'Forms of Hamas'

This week's LRB has a truly loathsome article on those poor misunderstood dudes at Hamas. Reading it, I was often uncertain whether Tom Stevenson intended me to laugh, or spew. 

The key takeout was less about the subject matter than about the author himself and his ilk. 

For it shows the lengths that the extreme Left will now go to in order to take the maniacal edge off this violent obsession, for once you have concluded that the cause is somehow righteous and have simultaneously discounted the deeper historical narrative beyond the impositions of ideology, and thus have internalised the implications of descriptors like ‘occupation’, ‘resistance’ and ‘apartheid’, along with 'Israel is always to blame' and needs to go, you are on your way to excusing just about anything. 

The central pillars of this exculpation, as far as October 7 was concerned, would appear to be...

• Israel was always going to respond with genocide / invent a terrible pogrom after the incursion, so Hamas might just as well have committed their own atrocity, as not commit one. Why squander the chance?
  
• But anyway...all the bad stuff only really happened because of some chaos and indiscipline, the fog of war and all that, as the equally dastardly British armed forces are themselves fully aware. 
• Hamas never expected to bump into a trance music festival and so, kind of did what anyone else would have done under the circumstances.

Stevenson also carefully conveys the notion that October 7 was conceived as a commando-style raid, thereby obviating the need to mention the numbers involved — a brigade-sized invasion, bigger than the land force Thatcher sent to the Falklands — further muddying the issue by suggesting that many civilian irregulars had poured over the border, thereby confusing both scale and objectives.

A few sentences that simply begged to be copied and pasted, many of which read almost like sneering parody, eliciting a few unexpected chuckles...

"In the US, Hamas quickly became a co-ordinate on the axis of evil (the suicide bombers hadn’t helped) and was conflated with al-Qaida.

"To say that Hamas is simply the zealous champion of a righteous struggle against a brutal military occupation, exercising legal right to armed resistance, is to pass over quite a lot.

(On October 7) "The outward form of a special forces operation quickly devolved into uncontrolled violence (a pattern not unfamiliar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the actions of British special forces in Afghanistan).

"Nothing Hamas did on 7 October approaches what Israel has done in Gaza.

"In the absence of real atrocities, false ones would have been invented, and military action would have been characterised as terrorism. Everything Israel has done was predictable from the moment Hamas paraglided over the barrier.

"The chance that Israel wouldn’t provoke armed resistance from Gaza was always zero. Gazans were in effect under siege, and military action to break the siege can’t be dismissed as terrorism or classed as a pogrom.

"It is in the nature of revolutionary violence to bring about insoluble problems. One must side with the people breaking out of a concentration camp. Yet one must also side with the non-combatant against the man pointing a rifle at him."

Such a delicate ethical tight rope walk the woke these days. Or at least the 'revolutionary' woke.

There's a lot of exposition about the rise of Hamas set within a carefully cherry-picked historical narrative. 

Another line that caught my attention was this one below, suggesting that the Hamas never really had any alternative than to spend everybody else's money on turning their territory into a terror fortress. (Stevenson neglects to mention the billions siphoned off into Qatari accounts by this pragmatic "social force" apparently describing itself as a national liberation movement with a moderate Islamic ideology.)

Indeed, the very idea that a way out of the cycle could be found by using foreign aid to achieve economic independence and a better life for Gazans is haram, clearly. 

"Hamas’s main defensive response was to extend the tunnel network to alleviate the blockade and to provide shelter from air attack – the move anyone would make if placed in charge of a besieged Gaza."

Anyone would have done the same, just like the Al-Qassam zealots did when they turned up unexpectedly at Nova. 

If the whole plan on October 7 had been to take (mainly military) hostages with minimal fuss, why did they end up killing significantly more Thai seasonal workers than they kidnapped?

And if this was just a result of things getting a little out of control on the day (DeepSeek will tell you the foreign were 'tragically' in the wrong place at the wrong time), why then did the invaders learn Thai words in advance so as to lure these people into a trap? And why not recognise the tragic error, and release these Thais quickly? 

Along with the baby that was also taken hostage, accidentally.

Crucially, was the Jihadi militant who called his mum to boast of murdering ten Jews with his bare hands just a bad apple?

I would imagine that anyone who has not yet descended into an ideologically-induced state of moral turpitude already knows the answers to these questions.

Spanish Steps

Lately it has become more apparent than ever that the only history we are ever comfortable deploying analogously — or indeed oh-so-readily weaponising — in contemporary debate is that of 1930s Germany. The comparisons have become so banal that they have ceased to be illuminating.

I’ve put some alternative medieval comparisons out there recently, but there’s also something in the nineteenth century history of Spain that deserves examination when it comes to the undoubtedly knotty situation in the US right now. (In particular as this was a preamble to another notorious ‘rise of fascism’ in Europe.)

Religious conservatism had long penetrated and to some extent overwhelmed the infrastructure of the Spanish state and, sitting in suspension above the empirical reality of Spanish society, there was a pervasive and occasionally rather toxic, ultra-traditionalist notion of what it meant to be Spanish.

Against this backdrop, in the early part of the nineteenth century middle class, would-be modernisers had somewhat overplayed their hand relative to their demographic position, attempting a wholesale re-engineering of Spanish society along not just traditional liberal principles but additionally upholding some fairly ‘out there’ ideas which had come tagging along.

The backlash came in 1823 when the King Ferdinand VII, teamed up with his French counterpart Louis XVIII in forming the ‘Holy Alliance’ with the aim of dramatically rolling back liberal modifications to the Spanish way of life. They they even reinstated the Holy Office (Inquisition) as a way of extirpating all forms of ‘mad thinking’, and it’s safe to say that the liberals had not expected that.

Soon afterwards, the monarchy itself became the focus of this escalating culture war, with Ferdinand's daughter and heir Queen Isabella II literally in bed with the liberal elites in the armed forces and the reactionaries coalescing around her uncle Don Carlos.

These so-called Carlistas — as illustrated — would become especially strong in deeply-traditionalist Navarra (home today to nice folk like Opus Dei) and had their first proper war named after them in 1833. They would go on to play a key role in the next century as the various conflicts embedded in the national psyche hypertrophied into all out civil war.

Last year's data...

2024 data reveals Guatemala as the key destination for US migrant deportation flights: 508 in all, 42x more than either Cuba or Jamaica and part of a cumulative total of 1,778 across the past 5 years.

Mexico had just 153 last year and even Honduras only 319.

 

Meanwhile, Colombia received 126 from Biden before they decided to turn the first 3 of Trump’s away.

Real and Barça

I sometimes explain the deep-seated rivalry between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona to chapines (who often just seem to have picked one side or the other), that it is a continuation of the Spanish Civil War by other means, or at least a continuation of the situation which took shape at the conclusion of that conflict, when Franco was consolidating his power in Madrid and clamping down on both the regionalist and anarchic tendencies of the Catalans.

But it does also seem to reference an earlier important duality in Spanish history: their most Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella.

Barcelona’s medieval maritime empire, which stretched across the Med to Athens, hopping from island to island, had been absorbed into Ferdinand’s realm of Aragon. But it was his wife, the Castilian queen Isabella would strike that momentous deal with Colombus, opening up seemingly vast possibilities for treasure and trade to the West, and Catalunya found itself locked out…suddenly becalmed in an inner sea.

Frankly, the Spanish Empire which, as I pointed out in the previous post, never really brought anything like real prosperity to the home country, might have worked out a bit better if the more serious, commercially-minded Catalans had been put in charge from the get-go. They were certainly none too chuffed about the situation and along with Portugal rose up against the central yet still somehow feudal authority of Phillip IV in 1640, but only the Portuguese were able to break free.

At this stage the Catalans had fancied themselves as part of France, but after the last Spanish Habsburg had croaked in 1700, they sided with the English against the Bourbons in the War of the Spanish Succession, only to be backstabbed by us during the composition of the Treaty of Utrecht, which abolished all their rights and established Louis XIV’s grandson on the throne as Phillip V — and the new king duly constructed the Castle of Montjuïc above Barcelona in order to remind the city’s inhabitants who was going to be the boss from now on

Espejitos

Ask anyone around here about the colonial period and a familiar refrain emerges: Spain enriched itself at the expense of the indigenous peoples of Central America, extracting their wealth in return for 'espejitos'.

Without wishing to deny the exploitative nature of the empire, it should also be noted that it had fairly terrible effects back 'home' too.

In the middle ages Spain had a population of 18m. This had declined to as low as 7m by the end of the eighteenth century, a drop which can be explained in part by the voracious financial requirements of the imperial system, which were ultimately met by establishing sheep — in order to produce Merino wool, then a most valuable cash crop — on the former communal lands of Spanish peasants.

Sustainability, especially of the poorer classes, went out the window. The most familiar colonial architecture here in Guatemala, 'Spanish terracing', has nearly vanished in the southern part of the Iberian peninsula, where the forests were depleted in order to build fleets of ships. Wealth was not only transferred TO Europe, it was both transferred and trashed in perhaps unexpected ways within Europe.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the poorest regions of Western Europe today were always undesirable backwaters. Yet several of them, Wales and Sicily for example, were once rather rich in resources. Take a look at the Roman road system in Britain and you get a clear sense of how valuable they believed Wales to be. Yet today it is Western Europe's poorest nation.

It's comparatively easy to collect metals and other minerals from close to the surface and to strip whole areas of their forest cover and this is what happened in ancient and medieval times, according to the needs of the larger commercial and political blocks, many of which were still not operating as nation states in the modern sense. 

 

The Romans had treasured Hispania as their equivalent of the Mid-Western grain basket, and this pattern of agriculture was at first maintained by both Visigoth and Moor. 

 

 

But the Spanish empire was a muddle from the start, with Conquistadors determined to set themselves up as feudal potentates in the New World, while back home the treasure had a corrosive effect on the old society and much of it ended up funding the rise of capitalism in Northern Europe, leaving Spain socially and economically unequal almost to an extreme. ‘One foot in Africa’, as people used to say, even after democracy had been restored. 

 

Alongside the flourishing of the Christian imperial system, Spain experienced a form of Reformation from within, whereby the corruption of Rome was rejected and a more localised form of austere, goose-steppy Catholicism was absorbed into the newly authoritarian state as its essential component.

 

The Donald’s Doolally Proposition

Gnash your teeth as much as you like at the presumptuousness of the dumb and doltish Donald for daring to suggest that some Gazans might be relocated and rehabilitated in neighbouring Islamic states, but as you do this, recall that for some eighty years the population of Gaza has willingly participated in the toxic fallacy of forever 'refugee' status and if asked, would probably very readily identify another land as their true home and destination, even those whose surnames clearly identify them as Arabs of Egyptian, Yemeni or Jordanian heritage — this land they have been taught to call Palestine, the realisation of which seemingly requires the total demolition of the Jewish state. 

Today UNRWA is transparently very firmly grounded in the notion that Gazans should not be in Gaza. 

In 1958, after ten years of its operation, the USA tried to disband the organisation, for it had realised that instead of doing what it was supposed to do, resettle and rehabilitate the thousands of displaced Arabs resulting from the war they had started ten years previously — in a process similar to that entrusted to near identical agencies created after WWII and the Korean war, the latter re-naturalising over 3m people from the north — it was rather blatantly turning them into permanent political pawns with the long-term objective of eliminating Israel: one might say a delusional attempt to turn a conclusive defeat into at least the mirage of eventual victory and Jewish extermination at the end of the long, shimmering highway.

But the Saudi Ambassador Abdullah al-Khayyal paid a visit to the US State State Department and told them "you don't want to do that" and provided them with some pressing reasons why they probably didn't, and thus the situation has been allowed to fester along with an additional input over the decades of putrid ideological sludge contaminating UNRWA, with the corruption slowly spreading up into the wider UN.

Commitment to the improbable 'goal' of 'return' requires the subordination of all other concerns the Gazans might have, such as liberty, living conditions and security, with UNRWA striving — with observable domestic and international collaboration — to ensure that the Gazans are never quite able to attain economic self-sufficiency...except in the rather galling case of their gangster leadership, who gleefully rehabilitate external aid into their Qatari-based indulgences.

Three Acts of Denial

The principal antisemitic commentary tropes which tend to emerge around the time of the annual Holocaust commemorations — like three acts of denial — are as follows...

1) Conflating the 'final solution' with contemporary events. (Almost always only those involving Jews.)

2) Diversifying/diluting the Holocaust, via name-checking every other group targeted for persecution by the Nazis to a point where mentioning the J word seems almost superfluous.

3) Suggesting that the European Holocaust has been an 'excuse' for the existence of a Jewish homeland; the only excuse according to some zealots.

These forms of bigotry have been steadily rising in recent times, perhaps peaking on Sunday when a pregnant Jewish woman called Lior Tibet was carried out of her own Holocaust commemoration event in Ireland as a result of a silent protest at the public shame the President was at that moment bringing upon the Irish nation.

 

 

For anyone else a bit too thick to immediately comprehend...

 

Anne Frank was not just any young civilian victim of the pitiless conflict that was WWII. To suggest such an equivalence is contemptible.

 

She is remembered for a whole package of reasons, but very specifically as an abiding emblem of the fate of Dutch Jews during the Holocaust: 75% of whom were exterminated by the Nazis.

 

 

 

 

The Reparations Scam

The narrative of decolonisation has plenty of useful idiots (I sometimes prefer craven amplifiers), most notably in the Middle East, but some of its biggest and loudest absurdities are to be found elsewhere...on our side of the pond for example.

Take Belize, where PM Johnny Briceño has become a leading mouthpiece for the Caribbean slavery reparations scam. (This specifically targets the UK even though history’s largest slave economy was overseen by France and the French contribution to abolition was, er…)

The Guardian, amongst others, have lapped this up in almost every piece they have published recently about our neighbour.

Oddly missing from these articles is any name-check for the most awkward of facts behind Briceño’s opportunistically stuck out palm.

Following emancipation — which had commenced with the successful trouncing in 1798 of a 'Spanish Armada' around St George's Caye — every inhabitant of the settlement was granted full civil rights in 1832.

Already during that same decade, black Belizeans had risen to the summit of government and the justice system which, in the wider context of the situation elsewhere in the hemisphere at this time, is genuinely extraordinary.

And then, following that, thirty years later in 1862, Belize became a crown colony with a governor appointed from Britain.

This new colonial situation surely, up to independence in 1981 — and to some extent beyond that date — protected the tiny country from further attempts at forced re-absorption into the nearby Spanish-speaking, republican sphere, with a concomitant loss of its rather uniquely English take on politics, law, civil rights and relative racial tolerance.

Many Belizeans are descended from Yucatecos to whom the British offered sanctuary. Ditto Mayan communities in the south who had fled the conflict in Guatemala. Some are descendants of Confederate troops who resettled there after the American Civil War. Those of African descent are a minority and a minority within this minority — the Garifuna — were never enslaved.

Belize's GDP per capita is today about 30% higher than that of Guatemala, and significantly higher than every nation in Africa, with the sole exception of Botswana, with whom there is near parity.

Yet today the party of government is even considering withdrawal from the Commonwealth on purely ideological, 'anticolonial' grounds, which would frankly represent an act of economic self-harm along the lines of Brexit.

Many of the contemporary British taxpayers who would presumably be simultaneously required to provide compensation, have ancestors in their immediate or deeper past with frankly far worse experiences of conquest, oppression, enslavement and exploitation.

So perhaps the rather sad truth here is that either the Guardian hacks don't know any of this, or they don't want you to know it: neither a good look for a platform priding itself on serious journalism.

 

Man Child

 

When, at the start of this book, Castor began drawing explicit parallels between Richard II and the Donald, I wondered whether she might be applying an artificial sell-by date to her narrative. 

This has been kicked down the road somewhat by Trump's election victory, but certain anxieties must remain.

I think the direction of travel, so to speak, is important: one should avoid applying modern political perspectives to the past, yet showing how the past might inform modern political perspectives is not so wrongheaded, per se.

At the stage that this sentence appears, the still adolescent Richard, approaching his sixteenth birthday and operating within a minority which had never been formalised as such, has evidently decided that he has no personal interest in the major issues — foreign and domestic — which are troubling almost every member of the elites around him, and can appreciate no distinction between his personal interests and those of the nation.

The Chancellor, Lord Scrope, has been forced to hand back the Great Seal after he dared to suggest that the young monarch might already be acting contrary to the needs of the realm.

And so, I suppose, here there could be hiding in plain sight a certain important lesson about holders of high office and how they go about locating themselves within the body politic.

Forty years earlier a rather random event, the Black Death, changed English social history forever. But the country’s political history was diverted around the same time by a more 'pinpoint' incidence of infirmity: the chronic and ultimately fatal disease picked up by Edward the Black Prince on campaign.

It is hard to underestimate the long term impact on the failure of this Prince of Wales to succeed his father. Instead a 'man-child' with authoritarian instincts took the throne in a manner where any checks and balances soon collapsed, in part because they simultaneously existed and did not exist, which is basically the worst of all worlds.

This eventually led to a coup, in turn setting off the Wars of the Roses, without which the Tudors could not have happened, and one would thus also have to question whether the Stuarts, the unification of the English and Scottish crowns, the Civil War and later the Glorious Revolution, would thus ever have occurred — so this ominously bad start to Richard II's reign had almost incalculable consequences for the English.

Liberalism Upended

Woke values — both Left Woke and Right Woke — pose as 'liberal' values, yet they are anything but — in fact they are a perversion (and often an inversion) of the 'real thing' and thus represent a serious threat to the whole edifice upon which our liberal democracies have been constructed. 

The foundational idea that our immediate ancestors have been building upon is that facts transcend culture.  

So, no matter how much individuals or groups express distaste for gays or people from a different race or gender, it should not matter on a societal level at all, because wherever you go in this world in terms of time and place, there will always be certain universal human characteristics which no amount of hatred or oppression will ever do away with. 

Woke, and again, it doesn't matter which extreme we are on about, reverses this proposition: Culture must be understood to transcend facts.

I'd hesitate to use an adverb like cunningly or subtly here, because it is absolutely blatant. It turns liberalism on its head in the most obvious of ways, and yet wants you to somehow not comprehend this and call it out.

And many 'true' liberals don't, because they tend to take on wokeism with facts, which is rather like pissing into the wind. Try arguing with a Trans ideologue using human biology or a Pro-Pal with Middle Eastern history and see where that gets you.

And on many levels the so-called Woke Right are even more fact-resistant and prone to package themselves in a conspiratorial, victimhood narrative which they understand as giving them permission to treat all push back in the most aggressive and ultimately toxic of manners. 

Both kinds of wokies are constantly conceiving of new privileges which can be branded as rights, and therefore protected by anti-discrimination legislation.

Along the way not only is the factual narrative, whether simple or complex, being trampled upon, but another absolutely core liberal idea: that one should be able to think and do whatever one wants to as long as it does not negatively impact on other members of society, not just in terms of what they in turn think and do, but also in terms of the universal rights that they are understood to possess by way of those culture-transcending facts.

Thus the 'rights' of trans women sometimes explicitly violate those of biological women, and they have done so by claiming the higher moral ground, often by commandeering and aggressively planting up there the rainbow flag, which previously stood, with near absolute clarity, for equality based on fixed human universals, a limitation that trans people seem to literally want to transcend.

In the West the rainbow flag is no longer straightforwardly emblematic of the homosexual share of universal human rights and dignity. It now encompasses a range of non-universal, cultural and ideological standpoints, which tend to fall under the banner of ‘queerness’. 

In any properly liberal society, people who live their lives according to a set of cultural precepts do have one key right: to be granted tolerance and compassion — if not affirmation — from those people living their lives according to an alternative, perhaps contrasting set. But this right does not include the privilege of expecting everyone else in their society to sign up to their dogma under pain of censure or punishment. (Sex and religion are rather obviously the key cultural battlegrounds here.)

Anyway, in today's politics the extremes of left and right are not about equality or freedom, no matter how enthusiastically they are invoked and chanted, as both of these values, which blend usefully towards the complex middle, have been distorted almost beyond recognition at opposite ends of the bell curve.

My post the other day about the Peasants' revolt in England in 1381 was, in part, an attempt to show why the start and end points of this curve are basically the same place. 

The very same incident — the same historical moment — looked completely different depending on whether one's perspective was from below looking up, or from above looking down. So that which the peasants perceived as a pivotal opportunity to establish a more radically egalitarian society, the King perceived as a chance to impose a far more authoritarian system.

And so it is in many modern western democracies which are faltering as a result of the combined cultural impacts of populism and wokeism. 

 

Talking back to the puppets...

One of the most obvious aspects of contemporary discourse, which to some extent is fed by mass amateur satire on social media, is that many of us seem to be losing sight of the distinction between the caricature and a reality which should also be addressed on its own terms.

Brits like me, of a certain age, would probably understand this as having an on-going argument with a cast of Spitting Image puppets. (Grok doesn't quite understand the reference, but whatevs...) 

Increasingly I see people, especially on the Left, doing this with the likes of Trump, Musk, Netanyahu etc.

It’s unquestionably entertaining to be part of the collective send up. Yet behind the exaggerated latex masks that we have created, there is a real person, with attributes and inclinations which often sit well shy of the extreme end of the spectrum where we like to place them for our amusement and performed outrage.

This does not make these figures less dangerous, on some levels quite the contrary, because we are failing to confront and comprehend the reality, which often ends up giving them more leeway to act on their inclinations than they might otherwise have.

One might argue that a man like Putin is WYSIWYG, but even he has some subtle complexities that often get passed over by the digital commentariat.

 

A friend recently commented to me that satire has always been 'geared' towards more sophisticated, usually more intelligent people, so perhaps 'democratising' it, especially in the context of 'American' democracy, has not been a process without potholes.

And there are clear indications that the supposedly sophisticated are habitually allowing themselves to be readily influenced by the obviously unsophisticated. 

 

There’s another somewhat related phenomenon which we should be wary of as well. Social Media appeals to narcissists and amplifies their voices above those of non-narcissists. One of my key red flags for narcissism is a tirade of bile and invective emerging from a profile which could just as easily be interpreted as a set of self-descriptions, readily reversible analogies etc.

The medium, by its very nature, brings this out in some form in almost everyone who participates, but the repercussion (or perhaps reverberation) for those who suffer from the pathology in ‘real life’ is that much more pronounced.

 

 

Foreign and Domestic

One of the more intriguing things I have noted about Latin Americans over the years is their ability to maintain separate foreign and domestic policies in relation to their basic political worldviews, even if the two are pulling in rather obviously different directions.

When they move into a more developed country, particularly where they take up a professional position or otherwise well-remunerated career path, they frequently appear keen to adopt all the latest 'progressive' causes and are often extremely vocal in their opposition to the forces that oppose them: textbook liberals in that respect.

But switch the discourse towards the nations of their birth and one often rather quickly detects a shift of emphasis: more libertarian than liberal, a grudging admiration for more authoritarian approaches, a distaste for migration and so on. 

Even when these are absent or suppressed, there is a much more transparent willingness to accept the inherent messiness, those more than occasionally dirty compromises, that underpin most American republics.

Between these two quite distinct responses there has been erected some kind of Chinese Wall, of which I think they are largely not even really aware themselves. 

 

 

Unsettlered

For the AO tennis this past week and a half I have been fairly permanently connected to my Melbourne VPN so that we can watch Channel 9 not ESPN in Spanish, and this means I have also been seeing the Aussie version of the Guardian, and this has been a true eye-opener.

On some levels it’s more demented than the British one. You have to ask yourself, why is this big island right down there at the bottom of the APAC region with serious regional strategic issues of its own to confront, so totally obsessed with the Levant?

It’s long been clear to me that this obsession is fed, in several rather obvious instances (Australia, Norway and Nordics in general, Ireland etc.) — not in the first instance by antisemitism — though that eventually kicks in as the fuel to keep it going in the face of factual rebuttal — but by a form of projection coupled with a diversion. For, these are white people who want you to understand that they are not that sort of white people, e.g. colonial oppressors.

The phenomenon is especially intense down under where parts of the popular culture possess a surface patina of proletarian coarseness. I suppose the general idea is that nobody will take you for ‘The Man’ if you go about performing the cheeky/chippy pleb routine, and they have always had us stuck up Poms to project onto long before Israel turned up.

In the latter context, of course, this is a nation for whom the term ‘settler colonist’ might be a more obviously domestic sore point, and that might explain the intensity of the convictions that one sees being performed in the Aussie Grauniad. (The ‘look away’ element to the Irish obsession with the Levant is undoubtedly their own history of religious sectarianism, intolerance and violent gangster terrorism.)

Meanwhile, Trump’s covetous approach to Greenland has suddenly (re-)raised awareness that Scandinavians don’t actually deserve the free pass they have generally been getting when it comes to colonisation, enslavement and ‘oppression’ in general — as in the map below which suggests that they have always been downstream of the main problem.

In the USA there has been a veritable race to adopt more 'progressive' white identities cherry-picked from the Old World, with Irish still the favourite as it comes with permission for a certain amount of charming over-indulgence.

It is usually the case that the more affluent the individual, the more frantic the need to project with certain postures becomes.

Elsewhere, anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism seems to replace white guilt as the main driver, but this is just another manifestation of chippiness, either inverted or straight-up.

Et tu, Brute?

 

"I had rather be a dog than such a Roman."

 

 

Chinky Nosh in Tapachula

The traditional ‘local’ food of Chiapas features as many Chinese dishes as more familiar favourites like tacos (Mesomamerican-Levantine).

Much of it is sold buffet-style around the centre of Tapachula in the form of a choice of guisados (this one cochinillo) served with rice, for less than $5.

Chinese migration and settlement in this state, particularly 1870-1940, followed a well-trodden route. Most came originally to provide cheap labour for the railroad and coffee plantations, but soon upscaled into retail and regional commerce and thereafter shifted into politics.

A major bump in the road came with the Revolution, which came packaged somewhat explicitly with ‘Mexicanisation’, which in practice meant a good deal of xenophobia and sinophobia in particular. Chinese properties were ransacked or stolen; massacres occurred, the kind of pogroms that Jews have regrettably often had to factor in as the price of doing business this way.

Like others, the Chinese had found a niche which was lucrative, but vulnerable. Societies like Mexico lacked a robust middle: there was a pronounced gap between the wealthy and the impoverished, which an organised group of determined ‘middle men’ might fill to pretty much everyone’s benefit.

These gaps may not always be purely economic. When I first arrived in Belize it was obvious that the Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic populations disliked each other intensely. Another chasm that needed spanning? Cantonese migrants have certainly assumed control of much of the country’s retail and other trading industries.

When I first shipped up in Antigua too, when there were only a handful of restaurants and ‘general stores’ in the town centre, and roughly half of these seemed to be Chinese-owned, the significance of this community was a little more salient than it is now.

The Chinese story in these parts has a less well-known earlier component, for they first came as facilitators of the great transfer of treasure from Asia to Spain, via Manila, an overland crossing of New Spain (Mexico) and then onward across the Atlantic after a rendezvous in Havana with other galleons.

Trial by Combat

 

I may have mentioned before that one of the things that has surprised me about AI is the cultural biases it has already internalised. 

And that when it comes to the Middle Ages, Grok in particular has the sensibility of a not very sophisticated American tourist.

So I knew it was going to be fun asking it to illustrate a striking but not very well-known event which took place on the pavement outside Westminster Hall in London in June 1380.

Does Grok comprehend that the current Palace of Westminster, including ‘Big Ben’, was built by the Victorians? Of course not. On other searches it has readily rendered Tower Bridge in medieval scenes as ‘London Bridge’.

Anyway, the Westminster incident I am referring to is a trial by battle between a knight and a squire that the former had accused of treason, in the presence of the teenager King Richard II and a raucous crowd of onlookers, some seated within purpose-built wooden lists.

The issue related to the surrender of a little place called Saint-Sauveur to the French after a year-long siege in 1373. The knight, Sir John Annesley, holding a claim to this town via his wife, insisted that the squire, Thomas Catterton, had taken a bung from the French and thus committed treason, but lacked the right kind of evidence…documents, witnesses and so on.

No problem, let’s have a big public joust under the jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry to sort this out.

The two men dueled judicially with lances on horseback, then with swords and daggers, to the point of complete exhaustion, and still the matter remained unresolved.

The larger and more ungainly of the pair, Catterton, then tumbled and Annesley seemingly concluded that he could surely now proceed to victory, WWE-style by falling on top of his opponent and pinning him to the ground.

But he had been sweating profusely beneath his helmet and could not see so well through his visor and when he launched himself at Catterton, he missed.

Catterton, at this stage basically Cattertonic, managed somehow to roll over on top of Sir John and then passed out. Neither ‘party’ appeared able to move. Stalemate. Nothing like the joust in ‘El Cid’, this.

The young King ordered his retainers to lift the stricken men in armour, but Sir John, still conscious, pleased to be put back in the same position where he had been ‘winning’.

As this was about to be done, Catterton, at that moment supposedly recovering, collapsed sideways off the chair upon which he had been placed and no amount of water or wine would revive him.

Richard issued an on-the-spot verdict in favour of Annesley with Catterton’s life declared forfeit, but he expired the next day anyway.

(In the end I have appended some of the less ludicrous images with which Grok responded to my promptings. In one of them the medieval crowd once again looks a bit like a mob of modern-day Gunners fans.)

 

 

Draining Ye Olde Swampe

 

 “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” > John Bull.

The parallels between England’s so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and contemporary populist rebellion are rather striking.

These men, in the main from the counties of Kent and Essex, were perhaps our original would-be swamp-drainers.

Their loyalty to the executive, their anointed King, 14-year-old Richard II, was absolute. Indeed, any of their number who refused to proclaim unswerving fealty to the monarch was likely to be done in forthwith.

Their primary enemy was the ‘system’, specifically government ministers and the MPs who sat in the House of Commons, plus anyone adjacent to the process of legislation and taxation, lawyers in particular.

The Commons were in fact a core group chosen from the middle orders, such as the landholding classes i.e. people who did useful things with land as opposed to using it as an excuse to run off across the Channel in order to bash the French, which is what the Lords did. (This was called Chivalry and it was basically a bottomless financial pit.)

As the latter activity became ever more fruitless and costly in the late 14th century, so the Commons started voting for measures like the Poll Tax which went down particularly badly with the lower orders.

When the Kentish mob under Wat Tyler finally got to voice their grievances in person to the young King at Smithfield (“smooth field”), it was clear that the goal was to simplify society, removing all laws and jurisdictions — such as those of Lords and churchmen — between the people and the crown, which the peasants, who saw themselves as the ‘true commons’, understood as a radical leveling of the social order, yet which the young Richard had already intuited as an opportunity to bolster his own direct sovereign power and a route to the kind of authoritarian rule which would later on lead to a coup and his demise.

They also reiterated the key demand of the Essex group, the abolition of serfdom, even though by tradition there was no serfdom in Kent and actually very little in Essex. In this lies one of the most important lessons that History has for us: the people who most clearly yearn for freedom are those who have had more than a whiff of it.

Prior to this meeting the mob had burned down the King's uncle John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace and, on the other side of the Thames, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London crib at Lambeth Palace. As they did this, they had seemingly been at great pains not to be seen to loot, happier to smash things up very demonstrably than help themselves to any loose valuables.

Subsequently they had also managed to storm the Tower of London, and with clear echoes of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol, they did things like taking turns to lie on the King’s bed.

They even demanded kisses from the King’s mother Jeannette who had a bit of a reputation in the land, which she had never quite shaken off.

Oh, and they also removed the heads of Archbishop Sudbury of Canterbury and Robert Hales, Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, not by reason of their elite ecclesiastical roles, but because these men were Chancellor and Treasurer in the government respectively, and thus traitorous members of the hated ‘establishment’ (swamp).

The peasants had also been sidetracked into a burst of xenophobic rage, taking the lives of many inhabitants of the capital’s Flemish Quarter “without judgment and without cause” according to a monk at Westminster Abbey, with mutilated bodies piling up around the streets.

Anyway, the revolt ended with the King making promises he believed he could keep and surely wanted to, but in the end could not, because the Lords and the Commons came together to rather brutally re-establish the ‘natural’ order of things.

One reason that left wing ideologues struggle a bit with the medieval period is that this ‘natural’, oppressive order of things lacked the modern protection mechanisms that are usually cited nowadays: a standing army, cops, Fox News, indeed any kind of media or propaganda system beyond the messages pumped out by the Church and these did not really take the form that said ideologues would like to imagine.

They are left with ‘deference’, which does seem a bit wishy-washy, and was rather obviously absent in 1381, except with regard to Royal authority.

To a certain extent, these events were the result of the ‘class struggle’ which Marx (well, early Marx) envisioned as the prime driver of History. He would later shift emphasis to the more impersonal dialectical mechanism, but the truth is that something had happened in England which his theory could not quite accommodate, something tremendously random.

Four decades previously, roughly half the population of England had perished from The Black Death. This ‘great dying off’ had radically adjusted the overall economic situation, setting up opportunities for the now scarcer labour force to improve pay and conditions, even reduce their working hours.

The Commons, the landholding and commercial middle orders, stood most to lose from this sudden social adjustment, precisely at the moment that they were being asked to foot ever larger bills for the failed foreign escapades undertaken by Gaunt and the other Lords.

It would seem that the Commons were becoming genuinely envious of the gains made by the ‘true commons’ and frustrated by the non-domestic focus of the elites, so their representatives at Westminster duly imposed a regressive tax on everyone over the age of 15, three times more onerous than any prior equivalent, and this basically tossed a match into the big box of fireworks.

(Below, Grok's best effort of depicting the scene at Smithfield. Richard is usually shown on horseback. The peasants look like Arsenal fans.)

 

'The Mayab'

I am aware of the plethora of really bad analogies that have attached themselves to the situation in the Middle East. 

And in spite of that I am going to put one of my own out there, based largely on a historical counter-factual which derives from my own geographical location and its often troubled history.

You may find reasons to object to it. If you so, say why, because I would be genuinely fascinated to know about them and debate them.

Here we go....

Iberian Catholic colonisers arrive in Central America and establish a measure of control. But the Maya in particular put up a persistent pattern of resistance and eventually the conquerors conclude that they have little choice but to send the majority of the Maya away and into exile around the world.

Centuries pass. The empire lingers on in one form or another until the early part of the twentieth. 

At the moment it finally collapses, a group of modern powers from outside the region intervene, partly, but not completely, for selfish reasons, their basic aim being to oversee a transition to a new era of relatively stable nation states based on ethnic and cultural identity.

There are pressures within and without. Those who predominantly identify with the colonising Catholic culture are not sure if they want their own sovereign states or whether they want to form their own ‘imperial’ blocks. They fight it out for a while.

Meanwhile, the remaining Maya in the region express a clear desire for their own sovereign territory which will consist of a fraction of their ancient homeland, the Mayab. They declare an intention to invite members of the Mayan diaspora to return there and help build this new society where Yucatec Mayan will be the main language and they will worship their ancient deities.

The international community decides that they can have the Peten region and the southern part of the Yucatan peninsula for their new state. Within this territory some 40% of the population will be non-Maya, either mixed blood mestizos or individuals of European descent who have been broadly content with the colonial culture, if not the empire itself. Let’s call them Iberians.

Their property rights are not under threat, but they will have to adapt to living within a sovereign Mayan state.

It is already a well-known fact internationally that non-Mayans will be more secure inside a Mayan state than vice versa, which is one of the reasons that the need for a Mayan state was so pressing in the first place, as well as the fact that while discussions about the new lines on the map continue, many Mayans residing in Europe start to experience a terrible persecution.

The international community really ought to have done more for the other non-Catholic ethnic groups in the region, but in the end caved in blackmail from the resource-rich Iberian League, and allowed them to assume control of 97% of the former empire. Within these Iberian states much of the former colonial system would persist and minorities would suffer, and none of them would show any inclination to follow a path of liberal democracy.

Anyway, at the very moment the new Mayan state declares its independence, some of the non-Mayans inside it and those beyond the borders get ready to rise up and murder all the Maya. The mere existence of Mayan self-determination is a profound offence to their Catholic God, they announce. 

With help from the neighbouring ‘post-colonial’ Iberian states they begin a war of extermination, but the Maya have had enough of their nonsense and are better organised, and thus achieve an unlikely victory.

At this point several hundred thousand Iberians are forced to abandon their homes and become refugees. This occurs in part because the Maya no longer feel safe living next door to people who want them dead, but also because they were told to get out of the way by their invading allies.

When the war ends, nearly all the Maya who had been living outside the Mayab in Central America are also displaced and most of them come to live within the new Mayan state. They number more than the Iberians who lost their homes as a result of the war, yet almost nobody remembers this.

Nor really that many Iberians continue to live inside the Mayab and enjoy civil rights there that no other Iberians are able to enjoy outside of it.

However, the displaced Yucatec Iberians are never in turn absorbed by their co-religionists in the neighbouring Iberian states. Instead they are told to hold position as long-term political pawns in 'camps' for as long as it takes (even if this is forever), because the Iberian League wants the world to know that they did not in fact lose this war, they are simply awaiting their eventual God-given victory. From the late 1950s onward they pervert the UN body set up to assist the refugees, so that it is fully on board with the underlying ideological project.

For decades the Mayan state is repeatedly attacked and repeatedly triumphs against its aggressors. After one of these intense wars, the Mayab takes back control of the northern Yucatan. They do not formally integrate it into their nation however, as their plan is to trade it back to the Iberians in return for lasting peace: the so-called two state solution. But it is thereafter referred to as ‘occupied Yucatan’, which effectively disguises the real blame for the on-going situation.

The sad truth is that the Iberians don’t want peace. In the 1960s they change their name to Yucatecos and demand ‘freedom’ for the whole of the Yucatan peninsula ‘from the gulf to the sea’ including the Peten. They don’t want their own state, they simply want to put a definitive end to the affront posed by the Mayan state.

They realise that in the English-speaking world there are some particularly dumb students who can be persuaded to see the Mayans who returned to the sovereign Mayan state after their long exile as ‘settler colonists’ who stole the Yucatan rather savagely from the poor oppressed Iberians, and duly leverage their support.

They are also getting a lot of help from another regional power with its own distinct ethnic base, the Inca, who have become Catholic fundamentalists and desire nothing more than to see the elimination of the Maya. 

'Occupied Yucatan' now has a measure of self-government, even international recognition. Half of it is run by a crazy fascist mafia financed by the Inca, and the other half by a corrupt mob that pays out cash rewards to any scumbag who murders a Mayan.

And that’s it. The analogy could be extended from here, but you get the general drift. People who chant ‘Free Palestine’ imagine themselves to be bravely anti-colonial, when in fact they are precisely the opposite.

The Yucatecos lost the war. They need to finally accept this, then accept the peace and the territorial deal that comes with it, and all the surrounding Iberian powers need to be on board, including the Incas.

They will have their own state, but this state needs to be able to live alongside the Mayab and function within an international order where the legitimacy of everyone’s sovereignty in the region is both recognised and protected.

Yucatecos should be free to travel around the Mayab, and Mayans around the Iberian world, without fear of violence or repression on either side. 

The Battle of St Giles's Fields

Name a battle associated with King Henry V. (They don't get much easier than that, do they?)

But one year before Agincourt in 1414 Henry assembled an army at Clerkenwell and marched west to confront the Lollards at roughly the present location of that cutesy, hidden urban green oasis known as Phoenix Gardens, which featured rather heavily in the romcom Last Christmas.

The loser that day was Sir John Oldcastle, a former MP and long time friend of the young King, who had escaped from the Tower of London following a conviction for heresy, and had then decided to organise a full-on rebellion. It is said that Sir John was the chap Shakespeare had in mind when he created the character Falstaff.

Inside the battlefield zone today a Palladian-style parish church from the 1730s holds the name of St Giles-in-the-Fields and stands in the late afternoon shade of Centre Point.

This is where, some six hundred years before its construction, a leper hospital had been established by "Good Queen Maud", Henry I's wife Matilda of Scotland (1080-1118, grand-daughter of the King Duncan offed by Macbeth) at a location believed to be at the midpoint between London and Westminster. Today it is not quite Bloomsbury, not quite Soho, not quite Covent Garden and not quite the West End.

Wherever you find a church of St Giles in England it is typically at a location outside the old medieval walls. He has always been the patron saint of people with disabilities, but lepers were for long a particular specialisation, and Anglo-Norman Christians had apparently learned a trick from the ancient Israelites when it came to positioning facilities for those suffering from that disease, 'outside the camp'.

Anyway, back to the battle of St Giles's Fields of 1414. Oldcastle was leading a force of religious and political radicals, in a way proto-Protestants who presaged similar movements and their societal impact two centuries later.

The Lollards were against the doctrine of transubstantiation, against priest confession, against clerical celibacy and against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while they compared the Pope to the Antichrist and had secretly translated scripture into English.

That they were against capital punishment too didn't help them that much after their defeat to Henry. Sir John had managed to escape after the rout but was captured and returned to the same area, where he was duly hung and barbecued above a wood fire at the same time.

This parish would later be home to Patient Zero in England's Great Plague of the spring of 1665, one of a pair of Frenchmen living at the end of Drury Lane, where Pepys would see a door marked with a black cross for the first time.

But not before it was ground zero for another rebellion, in 1570, this time by Catholics under Anthony Babington against the reigning Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I. He had solicited a letter from Mary Queen of Scots expressing her tacit approval for his plot and this would lead to her execution on 8 February 1587.

By that period the priory was surrounded by narrow streets, containing inns, brothels, butchers, watchmakers, booksellers, belt-makers, justices of the peace and nobility. Maybe not so much different from now, though undoubtedly lacking all those shops selling saxophones and electric guitars in 'Tin Pan Alley'.