Potted History

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free luxury Jumbo…anyone?

VE Day(s)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locked (2025)

 

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

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

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

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

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

The two leads add some notes of genuine excellence.

 

Intransigence

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game of Isms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Way

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

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

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

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

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

Havoc (2025)

 

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

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

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