Columbus Day II

 

October 12, 1992 was marked in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, by the toppling of a statue of Diego de Mazariegos, conquistador. 

 

Resistance to foreign conquest is seemingly coded into the Mayan DNA. They gave the Spanish their first and bloodiest of noses when the first shiploads showed up on the mainland, and a pattern of often violent push back continued into the twentieth century.

This had a couple of interesting features which are worth remarking on. Firstly, during the Caste Wars — ending 1901 — the insurgents were as likely to target their rage at the Hispanic population — those who'd long been busy blending, assimilating — as the Criollos of 'purer' European descent.

Secondly, although they seemingly rejected the non-'original' civilisation imposed on them, they typically did so in the name of the Middle Eastern prophet Jesus of Nazareth, who had kind of tagged along for the ride with Columbus. (A socially-radical Jewish thinker fully committed to a non-violent approach to imperialism…but they sort of skipped that rather significant bit of his teachings. You won’t find ‘by any means necessary’ in the New Testament.)

These Maya retained the sense of having been politically and culturally overrun, while filtering out the promise of eternal reward, which they regarded as the best part of the whole bad situation.

Contrast the indigenous peoples of North Africa and elsewhere who were conquered by the Arabs from the seventh century onward.

 

 

The recent Mohammed Salah British Museum meme has a relevant double-edge to it, as the joke is both that much-loved Mo is standing before small pieces of Egypt taken by light-fingered British colonialists, while at the same time he may be unaware that he is himself the representative of an invasive culture that came and stole the entire place; The Full Montu, so to speak.

In effect, he's one of those long term assimilators that the Mayan indigenous resistance would likely have singled out for punishment.

Arabs have spent far more of recorded history as colonial oppressors than as the victims of incursions from outside, rolling out conquests which featured many of the most repellent features of imperialism wherever or whenever it has occurred, such as brutal mass enslavement — particularly of black Africans — yet they consistently get a free pass on this today, not just in western academia, but also in the history that is generally understood in the conquered populations, like Egypt or indeed, Persia.

It seems rather obvious that it will remain difficult to engage in rational debate about some of the most pressing issues in our contemporary world until that blanket is removed.

Islamism, Jihadism and so on are leftovers of that first 'inflationary period' after the Caliphates formed, but they are also, crucially, products of contact with twentieth century totalist systems of thought which first emerged in Western Europe.

A grown up approach to this threat to the liberal democratic way of life requires us all to ditch the hackneyed models and simmering hatreds peddled by the intellectually-bunged up ideologues of Left and Right.

As I mentioned in part one, the first Iberian arrivals in this hemisphere came with a package of intentions and plans for the future. Religious and secular motives were often intertwined and difficult to unravel, both then and now, yet it had always been an abiding feature of European Christianity since the religion had been adopted by Constantine, that the majority understood on some fundamental level that a separation of the things of Caesar and the things of God was not only possible, but desirable — and the Maya appeared to have grasped this concept when they started cherry-picking which parts of forced Europeanisation would need to go.

There have been and will continue to be theocratic variants of all the monotheistic faiths, but Islam will always be the most problematic in this respect, because there are ultimately no real protections for lay society, with the political and spiritual far harder to prize apart.

This was perhaps Mohammad's great innovation, and its legacy has been complex. It possibly explains why many North Africans see themselves as 'Arabs' in a manner that would seem bizarre indeed to Mexicans or Central Americans, who would never refer to themselves as 'Spanish', not even the ones who have retained a fully European DNA admixture.

They appear unable to conceive of themselves as peoples still living with a legacy of colonial conquest, because they cannot find a way in their minds to separate the political imposition from the religious one.

So, unlike the Maya, they'll rarely conclude that while it is a good thing to have adopted a foreign religion, all the other stuff that came with it needs to be considered with a less worshipful frame of mind.

And alongside this cultural constraint, we see how the Arabs and their useful idiots abroad consistently blame the West in their rhetoric for all forms of colonialism, which helps maintain the smokescreen.

Their task has been made easier by the fact that, more than any other time in history, Western intellectual life is now dominated by cultural streams gushing out of the USA, and Americans are often by nature, historically myopic and somewhat self-obsessed.

 

Columbus Day I

Ignorant of the historical narrative beyond the report which had landed on his or her desk, the Reuters hack responsible for this topical piece for 'Columbus Day' appears to have concluded that the evidence now points to the Admiral having been Spanish rather than Italian, which was almost certainly not the case. 

Anyway, the basic finding of the study, that Columbus was a more or less closeted Sephardi Jew, has always been an open secret (though not of the Keir Starmer sort.)

Cue all the 'stealing other people's countries' comments from the would-be wags.

Yet, if there is an historical parallel that is worthy of consideration it would be the context in 1492 of a mass expulsion and persecution of Jews, leading to the extremely urgent need for a safe haven.

The Colón family had in all likelihood moved to Genoa a century earlier after the pogroms of 1391, the beginning of a wave of massacres and forced conversions in Spain and Portugal which targeted the Sephardi population.

 

As he sought investment for his project to go east by heading west, Columbus's key ally at the court of Queen Isabella was Luis de Santangel, the royal treasurer, himself a secret Jew, who at one stage offered to fund the voyage out of his own pocket. 

 

On April 17 1492 Columbus signed up to the Capitulations of Santa Fe which would limit his rule over any territories accumulated to his own lifetime, thus also limiting his ability to limit state interference, but with Santangel, he continually pressured King Ferdinand, and in the end sailed with the right to hereditary enjoyment of his 'discoveries', the key to his hidden agenda.

A group of Jewish youngsters came along for the ride, children of wealthy conversos in Spain who had helped provide much of the funding. They looked upon the Admiral as their Moses, which fitted nicely with his own self-image.

This group would be instrumental in the settlement of Jamaica, eventually achieved by Columbus's son Diego along with a chap called Juan d'Esquivel — also a converso — who had captured Melilla on the North African coast in 1497 and helped establish it as another part of the empire which would be exempted from the expulsion order.

Jamaica’s role as a Sephardi outpost and sanctuary would persist, even after the island was taken by Oliver Cromwell.

The sudden urge to push out into the wider world, from a relatively ‘backward, part of western Europe, which would lead to this (ultimately inevitable) contact between 'Old' and 'New' has typically been explained as a blend of 'Gold, Spices and Christians' e.g. one off personal enrichment, steady commerce and a chance to come up upon Islam from behind by locating hitherto isolated Christian communities long rumoured to exist in Asia.

But the repressive policies of the Catholic monarchs targeting both Muslims and Jews, seemingly led the latter to reach the conclusion that they rather urgently needed a new homeland abroad where no one would expect the Spanish Inquisition. 

 

And it turns out that this fourth spur to conquest would be almost as significant as the other three.

The Substance (2024)

 

There are almost too many things to say about Coralie Fargeat's movie, that one hardly knows where to start.

And I am conscious that there are perhaps a few things one ought NOT to say, especially as I believe I am personally acquainted with a few people who might be inclined to take this deal, or at least some version of it.

Beyond all the more gender-specific themes, this worked for me most as an examination of selfhood, provoking questions like: 'What would it be like to interact on some level with the person we were a generation (or perhaps two) ago?' And, 'How weirdly unfamiliar would this individual be now, leading to potential hostility?'

And this part of the film's payload was where I detected some weaknesses, where I wanted a bit more than mere metaphor, which was working for me extremely well in all other areas. At Cannes The Substance was recognised for the director's own screenplay, yet this was for us the least excellent part of it.

V also griped a little about how extreme the finale became. I didn't mind that so much, but it did whiff a bit of one of those OTT endings that emerges because the writer has not quite encountered a more elegant manner to wrap things up.

Speak No Evil (2024)

 

An excellent film, based on a the gag that if you ever come across some British people abroad and they say you must come and visit them at their home in the countryside some day, something has to be seriously off!

McAvoy has always creeped me out a bit, but here he becomes the consummate on-screen avatar of all the darkly manipulative individuals I have ever rubbed up against — individuals who seem to actively seek out 'polite society' where they will always be on the edge of weird transgressions committed with a twisted smile, and who appear to like nothing more than making sure that acquaintances, especially new ones, join them in doing whatever they want to do, particularly if there is an element of danger, or indeed of weird transgression, involved.

Killer Heat (2024)

Monozygotic twins have a Chekhovian quality, the Russian author having established the principle that if you mention something with an obvious narrative use in your story, you are required to have it used later on. 

 

And how else does one use identical human beings in a whodunnit/love-triangle ‘mystery’ like this?

 

Jo Nesbø’s source novel had a different title which one could almost take as an additional spoiler, ramming home the message that readers were not going to have to tax their brains all that much to get to the bottom of things. 

 

This adaptation is a truly terrible movie, yet at times entertainingly so. Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanders around Crete in a Roland Garros Panama doing his routine (and associated background monologue) as the wounded, alcoholic PI, and it all feels pleasingly spoofy, almost like a comically noirish take on Inspector Montalbano.

There's this one scene where the self-mockery seems to come out of the closet, so to speak, where a supposedly Greek character drops a remark about how the modern Hellenes have a word for people who act as if they are Greek, at which point it must already have popped unaided into the heads of many Greek-conversant viewers, because this is a Mediterranean island where locals seem very thin on the ground, certainly locals with significant speaking parts.

 

Who's baking the cakes?

I have struggled to take a consistently serious interest in the corruption and sleaze in UK politics, largely because it seems so amateurish and small-time compared to what typically goes on here.

Perhaps Boris drew the UK a bit closer to the worthy comparison zone during the pandemic, but it was 'partygate', more a matter of wounded public sensibilities than the outright venality, which did for him in the end. 

 

Along comes Sir Keir and his Arsenal tickets, and it seems like more of the same. Though more of the same Downing Street merry-go-round is actually the least of what I anticipated back on July 5. 

 

I'm reminded a bit when the first allegations emerged about Jimmy Morales (or even our fallen local mayor Dr Vivar). Bogus breakfast bills seemed like less of a fundamental problem than the General's ruse of using the public purse to purchase private jets. 

 

Over time however, I've come to appreciate that questions like 'Who's baking the cakes?' really do matter, because a completely corrupt system can comprise a plethora of ethical conduct variants which mightn't appear especially repugnant on the individual level. 

 

The PM's attempt (while Opposition leader) to dress up a New York penthouse as his own London property during lockdown had me thinking back to some public messages broadcast by our previous mayor here (around the same time) from his plush crib in Cayalá. 

 

And I was intrigued indeed to hear how the Guardian's football podcast pundits lambasted many members of the Labour government front bench last week for accepting freebies from the Premier League. Snouts in troughs were mentioned. 

 

But the key point was that such largesse could very reasonably be associated with Labour's (earlier) stated plans to impose some sort of independent regulator — with teeth — on our national game. 

 

In the early 90s I counted among my clients several state-owned institutions, such as Post Office Counters Ltd. They had clear rules about the receipt of gifts and as far as I could tell they stuck to them. (e.g. They would not even accept a bottle of plonk at Christmas even if you backed up to their vehicle in an isolated car park.)

 

Whatever happened to the common sense notion that one ought not to accept freebies from someone who has a vested interest in one’s decision-making processes?

Safe Havens

Israel exists today as a modern, western values-leaning, democratic state — albeit within a surging sea of enraged tyranny — largely because of the fate of European Jews during the Third Reich — a unique genocide in world history, because it was the only one predicated primarily on Death — but one can also allow for the quickly-not-so-secondary need to provide Jews from all over, especially in the Middle East, with a safe haven from what we shall politely refer here to as the radical Jihadi 'way of life'.

And on some levels the modern nation we call Lebanon , itself came into existence in order to fulfill a similar function for the region's Christians and their broadly ancient civilisation.

 

This has not worked out so well. 

 

The decline in the number of Lebanese Christians is almost never stigmatised as a 'genocide', but looks a lot more like one than anything experienced by so-called Palestinians, whose identity is a partial fabrication in the interests of the ‘radical Jihadi way of life’, whichever way you look at it.

 

 

Hezbollah in turn, has cropped up for two explicitly nation-destroying purposes, alone: the eradication of Israel as a self-determined Jewish entity and the conversion of Lebanon into yet another monolithic model of the ‘radical Jihadi way of life.’

It has deliberately occupied the southern zones where these two objectives can be served, along with an area of the northeastern border with better access to Syria and its peculiar Medieval-Modern mix.

 

 
Those who obsess about the West Bank rarely trouble themselves to ponder the displacements that have occurred here.

 

 

Identities and Loyalties

The closest thing to an absolute truth is that anyone who could believe in any such thing represents a 'social problem'...at best.

Truth is always incomplete. That follows from the basic situation we find ourselves in. But if it is porous, unfinished, wishy-washy and so on, it is still Truth.

 

Let's look at a subset of the issue: peoples. 

 

Englishness is an actual thing, but what is it made of? There's a rough and ready geo-biological truth of it and a cultural truth, plus an awful lot of silly mythology, as any nation can attest, most of all our immediate neighbours, but the thing in itself surely cannot be dismissed outright as a noxious lie.

 

One of the greatest and most violent tormentors ever of the Jewish people was the Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada, a convert from Judaism to Catholicism.

 

Today, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who was once recorded observing that “they say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true!” is himself descended from a rabbinical family, self-professed Hebrews as recently as the 19th century. 

 

This should not be very surprising. A significant proportion of the card-carrying Jihadist loons in that region will inevitably be descended from the patchwork of 'indigenous' peoples who lived there long before the overwhelming Arab-Islamic conquest, now having gone full Stockholm Syndrome. (It will be interesting to see how much of the external narrative Bullshit associated with the Middle East conflict can survive the current extension into Lebanon, with its more obviously sophisticated history.) 

 

Anyway, the point here ought to be that there is a Truth behind identities and loyalties, which we need to respect, even if we can easily locate the intersections with fiction. 

 

Compromise often looks like a clumsy fudge, but sometimes it really is the Truth.

Medieval Moderns

Behind the ‘punchline’ coded into this would-be memetic message below, there is another deeper, cultural contradiction lurking, which historians would tend to find more interesting.

There's a lot more to it than 'one man's Jihad is another man's resistance'. The flag on the left symbolises a package of attitudes and behaviours which are basically 'Medieval' or rather locked in the seventh century, whilst that on the right symbolises an alternate set, 'Modern' and locked in the twentieth century.

 

On some levels the shift could be characterised as cynical, but more often than not, there's greater interchange than subterfuge, such that the very individuals in that region who are doing this — not just those easy enough to identify as 'terrorists' — clearly exhibit a distended obsession with both the hyper-Medieval and the hyper-Modern, to the extent that they themselves would not be able to adequately account for the balance between them in what we can call their everyday mentalities. (The 9-11 pilots were textbook cases.)

 

Most westerners are so completely ensconced in fairly mundane Modern environments that they can't (or won't) pick up on this.*

 

But, out here in the beyond of the developing world, latent pre-modern, pre-global mentalities have kept bubbling away for centuries. Yet whilst I could have a stab at explaining their impact on the cultural life of a nation like Guatemala, I'd not be able to detail anything quite so stark or indeed pernicious as some of the more muddled, shape-shifting outlooks of the Medieval-Modern Middle East**.

 

Right wing polemicists in the West tend to refer to a "clash of civilisations", which is a mis-characterisation and unhelpful. What is actually happening is a kind of lumpiness in this incompletely modernised, globalised world, a broad set of irregularities rather than an outright polarity which can be easily mapped onto (useful) political positions.

 

The Israelis say the Palestinians don’t want peace and their own modern state. The truth, more intriguing, and perhaps confounding, is that they kind of only half want it.

 

* Some western academics do seem to intuit, if not accept the implications of this, and their response is typically to infantilise the Jihadi-Palestinians, which takes the edge of both aspirations, Medieval and Modern. And in doing so, they compromise their own rigour and their ethics, ending up only half wanting a peaceful resolution themselves. 

 

** e.g. by day, tireless leader of the UNRWA teachers’ union, by night, demented Hamas terror kingpin.

Wolfs (2024)

 

Part of the joke here is that the two stars might just be a little bit knackered...past it. But this gag ends up functioning on more than one level, particularly with Clooney, pathos subsuming the bathos.

There are times (an extended Croatian wedding sequence, for example) where the grunts seem to emanate less from sciatica than all the straining to be funny. 

 

Then’s there’s the stream of highly-editable, hit and miss dialogue, accompanied by a score that’s pretty much genre-specific and/or generic.

 

Anyway, certainly more entertaining to watch than Wolves, a Premier League team from an English town in the Midlands, which famously lacks the latent likeability of Pitt and Clooney.

 

 

Ancestsoz

There are a few things that ought to be obvious to any student of history (...but which are apparently not.)

One of them, somewhat topical just to the north of us right now, is that nobody should be forced to apologise for the behaviour of their ancestors.

 

This is especially true of the distant kind — such that Parisians need not fret over inviting Norwegians to dinner unless they produce the magic words about how terribly sorry they are about the way Viking expats carried on around there long ago. 

 

Yet it is also true of the more recent kind, in that Jewish people ought not interview every young German they come across about their grandparents.

 

 

 

Mexico's extremely petty non-invitation of Felipe VI of Spain to the inauguration of incoming President Claudia Scheinbaum supposedly over his refusal to apologise for Cortés and the conquest back in the 16th century, is all the more silly because the King's surname, Borbón, is a bit of a giveaway here: his ancestors were busy being French at the time.

 

Should Spain in turn require some performative contrition from AMLO before he departs the scene, for all that industrial scale, ritualised mass murder the Mexica were ramping up before Europeans showed up and put a stop to it?

 

Another common piece of righteous ignorance we've seen applied to History quite a lot of late is the 'de-colonisation' fallacy, this map I came across last week being one of the most fanciful I've yet seen.

 

 

 

The basic idea here is that the Middle East can only expect to encounter lasting peace if the ascendancy of invasive Arab-Islamic civilisation (for which nobody seems to be in any hurry to apologise) is fully rolled back and the various 'indigenous' peoples of the region are permitted to reform their old ethno states (OK, in some cases, their old would-be ethno-empires).

The Turks in particular would seem to get the raw end of this deal. Do they have to set off back to the Asian steppes or would a simple 'sorry' to their resurgent Greek overlords suffice?

 

Anyway, utter nonsense, but the peak of it cannot be detected on this map, as that is the counter proposal to re-colonise Israel in the name of some sort of imagined de-colonisation.

Fanatics often reveal themselves via irate, demented and counter-productive approaches to History and culture.

At base any feigned reverence for dead people involves a disrespect for the living. History is important, and each of us has been fashioned by it, but ought to be seen as free of any moral responsibility, as individuals. 

 

All AMLO and co have revealed is the flipside of this basic common sense: the historical chip on the shoulder, which is equally unnecessary and dumb.

Common sense rarely prevails however. When not actually killing each other, the peoples and cultures captured by this alternative political map of the Middle East are likely to continue nurturing their chips and inviting each other to apologise inter-generationally, at gunpoint.

 

 In London, to grovel?

Exposed

From some of the stuff I’ve been reading it has become absolutely clear that if the Israelis had just carried out a cunningly targeted strike against a fleet of invading aliens dead set on destroying human civilisation and then eating anyone left over, there are plenty of people out there who would right now be raging against them.

As an information gathering tactic ‘Grim Beeper’ has not only opened a lid on Hezbollah and its noxious network in Lebanon, it also seems to have successfully baited and exposed many of the individuals elsewhere who have more or less camouflaged their anti-Jewish hatefulness (and/or Islamist indoctrination) behind the constantly equivocating ‘progressive’ rhetoric of Palestinianism.

And for some reason this particular incident, against a truly unpleasant corps of militants that are non-core to the conflict and represent a violent repudiation of the key values which many of these commentators appear to live by — an incident they might easily have just ignored — has fully disengaged their brains and scrambled their moral compasses. 

You can't really be an anti-fascist who hates to see bad things happen to fascists. This would be like shedding tears over a defunct Dalek in Doctor Who.

Yet this is what the above-mentioned fools have been up to for eleven months when it comes to Hamas, because they have at least partially re-imagined and doggedly re-packaged those exterminators as heroic resistance fighters.

But Hezbollah? Try the same trick with them and the moral high ground becomes a spot with the un-surest of footing.

 

Pescado Empanizado

Mexican seaside destinations pass through distinct phases, rather like Mesomaerican civilisations.

The Postclassic for example, manifests not just as a palpable sense of diminishing returns, but with a kind of pustulating pretentiousness.

Playa del Carmen surely had an Early Postclassic era made up largely of boutique and or ‘hip’ propositions around town, before the serious overgrazing commenced and content switched places with style. 
Almost every key structure from the apogee was demolished and replaced — they didn’t even bother themselves with encasing the old with the new.

I have found that one of the key markers one can make use of for determining which stage is current is the size and quality of the breaded fish fillets served in the beach restaurants — establishments which, back home, the lapsed-conquistadores call chiringuitos.

Much of Oaxacan coast appears permanently mired in the shamanistic Early Pre-Classic. Not a bad thing.

There is Huatulco however, laid down by one of those visionary ‘build it and they will come’ approaches to higher civilisation. But they didn’t, at least not really, leaving it as a seemingly incomplete exemplar of all the stages, juxtaposed. 

Blink Twice (2024)

If this had been Zoë Kravitz's first novel as opposed to her Hollywood directorial debut, I suspect she would have been assigned an experienced editor who would have pointed out the conspicuous (and not particularly complex) changes she would have needed to make in order to make the material more compelling.

That clearly didn't happen here, so instead we get a sort of calling card demonstrating what she is good at and not so good at in this new role. 

 

She can get very good performances out of her cast and she knows how to work with the camera to build arresting visuals. But neither the screenplay nor the on-screen storytelling is quite as A-list as they seem to think they are.

There seem to me to be a pair of good reasons for making a psychological thriller. Firstly to demonstrate mastery of the form, that controlled interplay with audience speculative responses leading up to the reveal. And secondly to place within that form a story with wider human meaning, either on the level of individual existential concerns or on the more collective plane: social symbolism.

I don't believe Kravitz undertook this with a strong sense of how to deliver the former, beyond applying the obvious tropes, and any underlying message is blurry at best. This is exacerbated by the inherent sketchiness of not only the basic mechanism of the scenario, but also the characters, and their ethical underpinnings.

The version we saw came with a trigger warning that doubled as a spoiler. The plot does indeed possess a lot of potential for some seriously disturbing darkness, but largely dodges it at every key opportunity. This has been fashioned as entertainment not as intellectual or psychological stimulation and as entertainment the film is substantially successful.

Adria Arjona, playing an odd sort of stand-in, second tier protagonist is kind of emblematic of some of the on/off issues here. I remember concluding during Hit Man that while she can definitely play a role, I’m less convinced when she’s playing a role within a role (or perhaps only seeming to).

One fun aspect of the film is the primary location, the strikingly red Hacienda Temozón, just south of Mérida. I remember skyping with a friend who’d found himself as the only guest there during the swine flu panic, and got a great little laptop tour of the location.

Colourful Characters

Up until my early 20s if you'd asked me about the things that make me proud to be British I would have named the BBC fairly close to the top of any such list.

Habitually I date the rude awakening to December 21, 1989, the day after the US invasion of Panama, when I witnessed a news report* which suggested to me that the Beeb might not actually be any more reliable that those shortwave broadcasts from Radio Moscow that I'd listened to regularly for a lark as a teenager.

Nowadays I have concluded that there could well even be something worse about Aunty, as the manipulative dishonesty is seemingly far less self-aware. And sometimes I have no solid clue as to WHY they choose to shamelessly push a particular agenda, such as Bush's back then, and Hamas's today, and on some levels I am not sure they do either. (Vladimir Posner knew exactly what he was up to.)

I'd had a clear inkling of what goes on a year or so earlier, if truth be told (the very thing the BBC seems to shy away from).

Producers decided to hold a televised debate hosted by Janet Street Porter and picked my college as the venue. The topic was the defunct newspaper known as The Sunday Sport, then considered the dregs of vulgarian reportage and so ripe for a going over by the Corporation.

I suppose the idea on paper was to see how a group of young, potentially high-minded Cambridge undergrads would respond to the views aired, but in practice that was not what was broadcast. The BBC had invited a small group of 'colourful' characters who were not members of Girton and whose questions to the panel were largely the only ones that were shown in the final edit.

The entire exercise was essentially a bait for the tabloids, and they duly responded, unfairly lambasting the attitudes and intelligence of Girtonians, unaware of the ruse.

Perhaps the eventual fallout turned out to be that the BBC packed itself with these very same 'colourful characters'?

* Not a matter of 'slant'. A Panamanian in the ruins of his home was asked a question by the reporter who then live translated it in a wholly dishonest manner. I had only just become bilingual and I cannot begin to tell you how much this shocked me.

Surprising turmout at the old school reunion...

Didn’t age particularly well.

Let’s suppose this strike had been carried out against a drug cartel rather than a well-organised gang of hateful Nazi-saluting militants.

It’s highly targeted, yet on other levels it’s also explorative, practically an information gathering exercise.

Most of the victims would be low level foot soldiers and associated auxiliary cell-members, but there are bound to be a few surprises, not just ‘higher-ups’, but individuals who are going about more openly in ‘normative’, not so explicitly murderous society, often exercising a role which would provide a measure of legitimacy or indeed, untouchability.

In Mexico, for example, one can only wonder who might be rubbing their crotches today. As a bare minimum you’d expect politicians and members of the judiciary to have entered the ‘net’, perhaps even a priest or two.

Israel has attempted to demonstrate in Gaza how UNRWA and media outfits like Al Jazeera provide Hamas with a parallel infrastructure, but there’s been nothing as definitive and uncontestable as an exploding pager. 

The Iranian Ambassador will surely not turn out to be the only crossover case identified this way.

(If anyone wants to establish the basis of sensible government in Lebanon, now might be a goodish moment.)

Rebel Ridge (2024)

The plot is a ‘chirmol’ and there are loose ends to deal with as the credits roll, but Rebel Ridge is gripping from start to finish.

Jeremy Saulnier’s last movie Hold the Dark (2018) featured an extravagantly violent, high body count police/suspect gun battle, and I am sure that for some, expectations had been set for some sort of reprise here, but instead the near final shoot out is almost comically chaotic and imprecise.

 

Indeed the material’s USP is the subtle frustration of viewer expectations (e.g. an ex-Marine Corps protagonist who apparently has a Wikipedia page detailing how good he is at Asian martial arts who doesn’t really do any of that stuff in the movie, which is named after a completely subsidiary location in the story etc), yet we never felt properly frustrated and a large part of this has to do with the commanding persona of Terry Richmond, played by Brixton-born Aaron Pierre— a late substitution for John Boyega — and now surely on the path to Hollywood mega-stardom.

Don't Turn Out The Lights (2024)

The trouble with genre horror movies is so often that whilst they openly tease so many possible explanations for what's happening to a given group of unlikeable 'teens', the resolution, when it comes, always feels a bit disappointing.

So here Andy Fickman gives us instead something far more unsettled (perhaps in the hope that jaded audiences will find this more unsettling), and not in the Henry James ambiguity kind of way either, rather a constant stream of ill-defined potentialities, up to and including the final shot.

Overall this results in an exploration of how abnormal or paranormal events are interpreted by those on the sharp end of them, rather than of these happenings themselves.

Does it work? Kind of. Something both formulaic and yet lacking that creeping expectation that habitually rides with these formulas is gripping, if ultimately imprecise in its narrative payload.

 

(The title seems to be an instruction to home viewers rather than a reference to anything that occurs on screen.) 

 

 

Amateurs and Antis

There’s a beautiful kind of amateurism — the kind we saw in say The Detectorists on the Beeb — and a toxic kind, which is little more than ignorance on steroids, a clear perversion of professional perspectives. 

Technology has unleashed both kinds, inevitably, but this is one area where we tend to feel the poison all that more because of the ‘gentle’ nature of the benefits of the empowerment and the higher-viz nature of the nastier kind of crank. 

Such an imbalance surely existed prior to the age of technology. If one were to conduct a survey of medieval cranks, one would undoubtedly find that the wilder, more fundamentally unhinged members of this fraternity encountered the greater number of followers. (Oddly enough, 'charismatic' is often a euphemism for spiteful sociopath.)

Digital media were supposed to represent a shift away from the broadcast model, yet ended up simply democratising it, thus amplifying the massed voice of those more interested in the talking rather than the finding out aspects of their disciplines. 

(When I started working formally in digital media and comms one could already detect a bifurcation between the residual amateurs and a new breed of self-styled professionals and if you were looking for people who knew what they were on about the former remained your best bet.)

In this context, open-minded niceness becomes almost esoteric. 

Back at the start of this century Oliver Sacks was invited on a tour of Oaxaca state by the American Fern Society. In his journal he would write...

“This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public.”

A Flickering Light

 

The question of whether Nazism was the product of the Enlightenment or the anti-Enlightenment remains an open and fascinating one, with unquestionable relevance to today’s ‘border’ mindsets.

Hitler himself seemed quite adamant…

 

“National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression...We have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine…For the National Socialist movement is not a cult movement...Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult...In the National Socialist movement subversion by occult searchers for the Beyond must not be tolerated.”

 

The trouble is, “I am not a cult member” is always a bit of a giveaway. And however ‘reality-based’ and ‘sharp’ it aspired to be, Nazi science was essentially a form of pseudo-science. 

 

American historian Eric Kurlander has recently attempted to revitalise the connection between Nazism and the supernatural, in the face of evidence that the Gestapo actively conducted surveillance and repression against occultists (and more trivial irrationalists like Tarot readers), in particular after it came out that Rudolf Hess had consulted an astrologer before embarking on his harebrained solo peace mission. 

 

Many of his claims have largely been debunked by Third Reich expert Richard J. Evans, yet how the Nazis behaved once in power should not be the entirety of the story, as it is in the very nature of all revolutions to persecute the assorted charismatics and other weirdos that made them possible. 

 

Indeed, fringe thinking is always relevant to this mix. Kurlander looks at our own political debates and concludes that ‘a renaissance in supernatural reasoning, shadowy conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial powers, and the omnipresence of a hostile ethno-religious other has begun to correlate with illiberal political and ideological convictions, influencing national elections, domestic social policies and matters of war and peace.’

 

It is certainly true today at least, that an interest in Nazi fixations correlates with a kind of obsession that could be characterised as ‘religious’. And when this becomes more esoteric, it expands the pool to more seemingly-secular ideologues. 

 

The crossover effect in the discourse is still very much present, with the enemies of these contemporary cultists depicted verbally and visually, Kurlander notes, as ‘vampires, zombies, demons, devils, spectres, alien parasites and other supernatural monsters’, adding that the end result was ‘an ideological and discursive space in which Nazism’s enemies could be dehumanised, marginalised and figuratively transformed into monsters requiring physical elimination’. 

 

Freemasons and Communists are no longer on the hook so much as they were, but Jews are very rarely off it. Add to them certain kinds of migrant, and other distinct groups perceived as a threat to organised irrationalists, and the modern parallels become that much clearer. 

The frontier between reasoned and magical thinking has become even less firm than it was a hundred years ago. As a result irrationalists now seem unsure how to safely select their allies and adversaries from amongst the friends and enemies of the Enlightenment.