In a recent interview Bible-bashing actress Sydney Sweeney helpfully reminded everyone that the Crusades were “defensive”.
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Particular Skills
Friday, May 16, 2025
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.
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Jewlaks
Dostoevsky, literary poster boy of universal brotherhood and compassion, was also a really horrid antisemite.
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 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.
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’.
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Quatermass (Thames TV)
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
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.
Sunday, May 11, 2025
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.
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Locked (2025)
Friday, May 09, 2025
Intransigence
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.
Monday, May 05, 2025
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.
Saturday, May 03, 2025
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.
Friday, May 02, 2025
Havoc (2025)
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Missing You (Netflix)
Monday, April 28, 2025
Essence vs Experience
The dawn of Europe’s long day of rational inquiry began with the presumption, upheld by Spinoza et al, that essences precede experiences, so it is perhaps fitting, as dusk approaches, that the opposite notion is now starting to gain the upper hand.
A day or so ago I encountered an exchange on X in which JK Rowling was trolled as a “biological essentialist” and her response was simply to observe that all forms of zealotry tend to rest on an obstinate defence of fraudulent ideas.
I am about to make an argument in order to make a point — about a certain kind of argument — and I would ask Trans activists, especially the zealous kind, to bear with me, and thus forbear marching upon my house with torches and pitchforks until I have proceeded to at least partially (and tentatively) debunk the content of this argument myself.
Here we go...
In any human society at any time, in any place, one would be likely to come across homosexuality. How this manifests might vary, but it would be hard to argue with the statement that it represents a human universal. Trans-sexuality or trans-genderism on the other hand, is rather less ubiquitous and it seems reasonable to therefore conclude that any underlying biological or psychological factors are often significantly amplified by cultural factors. And therefore Trans rights must be seen to differ innately from Lesbian and Gay rights, requiring an additional layer of collective negotiation and buy-in.
I think the above paragraph sounds perfectly reasonable...but in fact I have grounded it in one of those dichotomies which may either be imperfect or even fallacious, at least in certain contexts: Nature vs Nurture.
Now, I am not going to speak for everyone who had the same education as myself, but as my years of study progressed I began to see everything in less granular terms. Meanwhile, the NATSCIs around me were probably becoming more and more reductive in their reasoning and I am well aware of Richard Dawkins’s snide “Holistier than thou” characterisation of some of the arguments which most irk him.
When one starts studying history one tends to imagine that all one has to do with any large scale event is something akin to examining the dish as it comes out of the oven and reasoning back to the original recipe.
Gradually however, one starts to comprehend that parts of the mix only really become operative in the process when exposed to each other, often in highly complex ways (Physicists are probably more on board with that intuition these days than biologists like Dawkins).
I was pondering this (occasional) fallacy of the clear distinction recently when I recalled one of the central contributions made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to twentieth century philosophy: speech is the accomplishment of thought.
This existentialist thinker had begun his career by taking aim at the duality which had dominated French thought for centuries: the Cartesian notion that Mind and Body are fundamentally different in essence — and soon determined that any attempt to prise apart thinking and speaking was likely a fools errand.
So, if we're looking for a resemblance to today’s trigger-fingery Twittersphere, Merleau-Ponty was trolling the "thought essentialists".
We are kind of stuck now with this world that is at once mechanical and relative, where we still imagine we have certainties, but the truth is that these only really make sense in relation to others, and a degree of uncertainty is necessarily baked into the whole dish.
The postmodern tendency to give precedence to the uncertain and/or wholly subjective should probably be resisted, for this leads to a discourse where either nothing matters or what certain very shouty individuals say matters, absolutely.
But choosing to die on the hill of an apparent certainty threatened by the flood waters unleashed by these forces may also not be the most productive approach to argument right now.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Mind boggles at DNA goggles…
As antisemitism flourished in Germany during the first few decades of the last century it became increasingly 'scientific', which in practice meant that the underlying prejudice was coated with a growing corpus of bogus academic interpretations.
In today's America, where ignorance has gained the same kind of prestige that science and medicine once had in early twentieth century Germany, the requirement to appear knowledgeable whilst being openly bigoted has been softened, to say the least.
To wit, this report of a 'visible' DNA test with the finding that Israel's PM is Polish.
Some time ago Benjamin Netanyahu had an actual ancestry test, which uncovered that his genes reveal a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage, which is completely unsurprising as his father emigrated from Poland to the Mandate and there met his mother, who had been born in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule.
Netanyahu's father was Polish in the way that South Asians in Idi Amin's Uganda were Ugandan i.e. a member of a deeply resented and persecuted ethnic minority.
So yes, technically he was indeed a Polish national, but the way that this antisemitic podcaster and Xcreter uses the term is rather like referring to a Mayan family living in Boston as 'Irish'.
Would these same a simple vista DNA tests determine that Obama is a native Polynesian from Hawaii?
This is all racist and stupid in equal measure, and unfortunately, unashamedly so. (Let's not even begin to wrangle with the notion of assessing people's territorial rights by relative pigmentation.)
And this is the problem we now have with ideologically-driven discourse emanating from the US on a range of different topics, especially those referencing other parts of the world, for this toxic emulsion of ignorance and thin, low-grade information is steadily seeping out into the wider world and affecting the thinking of everybody who comes into contact with it.
As a boy I read and enjoyed Arthur Koestler's provocative book The Thirteenth Tribe in which the author speculated that Ashkenazis may have descended from the Khazars of the Northern Caucasus — who had mass converted to Judaism in the early medieval period — a notion since debunked by both historians and geneticists.
It remains one of those immensely stimulating yet patently wrong hypotheticals, like Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind: worth reading if you are not the sort of person who systematically believes the last thing you read.
Ironically, Koestler seems to have imagined that by throwing doubt on the semitic origins of European jews he could take the sting out of antisemitism, yet today his theory has been appropriated by numbskull antisemites and used to make out that Israelis are on some fundamental level European settler-colonisers within a territory that has — as any broader historical analysis informs us — been under brutal and restrictive Arab and Turk colonial rule for around 1500 years.
And this when not even half of Jewish-Israeli citizens today have this Ashkenazi heritage which seems to set off the fanatical and chauvinistic simpletons.
Sunday, April 13, 2025
Rabbit Hole Contours
The 'Free Palestine' fixation bears comparison with similar ideological rabbit holes.
At the same time they often insist on highlighting handpicked, sometimes brutal truths, even as their overall disposition speaks rather clearly of a tendency to dispense with information which could prove inconvenient.
Thus the Anti-Vaxers are virulently anti-science and anti-expert in much the same way that the Pro-Pals are virulently anti-western...and anti-semitic — though they are usually at pains to disguise that particular pathology by assuming exclusive responsibility for the public interpretation of this rather hoary form of bigotry.
Adolescence...and Apaches
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Triggers
Sometimes it can be fun to detect some of the triggers currently at the disposal of the crazies in our culture.
‘Visigothic Spain’ is an anachronism, just like ‘Iron Age Scotland’. It’s perfectly normal and I would argue, legit, for historians to use modern labels for geographical zones so that their readers know which areas they are referring to. (One ought not need to remind everyone that culturally and politically a good deal has undoubtedly changed.)
Today I was I was reading about the early Jōmon culture in the far East (from c14,500 BC) and the book in question liberally makes use of terms like Japan and Korea. No need for anyone to spontaneously combust over that...right?
Yet it seems that when it comes to Spain, any attempt to use this designation to refer to the pre-modern situation breaks open a hornets’ nest of haters.
Some of the trolling that I have been treated to on Threads lately appears to reveal that Visigothic Spain now enjoys a similar status to the pre-twentieth century Jewish presence in the Middle East e.g. it’s something that the Islamists would rather you didn’t know about.
In this way, Al Andalus, or the Moorish period on the peninsula, can either be taken as Edenic and indigenous (like 'Palestine') or as a kind of gallant anti-colonial reaction to the Romans, rather than say, an imperialist project (a Caliphate no less) which duly made second class citizens of Christian and Jew alike.
‘Spain’ in this worldview is thus that tiny territorial remnant in the north which then came and stole the lands below from Allah. That cities like Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba and Mérida had a monotheistic history going back several centuries before Arabic became the official language, is seemingly a major inconvenience for the Jihadist narrative today.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
The trouble with ceasefires...
Experts are part of the problem…
"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past" > Spinoza
Seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Yet most historians of the phlegmatic variety will tend to admit that by the time the parallels are so obvious that they need to be called, it is often too late.
When looking to avoid a recurrence of proto-fascist tendancies in our own times, we are generally quick to pinpoint certain streams of cranky and potentially hazardous thinking which took hold in say, early twentieth century Germany.
This exercise fits with our sense that right now we are witnessing a widening gulf between 'populist' chatter and the discourse we associate with experts and the more technocratic sort of administrator.
Yet one of the things that has struck me about Richard J. Evans's exposition of the situation The Coming of the Third Reich, is that beyond the antisemitism and other forms of extremist babble bubbling up in German political life at the start of the twentieth century, there was another problem emerging from an entirely different and perhaps less avoidable source — what Evans refers to as a "widespread medicalization of society".
German scientific successes, especially in the field of medicine, had given one particular group of accredited experts an almost untouchable form of prestige in the society, and a consequence of this was the way "the concept of hygiene began to spread from medicine to other areas of life, including not only ‘social hygiene’ but also, crucially, ‘racial hygiene’."
I take this to indicate that the interplay between the elite culture and the strange, mutating pathologies further down the chain may have been crucial in the formation of the truly 'diseased' politics which would emerge under the Nazis.
When I came across these passages it prompted me to think about how the recent global pandemic may be informing political attitudes in 2025.
And low and behold, today this article pops up...