Thanks a million

Blogger stats now tell me that I have had a million page views. Even if most were spambots, it feels like some sort of milestone. But, then again, visits are going down - though I think that this is true of all blogs - and my posting has become much more sporadic. Blogging has had its moment in the sun. This one was hardly stellar, especially since the lamented but unavoidable loss of the DSTPFW but I shall continue - for the time being anyway.

The enemies of reason

I have just finished reading the late James Webb's The Occult Underground. For a book first published in 1971, it has worn quite well. It was originally published as The Flight from Reason and that is a far better description of its theme, but a much less marketable title. In an area that I do know about, late 19th century radical thought, he made loads of mistakes – for example, Geddes was not a mystical thinker, Gandhi was already a vegetarian when he came to London, Kropotkin did not flee Russia after a murder, etc. - and his topic, the revival of esoteric thought, has been the subject of earlier and later study. For example, both Orwell and Adorno wrote about the links between mystical thought and the far right, whilst the occult nature of Nazism has spawned a library of books. But there is something quite fun about reading a book that kicked off a sceptical look at mysticism and its broader place in the history of ideas, not just the far right, especially one that has such a promising line at the beginning:

The neglected genius is a familiar figure of mythology; but there are those neglected lunatics who are worthy of study. 

And my, were they lunatics. According to Webb, they blended a half understood Eastern philosophy into a "sort of spiritual porridge." Political utopians and romantic nationalists fed from the same trough. Fake spiritualists, believers in mesmerism, frauds and charlatans pulled in believers by the score. Sects proliferated - schismatic Protestants, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, followers of a reinvented neo-paganism, deluded ghost-hunters and psychical researchers, mainstream religious revivalists, and many others. And if you want an example of the intellectual contortions they went through, look at this tragi-comic example of how Annie Besant reconciled her conversion to Theosophy and belief in reincarnation with the theory of evolution, in this case using "clairvoyant investigations" to discover her own personal evolution into becoming human.

The evolutionary leap was taken when Mrs. Besant was incarnated in a large, monkey-like body, in which form she was particularly attached to an entity already human, who was to become the Buddha. One night the Buddha and his family were attacked by savages. During the ensuing fight, the Besant-monkey saved the Buddha at the cost of its own life. The aspirations of this relatively humble creature provoked a stream of cosmic reactions so that "in the very moment of dying the monkey individualizes, and thus he dies – a man." 

Blimey! Have you noticed that most believers' imagined past lives are usually those of significant or interesting people? They rarely see themselves as humdrum. What I find sad about Besant is that she had been a formidable campaigner for women's' rights and contraception, a socialist and trade unionist, organising the female workers of the Bryant and May match company in their celebrated 1888 strike, active in working class education and secretary of the National Secular Society for seventeen years. Then she fell for Blavatsky's facile, perennialist nonsense.

And this is why the book still has an appeal today. I groan when I see supposed leftists come out with pseudo-scientific rubbish about GM crops, form alliances with Islamists, flirt with anti-Semitism, indulge in paranoid conspiracy theories, and talk in hushed, reverential tones about ancient wisdoms and authentic, 'natural' cures. How on earth did this happen? Mainstream studies see this as down to the influence of Romanticism and the idea of nature. Paul Berman has fingered what he called irrational death cults as one of the inspirations behind Islamist terrorism, but Webb did more, giving us a speculative structural explanation of why the occult should explode into life at the end of the nineteenth century, seeing the growth of irrational thought as the product of an intellectual sea change.

The occult is rejected knowledge. It may be knowledge that is actively rejected by an Establishment culture, or knowledge which voluntarily exiles itself from the courts of favor (sic) because of its recognized incompatibility with the prevailing wisdom. The word "occult" means "hidden", and in this idea lies the key to the occult's forbidding appearance. Something may be hidden because of its immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane. But this hidden thing may also have achieved its sequestered position because the Powers That Be have found it wanting. Either it is a threat and must be buried, or simply useless and so is forgotten. 

For centuries, reason and science were an insurgent force against establishment religion and the power of the nobility. But then, in an intellectual revolution, they became orthodoxy. The victory was not clear-cut, there were fudges and compromises, but Darwin had overthrown god. Science as a method of enquiry, as opposed to a body of knowledge, had prevailed. The long struggle between Plato's idealism and Aristotle's materialism for pre-eminence was over. Aristotle had won.

Esoteric mysticism, The Tradition as Webb called it, became the opposition; rejected knowledge. And so it flourished as an act of rebellion, by both conservatives and radicals, as anti-establishment thought. Freed from the constraints of orthodoxy, it fragmented into many weird and wonderful ideologies. And so religious reaction, conspiracy thought, political utopianism, and the like all share a common root, fear and revulsion of the new age of reason.

Take Pseudo-science, for example. Webb wrote:

The pseudo-sciences, in fact, are not sciences at all, but offshoots of an approach which is similar to the Tradition, even if there is no direct connection. It is, therefore, not merely rejection from the Establishment which pushes homeopaths into the arms of the occultists, but a fundamental kinship.

And Webb gave a key role in this transformation into radical respectability to Theosophy.

In the last analysis the achievement of H.P.B. (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) was to make what seems today a markedly eccentric society part of the "progressive" thought of the late 19th century. 

Later writers have tried to be break away from what they saw as Webb's manichean view of the opposition of esotericism and reason. For example, Marco Pasi wrote:

 … these occult organizations offered a social space where new conceptions of culture and society could be formulated and experimented with. This would be in itself a good reason – if there were no other – to argue that occultism, as part of the larger historical body of esotericism, has contributed significantly to the shaping of modernity, verging, in this case, rather towards the progressive, liberal pole of the cultural and political spectrum. 

I don't think Webb would have demurred, but he might also have pointed out that belief in bollocks is not a necessary precondition for social and cultural experimentation.

Webb's occult net was spread wide, perhaps too wide, but in looking at mystical underpinnings of even secular ideas, he was echoing the nineteenth century freethought movement, which sought to secularise ways of thinking, not just reject religious ideas. And when one looks at New Age ramblings, deep green primitivism, neo-feudal traditionalism and the deep distrust of science that comes out of climate change deniers, anti-vaccination campaigners and the opponents of GMOs, you can see that they share a common theological and eschatological mind-set. Rather than the hard task of using reason and science to further human emancipation, they chose to challenge and bury them under a pile of mystical 'woo' - reaction posing as radicalism. Some of this is harmless enough, but we are also seeing its malign, totalitarian side in murderous action in Iraq and elsewhere at the moment. Reason may no longer be an insurgent against the establishment, but it now has a counter-insurgency to fight.

On and on

And still they keep coming, the photos, videos and speeches. All contain certainties about what has happened, about who did what and who knew what, none of which can be definitively known until long after the conflict is over or even until the archives are opened. The obsession with minutiae at the expense of the obvious, which is the foundation of conspiracy thought, is drafted in to support one side or the other. Politically pre-determined and historically illiterate, they make dismal reading. So the three well-written pieces were sent to me in the last few days that cut through the fog have been a welcome respite. There are things to debate and disagree with in all three, but not their main themes. And all of them call for the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution. Though, in this sense, they are pro-Palestinian, they challenge the anti-Israeli activists' consensus.

The first is Hopi Sen's exercise in agonised sanity.

Today, Stop the War have organised a great demonstration calling for an end to the attack on Gaza. 

This is not merely a call for peace; for the end of bloodshed. It cannot be. After all, the cautious truce agreed last week ended not with an attack on Gaza, but an attack on Israel. 

Instead, the demonstration is something more than just a call to an end to violence. It is a call for a particular solution… 

If Hamas remains committed to the destruction of the entire Israeli state, then to propose an unconditional end to restrictions on Gaza … and at the same time demand a boycott of Israel; then you effectively demand, not unconditional peace, but a tilt in the battle to Hamas. To Hamas, note, not to the Palestinian Legislature, or Fatah, or the people of Gaza, all of whom want an immediate ceasefire, then talks and negotiations and a permanent peace with Israel, but to Hamas, who want no such thing.

He generously appreciates that the main motivation of demonstrators was compassion at the death and suffering, but he goes on to ask,

Is being a progressive in foreign policy merely to will peace and loathe destruction, but to shrink from any proposed action for achieving this, fearing it will breach peace and promote destruction?

Yep, and it can be even worse. You could actively oppose action. From the gruesome Stop The War Coalition: "Defeating ISIS and the other terrorist groups is vital, but it is also vital that we oppose US intervention, which will make matters worse." I suppose the US intervention they mean is the very limited air strikes that allowed half the 40,000 people awaiting a real genocide to escape and the plans being made to rescue the rest. Stop the War are more than stupid, they are sick.

Then we have had the cancellation of the Jewish Film Festival – note, not the Israeli Film Festival – by The Tricycle Theatre in London over a row about a piffling £1,400 grant from the Israeli embassy. An Irish poet, Kevin Higgins, came up with a flawed, but witty and wry response.

… but even if it was a possibility Israel's destruction would involve the deaths of, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of people, both Jewish and Arab. 

Try telling that to the group of demonstrators whom I observed marching along University Road on Friday, chanting: "Palestine! From the River to the Sea!" The river being the Jordan, the sea the Mediterranean. Palestine can only ever stretch "from the River to the Sea" if the state of Israel is destroyed. It's a mad thing to be chanting. It is not the position of the P.L.O. leadership, who have long since recognised Israel. It might be an understandable slogan to go down the road shouting if your house has just been blown up by the Israeli Defence Forces. But when you are seperated from such dusty unpleasantness by a couple of thousand miles and the worst thing you're facing is, perhaps, your landlord calling by to enquire why the direct debit set up to pay your rent didn't work last week, it is altogether less understandable. Of course, people often chant things on demos, which they don't really believe will come to pass... 

And his artist's disdain for the administrative class is put to good effect too:

Can't you just see the sweating arse cheeks of the Tricyle Theatre's board members as they sat around on those cheap chairs on which we have all in the arts at some stage placed our buttocks. It's an unedifying picture but an unavoidable one for anyone familiar with the high principles that guide most such boards of directors.

What happened there is that a bunch of arts administrators - a socioeconomic group not generally known for their personal heroism - demanded that the Jewish Film Festival take a political stand, as a festival, one way or the other for or against the state of Israel. It wasn't enough that the festival included films highly critical of the Israeli government.

But both of them underplay something else, the hatred - raw, nasty, violent hatred. It is taking us deeper into a dark place. Howard Jacobson fears it and knows the smell. He gave full vent to his alarm in this piece. Here are some extracts:

I was once in Melbourne when bush fires were raging 20 or 30 miles north of the city. Even from that distance you could smell the burning. Fine fragments of ash, like slivers of charcoal confetti, covered the pavements. The very air was charred. It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don’t mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.

A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue...

But my argument is not with the Palestinians or even with Hamas. People in the thick of it pursue their own agenda as best they can. But what’s our agenda? What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak? 

In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps, and when the Ghetto rose up it was liquidated, the last 50,000 residents being either shot on the spot or sent to be murdered more hygienically in Treblinka. Don’t mistake me: every Palestinian killed in Gaza is a Palestinian too many, but there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed – even in the most grossly mis-reported deed – between Gaza and Warsaw. 

Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those – it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday...

And so it happens. Without one’s being aware of it, it happens. A gradual habituation to the language of loathing. Passed from the culpable to the unwary and back again. And soon, before you know it... 

Not here, though. Not in cosy old lazy old easy-come easy-go England.

And he wrote those words in 2009. It is an old article, five years old. See how fresh they are. I didn't notice at first when someone shared it with me. You see, we have become used to it. Casual and unthinking, the language of loathing is here all around us.

And if you want to see what genocide really looks like, turn your eyes towards Iraq.

Full moon

The August full moon

Anthropomorphism

An evening on the patio in Greece is like an innocent childhood, living in a Beatrix Potter book.

Here is Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

And along comes Tommy Brock the badger, keeping his distance, eyes shining from the flash.

And here is a very young Tom Kitten sheltering behind the wall with his mum.

Awwww. Sweet.

Then the badger ate the kitten. Potter never wrote about that bit, did she?

Internet bollocks

Sometimes you start by wishing you hadn't. I got involved in an online discussion with someone that posted the following quotation:

"Our race is the Master Race. We Jews are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." - Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech to the Knesset quoted in Begin and the Beasts," New Statesman, June 25, 1982 by Amnon Kapeliouk

The quotation is obviously absurd. It is a crude and stupid assertion of brutal racial superiority. Begin was many things during a long life, starting as a refugee from war-time Poland, through being head of the Irgun, to founding the right-wing Likud, to eventually becoming Prime Minister. He was a forthright, right-wing nationalist. He was not a racial supremacist. And Prime Ministers are not prone to make statements of incriminating, rancid garbage to national parliaments. Curious too how there are no Parliamentary records of such an inflammatory remark nor any contemporaneous press reporting. It is an obvious fabrication. Yet there was a proper citation, Amnon Kapeliouk, the leftist Israeli journalist and writer.

So I started checking. The quotation is all over the internet and heads up articles on Kapeliouk, but only the right-wing seemed to question it. In 2009, the Begin Centre, not a natural home for me, had traced what they saw as the earliest use of the quotation on the web and it appears to have been fabricated by one Texe Marrs. It is on his site without any attribution. I refuse to link to his stunningly vile web site. It links end-times Christian fundamentalism, homophobia and loopy conspiracy theories with an all pervasive, drooling anti-Semitism. Preserve your mental health, don't even Google it.

There was no way that someone like Kapeliouk would have used an obvious fake like that, but my discussant was adamant. Even more suspicious was the article it had come from. It was a report from the early days of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And it had been under attack previously for Kapeliouk's use of Begin's real words, describing Palestinian terrorists as "beasts walking on two legs", as if they had been directed against all Palestinians and not just terrorists. The fact that the article was known made it easy for someone to use it to construct an internet meme by adding a bogus quote to it.

The only way to resolve the argument was to find the article. It wasn't easy, but someone had uploaded it to Scribd. You can read it here. The 'master race' quote is nowhere to be seen.

There are three lessons to draw from this. The first is do not trust those endless photographs with slogans and quotations next to them without checking the proper attribution, especially if they seem as outlandish as this one. Seeing them reposted on like-minded web sites is not checking, you need to match them to authoritative sources with proper citations. Internet memes reproduce and multiply. Don't encourage them or draw quick and easy opinions from them.

Secondly, and this is more worrying, it shows that Israel/Palestine tends to make even the most reasonable of people lose their marbles. Wild enthusiasms for whichever cause win out over any reasoned argument. How else would anyone believe something that was such obvious bollocks? Passionate belief makes us credible dupes. And we all fall for things.

Finally, there is the fact that in the end I am glad I did have this argument. After I sent the link to the full article, I was thanked and the post was taken down. The people you disagree with are not necessarily bad people and there are plenty of times I get it wrong. It was a small crack in a profound ideological disagreement, but in these febrile times the smallest of victories for knowledge over propaganda are welcome. 

Football latest

Two short pieces. First a Silicon Valley Russian contemplates his home nation:

To understand Russia’s lighting fast descend into the abyss one has to understand a simple truth that many (myself included) suspect all along: Russia was and is a failed state. What is seen from the outside is just a facade imitating a functional country and government. High oil prices, residual infrastructure of USSR and internal mass propaganda machine maintained the illusion for more than a decade.  ... 

In simple terms, Russia is a mafia state. All the way from Moscow to regions and to small towns, everything is controlled by various mafia gangs. Police and judiciary are parts of most powerful gangs. They usually assist in extortion or theft of property earned by local small and medium size businessmen. Big business is subject to federal mafia clan wars.

Second, one of a series of Guardian investigations into what is effectively slave labour in Qatar.

Migrant workers building the first stadium for Qatar's 2022 World Cup have been earning as little as 45p an hour, the Guardian can reveal. ...

The problems for the World Cup workers come after the Guardian revealed on Tuesday that migrant labourers who fitted out luxury offices used by Qatar's World Cup organising committee have not been paid for up to a year and are now living in squalor. 

There has been an international outcry over the deaths of hundreds of migrant builders in Qatar in construction accidents and traffic collisions, and from suicides and heart failure. Low pay, late pay and even no pay are now an increasing concern.

And where are the next two football World Cups due to be held? In a mafia state followed by a slave state - both awarded in free and open competition without a hint of corruption eh?

It's horrible, but it points to a broader problem. Sport is wonderful, on one level it is escapism, but on another it has much broader political implications, especially where prestige events are concerned and there sports administrators show a lack of engagement with everyday morality. The next two tournaments stink.

Into the lion's den

Why did the events in Gaza make me think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech? I am uncomfortable with much of its content and it doesn't seem that relevant at first. Actually, it was because of two memorable quotations that he used. First:

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: "Beauty will save the world". What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes - but whom has it saved?

Beauty? When I look at much of the commentary on Gaza that is flooding social media, I see no beauty. There is a deep ugliness running through much of it.

The least offensive are the endless posts - from both sides - that have a photograph of dubious provenance with a slogan underneath saying that 'this really shows whatever'. Then there are the three-minute YouTube videos that offer you 'the essentials', 'the truth', 'the things THEY don't tell you', 'what you need to know to understand' and so on. And the charts, graphics and maps all purporting tell you something that will make you feel that you were right all along. I want to write under every one, 'No it won't. This is selective, simplistic and distorted. Please go away and read some books. And not ones selected solely because they will confirm your pre-existing prejudices.'

But then there is much worse. There are the 'solutions' being proffered, all horribly final, ranging from mass deportations to mass killings; the denials of the other and of their humanity – 'beasts', 'animals', 'scum'. Or, simply, there are the expressions of rage and hatred – no suggestions, no solutions, just anger. Deeply, deeply, unpleasant - and touching something dark that has refused to go away. It makes me very uneasy.

Some people have shared some good thoughtful articles from both sides, and I am grateful to them, but they have been swamped by a wave of unreflective hatred and attempts to shape the agenda with manipulative propaganda.

So once again, I turn to not so much thinking about the conflict, but as to thinking about how we think about it. Which brings me to Solzhenitsyn's second quotation.

From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life. As the Russian saying goes, "Do not believe your brother, believe your own crooked eye."

There are crooked eyes aplenty.

Israelis hiding in bomb shelters and Gazans under fire will each have a different perspective, but they aren't the people I am writing about. Their fear and heartbreak is beyond my understanding or ability to verbalise. Nor can I write with any authority about policies or the wisdom, justice or otherwise of what is happening now. No, it is those campaigners and commentators, those demonstrators on the streets of European cities that concern me. They are people who are only too keen to fight a cause rather than attempt to solve a problem.

The question that is frequently asked is, why does this conflict alone send everybody crazy? Why, given the worse horrors going on in the world today is it this that mobilises such passions? If what people care about is the lives of Palestinians, shouldn't they have all been on the streets protesting the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been slaughtered by Assad's forces in Syria and the slow starvation of eighteen thousand people in Yarmouk? It is tempting to mutter that it is because it is Jews that are fighting, but that is too simplistic. What follows is a very tentative proposition, but one of the reasons why I feel that Israel/Palestine so animates the European left, to the exclusion of much else, is that it is our conflict.

By that, I mean that it is deeply tied up with our own history, our own collective narratives and our own crooked eyes. It is our religiosity, our nationalism, our liberation, our imperialism, our anti-Semitism, our genocide, our guilt and our atonement that animates us. For European onlookers, it is a European crisis being played out with other people's lives in the Middle East.

And this is what Solzhenitsyn was critical of. We could no longer rely on a localised crooked eye in a global world. He argued that we needed a holistic, transcendent truth, something that he thought literature could provide. That is the beauty that could save the world. I am more prosaic. I think that we need clear thinking. And that too has its own beauty.

In the endless circular arguments I am struck by a basic failing of historical analysis, one that I used to drum into my students, to distinguish between structural, long-term causes and proximate causes. In general, pro-Palestinians have stressed long-term causation at the expense of the proximate, whilst pro-Israelis have done the opposite. This is not surprising.

The long-term conflict has not gone away, nor has it been resolved. The tensions raised from the early days of Zionist immigration in the 1880s remain. So do the multiple failures to create a Palestinian state, to resolve the issue of the displacement of refugees, to deal with the questions of occupation and settlement and of secure, mutually recognised self-determination. This is the Palestinian case. The broad parameters of a settlement are known; that they have not been implemented is a failure of political leadership that has not been confined to only one side. (Of course, partisans of both put that failure down to malign intent, but that is another argument). However, is this the sole cause of the current violence? Is the war being fought in Gaza the result of the breakdown of the peace negotiations as I have heard suggested by many?

No, the proximate cause is more uncomfortable for pro-Palestinian activists, which is why they seldom mention it. It is the decision by Hamas and its Islamist allies to launch military rocket attacks at civilian centres of population in Israel. Does anyone seriously believe that Israeli forces would be bombing and fighting in Gaza if this had not happened, that it is just an expression of wanton belligerency? Are there any countries that would not have responded in some way to such attacks? Demonstrators rarely even acknowledge the role of Hamas, let alone condemn it along with Israel's action.

Let's look at this more closely. Hamas' seizure of power in Gaza and their consolidation of an authoritarian regime there certainly worried Israel. Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, pledged to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state (solidarity with the 20% of Palestinians who are Christians anyone?). Its founding Covenant opposes all peace deals, talks of religious approval of killing Jews and also indulges in the poisonous idea of a Jewish world conspiracy, claiming that Jews were behind both world wars and organise themselves to rule the world through the Rotary Club! It is far-right lunacy. But such madness is dangerous with power. And once they began practicing what they preached through suicide bombing, Israel had three options. The first, to ignore it and hope it would go away, is not to be recommended. It doesn't and grows stronger. The second, to directly intervene and effect regime change, would be bloody and fraught with danger. So they chose the third option, containment - the strategy that underlay American policy in the Cold War. Containment implies the threat of military action if it is to be tested. Hamas tested it. Deliberately. They knew what the result would be. But then they are wedded to a long-term strategy of attrition and to provoke the very polarisation that we see today.

The current crisis is horrible. Modern warfare is cruel. The proportion of civilian casualties has been rising inexorably in all warfare. There is nothing exceptional about the figures for Gaza. But each number is an individual tragedy screaming out for our compassion. And that compassion lies behind much of the antipathy to Israel, but not all. Though this compassion too has a crooked eye, looking only one way.

Yet, there is something else missing, another structural element to this conflict. This one is not ours though; it is the crisis in the Arab world and its significance is not so instinctively grasped.

It has certainly touched us, as on 9/11 and 7/7. We can see it on our streets through the shocking anti-Semitic rioting in France, but it is not something that we fully comprehend. The Arab Spring collapsed the crumbling legitimacy of Arab regimes, but what was to replace them? The hoped-for democratisation has only partially succeeded in displacing authoritarianism and even those small successes are not secure. And all the time there was a totalitarian movement ready to challenge – the theocratic revolutionary right. Hamas is part of that revolutionary movement.

What we have at the moment is not an Israel/Palestine war, there are plenty of Palestinians who are not in the Islamist camp, we have an Israel/Hamas war. So, by taking up its undifferentiated, partisan position, the left have moved firmly behind the radical right. It posts pictures of a 'free Palestine' and we have no idea what they mean by 'free'. Unthinkingly, some are buying into the vision that it means a Palestine free of Jews, ruled by Hamas. It is a call for a war of annihilation.

It is easy to valorise Hamas as a resistance movement, but to do that is to make a categorical error. We have to ask precisely who is resisting and what they stand for. Pol Pot headed a resistance movement after all. Genocide followed. Hamas are lining themselves up to be the Palestinian people's latest oppressors, not their liberators. Rather than being a symptom of the conflict, and they are part of an ideological, regional power struggle.

To support the Palestinians is not to support Hamas. It is not to engage in ugly anti-Semitic abuse. It is not to raucously echo Islamist sentiments. It is to ensure that those long-term issues remain on the agenda, that a deal remains possible, to support both the Israeli and Palestinian people, if necessary against Hamas, though not uncritically. And it is to continue the long struggle for peace, the small-scale communal, trade union and cultural collaborations, and to struggle for empathy - the understanding of the bitter experiences of both people. It is to straighten our crooked eyes and see that peace is both practical and, yes, beautiful.

Another blow

There were two models adopted by adult education, particularly in the university sector. The first used high fees and rarefied subjects to run self-financing courses with the majority of students being affluent enthusiasts. The second was to engage with the community, work with trade unions and the voluntary sector, teach in prisons and outreach areas, and the like. That was the route we chose in Hull. Funding regimes changed. We closed.

And now that dilemma is hitting the City Lit in London, the largest adult education centre in Europe. I have a personal connection, my first boss in Manchester went off there to be principal and saved them from a near terminal crisis. A man of horrifying energy, he left early, utterly exhausted, to be a freelance adult education tutor and consultant. I am still in touch with him even after all these years.

And it appears that the City Lit is now choosing to go down the self-financing route at the expense of Access courses and the like. The Guardian report imposes its own agenda by denigrating 'hobby courses', which those of us who have worked in adult education know can be life savers for many and safe entry points for others, but it makes it clear that the erosion of Access courses is particularly damaging.

In another report on education, this time about universities, Aditya Chakrabortty starts with this anecdote:

Last November a letter appeared in the London Review of Books that should be carved into stone. It recalled a reception held in the early 90s at the British embassy in Tokyo, where some attache was guffing on about how the dreaming spires of Albion were going to become centres of enterprise – just like the private sector. On hearing this, a normally "polite and reserved" Japanese professor felt moved to protest: "Your universities – they will follow British business model? But British business is … I am sorry … it is not well. It is dead, and your universities are famous and respected. They are not dead."

It is when management talk about being more like businesses when you know you are in trouble. Because they would make lousy business managers too.

We can say the same about adult education. It was one of this country's success stories; thriving, entirely voluntary and open to all without any restrictions at all levels. And if you want a sense of how important it is and what second chance education can achieve, read this feature on the NUS student of the year, Natalie Atkinson.

And what have we done with it? Inspect the ruins and see.

Gurus

Religion is passé, writing a management text is how to make money from bollocks these days. John Naughton tells us what to do:

It's a pernicious genre based on one simple principle: the "idea" must be big enough to seem profound, but it mustn't be so profound that it cannot be memorised by halfwits and used in PowerPoint presentations.

Spot on.

Sanity

I have just read Doug Saunders short book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide. It is a beautifully clear dissection of modern mythologies about Muslims. Saunders demolishes the writing of those like Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer, Melanie Phillips and their ilk and goes further by taking on the batty conspiracy theories of Gisèle Littman that animate the new far right.

You see, something strange has happened. As the far left has adopted anti-Zionism with zeal and supped at the trough of anti-Semitism, the new far right have adopted Israel as one of their own because, as they see it, it is sticking it to the Muslims. The old Jewish world conspiracy has morphed into a Muslim world conspiracy, Eurabia. According to Saunders, Littman fingered a committee based in Brussels called the Euro-Arab Dialogue. This was founded in 1973 and she saw it as a body where the European elite was conspiring to Islamise the West. The committee met four times and was wound up in 1979, but then reality and conspiracy are usually strangers.

Faced with this lunacy, Saunders calmly debunks it, together with the more mainstream myths, using evidence and historical detail. All the demographic and cultural assumptions made by the 'Muslim tide' authors are just plain, empirically and verifiably, wrong. Not only that, but identical arguments were made about Catholic and Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century. Assimilation took time, we often underestimate how long, and, he says, the same will happen with Muslims. We are in the early part of a familiar, and very human, cycle of migration and change.

This doesn't mean that he lets either jihadi terrorism or Salafist politics off the hook. The violence is by no means over and many more will die at its hands, but the point he makes is that it is not an inevitable and integral part of Islam. Instead it is a self-contained political movement that has sprung from two sources. Firstly, there is the 'privatisation of religion', a process of secularisation where Islam has become decoupled from cultural certainties, become a matter of private belief and has entered the modern market place of ideas. Secondly, radical Islam springs from the identity politics that was a twin reaction to social exclusion and to a particular form of multiculturalism, as opposed to religious and cultural pluralism, creating "the prison house of culture." It is not the product of a changeless tradition, but is a totalitarian utopianism springing from the uncertainties of change at a time of radical modernisation. It is nasty stuff and likely to persist for some time to come. As he says,

While these Islamist parties … reflect a transient political moment, they are neither benign nor to be celebrated. They represent reactionary, repressive, intolerant and anti-Semitic forces at a moment when the countries of the Middle East and North Africa are badly in need of the opposite. We should not wish such parties upon anyone. But they are not evidence of a conquering Islam … or that American immigrants could not be trusted.

What Saunders does is to bring sanity and historical perspective to bear on contemporary anxieties. He does this by looking at the facts and undertaking the simple task of differentiating between migrants and their descendants, who just happen to be Muslims, with political movements that prey on them and abhorrent cultural practices that still persist amongst a minority. This is a judgement that neither the new far right, together with their fellow travellers – the 'Muslim tide' authors – nor the far left, with their embrace of Islamism as an expression of an undifferentiated Muslim anti-imperialism, have attempted. I sometimes wonder what both Israelis and Palestinians have done to deserve such unsavoury champions.

Yet there is always hope. Once again, when real people emerge from the demonology of ideological hysteria, they appear to be not so different from everyone else and often rather nice.

Advice to Paxman

I wish I had heard this at the right time. But after Jeremy Paxman's step into the ring with George Szirtes last month, I think that this is the lesson he learnt.

Jaws

Keen swimmers amongst you may be pleased to know that Ian Steadman has done the maths in the New Statesman:

You are more likely to be bitten by Luis Suarez (1 in 2,000) than a shark (1 in 3,700,000)

Of course he is not the only sportsman to be punished for biting. There is a list here. My favourite, complete with accompanying YouTube, is Francisco Gallardo.

In 2001, the Sevilla striker was fined and suspended by the Royal Spanish Football Federation for biting the penis of his team-mate José Antonio Reyes during a goal celebration. The federation said that his behaviour was not in line with the "sporting behaviour and decorum" of La Liga's players. Gallardo for his part did not see what all the fuss was about. "I am sure I didn't offend anyone," he said. "I don't think what I did was very noteworthy."

Hot stuff

A mini heat wave sent temperatures near to 40C, perfect for spicy food. So it's time to make some τυροκαφτερή (tirokafteri), a salad dip made from cheese and hot peppers. It is really easy.

First grow your peppers.

OK, I'm showing off. You can buy them instead. The ones you get in Greece are long green peppers, not like the chillies you get in the supermarkets in the UK. A good Asian grocer will have some, they have a different flavour and are soft and fleshy.

First, you fry a pepper lightly so that the skin lifts off and you can peel it. Taste it when you do this as it may determine how many you use. I picked two, had a little taste, ran round the house a few times breathing fire and then used one. Skin and deseed it. Chop coarsely and put in a blender with some olive oil and either wine vinegar or lemon juice. Give it a good whizz up and then add cheese. Feta is the basic ingredient, but it is nicer if you add a blander, soft cheese as well. I use fresh ανθότυρο, (anthotiro), a whey cheese, but you could use ricotta or even a very thick set yoghurt.  Blend the lot together adding olive oil if it is too solid, until you have a coarse paste. Stick it in the fridge for an hour or so for the flavour to develop and that is it. Serve with fresh bread or anything you like. Spectacularly good and simple.

I feel your pain

The white working class - this is the latest object of political fascination. And so the cry goes up from the left to listen to them on immigration, to reach out to UKIP voters, to prove that you will be tough on benefit 'scroungers'. Then the right joins in about the need to strengthen declining social capital, build the 'big society' out of a 'broken Britain' and to improve the incentives to work. All share the assumption that this mythical beast is rather a nasty brute, inclined to violence and irrational hatreds. Throw it some raw meat and it will stay in its corner, growling but not menacing.

I have never bought it. So it was nice to see some empirical research from Open Society Foundations, a think tank funded by George Soros. And what they found didn't surprise me after my own work in outreach adult education. People hated the stigma and the blame being thrown at them. There was a strong work ethic, of course, and very strong communities where, "People will reach out to neighbors in a time of need before they turn to public authorities." The concern over immigration appears when it is perceived as a threat to the stability of these close-knit communities. But why? The summary concludes:

It is by no means inevitable that boundaries are set up against outsiders or newcomers. Some of the six communities have been ethnically diverse for decades; others are just starting to experience change. Though there was prejudice towards outsiders among some, many also expressed interest in contact with people from other backgrounds and a desire to build new shared values. In some cities such as Aarhus in Denmark, ethnic diversity was seen as a positive development and a source of pride. 

One of the benefits of in-depth research like this is its measured response to questions about sensitive subjects of inclusion and immigration. At a national level, in a country like the UK, immigration is linked with popular discontent, but when the questions are asked at the local level, individuals will demonstrate a willingness to negotiate differences and find common ground with newcomers, as well as understand the wider social and economic factors that are having an impact. An older resident from Manchester declared that: 

"If there was work, and there was houses, and there was everything what’s needed, I wouldn’t have a problem with [immigration]. The problem is that there’s too much looking for too little, and you’re bound to get trouble when that happens. If you have starving people and throw a loaf in amongst them, there’ll be a murder committed to get that loaf. That’s what’s happening here on a much bigger scale. There’s not enough."

In other words it is the old concerns of the left that should be animating them today - employment, housing, health, education, the basics of a decent society. These are modest enough demands. Meeting them should be an article of faith on the left. Actually doing something could pay big political dividends. 

1066 and all that

Owen Jones takes on David Cameron's assertion that Magna Carta is a good thing, by trotting out his own list of good things. It is hard to read either without cringing. One historical myth is replaced with another. Both are Whig theories, in that they assume incremental progress, one through paternalism, the other through struggle.

This leads Jones to say that,

The government's crusade to embed "British values" in our education system is meaningless at best, dangerous at worst, and a perversion of British history in any case.

And here we come face-to-face with the complete muddle informing the whole debate about jihadi entryism in British schools.

There are two main problems. The first is the use of history and the second is the ascription of nationality to a specific set of values, usually without defining them in anything other than the vaguest terms.

What we are talking about are not British values at at all, but a cluster of universal rights, liberties and values that fall into several categories. First are human and legal rights, such as the right to life, to liberty, habeas corpus (which indeed appears in Magna Carta, though not much else does), freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from torture, no punishment without due process, etc. Secondly, there are democratic rights, the institutional arrangements that limit state power and allow for some form of popular representation. Third are social values, such as freedom from discrimination, toleration, social equality and liberty of lifestyle. Finally, there are economic rights - welfare, health and, yes, education. You can probably add many more to the list. None of these belong specifically to any nation, though some are at better practicing them than others.

Broadly speaking, these are liberal values and what is being proposed is their defence against a totalitarian movement and its relativist allies. The strength of the argument has been undermined by foolish nationalist sentiment.

But what of history? Well what any national or international history is doing is not defining these values but looking at the ways that they have been developed, implemented, violated, challenged and defended. It is full of ambiguities. For instance, Britain both profited from and abolished the slave trade. Polemicists seize on one or the other, historians look at the interrelation and the reasons for both.

I find history endlessly fascinating, but nothing disturbs me more than it being cherry-picked to create partisan narratives. Some of the worst offenders are nationalists, which is why talk of inculcating British values instead of promoting human rights is so inappropriate. And please, let's leave history out of it.

Fame in Spain

Oh look. I get a mention in the CNT newspaper. Page 22.

Le siguió la conferencia de Peter Ryley sobre El Manifiesto de los Dieciséis, redactado en 1916, abogaba por el triunfo de los Aliados frente al eje germano. Entre sus defensores se encontraban los anarquistas Piotr Kropotkin y Jean Grave quienes defendían que era inmoral ser neutral o las posiciones antibélicas ante la amenaza que se cernía sobre el mundo. Ryley alegó que Kropotkin tenía razón y que la supuesta integridad moral del pacifismo a veces puede servir a ideas inmorales y que los anarquistas tienen que comprometerse con un concepto de guerra justa basándose en el principio de la internacionalidad. Defendió la necesidad —en circunstancias muy especiales— de abandonar ciertas predisposiciones ideológicas predeterminadas.

I take my fame where I can find it these days. It was all because I was here:

Language

We are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages. Actually, we are lousy at learning our own. We rarely recognise that we are a multi-lingual nation and it only really becomes visible if you go to Wales, where road signs are in both English and Welsh and bilingualism is encouraged. And then you see signs like this one.

Impressive, unless you can speak Welsh. WalesOnline reports that llid y bledren dymchwelyd does not mean 'cyclists dismount'. It loosely translates as 'bladder disease has returned'. Ah. We're not very good at it, are we.

Thanks to Lucy

Is it 'cos I is black

Sepp Blatter does his best Ali G impersonation as he tries to fend off corruption allegations that swarm around FIFA. It's all about racism in the media apparently. Maybe he needs to shake their hands.

John Oliver explains it all for Americans.

Delusions

The virulent anti-vaccination movement is limited in the UK, though the MMR panic, based on what the BMJ is happy to call fraudulent research and encouraged by papers like the Daily Mail, has done plenty of damage. Inexpert, celebrity-led campaigns have taken a much stronger hold in the USA and the fightback is increasingly urgent. Jennifer Raff's post, Dear parents you are being lied to, with multiple authoritative links, is as good a counter attack as any. This ignorant conspiracy theory kills. If vaccination drops below critical levels, people will die. In the same way, Thabo Mbeki's HIV denial may have cost 300,000 lives.

This should be enough to convince people to counter this nonsense where they can, hoping that people are open to persuasion. But this underestimates the sheer nastiness of convinced obsessives, another example of which I saw today. This Australian report details the harassment of parents who had lost a child to a communicable disease. Yes, the parents of dead children are their target. So perhaps the Aldrin method is the best way of dealing with them after all.

Diving in

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

T S Eliot

George Szirtes has skewered Jeremy Paxman; nicely, poetically, but firmly. He may be wriggling at this moment. In pinning Paxo to the wall, George has written with insight about poetry itself. I particularly liked this:

Poetry is as ancient as language itself, and the sense of the poetic precedes language. Animals could be charmed by music; mere drumming can heal the sick. The poetic even penetrates to football commentators who exclaim "Sheer poetry!" at a particularly wonderful moment. They tend not to exclaim "Sheer prose!" 

Ah yes, the beautiful game. A wonderful metaphor for artistry. Playwrights come out of it pretty well too. There is the "Theatre of Dreams", faking injury is "play acting", a match can be "high drama", a club plunging down through the leagues is "a Greek tragedy".

But what about us prose writers, especially those who get published by a respectable academic press? What do we get? A prosaic style of football, and that's it. Surely we can join in the fun. How about, "that goalless draw was as turgid as a Judith Butler paragraph!" No? Ah well, I suppose we will have to resign ourselves to playing in the Championship, whilst the poets and dramatists fight it out in the Champions' League.

Regaining marbles

Howard Jacobson has stopped being a miserable bugger and has gone on holiday. He liked it. He would, he went to Greece. Not only that, he wants to return the Parthenon Marbles to their rightful place. I have only one quibble with his article and it is this.

God know what would have happened to me had I stayed a year. Well, I know what would have happened to me: I’d have learnt the language ...

Learnt Greek in a year? Wow! I think he needs a reality check from the finest Greek Language book I have ever read, Learn Greek in 25 Years. The book is very funny, but, like all humour, is too close to the truth for comfort.

Big Tom

This is Big Tom. He is called that because he is a big tom. He lives in Greece. I am there too. That is all that is going through my head right now.

You kip if you want to

The media are getting far too excited than is good for them. They have been in a frenzy over UKIP for months. Last week the local election results were reported as a surge of support for UKIP. Given the wall-to-wall coverage and stunts like Nick Clegg's amazing act of stupidity in agreeing to debate Farage on TV, it wouldn't be surprising if there had been. There is only one problem. UKIP gained 22% of the vote in 2013 and 17% in 2014. They had lost support. This should have given pause for thought, but it didn't. Commentators were saved by the European election results, with UKIP topping the polls with 27% of a very low turnout. The media breathed a sigh of relief and their big political story lives on, until they get bored with it that is.

That story isn't as simple as portrayed. European election results rarely correlate to votes in a general election and they hugely over-represent fringe parties. Think back to the last time. Then, it was the BNP that was the talk of the town. Two fascists were elected. Everyone got very excited. Nick Griffin was invited onto Newsnight. This year they were wiped out.

Analysis and reporting has also been lazy (at best) when looking at the figures. In the local elections UKIP lost votes but gained seats. To sustain the narrative, the share of the vote was ignored and the gain in seats highlighted. But the media was keen to paint the elections as a failure for Labour, so in their case they concentrated on share of the vote (the largest, but not enough to win a general election), not on the more than 300 seats gained. The problem of using seats to gauge popular support is that their distribution often reflects the crankiness of the electoral system, rather than share of the vote. Any meaningful comparison has to look at the share of the vote alone.

If you do this, then things look a lot more interesting. Britain seems to be becoming a much more multi-party polity. This will create all sorts of anomalies at the general election as first-past-the-post is poor at giving representation to smaller national parties. The electoral reform debate is not going away.

The second thing that is obvious is that Labour is recovering, pretty slowly, but improving all the time nevertheless. The only two parties that have gained are Labour and UKIP. It is just that nobody seems interested in talking about Labour. Also on the left, there is the continuing support for the Green Party. They are holding their place too.

The Liberal Democrats certainly should be worried, their support is melting away. UKIP is not helping the Conservatives either. They face the prospect of a divided right. The major parties are pretty resilient. I remember back to the times when the SDP was supposed to be the new force that would supersede Labour. They didn't but they did divide the left, leaving the way open for big Conservative majorities. UKIP will not replace the Tories, but they can lose them seats in marginal constituencies.

After the banking crisis and the politics of austerity, some polarisation is apparent. This time the main challenge is coming from an embittered right, itching to be nasty once more. UKIP is its latest indulgence. Certainly they represent an unlovely and authoritarian suburban insurgency, but a new force in British politics? Don't hold your breath.

Mad dogs

The unexpected can sometimes be an integral part of the familiar. An old friendship regained means alcohol-fuelled conversations filled with nostalgic reminiscences of shared times, whilst eagerly taking advantage of the missing years by retelling favourite stories to the only person in our social circles who hasn't heard them a thousand times before. But then the person we have become is not always the same as the person we were. What of this new friendship, this time one between an academic writer and a playwright, neither of whom we had known before? How would that work out? This surprise was put to the test last weekend.

I went to see two one-act plays performed under the title of Mad Dogs and an Englishman, written by my old school friend, Tim Elgood. There was a nagging anxiety the whole time. What if I didn't like them? Even worse, what if I didn't like them when I was sitting next to the very self-conscious author? What if I didn't like them when one of the main characters in the first play was a dog I knew thirty years ago whose portrait was painted by my aunt? Ah. The last bit should give you a clue. How could I not like anything quite so ... well ... idiosyncratic.

Tim writes comedies. Only serious topics make worthwhile comedy. The first play is about three dogs in a dog rescue centre. Like all anthropomorphic writing it is really concerned with the human condition; homelessness, despair, aggression, cynicism, survival, love, and the increasingly pressing need of middle aged males for a pee. There is care and respect for animals underneath too (Tim was always mad about animals and was the only friend I ever had at school who kept a plastic tub in his lean-to containing pet mud leeches). Except he makes you think about them - differently - subversively. Animal themes invite sentimentality and kitsch, not the perception and dark tenderness evoked here. There are jokes and they are funny, but it is the tenderness that makes you smile.

The second play, Bare Words, is a dialogue between one person. It is about the agony of writing and the role of seduction in art. All writers will identify with it instantly. Others will enjoy it too, even if they come out with a vague sense of horror about what really goes on in an author's mind.

Tim's writing is accessible, intelligent and witty. A word should also be put in for the excellent cast and production, but it was the writer that concerned me. And I feel rather proud to have such a new old friend.

Anyway, go and see them if you can. There is a YouTube taster below.

Moaning

One of the things that I keep reading about the rise of the UK Independence Party is that it appeals to angry people. This is OK as far as it goes, but the sentence isn't complete. No, UKIP appeals to angry people with bugger all to be angry about. It isn't tapping into real deprivation or discontent, but suburban self-pity. So I was pleased to come across this article about the same phenomenon in the United States.

Kathleen Geier skewers a piece of conservative resentment by Tal Fortgang that seems to have gone viral in the States. She is deliciously contemptuous:

Fortang is a college freshman, after all, and it reads very much like the kind of thing a young, upper middle class, white dude with a pretentious vocabulary (see: “Weltanschauung”) and no experience in the real world would write.

But her real points are about the way it was taken up by a fawning press and by the author's of denial of privilege and claim to victimhood. This is a common trick, she writes:

... today’s plutocrats face a huge obstacle: they have struggled with zero major obstacles or hardships in their lives. This makes it very hard to craft biographies and stump speeches that can make the candidate relatable to the average Joe and Jane Sixpack. What to do? The answer, it seems, is to wheel out the grandparents. Cue the violins.

As she says,

They are madly envious of women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the poor for whatever public sympathy they get for their suffering, and they desperately want in on the action.

 The difference in the UK is that you don't have to dredge up any evidence. You just have to pretend.

The whole narrative doesn't just rest on scapegoating or blaming the victims, but on the bizarre claim that the privileged are the real, authentic victims, despite their easy, lucky lives. It is a political discourse based on the grumblings of saloon bar bores, complaints that everything is going to the dogs, together with a sense of peeved indignation that they haven't got even more. What a waste of their lives. Why don't they just enjoy themselves?

Cynicism

Sometimes I wonder about editorial standards. But when I read the Guardian, I abandon all hope at all. If I had received this article as an undergraduate essay, I would have failed it. The Guardian published it.

It would be easy to fisk the piece, but I have a life. Perhaps the most irritating bit is this:

 ... we also witnessed that old standby "no-fly zone", which actually means "flying-and-bombing zone"

Actually no, it means preventing someone else flying and bombing. For example, it was the no-fly zone established over Northern Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991 (remember?) that saved the Kurdish people from Saddam's genocidal suppression of their uprising. It was an achievement that has made John Major into a rather unlikely national hero for the Kurdish people.

Instead, the tactic of a no-fly zone is presented here as a capricious excuse made by someone who just likes bombing "people we don't like in the Middle East" for the hell of it (with no attempt to address the reason why we might not like them). Strip actions from context and meaning and you lose precision and all connection with reality. And this obfuscation is in a column about the clarity of language! As for the bit about Syria ... stop it, I have had enough.

I am prone to making big speeches about the difference between cynicism and scepticism. Scepticism is wholly to be welcomed and is based on evidence, investigation and critical thinking. Cynicism is a posture. It is a generalised mocking stance, one that is inherently conservative. That might sound odd, cynicism often has a radical sound. Yet it answers the question, 'what can we do', with one word; 'nothing'. It is a recipe for paralysis and posing. This article is pure, rampant cynicism.

Sceptics see realities with all their risks, complexities and obstacles. But they don't relapse into fatalism. They believe that something can be done. And on occasion that may mean using military force to stop genocide. Cynicism is the fashion of the moment and I wonder how many lives this bien pensant sneering will cost in the long run.

Oops!

Putin Accidentally Releases REAL Crimea Vote Numbers

As we know, the official results as reported by the Kremlin were 83% turnout, with 97% voting for annexation.Let me repeat that:
Official Kremlin results: 97% for annexation, turnout 83 percent, and percent of Crimeans voting in favor 82%.
President’s Human Rights Council results: 50% for annexation, turnout 30%, percent of Crimeans voting in favor 15%.

Who would have guessed?

History

Thanks to Snoopy for this translation of a must-read interview. A snippet:

...Putin is a thug, in classically conventional sense. He "sees everyone in a coffin" and he does not care for the consequences. And not because he's crazy, absolutely not. It is just that they all were that way in the KGB. And the people who are around Putin: Sergei and Viktor Ivanov, Sechin - are exactly the same.

Thoughts on Moyse

Football v education.

Football.

Appoint a new manager. Not up to the job.
Sack him. 

If Manchester United was a university.

Appoint a new coach. Not up to the job.
Promote him to manager.
All the players complain.
Get rid of them.
Attendances fall.
Write papers about how fans are not economically viable.
Relegation.
Sack the programme sellers.
Relegation again.
Blame the pitch and sack the ground staff.
Another relegation.
Send manager on a management training course.
He fails.
Promote him to director of football and appoint his best friend as manager. Call them the dream team. Drop into the conference.
Give the manager and director of football a big pay rise.
Go bankrupt.
The club bought by China.
The manager and director of football get a huge pay-off. The stadium is named after them in recognition of their outstanding service.
They then write a newspaper column about how the club wasn't good enough for them.

NB. Some of these apply equally to Newcastle United.

Mental health

Which of these is the craziest?

John Pilger regurgitating Russian propaganda and bonkers conspiracy theories about Washington launching a 'proxy "colour" coup against the elected government of Ukraine' and 'Moscow's inevitable response in Russian Crimea to protect its Black Sea fleet' (by invading and annexing part of a state whose territorial integrity they had guaranteed in return for them giving up nuclear weapons - not the best argument for nuclear disarmament), before going on to his latest obsession - an American plot to invade China.

Or,

A certain Mr Amess who has developed a phobia about Kim Kardashian after watching her sex tape; "the sight of Kim writhing around with her huge bum and the sound of her horrible, high-pitch wailing repulsed me … The experience left me terrified and I never wanted to see her face again".

It's obvious. Pilger by a mile. Never mind, the Guardian will always find a home for him.

Nurse!

Hey man!

We are in the midst of a primordial redefining of flow that will remove the barriers to the nexus itself. Who are we? Where on the great quest will we be recreated? Our conversations with other storytellers have led to a blossoming of ultra-dynamic consciousness.

Yep, it is one of those word generator thingies. This one produces a full article of New-Age bullshit at the click of a mouse. Rather like the Alan Sokal hoax, it is indistinguishable from the real thing and just as meaningless. How long will it be before one of these appears on an inspirational quote website?

There is a serious point to all this fun. The generator's creator writes,

Sometimes, there is a better way to pull your head out of the clouds and the charlatans’ hands out of your pockets. All it takes is a sneaking suspicion that this doctrine you’ve come to defend, fund and worship is, all things considered, perhaps a bit silly. Ridicule can be more persuasive than reason when it’s done right.

Not just effective, but funny.

The return of the Plump

Back in Greece for Easter. Spring has been early, but the trees are in blossom and the scent of jasmine and orange blossom compete with the song of the nightingales for airspace. And I have just spotted my first mosquito. Summer is round the corner.

It is a brief trip this time, sandwiched between two events. The first, unusual and lucrative, a colloquium in London that provided intense conversation and even more intense alcohol consumption. It was enormous fun. Most of those present would not have been natural political allies, but what was really interesting was not arguing out the differences, but finding the areas of agreement or, at least, of mutual interest. And discussion is so much more pleasant when washed down by free Rémy Martin.

After Easter I am off to give a paper at the European Social Science History Conference in Vienna. So I am maintaining my academic career, but without the salary (something surely wrong here, ed).

In all this gallivanting, thoughts of blogging have been few and far between. So, try this for some light entertainment.

Friday cat blogging - with a difference

Lisel Hintz has written an excellent piece on the widespread electoral fraud in the Turkish municipal elections for the Washington Post. The vote rigging is unprecedented in a usually clean electoral process. Hintz suggests reasons why it was different this time round.

Among the ingenious excuses coming from the government is the one that a highly convenient power outage that stopped vote counting was caused by a cat. Inevitably, a meme has resulted. The internet is a great device for mockery and when cats are involved, it will take off.

Turkey anyone?

The continuing protests and repression in Turkey have got, at best, sporadic coverage. The attempts to ban Twitter and YouTube after they were used to leak evidence of corruption did get some notice. But the local election results are being portrayed uncritically as an endorsement of Erdogan and an indicator of opposition failure. For example, Simon Tisdall reports in the Guardian;

For the first time, it was suggested, his (Erdogan's) remarkable grip on the working class and rural vote was beginning to slip. The municipal poll results provide scant evidence to support this theory. The AKP's share of the vote was up six points on 2009, at around 45%, while the main opposition trailed with around 29%. On the other hand, the AKP total was 5% down on the last general election, when it polled 50% of all votes. Some voters, at least, may have turned against their prime minister.  

However, this is from a source who knows the country well:

As many of you know, yesterday probably the largest electoral fraud in Turkey since 1946 was discovered in Ankara. The method (writing fake numbers into the computer system that didn't tally with the ballot box counts) were used for hundreds of ballot boxes (the CHP say 70,000 of their votes were not counted or transferred to other parties) seen to have been used in a number of other Turkish cities as well. Once the fraud was discovered, well over a thousand volunteers went out to follow the physical paper trail and there were protests in front of the Supreme Electoral Council (where the fraud had taken place) and in front of polling stations in CHP areas where they are still refusing to count the votes.
The problem: the Supreme Electoral Council was both responsible for the fraud (Efkan Âlâ, the Interior Minister, himself stopped vote counting in CHP areas between 2-5am, apparently in order to allow it to happen) AND it is the body which handles appeals. So it may be that there is no justice, even if the fraud is documented down to the minutest detail (on the Twitter hashtag ‪#‎TutanakNO‬ you can see photographs of almost every ballot box total, and you can compare them online to the Supreme Electoral Council results, if you want to check for yourself).

It seems like the blow to democracy that Tisdall fears has already happened.

UPDATE:

See here for an account of the protests