fashion. In 1717 Alexander Pope wrote a letter to a female acquaintance, which serves to sum up just how central a part the season they had become, "For news in London, I'll sum up in short; we have masquerades at the theatre in the Haymarket, of Mr Heideeker's institution." These events allowed for otherwise unacceptable degrees of familiarity between the classes, from the highest to the lowest, as we know from the correspondence of Horace Walpole-"On Monday there was a subscription masquerade. The King was well disguised in an old fashioned English habit, and much pleased with somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea." Dear old Georgie was so fond of these events that he even appointed Heidegger Master of Revels in 1728.

As for the element of sexual release, well consider this from an issue of The Town and Country Magazine in 1770, describing an event at Carlisle House. A young woman was in attendance, "Wearing a double mask, one side a decrepit old woman, the other a young girl; the mask curtsied both ways, so that it was for some time difficult to discover which was the real front; on being asked by a Domino whether he should take her before or behind, the mask replied, which way you please sir, for it will come to the same thing in the end." In general, it was a moment of liberation for woman, allowing them not just to shed the conventions of the day, but also some of the accepted forms of clothing, corsets most notably. One maid of honour to the Queen attended an event dressed as Iphigenia, causing Walpole to observe that "Miss Chudleigh was Iphigenia but so naked she could have been taken for Andromeda."

Given all of this, it is hardly surprising that such events were so popular. The real question is surely why did they decline? :-)

Civilization and Death, exploring the Halls of Montezuma

I’m sure that the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City must count among the best museums in the world; it’s certainly one of the best I’ve ever been to, with an absolutely wonderful collection of Mesoamerican artefacts, many from the time of the Aztec Empire. It’s where I first saw the teocalli, a votive sculpture cared at the beginning of the sixteenth century to mark the end of the 52-year calendar cycle, and bearing the image of Montezuma II. Well, now it’s in London, the centrepiece of a new exhibition at the British Museum, focusing on Montezuma himself as well as some of the wider aspects of the culture of the Mexica-the term the Aztecs used for themselves-and the final clash of empires that followed from the arrival of Cortés.

The Aztecs, as most people known, certainly people who have seen Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, built a city that floated on water and a civilization that floated on blood. War and religion were closely united, in that campaigns were essentially pursued against their neighbours with the aim of taking captives who were then fed to the blood-thirsty gods, though this aspect is rather down-played in the exhibition itself. Though not generally understood this was the key to their downfall, not the fact that Cortés’s tiny force had firearms and horses. No, he had allies, Indian allies, enemies of the Aztecs.

So, given that the Aztec civilization was at heart a cult of death Boris Johnson, my favourite mayor in all the world, took to the pages of Monday’s Daily Telegraph to argue that their taste for killing presents a powerful case for colonialism and the intervention in the Americas of the oh-so benevolent Conquistadors (When one civilization deserves a bloody nose from another). Human sacrifice as practiced by the Aztecs was indeed horrible, a process by which the living heart was cut from the body by razor sharp obsidian blades; it certainly horrified the Spanish.

And yet, Boris, and yet. I wonder what an Aztec party coming to Spain would have made of the procedures of the Inquisition; what they would have made of the auto de fé, when living victims were cast to the flames in the name of another God, not a god of war, not a god who needed blood to rise in the morning, but a god of peace and love? Would they have been equally horrified? Yes, probably, because I imagine they would have been unable to work out why this was happening. There again, they may have sympathised with the ‘religious’ sacrifice of the Spanish in the way that the Spanish did not, could not, sympathise with theirs.

Boris, I know, is a Classical scholar and an admirer of the Roman Empire. So, let me take my imaginary Aztec travellers back in time to the days of the Caesars. What would they see? Why, yet another death cult, with ‘sacrifices’ across the Empire not for the benefit of the gods but for the passions of the mob. Now if our Aztecs were as technologically advanced in relative terms as the Spanish, if they came to Rome in the way that Cortés came to Tenochtitlan, if they had been as thoroughly destructive as the Spanish, we may never have heard of Virgil, of Livy, of Horace, of Cicero or of Seneca, as one imperial power built itself on the sands of another.

But I realise that this is all great fun, and that the dear mayor is writing partially tongue-in-cheek. What he and I can both agree on is that this is a super exhibition, worth going to see, and even worth the entirely voluntary sacrifice of a fiver. :-))

The Paradox of Islam

Anyway, where does one begin? There is so much to admire in Islamic culture and history; in their architecture, their philosophy and in their art. When Europe was only just emerging from what was once widely known as ‘the Dark Ages’, Islam was moving steadily towards the fullest expression of a unique civilization. I’ve seen the Mezquita, the former mosque in Cordoba in southern Spain, built when the old Moorish kingdom of al-Andalusia was at its height, and it truly is breathtaking.

It’s as well to remember, though, that militant Islam is not an aberration; the religion has always carried the sword, in the one hand, and in pen, in the other. It’s really a matter of degree. Arab civilization, in particular, has been in relative decline for centuries. The period when it was at the forefront of human progress is long gone. The advance of western imperialism in the nineteenth century, and neo-imperialism in the twentieth, was the occasion for what might be referred to as ‘great reappraisal’; that things had got so bad because Islam was not Islam enough. The emergence of the conservative Wahhabi movement and Islamic Jihad are but two symptoms of this phenomenon.

Have you read the Koran? Well, I have, and it’s altogether quite revealing.