A phase shift is now required...

The pro-democracy protests in Guatemala have arrived at what one might characterise as a critical juncture. 

 

This morning a reduced total of 14 bloqueos were reported in the national press. Yesterday we saw how these attempts to force the removal of key figures in the MP and wider justice system have resulted in the first concrete examples of lethal force being used against peaceful demonstrators.

With just under 90 days remaining until the handover of executive power, those who fear for their fundamental constitutional rights can probably perceive that they need to adapt their package of tactics. 

It is becoming increasingly obvious that, in the absence of any change of heart from the Fiscal General that the economic stranglehold approach will start to deliver rather mixed results. And possibly even more lethal force. 

Right now, what is required is a flexible shift to a more variegated range of pressures, whilst at the same time maintaining broadly an identical perceived extent of popular engagement and mobilisation. 

History can provide numerous instructive examples of how this might be achieved. 

It will also warn, especially here, how an undesirable descent into civil war could also occur.

 

Influencers

I listened to an influencer this morning somewhat ironically pronouncing that Miguelito is a "cero a la izquierda", a sugar baby, one of a multitude of Miguelitos and Miguelitas around the country, all of whom are nobodies and thus a distraction from the 'real problem' and its rather less amarillismo-adapted protagonists.

This argument makes very little sense, historically.

Individuals entrenched on the sidelines of great authoritarian power, be they Marie Antoinette or Rasputin, have always tended to be significant influencers.

And sugar babies are not all alike, some are facilitators as well as mere receivers. Pablo Escobar made use of a plethora of younger lovers, many of them basically children who ultimately had no national impact, but his girlfriend in the Colombian media was a different matter.

It is not delusional at all for the masses to focus their ire on these figures. The dynamic of both the French and Russian revolutions was profoundly affected by how people felt about the Queen and the Mad Monk.

And it is very hard to focus one's energies in resistance on faceless actors.

The key caras in this current popular uprising have been those of Porras and Curruchiche, and I have mentioned before how this creates a rather helpful narrow focus, preventing the movement from being hijacked by radical social and political propositions. The flipside of this is that if Porras were gone tomorrow, nothing essential would have changed.

Anyway, the underlying dynamic of the protests in Guatemala may not be the same after yesterday's ruckus, and in that alone we can say Miguelito's arrogance in showing up in the middle of Antigua on a Saturday, will have its due significance over the course of this 'interregnum'.

But, potatoes...

This afternoon I ran into one of our friends in the aldea as she returned from an exploratory expedition into La Antigua, not long after I had done. She duly reported that she had decided to head into town in order to discover if it was Antigua that was encerrada...or herself! 

Like me she had found the streets of the casco pleasingly quiet and the Bodgegona open and largely patronised by groups of enthusiastic young 'gringos'.

It's all a bit like the pandemic, but without the sense of dread.

If you wanted to fill a bag full of tomatoes yourself, you'd be paying around Q10 per lb, but a pre-bagged set of 3lbs works out at around Q6.5 per lb. Compared to the market after several deluges, this is not yet 'end of days'.

But, potatoes.

All things told, we can now survive for a few weeks, if not the full 95 days of transition. We also have enough chiribiscos should the gas become scarce.

Let's hope pet food doesn't become an issue, as we have a particular vulnerability in that area.

Impasse

Tonight’s televised huffing and puffing by the President has done little to demystify one of the key enigmas of this induced crisis — is Giammattei pursuing a set of concrete, achievable, anti-democratic goals through surrogates in the MP i.e. is his hand on the rudder of the pirate ship, or is he himself the surrogate, a flailing figurehead with a cutlass to his throat? 

Beats me. 

He can ask whether it’s possible to stage a golpe against a man with only a mandate and a nail-biting 96 day wait ahead of him, and we can respond “how can it be reasonable for a man with almost no skin left in the democratic game, even the simulated democratic game, to undermine the peaceful transition?” 

Donald Trump did at least seem to have a political future worth fighting dirty for.

The suspected coup attempt is anyway not against a single individual or party, but against the sovereignty of the people.

These will be a long three months indeed if the outgoing President continues to avoid mention of the theft of the electoral actas. Blaming the people and foreigners for this literal impasse is not going to unblock the country.

Four years ago in Chile…

As civic resistance to the implied procedural threat to democracy here reaches a new and disturbing phase — the airport has run out of fuel, I have run out of red wine — I’d like to share a few observations on how this so far compares to my experience of the #EstallidoSocial in Chile back in 2019. 

By the time I arrived in Santiago a fair number of demonstrators had died. What had started as a protest against a hike of public transport fares in the capital had turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis and the government had deployed the carabineros — a paramilitary police force with an essentially fascist ethos and a plethora of heavily armoured vehicles. 

Any businesses not openly supporting the revolt were being ransacked as enraged crowds periodically flowed through the downtown areas. 

These were not peaceful demonstrations. An Uber I was travelling in was hit by a brick. Aside from the people killed by real bullets, the rubber projectiles were causing horrific ocular injuries.

And yet there was a fairly well-demarcated war zone centred on Baquedano metro station, which along with its immediate neighbours was shut. One could pass beneath the mayhem, almost as if a small area of central London had been designated as a permanent yet limited theatre of riot and repression, beyond which life was carrying on broadly as usual.

Valparaiso, on the other hand, had turned almost wholly post-apocalyptic. Aside from all the visible damage to property, the streets were sticky with the residue from gas canisters and I was genuinely shocked to observe how elderly residents just trying to stock up with basic provisions were coughing and spluttering. 

The popular movement appeared to stand its ground and achieve its immediate goal, a constituent assembly tasked with devising a new constitution, but then the cracks appeared. 

Narrow objectives had mutated into an unfocused and ultimately incompatible multitude, and after a left-wing drafted constitution was rejected in a referendum, a similar fate now seems to await a right-wing devised alternative.

Meanwhile, here in Guatemala 2023, after just six days of Paro Nacional Indefinido the country is already on the brink of an economic crisis and the Constitutional Court has greenlighted a more aggressive response to the blockades — but so far only an Opus Dei priest with a crib in Cayalá has taken up the invitation. 

Consuelo Porras seemingly lacks the resources and budget to suppress more than 80 choke points nationally (or overcome a case of 70% paralysis, as someone put it today), but some sort of incremental use of violence is surely to be expected. 

How will chapines respond to this?
 

So far the protests have keep up their narrow focus on Porras and her FECI clique. I would suggest that this is important, as wider support for the blockades, both domestically and abroad, depends on this remaining a preemptive counter-strike against a technical coup and not an umbrella movement attracting all sorts of radical nutjobs, which is essentially what happened in Chile. 

Yet it has its inherent limitations too, because Porras could go and the fundamental problem would remain. Indeed right now the ‘Pacto’ may be considering throwing grandma under a bus, as this might temporarily take the sting out of the situation, but would not necessarily clear the path for an uninterrupted transition.

Cadena Nacional

Dr G was back on all channels this evening, just like the good old days…except all attempts to appear folksy and reassuring have been abandoned. 

What a bizarre rant that was; rather stressful to watch, all told. 

Giammattei was like one of those older, isolated residents in the block who’s been drooling into his pillow all week as he imagines how he’s going to address the building committee about that light bulb problem on the sixth floor, but when the moment finally comes, finds himself on the crest of a breathless verbal tsunami. 

“You cannot carry out a coup against someone who’s not in power”, was the stand-out executive soundbite.

Did we get any sense that he understands that he has a moral duty as President to prevent the Attorney General from acting like a rogue fourth branch within the state? 

No, we did not. 

Now he can stand back and watch things get markedly worse.

De-legitimised

Until the 20th century revolutions were never the direct result of action by revolutionaries. Ancien Regimes just ceased to function as advertised and then bled out in terms of legitimacy. 

Even later there remained underlying triggers, usually a combination of severe economic crises with foreign policy pressure, which provided radicals with their moment. 

I suspect that future historians of the genre will have reason to be extremely intrigued by what has happened, by what is about to happen, in Guatemala in 2023. 

The people have elected a President whose proposed plan for government would be difficult to describe as radical. There is certainly no call for a significant redistribution of wealth and power. 

Movimiento Semilla’s previous candidate for the top job, Thelma Aldana, was long considered conservative, but like Arévalo, her central political goal became one of restricting the impact of corrupt actors in and around government. 

Yet the response of the mafias that prey on the state here to the popular choice of administration has been so shameless that it now threatens to undermine the very fabric of constitutional order in this country. 

Since the first round results it has been clear that the Ministerio Público was inclined to discredit itself beyond hope of repair. But as of today, the Constitutional Court seems to have embarked on a parallel course. 

We are reaching a point where the everyday credibility of the existing structure of law and governance might completely evaporate, and under the most minimal of pressure from unusual agitation. 

Arévalo’s father began a process of reform which came unstuck under his successor, because it chose to cross a line that social democratic Costa Rica stopped just shy of — stepping on the toes of Eisenhower’s government, specifically the Dulles brothers with their interest in bananas. 

Arbenz’s not especially radical proposal to repurpose fallow land then held by United Fruit led to his downfall and that of Guatemala’s first stab at a democratic state run broadly in the interests of the majority. 

The second stab is at a crucial juncture. This Arévalo is making his stand on the hill of clean politics. The mafias know that uncorrupted government is possibly the most radical threat they could face, and that once they are squeezed out, it will be so much harder to force their way back in. 

One might dream up all kinds of radical, populist nonsense and head to the polls, but it is the simple, easy-to-comprehend platform of Movimiento Semilla that appears most threatening to the forces of indecency. 

The worrying thing is that they seem intent on bringing down the house around them as they fall.

Lessons

It's an oft repeated truism that we constantly run the risk of ignoring the lessons of history. Yet what exactly are these lessons?

Perhaps the one we ignore most of all is that all of the ideas that we use to understand our own world are over-simplistic. Almost as soon as historians take them and use them to analyse what happened in the past they discover that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, inadequate.

Take European society in the post-feudal era. It's rather easy to blame capitalism for some of the damaging social changes leading to both mass paupersisation and political turmoil in the nineteenth century, and by capitalism we tend to mean ethically-challenged rich people. And it is true that many landlords seized on the opportunity to assert private ownership on land that had previously been held communally or at least within a system of reciprocal rights, yet it is also true that in some regions it was the peasants themselves who drove this march towards a 'liberal' market economy against the conservative resistance of the landowners.

Another lesson of history, sadly, is that as a society we usually decide whether our ideas are good or bad based on their consequences.

Puberty blockers may be either harmless or harmful, but there is almost no point in people who believe the latter sacrificing themselves to the baying mob until enough time has elapsed for us all to see how much suffering they may have caused. It's like pissing into the wind. Human beings so rarely change course based on reason alone before the disincentives kick in properly.

 

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

 

This Dracula is not quite the sinister charmer played by the likes of Gary Oldman and Claes Bang, but a bit more like the alien on the Nostromo. 

The movie is a sort of spin-off aspiring to be a reboot, carved from an (up to now) under-exapnded part of Stoker's tale*, the Count's less than luxurious ride to the shores of Blighty on an ill-fated vessel called the Demeter. 

I can say I rather enjoyed it with the caveat that I am almost as much a sucker for any story set on a tall ship as I am those based within large old hotels. 

The ship's course seems to be straightforward: Black Sea port, across the Med, up through the Bay of Biscay, into the channel and then a hard left into the Thames. But the script keeps throwing out navigational corkers like "we've passed the Straights of Dover and are still four days from London" and it's anyone's guess how the Demeter eventually ends up on the rocks at Whitby, though I think I once read somewhere that the Yorkshire town and its ruined Abbey inspired Stoker to write Dracula. 

 

* The chapter entitled The Captain's Log.

Flip to the Obverse

The most important concepts in our collective discourse have an innate tendency to pile on the pounds, poor things. 

​Take Freedom, for example. Thomas Hobbes would have taken a matter of moments to inform you as to whether you possessed it or not. These days he'd be scratching his head along with the rest of us. 

Over the course of four centuries it has become increasingly difficult for educated, reasoned people to find themselves on the same page on this matter, and sometimes they disagree even as to the text everyone ought to be referring to. 

This cultural bulking up has notably accelerated in my lifetime, affecting a whole load of key terms — Racism, Refugee, Genocide, Misogyny etc. etc. — all of which have become, as well as engorged, rather slippery and context-driven. 

This sudden velocity of expansion can be explained in part by the way these rousing concepts have been adopted by specific governmental and non-governmental bodies and other organised groups of activists. 

Freedom was always everyone's problem (at least as the latter grouping was then defined), but these others were nichier concerns, yet not without the aspiration to be so much grander and collective in their impact. 

Today there is hardly an interest group which refuses to imagine that its problem is very much everyone's problem. 

And once you have salaried individuals whose careers depend on their specific area of interest achieving maximum reach the goalposts start to move all over the place. 

Here in Guatemala there is one such term one could write an entire book about, and such a tome would be duty bound to outline its often  unanticipated effects on the nation’s recent history: IMPUNIDAD (Impunity). 

As I suggest, this is a very complex issue, but I will outline what I think is the correct basic outline. As Guatemala moved into the new millennium and attempted to put the years of civil strife behind it, the term was largely deployed in order to refer to atrocities committed prior to 1996 and the alarming possibility that those who had committed them might never face justice. 

There were then two specific cases which permitted a kind of mission creep into the postwar era: that of the murder of Bishop Gerardi (for daring to publicise details of the role of the state in human rights abuses) and that of former dictator Ríos Montt, who had retained a high profile into the new democratic period. 

Just as the army was losing its privileged position alongside the executive, the office of Fiscal General was provided with some extra bite in order to pursue cases against those who might otherwise be permanently guilty of impunity. This seemed like a good idea at the time.

Yet the remit started to swell in the manner characterised above. Maybe it would be wrong to describe this as a consequence of over-feeding, yet the range of items in the diet definitively expanded and the targets of prosecutors (particularly under CICIG) were increasingly those whose impunity had more to do with on-going circumvention of the law in the present time than past offences under the military regimes — though it helped that there was considerable overlap at first. 

What then happened should come as a warning to all those conceptual guardians who have overseen significant bloating under their watches.  Impunity here suddenly switched to signify its own antonym* and the Guatemalan body entrusted with fighting it — FECI — has spent the last few months being the very paragon of carte blanche constitutional abuse. 

This flip to the obverse is surely not limited to Guatemala and this one concept. For example, many self-styled anti-racists in western discourse are increasingly finding it hard not to sound like common or garden racists.

Sin Pelos En La Lengua

Fernando del Rincón, like many Guatemalans, seems to revel in enunciating the surname of Rafael Curruchiche. (It’s a skill that CNN’s automatic subtitling system still needs to get the hang of.)

It would seem that, sin pelos en la lengua, it is easier to pronounce ‘judicialización’, a Spanish word I have decided to abbreviate to ‘judi’ in everyday speech, for my own sanity.

I’m not sure that ‘judi’ entirely encapsulates the nature of the problem faced by chapines today, or indeed its peculiar local roots.

At first I wanted to throw out something along the lines that its all rather like the situation would be in the UK if Suella Braverman were acting as if she were the real PM and as if she could not be removed under any circumstances — and then I realised I might need a better counterfactual analogy. 

 

Perhaps, it’s as if the deep state has risen from the depths and is operating on the surface with its gun like a German U-boat.

Consuelo Porras does seem to have become the de facto ruler of Guatemala, albeit as the puppet of altogether shadier figures, and as Dr G shifts into lame duck transition mode, it’s a situation that can seemingly only deteriorate…if millions of Guatemalans allow it to.

I may be wrong about this, but I suspect the post-war settlement in this country may be playing an important role in the way this is all playing out. For most of Guatemala’s history after independence the real power in the land was always the army. (Bernardo Arévalo has literally written the book on this phenomenon.)

Back in the 90s we used to take delivery in London of a glossy current affairs magazine called Crónica. In those days it was clear that the state within the state was personified by the Defence Secretary, also the de facto generalissimo.

Given the limited resources at the disposal of the elected executive, this was often more like the inner state that provided an often smothering external wrapper for the constitutional institutions.

In that era I always had a clear idea of the name and physical appearance of each incumbent Defence Secretary. I can’t say I have kept this up lately, and this has to be partly a consequence of the manner in which the military and its influence was deliberately shrunk by the peace accords of 1996.

I would therefore argue that this may have permitted the potential monopoly of weaponised, repressive power to shift across to the office of state currently occupied by Consuelo Porras. Her anti-democratic actions need to be cloaked in the codified mechanisms of that aforementioned barely pronounceable word, but in effect owe their exuberant shamelessness to a longer tradition of autocratic distortions to the rule of law in Guatemala.

 

Not so insólito after all.

 

What the millennials who aspire to transform this nation need to remember (history or indeed noted national literature can help with this) is that they are comparatively fortunate compared to previous generations. Not long before I first came here those named on the attorney general’s abortive amparo would likely have simply disappeared.

Arbitrariness has taken significant steps backwards since those dark times and the contemporary pattern seems to involve discreet initial stages of coaccion and coercion, with persecution less likely to involve blunt cruelty.

 

 

Spring is in the air...

Back in '88 I was supervised for a term on the subject of the history of revolutions at King's College by a long-haired post-grad whose name it really pains me to have since forgotten.

Decades later I understand that I am at least as interested in the apparently lesser phenomenon of the 'Spring", those moments of mass popular engagement with political change which, by and large, end up being smothered by an unstoppable reactionary wave.

If I were a young historian at Cambridge today, I'd practically kill to be taught by the current Regius Professor, Christopher Clark, whose most recent book charts the history of the pan-continental mass movements we tend to refer to as '1848'.

Clark asserts that the revolutionary springs of 1848 did not end in failure as many other historians have suggested, but then in Sleepwalkers, he said the Germans didn't start WWI. (In fairness, he pretty much convinced me on the latter point, though I might have been predisposed to suspect the French and the Russians before even starting that book.)

Mass popular protest usually commences after a single instance of perceived injustice. In Chile in 2019 it was a change to the pricing of public transport with respect to one demographic, in USA and its cultural clients it was the racist murder of George Floyd the following year.

The people on the street are never really 'the people'. The momentum in the crowd comes from an uneasy alliance between bourgeois liberals (such as myself) and radicals from the disenfranchised and marginalised groups. The connection between them most often a cadre of middle class poseurs.

In essence this is a heady mix of people with realistic and unrealistic objectives. There are those seeking redress for a specific set of grievances and those whose purview encompasses pretty much all available grievances; an aggressive completism that is often hard to distinguish from nihilism.

The movement starts to falter at the point that the realists get spooked by the often loopy and violent approach of their fellow travellers, and this then permits 'los mismos de siempre' to rapidly re-consolidate.

The Spring that Guatemala is experiencing right now is fascinating on many levels, not least because it seems to have arrived with some powerful antibodies which may help it to dodge the familiar pathological outcome.

Firstly, the primary goal, an eradication of corruption, is either realistic or unrealistic depending on which side of the bed one got out of. That ambiguity will remain unifying for a considerable time, I surmise.

And crucially, it does not propose any fundamental change to the constitutional order (as in Chile). The social order seems fairly safe in the short term as well.

Through the persona of Tio Bernie, this primavera is as much backwards-looking as forwards-looking, a deliberate re-staging of the mid twentieth century social democratic aspiration which was effectively stolen after ten years by the gringos. (No prizes for guessing why Izabal sided with Sandra.)

It's like The Return of the King, the concluding part of a trilogy which began in 1944, re-appeared with renewed fury in 2015 and has apparently now seen off the resurgence of its orky antagonists.

I use that term resurgence with caution because the action of the corrupt elite in Guatemala throughout this election year have, to an almost ludicrous extent, contributed to the outcome on August 20.

 

 

 

 

Miaooooow

In a matter of hours the Lionesses will be released into a Sydney arena where the poor Christians of Castile await.

And so let this be another one of those periodic opportunities to remind everyone of a few facts about this, the Royal Banner of England, aka the heraldic arms of the Plantagenet family, at least before they decided that the whole of France probably also belonged to them. 

Technically the felines doing their passing, guarding thing here are leopards not lions. (I know they do look much like lions, but this is one of those courtesy (courtly?) semantic impositions like referring to a person with a penis as a woman.

Also technically, only one of them is properly English. (I'm hoping it's the little girl at the bottom.)

The marque is property of King Charles III. The English FA use it only under special dispensation from the Crown. 

And it looks like the Crown can't be bovved to schlep to Australia on this occasion.

 

 

Purge-atory

La Ley Seca is upon us.

As part of Guatemala's supposedly benign twist on The Purge, we are all expected to be on the spinach smoothies for the next 42 hours.

And when the virtual sirens sound again on Monday morning, this land may feel like a very different place.

OK, Sandra Torres will have lost again, possibly by as much as 30%, and be crying foul, so in that sense, same old, same old. (One wonders if the hair dye will slither down her cheeks as it did with Giuliani.) 

 

But there will be palpable change in the air. A change that will nevertheless fall short of its full potential until Movimiento Semilla is more than a rickety raft in a sea of sharks. 

The potential margin of victory and widespread popular merriment may end up masking the extent of the challenge that will remain. 

This movement has demonstrated what a new kind of politics here might look like, but in the longer term there needs to be more than one exponent of it, more that one party committed to basic decency. 

 

There will be significant obstacles ahead, not least in the form of existing constitutional constraints.

Anyway, I've been on the wagon for over a month now, but my bunker is now nicely stocked up for the weekend...and beyond, into the brave new world.

 

 

Guatemala Untapped

 

"Ignorantes" is possibly a rather harsh way of referring to many of the people trapped in a localised rural economy with little immediate possibility for development.

Of these there are plenty in Guatemala, and ever since the system of adult suffrage was exported by the developed western world to countries where endemic economic and cultural conditions were less than ideal, there have been entirely predictable difficulties.

Arévalo sometimes talks as if corruption can be turned off like a tap, having pinpointed specific interested groups like organised crime and monopolised business as the root cause of it all.

Yet writing in March 1954 for the Sunday Times — as Vietnam's search for a lasting model of independence developed into a bigger war — Graham Greene suggested that any country with large numbers of illiterate peasants living at the edge of subsistence will not take well to a system based on voting, organised political parties and so on. 

 

"Any Government with a genuine programme of reform faces a blank wall, a time-limit, the knowledge that beyond a certain point lies the wilderness...In Europe, a strong Government is one with popular support: here a strong Government is a group of individuals with a common aim and determination, free from corruption and free from the necessity of clinging to office for the sake of the perquisites.

"Never before in Vietnam has there been a Government with a common aim; for every previous Govern­ment has included the sects, and there is little in common between the Caodaists, the Hoa Haas and the Catholics. One doubts, too, if there has ever before been a Government free from serious corruption, and certainly none where the chief Ministers were indifferent to the fruits of office."

Greene understood developmental issues as a chicken and egg conundrum. Change was needed before change could be imposed.

Vietnam lacked many of the conditions Guatemala currently blames for its corrupted state, and yet was still extremely corrupt.

Semilla's little shoot will only turn into a proper Spring if Arévalo is somehow able to kick start a developmental surge which outlasts a four year term and lays down conditions where institutions can offer an improved function, almost like they do in say Uruguay!

I suspect that "los mismos de siempre" in Guatemala feel threatened by him and his party not because he will get his hand firmly on the corruption tap (he won't), but because his programme portends a radical change in the way politics are done here relative to the disjointed conditions on the ground. A change that could be hard to reverse.

 

 

Mirage / Durante La Tormenta (2018)

Another enjoyable example of a genre that the Spanish seem to excel at — time travel or what I would tend to refer to as reality transfer.

In this treatment two cosmological storms over Catalunya, separated by thirty years, enable the transfer of information via an old TV which changes the course of events and relationships within a close-knit community.

Anyone who sat through all three seasons of Dark, also on Netflix, will either tut tut or marvel at the levity on display here.

Mirage is for that reason tonally interesting and generally rather successful. This is a movie which features a murder, by stabbing and followed by dismemberment, a suicide by jumping off a tall building and the brutal accidental death of a child, yet somehow retains the a mood close to that of romantic comedy / gentle childhood mystery story throughout.  

As in Dark the action is set in a suburban environment in which almost every character has been content to spend almost their entire lives. Indeed the German series flagged this up at one point as a possible loose end which would require tightening, but then didn't. 

Mirage features a protagonist in the contemporary stream who appears to have entered from outside and is the only character aware of the changes that have occurred, plus two timelines which are effectively shut down by the telly-messaging process, leaving one to ponder what actually happened subjectively to every other sentient being left behind in these realities.

In the German metaphysical mindbender answers to these sort of conundra gave me sleepless nights. I slept rather well after Mirage.

Huevonocracy

As I may have mentioned before, widespread corruption represents the ascendancy of incompetence, because all the incentives start to point away from excellence.

Or to put it another way, as Bertrand Russell did in the 1930s, when several forms of autocratic government threatened to devour Europe's freedoms…

Talent, specifically of the kind which might lead to positive developments, is always stifled. "since it is the nature of bureaucrats to object to all change except increase in their own power," And note, corruption is not even a prerequisite for this to occur.

 

 

Russell added: "All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular people to survive." And unpopular people inevitably struggle to survive in autocratic societies. 

The one positive we have in our own moment, is that the autocracies of the early twenty first century, at least in this part of the world, are not really putting in a full shift. Unlike the prepackaged despotisms which cast a shadow over Russell's generation, they are not expending the time and effort required to mould the population in line with their own preconceived patterns. 

They love power and simply assume that the rest of us will grow to love watching them hoard it and abuse it.*

Corruption has become such an end in itself that incompetence has swelled up from the bottom to the top and one is even less likely to come across a would-be dictator with any basic talent for administration or persuasion.

 

 

* So-called called plazas fantasmas could be said to represent incompetence in its purest, almost transcendent form.

Golpista

A non-Yank's perspective on the Trump indictments...

The first two tell us stuff about the man. Stuff we pretty much always knew. The porn-star payoff reminds us that he's a sleaze. The documents in the Mar-a-Lago loo accusation reminds us that he's a bit of an idiot, and probably corrupt.

But it's the case relating to his attempts to cling on to power — the only alleged crime he committed as a sitting POTUS — that tells us about the state of America and not just about the state of the Donald.

I think western leaders would find a way to work with Trump if he were somehow found guilty in the first two cases and then re-elected. But not the third. A very significant line would have been crossed in the community of western democracies. And I think we have at least one leg over that line now that Trump has been formally indicted. 

And it's hard to see how he could fail to be found guilty of conspiracy to deny every other American, no matter which candidate they had voted for, a peaceful transfer of power. Anyone even vaguely paying attention watched him do it. 

The whole world is a potential witness for the prosecution.

 

 

Paradise (2023)

Recently released on Netflix: a German made piece of speculative science fiction about a society in which the human lifespan has been commodified, indeed whole chunks of unlived time can be left as collateral for a bank loan.

It's a thought provoking premise, and unlike the movies mentioned in the previous post, pretty much satisfactorily explored in the plot, though I did conclude that it perhaps could have done with the extra narrative space of a TV format. Maybe that's the plan for follow-up.

Inevitably there was a point where I started to consider how a Hollywood remake might turn out. The additions and omissions are not hard to imagine. Some of the darker themes and outcomes would likely be toned lighter. The action scenes would be spruced up. 

They would also find it hard, I imagine, to leave so much that is going on in the background of these dystopian near-future versions of Germany (and the Baltic states) without explicit explanation. Indeed, whole new roles would be introduced simply for the purpose of exposition. The central couple would have 'friends' etc.

 

 

Infiesto (2023)

Infiesto is a town in Asturias that V must have driven through in the early noughties, because we do indeed recall soon after arriving in the next large settlement on the N-634: Oviedo.

 

So, not perhaps a stop and soak up the atmosphere kind of place. Yet this film set within this old mining community as the pandemic takes a grip on northern Spain has plenty of atmosphere. 

That said, the plot is largely televisual and unremarkable, and the drama is only partially redeemed by the context of early-stage lockdown. 

Overall I'd have to say that the thematic connections between the end of days mood in the spring of 2019 and the apocalyptic cult under investigation are not exploited nearly as well as they might have been. 

Last night we watched a Belgian film on Netflix called Noise which is basically a cure for insomnia. If not deserving of its own entry here, it perhaps is worth flagging up as another example of a European movie with under-exploited thematic potential. It could so easily have been a proper exploration of how so-called influencers are themselves reverse victims of the influence of their follower base, led to do things they would otherwise have no need or desire to do, solely in order to generate narrative in their existence.