The Antis

There are certain aspects of the political programme of the Scottish nationalists, specific sentiments even, which I will readily express my opposition to. That said, I am careful how I express that opposition. 

For example...

I try to stick to the issues, steering well clear of ad-hominem attacks on the Scots, specifically avoiding characterisations which they might find deeply demeaning. (For instance, suggesting that anyone in their 'camp' is somehow inhuman and monstrous.) 

I will not refer to my own position wholly in terms of a negative outcome for theirs (e.g. I don't call myself an Anti-Scottishist.)

I won't call for them all to be driven back where I imagine that they originally came from. (Ireland?) nor will I insist that instead of granting them autonomous statehood they ought to be purged entirely from the political map. 

And however much I may suspect that there are a bunch of Scottish nationalists who are card-carrying reprobates — as there are certainly some Russian nationalists one would not want to be stuck in a lift with — I do not discount the notion that it is possible to espouse a nationalist worldview in a largely benign fashion and that there are aspects of the associated cultural programme which are undoubtedly worth celebrating without caveats.

These are all important divergences of the kind we all need to bear in mind whenever we hear someone trot out the 'I am not antisemitic, I am anti-zionist' chestnut. 

Superficially there is indeed a clear de jure distinction between the two pathologies, but do those who claim this 'amendment' truly understand it, or are they simply disguising a bigoted worldview, or perhaps even dog-whistling an essentially hateful, racist project? 

Often enough they rumble themselves almost as soon as they open their mouths. One can almost immediately tell if the very idea of Jewish self-determination is abhorrent to them. 

And let's face it, any kind of 'anti-zionism' which holds that Zionism — the nationalist aspiration of some 80% of Jews worldwide —  is some sort of global Satanic conspiracy, is surely antisemitic by agreed definition. 

 

Le Hump

Having watched much of the Opening Ceremony again, in a far better mood than I was in throughout the original viewing, I have one or two more thoughts to share.

I believe I have experience, both first hand and less so, of examples of when French people appear to be noticeably rather less adept than others of vetting their own ideas, especially the big ones.

They’d come up with some truly great (but...) concepts and would immediately get Le Hump if one were to begin by enumerating some of the things that might not work out as planned.

You know the kind of thing. Maginot Line: what if the Germans come in over there? Le Hump.

My father’s business was large scale theatrical events and I recall him explaining (sometimes com-plaining) how constant the need always was to keep a close eye on the ambitions of the creatives.

The problem in Paris may have begun as an urge to in some way over-compensate for the pompous and pious solemnities of the modern Olympic Movement, its ever so slightly neo-fascist aethetics even, all of which the French probably feel rather responsible for, and rightly so. So from the outset, some sort of shattering of the boundaries of good taste and common sense was always going into the final recipe.

Even the best bits of the ceremony were hindered by little details that might have been addressed rather better in the planning stage.

As for the part they have since felt the need to apologise for, Thomas Jolly did try to allocate himself some plausible deniability by leaving it open to interpretation which, if any, great work of art and thematic mythological material was being referenced, but then his cast members went on the platform formerly known as Twitter and explained what they thought they were up to, and there we have it, one of those (likely) mishaps which were not given due consideration at sign-off.

Soft Targets

 

Yesterday saw the rather predictable surge in righteous indignation over certain aspects of the Opening Ceremony, with a subset of commentators scouring the footage for the remotest indications of satanic imagery.

Some even went back twelve years to the NHS bed sequence at London 2012 in order to propose a new exegesis involving demonic possession.

As Danny Boyle had some notoriety as a lapsed aspirant to the Catholic priesthood, Thomas Jolly is both Jewish and homosexual, and a man with an understanding of the term ‘republican’ which no longer travels so well across the pond.

Still, his artistic vision, if stoked by Hellfire, suggests that the latter may after all be a metaphor for the most extreme, everlasting form of ennui, for his ceremony was diabolically boring at times, when not fiendishly shambolic, aesthetically and organisationally.

I don’t have an issue with sending up religion per se, but there’s a time and a place for the full Charlie Hebdo, and with freedom comes responsibility — the responsibility to not just go after the soft targets. 

 

People who think The Last Supper is an article of faith rather than say, a painting by a gay man in the Renaissance are surely the softest of targets.

Slippery Slopes

Disturbing events in the USA over the weekend, (Pennsylvania not Miami) can, one supposes, either be put down to a deep level conspiracy or monumental incompetence. 

I currently favour the latter interpretation. (And let's face it, even if we lean towards the former...)

Perhaps these two doddery, barely competent men occupying the White House for the last eight years have somehow 'conspired' to disguise a larger problem. Rather than being anomalies at the summit of American power, perhaps it has become one-legged turtles all the way down?

As a detached Brit, my biggest beef with Biden during his term was the behaviour of his Secret Service goons at Buckingham Palace the night before the Queen's funeral. The self-conceit of this entourage was immediately apparent, but perhaps the resulting rudeness was itself a consequence of poor quality leadership, of basic incompetence. 

The rot, the hollowness, may now be irreversible.

B Teams in action

Following defeat at Waterloo and a subsequent failure to reconsolidate his political position in Paris, Napoleon made a beeline for the west coast in the hope of escaping to America, but he failed to secure passage on any ship other than HMS Bellerophon. 

There were many reasons to be disappointed with Ridley Scott's Boney biopic last year. The story was too sketchy and none of the characters psychologically interesting enough. 

I guess it will be a few years before we get another big budget take on Napoleon. If it were me, I'd be looking at the period between the calamitous flight from Moscow up to Waterloo. 

Hollywood tends to tell this story as a collection of minor incidents around the pivotal moment when Napoleon arrived back on French soil after getting away from his tiny realm of Elba, and the French army dispatched to take him back into custody instead cries 'Vive L'Empereur!' and joins him for the march to Paris. 

Napoleon V2.0, the so called 100 Days, deserves a more detailed dramatic exploration. Rather than simply going back to where he had been rudely interrupted in 1814, Bonaparte decided to reboot himself as the people's sovereign, the true avatar of the Revolution. 

Or at least some sort of workable trade-off between the ideals of 1789 and the stability he later imposed. To this end he re-abolished slavery, having before de-abolished it, and re-jigged the constitution along more liberal lines, forming two chambers with powers alongside that of the executive. Ironically, it would be these deputies who turned against him after his decisive defeat by the allied coalition. Had this happy compromise been unbeatable, like Spain proved on Sunday, things might have become very interesting indeed. (Though Napoleon in America would have been worthy of a movie treatment in itself.) 

This coalition, which some have compared to a kind of proto-NATO, also had a strong core and some wobbly fringes. Wellington had to face his adversary with an army consisting of 30-40% Dutch and Belgian troops, some of which were little more than militia, while others had only recently fought alongside the French. 

Part of the Duke's problem was that since Napoleon had come a-cropper in Russia the British had gone to war with the US in 1812. Other than the whiteness of the White House the most significant consequence of this conflict was the fact that the best bits of the British army were stuck in North America when Napoleon marched on Brussels, in particular the majority of the regiments with relevant experience of fighting and defeating the French in the Peninsula War.

One could even say however that both sides undertook this most history-adjusting of battles with their second string squad members. Certainly, other than Ney, Bonaparte had very much a B team of advisors and military subordinates around him. His best hope of success, as with Putin vs NATO, was divide and conquer and/or pick off the weak parts of the alliance. 

It almost worked, but he made some critical errors of judgement and the weather didn't help. 

There were many different political and constitutional visions in play during this final phase of Napoleonic aspiration. 

We've seen these last few days how History can pivot on tiny details. Waterloo was rather like an great compilation tape of such 'sliding doors' moments, fully deserving of the title 'Now That's What I Call A Near Run Thing'.

The parentage of invention...

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something > Robert Heinlein

 

This rather drôle quotation made me think back to some essays I wrote in my first year of Uni, specifically about some of the apparent great leaps forward in medieval agricultural techniques. 

 

As ever the issue in historical analysis is usually whether necessity is the mother of all invention. Heinlein seemed to say “yeah”, with a bit of a yawn. 

 

At some point since Heinlein's era, there seems to me to have been a fairly subtle adjustment to the meaning of the term ‘easier’ and a further complication in our understanding of the ‘something’ needing to be addressed. 

 

Innovation in contemporary capitalist societies is often driven by a need to create additional ‘value’ or ‘augmentation’ over firm solutions. Indeed, problem solving is generally avoided, as it generates a potential profit dead end. 

 

So perhaps we have seen a switch back towards the early risers, people who spend at least half their days configuring new problems that might need fixing during the rest of their waking hours. 

 

And it does seem that the outcome of this is more like ‘peculiarly driven men trying to find more complicated ways to do something’, i.e. acquire money and status, whilst almost tangentially, adding novelty to everyone else’s lives. 

 

Novelty was not such a big thing in the lives of medieval people.

 

Mentalities

When commentators blame formal bodies of ideas or 'isms' rather than people for the things they apparently find seriously problematic, they are quite often trying to camouflage another kind of ism altogether: race-ism.

"I'm not against Jews, I'm anti-Zionist" or indeed "Islam represents a threat to our way of life." 

And the people who don't mind being considered shamelessly bigoted tend to blame aspects of those groups they regard as complicit in propagating the phenomenon they hate, which are usually only tangentially related to it, if at all. 

Even when it's not one of these surrogate attributions, we are still dealing with a subset of the major fallacies which persist in our culture about how live action History actually works.

Neither Karl Marx and his book nor Mohammed and his book are directly responsible for the inhumanities later committed in their name. 

These detached dogmas function a bit like chemical agents which in some people engender, or more often accentuate, what historians often refer to as a 'mentality' (or more pretentiously, a mentalité.)

It is these that we need to watch most closely, not texts or the way people dress etc. The conflicts surrounding us are driven by complex dynamics which include impersonal situations and cultural factors, but ultimately it is nearly always the aforementioned mentalities which provide the key impetus.

If you understand how they form, you can start to appreciate how they can be either encouraged or discouraged.

Focusing on how people look, where they are from geographically, what information they consume and spread, can often be an unnecessary distraction.