LETTER FROM LONDON JUNE 2015: LOOKING FOR UTOPIA
I have had a busy month providing copy on the 150th
Anniversary of Portobello and Goldborne Markets as well as the concurrent
InTransit arts festival. More of this later. One thing that the month has
reminded me is the way in which when I was immersed in work ‘the news’,
massacres, financial crisis, coups, civil wars, famine became just a vague
background blur, not really registering. This is how it is in the new
globalised world. It takes a particular level of outlandishness, or now an
exceptional degree of barbarism to pierce this fog. Butchering people as they
lay sunbathing on a beach would do it.
As it happens I stayed in Sousse a few years back, possibly
in the hotel targeted. I cannot remember the name of the hotel[1], but it
does not matter, I know the beach. I preferred to lie beside the pool and that
may have brought me a few precious minutes. Though as far as IS/Daesh are
concerned it could have been a beach anywhere full of ‘Kafirs.’ I have lain on
many beaches, daydreaming in that somewhat strange state called sunbathing. It
would be difficult to imagine a more defenceless state of affairs in which to
confront a machine gun wielding Islamist fanatic. Someone though has imagined
it, Michael Houellebecq. In his novel Platform, in which sunbathers are massacred
by Islamist fanatics shouting how great is God?
It’s worth noting that his description of Islam as a stupid religion
landed Houellebecq in court. Whether Islam is a stupid religion or not the idea
that such atrocities have ‘nothing to do with Islam,’ certainly is
extraordinarily stupid, and, despite this nonsense being trotted out by the
Home Secretary this morning, is finally starting to crumble in public, as it
has long since in private;[2] Baroness
Warsi notwithstanding.
I have recently finished reading ‘Guernica and Total War,’
by Ian Patteson. Guernica, becoming a byword for atrocity and the use of terror
as a weapon of war. The casualty figures in the Basque town, 1, 654 people were
killed and 889 wounded, were to be literally dwarfed by the mass bombings of
the World War to follow, a war ending with the ultimate obscenity of atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our capacity for atrocity just keeps on
keeping on.
Interestingly Franco, and the German Condor legion, - who
carried out the attack, - denied all responsibility, grotesquely seeking to
blame the Basques themselves. Now our contemporary theocratic fascist’s film
their barbarism in great detail, so that they might boast to the whole world
the mechanisms they use to inflict pain, torture and death. It may be true that
they love death more than they love life, though they also certainly love
inflicting it.
So against a background of beach towels covering up the dead
and news of another assault on Kobane, aimed at killing as many non-combatants
as possible. Children, women, the elderly all slaughtered for…well I suppose because
they could be. I was travelling to the Victoria and Albert, [V&A], museum
to participate in an exploration of Utopia.
Given the history of the last
century the search for Utopia has understandably fallen out of fashion. Too
many mass graves mark the most recent attempts to build a perfect society.
Whilst on a more personal level one person’s Utopia can be another’s dystopia.
Thus it was brave of the ‘InTransit’ festival to co-produce ‘An
Other World,’ particularly in conjunction with the Neo Futurist
 |
| The Founders of Futurism |
It was difficult not to notice the predominance of the past
in Mr Marinetti’s presentation, particularly those intense periods, the early
1900’s and the 1960’s when optimism combined with technology and revolutionary
ideas to transform the intellectual landscape and, in the case of the 1960’s,
society itself. How distant some of that ardour and revolutionary optimism now
seems, as 1968 joins 1848 in the history books and as the decades that followed
have seen the concerted counter-attack of reaction. It has been a counterattack
replete with irony, with the left now the standard bearers for censorship and
the curtailing of free speech, and many on the right fighting against religious
bigotry and censorship.
The Old Etonians are back in power, though no longer the
patrician type constrained by a noblesse oblige. These ‘Bullingdon boys’ know
the price of everything and the value of nothing. The imagination, the idea of
self-supporting communities, the very spirit of the 60’s has no value to people
like George Osborne,* indeed such an ideology interferes with the unfettered
operation of capitalism. Though of course the unfettered operation of
capitalism, or more accurately the City and multi-National corporations, is the
very stuff of Osborne’s Utopia.
The final act of the event was the reading of The Peoples
Manifesto, part of Revolution #10 http://www.revolution10.uk/
a follow on from the Beatles White Album track Revolution 9. A vox populi of
‘ordinary’ peoples wishes for a government. You can read the full manifesto on
the website above.
Of course if you ask people what they want they often want
contradictory things, and what you end up with is populist rhetoric, as was
evinced when the manifesto was read out. Guaranteeing a minimum income for all
and ‘living within our means’ may not be mutually compatible. Whilst abolishing
all the armed forces at the same time as recognising that, “Our rights are
never safe, there is always someone ready to take them away,” would seem
foolish.
But there was also much in what people voiced to hearten and
indeed inspire. People it seems are not governed solely by greed and self-interest.
Leaving the comfortable atmosphere of the lecture theatre
and walking through the garden that lies at the heart of the V&A I watched
children playing in the fountain whilst their parents sitting in deck chairs
basked in the afternoon sunshine. Of course if I were an Islamist Jihadi I
would have just seen lots of juicy targets.
Whatever Utopia is we are a long way from it.
* Unless that is it can be marketed as a T shirt, or used in
a clever advertising campaign.
[1]
What I do remember is the courtesy and open hospitality of the Tunisians, so
much more relaxed than Moroccans or Algerians. It is this quality in Tunisians that
Daesh hate and is seeking to destroy.
