The Politics of Dancing

 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 of se

 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 safety, for over a

 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 he co

  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 ghost to

  Ancient and medieval history is littered with tyrants, Caesars, Kings, despots happy to lay waste to a province, destroy a city, killing innocent civilians to make a point. Sadly, the 20 th century saw, in Europe a return to such barbarity. Still, after Nuremberg, after Auschwitz and Soviet and Nazi crimes there was a belief that the kind of war fought in Europe from 1939 – 1945 was a thing relegated to history. But the world cannot be changed by magical thinking or the supposed healing power of time. We remain great apes sharing 99% of our genes. Evolution has yet to reach the stage when cooperation is universally seen as better than competition and conflict. And in a line from hunter gatherers through Genghis Khan, Ivan the terrible to Hitler Stalin there have always been great apes like Putin who will wage war, destroy cities, and murder women and children on a whim. We need to climb down from the pedestal of ‘civilization’ we have erected for ourselves and address the questi

  History ls littered with national myths, uncomfortable realities glossed over, and exceptions presented as the norm. From Joan of Arc to Britain alone in 1940. We were not, unless you exclude Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and the rest of a still extensive empire. The myths, often tinged with the strong elements of truth can be extraordinarily resilient and fact proof. This is particularly true of the Nazi Soviet war of 1941 to 1945. Within Russia the myths of this period are particularity poignant, The Great Patriotic War, excludes the fighting in the west prior to June 22 nd , 1941, and, obviously, the Nazi Soviet pact. It excludes the vast amount of war material, especially petroleum supplied to the Germans, material without which it is unlikely that the Wehrmacht could have defeated France.   The war narrative, understandably, begins with the German invasion. Though Stalin’s disastrous decisions are glossed over.   It is First and foremost a Russian wa

  Kyiv 2022 When evil like a toxic cloud Descends upon a modern city And children die and mothers weep When no amount of love or pity Protects the vulnerable and weak. There is no god or God’s to pray to No moral taught no lesson made Only the ancient,   ancient sorrow Only the ancient, ancient trade And young men raised for better things   shape the ancient, ancient skill Of Learning how to die and kill.

  East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20). I. Most historical events inevitably diminish in impact with the passage of time. Not so with the Holocaust, which, certainly in my own case, the impact has grown in scale and horror as I have grown older, and others have told me of a similar response. That this should be is so is not hard to fathom. The steady process from petty indignities to the mass delegitimization, increased humiliation, ostracization, and eventual murder, the attempted genocide, of an entire race of people happened on the European continent, in one of the most literate and cultured nation states, within living memory. Men, women, and children were rounded up, marched into nearby woods or wasteland, and shot, to be thrown into ditches they had been forced to dig. Later the process involved herding jews into ghettos, starving, and then stuffing them into cattle trucks and transported to

 THE BBC AND NADINE DORRIS  The TV licence is an anachronism, it is not of course alone, this country is awash with anachronisms from the Royal Family, to the House of Lords I could go on. When we wish to keep anachronisms we call them traditions, when we wish to dispose of them, we call them relics. As anachronism go the TV licence strikes me as of greater value than the Royal Family, and much greater value than the House of Lords. Indeed, the BBC is an institution that enriches British life and culture and is admired throughout the world. [1] The same cannot be said for the House of Lords, rancid and corrupt, a carbuncle on British democracy. Alas the licence fee will have to go, not because of the reasons put forward by the Culture Secretary[sic] Nadine Dorries, a woman who understands as much about culture as a dead hedgehog. A Dead Hedgehog opines The reason that the licence fee is no longer viable has however been provided by Ms Dorries, inadvertently or not. It is that gove

      Like Trump,   Vladimir Putin is a master at bully and bluff. He knows how to play a weak hand well and is acutely aware of the weaknesses of liberal democracy and the constraints imposed upon his enemies by fidelity to the rule of law and accepted norms of behaviour. Thus far, from Georgia to Crimea, he has got away with levels of criminal recklessness virtually scot free.   But   ‘success’ like this can be heady, and even the most composed of poker players can overplay their hand. Public opinion in autocratic and   semi-autocratic states is a complex affair, measuring it is difficult, but it does exist, as the rulers of Kazakhstan are just finding out. For Putin’s Russia, which belongs in the second category, the pressures are similar but more complex than many similar autocratic states. The pressure of public expectations of reasonable incomes that keep pace with prices, matched by the competing pressure to meet the demands of greedy elite supporters and those commanding