Satan in Moscow

Ding, dong, bell, Pussy’s in the well, so goes the opening of a traditional English nursery rhyme.  In the modern Russian version Pussy is not in a well but in prison.  She was told by a Moscow judge on Friday that she must remain there, poor beast, until at least January of next year, pending proceedings on a charge of ‘hooliganism.’ 

The Pussy in question is actually three members of Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk rock band.  Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Ekaterina Samutsevich, all in their twenties, have been in custody since March, arrested for their part in protests against Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the presidency earlier this year.  It’s a sign that the more things change in Russia the more they remain the same; that free speech is a right more often defined by its absence.

The whole case is tinged with some ludicrous colours, nothing more ludicrous than the offence itself.  They were arrested for performing an impromptu punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, beseeching the Virgin to ‘Drive Putin Out.’ 

That’s it; for that they will be held for a total of ten months in detention.  When the case eventually, if ever, goes to trial they could face another seven years if convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”  Bail has been repeatedly denied despite the fact that two of the women have young children.  There have even been calls to deprive them of their parental rights along with their liberty. 

How Stalin, sleeping fitfully under the Kremlin Wall, would marvel at modern Russia.  The Orthodox Church, which he and his comrades subjected to systematic persecution, is once again a power in the land.  The hierarchy, which has close ties to Putin, supports the continuing incarceration of the three women, though the majority of ordinary believers want them to be released.

Boris Akunin, a popular writer of crime fiction, has described the “state’s malice” towards the women as “disgusting.”  It certainly is, but there is more than simple malice here.  The whole process is acquiring Gothic overtones, reminiscent of past prosecutions for witchcraft.  Salem, it might be said, has flown east.

On Thursday, Mikhail Kuznetsov, a lawyer acting for one of the Cathedral guards, accused Pussy Riot of being motivated by the same “Satanic forces” that carried out the 9/11 attacks on America.  The punk band is apparently the "tip of an iceberg of extremists, trying to break down the thousand year edifice of the Russian Orthodox Church by creating a schism, guiding the flock through trickery and cunning not to God, but to Satan. Behind this stands real enemies of our state, and Church."

A heavy indictment indeed, if one believes that opposition to Putin has demonic overtones.  Democracy and free speech would also seem to have a devilish character in modern Russia.  Well, by and large, they always have. Satan is back in Moscow.  Readers of Mikhail Bulgakov will surely love the irony.  

Man Bites Shark

Last Saturday morning, at 9am local time, Ben Linden, a 24-year-old surfer, was killed in a particularly horrific attack by a Great White shark to the north of the city of Perth in Western Australia.  It's a news story I reported on BrooWaha simply as a story (Shark Bites Surfer in Half, 15 July).  

There are aspects to this tragedy that made me uneasy, specifically over the slightly hysterical reaction in the Australian media.  However, with the death so fresh and the shock so apparent, I felt it best just to report the bare facts.  I did, right until the end.  It was only after I found out that surfers were still using the beach in question, despite a local ban, that I felt a brief observation was necessary;

Comment is superfluous in the face of such tragedy, though I think it only right to say that there are some risks simply not worth taking, or if people are prepared to take them the sharks themselves should not suffer the consequences of their foolhardiness. Jaws-style hysteria seems wholly out of place.

Sadly Jaws-style hysteria is what we are getting. Great Whites have been a protected species in Australian waters for more than a decade, after the International Union for Conservation of Nature identified them as vulnerable. Now, in the aftermath of Ben's death, there have been repeated calls for a cull.  Norman Moore, the Western Australian Fisheries Minister, said that is now time to reassess the species population numbers and its protected status.  "Regrettably", he said, "people are being taken by sharks in numbers which we have never seen before.”  

Greater numbers, yes, they are, but what exactly are we talking about here?  Precisely this: five people have been killed in Australian waters in the past ten months.  I agree; it's not a statistic - its five individual tragedies.  Still, the matter should not be taken out of proportion.  We have to understand why sharks are taking a greater interest in human swimmers, clearly not part of their routine food population.  

The answer is we have attracted them, with new and thoughtless forms of high adrenaline tourism.  Cage diving with sharks is a popular pastime in both South Africa and Southern Australia.  When you look into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss looks back into you.  

For sharks this baiting with bait has made them more familiar with a human presence, with humanity as a source of easy food.  Great Whites feed mainly on seals.  Even the rare human attacks have not often resulted in the total consumption of the victims, little comfort, in that a single bit from these powerful jaws is likely to be fatal.  The bites, though, are clearly tests.  In future they may become something more.

There were proposals to introduce cage diving into Western Australia.  I understand that operators have now been told that they will not be allowed to go ahead for fear of attracting more sharks and more attacks.  The link here has been a matter of controversy.  Research by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation produced findings which are ambiguous at best.  They concluded that baiting kept sharks in an area for longer, but did not prove a link between baiting and attacks on humans.  Well, I can only go on a level of simple intuition here but I think it reasonable to assume that more sharks means more attacks.  If human are there and sharks are there the rest will surely follow.

Sharks are ancient creatures.  They were swimming the waters of this planet before humans appeared.  How much longer, though, is now open to question.  In all of last year twelve people across the entire planet died as a result of encounters with sharks.  In the same year, as reported recently in Prospect magazine, a million sharks died in encounters with humans.  The story surely has to be man bites shark, not shark bites man.  

Hungary’s Future is all in the Past

Auntie Angela Merkel, in the fashion of an earnest and humourless German Leherin, is in habit of lecturing us all on the dire consequences of the collapse of the European Union.  The alternative is the past, the alternative is German history, and we all want to avoid that! 

The thing is, you see, Auntie and the others who believe in the benighted European ideal have a kind of Marxist view that history has been surpassed and superseded; that the past, so to speak, is all in the past.  I can assure you that it’s not; modern Hungary, the Hungary of the European Union, is example enough to dispel that comforting illusion. 

Just imagine how Europe and the world would react if Germany repudiated the Treaty of Versailles which followed the First World War, the Versailles ‘Diktat’ which so enraged Hitler and the other German nationalists.  Ah, but that is a history too deeply buried.  Who now cares about that distant past?

Hungary does, oh, not about Versailles but about the Treaty of Trianon, its own post-war settlement, concluded with the Allies in 1920.  By this the old Greater Hungry was reduced to a rump, a land-locked central European state, a kingdom without a king ruled by one Miklos Horthy, an admiral without a navy in a country without a coast. Horthy later went on to form an alliance with Hitler, repudiating Trianon and recovering some of the lost territory before the whole dream went belly up.

Ah, but Hungary is such stuff as dreams are made on and its little land is rounded by…places it wants back!  Now I feel sure that Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose conservative Fidesz party came to power in the election of 2010, would not dream of going to war with Austria, Slovakia, Romania, the Ukraine, Serbia and Croatia to regain in whole or in part what was lost, at least not all at once.  But that has not stopped him repudiating the treaty and inaugurating a ‘national day of mourning’ on the anniversary of its signing. 

Viktor is a decent man.  He has declared himself firmly opposed to monuments for such dictators as Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.  Well, they are all foreigners, are they not?  He’s a bit more ambivalent when it comes to Hungary’s Horthy. 

The Admiral is making something of a comeback in a country still traumatised by a ninety-three year old treaty.  Last month a bust of the old boy was unveiled in Csokako in the north of the country by the paramilitary Hungarian Guard, a movement closely allied to the right-wing Jobbik Party.  It’s nothing to do with me, says the prime minister; it’s a matter for local government which monuments are erected or not.  Just as well, I suppose, that it was not Lenin, Stalin or Hitler. 

“Viktor Orban is a man of the past,” Socialist party president, Attila Mesterhazy, said in his annual address in parliament in March. “He wants to bring back a Hungary that’s long gone. That’s why they’re always citing politicians from the beginning of the 1900s. That’s why they’re trying to fashion the state after the Horthy regime, the public law configuration, even parliament.” 

The thing is, though, in Hungary the past is very much the present, with Orban moving the country back into an uncertain future. How I love history; how I love her sense of irony.  

Egypt through the Barrel of a Gun

No sooner had Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s new Islamic Brotherhood president, assumed office than he showed that he was not a figure to be taken lightly.  The parliament, dominated by his Brothers and dissolved earlier this year by court order (for this read army order), had to be reinstated, he decreed.  The following day he changed his mind.  His office, he said, would respect the court’s decision “because we are a law based nation.”  In other words, he is a figure to be taken lightly. 

I have to ask what brought this epiphany in a mere twenty-four hour period.  Your guess is as good as mine and my guess is the generals  They are ever present in the omnipresent SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the guardian of all truth, justice and the Egyptian way, or the Egyptian way as they see it, which is their way. 

I have said this before and I will say it ad nauseum – in Egypt old soldiers never die; they don’t even fade away.  The other thing I will continue to say is that the so-called Arab Spring was never about freedom and democracy; it bore no relationship whatsoever to the process that ended the moribund communist gerontocracies in Eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties.  No; it was about power; it was a struggle over the transfer of power from one self-interested group to another self-interested group

In Egypt the generals may have let power slip in the pretence of democracy but you can be assured that they will never let power go.  Egypt is not a law-based nation; it’s a military-based nation.  Anticipating a victory for the Islamists in the presidential election, SCAF issued a constitutional decree as soon as the poll closed, stripping the potential president of many of his powers, most particularly oversight of the armed forces.  Brothers to the right of them, Brothers to the left of them, the generals were having none of this valley of uncertainty. 

So, then, the future of parliament is in the power of the courts and the courts are in the power of the army.  The only way that Morsi can achieve full constitutional legitimacy is for his Brothers to reassemble and administer the oath of office “This will go down in history as the first serious step towards a democratic transition in Egypt, said Omar Ashour, an Egyptian academic.  “The ultimate test of a democratic transition is whether civilians are in charge of the armed forces.”

In matters like these I often draw parallels with seventeenth century England.  Egypt now is a little like this country after the conclusion of the First Civil War.  Then there was uncertainty; then the outcome could not be predicted; then there were fractured sources of authority.  In the contest that followed the New Model Army came out on top, the guardians of the revolution as they interpreted it.  Political power came from the barrel of a gun; political power comes from the barrel of a gun.  Egypt is set to prove a time-worn adage.  

The Way We Were

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood and make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.  Actually, I couldn’t but Dominic Sandbrook can; he has in Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, the sequel to State of Emergency - the Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, which I reviewed here in October, 2010. 

I’m not quite sure how to describe this book, hovering as it does between history and black comedy.  I found myself laughing out loud at points at the sheer awfulness of our national life in the not so distant past, a past my parents lived through, a history they experienced.  I simply had to ask them if it really was that bad. 

Yes and no, they replied: politically, economically and socially times were bad - a time of IRA terror, a time rampant inflation, a time of irresponsible trade union barons, a time of Marxist militants, a time of drift and decay; but they were young, they were both undergraduates at the same Cambridge college; they were in love; they had their season in the sun.  Perhaps the day will come when I look back at our present troubled times through a soft-focused lens! 

Sandbrook’s title, taken from a whimsical song popular at the time, is deliberately ironic.  The period between the surprise victory of Harold Wilson and the Labour Party in the election of March, 1974 and the defeat of his successor James Callaghan in the election in May, 1979 comes as close as any to marking the nadir of modern British history.  It was a period that ended not in a Summer of Satisfaction but in the so-called Winter of Discontent, when the country, overwhelmed by a great wave of trade union militancy, saw rubbish pilling up in the streets and the dead queuing for burial. 

I knew that Labour governments were dysfunctional but, my goodness, I had no idea of just how dysfunctional.  Harold Wilson, who won two elections in the 1960s, came back to power a sad ghost of his former self, increasingly beset by paranoia and quite possibly showing the signs of early mental decay. He was completely dominated by his long-standing political secretary and confidante, one Marcia Williams, a truly ghastly individual.  At one point she even addressed Wilson in the hearing of others as “You little cunt!”  By the summer of 1974 her influence was so baleful that his inner circle even contemplated having her murdered.  Instead the next best thing served: she was sent upstairs to the House of Lords as Lady Falkender.  This Lady was no lady.  Even the Queen obliquely queried her elevation. 

Sandbrook rightly suggests that the mid to late seventies were not just important as prelude to Thatcherism, surely the most necessary antidote ever devised, but as a “decisive moment in our recent history.”  It was a time of transition, a time that saw the strange death of social democratic England, a time that saw the death of the consensus that had dominated British politics since 1945.  It was the time that saw the end of Old Labour, killed off, ironically, by its trade union allies.  I would say that if one wanted to understand Tony Blair and the modern Labour Party one could do no better than pay close attention to this period.

It was a time when illusions went hand-in-hand with delusions.  In March 1974, when it was clear even to the economically illiterate that it was no longer possible to spend one’s way out of a crisis, Denis Healey, Wilson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, proceeded to spend his way out of a crisis.  More and more people began to wonder if Britain was on the road to Weimar, with hyperinflation an ever present threat. 

Actually the country had the worst of both worlds, inflation and economic stagnation, allowing a new term – stagflation – to enter the vocabulary.  The historian A. J. P. Taylor, who prided himself on his left wing credentials, wrote to his Hungarian mistress urging her to “Pray for the recovery of capitalism.  You can’t realise how near we are to catastrophe: all our banks may close their doors in a few months’ time…You are lucky to be living in a Communist country and safe from such things.”  Even Callaghan, Foreign Secretary at the time, said, in a mood of black humour, that if he had been a younger man he would emigrate.  Many did. 

The author does an excellent job in identifying some of the key cultural icons.  There is surely none more iconic than the inexpressibly vulgar Beverly Moss from Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party.  She is a monster of social one-upmanship.  She is also a harbinger of things to come.  Most of all she is a representative of a new aspirational Britain, wholly material in concern, and this includes the trade unionists who, in their devil take the rearmost attitude, killed all hope of a bright new socialist future. 

There is surely no more pathetic case than that of the political fantasist Tony Benn, the Secretary of State for Industry, propping up one dying industry after another, full of socialist sentimentalism, when all the working classes really wanted was new fridges and package holidays.  Workers of the world unite; you have trips to Torremolinos to gain.  The trade unions are often seen as Margaret Thatcher’s greatest enemies.  In fact they were her best allies.  “The cowardice and irresponsibility of some union leaders”, Denis Healy later reflected, “guaranteed her election; it left them with no grounds for complaining about her subsequent action against them.” 

I’ve emphasised the politics of the period in this review by there is so much more in Sandbrook’s door stopper of a book, weighing in at a hefty eight hundred plus pages.  He covers so much ground, including the cultural and sporting highs and lows.  The highs and lows, depending on your point of view, might be best represented by the Sex Pistols, a dysfunctional punk band for dysfunctional punk times.  Yes, it was true: there were no more heroes anymore. 

There is also a very good chapter on schooling and the negative effects of fashionable, 'child-centred' educational theories, absurd beyond absurd, particularly in the example of William Tyndale Junior School in Islington.  This school might very well serve as a microcosm of England, an undisciplined free for all. 

Drawing on a huge range of sources, Sandbrook weaves an effective tale, though perhaps a little less effective than that told in State of Emergency.  To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best of books and the worst of books.  It is strong in narrative and anecdote, weak in depth and analysis.  The author’s industry is impressive though, given the quick turnaround between this and his previous book, perhaps a little too Stakhanovite.  I would suggest less labour and more reflection.  No matter; Sandbrook’s limpid prose carries one along quite nicely through an epic comic tragedy. He has the ability to make one laugh and cry by turns.  This is the way we were.  This is the way we never want to be again. 

The Message of the Monoliths

In October 2011, according to the United Nations, the world’s population reached seven billion.  It was the Malthusian nightmare seven fold, except it was no nightmare.  It was the occasion for digging up the corpse of poor old Thomas Malthus, who’s 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population warned that the capacity for population expansion could far exceed the increase in food production.  It was the occasion for giving the gloomy old prophet a good media kicking.

A headline in Forbes, an American business magazine, trumpeted Seven billion reasons Malthus was wrong.  Others followed the general condemnation, including Reuters, which said that he thought that women had as many children as physically possible, deepening the indictment by saying that he argued “without providing any reasons.”  The Independent said that he underestimated human inventiveness and was thus unaware of improvements in agricultural production. 

On and on it went, a perfect media storm, proving one thing: that none of these reputable sources had ever read Malthus.  Ah, but we all know Malthus, do we not?  Even his name has been turned into an adjective, a sure indication of his legacy.  We know him even if only from the pages of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge appears as the world’s first heartless Malthusian, saying that the poor better die and “thus decrease the surplus population.”

The truth is we do not know him at all, few doing him the courtesy of actually taking the trouble to read his book.  Forbes, in a wholly pompous and condescending manner, declared that “he was not a bad person just rather unimaginative.”  I was so grateful for the corrective provided by Professor Robert Mayhew writing in History Today (Malthus and the Seven Billion), who quite rightly said that the problem with imaginative insight lies not with Malthus but with his commentators;

It we dare actually to read Malthus rather than to merely bandy his name around we shall find a complex, subtle and open-minded scholar who pioneered the study of problems that are increasingly important in the age of climate change and concerns about food security.  By letting the real, historical Malthus speak in his own voice we may just open dialogues that help us to address our present and future planetary predicaments.

There are two nineteenth century paths here that one might care to take, the path of Marx and the path of Malthus.  For Marx the earth was a cornucopia, its resources unlimited.  Only Scrooge and the other heatless capitalists got in the way of Nirvana.  Malthus, in contrast, argued that the world’s resources were not limitless, that “The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

According to the World Health Organisation some eighteen million people die each year from malnutrition and outright starvation.  With the earth’s population heading towards ten billion by mid-century, more people will mean more death, more pressure on land, more pressure on resources, more pressure on food production, no matter how innovative we happen to be. 

Contrary to the ignorant comments in the media, Malthus was not ignorant.  He argued from reason based on a painstaking assembly of facts.  He was fully aware of human inventiveness, arguing that “Necessity has been with truth called the mother of invention…Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.”  His point was that no matter the great agricultural and industrial improvements of the day, humanity could never be fully free from resource pressure.  Cornucopia’s Horn is not endless after all. 

There is Forbes, in complacent self-congratulation, looking over the past and blind to the present, at least the present for some.  But can it say, can anyone say, what the world will look like in twenty or thirty years from now?  For those a little more cautious than the media pundits Malthus has an abiding relevance.  As Mayhew writes he “…remains a vital well-spring for all who want to think rigorously about the nexus of population, resources, economics and the environment.”

Those who think less rigorously might actually take the trouble to read The Essay on the Principles of Population.  If they have not the intellectual stamina they might consider the fate of the people of Easter Island, a Malthusian nightmare in miniature.  There is a message in those monoliths, even for the heavy-witted journalists of Forbes.  

Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

 I don’t think I’ve ever voted with such enthusiasm as I did in last year’s Alternative Vote (AV) referendum.  I voted NO, the most delightful negative ever.  If there were a thousand such referenda I would vote no time and time again.  It was supposedly about introducing ‘fairness’ into our electoral system.  What rot!  Part of the present Coalition deal, it was a way of allowing the Liberal Democrats to be kingmakers for ever and a day.  It was about the strange revival of Liberal England.  How glad I was to put the beast back in its coffin!

Not content with that, Nick Clegg and his gang went forward with another piece of constitutional vandalism; they went ahead with proposals for ‘reform’ of the House of Lords.  The aim here is to turn our venerable and unelected upper chamber into a kind of senate, selected on the basis of – guess what – proportional voting. 

Just imagine the political chaos that would ensue.  The House of Commons could no longer claim unsullied primacy.  An upper house elected on the basis of AV or any proportional system would give the Liberal Democrats disproportional influence.  In any deadlock with the Commons their Senate could claim greater electoral legitimacy.  Clegg’s placemen, moreover, would have fifteen year tenures, a greater opportunity for abuse and the insolence of office I find impossible to imagine, a modern form of the old Whig supremacy.  It all comes down to one thing: this shabby and debased party would have its grubby hands forever on the wheels of power.

It’s obvious that David Cameron has no stomach to this fight, but he dare not depart.  Nick Clegg, huffing and puffing like the petulant schoolboy he is, is threatening to derail the necessary changes to the boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies if he does not get his way on the House of Lords.  But - thank goodness – there is still enough backbone in the Conservative Party.  A sufficient number of Tory MPs have rejected his childish attempts at blackmail.  The bill, like a ball, has been kicked into touch!

Clegg, with Cameron in tow, had intended to hammer ‘reform’ through Parliament with a minimum of debate, an absolute disgrace considering the constitutional importance of the proposed change, one of the most important in our history.  But, in the face of rebellion within the Tory ranks, coupled with the Labour Party’s opposition to a foreclosure on debate, the government was forced to drop a timetable motion. 

On Tuesday the bill passed its second reading, with close on a hundred Tories voting against. It passed alright, but it’s now going to be a narrative as long as the tale of the Ancient Mariner.  Threatening to derail the rest of the government’s legislative programme, it is likely also to be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing

Cameron, Mister Whichever Way the Wind Blows, now says he will try to “proceed with consensus”.  To echo the words of Iain Martin in the Telegraph, good luck with that.  Saying consensus, consensus, when there is no consensus; there will never be consensus on this ill-conceived, badly thought-out and wholly unnecessary legislation.  Change of this magnitude should be approached with great caution, not on the whim of the Liberal Democrats, the permanent political also rans. 

The real shocker here, though, is not Clegg, acting on his own debased principles, but Cameron, who, for the sake of office, was prepared to push through a measure that neither he nor a goodly part of his own party believe in.  What kind of man is this, what kind of Conservative and, most important of all, what kind of Prime Minister?  There he was, waving the reform flag albeit in a limp-handed manner.  There he was, prepared to destabilise the constitution and our system of government.  There he was, offering support to a bill no matter the damage or the consequences.  All this for what exactly?  All this for Clegg. 

In the Telegraph Martin described Clegg as a “third rate Tony Blair: an unhistorical and restless progressive seeking relentlessly to apply his abstract agenda, with pious, cliché-ridden petulance, to whichever institution he does not like the look of.”  He later retracted, saying that calling him a third rate Blair was overgenerous.  Yes, well, we are all permitted a slip twixt cup and lip. 

I hope the Conservative rebels continue their principled opposition to this unprincipled and opportunist bill.  I hope it really is, as one said, a ‘dead duck.  AV is dead; House of Lords ‘reform’ is dying.  Now let’s have a creeping barrage directed at gay marriage.