Word Master

I’m in the process of reading The Complete Essays of Michel Montaigne, a labour worthy of Hercules. Please don’t misunderstand me; if it’s a labour it’s a hugely entertaining one. I’ve read some of his essays before though in a highly abridged edition. The full collection weighs in at thirteen hundred pages, full of all sorts of surprises and delights.

Montaigne is the father of the essay as a literary form. In so many ways his own personal technique, his assaying has never been bettered in style, range or content. I’ve not long finished On Democritus and Heraclitus, where he says of himself:

I take the first subject that Fortune offers: all are equally good for me. I never plan to expand them in full for I do not see the whole of anything: neither do those who promise to help us to do so! Everything has a hundred parts and a hundred faces: I take one of them and sometimes just touch it with the tip of my tongue or my fingertips, and sometimes I pinch it to the bone. I jab into it, not as wide but as deep as I can; and I often prefer to catch it from some unusual angle. I might even have ventured to make a fundamental study if I did not know myself better. Scattering broadcast a word here, a word there, examples ripped from their contexts, unusual ones, with no plan and no promises, I am under no obligation to make a good job of it nor even stick to the subject myself without varying it should it so please me; I can surrender to doubt and uncertainty and to my master-form, which is ignorance.

It’s just so brilliantly put, this technique of playful serendipity, the one I try myself with a fraction of the skill or the insight. There is not the least artifice in the way that Montaigne looks at things, though there is a slight tendency to self-deprecating understatement. He is the subject of his book, and spending a little leisure in pursuit of the subject is neither frivolous nor vain, as he himself suggests!

Montaigne also has a quality I admire most in a writer: a simple love of words. In introducing On the Vanity of Words, the essay that follows on from the above, the editor says that, despite the author’s mastery of language, he despised words and admired deeds. But that seems to me not to be a wholly accurate reading; for, drawing on classical examples, what he really despises is rhetoric, and rhetoric here is the worst kind of artifice; an abuse of words, an abuse of meaning and an abuse of language. Montaigne does give examples of bad usage, particularly in overblown technical terms, but he does so in words that are anything but vain. In other words, he disproves his own argument, or he proves the subtle irony of his intellect.

On Democritus and Heraclitus has another passage that I particularly like:

I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable.

Vain, daft, inane and despicable, watching the news night after night, discovering the latest antics of some politician or celebrity, it’s a conclusion that is almost impossible to escape.

History in a Charter

There is a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indian Jones, in a bluff, threatens to blow up the Ark of the Covenant, captured by the Nazis. The bluff is called by Dr René Belloq, a French archaeologist in the pay of the Germans, who says “Yes, blow it up! Blow it back to God. All your life has been spent in search of archaeological relics. Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations. You want to see it open as well as I. Indiana, we are simply passing through history. This...this is history.”

I remembered this on reading that the City of London’s copy of Magna Carta was recently returned to the Guildhall from the Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell, where it has been resting for the past five years while the strong-room in which it is normally kept was being renovated. We are simply passing through history; Magna Carta is history.

London’s copy is not one of the four extant originals signed by a reluctant King John at Runnymede in the summer of 1215. It’s a later version, authorised by Edward I, John’s grandson, in 1297, though it has the distinction of being the best preserved, the one that is consulted by Parliament when its clauses become relevant.

According to an article I read in the Times it’s valued at £20million, an entirely nominal figure because it will never be sold, could never be sold. Magna Carta is literally priceless. At the Guildhall itself it is not normally on view, being kept secure behind fire doors with an eight hour resistance. The only other danger it faces is from insects, which could consume the thirteenth century vellum. To guard against this those who care for it carry out regular ‘bug hunts’, to use their own expression.

Magna Carta itself is better known for its principles than its contents, a good bit of which is concerned with the property-rights of the thirteenth century aristocracy. Unlike, say, the American Declaration of Independence, which takes it as one of its cues, the language is dry and legalistic rather than poetic and inspirational.

Dry it may be but it is still the basis of so much that we have come to value as central to our liberties. It was the first serious attempt to limit the power of the executive, the first attempt to determine that monarchs were also subject to the law. Most important of all, though this was never the intent, it is a kind of constitution, a prototype for all that followed across the Anglo-Saxon world.

Take chapter 29, still the best known and by far the most relevant: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [deprived of property] or exiled or in any way destroyed…except by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” In these few words, as the historian David Starkey wrote, lies the kernel of the three great legal freedoms: the rule of law, the security of property and the right to trial by jury.

There is also something even more fundamental in elementary notions of political freedom, a balance of rights and duties. In the reissue of the Charter by Henry III in 1225 it is recorded that the liberties had been given by the crown in return for a grant of taxation. Such grants were to become the prerogative of Parliament, the basis for still further compromises and concessions.

No taxation without representation, the political battle-cry of the American Revolution, stems from the principles that Magna Carta introduced to the world. It is a document that should be cherished, one that shows the enlightenment of medieval barons compared with the thugs and tyrants who control so much of the modern world, individuals and oligarchs who are governed by no law but their own.

Bloodless Drama

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April, 1865 immediately conjures up one name – John Wilkes Booth. But there were others involved, or implicated, in the conspiracy that led to this seminal event in American history. They included one woman, Mary Surratt.

I confess I had never heard of her, not until I saw The Conspirator, a historical drama directed by Robert Redford. Surratt ran a boarding house in Washington in which Booth and a group of Confederate sympathisers, including John Surratt, her son, met first to plan the kidnapping and then the murder of Lincoln along with other members of the Federal government.

Surratt was caught up in the sweep that followed the assassination in Ford’s Theatre, though her son escaped. She was eventually convicted and hanged in July 1865 as a co-conspirator, though the question just exactly how much she knew, how culpable she was, remains open, and Redford makes no attempt at closure. One of the highlights of the movie is Robin Wright’s depiction of Surratt, a perfect study in stoic ambiguity. Clearly I can’t speak with any authority on her innocence or guilt though it would seem obvious that she stood trial for her son, whose guilt was the greater. The irony is that when he was eventually caught, at a time when the initial panic and outrage had died away, he was released after a mistrial.

This is a good story which should have made for compelling cinema. Sadly it did not. I thought the script plodding and the general treatment stuffily didactic. There is simply no emotional engagement, rather odd considering the potential here. Because I’m so keen on history and courtroom drama this movie should have worked for me on so many levels. It was all the more disappointing that it did not. There was loving attention to detail, certainly, in creating the general atmosphere of the America of the 1860s but the overall effect was like a heavy pudding – bland and stodgy.

There are good performances by a first class cast. Wright, as I have said, excels as Surratt, James McAvoy is good as Fredrick Aiken, her idealistic defence counsel, slow to accept that his client has any defence at all, and Kevin Kline was superb as Edwin Stanton, the Secretary for War, who seems to have taken control of the government in the wake of Lincoln’s murder, pursuing the conspirators with a single-minded determination. But even this could not lift The Conspirator above the mundane.

The movie, in its heavy-handed manner, comes with a serious point. The trial of Surratt and the others, conducted by a military tribunal, did not just trample their constitutional rights – it ground them into the dust. If the war had been fought, to use Lincoln’s words, for a new birth of freedom this was most certainly not it. Even Aiken’s attempts to obtain a writ of habeas corpus and have Surratt tried by a civil court were frustrated by edict of President Andrew Johnson.

One would have to be blind to miss the subliminal message (Kline even bears a strong resemblance to former vice-president Dick Cheney!), that no matter how great the emergency we stamp on civil liberties, on the legal principles established by Magna Carta, at great peril. Yes, all very important, if only it could have conveyed in a fashion that feels a little less worthy, a little less like a movie made for TV. Where, oh where, was the stardust? The Conspirator is not full-blooded; it’s anaemic.

Gordon Brown, the Sewer Rat

We haven’t heard much from Gordon Brown, our late, unlamented, prime minister, the man who bankrupted Britain, since he was ejected from Downing Street with as much lack of personal dignity as the scheming and the treachery that took him there in the first place. But we heard from him last week, the raging bull, raging in Parliament, attacking Rupert Murdoch’s News International as a “criminal media nexus” engaging on “law breaking on an industrial scale.” On he fumed about ‘rats’ and ‘sewers’ and the like.

This had nothing to do with the phone hacking fuss that saw the demise last week of the News of the World, though he certainly drew on that for additional ammunition. It was brought on, rather, for altogether more personal reasons.

In 2006 the Sun, another horse in the Murdoch stable, improperly, according to Brown, accessed the medical records of his son, Fraser, revealing that he suffered from cystic fibrosis. The odd thing is that it’s taken five years for this to come out, and clearly just at the right moment, to inflict even more damage on News International. In the court of public opinion the shout went up “How awful!”, “How awful!” David Cameron even offered the former PM his sympathies.

Oh, it’s awful alright, but not for the reasons you may suppose. Of all the hypocrisy and hand-wringing that has been demonstrated over the past week in the wake of the News International scandal Brown’s is by far the worst. Let me put it plainly: he used his son, his own son, as part of an act of the basest political vengeance. If there are rats, he is the biggest; if there are sewers, his is the deepest.

The fact is that the Sun did not obtain the information in the manner suggested but from another father, whose son also suffered from this condition. The fact is that the Sun cleared the story with Brown and his wife before it was published. The fact is that they both asked for the widest possible coverage, pushing for it to be published in other papers. The fact is they tried to make political capital out of personal unhappiness, the most sickening fact of all.

The publication of this story did nothing at all to sour Brown’s relationship with Rupert Murdoch or News International. The first interview that he gave after becoming Prime Minister in 2007 was with a Sun journalist. Rebekah Brook, the former News International chief executive, was editor of the Sun at the time of the cystic fibrosis story, though that did not stop her coming to Downing Street as a personal guest of Sarah Brown. Moreover, it did not stop the Browns attending her wedding in 2009.

The real reason for the rupture has nothing to do with medical records and phone hacking. No, the real reason is the Sun, the newspaper that supposedly ‘delivers’ the outcome of British parliamentary elections, abandoned Labour in support of the Tories prior to the election of 2010. Brown, noted for his rages, noted as the Mad Mrs Rochester of the Downing Street attic, rang Rupert Murdoch saying that “I will destroy you.” That’s what it’s all about: petty spite and vengeance. At once my sympathies switched to Murdoch. I simply cannot stomach hypocrisy seasoned by treachery, treachery, moreover, by a kind of vicious Holy Willy, a canting Presbyterian Scot.

Let’s look a little more closely at the sewer and the rat. Brown expresses contempt for the techniques employed by News International. But this is a man who, when the phone hacking allegations first emerged in 2009, refused to set up an inquiry. He now says that his efforts to do so were obstructed by Sir Gus O’ Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary. That’s an outright lie, as the good knight has since confirmed.

It get’s worse. The moral tone of Gordon Brown’s sewer-like premiership was set by political thugs like Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride. The altogether loathsome Damian McBride served as a special advisor on Brown’s staff until 2009, when he was caught trying to disseminate lies about opposition politicians, lies that did not stop short of embracing one MP’s wife. The emails in question were issued from Downing Street. It was a culture of political poison that makes News International look almost amateurish.

I’m sure Dante would have found a special place in the Inferno for Gordon Brown. Yes, of course, the Eighth Circle, that dedicated to the treacherous and the fraudulent. It’s there, specifically in the sixth section, where the hypocrites are to be found, weighed down forever by gilded lead cloaks, representing the reality behind the appearance of their words and actions in life.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

The Dawkins Delusion

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine…

Actually, no, I couldn’t but I can a tale unfold that might make you smile, perhaps even laugh. It concerns atheist, rationalist, feminist, progressive and sceptic folk; it concerns people not noted for their wit or their humour; it concerns, most particularly, Richard Dawkins, an atheist god and his fall from grace into disgrace.

Before going a step further I have to thank Michael Ezra, a friend and fellow tweeter, who drew this delightful brouhaha to my attention, with links to all sorts of places and rational forums that I would never have visited, places where oh so liberal folk are busy tearing Dawkins apart, yea, even so far as the New Statesman (when is this sexist publication going to be renamed the New Statesperson?) So, Michael, thanks!

Let’s begin at the beginning, let’s begin at the Dublin conference of atheists and sceptics last month, addressed by Holy Dawkins. But as man – and women – shall not live by doubt and dismissal alone, one of the participants, in a mood of romantic timeout, thought he would try his chances. Indeed he did.

Let me set the scene for you. It’s late, four o’clock in the morning to be exact. Dog-tired after a day of doubt, debunking and drinking, a woman leaves a hotel bar and gets on the elevator, making her way to her room, bed and a godless rest.

Before the doors are fully closed a chap jumps on board. A bit nervous and a bit awkward, he says to the woman “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” He just wanted a spot more scepticism but she assumed that his mind was on another topic beginning with the letter s and did take it the wrong way. No, she would not, a lame proposition put down by a quick rebuff. And that, as they say is that. I know; I’m an expert in the art of the cutting brush off!

No it was not, because the woman Randy Roger the Sceptic tried to inveigle with offers of coffee was a certain Rebecca Watson, apparently, as I now know, a leading American sceptic (forgive the k-less spelling) who runs the excellent Skepchick site. It has to be; the New Statesman says so.

Now Rebecca, rather than brushing the whole thing off, goes home and posts a video on the excellent Skepchick site, saying, amongst other things, that she does not welcome chat-ups from sex-starved sceptics on the elevators of foreign hotels. It makes her uncomfortable, you see, when men sexualise her in that manner. I rather expect it makes Rebecca permanently uncomfortable to be seen as an object of sexual desire, anywhere, anytime. She most certainly does not want a bash from other God-bashers. It creeps her out. These guys creep me out, too, but that’s by the by.

So, that’s that, you might think, but no; enter Dawkins on a donkey, riding in to the comments section of the excellent Skepchick site, rather sceptical about dear Rebecca’s sexual scepticism. He expresses his view in a letter to an imaginary Muslim woman;

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

Talk about the God that failed! At once his adoring acolytes were not quite so full of adoration; at once they gathered together with cries of “Crucify him!” “Crucify him!” And, my, how they have, in an explosion of blogosphere outrage made worse by his cack-handed attempts at further explanation. Those nails, how they must have hurt going in, judging by this sharp example;

It makes me want to cry a little when you live up to the stereotype of a well-off, 70 year old, white, British, ivory tower academic. But let me spell it out for you instead of just getting mad (though I'll do that too):

Words matter. You don't get that because you've never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don't have people constantly explaining that you're subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal. You don't have people saying you shouldn't have rights. You don't have people constantly sexually harassing you. You don't live in fear of rape, knowing that one wrong misinterpretation of a couple words could lead down that road.

Well, I’ve referred to Dawkins as a prat, a four letter word; does that not count?

And so it went on, blah, blah, with Watson chipping in, saying her own piece in hyper-feminist mood;

To have my concerns—and more so the concerns of other women who have survived rape and sexual assault—dismissed thanks to a rich white man comparing them to the plight of women who are mutilated, is insulting to all of us. Feminists in the west have been staunch allies of the women being brutalized elsewhere, and they've done a hell of a lot more than Richard Dawkins when it comes to making a difference in their lives.

Sceptic chick (chick? My goodness!) turned by degrees from angry chick to furious chick to vengeful chick, so much so that she called for a boycott of Dawkins' books. Perhaps there should be a public burning of The God Delusion? My, what a delicious irony there would be in this immolation of the atheists’ bible!

Scepticism grew by the hour as more and more people raised doubts about the existence of Richard Dawkins. Where is the evidence? Perhaps it’s all a delusion? Perhaps someone could write a book and organise a conference. No sex, please; we’re sceptics.

Doubts were raised about the Dawkins, verily, so far as the New Statesman, where one David Allen Green weighed-in in the pompously sanctimonious style I associate with that publication: “Can Richard Dawkins still credibly pose as champion of rational thinking and the evidence-based approach? In my opinion he certainly cannot, at least in the way he did before.” How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of scepticism perished!

So, bang goes Richard as the high priest of rational thinking and the evidence-based approach! All this, all this pointless and petty fuss because some stupid guy had the temerity to approach a humourless frump. I think God must have set it up just to have a good laugh at these clowns. It’s simply wonderful to see the rationalists descended into such risible irrationality. This is a tale worthy of an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Behold, Grandma Moses, the Useless Idiot

Alice Walker, a professional American African American woman, wrote The Color Purple and she’s been dining out on it for years. Alice Walker, the professional American African American, is a well-known radical, active in all sorts of progressive and fashionable causes, and she’s been boring people relentlessly for years.

Alice Walker walks in a higher plain: she walks with Gandhi; she walks with Martin Luther King; she even walks with Jesus. She drips with compassion for all children, “humanity’s most precious resource”, to use her own words, though she can’t even manage a human relationship with her own child, Rebecca, who has said that she felt “more of a political symbol that a cherished daughter.” Shades, I think of Charles Dickens’ Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House, as another blogger noted. Like Mrs Jellyby, the “telescopic philanthropist”, Alice Walker is a prig; a sanctimonious, preaching, hypocrite. Worst of all she is a self-important, self-regarding fool.

So, what’s brought this on? I should say that I had little interest at all in this woman, the avatar of the second rate, grossly inflated beyond all proportion, famous for being famous, an individual whose talent stands in inverse proportion to the size of her mouth.

She is not a writer for whom I have any respect, representing all that is cankerous in modern liberalism, exposed so brilliantly by Nick Cohn in his book What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way. I would continued to have ignored her but for the fact that she decided to join the so-called Freedom Flotilla 2, an act of political agitprop by the murderers of Hamas, supposedly intended to end the Israeli blockade of Gaza. She has not the first clue over the true objectives.

I recently wrote Eyeless to Gaza, an article published on BrooWaha, the online newspaper, drawing attention to the political realities behind Freedom Flotilla 2, an armada made up partially of the malicious and partially of the moronic. I made it plain that this is an ‘aid’ convoy that carries no aid. What it does carry is a lot of left-liberals, useful idiots, as Lenin is once supposed to have described such people. Of Walker specifically this is what I said;

The useful idiots, incidentally, include Alice Walker, the American writer, who has joined the flotilla, saying she is concerned about ‘the children.’ Perhaps she might have considered talking with Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli-Arab journalist, who has actually spoken to ordinary Palestinian people, as opposed to the publicists of Hamas. If she did she would have discovered that there is no shortage of food and that shortages of medicine are caused by infighting between Fata and Hamas. The latest news from the Gaza Strip itself confirms this, officials blaming Fata for “political blackmail”

I really don’t see this woman now talking to anyone, or being able to make any sense of what’s being said to her. Prior to sailing with the pompously named Audacity of Hope - thankfully now ‘becalmed’ in Greek waters along with the rest of the diminishing armada - she issued a statement so sanctimonious that people watching her at the press conference could not possible have missed her halo;

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation. Not to mention in speeches that circle the globe…we must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid… So, Gazans, and especially the children, we are on our way. We are coming. We hear you. We are coming

And on that note she floated away. Actually I’m surprised she needed a ship at all. Surely the waters would part before this modern Grandma Moses as the Red Sea parted before, well, Moses!

They are coming alright, or rather they are not, which is probably as great a relief to the people of Gaza, spared this woman’s oleaginous embrace. The ocean of compassion, incidentally, does not extend to the children of southern Israel, for all Walker’s maudlin mawkishness, children whose homes have come under attack by Hamas rockets. These terrorists, moreover, with no qualms at all, hide the launch sites in civilian areas, effectively using Palestinian children as a shield. Does Grandma know?

Howard Jacobson, a prize winning British author, wrote an excellent expose of Walker in all her laughable hypocrisy. Beyond highly charged emotionalism the woman gave not a single valid reason for joining the flotilla, for wanting to end a blockade absolutely necessary to prevent the terrorists who control Gaza from getting hold of more weapons.

One would have to be a complete fool not to see through Walker’s partiality, to see through all her tendentious colour purple (oops!) prose. Alice Walker comes in peace, with the side possibility of wished-for martyrdom (but who would dare assault a ship carrying Grandma Moses?). If the Israeli military attacks, she said, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. Let there be some Jacobsen light;

Wrong on a thousand counts. As a writer, Alice Walker must understand the symbolic significance of words. The cargo is a cargo of intention. It is freighted with political sympathy and attitude. It means to blunder into where it isn't safe, clothed in the make-believe garments of the unworldly, speaking of children and speaking like children, half inviting a violence which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents.

Even before the deed, Alice Walker has her language of outraged moral purity prepared -- "but if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us..." The Israeli response is thus already an act of unprovoked murder, no matter that the flotilla is by its very essence a provocation. Whatever its cargo, by luring the Israeli military into action which can be represented as brutal, the flotilla is engaged in an entirely political act. To call it by any other name is the grossest hypocrisy.

Meanwhile Grandma cools her heels in Greek waters with the other useless idiots as this gesture begins to look more farcical by the day. The Israeli government has behaved brilliantly in becalming the armada politically, something even the Guardian has been obliged to admit. Even the IHH, the terrorist front based in Turkey, has withdrawn support, because of ‘technical problems.’ In point of fact it’s because the Turkish government is anxious to restore its previously good relations with Israel, disrupted by last year’s flotilla.

So Walker sits still, I assume, audaciously hoping on the Audacity of Hope. She might be moved to entertain the others with a rousing spiritual or two. Or perhaps not, just in case the waters of the Aegean are not quite as obliging as those of the Red Sea.

Putin’s Potemkin Democracy

Lieutenant Kijé is a soldier who never was. He was born by sleight of bureaucracy and he died by sleight of bureaucracy. The anecdote dates back to the late eighteenth century, to the time of Tsar Paul of Russia. First published in the 1870s, it tells of man, originally named, Kizh, created by a misprint on a list of officers. Paul sees the name and promotes him from second to first lieutenant.

Having come to the attention of the Tsar, nobody dare admit that there is no such person as Lieutenant Kizh. Bit by bit he is promoted, until he becomes a full colonel. At such an elevated rank the Tsar now demands to see him, only to be told that he is dead by the nervous officials. “What a pity”, he says, “he was such a good officer.”

This splendid little satire on the stupidity of bureaucracy and the blindness of autocracy was turned into a novella by Yury Tynyanov, a Soviet author, in 1927, with Kizh now as Kijé. Still later it was made into a film with a marvellous score by Sergei Prokofiev.

In so many ways it’s the perfect parable, illustrating the absurdity that has long formed part of Russian history, where openness and freedom are constantly imperilled by servility in the face power, the power of the state and the power of the ruler. It immediately came to mind when I read about the six month travel ban imposed on Boris Nemtsov, formerly deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and a leading critic of Vladimir Putin, the increasingly autocratic prime minister.

What was Nemtsov’s offence? Oh, it was terribly serious. Last year he published a pamphlet drawing attention to Putin’s relationship with Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire energy trader. Following legal instructions, a correction was printed by a newspaper in March. It was too short, the judges said, and because the author was determined not to have co-operated fully with the court a travel ban was imposed. The connection and the logic here is quite beyond me.

It’s laughable in its absurdity, an indication that Russia has moved full-circle back to Soviet days, when such devices were regularly imposed on those critical of the regime. It’s also an open admission that Russian law is an ass, Putin’s ass. In general the treatment of Nemtsov provides evidence of the premier’s increasing paranoia in the run up to next year’s presidential election.

Official intolerance against any form of opposition grows by the day in Putin’s Potemkin democracy. The reference here, of course, is to the artificial settlements allegedly put up by Prince Grigory Potemkin, chief minister to Catherine the Great, to impress the empress on the value of the new conquests he had made in the Crimea, an illusion, hollow and unreal.

Recently the Justice Ministry refused to register the People’s Freedom Party, co-headed by Nemtsov, preventing him fielding candidates for the parliamentary election scheduled for December. No such ban was placed on the pro-Kremlin Right Cause party which registered at the same time. This selectivity comes despite President Medvedev’s promise to encourage greater political competition. But Medvedev seems himself to be little more than a Potemkin head of state, keeping the place warm for Putin.

Competition and openness, any kind of freedom really, have always been problematic when set against the kind of court politics that have changed so little from the days of Paul to those of Putin. It’s all cronyism and intrigue set against an obsequious and fawning officialdom, falling over itself to carry out the will of the throne. Russia may have a modern face but it is little more than a mask, behind which little has changed.