The Politics of Dancing

It was a typically British August Days filled with boredom and rain. Nothing much was happening On the day the censors came. Under a no smoking poster I wanted a cigarette Thinking of thoughtcrime and shame I didn’t have a light on me On the day the censors came. The struggle against forgetting Like a gnawing rat in the brain I wanted to drown out the sound of the doorbell On the day the censors came It was a day for laughter and pretending Things always stay the same A day for drunken theatrics The day that the censors came. ALEX TALBOT AUGUST 2008

The precipitate and reckless rush to recognise Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence by the US and the majority of EU states was always going to have implications far outside that province. In a world dotted, like a bad case of acne with would be breakaway provinces and embryonic nation states, the precedent did not go unnoticed. The world became a little more unstable. Now the expulsion of Milosevic’s army from Kosovo represented a real progress in the struggle against the bloody processes of ethnic nationalism. Moreover those, usually characterising themselves as being on the left, who opposed the NATO intervention would have left Kosovo to the mercy of Milosevic entailing further ethnic cleansing and a brutal and bloody long term guerrilla war. However the status of Kosovo represented a complex problem with a variety of possible solutions and timetables for those solutions, outright independence at this time probably the least desirable. The Russians with a long history...

The news this morning is filled with the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We are told that it was he who blew the gaff on the horrors of the Soviet System, the camps, the terror, the insanity of an ideology gone mad. Now I am an admirer of Solzhenitsyn’s courage, if not his reactionary politics, he was at the end of his life after all a very narrow Russian nationalist. Though given his life experience and what he suffered I am in truth no position to make a judgement. However the idea that he was the ‘first’ to expose the hideous lie that was Stalinism is itself untrue. There were others. Out of the writing that emerged from the moral abyss of Stalin’s Soviet Union several books stand out, Vasily Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate,’ Anotoli Rybakov’s ‘Children of the Arbat, ’ and an extraordinary insightful book ‘ The Case of Comrade Tulayev,’ by Victor Serge. Serge’s life story almost exactly parallels that of the European Left from 1900 to 1945. (Only perhaps Arthur Koestler shares a re...

Two stories from the week ending 26th July 2008: A man is fined £30 for smoking in his van as this is deemed his ‘place of work.’ I speak to a man in his early sixties, mild mannered to the point of being self effacing; he enjoys a beer, however being on benefits he can no longer enjoy drinking in the pub as much as he would like. He goes to a Local park in Haringey to drink a can of beer. However it is now an offence to drink alcohol in any Haringey park. A Police Community Support Officer arrives and not only confiscates the can from him but insists on pouring its contents away in front of him. Both stories are so translucent that further comment seems superfluous however at least one point comes to mind. One wonders if our drinker had instead been two local councillors enjoying a bottle of Champagne in the park our PCSO would have been quite so officious. I feel weary of rehearsing arguments I have already made however again I point out that anyone who is drunk in a park, especially...

I write this overlooking the great expanse of the Black Sea, a gentle breeze blowing into my room from the open door as the early morning sunshine, already warm, heats the decking of the balcony where soon I will be eating breakfast. Holidays are a creation of ‘enlightened’ late 19th Century capitalism, allowing the workers some time off so that they might return as refreshed willing slaves. A whole industry has been created out of this segmented leisure culture, time given back in exchange for wage slavery. There has consequently always been an element of torture about this phenomenon, with its annual fortnightly taste of freedom, of life as it should be lived, as it should be experienced. As the annual two week trip to sun and sea draws to a close the reality of daily existence is thrown into sharp relief, back to work on Monday and the colourless routine of the factory floor or office. This was well understood by the Anarchists and Situationists who had a healthy contempt for th...

I cannot remember who it was that reflected upon the pleasure provided by good/bad films, those B movie creations which, despite the sometimes wooden acting or cliché ridden scripts can often grip and even move one. Casablanca for example, for all it’s celebrity contains a plot that is barely credible and moments that demand more than is reasonable in efforts of willing suspension of disbelief .Yet it undoubtedly contains within it a fable of considerable power that speaks to something very deep in the human psyche. A similar pleasure can be had from good/bad poetry, A.E. Housman’s Epitaph on an army of mercenaries for example. 'These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.' The poems sentiments see...

In Europe the widespread disappearance of religious belief as traditionally understood, that is in God, Heaven, the central role of the Church, the belief in an afterlife has had consequences that I believe have not been sufficiently understood. (I leave aside here the resurgence of Islam which is an imported phenomenon and itself requires greater analysis). It is I believe Umberto Eco who reflected that “when men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.” When faced with the daily stream of ‘New Age’ drivel in the broadcast and written media, the obsession with horoscopes, with the varieties of ‘alternative’ medicine, Tarot readings, and all other manner of quackery voodoo and other sundry nonsense one is inclined to sympathise with the sentiment. Of course the flight from science, from rationality and reason has complex roots and ever since the Thalidomide disaster the claims of the pharmaceutical industry have been greeted wit...