The Politics of Dancing

Who would have a Catholic conscience?  After the inquisition the torture  After the burning of books. After the Jew hate and ghettos   The bonfires and screaming pain.  After South America  After Chile and Spain. After Franco, Tiso and Pavelic  After Pinochet. After the ratlines and the Nazis rescued by monks.  After child rape and torture across the globe In Ireland and Chile and the cities across Spain. Who would have a Catholic conscience?  Those who still chant clutching of beads  In an institution which Has scarred mankind and made so very many sick.

A Melting World   The display begins to dissolve, to merge with the Portobello morning. Afraid of what might become of them the hire bikes huddle together for a sense of security.  The theatre sits silent and empty awaiting its premiere performance.  Burgers and Calamity Films. Pick Up Point TOO MUCH LIGHT 

 Deepening Shadows In the democratic West we live in the age of shadows. The shadow of tyranny and the threat to democracy, the shadow of Putin and war, the shadow of poverty and economic destitution, the shadow of climate catastrophe. Two events recently have seen shadows take form out of the fog of deceit and misinformation, and become concrete reality, the overturning of Roe V Wade in the US and the scrapping of the Human Rights act here in the UK. For women, the world over, this assault on their bodily autonomy represents a return to an oppressive darker age, for make no mistake the decision of the Court has given hope and cover for reactionaries everywhere. The cost in mental health and human flourishing by this atmosphere is immense and impossible to quantify. Never has human solidarity been more important. A Wounded Johnson Johnson emerges fatally wounded after a mauling, first in a vote of confidence and now by two disastrous by-election defeats. Surrounded by a cabinet o...

 I  For all its great claims Christianity has been far more of a curse than a blessing to civilisation. The world it destroyed was more tolerant and open. Of course, we can never know what might have been had Constantine not chosen to embrace a small religious sect. What can be known is that because of that embrace Christianity came to dominate western culture and all aspects of daily life. It was this all-encompassing aspect, supported by a framework of enforcement, the church, the state, informal spies, and informers, which gave Christianity its totalitarian quality. Long before Nazi Germany books were confined to the flames. Long before Stalin and the NKVD heretics were hunted, tortured, and killed.  No violence, no cruelty, no exercise of imaginative sadism, was too great to protect the faith. In such an atmosphere free thought, outside the privacy of one’s own home, or confined to the pages of a diary, proved impossible. Even this privacy often failed to provide safe...

 HUMBLED Being humbled is not a common or garden experience. In the face of withering criticism of our behaviour it is even rarer, criticism is more likely to produce shame, humiliation, remorse, even anger, whilst being humbled is suggestive of a certain nobility of spirit, a sense of having a true grasp of one’s moral dimensions. I have recently felt humbled by the Ukrainians courage and resolve to fight against the unprovoked attack on their Republic. This sense of humility is born out of an awareness of one’s own lack of courage, one’s own shortcomings. Which brings us to the spectacle of Boris Johnson appearing in the House of commons after the publication of the Sue Gray report. Johnson said that he was humbled. Now he knows of the word, but it is a term like infinity, or a million light years, a word without concrete meaning for him. Of course, he was not humbled, he was not even ashamed, though ashamed would have been the more appropriate word. He was instead drunk, as h...

  Lost Kingdom the Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation,  How useful are national stereotypes? I leave the question hanging in the air, for regardless of their utility we seem stuck with them for the time being. With respect to Russia the stereotypes can be harsh and unforgiving. Though given the history of the 20 th Century and the opening decades of the twenty first many would argue justly so. One of the side effects of such stereotypes is the tendency toward anthropomorphising nation states. Putin’s Russia, like all autocratic despotic regimes makes this exceptionally easy. Never more so than in the case of Ukraine. As Serhii Plokhy makes clear in Lost Kingdom the Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, Ukraine, and Ukrainian identity, or indeed the supposed lack thereof, looms large in both Russian history and, following my earlier thread, the Russian psyche. For Russia Ukraine represents both father, son, and is rapidly becoming holy ...