The Politics of Dancing

  American Ignorance Watching one of my favourite films again, Inherit the Wind, - there are two versions, the first featuring Spencer Tracey, the second Jack Lemon in the lead role. The film is based on the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1926, in which the teaching of Charles Darwin was prosecuted   in a small American community.   Without going further into the mechanics of the film the gist of the plot   is the triumph of intelligence over bigotry and ignorance. Watching the film these days no longer has the same impact on me, for at present the laughable bigotry of the Scopes trial reigns triumphant in Trumpian America. The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, - incidentally a man so riddled with sin, original or otherwise, from adultery to sexual bullying and violence, he could challenge Trump himself in the moral bankruptcy stakes, - now openly promotes a pastor who opposes women’s enfranchisement and holds that women must be subservient to men, always. There role ...

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 ...

  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 qu...

  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 foremos...

  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 transporte...

 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 ...

      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...

  Covid and Liberty Anyone who does not have any concerns about the curtailment of liberty created under the draconian, albeit necessary, response to Covid is not fully awake. Once accrued governments rarely roll back powers. Once having acclimatised the population to restrictions governments are apt to become trigger happy in imposing them. That stated, the threat from Covid is all too real and no right wing (UK), or left wing (US), conspiracy theory can alter this reality. These two competing challenges create serious problems with respect to safeguarding against abuse of power, not helped by the legions of fruitcakes taking to social media and or the streets selling their own specially concocted brand of crazy. The threat these people create to public health has proved disastrous in the US and to a lesser extent here in the UK Most pernicious are the so called ‘anti-vaxxers’ who have contributed immensely to the failure to stem the tide of infection in the US. Even he...

    Tucker Carlson/Corbyn and the new Fifth Column When British citizens were murdered on British soil by Putin’s hit squads it was the far left, from Corbyn and the Stop the War[sic] crowd usual suspects, that came out to exonerate and/or offer apologia for Putin. In the US it has been the far right, from Tucker Carlson and the Trump supporters who have functioned as Putin’s fifth column. Not since the Molotov Ribbentrop pact has the right and far left embraced each other so tightly. At the heart of this love in has been the hideous 19 th century/Cold War concept of ‘spheres of influence,’ which with respect to Putin’s Russia the far left have embraced with a passion that would make Bismarck blush. Of course, this is a doctrine very much at home in the right, from the Monroe doctrine to the present small states forced to bend to the will of their larger neighbours. The interests of these citizens of these states must be ignored and sublimated in the interests of, e.g...

 Reflections 2nd December 2021 I see the laws allowing for forced sterilisation of men responsible for children for whom they do not intend to take responsibility, or neglect by being absent from, are passing into law in State after state in the US. These ‘Right to Fulfilled Life,’ laws are being passed by overwhelmingly female legislators, thus marginalising men whom the law will affect. Most controversial is the bounty rewards awarded to those reporting men engaged in sexual promiscuity. In defence of this legislation religious groups cite biblical authority and the human rights of the unborn who would be denied the right to a Fulfilled Life. [Note: Some details in this account may not be wholly accurate.] I see the execrable Julie Hartley-Brewer is parroting the line that she is 'done with Covid.' She is voicing a widespread reaction reflecting a childish response to reality, if I stick my fingers in my ears and chant incessantly, reality will go away.   If the Co...

  The Prime minister of the United Kingdom, heir to a post that boasted such eloquent orators as Churchill, Gladstone, Disraeli, like a drunken best man at a wedding reception, blunders, and splutters, loses his notes, goes off on a tangent about Peppa the Pig, a cartoon children’s TV star. This before the ranks of the Confederation of British Industry. In Johnson’s case however, he does not need drink, he can accomplish this level of meandering incompetent drivel stone cold sober, doing so with a complete nonchalant and self-regard. It takes a titanium strength sense of entitlement to believe that you can get away with behaving like this. He is right to feel so confident, for he has got away with behaving like this all his life. Welcome to British politics 2021. Meanwhile in the US a teenager buys an automatic weapon, - normally used by armies across the globe, -   is then driven by his ‘ mother’ some distance to where Black Lives protesters have assembled, shoots ...

  Having been away from the blog since March  I can no longer ignore the noise, the cacophony of catastrophe, mixed with the pungent smell of decay. Representative democracy, with all its faults and inadequacies, still the healthiest of human accomplishments, now exposed for the fragile creature that it always has been. Of course, people outside the anglosphere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe have known this for a long time, whilst Europe needs no lessons on the dangers that are ever ready to pounce from left or right. However, here in the UK and across the Atlantic, cocooned in complacency and cultural hubris, - such frailties only threatened ‘lesser breeds’ – we have felt inoculated to such threats. After January 6 th and the attack on the Capital you might think people could no longer remain blind. You would be wrong. The recent success of Republicans in Philadelphia demonstrates either an indifference to these threats or more worrying an indifference to the survival of rep...