Enraged vs Deranged

Terrorism is not a euphemism for a non-white person with a grudge. (And this usage, even by inference, should definitely be avoided in the mass media and by government spokespeople.)

Instead it might be said to refer to any individual (or group) that initiates a mass casualty event for reasons decidedly beyond the personal. In this case the Police have insisted that the Liverpool suspect’s actions are ‘not being treated as terrorism’ and yet they have revealed that he gained access to the restricted area by following an emergency vehicle, which does suggest to me a more than basic level of planning and intelligence.

And let’s face it, if he turns out to be an enraged Everton fan, and did this for (albeit disturbed) tribalist reasons, that would still be a form of terrorism, wouldn’t it? The fundamental drive does not need to be a geopolitical obsession.

And we’d then have to confront a further breakdown in the social order, whereby just about any extreme take on identity can lead to this explosive, culturally-absorbed kind of violence, albeit in copycat format.

I think we should be wary now of attempts to put this one down wholly to mental illness. The enraged and deranged parts of this act need to be identified and understood apart.  

This individual drove a large vehicle into a crowd, including children, intent on causing harm indiscriminately, stopping only because of people trapped beneath it, and if there were any motivations for this beyond any private peculiarities of psychology, then the UK authorities really ought to treat it as a watershed, ‘iconic’ moment in the public expression of hatefulness.

But if he really was just a random loon, there still need to be some significant learnings for all future mass gatherings, especially those which are inherently grounded in the expression of tribal identity. (See also Canada’s recent trauma at a Filipino food fair.)

The Myth of Tordesillas

One myth this map reinforces is that these two were global superpowers of the era.

Instead they were relatively impoverished small nations in a relatively impoverished section of western Europe.

 

This was an age of political and economic innovation and around 1494 the most expansive and successful empires in these respects were operating elsewhere: the Ottomans, the Russians even, but most of all the Aztec and Inca plus two in Africa we hardly ever hear about: Mwene Mutapa in the east and the empire of Muhammad Touré in the Niger valley.

The Ming were nicely consolidated as well.

What distinguishes the Iberians is their sudden and startling global reach, but this exploration was very much needs driven. 

The Portuguese, for instance, were welcomed into the wealthy commercial system of the Indian Ocean at first because they brought extra shipping capacity and were rather desperate and cheap, and it was thought at the time that this would ultimately benefit everyone. The Indian Ocean was a lucrative and predictable, self-contained system. Nobody had much incentive to push out beyond. 

Only later did it become apparent that the newcomers would use their superior ship-borne firepower in order to establish a kind of protection racket.

A word for the watermelon mob…

Please stop comparing Israel to the Nazis. Everybody knows why you do it and it is thoroughly obnoxious and offensive and you cannot pretend otherwise.

Sensible, important, ethical people — like the Pope, say — seem able to refrain from doing it, and that has to tell you something. 

In fact, while you’re at it, stop comparing anybody with the Nazis (unless like Elon, they almost certainly appear to be self-Hitlerising.) 

Any point thus made is inherently trite and it comes with the cost of trivialising history that surely needs to be remembered and understood correctly.

When it comes to Gaza, there is one big fat blockade from WWII that you might just want to latch onto — Leningrad — but even there the scale is quite staggeringly different. (1m dead civilians). I’ve visited the mass graves outside the city and I know that if I had family connections there today, I would not want the experience of any immediate ancestors to be appropriated willy-nilly for someone’s contemporary demonisation project.

That leaves one potentially appropriate modern historical parallel for habitual users and abusers of historical parallels. 

Not Germans…but Brits, in Malaya in the 1950s, where starvation was used cynically, and appallingly, as an almost unconscionable counter-insurgency tactic.

But be warned. Unlike the Nazis, us Brits are not off-the-shelf avatars of cosmic evil — at least not all the time — and if you do adopt this chunk of our history as an alternative ‘never again’ mace to wield against the dastardly Jewish state you will need to look beyond the strategy to the consequences. Nasty it most definitely was, but on some levels it was successful. 

Weaponised Crybullies

Is 'Free Palestine' responsible for the murder of innocents in Manhattan? It kind of depends on how it is conceived and then expressed, and the lines here are not so easy to draw.

It can be the verbal expression of either a political or a trans-political idea. In the latter case the very last thing those who say it are looking for is a conversation. 

In this way it can be one of those almost pure expressions of want, detached from need, and as such reflects a posture which is broadly common on both sides of this divide right now, sometimes formalised into a set of dogmas. 

Those who speak this way are, consciously absolving themselves from having to engage with the achievable.

Yet most have no discernible relationship with the achievable to begin with: they are, in the main, harmless if pushy windbags whose opinions seem not to actually matter, at least in regard to the real world events they ostensibly refer to. Julie Burchill has amusingly characterised this mindset as that of the 'crybully'.

Yet for a minority, this absolute and abstract discourse leads to a far from funny self-weaponisation, which can have genuinely unpleasant real world consequences, and there are two main sub-groups worth mentioning, both of whom appear to discover quite rapidly that the only available outlet for them is viciousness. 

These are, strangely enough, poles apart — those who are in a position to wield power without restraint, and those isolated by a perceived lack of any kind of power at all. 

The lashing out which results can be dressed up as 'self-defence' or 'resistance', and so on, but in this case it is nearly always maniacal and usually also self-defeating, owing to its essential disorder.

I find myself asking if there is something 'in the air' right now feeding these pathologies and certainly the cultural air we breathe these days is irredeemably cybernetic. 

Jean Baudrillard would undoubtedly have seen the problem here quite quickly: technology is making everything seem startlingly up close and personal with all events occurring in 'real time'. 

In such an environment, what he referred to as the 'phantasies' in our heads cannot easily be contained by these heads, they escape out into the immanent technologically-mediated world, where the distinctions between flawed reality and perfectibility have already broken down. 

We'd struggle to keep them in even if we wanted to, because we always have a way to expel them, almost immediately. 

And Baudrillard would have noted, I think, that it is precisely in that technologically-mediated instant when we simultaneously realise that the phantasy cannot remain just as phantasy —  and that it will never fit snugly (and thus peacefully) with the material circumstances outside of our minds — that a usually limited number of us are driven to 'act up'.

Can It

Palestinianism and Zionism both have groundings in non-extremist, reasonable and realisable yearnings.

Yet both ideals are being hijacked by radicals who have become completely detached from reality — flooding the algorithm — seemingly determined to relentlessly demonise the antagonistic POV…rival cadres insisting that it's the other side that is inherently extremist, an avatar of everything which must be held up for reproach, thus feeding the very process whereby any engagement between the decent voices on each side is effectively been smothered. And this is no accident.

Now people are dying. Not just people in the immediate firing line of the underlying conflict, but people both inside and outside of it, who may even be trying to find a path to resolving it.

Those responsible for this collateral violence have a duty to bottle their out of control animus, to put a sock in it, at least where their rhetoric has turned extremist, and that includes the judgmental verbal violence they have inflicted on the silence of others turned off, when not actually disgusted by, this ambience of demented militancy.

 

 

The 'Phantasy of Artificial Intelligence'

Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime reads like a dire warning about technology as an ‘extreme phenomenon’ from way back in ‘96, similar to pieces we can find today, relentlessly scaremongering about AI, though rather more idiosyncratic, philosophical and French.

Yet there’s another message within it which we tend to hear less often nowadays. The clue is in the title: we are habitually deluding ourselves when we imagine ourselves capable of criminal perfection.

 

And so it is with our tech fantasies. We manifest curiosity and then a creative flirtation with all the interesting possibilities, which we should, before powerful radicals nearly always muscle in with a bid to impose a more consummate vision of the goal, transcending any cost/benefit analysis.

For Baudrillard, this urge to leave behind all trace of corporeal constraint is an inevitable recurring feature of our condition…the original imperfect crime.

There’s a lingering ambivalence: he refers to AI as the ‘achieved utopia of thought’ whilst tacitly acknowledging that all utopias are places we are doomed never to reach, set up by radical language that is dangerously disconnected from reality.

Yet try we do, and the result is a cycle of ‘appearance and disappearance’ between materality and its dopplegänger.

On any final approach to the Truth — the ‘highest definition’ — we seem to grasp that the best version of the message is not sitting at the end point of the journey, by which time some sort of ‘crazy sophistication’ has set in.

And so we recoil.

(Viz all those doomed attempts to impose either 3D or Ultra-HD on our movie experiences.)

“The phantasy of Artificial Intelligence, of the brain’s becoming a world, the world’s becoming a brain, so as to function without bodies, unfailing, autonomised, inhuman. Too intelligent too superhuman to be true. There is in fact no room for both natural and artificial intelligence. There is no room for both the world and its double.”

 

Particular Skills

In a recent interview Bible-bashing actress Sydney Sweeney helpfully reminded everyone that the Crusades were “defensive”.

 

 

 

Well, kinda, in the same way Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills is being super defensive when he makes telephone contact with the ‘scummers’ holding his daughter.

From the point of view of the Pope who first preached them, there was undoubtedly a perceived, urgent need to defend Christendom, to get back what had been Taken. 

 

The problem was that the first (heavily armed) people to heed the call were Normans, relatively recently-Christianised former Vikings whose whole approach was a lot more front footed.

And they had “a very particular set of skills”…skills that made them a nightmare for just about anybody who got in their way. 

 

 

If Urban II rather naïvely saw them as useful idiots who would enable Constantinople to recover Jerusalem and much of the rest of the Levant, sending the Arabs back home, for the Normans it was always going to be more of a smash and grab. 

 

And the resulting Crusader States were radically new i.e. they were no kind of return to the former status quo.

 

Something else the Papacy maybe mis-assessed about its Norman allies: their broad inclination towards tolerance once all the smashing and grabbing had been done. Wherever they set themselves up around the Med, they were content to rule over fairly diverse populations of Greeks, Latins, Jews, Arabs and other minority communities.

 

Only the original eleventh century version of the venture could be characterised as a locking of horns between northern and western Europeans and the Arab empire. 

 

By the time of the second iteration, the antagonists had largely changed: Seljuks: a Turkic people who were also comparatively recent converts and still in full expansionist mode. 

 

Then, come the Fourth Crusade, the westerners had twigged that the Orthodox Christian Greeks presented an even juicier target, though even the Normans had taken a bite or two out of Byzantium en route to the Holy Land. 

The Emperor had then dispatched his Varangian Guard to deal with the Norman threat, and as this elite body of warriors was by then largely made up of battleaxe-wielding Anglo-Saxons exiled from England after 1066, the ensuing scrap has been hailed by historians as Hastings, the rematch...in the Balkans. 

 

The result, sadly, was unchanged — ‘a victory for the equestrian classes over the pedestrian’.

 

Grand Communion

As I have examined in the previous posts, Dostoevsky’s antisemitism was in a sense a side-effect of his belief in the imminent arrival of a final, just order on Earth. This ultimately is the essence of antisemitism: the notion that Jews are somehow fundamentally in the way of the new order. It has always been the same whether we are talking about medieval Catholics, Protestants or indeed the last century’s seemingly unbelieving totalitarians, and it was also the case with Dostoevsky’s peculiar millennarian vision for Russia.

The latter is deserving of some exploration on its own, not just in terms of those who were implicitly excluded, because it differed markedly from all the other aforementioned antisemitism-generating systems of thought in a number of significant respects.

The way history subsequently played out in Russia might lead us to conclude that Dostoevsky’s apparent belief in the coming of a ‘great and open-hearted communion’ was completely wrong, almost laughably so, but people still turn to The Brothers Karamazov, because the vision expounded by the dying Elder Zosima continues to intrigue, not just as one of what might be, but of what might be wrong with all the other programmes for societal change that we currently possess. 

Dostoevsky's Russia does tend to sound like a bit like something off the pages of Spiked! There are the people, and there are those deluded metropolitan elites. The latter are liberal, rational and atheist. They imagine themselves as free, but they are 'isolated'. 

When the poor rise up against the elites they are often led to do so with bloodshed by a discourse that is fed to them by dissident elements of those same liberal, rational, atheistic masters. "Their wrath is accursed, because it is cruel."

The insistence on the need for non-violence is explicit: He who draws the sword will perish by the sword.

Instead, the people have to be true to their own essential selves, to their faith and humility, acting without vengeance or envy, in a manner likely to eventually sort of shame the rich into allowing a society grounded in equality. 

This is a new order to be won by 'humble love' not by force of arms. Salvation must come from the people in effect swallowing those who would be their masters, economic or political, into their big blob of love.

When confronted by the wicked, the Elder Zosima advises that the best approach is to 'shine' on them. 

Earlier on in the story he had perplexed many of those present when he threw himself down at the feet of the town's best known wrong-un, seemingly responding to the 'pride of Satan' with performative grovelling. 

In his deathbed Talks and Homilies Zosima explains his approach...

"If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek torments for yourself, as if you yourself were guilty of their wickedness. Take these torments upon yourself and suffer them, and your heart will be eased, and you will understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have shone to the wicked, even like the only sinless one."

Reaching this part of TBK is rather like coming across one of those unusual somewhat stand-alone episodes in the middle of a favourite TV series, which will initially generate significant frustration as one comes to terms with the realisation that there will be a further extended delay before the cliff-hanger from the conclusion of the previous episode is resolved. And yet, once everything has been wrapped up, one starts to look back on it with greater fondness.

And here at least we get a lot more than a bunch of flashbacks and character backstory padding. One might say that these observations lie at the very heart of what Dostoevsky was trying to say and that the wider 'plot' is the padding, really.

Jewlaks

Dostoevsky, literary poster boy of universal brotherhood and compassion, was also a really horrid antisemite.

Many other such bigots are perfectly happy to admit to the charge, but Fyodr was one of those, a bit like Gary Lineker, who vehemently denied it, even as he was ‘posting’ content which made it rather obvious.

Hatefulness goes against my profoundest principles, he would say, and in this he did seem to have a point. He also had his own version of the ‘some of my best friends’ get out clause. This is one the racist’s oldest subterfuges, whereby they highlight specific individuals they like, while demonising certain salient forms of the collective.

The recent online ‘faux pas’ involving Lineker hung not just on latent Nazi symbolism, but on a fanciful characterisation of Zionism, which has clear parallels with Dostoevsky’s ‘Jewish Idea’. 

 

In simple terms, Jews are just fine as long as long as they don’t go around being Jewish or attaching themselves to specifically Jewish aspirations or cultural patterns. If they do, they become a kind of existential threat to the wider civilisation.

Ultra-nationalism and Ultra-socialism were for a long time fairly compatible e.g. Vietnam, Cuba etc. But today Ultra Socialism seemingly rejects all expressions of Jewish post-colonial national aspiration, choosing to misrepresent it as the reverse phenomenon, a continuation of colonialism.

One can find some specific historical reasons for this, and others bound up with the complexities and absurdities of modern geopolitics, but deep down it is connected to one of the very oldest antisemitic tropes: the notion that Judaism itself presents a uniquely serious obstacle to most other forms of universal brotherhood and salvation. (For Dostoevsky universal meant Christian and Russian, but he would have barely understood the distinction. Some of the same civilisational violations he impersonalised via his ‘Jewish Idea’, he also fingered the ‘Turks’ (rather broadly defined) for in his novels.)

Lineker has thus been retreading ground that is essentially medieval, and this is one of the serious quibbles I have with the widespread 1930s Germany obsession, because the pathology has much deeper roots. In the Middle Ages every time Europe became obsessed with millenarian fantasies of worldly cleansing and the final imposition of Divine justice, there would be major pogroms.

One can see that the difficulty Dostoevsky perceived with the Jewish collective had analogues in other groups, notably the ‘commune-eaters’ referred to in The Brothers Karamazov by the Elder Zosima. These were the same Kulaks later exterminated en masse by Stalin: a group of people who seemingly lived by their own ‘selfish’ ideals within a romanticised rural society, and were thus like a tumour which had to be forcibly removed.

Corbyn is out celebrating Nakba Day today, pushing the loaded tale that 750,000 Arabs were forcibly evicted in 1947-8 by the dastardly Jews of Israel through no fault of their own, and of course no mention is going to be made of the even greater number of Jews who also had to up sticks at around the same time as they were driven out of assorted Muslim majority nations around the Middle East.

Within Corbyn’s worldview Israel now has to go for the same reason the Kulaks had to go in the USSR, yet the mental gymnastics involved are even more extreme, because achieving this involves a loose-ish alliance with Jihadists whose own ideal of brotherhood is about as ultra-exclusive and un-diverse as one could imagine. 

 

The South African Afrikaaner refugees showing up in Trump’s America are undoubtedly ludicrous, but there are certain parallels worth observing with Arab Muslims in the Levant: they are the descendants of a colonising culture which has consistently failed to accept or adapt to the 20th century post-colonial carve up as presented to them by the out-playing of history. They essentially desired to continue to run the whole show with the indigenous culture as, at best, second class citizens. (See also, Rhodesia.)

Being a substantial minority within a society run by peoples with an older claim was anathema to them, even though within it they’d enjoy more rights than they’d have ever given other ethnic groups if they’d held on. Time to play the victim.

 

The Dostoevsky Problem

The name given by scholars to the phenomenon whereby individuals who appear to define themselves by their compassion, somehow withhold it from Jews.

The Russian author was himself self-consciously uber-compassionate, indeed could be said to have devoted himself to compassion and vicarious suffering , and yet made a pointed exception when it came to Jews. He would vehemently deny hating Jews even as he was making rather obviously hateful statements about them.

While he’s very much not the only example of this phenomenon, he has given his name to it.

When pushed, he would say he had no ‘preconceived’ hatred of Jews, which permitted him to hate specific real world examples, usually collectives rather than individuals, and perhaps even ‘the Jewish idea’.

Some say that the underlying problem has been that Jews, with their messianic views and their unique historical suffering, offer a sort of implied rivalry to the Russian culture Dostosevsky saw himself as belonging to.

You often witness something similar today with identity politics and anti-racism movements, which tend to regard Jews as a threat rather than as fellow travellers, and this is in part because Judaism is relatively isolationist and does not easily lend itself to more universally conceived movements of liberation or salvation. It is the one monotheistic faith which has not gone out of its way to make converts.

Throughout the Middle Ages antisemitic violence attended almost every moment when Christians engaged with the millenarian fantasy that the world was about to be cleansed and made perfect. 

 

Dostoevsky’s own ideology of compassion comes with a vehement rejection of utilitarian logic, which he came to associate with Jews, along with materialism, something which has stuck with many modern believers in the socialist utopia. 

 

Staunchly Christian, he nevertheless hated the Crucifiction as a Jewish utilitarian idea: that God would sacrifice his own child for the greater cause.

A lot of antisemites today share his apparent obsession with children and yet appear absolutely unwilling to see how Hamas has been applying the utilitarian logic against the Jewish state, sacrificing their own people so that their cause might better thrive.

 

Quatermass (Thames TV)

I have lately been re-viewing some of the films and TV shows which most unsettled me as a child, and this 1979 four-parter, written by Nigel Kneale, was a stand-out.

Strangely enough, I had either mis-remembered the end or missed the final episode entirely, reminding me of a vaguely-related content consumption phenomenon in the seventies.

There was a swashbuckling French series set in the days of Cardinal Richelieu which was shown on various occasions on Saturday morning telly called The Flashing Blade. The concluding episode seemed to have upsetting elements because — for some reason — the dubbed English version never included the final installment and one was left with the impression that one of the good guys had been struck down and there were various other détails en suspens. Only years later did I see the missing conclusion on DVD.

 

 

Anyway, in the case of Quartermass, if I imagined that a much older, more worldly me, bingeing the whole show over a long journey, would find it quaintly dated and thus less discomforting, I was mistaken. If anything the original effect was not only still present, but even more pronounced.

The set up is fairly straightforward. It’s the end of the 20th century and human society is breaking down. The young have either joined warring urban gangs or an itinerant cult which believes they are all about to be transported to another world. Masses of the latter gather at ancient stone circles and similar sites around the world, where they are seemingly reduced to swirling white dust and granular detritus.

These ultimately impersonal mass casualty events induced from space are fundamentally shocking, especially within a storyline which spares almost none of its main characters, even young children, from unhappy termination. (Back then in Star Trek you knew the guys in the red shirts were slotted for extinction and in Doctor Who at least one of each story’s incidental leads would probably not make it, but Kneale was absolutely relentless here.)

The strangely obsessive and deluded demeanour of the ‘Planet People’ in Quatermass chimed with an earlier experience from my childhood: a visit to Hyde Park during the ‘Summer of Love’ where I found the whole place overrun with hippies either dancing manically or frolicking on the grass which my barely-formed mind found all rather sinister at the time.

The abject state of the yufe requires a solution to be cobbled together by a collection of old timers. And this is where Kneale’s scenario delivers its emotional punch within a decidedly creepy package, for he does something which other marquee British content has always done, though perhaps a little less explicitly: position a vision of a gadget-tastic near future with a deeply nostalgic anchor in the British past. This is what makes the likes of James Bond, Doctor Who, The Avengers etc work. Indeed, these formats basically cease to function properly when the backward-looking part of the product is neglected.

This particular dystopia is situated perhaps a decade on from the date of filming, yet we are constantly shown glimpses of costumes and other iconography from the middle of the twentieth century and the crumbling generation left to confront the threat from deep space are Britain’s ‘wartime generation’. The references to the Holocaust are overt. Thus what you have here is a combination of the predictive power of the genre at its most gloomy, with an eerie kind of reverse speculation.

Maybe the late 1970s was the last great opportunity to pull something like this off. (Rather like The World at War). As we saw last week at the VE Day concert at Horse Guards', only a few stragglers remain from the wartime experience, almost none of whom will have played a defining role. And we have coated the period in so many layers of platitude and positive nostalgia that the fundamental nastiness which Kneale tapped into with his script for this series would probably not operate in the same way today.

And in truth the massed youth movements of the epoch, often characterised by collective hysteria (I lived just a few doors away from where the Osmonds stayed on their London visit in May 1975) are also something of a distant memory.

If there is a villain of the piece, it is an alien machine harvesting our young for some property, possibly their perfume, yet it remains unclear whether this artifact, which has come before in ancient times, remains under the conscious control of other beings.

Down below on Earth, this partial apocalypse is perceived as one that has occurred as a result of a unfathomable foundering of the collective psyche — not a virus, environmental catastrophe, global-level conflict etc. as we tend to come across more commonly today, and this, I would suggest, makes it that much more ominous and perplexing.

Dumbfounding

During the 2-3 year period when we were working through the deal underpinning the sale of our company, I was exposed on numerous occasions to the basic pattern of 'hard-nosed' American negotiation, especially as epitomised by NYC lawyers. 

For almost anyone who has grown up within a different culture, Brits and Scandinavians in particular, these machinations are often profoundly shocking. 

No obvious attempt is ever made to establish mutual goodwill or indeed an opening position not far from that which either side might be content to settle on. Instead, the first move is always almost ludicrously extreme, morally highly suspect, and often enough, seemingly self-defeating to boot. 

I see rather obvious signs of this in Trump's administration and it is clear that many outside observers are not quite getting how this works. 

There's a pattern emerging of a spectacular gnashing of teeth whenever he indicates an approach to a possible 'deal' — even prior to any formal discourse — and then a form of semi-relieved gloating when he later appears to cave in. 

But this is how it always goes. He is not some sort of outlier in this respect, at least not within the environment he has always operated in. 

Traditional politics have tended to be more like a marketplace than a Manhattan lawyers’ office. But Trump, Netanyahu and others are adopting — with mixed success so far — an alternative strategy which always begins with an attempt to dumbfound the opposition with its basic unreasonableness.

Resisting it is going to have to involve a bit more than acting dumbfounded.

Potted History

 

These potted histories of the subcontinent and its currently sub-nuclear discords, usually delivered via animated infographics, are starting to proliferate on social media.

Two common themes; well, one theme and one kind of glaring non-theme.

Firstly, it's all the Brits' fault. In this particular clip the AI voiceover in Spanish tells us that India was basically minding its own business until, in 1820, it was forcibly Raj-ified by 🇬🇧 and then had little alternative but to descend into murderous, religiously-motivated conflict once the imperialists had departed in a great hurry in 1947.

Listen to the extremist voices amongst the Arabs and Jews in the Levant and a broadly similar refrain will emerge: their raging mutual animus has developed at least partly as a side-effect of clumsy British colonial interference.

But the way that the big picture allegiance of Pakistan has been illustrated here is unintentionally oh-so-telling.

And this is how we intuit the theme that seemingly nobody wants to openly discuss, either in the case of the Indian subcontinent, or indeed in the case of the Levant — what exactly have Muslims, specifically expansionist Islamic fanatics, been doing there in the first place?

Might there have been an earlier history of brutal, faith-based conquest prior to the arrival of everyone's favourite historical villains: nineteenth century Europeans? And is the situation implied by the term 'post-colonial' a little more complicated than many amongst the semi-literate will allow it to be? 

Hinduism looks fairly indigenous to the territory, just like Judaism does. Islam, on the other hand, comes over a bit more like that chap up there, top left: a 'peaceful', smiling visitor from the Arabian Peninsula.

Free luxury Jumbo…anyone?

VE Day(s)

This has been a week where, after eighty years, it has become clear that our culture is losing a bit of clarity around how and when (and where) WWII ended. Though a measure of ambiguity has always been present. 

The Donald is here referencing a not especially relevant event which took place in the Pacific in February 1945. 

Germany meanwhile would surrender largely as a result of defeat to the Russians in the Battle of Berlin and the suicide of Hitler on April 30. The relevant docs were signed at Rheims on May 7 and formalised in Berlin the following day, which became VE Day for us. 

Though the Russians continue to celebrate on the 9th, owing to some procedural delays both sides kicked up, for Stalin didn’t believe Jodl, the general who’d signed up to unconditional surrender in France, was senior enough to do so — though he’s one of those allowed to stay in the bunker office room to witness the Führer going ape in the Downfall memes — or indeed, that the location was appropriate. 

And Keitel started nit-picking over a single clause, which meant the war would end — and for the Russians and Germans REALLY end — after the ceasefire had formally commenced. 

For London civilians like my mother, the experience of war would wind down both sooner and later. The last V2 rocket struck on March 27, but emergency conditions like the rationing of basic foodstuffs would persist a further nine years. The general election of July 5, 1945 was perhaps the greater watershed moment. 

My uncle’s Division, the ‘desert rats’ (into which his regiment, the 8th Royal Irish Hussars fitted) had accepted Hamburg’s surrender in March and he’d reached the Elbe in his tank at the time of ceasefire, and would later participate in the Berlin victory parade at the end of July. 

My father, then just 18, was also in the army and stationed in Sinai, in charge of a courier company within the Royal Fusiliers. He was not especially demob happy as the news reached him, fully expecting to be redeployed out to Asia. For most British soldiers in active service, the prospect was fairly terrifying. 

In May 1945 hardly anybody had an inkling of those goings on at Los Alamos and so there was no sense of imminent surrender in the Asian theatre as there had been in Europe after the failure of Hitler’s last offensive in the Ardennes during the previous winter. 

The war, it was presumed, might drag on for a while. Elation was tempered.

Locked (2025)

 

This is basically a B movie with an A-list, two-hander cast.

You wouldn’t even need a whole ride in an elevator to pitch the concept.

A Covid Compliance officer appears in the end credits. So maybe the idea recommended itself at a time when the industry was looking for this kind of restricted set-up.

It was shot in Vancouver and so, looking ahead, might be the sort of production attracting 100% tariffs in the near future. Though on my one visit to that city in 2010, I did come across some peculiar patterns of street-level indigency and social decay there which are certainly plot-relevant in Locked.

Everything about it is perfectly adequate. The writing is decent and it avoids the risk of both obvious absurdities (OK, maybe that nigh speed ride through the city) and of trivialising the social and ethical issues it necessarily evokes. Dostoevsky is name-checked.

The two leads add some notes of genuine excellence.

 

Intransigence

 

There are several points of view or even world-views which have informed the conflict in the Levant over the last 80 or so years.

The Arabs will tell you that the perverse mindset which trumps all others is Zionism. In truth no serious historical analysis is likely to conclude that this particular ism, understood as some sort of malign western-colonialist ideology, has been the key driver. And the Arabs are conspicuously slippery on this matter, using the term to refer to either a niche form of ethnocentric extremism or all Jews no matter how they think, according to the way it suits their argument and current state of mind.

In as much as whenever someone chants 'Free Palestine' what I usually hear - according to context, though actually not really -  is 'Destroy Israel', and as I could never support the latter proposition, you could tar and feather me as a Zionist, but it would be churlish to do so, especially as I am very much on the record for my abhorrence of all forms demented ideology and childish sloganeering as ways of dealing with the world's problems.

Next up for consideration, Jihadism. It's been around for over a millennium, and what we really need to consider here is the way it has more recently become entangled with 20th century European death cult extremism, specifically in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood and then later as Hamas. This unlikely cocktail form of ism is especially relevant today, though the Arabs of this region openly flirted with hateful Nazi nonsense some time before the end of colonial rule and this connection with fascism has persisted. 

Is this really then all about deciding which of the available partisan dogmas one finds most repellant?

I would argue not, because the finger pointing over formalised ideas only serves to disguise the fact that one particular perspective above all others has led to the slaughter of many thousands: the unwillingness of the Arabs to accommodate themselves in any way with the post-imperials set-up which was presented to both them and the Middle Eastern Jews. The latter did indeed accept significant compromises, but the Arabs chose the most violent version of winner takes all and lost. Pretty much everything else surely stems from that.

There are sections of the extreme wings of both camps who like to point the finger at us Brits, the suggestion being that we dropped the ball and that the actions of my immediate ancestors were at best unhelpful. Yet, given the collective mentalities then prevalent, I think Britain did ultimately make a fairly decent attempt to pinpoint a post-colonial resolution which all sides could live with. Arab intransigence was and is the problem.

Game of Isms

ISMs are, for me at least, codified systems of ideas that want to be shared. The basic idea is that those who live their lives according to an ISM are largely freed from the requirement to think or investigate before speaking or acting. In many cases these individuals — though this may not be the right identifier here — are motivated by pre-dispositions and prejudices.

Now, while this is true of both Zionism and Anti-Zionism, any debate which frames the contention between these two as a battle of ISMs, tends to either misrepresent or suppress what seem to be the rather obvious underlying balance of basic sentiments.

The vast majority of Zionists are not really living by the precepts an ism at all (least of all one that calls for colonislism and/or racial annihilation); they are simply Jews, a fact that their detractors seem well aware of in practice.

And on the whole they would appear to have adopted the term in order to indicate a desire to stake an emotional share in a ‘national’ homeland which is a place of both sanctuary and self-determination.

There are of course those who have permitted this sentiment to become encrusted with the proper trappings of an ISM, including a more expansionist vision and an ingrained hostility to the other, but these tend to be in the minority.

Anti-Zionism on the other hand is indeed a slippery one, because it has been formulated specifically in order to disguise those components of expansionism and hostility towards the other which come packaged with the Jihadist mentality, along with some rather obvious associated streams of intolerance and bigotry.

There are of course those who simply see the Middle East through progressive goggles and apply the appropriate anti-western tropes, typically with oodles of highly-performative humanitarian sentiment, but these tropes and the sentiments which motivate them, have become far too entangled now with much more toxic and bigoted perspectives, not to mention the militant dictates of Jihadism: the most menacing ISM in the modern geopolitical mix. (Though Antisemitism is once again in ascendant mode.)

The point here is that one needs to look behind the formulations and the pretensions of the ISMs and confront the underlying thinking patterns (if any), but more importantly, the feeling patterns.

One Way

There are, and always have been two basic possible resolutions of the conflict in the Levant, at least as far as the main participants are concerned. For one side there is the peace that can come when the Palestinians renounce violence, and for the other there is the peace that will come when they have exterminated their enemy.

Palestinians will undoubtedly never be free to live with dignity as long as their adopted identity fundamentally embodies — above all other aspirations — the urge to eliminate or at least totally suppress the Jews of Israel, for we are bound to assume that this is not currently an achievable goal.

Everybody knows — or really ought to know —that the ball is in the Arab court when it comes to making the key move that ends the bloodshed, but the Palestinians and their enablers have lately attempted to disguise this bit of conspicuousness by projecting their own genocidal urges onto their nemesis...and not entirely fancifully, because their obstinate refusal to accept the way of compromise and coexistence has undoubtedly encouraged both Israelis and a subset of Americans to consider a potential third route to resolution: one which involves drastic population removal or re-engineering.

It is frankly absurd to characterise the violence that the Arabs refuse to renounce as ‘resistance’ because the goal of movements worthy of that name has always been regime change: the removal of an oppressive administration, a new and better beginning for all, or almost all, Whereas the decapitation project the Islamists envisage here is certainly of the more general sort that they have practiced elsewhere against other non-conforming communities (and are in fact practicing right now in Syria, although nobody seems to care.)

What is actually being resisted in the Levant today is the only valid path to peace: a territorial settlement and mutual recognition of each other’s right to exist. And the blowback from this affectation of resistance as an excuse for violence rooted in prejudice and delusion, is government by venal bullies and fanatics, for Hamas and Fatah are natural extensions of a deeply embedded delinquency and it seems that this curse has started to seep into Israel too, though so far to a lesser extent.

Havoc (2025)

 

Wales's own Gareth Edwards, purveyor of an ultra-violent aesthetic one might just have to refer to as 'John Woocky', is back on home turf — albeit a version that has been computer-coated to look like a GTA take on an American metropolis.

This isn't quite the extended attempt to reach a new close quarters body count record within a reasonable running time that we experienced before with his 'Raid' films, for there are one or two character-building pauses here, separating three principal set-piece sequences, one of which — inside a suitably brutalist nightclub — did have me pondering whether there are enough Chinese extras in Cardiff to supply all the bodies in that scene.

The plot is as 'throw away' as one of those Little Caesar's boxes.