Trouble at t' uni

Marina Warner, Alex Preston and Terry Eagleton have mounted the barricades on the streets of higher education to repel the barbarians storming the ivory towers.

The worst and most hyperbolic defence is mounted by Eagleton. High on rhetoric and low on fire-power, he doesn't stand a chance. But the other two have something more substantial to say and Marina Warner's contribution, a follow up to an earlier piece, is particularly thoughtful. But even so, some of their aim is awry. It is clear that something has gone wrong in higher education. I agree; I have lived through it. The question is, what?

First, let's get this straight, being an academic is a privileged job. Even given the difficulties and pressures, being an academic is still a privileged job. For a variety of reasons I took an early retirement. There isn't a day when I don't miss it. There isn't a day when I don't wonder about my decision and think about whether I could or should have held on. Here, in a Greek spring, I can see the attractions of a pension more clearly than I can on a wet day in Manchester, but being an academic is most definitely a privileged job and I was lucky to have been one.

Now, let's look at some of their targets.

1. The war on the humanities.
The main evidence for this is that teaching grant was removed from all humanities subjects and they are now funded through fees alone. However, STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) still get some grant. Sounds suspiciously like bias, but it isn't really. Under the new funding regime, with most universities charging top-level fees, humanities subjects got more money per student than before. The problem was that STEM subjects are more expensive to teach and the humanities are more popular. They were in danger of getting less funding. The conclusion was obvious. STEM subjects were at risk. The logic for any university was to pack it with cheaper humanities students. The market had to be modified. Maintaining some teaching grant was a way of ensuring that STEM subjects were not lost, not an act of anti-humanities prejudice.

2. Marketisation.
Because of fees, university teaching is now funded on the basis of the number of students universities recruit. Before the new system, it was funded on the basis of the number of students universities recruited.

3. Privatisation.
All that the new funding system has done is to transfer some funding from the state to the student through higher fees and loans. But the fees are still funded up front by the state and it is likely that many of the loans will be unpaid. There is no sign of the state withdrawing and it is still determined to try and use the tools at its disposal to shape university provision, often for the worse.

4. Bureaucracy.
Yes, it has increased and how. But, part of this increase was necessary. If you want to understand why, read the classic essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. For example, when I was a student in the late 70s and early 80s I had no idea why a particular mark was applied to my work. Now we have assessment criteria that can be used to explain why and to challenge judgements if necessary. Clear regulations and information benefits students, but does increase administration. The cosy informal arrangements of an elite system were convenient but exclusive. A mass system needs structure.

5. The rising number of administrators.
This is certainly an indicator of increasing bureaucracy. But what would happen if the number weren't going up? Academics would have to do it all! Administrators should enable academics to be academics by handling much of the paperwork. That is what they are there for. My main complaint was that I didn't have enough administrative support, not too much.

6. Instrumental education and vocationalism.
I actually don't mind if students get a job as a result of their studies.

7. The neo-liberal university.
I am not sure what that means. Neo-liberalism is a theory of economics, not education. If it means that universities are shaped by the dominant political and economic paradigm, what's new about that?

Many complaints consist of ill-defined "boo words" or of things that don't stand up to much scrutiny. But something is still wrong. Very wrong. Crass and poorly thought out policies can be worked around creatively, the real problem is implementation.

Clearer regulation was needed, but this much? An emphasis on helping students to get work and some vocational content isn't a bad idea, but it has translated to a sneering attitude to the arts and humanities and a mad rush to build prestigious business schools and overseas campuses that can sometimes lose money. The various research assessment exercises have been poorly conceived, mitigate against good quality work, are stupidly bureaucratic and have led to the under-valuing of teaching. And there has been a real victim, whether by design or by neglect. Part-time study and adult education have been decimated by the new funding regime.

I have overstated the case for the defence because I wanted to say that there was a rational basis to policy, however poorly designed it turned out to be. I have also brushed away a genuine complaint about the failure to think about the purpose of higher education, other than making a simplistic and dubious causal link between numbers of graduates and economic prosperity. There has been a real external pressure to turn centres of learning and community resources into diploma factories. But the main complaints from academics are about impossible workloads, stress, bullying, exhaustion, casualisation and the erosion of employment rights. This is the result of practice, not policy. And so we have to go back to looking at the old culprit of managerialism.

The exaltation of the manager is one aspect of the ideology, as is the cult of leadership (though I thought that rather fell out of fashion after the nineteen thirties). Both have led a trend away from democratic governance of institutions. However, of prime importance is bureaucracy. Rather than seeing it as either irrational, a manufacturer of "bullshit jobs," or as the product of an excess of zeal, it is important to grasp that bureaucracy is an instrument of power. It doesn't impose structure, but control. Structure needs administration, not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a weapon in the battle against autonomy and it is the restriction of autonomy and independent judgement in favour of institutional control that is hurting.

Stalin understood it well. Controlling the bureaucracy rather than commanding the support of the people is the way to power. We are not building neo-liberal institutions, which, after all, would be liberal, but proto-Stalinist ones camouflaged with a veneer of consultations and meetings, endless meetings, giving an illusion of democracy. And there is an irony here. Getting to a position of power does not require competence or even eloquence, all you need is a certain amount of self-regard and cunning. Once there, managers are protected by closed circles of self-interest and the decline of accountability in a managerial institution. At its worst, the results are not impressive. You get a lemming-like following of fashionable policies, from chasing after dodgy money to the current cowardice in defending free speech, whilst the most consistent effect is the rocketing of Vice Chancellor's pay, mirroring the cash grab in the corporate sector.

I know of good managers in good institutions. I understand the pressures that institutions face and the uncertainties that go with funding changes. These can lead to unpalatable choices. But the working lives of academics are outside their control in a way that they used not to be, whilst their managers are less constrained and better paid. It is not a formula for happiness.

Even so, even in these difficult times, never forget that being an academic is a privileged job, that university teaching can be a joy and that the intangible rewards are immense. I miss being one. I miss it intensely.

Twenty years

It is twenty years since Father Ted was first broadcast. Unbelievable. And this is a marvellous feature commemorating it.

What about Ted and reality though?

Some years after Father Ted ended, Linehan and Mathews ran into a real-life priest – always a sticky moment for the men who had portrayed Catholicism as a joke and the Vatican as an all-night disco party. Ted was intended to be crazy and absurd, they said. Nobody really thinks priest are like that. “Lads,” the cleric confided, “you don’t know the half of it.”

Satire is dead

I emerged from the fog of a bad cold in an unseasonally chilly Greece and, now recovered, picked up the Guardian. Or was it the The Daily Mash? Has the Guardian become a self parody?

First up was a strange rant about how the cause of jihadi radicalism in Britain is apparently, er, David Cameron. Oh. Well, he "got away with bombing Libya (with barely a thought for the poor Libyans ...)" - other than responding to the Libyans' increasingly desperate requests to bomb Libya of course, or, to be more precise, bomb the Libyan army that was busy killing them. But since then he has encouraged jihadis by calling "for the overthrow of the secular Syrian government" and "to demonise it out of all proportion" (with 200,000 dead, overflowing torture chambers and around nine million displaced I want to know what would be proportionate in the demonisation stakes). But he had a clinching argument. He insisted that we "remember, this is the same President Assad who was having tea with the Queen in 2006." Of course, I had forgotten. How could I be so silly?

So was this pro-Assad propaganda a Seumas Milne column or by someone from the SWP or the Stop the War Coalition? No, it wasn't a stopper, it was a former British ambassador. I think that the diplomatic service may need to look at their recruitment policies.

So, with a mounting sense of despair I turned to the next article. It was by Naomi Wolf. Please tell me, why does anybody publish Naomi Wolf? Anyway, it started off as a robust defence of free speech, even if her history was embarrassingly wrong. According to her, "Before 1857 it was quite difficult to get arrested for speech in England." Tell that to John Wilkes (1763), Francis Burdett (1820) or Richard Carlile (1819), to mention only the most prominent cases, and it would be helpful to know that the offence of seditious libel had been part of the common law since 1606. Never mind, the main thrust of the argument might have been superficial, but it is a fair point that government restrictions on speech usually fail to suppress ideas. Except that she too is writing about jhadi radicalism and suffers from the standard liberal under-estimation of an ideology that exhorts people to murder strangers and obliterate free speech with violence.

Wolf doesn't bother to get to grips with harm principle, that free speech can be restricted where it can cause harm to others (like 'let's nip off to Iraq, crucify people, throw gays off buildings and rape a few slaves'), nor does she really engage with the fact that most policy makers feel that any response to jihadism has to be multi-layered, combining a range of different measures. Instead, she offers the Mrs Merton solution - "Now, let's have a heated debate..."

If you look at what actually worked in history, you would not be arresting people for “Muslim extremist” thought or antisemitic cartoons, however unpleasant: you would be holding well-covered, widely translated public debates between moderate Muslim critics of extremism and extremist voices, or between Muslim extremist religious advocates and western rabbis or secularists – and tweeting, Facebooking, televising, and commenting on the debate in real time.

 Is this for real? Are you sure it is a serious newspaper? 

I put it down and stared out of the window as a brightly coloured woodpecker flitted between trees before settling on the apple tree and tapped at the bark, its bright red head moving rapidly in a cold breeze. It beat reading the Guardian hands down.

Making sense

Let's face it. Dali was an amateur.

It's very quiet

And rather splendid

Eagles

Responsibility

New Labour loved to lecture us on the theme of "no rights without responsibility". How about taking some responsible positions themselves? How about not pandering to ignorance? How about challenging popular prejudice? How about a modicum of intelligence rather than engaging in a race to see who can be nastiest to the poor in search of votes, regardless of facts? Any chance? No. Forget it.

Rosie Fletcher says it all perfectly.

“We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work.” Well, it’s cheering to hear that Labour are so doing so well that they feel able to turn my vote away. That is confidence indeed.
What Rachel Reeves fails to understand is that there is no difference between working people and not-working people. We aren’t some grotesque, Orc-like other, bred by Morgoth to take your wages from you.
There is no them and us. They are us. We are they. Working people have just managed to avoid the very bad day, or set of bad days, that took someone out of work.
 ...I understand why it’s comforting to keep us separate. It’s not that claiming benefits is bad. The situation that necessitates claiming benefits is bad. I did everything I was meant to do to be self-sufficient. I went to university, I earned less money than my work deserved in the hope of the next, better job. And still, I am here, receiving little brown envelopes from the DWP that even with a university education, I still don’t always understand. You can get ill. You can be made redundant. You are working today. You may not be working tomorrow.

Crime watch

Essential reading.

The coroner said that when David Clapson died he had no food in his stomach. Clapson’s benefits had been stopped as a result of missing one meeting at the jobcentre. He was diabetic, and without the £71.70 a week from his jobseeker’s allowance he couldn’t afford to eat or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge where he kept his insulin working. Three weeks later Clapson died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin. A pile of CVs was found next to his body.

"Ending the something for nothing culture", eh? I would prefer "ending the crass policy making based on a stupid sound bite conceived in complete ignorance of the lives of the poor culture."

Fat chance.

Women's suffrage

George "not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion" Galloway may be going for the female vote in a slightly curious way (Hello Ladies!), but he might have his work cut out. This is his Labour opponent, Naz Shah.

My selection isn’t about me, it’s about the recognition of inequality in society. It’s an understanding that we still have many changes to make ...

It’s been 6 days since I was selected, an amazing 6 days by anybody’s standards. I have been on a learning curve second to none. I’ve always campaigned against violence against women and have a deep understanding of the role of ‘power and control’, but even I have been taken aback by the ‘power dynamics’ of politics. ... The smear campaign that has started has been some of the most vicious and disgusting I have seen. But it does not scare me, will not change me, and it in fact fuels my passion for change more.

Even in a short space of just 6 days this tells me clearly that unfortunately 22 years later it is still a woman’s character that is attacked. Why is it that men’s characters are not questioned in this city when they stand for elections? For me personally every attack is a further indictment of why I must stand and challenge the status quo, it gives me more strength and resilience to ensure I win the trust and belief of the people in Bradford West and then this election to bring change in my community...

I don’t want for any child to miss out on a good education. Having experienced poverty first hand I understand how it impacts. I was the first ‘compulsory redundancy’ in NHS Bradford & Airedale in 2009 following the cuts/austerity measures. The fact that I am where I am illustrates how even against the odds we can create a better future for the next generation.

And you have to read her dramatic family back story.

This is going to get interesting.

From the wasteland

As tumbleweed blows through the ruins of adult education, with even the vestiges that still cling to life being eroded by harsh financial winds, it still has its advocates. Peter Scott is one, but his piece on university funding reads like a lament.

The winners have been young, full-time (and more privileged) students who want, or are able, to attend large-campus universities in big cities. The losers have been older, less privileged and, especially, part-time students who want, or need, to study locally.

The figures tell it all. The number of full-time students has increased despite the trebling of fees – maybe because no one has to pay them; they just have to pay higher taxes later. But part-time numbers have collapsed.

The situation bears all the hallmarks of a government that didn't consider the social purposes of education as they created an artificial market that was almost guaranteed to produce a cartel rather than thriving competition. Modern higher education is like wandering through one of those vast Tesco hypermarkets. The shelves are packed, but the produce is much the same and most looks unappetising. Now compare that to my two favourite food markets, Bury in Lancashire and Argalasti in Pelion. They may be smaller, but the variety is amazing. Local, traditional and seasonal products crowd small stands as the sellers shout at you as you wander round. The quality is great and the prices low. I always buy too much. Adult education was the one thing that gave universities and colleges something distinctive, innovative, local and cheap. But now, its gone. As Scott says,

Most colleges that took over adult education institutes struggle to fit them into their corporate strategies, except perhaps as short course units. Universities with once famous extramural departments take the same line.

It is very tempting to say, "we told you so", because we did. We warned over and over again that this is precisely what would happen if we didn't have discrete adult education provision. The university may be a supermarket, but it needed its market hall tacked on to it as well. Try and add its produce as product lines on the aisles and they would be swamped.

It is a classic failure. The government attempted to manufacture a market, but ignored the major determinant of demand - status. They worked on the idea that universities would compete for students on price and quality, not status. The government introduced variable fees and then found that they were applied as if they were invariable - at the top rate. This was completely rational. Demand exceeded supply and institutions wanted to maximise their earnings. But there was something else. Students were encouraged to view higher education as a way of buying a competitive advantage in the jobs market. In the era of mass education, that advantage comes through status as much as achievement. Universities reasoned that lower fees would indicate a lower status that would put them at a competitive disadvantage. The result was that there was no competition on price, individual institutions charged the same price throughout the sector and hoovering up as many high fee students as possible. All the Aldis pretended to be Waitroses.

Part-time and adult education, which was supposed to have been supported through variable fees, disappeared as everyone focused on maximising income. Part-time and adult students had to pay fees and when they rose to be pro-rata with full-time courses, demand collapsed. But this didn't matter to institutions because of their ability to pull in subsidised full-fee students from elsewhere. Social purpose played no role in their calculations, neither did the idea of long-term investment in their local communities to ensure a continuing supply of customers. Scott nails it:

The result is a mass system that is also monolithic, although riven by snobbish hierarchies. The so-called market is making it more monolithic.

V for Varoufakis

And who says the Germans don't have a sense of humour?

Half full or half empty

The deal was done. Syriza and the EU 'institutions' found a compromise. It is a big compromise on Syriza's behalf, but a bank run made a weak bargaining position even weaker. The old left were quick to shout betrayal and more thoughtful doubts have been expressed by Costas Lapavitsas and, in the UK, by Paul Mason, who sees the possibility of Greece leaving the Euro in a managed exit further down the line.

Making this type of criticism is far easier than managing the reality of tough negotiations with the risk of dramatic consequences if they fail and, for the time being anyway, Syriza's negotiating position is being supported by a majority of Greeks. So, here are three pieces by sympathetic economists in support of the deal.

First, Duncan Weldon stresses the importance of buying time - in defence of 'kicking the can down the road'. And he makes an interesting point, which supports his line that Greek debt can be managed:

Greece’s government debt stands at around 175% of GDP. That is, there is no disputing it, very high indeed. But concentrating on the level of debt is not necessarily the most meaningful way to think about it ...

In many ways, when considering the case of Greece, the most economically meaningful number isn’t the level of debt to GDP, but the cost of servicing that debt measured against GDP i.e. how much of the Greek national income is being swallowed up in servicing debt? That is a better measure of the burden of debt than simply looking at the headline numbers. The results of this analysis are somewhat surprising. In 2014, government debt servicing costs in Greece were just 2.6% of GDP. That’s considerably lower than Portugal (5.0%) or Italy (4.7%) and not that much higher than Germany (1.9%).

Measured as share of tax revenues, Greek government interest payments are now lower than when Greece joined the Euro.

He concludes:

The costs to Greece of the past five years have been enormous, neither Greece nor the creditors have covered themselves in policy making glory. Faced with an ill designed currency union the costs of the shock that hit between 2008 and 2010 was always going to have been high. Imposing extreme austerity on an economy hit by a lack of demand exacerbated that crisis. But a policy of ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ isn’t a real policy. ‘Kicking the can down the road’ was probably a lot better than the alternatives.

James Galbraith, who has previously written on the crisis with Varoufakis, takes on critics and cynics with both barrels in a trenchant defence of the deal. It is worth reading in full. He points out:

To understand the issues actually at stake between Greece and Europe, you have to dig a little into the infamous “Memorandum of Understanding” signed by the previous Greek governments. A first point: not everything in that paper is unreasonable. Much merely reflects EU laws and regulations. Provisions relating to tax administration, tax evasion, corruption, and modernization of public administration are, broadly, good policy and supported by SYRIZA. So it was not difficult for the new Greek government to state adherence to “seventy percent” of the memorandum.

The remaining “thirty percent” fell mainly into three areas: fiscal targets, fire-sale privatizations and labor-law changes. The fiscal target of a 4.5 percent “primary surplus” was a dog as everyone would admit in private. The new government does not oppose privatizations per se; it opposes those that set up price-gouging private monopolies and it opposes fire sales that fail to bring in much money. Labor law reform is a more basic disagreement – but the position of the Greek government is in line with ILO standards, and that of the “programme” was not. These matters will now be discussed. The fiscal target is now history, and the Greeks agreed to refrain from “unilateral” measures only for the four-month period during which they will be seeking agreement.

His conclusion is that the Greek elections could mark a sea-change in political economy:

Alexis Tsipras stated it correctly. Greece won a battle – perhaps a skirmish – and the war continues. But the political sea-change that SYRIZA’s victory has sparked goes on. From a psychological standpoint, Greece has already changed; there is a spirit and dignity in Athens that was not there six months ago. Soon enough, new fronts will open in Spain, then perhaps Ireland, and later Portugal, all of which have elections coming. It is not likely that the government in Greece will collapse, or yield, in the talks ahead, and over time the scope of maneuver gained in this first skirmish will become more clear. In a year the political landscape of Europe may be quite different from what it appears to be today.

Sony Kapoor is less ebullient, but highlights the concessions that Syriza did achieve and sees the value of working with 'the institutions':

Greece has the best chance it has had in years to make a clean break with the past. It may not be on the terms its people wished for, but on a number of matters the moderating influence of the “institutions” will actually make for better policy than what Syriza had in its manifesto. 

The reforms Syriza puts forward, particularly for the longer term will be judged on merit, not on their conformity with German diktat. The triple criteria of “fiscal sustainability”, “financial stability” and “economic growth” make sense and one hopes that the technocrats at the IMF, the European Commission and the OECD do a better job of applying these. If Syriza governs competently it will no doubt also win significant concessions on debt relief and the size of the primary surplus it will be required to maintain. Together, this could easily amount to more than 10% of GDP of fiscal space over its term to be used for much needed investment and humanitarian relief. It will also have a significant positive impact on growth. Whether the reforms look good for Syriza or not, they should be good for Greece and that is all that really matters.

I like his conclusion, it demolishes the facile analogies that were drawn between Greece and Weimar Germany.

It has been remarkable that defying history and developments elsewhere in Europe, the Greek people have, after enduring a great depression, elected a party that is pro-European, pro-Euro and pro-migration. This contrasts sharply with the rise of the anti-European anti-migrant far right in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere. 

That alone is worth celebrating

On totalitarianism

This article by Graeme Wood has been shared widely. It isn't surprising that it has been. It is a clear explanation of the theology of Islamic State. It is long, but is worth reading in full. It is also a critique of the way that journalists and writers have understood Islamism as being something other than religious. That it really is Islamic should be obvious. Equally obvious is that it is unrepresentative of what Islam has become in the modern world. There is a trap here that the article comes close to falling into. It may rubbish the claim that Islamic State is somehow un-Islamic, quoting Bernard Haykel that such views are "embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion," but it doesn't say explicitly that ISIS' fundamentalist views are atypical of the faith as a whole and the piece seems to me to come too close to an essentialist view of Islam as violent and oppressive.

It may be a cliché to say that Islam is a religion of peace, but it is certainly true for many of its adherents, some of whom are willing to take action to prove it. Time is a great editor and modernity has discretely removed much of the psychotically bonkers bits from the sacred texts of all religions, rendering them, in the words of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, mostly harmless (the qualifier is very necessary). ISIS reject modernity to produce something that is unexpurgated and wholly harmful. Most Muslims are horrified, not least because they are becoming targets of hatred from all sides and picking up the blame for something that they had long rejected. However, Islamism's air of authenticity, its politicisation of piety and its spirit of religious revivalism are an important part of its appeal, especially to a generation looking for radical alternatives. I am anything but an expert, but it seems to me to be a challenge to the liberalisation of Islam and, on a secular level, a grab for power.

Religious movements are difficult for secular minds to understand, myself included. And so we have mentally secularised Islamism in two main ways. The first is by suggesting that it is responsive. Apologists portray it as a retort to western imperialism, liberals that it expresses a hatred and even envy of enlightenment values. The former is contemptible, the latter is true though superficial. The second way is by describing it as an interaction between religious traditions and European political movements. The term Islamofascism is one way of rendering it comprehensible to a secular mind, as is Paul Berman's discussion of the history of death cults in Terror and Liberalism. There is much more sense in this. Just as interaction with liberal societies has been a stimulus for reform, it wouldn't be surprising if authoritarian and irrational western ideas have also influenced Islamic political movements. Yet, I am not comfortable with either as a complete explanation and Wood's article rejects them in terms of understanding ISIS. So, what if this form of jihadi radicalism has nothing to do with the west? How then do we understand it? Well, we can simply take it on its own terms and assume that they mean what they say. That is common sense, even if it leaves us baffled, but we can also use totalitarian theory.

Totalitarianism is one of those many terms that are thrown about as accusations without paying much attention to what they actually mean. It has been applied so widely as to render it meaningless and it has been used to conflate very different regimes as being essentially the same. I think we need to be much more precise. Seen as a form of government, Friedrich and Brzezinski's definition of totalitarianism as a six point syndrome (a single ideology; a single mass party; the use of terror; a monopoly of force; a monopoly of the means of communication; central control of the economy) has been the basis of most post-1945 discussion. Though useful, I find it limited. It is firmly secular and historically specific. It tells us nothing about the nature of different totalitarianisms. I don't think totalitarianism is solely a form of government, instead I would argue that it is an intellectual pathology and that the key to understanding it is ideology.

Totalitarianism has emerged on both the right and the left and I want to suggest that these ideologies can be categorised into four ideal types: secular, theocratic, modernist and traditionalist. They can either be inspired by science - or more usually pseudoscience - or by religious revelation. They can look forward to a new world remade or backwards to an idealised version of the past. These categories aren't enough though. I would add three additional defining features, which, when all are present together, make for a totalitarian ideology.

The first is eschatology. This is a belief that there is a final, absolute destiny for humanity. It is a much stronger concept than utopianism. There is plenty of utopian thought that is crazy and potentially dangerous, but utopianism is mainly speculative rather than prescriptive. It can be dreaming about a better world that may just be possible. And without the dreamers, would we ever progress? I doubt it. No, totalitarians are not sentimental dreamers, they know where we are heading and brook no compromise or deviation. They are ruthless because they are dictated to by destiny.

Secondly, totalitarian ideologies assert the importance of human agency to bring about radical change. They do not think that all people have to do is sit back and wait for some historical process to work itself out or for an act of divine intervention. People are obliged to take action, to struggle and sacrifice, otherwise humanity will remain sunk in the squalor of mediocrity. It is demanding and heroic. As such, totalitarianism is revolutionary.

And lastly, a totalitarian ideology is clear that this final goal, this state of human perfection, can only be realised through the elimination of certain categories of unworthy or corrupting people. Terror is not just an instrumental tactic for holding on to power, it fulfils our destiny. Totalitarianism is inherently genocidal.

Islamic State fits these definitions. It is a theocratic and traditionalist totalitarian movement seeking to return to the purity of 7th century Islam. It calls the faithful to action and martyrdom and condemns to death those who do not answer the call. It wishes to purify the earth through the slaughter of unbelievers. It isn't secular in any way. It isn't fascist. It is millenarian, an ecstatic religious uprising of the type that has occurred and reoccurred throughout history. And if we want to understand it, perhaps we could do worse than to dust off our copies of Norman Cohn. Countering it is another matter altogether.

Gentrification

The fashion started with politicians parading their football supporting credentials so that they looked like ordinary human beings, it spread into the grounds with the 'prawn sandwich brigade' of corporate hospitality guests, it was reinforced by rocketing ticket prices as clubs became the playthings of international billionaires and now we have reached the ultimate in gentrification - posh football hooligans.

One of the Chelsea fans behaving in a racist way has been identified as

... part of a small but “vocal” Ukip crowd during their time at Millfield private school more than a year-and-a-half ago.

Millfield charges fees of £30,000 a year. 

Now what was all that guff about the white working class again?

Payback time

The Eurozone crisis has focused on sovereign debt, the debt owed by states. But there is another debt crisis, private debt. Much of the expansion of consumption before the banking crisis was down to credit rather than earnings. Low pay has spawned the exploitative pay-day loan industry - respectable loan sharks. And then the pressure mounts, credit dries up and people have to repay rather than spend. At the bottom end of the income scale, they stop spending on essentials. Economic crisis and social crisis walk hand in hand.

So, how about this as an experiment for boosting demand through poverty alleviation?

From February 2, around 60,000 of Croatia’s poorest citizens are having their debts wiped under the country’s “Fresh Start” scheme. This figure carries greater significance when placed into context of Croatia’s population of around 4.4 million. Having endured six years of recession, and with growth forecasts remaining stubbornly low, around 317,000 Croatians have found their bank accounts frozen due to debt, stifling economic demand. 
Those with a debt under the equivalent of around £3,300, with a weekly income under £91 and with no investments or savings have now found themselves with a clean slate.

Deal or no deal

Both sides need a deal, but is there going to be one? We will know by Friday, because that is the deadline to stop the process that will lead to a Greek default. Negotiators seem to be going about it in rather an odd way. Mind you, the Greek finance ministry is led by a tie-less economist who quotes Kant.

One may think that this retreat from game theory is motivated by some radical-left agenda. Not so. The major influence here is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who taught us that the rational and the free escape the empire of expediency by doing what is right.

How do we know that our modest policy agenda, which constitutes our red line, is right in Kant’s terms? We know by looking into the eyes of the hungry in the streets of our cities or contemplating our stressed middle class, or considering the interests of hard-working people in every European village and city within our monetary union. After all, Europe will only regain its soul when it regains the people’s trust by putting their interests center-stage.

Meanwhile, the apparently German-led insistence that the Syriza government has to abide by the agreement made by the previous government would, in effect, nullify the result of the Greek election, which was fought on precisely this issue. It is a basic principle of Parliamentary democracy that a Parliament cannot bind its successors, otherwise there can be no change and democracy becomes meaningless. Negotiators have to face that reality.

Austerity has produced a primary budget surplus in Greece. It has also produced an increase in sovereign and private debt, social crisis, capital flight, a brain drain, mass unemployment, the rise of fascism and a 30% contraction in GDP. Every economic forecast coming from the 'Troika' of lenders has been completely wrong, every target missed. And now the Eurozone as a whole is slipping into recession and deflation. Is this a success? 

Syriza's negotiating position on economics is modest. They wish to run a smaller primary budget surplus (not a deficit), restructure debt and tie repayments to growth, mitigate the social crisis, whilst dealing with serious problems of elite corruption and tax evasion. The principle is simple - they aim to restore growth by boosting demand at the bottom though poverty alleviation and at the same time attack corruption at the top. It's not a bad basis for a democratic left reform agenda. But modest proposals sometimes have immodest aims. This policy undermines the elite economic consensus and the basis of decades of economic policy making. It won't be easily conceded.

There is something else as well. If it works and the debt crisis is eased, the fundamental issue will still remain - the flawed construction of monetary union. Here, Greece isn't the problem. It is Germany, with its excessive savings and trade surplus. This is beautifully explained in this neat animation from the Financial Times. All currency unions allow for transfers from wealthy to poorer areas and the collective sharing of risk, except EMU. In other words, the next crisis is built into the Euro. Even with a deal, it will not be time to relax.

Monopoly is theft

I never enjoyed the board game Monopoly, probably because I always lost. However, this article by Mary Pilon describes how the idea for the famous game was misappropriated. The article is drawn from her new book about the history of the game and the subsequent legal struggles over ownership and recognition. Charles Darrow made millions from it, but the original idea came from a woman, Elizabeth Magie, who invented the Landlord's Game thirty years earlier, in 1903.

She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

The story is well known these days, but this is a nice article giving a picture of an independent and creative woman, the sort of person that keeps cropping up when you research radical history and who, just as frequently, disappears again when you read later accounts. Just as intriguing is the way the game was developed to promote the ideas of the radical liberal, Henry George. George was hugely influential in his day and gathered a mass following in the latter part of the nineteenth century. If you look at contemporary writing across a wide spectrum of liberal and socialist ideas you keep bumping into two names who are relatively neglected these days, George and Herbert Spencer. Any intellectual history of nineteenth century radicalism should include mention of both, they often don't.

It's the symbolism that really gets me; the cooperative rules lost out (crushing an opponent is much more fun) and the millions were made by a man. It is good to see an attempt to reclaim the credit due. Shame about the millions though.

UPDATE
This is a nice little article about how a British version was published in Newbie, Scotland by a Liberal group who based it on Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. NB. Phillips was Magie's married name.

Boyhood heroes

When I became captivated by football, watching the Crystal Palace side of the late 60s, I, like most young fans, had a boyhood hero whose memory has stayed with me. Mine was Mark Lazarus. He had joined us late in his career after scoring the winning goal for third division Queens Park Rangers in the 1967 League Cup Final.

I loved his flamboyance and skill, but most of all it was his goal celebrations that made him my all-time favourite. Modern footballers have their awful choreographed routines, but nothing has even beaten Mark Lazarus'. You willed him to score, simply so you could see it again. After a brief celebration with his team mates, he would set off on a lap of honour round the whole ground, waving and shaking hands with the fans. The teams were lined up for kick off, but had to wait as Lazarus jogged round the pitch, milking the applause before taking his place out on the right wing. These days he would probably be booked for 'over-celebrating'. Modern football takes itself far too seriously.

Lazarus was the obligatory 'character'. Every team had one. They were the flair players, usually tricky wingers or flashy forwards. Fans loved them and some of the names still flow off the tongue; Frank Worthington, Rodney Marsh, Duncan McKenzie, Stan Bowles - great players who were never allowed the international honours their skills should have won them. They were distrusted entertainers in a pragmatic sport. But in those innocent days I was unaware that there was much more to Mark Lazarus' story and have only just discovered it by reading a fantastic football history, Anthony Clavane's Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?: The Story of English Football's Forgotten Tribe, about the experience of Jews in British football. A section of the book is a profile headed, Mark Lazarus: The Tough Jew.

Clavane also had his boyhood heroes. Growing up in the Jewish community in Leeds, supporting Leeds United and facing some pretty unpleasant anti-Semitism, both on the streets and on the terraces, he idolised three Jews who fought back.

"My number one Jewish strongman was Samson, whose doomed heroism particularly appealed to me. In second place I selected the biblical warrior Judah Maccabeus, whose followers, the Maccabees, … founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 164 to 63 BCE … And third was Mark Lazarus ..."

He quotes Rodney Marsh.

"For me the hardest player [of my era] may surprise you – Mark Lazarus the former QPR winger … He didn't look for trouble, but when it came his way, look out, Lazarus could stand up like one of the old-fashioned bare-knuckle fairground fighters".

Lazarus came from a large, East End family of fighters. He had been a boxer as were two of his brothers, one knocking out the gangster Charlie Kray in a bout. His mother gave him sound advice:

My mum always said to me that if anyone called me a 'Jew bastard' I should go up and smack him on the chin …

It seems he did precisely that. There are lots of stories in the book; Lazarus knocking out one of his team mates in training because of an anti-Semitic remark, getting away with punching abusive players behind the referee's back, including a big centre-half at Scunthorpe, and tales of how he handled some appalling crowd abuse:

During one match at Sunderland home fans called him a 'Jew bastard', said he should be sent to the ovens and informed him he was lucky to be alive. Those who visited the Den in 1971 will never forget the vile, anti-Semitic abuse he received. At Shrewsbury, Lazarus responded to racist heckling by flicking the ball up and juggling it from one knee to the other - then turning to his abusers and waving at them. The referee booked him for inciting the crowd. Perhaps it should have been for chutzpah.

And this is where there is another side to his lap of honour. It wasn't just showmanship. It was pride. His own supporters may have adored him, but in away games it was a way of sticking two fingers up to the racism and the hatred that poured out from the terraces and beyond.

A lot has been written on the struggles of black footballers for acceptance, but anti-Semitism is the forgotten, hidden racism and, whilst reading Clavane's book, I was shocked by how widespread it was in the game and in broader society.

The book is a classic example of how important sporting history is to social history. It is a field of human endeavour that is often ignored. Yet Mark Lazarus' story tells us so much about prejudice and about how people fought back. Lazarus wasn't religious. He is an atheist who married out, but he was never apologetic or furtive about his background, unlike some of the other figures in the book. He was pugnacious in the defence of the people he came from. He always was my favourite player and now is even more so.

Paperback writer

The paperback is released today. You can almost afford it. Available direct from the publishers, Bloomsbury, here or from Amazon. And it can be ordered from any good bookshop. It is also being distributed in the USA and Australia by Bloomsbury.

Populism

Syriza has a strong populist narrative, supporting the people against the oligarchic elites as the only way to rescue a crumbling economy. That line can be socialist or nationalist. So it seems curious that that the new leftist Greek government should position itself in support of a mafia state, run by kleptocratic oligarchs, with a crumbling economy, an authoritarian conservative ethos and an aggressive foreign policy. They seem to be joining far right Hungary in a pro-Putin nationalist bloc in the EU.

What is going on? I do not pretend to be an expert, just a person with an attractive vested interest in Pelion. So, here's another interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal via Marcus Walker (but don't read the comments! I thought CiF was bad), arguing that they are being driven by a tactical repositioning rather than an ideological affinity. But it is clear that there is a nationalist/leftist tension at work.

This, from Joanna Kakissis, is worth reading too. But at the moment, all is speculation. Only time can tell.

Uncertainty

Firmly in the hope camp is Paul Krugman:

So now that Mr. Tsipras has won, and won big, European officials would be well advised to skip the lectures calling on him to act responsibly and to go along with their program. The fact is they have no credibility; the program they imposed on Greece never made sense. It had no chance of working.

Maria Margaronis raises questions:

So there are very tough days ahead, and the possible price of failure hardly bears thinking about. This may be the left’s last chance for a long time, and not only in Greece. As a Golden Dawn supporter leaning very visibly against the doorway of a polling centre in a left-wing neighbourhood told me, “We want Syriza to win so it can be stripped naked and the people will turn to us. Our aim is to come third so that we can be strong in parliament.” As far-right Eurosceptic parties rise across the continent, Brussels and Berlin would be foolish not to listen to the message from Greece last night: austerity has been a disaster, economically, socially and politically, and people are fighting back with everything they’ve got.

Marcus Walker is more sceptical:

Hopes that Syriza’s win can trigger a political and economic shift across Europe are likely to founder on cold facts: Greece is small, lacks allies, and faces bankruptcy without rescue funds that Berlin can block.
Berlin officials fear that relaxing Greek austerity would send the wrong signal to France and Italy—and that it would play into the hands of Germany’s own populist upstart party, Alternative für Deutschland, which opposes eurozone bailouts and thinks Ms. Merkel has already provided too much largess in Europe.

Irate Greek is, well, irate at Syriza's choice of coalition partners:

I am incensed – INCENSED – that SYRIZA chose to go for a coalition with Independent Greeks instead of repeat elections. I believe that people like Panos Kammenos – the raving, racist lunatic who said last week that that “Buddhists, Jews and Muslims don’t pay taxes” – should never, ever be given positions of power. Furthermore, accepting people such as Kammenos in a left-led government is playing with fire because it gives public and political legitimacy to his xenophobic, racist, antisemitic, homophobic views and Greece doesn’t need more of that when it already has a neo-Nazi party as its third largest political force.

Only time will tell.

Hope and caution

“If Syriza doesn’t send the first person who tries to bribe them, even for a single euro, straight to the prosecutor, we’re finished,” says Kyrios Dimitris, 71, who runs an efficient food bank in working-class Nea Ionia.

I can't think of a political party coming to power facing a more difficult prospect. Syriza carries wild, extravagant hopes against huge obstacles. Disillusionment is inevitable and hard deals have to be done. Germany's economic stringency is foremost in people's minds, but there is also an internal enemy, the need to tackle not only the institutional weakness of the Greek state, but also the entrenched network of interests, embedded corruption, clientalism and the divisions that linger from the civil war. Maria Margaronis sums it up.

Yet that’s not the only thing that explains Syriza’s rise. Over the past five years, Greece has begun to change, and Syriza has changed with it. In the early months of the crisis, you were either against the troika or in the “reformist” camp, which meant you were signed up to the neoliberal agenda of Greece’s creditors. Now the party that rallied the crowds by railing against the troika has also turned its attention to what’s rotten at home. Syriza has reclaimed the idea of reform for the left, reframing it in terms of a fair, egalitarian welfare state.
 It has also promised what may be the most essential and most difficult thing: to end high-level corruption and cut the apron strings that bind Greece’s political parties with the banks and media emperors. “Even if we could, we don’t want to go back to 2009,” Tsipras said on Thursday. “We need you behind us to put an end to corruption, tax evasion, bribes and clientelist politics.”

There won't be miracles. Maybe there will be successes. But the consequences of failure could be profound.

Back

I am back in the UK and Greece is back in the headlines as the Eurozone crisis refuses stubbornly to subside in line with optimistic forecasts. This time the eyes are on the early Greek election and the probable win by an improbable left coalition.

This was an election that neither Germany nor the Greek government wanted, yet that is what their actions produced. Marcus Walker and Marianna Kakounaki, writing in the Wall Street Journal, provide a superb blow-by-blow account of how it happened.

The infographic provided by the WSJ also gives an insight in why Syriza are ahead in the polls. Taxes up sevenfold from 2009; GDP down by 25% since 2008; 83.9% drop in the stock market since 2008; 25.8% unemployment; 23.1% at risk of poverty. It is true that Greece now has a primary budget surplus - in the midst of a slump - yet the result of austerity economics is that debt has risen, not fallen. Austerity has failed, as it usually does.

Syriza is a symptom of what is happening throughout Europe. The support base of traditional political parties is collapsing. Rather than being a rebellion against the political system, it marks a rejection of a model of political economy. It is an inchoate intellectual revolution that wishes to re-establish Keynesianism as the basis of economic policy making, the model that mainstream parties had abandoned.

So does Greece herald a sea-change? Syriza have little bargaining power. EMU is secured against any Greek default. Greece can be isolated or ejected without bringing down the system. What Greece needs, investment and debt relief, is not on the table. It is hard to be optimistic, except that the flaws remain; Europe is facing recession and deflation. Who knows what a crack will open up, or what will emerge from it? 

Je suis toujours Charlie

Maybe I was a bit complacent in my previous post. There is a sense of desperation out there. How does a bunch of people who have idealised radical Islamism as some form of liberation theology deal with the murders in Paris? Of course, they could change their mind, but that might be asking a bit much. No, instead they have used three tactics to justify themselves to themselves and to continue feeling virtuous.

The first tactic is sneering. There has been some horrible stuff written about the people putting "Je suis Charlie" as their Facebook status or on Twitter. It talks about how using the slogan is false, easily forgotten afterwards, achieves nothing and diverts people from real action, or, more insidiously, how it only resonates because it chimes in with their inner 'islamophobia'. I'll tell you what it really is a sign of - people who know right from wrong. It is a moral spasm. Faced with something recognisably evil, people did what they could. Changing an avatar is possible, changing the world is out of their reach.

Secondly, they mount a diversion. I keep seeing stuff urging me to demand that Muslims should not be asked to apologise for the massacre. Of course they bloody shouldn't. Rupert Murdoch might have gone off on one and I know it is fashionable to apologise for everything under the sun (maybe I should find an Italian and say sorry for Boudicca's massacre of the Romans at Camulodunum), but they had nothing to do with it! Murdoch's a tosser. That's it. Over and done with. Now how about what matters?

Finally, after the obligatory hand-wringing, they blame the victims. Let's all smear Charlie Hebdo. Here are a few examples. Anne Norton, author of a pretty good book on Leo Strauss and a dire one on Islam and politics, writes:

#jesuischarlie might be meant as solidarity. But it calls for an identity bounded by bigotry. Charlie Hebdo is a scurrilous rag, willfully offensive, that defended the powerful by attacking the weak.

Has she read it? Probably not.

Then there was an unpleasant cartoon from Joe Sacco published by the Guardian. It was what you would expect from a 'yes, but ...' piece. It conflates political Islamism with all Muslims (just as the right do), puts the blame for the attack on provocative cartoons rather than on a malign ideology, Abu Ghraib gets a spot, it implies that only Muslims are attacked and that Jews are given a free pass, and ends with a sideswipe at Zionism.  Predictable and wrong in so many ways.

And here's a piece that at least tries to add some historical perspective about the long French tradition of scurrilous and offensive satire. "At last", I thought. Then I read this:

Charlie Hebdo certainly trades in such racially incendiary images; a cover once depicted the sex slaves of Boko Haram as screaming, pregnant welfare queens. In their defence, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo would say that they mock everyone equally. But in a racially stratified society, making fun of novelist Michel Houellebecq for his smoking and drinking is hardly the same as conflating sex slaves in Africa with welfare recipients in France.

Except they bloody didn't! That cover was attacking the French right for their accusation that refugees deliberately get pregnant to get welfare benefits. So they get raped by Boko Haram solely to get benefits do they? That's what Charlie Hebdo was saying. It is powerful, anti-racist stuff. There is another explanation of a frequently misrepresented cover here. Do these people think or do some basic research before playing follow my leader and repeating the same misinterpretations? Obviously not.

All three of these and many more are promulgating the line that Charlie Hebdo was a racist magazine that was, at best, apolitical and nihilistic, or, more commonly, racist and islamophobic, a right-wing anti-Muslim hate rag. How convenient. They obviously had it coming to them.

The only problem is that every word is untrue. It took an astonished, baffled and horrified French leftist to try and explain. Olivier Tonneau gets the critics' method spot on - "Charlie Hebdo, ... was often “analyzed” in the British press on the sole basis, apparently, of a few selected cartoons." Knowledge of French politics? Ability to read French? Clearly not required for authoritative punditry.

So, now listen to what he has to say.

It might be worth knowing that the main target of Charlie Hebdo was the Front National and the Le Pen family. Next came crooks of all sorts, including bosses and politicians (incidentally, one of the victims of the shooting was an economist who ran a weekly column on the disasters caused by austerity policies in Greece).  Finally, Charlie Hebdo was an opponent of all forms of organized religions, in the old-school anarchist sense: Ni Dieu, ni maître! They ridiculed the pope, orthodox Jews and Muslims in equal measure and with the same biting tone. They took ferocious stances against the bombings of Gaza. Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic. Charlie Hebdo also continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay. I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies.

And the money line:

This being clear, the attack becomes all the more tragic and absurd: young French Muslims of Arab descent have not assaulted the numerous extreme-right wing newspapers that exist in France (Minute, Valeurs Actuelles) who ceaselessly amalgamate Arabs, Muslims and fundamentalists, but the very newspaper that did the most to fight racism.

Let's be clear about what happened. A far-right death squad broke into the offices of a radical left paper and shot dead unarmed journalists and artists. They executed a Muslim policeman, split up and took hostages ready for a shoot-out. One of them went to a kosher supermarket to kill Jews, purely because they were Jews - I've noticed that fascists seem to like that sort of thing.

And all these leftists and commentators can think of doing is excusing the killers and smearing the victims. And when they do, they are not just betraying their friends and allies, they are betraying the millions of Muslims around the world that these theocratic thugs are killing. They are betraying the Muslims who try and resist. They are betraying the thousands of Nigerians slaughtered by Boko Haram. They are betraying the murdered children of Peshawar. They are betraying the people of Iraq and Syria currently being overwhelmed by oppression, murder, slavery, rape and genocide. And they are betraying the basic moral decency of those who go and stand in vigils, write poetry, display pencils as a symbol, and write "je suis Charlie" wherever they can in countries all round the world.

Just what goes on in their heads?

UPDATE
A website has been set up to provide translations and explain the political context of Charlie Hebdo cartoons in order to answer the uninformed criticism. It can be found here.

Aftermath

As you would suspect, the usual people are saying the usual things. I can't be bothered to dignify their ordure with links. There are the covert sympathisers, such as Galloway. Then there are the 'murder can never be defended, but ...' apologists, Richard Seymour is one of the worst examples - part of a far left that is slowly vanishing up its own orifice rather than face up to the fact that they have made a colossal error in allying with Islamists. The far right blame immigration - Nigel Farage being spectacularly insensitive. And, of course, there is the anguished reasonableness of the reasonable anguished, desperately seeking a therapists couch to confess their sins and accept the blame. But this time round, they seem to be in the minority. There are more and more pieces that get it right. I will just quote one, from the New Yorker. George Packer's eloquence nails it.

The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be “understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists. 

They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.

 Maybe, just maybe, we have reached a tipping point. 

Tonight

Stone me

The last voice-over of Oliver Stone's film Platoon always struck me as the ultimate in self-absorption.

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. 

I think that the Vietnamese might demur.

It is an example of a pathological narcissism that can only see the world as a reflection of the actions of the United States, an America that is villainous and malign. This anti-imperialism is the most imperialist thinking of all, it places the USA at the centre of the world and the rest are merely its accomplices or victims. And it means that any creep or criminal who opposes them dons the mantle of heroism. And in Stone's mind now, the latest champion of the people is none other than Vladimir Putin. Putin won an award elsewhere too.

Vladimir Putin has been named the 2014 Person of the Year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an award given annually to the person who does the most to enable and promote organized criminal activity. 

Putin was recognized for his work in turning Russia into a major money-laundering center; for enabling organized crime in Crimea and in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine; for his unblemished record of failing to prosecute criminal activity; and for advancing a government policy of working with and using crime groups as a component of state policy.

What a hero. 

Snow business

Just a reminder that we do have winters in Greece

Merry Christmas

This is a lovely article about a lovely unsentimental, sentimental song. Twenty five years ago. As you get older, time always surprises you. Another Christmas, another year. Have a good one.

Talking of Wales

The ghost of Christmas past

A ghost story

Telling tales about spooks and spirits is a Christmas tradition, so here is my contribution - a YouTube of a TV programme. It is a supposed investigation into a haunted house. It is terrible, absolute rubbish, it stinks.



My favourite moment is the one when, after the dodgy medium has been chuntering away throwing out guesses, the "historian" emerges from her eavesdropping and confirms that he has got a date right. Spooky! How on earth would anyone know the date of the English Civil War if they hadn't been told it by a dead catholic priest? After that they all sit in the dark, knock things over and scare each other. The only saving grace is that I am not sure how seriously all the participants took it. If they did, god help us!

But I love it. Because there are metaphorical ghosts there. They are my memories. This was my Uncle's house. I spent long childhood holidays there, together with a few family Christmases. It was derelict when he bought it and he spent the twenty years until his death in 1982 renovating it, embellishing it with some false flourishes that the film seemed to be particularly taken with.

I have slept in that four-poster bed many times and never been hauled out of it by a poltergeist. As for the "Cromwell Room", there were no flickering lights when I stayed there. And I used to like the cellars, they were light and airy with big windows to the front as the house is built into a hill.

There are no ghosts. We only have the science of human perception and a literary tradition. It is a tradition that has been associated with Christmas since Victorian times. So if you want to be seasonal, read the best, the ghost stories of M R James. But do remember they aren't real. And sleep tight.

The answer is ...

Back in Greece. The rain has been heavy and the citrus fruit is ripening. I have been doing some proper writing, so have neglected the blog. Sorry to my diminishing band of readers. To start me off again, here are three things to which there are no satisfactory answers.

1. If we want Members of Parliament to behave more like normal human beings, why do we moan when they do? I mean, who wouldn't play Candy Crush during a mind-numbingly boring meeting if they could?

2. If this country could make Fifty Shades of Grey a best seller, showing that we are perves and not prudes at heart, what on earth does the censorious establishment think it is doing drawing up an arbitrary list of practices that are to be banned from British porn, even if they are available everywhere on the internet? (And just what were those meetings like when they were drawing up their list?) At least it sparked the best protest ever, though only half the participants could speak out.

3. When we will see top football clubs treat their supporters with respect rather than an obedient cash cow? This report on the treatment of a Manchester United supporter who was the victim of extreme police brutality in Rome is shocking.

In the most shocking footage a woman in her early-20s is filming with her camera until a policeman snatches it and his colleagues wade in. Three hit her in the face. A fourth strikes her with his truncheon. She disappears and the legal documents filed by Imusa state that is her being flung down a stairwell …  

Trio Medusa went to Old Trafford to hand the woman a new camera loaded with goodwill messages, including Francesco Totti asking her not to be put off from visiting Rome again. “We would like to apologise for the treatment you received and we hope it has not damaged the opinion you and your fellow supporters have of our city,” Totti tells her. “We would also like to invite you back to the Olympic stadium and treat you as our special guest.” ...  

As for the woman who went to see her football team in the Eternal City and took a beating from the local police, she is Carly Lyes from Rusholme … and, when United did eventually get in contact, it was not in the circumstances you might imagine. In 2010, during protests about the club’s ownership, she lifted one of those banners that were popular at the time, saying “Love United, Hate Glazer”. She was thrown out and the club allege she was “disorderly”. Carly has been banned from Old Trafford for life.

The answer is a lemon.

A tribute

To the late Jeremy Thorpe. You have to be old enough to know what this is all about.



We had real political scandals in those days. MP's expenses - pah!

England our England

What would an English fascism look like?

I can't see it strutting around in uniforms. Nor would it adopt any of these fancy theoretical doctrines - they are far too European. As for all this modernism and talk of the future, no way would that appeal. Instead, its utopia would be smaller, more modest, rooted in the past. It wouldn't care if that past existed or not, as long as it sounded familiar and cosy. It would be self-effacing and modest. Fascism feeds on the idea that all will be well if one or other of a group of people are removed from our presence. An English version would only seek to get rid of sufficient of them. It wouldn't be one for ambitious, teutonic efficiency. Just enough will do. Others will be able to remain - in their proper place of course. It would be careless with democracy, it never had much time for it. It would expect deference, obedience and, above all, respect for authority. Our rights would be English, not human - whatever that means. It would have some exotic friends who do speak piffle from time to time, but you have to admit old boy, they do have a point. Its language would be uncomplicated. You would be able to call a spade a spade without any of this politically correct circumlocution. It would seek power without the glory. And above all it would be suburban. It would not speak for the cosmopolitan or the rural, but for the semi-detached sprawl, for respectability and convention.

And that is why we should confront UKIP rather than pander to it.

Back in Blighty

Greece has its eccentricities, but it would be hard pushed to match the surrealism of politics here. When I got back the news was dominated by the amazing revolt against the political class signified by the, er, reelection of the existing Conservative MP for Rochester. OK he stood for reelection because he had jumped ship from the Tories to UKIP, a party further to the right, but he is still the same former barrister and banker as ever. Then he declared that, "The radical tradition, which has stood and spoken for the working class, has found a new home in Ukip." Oh.

So, how did the Labour Party leadership react? Miliband sacked one of his few remaining allies for tweeting a picture of a house and spoke passionately about respecting white vans.

I give up.

PS. At least Andrew Rawnsley talks some sense here.

Tourism

I'm off to Greece on Friday for a short trip, but will return for a longer stay in December. I don't think this extra visit was the result of the latest marketing ploy by the Greek National Tourism Organisation (EOT). At first their new video was criticised for being hackneyed, all about mythology and ancient Greece again. Starting it with a picture of New York was odd, but fitted the storyline. Yet then there was the inclusion of a clip from Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Yes, those Olympics. Not brilliant either to show a beautiful night-time beach scene in Australia (!?!). This was followed by accusations of plagiarism too with the use of unlicensed and unaccredited photos. Oh dear.

All has been put right and EOT has issued a statement. It didn't help much and is savagely demolished here. You can see why Greeks despair sometimes. Even so, its a great place in its own way. Go there and spend your money. Greece needs it and you won't regret it.

Memory and history

I wasn't impressed by the original article about the First World War commemorative installation at the Tower of London, but all the indignant moralising about it didn't do much for me either. However, it did provoke a response and Jonathan Jones replied to his critics here. I liked it when he wrote,

What can make a difference is our historical understanding of the Great War, its causes and consequence. History is worth far more than the illusion of memory, when none of us today actually have a memory of being soldiers in 1914-18.

History is a collective memory, but is just as fallible and contested as an individual one. And that is where Jones goes wrong. He sees the history of the First World War as unproblematic.

Popular history has been invaded by revisionists who tell us that far from being lions led by donkeys in a futile bloodbath, the British soldiers who fought from 1914-18 were fighting, as the propaganda at the time claimed, to defend democracy from militarist authoritarian Germany. 

I believe this fashionable view of the first world war to be historically unjustified. I’ve been interested in its history ever since I spent too many hours as an 18-year-old reading up to win a history entrance scholarship at Cambridge – no, before that, since seeing that photo of an unburied corpse on the cover of Taylor’s book. The best current work on the origins of the first world war, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, is a 562-page analysis that does not pander to instant explanations. He demonstrates the absurdity of seeing Germany as the unique culprit and reveals the complex process of diplomatic folly that started the war.

I have not read Clark's book, but I doubt if it is the last word. So let's take apart that revisionist jibe.

The historiography of the war is a topic in itself. It started in the immediate post-war period with an account based on German guilt. The war had begun when Germany invaded Belgium and France as part of a co-ordinated attack on Russia. German culpability seemed clear. But then the emphasis on pre-war diplomacy was given a boost by the publication of diplomatic papers as a revisionist process set in. Socialists had always seen the origins of the war as lying in imperialism in general rather than the act of a single guilty power, whilst the idea of the war as a "futile bloodbath" was first propagated by the inter-war peace movement. It also had the unintended consequence of encouraging the appeasement of Hitler. The notion of the war being a catastrophic blunder by the great powers, an accidental war, was encouraged by Albertini's major study of its origins, published in English in 1953. However, it wasn't long before the debate was opened up again. An odd combination of the very right wing historian, Alan Clark (who admitted to, at best, misattributing the lions led by donkeys quote), with the pacifist left popularised the "futile bloodbath" argument once more and gave us Joan Littlewood's "O What a Lovely War" in 1963. But in 1961 the case for German culpability had been restated as well, this time in Germany itself, by Fritz Fischer. And the debate has raged on to this day.

Revisionism has succeeded revisionism from 1914 onwards. For instance, I have just written about the anarcho-communist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin's position in the First World War. He supported it, to the horror of many of his comrades. He had warned about the dangers posed by a German state unified under the principles of Prussian militarism for more than a decade before the war began and fully expected Germany to start a European war. Once France had been invaded he called for solidarity with their right of self-defence and military action to destroy German militarism. The idea that this was a just war wasn't "propaganda," it was a ferocious controversy, even taking place within the the revolutionary left!

So, this is no recent invasion by propagandists, but a continuation of an unresolved debate about the war. That there is no consensus suggests that we are faced with ambiguity rather than a definitive history that should be propagated by works of art.

Secondly, Jones makes a common error when he elides between the causes of the war and the experience of it. And what was that experience? Horrific, certainly. We have plenty of evidence for that. But the social history of the trenches is not straightforward at all. With all the correspondence and memoirs of participants we have a huge archive of material and it too is ambiguous. I am uneasy with any account that treats participants as unthinking victims, simply because so many of them weren't. They were driven by propaganda, certainly, but also by duty, family and a belief in a cause, particularly the defence of Belgium. So what was it that made people (including Wilfred Owen) return to the trenches willingly, even if they could have been invalided out? Was it duty or the intensity of the experience and the deep comradeship with their fellow soldier, a profound love that could be found nowhere else? There is evidence for this as well.

Again, there is no single answer. The war, especially on the western front, was terrible. But then war is not good, war is horror, but sometimes it is necessary. And if it was necessary, shouldn't we honour those who experienced that horror?

In the end, we don't have a single objective truth about the war and its participants. Victims or heroes? A necessary war or a crime against humanity? Cases can be made for both. So is it right that a "true work of art about the first world war would need to be as obscene as cancer," a kind of pacifist realism, or should it reflect that ambiguity, try not to be didactic, and provoke reflection and debate? Do the poppies do that? I haven't seen them so I can't say.

I want to end on a note of semi-agreement. The centenary of 1914 does not need politicised sentimentality, it does need history. The ongoing debate is its real memorial, the archives and library shelves a living memory. As for art, my personal view is that ambiguity and dialectics, informed by respect, should win out over certainty.