Matthew Carr's Blog, page 21

Johnson and Trump: That’s Entertainment

If there’s one thing that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have in common, it’s their propensity for lying.  Where politicians like Blair and Bush lied and massaged facts to realise specific agendas, both these politicians at least recognised that truth existed and that it was important for politicians to make it seem as though it mattered.

Johnson and Trump don’t care.  They lie about everything, big and small.  They lie almost as often as they open their mouths.   Both men have prospered not in spite of their propensity for lying, but because of it.  Johnson’s early career as a journalist was due almost entirely to his willingness to feed his readers with the same kind of lies about the European Union that were later mobilised to support the Leave campaign.

Lies have since been crucial to his political campaigning, from the £350 NHS promises during the Leave campaign to the more recent nonsense about kippers on the Isle of Man, Melton Mowbray pork pies or the brazen denialism in his insistence that No Deal will not damage the country.

Trump, as everyone knows, lies for as long as he is awake on any given day, and may well lie even when he dreams.  Even more than Johnson, he tells the most breathtaking whoppers without a trace of embarrassment or regret.  He has contaminated his administration with a pervasive dishonesty that makes Bush or Richard Nixon appear to be paragons of moral probity, while continually gaslighting and wrongfooting his opponents and critics by accusing the ‘mainstream media’ of ‘fake news’.

In effect, both men are prototypes of a new kind of populist politician and a new kind of political lying, in which truth and facts are no longer even basic requirements in political life, and being caught out lying no longer matters.

Why has this happened?  How have they been able to get away with it?   Part of the answer is that the journalists and media outlets that are supposed to challenge them don’t do it. This is sometimes because journalists aren’t able to gain access to the politicians they wish to interrogate – as Dorothy Byrne argued in her MacTaggart lecture.   But I would like to offer another explanation: that journalists too often simply refrain from holding even the most barefaced liars to account and don’t call them out for lying when they are lying, and not only because of collusion, timidity, or the potential loss of access.

Many years ago the late writer and educationalist Neil Postman argued in his terrific polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death that television was undermining politics, culture and intellectual rigour, by turning everything into a form of entertainment.

 

 

The result, he argued, was a continual desire for distraction, in which anything that was not instantly ‘amusing’ could be ignored or discounted.  In making this argument, Postman compared Orwell’s dystopian predictions in 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy

For Postman, the latter was closer to his own era because

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Postman’s book was written in 1985,  before the Internet and social media offered an even wider range of potential ‘distractions’, but I have often thought of him these last few years.  I thought of him today when I came across the following tweets, from ITV’s Paul Brand:

Just to be clear: I would really, really like Boris Johnson to answer our questions (and those of other colleagues who haven’t been

able to ask them). And we mustn’t let his distraction techniques baffle us.

My point is that his style couldn’t be in starker contrast to May.

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) August 26, 2019

For Brand, therefore, the fact that Johnson’s performative press conferences were more ‘engaging’ than Theresa May’s dire stage-managed rituals was more worthy of comment than the question of whether his willingness to ‘engage’ with the truth might amount to a willingness to tell the truth.

The problem is that Johnson’s ‘distraction techniques’, for the most part do ‘baffle us’ – or at least they seem to baffle many of the journalists who seek to get a grip on Johnson’s Harpo Marx shambolic cheekie chappie posh cabbage doll shtick.  The very fact that Johnson, unlike any other British politician, is known as ‘Boris’ – a name that his own friends don’t even use – is a testament to how successful he has been in ‘baffling’ even those who supposedly interrogate him

I have seen respected journalists grinning and giggling in their conversations with Johnson for no apparent reason except that Johnson was grinning and giggling too, and that Johnson -presumably – was an amusing guy.  So it is no surprise to find Paul Brand enjoying his press conferences, regardless of whether they actually produced truthful answers.

Personally I don’t find Johnson amusing at all, and Trump even less so.  These are dishonest, dangerous men, and I want to see them rigorously scrutinised on every possible occasion.  I don’t want Johnson to be ‘engaging.’ I want to know why he lies so often.  I want to know why so many hedge fund managers have supported his rise to power and what they hope to gain from it.  I want to know why Steve Bannon once wrote his speeches.  I want to know why he insists that No Deal will not damage the country when even government reports insist that it will be.

There are a lot more questions that could be put to him, and to Trump.  But it is alarmingly clear that their supporters don’t want to ask them, and don’t actually care about the lies they tell.

And equally alarmingly, when confronted with nonsensical observations such as Brand’s, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that too many people aren’t bothered about the lying either, as long as politicians like this continue to entertain us.

To some extent the brazenness and the absurdity of the lies they tell have become part of their entertainment value  Kippers, pork pies, Trump’s crazed and ludicrous rantings – all this nonsense makes us shake our heads and laugh or giggle as the next absurd claim comes and goes, only to be forgotten by the next ridiculous pronouncement.

It’s all good knockabout fun – if you like your dystopia marinated in gallows humour.  But politics is not supposed to amuse us, and societies that think it should may in more trouble than they think.  As Postman once argued ‘If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.’

It is.  And the unlikely triumph of liars like Johnson and Trump is another indication of how far we have moved from any conception of excellence, clarity or honesty to embrace the worst that our societies have to offer.

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Christian Petzold’s Transit: Fascism in the Present

Last night I went to see Christian Petzold’s Transit.  It’s a beguiling, enigmatic and haunting film, which cleverly inserts the history of the German occupation of France into present-day France, in a tale of one man’s attempt to flee safety through Marseilles by adopting a false identity as a writer.  Based on the 1942 novel Transit by the German writer Anna Seghers,  the film never refers to Nazism directly.

There is no Gestapo, no occupying troops or Nazi iconography.  The police the characters are fleeing from are contemporary French police who might be carrying out counterterrorist or immigration raids.  Apart from the technology – old radio sets – and a few elliptical references to fascism,  Vichy roundups, the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin and the WW2 escape routes across the Pyrenees, the film situates Seghers’ novel in a French setting that might be 2019 or some dystopian nightmare further down the road.

Though some of the stateless people in the film are Jews, others are North Africans who might be refugees or simply undocumented sans papiers.   All of them are part of a world in which everyday life is permeated by an omnipresent all-pervasive terror, in which fascistic police can burst into their homes, their workplaces, or snatch them from the streets at any moment.

This is the world that Walter Benjamin was once part of; a world of consulate and embassy queues, where desperate men and women seek a signature or a transit visa to get out of France that can make the difference between life and death, but Petzold resolutely situates this history in what might be the present or the near future.

It’s this deliberate mingling of past and present that makes Transit interesting – and strikingly pertinent to our current predicament.

It depicts fascism not as something freakish or abnormal, but as a quotidian reality of terror, flight, and precarity that can repeat itself in any era and any country, when men, women and children designated as aliens or unwanted outsiders are stripped of their rights and left at the mercy of a predatory state.

In the film the American consulate in Marseilles is the gateway to safety in Mexico and the US, just as it was for the thousands of Jews and anti-Nazi emigré artists and activists who found safety with the help of the journalist Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee in 1940.

Few people will need reminding that this is not the role that America is currently playing.  Just two days ago, the Trump administration announced plans to indefinitely detain migrant children arrested at the border.  In the same week the US government refused to give flu vaccine to migrant children detained at the border, even though at least three children have died of flu while in custody.

A fortnight ago, on the same day that Trump visited El Paso to pose with a baby whose parents had been murdered by a white supremacist with very similar views to his own, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 680 migrants during ‘deportation raids’  in seven Mississippi agricultural processing plants.

A video showed the 11-year-old daughter of one of the detainees, Magdalena Gomez-Jorge, crying and begging for her father to be released.  Similar images have reached the public before, but there is no indication that they have had any impact on an administration that is coolly and gleefully implementing a regime of terror and cruelty both at its southern border and inside its territory.

Commenting on the Mississippi raids, Jess Morales Rocketto, the chair of the pro-immigrant group Families Belong Together, argued that the arrests were part of an ongoing pattern in which

“Dismantling our asylum laws, caging children, and separating families — all while El Paso mourns — is Trump’s comprehensive white nationalist agenda in action. The raids are part of a broader strategy that is sadistic, cruel, and intentional, all in an effort to terrorise communities of colour while scoring racist political points with his base.”

This is exactly what is taking place.   Everyday hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States go about their daily business in the knowledge that – like the characters in Petzold’s film – they could be snatched from their homes or workplaces.

Trump did not start this process, nor are such actions unique to the United States.  Contrary to what many of Trump’s critics often assume, his more liberal predecessors also oversaw a similar regime of raids and deportations.   The European Union and Australia have established brutal and inhumane ‘border regimes’ both inside and outside their territories.

But there is no doubt that Trump has taken the persecution of migrants to new lengths.   And what is striking – and appalling – about the regime of terror that he has unleashed against migrants is its naked cruelty and sadism, and its absence of accompanying shame or regret.  Unlike his predecessors, Trump and his officials have not apologised for the egregious horrors unleashed by the administration’s ‘no tolerance’ immigration policy, let alone tried to redress them.

The result is that we now have a liberal-democratic government that separates migrant children from their families, without even ensuring that they are reunited with their parents; whose officials actually appear before judicial committees to explain that migrant toddlers do not need towels or toothbrushes; whose Border Patrol agents have told migrant children to drink toilet water.

 

 

It’s a government that makes even young children lie down each night in cages on concrete floors, that has not taken steps to prevent thousands of migrant children from being sexually abused by immigration staff.

All this is happening in plain sight.  In effect, Trumpism has effectively lowered the threshold of what is morally acceptable, and if he is allowed to continue in the trajectory, we can expect the threshold to be lowered still further.

That is why Petzold’s subtle reimagining of fascist terror in 21st century France is so powerful.   It’s not a perfect film, but it is an important one.  In fusing the history of the Nazi occupation with an undefined fascistic present it reminds us that the history it invokes is not a freakish aberration, but a process that can be repeated in many different contexts.

The film plays out with credits rolling over Talking Heads ‘The Road to Nowhere’, and as I came away from the cinema I thought of the world of Trump, Windrush, Salvini and Orban, and I saw the film as a dystopian warning about the worst possible future, and also as a fairly accurate depiction of the dystopian reality that many of the 21st century’s stateless or unwanted people already inhabit.

 

 

 

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No Deal: All the Demons are Here

There was a time when Halloween or All Hallows Eve was not much celebrated in the UK.   Now children up and down the country merrily celebrate the liminal point where the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve, where witches, ghosts and spirits briefly walk the earth,  when ‘Halloween wraps fear in innocence’ in order to let ‘terror be turned into a treat’ as the poet Nicolas Gordon put it.

This year’s Halloween promises to be on a very different order of spookiness, because this is the date when the entire country goes over to the dark side not just for one night, but for many years to come, when the UK willingly, even gleefully, embraces the kind of chaos, hardship and misery that no country in history has ever voluntarily inflicted on itself.

The lineaments of that disaster have been known for some time, even though those who favour this outcome have always ignored them or dismissed them as ‘Project Fear’.   This weekend, in the midst of a wet August, the UK Treasury’s  leaked civil contingency planning report Operation Yellowhammer brought the cold breath of autumn into households across the country and laid out some of the festivities that are in store for us.

Its predictions include the following:

On Day 1 of No Deal, 50%-85% of HGVs travelling via the short straits may not be ready for French customs.  The lack of trader readiness combined with limited space in French ports to hold “unready” HGVs could reduce the flow rate to 40%-60% of current levels within one day.

Disruption to Channel flow traffic will cause significant queues in Kent and delays to HGVs attempting to use the routes to travel to France., leading ‘ in a reasonable worst-case scenario’ to HGVs waiting for up to two and half days to cross the border.

UK citizens travelling to and from the EU may be subject to increased immigration checks, leading to ‘long delays’ at St Pancras, Cheriton, and Dover.

Reduced flow rates will cause ‘ significant disruption’ for up to six months,  which will impact on the supply of medicines and medical supplies, particularly medicines subject to ‘  limits on transit times and temperature-controlled conditions.’

Disruption will also reduce, delay or stop medicines for UK veterinary use , which will ‘reduce our ability to prevent and control disease outbreaks.’

Certain types of fresh food supply will decrease.   Though this will ‘not cause an overall shortage of food in the UK’ it will ‘reduce availability and choice and increase the price differential, which will affect vulnerable groups.’

The report also predicts that there will be disruptions to fuel distribution; that the ‘ no new checks with limited exceptions’ model at the Irish border ‘ will prove ‘unsustainable because of economic, legal and biosecurity risks.’ thereby leading to a hard Irish border; that ‘Disruption to key sectors and job losses are likely to result in protests and direct action with road blockades.’

In addition ‘Price and other differentials  are likely to lead to the growth of the illegitimate economy.  They will be particularly severe in border communities where criminal and dissident groups already operated with great freedom.’

There is also the likelihood that ‘Protest and counter-protests will take place across the UK, using up police resources. There may also be a rise in public disorder and community tensions’. and the possibility of ‘Clashes between UK and EU fishing vessels’ thereby leading to ‘Violent disputes or blockading of ports.’

Meanwhile ‘Low-income groups will be disproportionately affected by rises in the price of food and fuel; and small and large scale social providers are likely to fail as a result of ‘increasing staff and supply cost’ between 2 to 6 months.’  And ‘ UK nationals will lose their EU citizenship and can expect to lose associated rights and access to services over time, or be required to access them on a different basis.’

This is what we are about to inflict on ourselves.   This is what our government-of-ghouls is supposedly preparing for.  In accordance with the government’s ‘rapid rebuttal’ strategy, a bevy of useless and/or sociopathic cabinet members including Owen Paterson, Ian Duncan-Smith immediately hit the tv studios to present the report as an ‘establishment’ plot intended to ‘sow fear in people’s minds’ and ‘influence discussions with EU leaders.’

Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of no-deal planning, said that Yellowhammer was an ‘old document’ that showed ‘absolutely the worst case’.  In fact a senior Whitehall source told the Sunday Times that Yellowhammer ‘ is not Project Fear, this is the most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios – not the worst case.’

Despite Downing Street’s attempts to play the report down and emphasise its mitigation strategies, the Freight Transport Association (FTA) declared that fuel shortages ‘ had not been conveyed to them by the government’.

So Gove and co. were not ‘rebutting’; they were merely lying.

As if this was not bad enough, the coagulated composite of corruption, stupidity and malice that goes under the name of Priti Patel has promised to use secondary legislation to end Freedom of Movement on the 31st.   This astonishingly cruel and malicious decision will not only inflict entirely unnecessary anxiety, hurt and misery on EU migrants who have done nothing wrong except come to live here; it will also increase the vulnerability of British citizens living in Europe under EU citizenship rights.

Meanwhile the National Sheep Association have warned of the mass slaughter of livestock in the event of 40-50 % WTO tariffs in a no deal scenario, and some economists have predicted that half the country’s farms may go under.

All this ought to be a national scandal and a national emergency.  A government that is willing to contemplate these possibilities is unfit to govern.  Yet the Internet is awash with adverts from the ‘Party of the People’ promising to ‘deliver Brexit’ on the 31st and raise the retirement age to 75.  The sinister astroturf lobbying group the TaxPayers Alliance pours forth a constant stream of suggestions on how to reduce taxes.

The troglodyte reactionary John Bolton is courting our politicians with the prospect of a rapid trade deal with an unstable rightwing nationalist American government whose poll ratings are plummeting, and which is racing towards a trade war.

In short this is a political manifestation of Bram Stoker’s ‘children of the night’ – a monsters ball that includes hardright libertarian extremists, Little Englander nationalist zealots, predatory millionaires and billionaires, Faragists and Bannonite ‘anti-Globalists.’  These are the forces that are conspiring to wreck the country in order to rebuild it in their image, with the support of voters who, when it comes down to it, couldn’t stand having a Polish deli on their streetcorner.

Let no one be foolish enough to believe that a government made up of such people is fighting ‘the establishment’ or taking any serious measures to mitigate the coming disaster.   On October 31st, Sajid Javid promises to release thousands of new 10p bits to mark the occasion.   These ‘10,000 commemorative collectors’ coins will laughably be stamped ‘Friendship with all nations.’

It is difficult to believe that many nations will want to be friends with us after the carnage we are about to unleash on the 31st, and a country that is prepared to allow such a thing to happen is not worthy of anyone’s friendship or respect.

We have been played, suckered, fatally undermined, by political forces that we were not wise enough, or courageous enough, or decent enough, to stop.  And if No Deal unfolds as predicted, October 31st will not be the end of anything, but the beginning of something even worse, unless, even at this late stage, our politicians can find the collective gumption to bring this nightmare to an end.

And if not, ‘ when black cats prowl and pumpkins gleam, may luck be yours on Halloween.’

 

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John Bolton: American Psycho

Over here in the 51st state we’ve been hearing  and seeing a lot from US National Security advisor John Bolton in the last few weeks.  First there was a photo-op with our stupefyingly dense and utterly out of her depth Trade Secretary Liz Truss in Washington:

 

 

Then there was Dominic Raab’s visit to Washington, where the latest appointee to bring the foreign office into disrepute checked in with Bolton and Mike Pompeo to chat about the dazzlingly quick and easy trade deal that awaits us in the sunlit uplands.

Now the man with the civil war mustache has come all the way to 10 Downing Street to meet with our esteemed prime minister, the Right (Dis)Honourable member for Demagogue & Charlatan, where he promised that the UK is ‘first in line’ for a trade deal with the US that could be done on a ‘sector-by-sector basis.’

To anyone with any real concern for the future of this country and the welfare of its population – not a category that Raab, Truss or Johnson belong to obviously – these promises should be less than reassuring coming from anyone in the Trump administration.  But the fact that they have been brought to us by a dyed-in-wool paleoconservative like Bolton should set all alarm bells ringing amongst those who still retain any capacity for being alarmed by our increasingly dire national predicament.

In his analysis of American military and political decline Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning (2018), Andrei Martyanov writes scathingly of ‘the incompetence of the contemporary American political and intellectual classes, especially of their complete obliviousness to the realities of war and the horrors it unleashes.’.

Few people embody this combination of incompetence and obliviousness more than John Bolton.  This is a man whose entire career is predicated on strategic myopia, which has generally expressed itself through lobbying for American wars and manipulating people into supporting them.   Bolton has never seen a war he didn’t like, except the Vietnam War, which he avoided fighting in by joining the National Guard on the grounds that ‘ I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.’

An understandable sentiment, had it not come from someone who has never expressed a shred of concern for the Americans who fight and die in the wars he supports, not to mention the mostly dark-skinned folk who are usually on the receiving end of them.   With apologies to Tina Charles, some love to love, but John Bolton just loves to bomb, he loves to bomb, and no amount of destruction and devastation ever seems to diminish the thrill.

Bolton has often been described as a neoconservative,  but despite his associations with the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute he doesn’t really embody the ‘reactionary idealism’ that Jean-Francois Drolet has identified as a central characteristic of the neoconservative movement.

With Bolton there is no ‘idealism’, only the troglodyte reactionary politics which reach  back to his mentor Senator Jesse Helms.   What Bolton does share with the neocons is a taste for – or rather an addiction to – war as a primary instrument of American strategic power, coupled with an absolute indifference to the human consequences of these wars that can only be described as psychopathic.

Like most of the neocons who hovered in the slipstream of the Bush administration, Bolton also lies whenever necessary to achieve his aims.   As Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs in 1986 and 1987 he once tried to block the Kerry inquiry into allegations of drug smuggling and gunrunning by the Nicaraguan Contras.  He has lied about WMD programs in Iraq, Cuba, Syria – and of course Iran – which he is currently trying to provoke into allowing the US to bomb it.

In short, this is a man you don’t want on your side, and who never will be on your side unless he thinks there is something that he or his country can get out of it.  But  Bolton also has some other principles that are likely to appeal to some of the more ideologically-motivated Brexiters amongst the Britannia Unchained crowd.

Like them, Bolton does not think much of taxation, the public sector, the welfare state or any regulations that smack of ‘big government’ – beyond the ‘big government’ that makes his fantasies of unlimited military destruction possible.  He doesn’t like international law or the organisations that try, however imperfectly, to implement it.  As ambassador to the United Nations he made his hostility clear on more than one occasion, so it comes as no surprise to find that he doesn’t like the European Union.

In a 2010 op-ed for Fox News, Bolton suggested that Obama represented a flawed ‘European’ model of politics that was anathema to most Americans.  This ‘model’ was reflected in an unwillingness of European politicians to implement ‘cutbacks in welfare and other national subsidies’ that Bolton insisted were necessary.

Though Bolton approved of Cameron’s austerity measures, which he eagerly predicted ‘will cause sweeping revisions in the excessive expectations many Britons have from their government’, be worried that defense budget cutbacks might limit the UK’s ability to ‘sustain its leading role in NATO.’

Beyond that, public sector strikes and resistance to austerity in Greece and France only

emphasize both how hard it is to withstand the endless expansion of the state’s role in civil society, and how hard it is to roll back even failed and financially debilitating statist policies. Public expectations become entrenched, citizens become dependent and attached to their benefits, which come to be seen as “entitlements,” and the steps necessary to redress the balance can be painful.

You bet it can.  But faced with these outcomes, Bolton exhorted Americans to reject Obama’s ‘massive European-style health-care reform, and his extravagant Federal spending increases’ which risked turning the US ‘to descend further into the status of European social democracies like France and Greece.’

All this will be music to the ears of the ideologues in Johnson’s hard right cabinet, who share his antipathy to social democracy, taxation and the European Union.  They won’t ask why a national security advisor with such a dismal record has become the Trump administration’s pointman in discussions about trade.

On the contrary, they will prattle on about Trump’s ‘warmth’ towards us and the ‘special relationship’, and ‘shared language and culture’ etc, and how lovely it all is.

Beyond the waffle and the propaganda, there is a nastier and more pathetic reality:  of a desperate and foolish island whose leaders have abandoned a trade bloc in which the UK had genuine influence, in order to place itself at the mercy of a predatory superpower; of trade negotiations between rightwing Thatcherites on both sides of the Atlantic linked by a common desire to rollback the welfare state still further and destroy and sell off the NHS; of an international nationalist assault on the European Union and any other international institutions seen as brakes on American military and/or political and economic power.

That’s what being ‘first in line’ means.  That’s why the dead-eyed psycho with the walrus mustache is over here to give us a big hug.  He would like us to believe that any trade negotiations will be a nice easy deal cooked up by two friends acting in their mutual interests.

But for Bolton there are only American interests.  And from where I’m standing Johnson, Raab and co look like the crew of a sinking ship running to the edge of the boat, and if you look closely beneath the hairy curtain that hangs down over John Bolton’s benevolent smile, you might just see the teeth of the shark waiting to swallow us up.

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From Brexit to Trump: The Incredible Shrinking Countries

I’m not much of a fan of the concept of ‘national greatness’.  It’s not I don’t think that nations can have qualities and achievements worthy of pride and admiration.  But the concept of national greatness is almost always steeped in a collective narcissism and national chauvinism that I find unedifying and inherently repellent.

Its proponents often seek some kind of moral uplift from their imagined greatness, and take a peculiar satisfaction from looking down on the rest of the world and imagining that everyone else is looking up to them.

Generally speaking, national greatness is associated first of all with military power, followed by various subsidiary markers such as international political influence, economic strength, diplomatic reach and cultural ‘soft power’.  Countries that believe themselves to be great may not engage in wars and wars of conquest, but they do like to dominate others, and this ability is often accompanied by a sense of moral and political exceptionalism and the belief that their country is ‘destined’ to be great.

Great nations hate the ordinary and mundane.  Even when they feel their greatness  waning, they are often desperate to cling onto it.

Some great nations fail to understand – often till too late – that they aren’t great anymore and they no longer have the power and influence they once had.  The greater they were, the harder it is to accept that they must now take their place in a world which they can no longer bend to their will.

Where they once dictated to others, these formerly great nations must reluctantly negotiate with their partners and competitors on an equal basis.  They must operate as members of international organisations, trade blocs, regional networks based on pooled sovereignty, security organisations which operate according to shared rules intended to benefit all their members, rather than any one country.

Smart countries can make this adjustment.  Others may experience the absence of greatness as an unpleasant shock.   Every nation that has once been great contains sections of its population that looks back towards old empires, great wars and battles and moments of national triumph or heroism.

Stripped of any counterbalancing factors or acknowledgements of less uplifting historical realities, the memory of their lost greatness will cast a warm sunset glow, that makes the present look thin and uninspiring, leading to a dangerous nostalgia that can easily rot a nation’s brain if it goes unchecked.

In the last three years America and the United Kingdom have provided object lessons in how toxic and dangerous such illusions can be.  The idea of making America great ‘again’ is not entirely new.  As far back as the 1980s the Reagan administration’s massive rearmament program, and its huge investment in global covert operations were intended to reverse American strategic defeats in Iran, Vietnam, Africa and Central America.

In the aftermath of the Cold War ‘victory’, American conservatives were often overcome by a sense of anticlimax the sense that the ‘indispensable nation’ might be losing its position of global leadership.  In 1997 the self-proclaimed ‘National Greatness Conservative’ David Brooks wrote a piece in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, in which he argued ‘The quest for national greatness defines the word ” American” and makes it new for every generation.’

To some extent, the ‘reactionary idealism’ of the neoconservative movement, and its lobbying groups like the Project for the New American Century were intended to preserve and extend American ‘pre-eminence’ into the 21st century.  The unilateral hubris with which the Bush administration responded to the 9/11 atrocities were also part of that same quest for greatness.

Even before Obama attempted to tilt America back towards a more multilateral position,  America had failed to translate its unrivaled military power into coherent strategic outcomes, and its moral reputation was tarnished by a trail of illegal wars, torture, and the violence, corruption and epic incompetence of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

None of this diminished Brooks’ belief in his ‘national greatness agenda.’    In 2010 he looked forward once again to a movement whose ‘goal will be unapologetic: preserving American pre-eminence. It will preserve America’s standing in the world on the grounds that this supremacy is a gift to our children and a blessing for the earth.’

Today America has that movement, in the shape of Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ administration, but that outcome has already fallen some way short of a ‘blessing for the earth.’

Rather than ‘preserve America’s standing in the world’, Trump has alienated America’s allies through his incompetence, his bullying unilateralism, his disdain for democracy,  his fondness for dictators and authoritarian rulers and autocrats, his crass vulgarity, his tone-deaf viciousness, and his sheer lack of understanding of the basic tenets of diplomacy and geopolitics.

All this diminished the ‘soft power’ that once took America to places its military couldn’t reach.  At the same time, as India and China have proven during the last week, Trump has been entirely unable to impose its will on a multilateral world that no longer feels beholden to American economic and military power.

In attempting to make America great again, Trump has actively diminished his country’s standing and reputation.  A similar dynamic is underway in the UK, where Brexiters continue to pursue a more distant ‘greatness’ that was variously expressed in nostalgia for the British empire, a romanticised vision of World War 2,  or a stupefyingly weird conflation between Francis Drake and 21st century capitalism that was imagined to be equally ‘buccaneering.’

Three years after the referendum, these inane ahistorical delusions have brought the country to its knees.   Brexit has paralysed the nation’s politics and polarised the country to the point where a national consensus on the way forward is now impossible, and a tiny minority of the population is attempting to impose a damaging departure from the EU in what amounts to a constitutional coup.

Having withdrawn from a trade bloc that it voluntarily joined and helped to shape, the UK is now looking to negotiate a trade deal with a  predatory presidency that will inevitably dictate the terms in any forthcoming discussions.  Brexit has also paved their way for the breakup of the United Kingdom –   an outcome that may be welcomed by the Scots and the Irish, but was certainly not what the referendum promised.

A country that would elect a political monstrosity like Trump to power is not as great as it thinks it is.  And a country that detaches itself from a trading bloc with no alternative arrangements in place is either extremely foolish or narcissistically fanatical.

Whatever the explanation, the UK’s global reputation has been shredded, and no amount of ‘optimism’ or ‘belief’ can put it back together.

So Trumpism and Brexit ought to be cautionary tales for other countries that seek to become ‘great again’.   They ought to teach us that delusions of national grandeur can never survive any serious encounter with reality,  and that certain periods of ‘greatness’ once gone, cannot be recovered.

In the meantime we can only hope that these shrunken, diminished countries will learn, one day, that being ‘ordinary’ is not such a bad thing, and instead of trying to make themselves great again they might try to learn to cultivate decency, justice, competence, humility, and the common good.

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Writing and Terror: Peter Herman’s Unspeakable

From the so-called ‘anarchist terror’ of the late 19th century to al Qaeda and Islamic State, the history of terrorism is filled with episodes in which governments have overreacted to  terrorist violence.  Emergency antiterrorist legislation, military tribunals, wars and quasi-militarisation, extra-legal procedures, torture, administrative detention, national security hysteria – all these responses have been repeated throughout the relatively short period in which terrorism was first identified as a unique category of violence in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This uniqueness – and the tendency towards overreaction that has accompanied it – has often been shaped as much by what is said and written about terrorism as it has by the actual acts of violence that have given rise to terrorist emergencies. Throughout the last 140-odd years, governments, politicians and the media have routinely depicted terrorism as an activity beyond comprehension,  whose protagonists are moral aliens rather than human beings or rational actors.

Such representations are partly due to political convenience: it suits governments embroiled in violent political conflicts to deny that such conflicts exist and present their adversaries as perpetrators of ‘senseless’ violence worthy only of ‘counterterrorist’ eradication.  Governments seeking to generate popular support for antiterrorist emergencies and states of exception often seek  to portray terrorism a violent tautology, practiced by terrorist perpetrators with no discernible aims or motives except to terrorise.

While it may be tempting at times to agree with such conclusions, faced with the merciless and often savage acts of brutality carried out by terrorists, it’s a temptation that should be resisted.  Not only is it politically foolish to accept official depictions of terrorism at face value, even when it is glaringly obvious that its perpetrators have motives, objectives and a context that can be understood, it’s also intellectually incoherent to deny the possibility of such understanding.

After all, we accept the right of historians and social scientists to write about the motives, context and rationale for Nazi mass murderers, without assuming that such depictions translate into sympathy for their actions.    Yet too often, we prefer to represent terrorism as a form of insanity and a mysterious manifestation of evil that is so contagious than any public discussion of its protagonists and their motives and context is akin to some form of moral collusion.

To say that this is not helpful doesn’t even begin to describe it.   It’s refreshing and even thrilling therefore, to read a book like Peter Herman’s forthcoming Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11, which challenges such representations.  A professor of English literature at San Diego State University with a distinguished track record of literary scholarship, Herman has turned his attention to the depictions of terrorism in fiction, and the different ways in which  novelists, filmmakers and playwrights ‘create works predicated on dramatic conflict, which very easily maps onto providing multiple perspectives on terrorism.’

Taking his cue from the British literary scholar Christopher Ricks’s observations about Bob Dylan that ‘ One of the ways in which art is invaluable is by giving us sympathetic access to systems of belief that are not our own,’ Herman traces the treatment of terrorism in the cultural imagination from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 and white nationalist terrorism, and explores the different ways in which writers of fiction have provided such ‘sympathetic access’ to terrorists and terrorism in different epochs.

There are innumerable films, tv shows and novels about terrorists and terrorism, most of which are entirely forgettable, but Herman has performed an invaluable service in revisiting books, films and plays in which terrorism has been represented with real artistic complexity and nuance.

Whether discussing the impact of the Gunpowder Plot on MacBeth, the anarchist novels of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, nineteenth century Irish novels on the Fenians, Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, Spielberg’s Munich,  or Don Delillo’s ‘9/11 novel’ Falling Man, Herman casts a new light on the fictions he explores, and also on the historical representations of terrorism itself.

These fictions are counterpoised with historical quotations on the ‘unspeakability’ of terrorism in different epochs, in which Herman traces the striking continuities in the way that terrorism has been officially written about and described.  In citing the 1605 Gunpowder Plot as an example of terrorism avant la lettre, Herman quotes from King James’s Sergeant at Law Sir Edward Phillips, who described the plot as

Treason; but of such horror, and monstrous nature, that before now, The Tongue of man never delivered.  The Ear of man never heard. The Heart of man never conceited.  Nor the malice of hellish or earthly devil ever practiced.

Herman shows how this essential template of unspeakability and ‘inexpressibility’ has been repeated again and again, whether in nineteenth century depictions of the Fenians (‘ a course of scoundrelism for which barbarism has no parallel, and the English tongue no words strong enough to describe.’) or the destruction of the World Trade Centre to 9/11, which the New York Times described an example of ‘the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable’.

For Herman writers of fiction ‘have always offered us the tools for a better understanding of terrorism.  We just need to pay attention.’  This scholarly, insightful, and illuminating book gives these writers their due attention, and it also shows how the one-dimensional representations it critiques have too often obscured our historical understanding of terrorism, and too often left us dangerously blind in one eye.

 

 

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Ahmet Altan’s Freedom Song

There have been many times in my life, particularly during these last few years, when I have doubted my vocation as a writer.  Faced with the rise of populism, ‘post-truth’ politics, churnalism, nationalist demagoguery, and the shallowness and hysteria that so often underpins 21st century politics, it’s tempting in one’s more despondent moments to conclude that writing, reading and even thinking itself have become obsolete and irrelevant activities.

Of course I don’t spend too much time dwelling on such possibilities, because even if all this was true, writing isn’t something you just walk away from, and a part of me continues to believe that reading is an essential and liberating human activity that will always open the world for us, and that therefore readers need writers as much as writers need readers.

Nevertheless, the doubts are always there, and even though you learn to work with them, it’s something to celebrate when you come across a book that reminds you unequivocally why we do this and why we need to keep doing it.

One such book is the marvellous collection of essays I Will Never See the World Again, by the Turkish novelist and journalist Ahmet Altan.  To those who don’t know – and I didn’t before this book was brought to my attention – Altan was arrested with his brother, the economist Mehmet Altan, shortly after the aborted military coup in July 2016, which attempted to topple the authoritarian government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Mehmet brothers were amongst the more than 100, 000 people arrested in the aftermath of the coup, in what rapidly became an ongoing purge of any opposition to Erdogan’s government.  The Altan brothers were initially accused of disseminating ‘subliminal messages suggestive of a coup attempt’  during a television panel interview on the night before the coup.  This ludicrous charge, which Altan has rightly described as a ‘legal monstrosity’, was subsequently changed to the charge of ‘attempting to overthrow the constitutional order’, with further charges of ‘insulting the president’ and ‘conducting propaganda for a terrorist organisation.’

No evidence has ever been produced to justify any of these charges, which appear to have more to do with the liberal-left politics of the Altan brothers and their defence of human rights, Kurdish rights, and Ahmet Altan’s recognition of the Armenian genocide.  In February 2018 the two brothers were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment without parole – a brutal sentence that speaks volumes about the domestication and subjugation of the Turkish judiciary under Erdogan’s heavy hand.

Deprived of his freedom, his books, his family and friends, and his readership, Altan has responded to this appalling fate with a collection of handwritten essays that he released through his agent, and which have now been published in various languages.

There are many reasons to admire I Will Never See the World Again.  Despite its title, despair is conspicuously absent from a collection of essays that overflows with humour and humanity, sharp observation, lyricism, and powerful insights into writing, fiction, and the pleasures of the imagination.

Written in bleakest adversity, these pieces contain the sharply-drawn portraits and descriptions of guards, fellow-prisoners and guards that you would expect to find in ‘prison literature’, but even these descriptions are infused with the thoughtfulness and psychological complexity of a novelist who responds to his predicament not simply as a man unjustly deprived of his life and freedom but as a writer.

As Altan observes

Add the sentence ‘I write these words from a prison cell’ to any narrative and you will add tension and vitality, a frightening voice that reaches out from a dark and mysterious world, the brave stance of the plucky underdog and an ill-concealed call for mercy…Before you start playing the drums of mercy for me, listen to what I tell you.

What does Altan want to tell us?

I am writing this in a prison cell.

But I am not in prison.

I am a writer.

I am neither where I am nor where I am not.

You can imprison me but you cannot

keep me here.

Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls

with ease.

Throughout these pieces, Altan constantly makes us aware of the truth of this.  Whether reflecting on Tolstoy’s psychological acuity, his own childhood discovery of reading and the magic of words, or the craft of the novelist, his writing is both an act of quiet defiance and a triumphant affirmation of writing and reading as essential acts of liberation – even in the face of an absurd and overwheening tyranny.

These words will be remembered long after that tyranny has gone.  Last month the charges against the Altan brothers were rejected by the Turkish Supreme Court of Appeals on the grounds of ‘ a lack of sufficient and credible evidence.’   Both of them are still in prison and may face new charges of ‘aiding a terrorist organisation without being a member.’

All those who wish to prevent Turkey’s ongoing slide into a populist autocracy should call for the brothers to be freed immediately and for all charges to be dropped.   Because few things demonstrate the absence of democracy and justice more clearly than the imprisonment of people simply because of what they think and write.   As Altan writes of his own response to his imprisonment:

Like Odysseus facing Poseidon’s fury, I had to use all my strength to survive, and for that I had to focus not on the storm but on what was within my capacity.  I had to write my own Odyssey in this dark cell.

To save oneself from the monstrous waves, the sirens and the man-eating Cyclopses, one must resist and fight.

There was the storm and there was me.

We were going to fight.

Altan does exactly that, and these essays should remind us that all of us face the storm, and that we should fight it too, and if we can show the strength, humour, humanity and passion that he does, then we might just have a chance of defeating the monsters who currently threaten us.

Anyone wishing to call for Altan’s release or send messages of support can write to English PEN at:  cat@englishpen.org.  

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Meghan Markle’s Vogue

It’s safe to say that readers of the Infernal Machine probably don’t come here looking for coverage of the Royal Family or fashion.  Despite my own well-deserved reputation for discreet sartorial elegance, I generally don’t read Vogue magazine unless I come across old copies at the dentists.   It’s true that I was surprisingly engrossed by the documentary on Anna Wintour and the September issue that my daughter once dragged me off to, but that was the exception that justified the rule.

No doubt Miranda Priestley would berate me for my indifference to the subtle cultural shifts going on behind the glossy pages, but that’s an ignorance I can live with.

These caveats aside, it’s impossible to ignore the distinctly rank odour exuding from the UK media in response to Meghan Markle’s editorship of the Vogue September issue.   Until now I have been vaguely aware that the UK rightwing press – in England at least that’s pretty much all the UK press – don’t like Markle, and that many of its readers don’t like her either.

I’ve occasionally come across depictions of her as a ‘golddigger’; references to her troubled father; condescending suggestions that Markle was not ‘one of us’; and references to a ‘feud’ between Markle and Kate Middleton.  The people who make observations like this rarely seem to have any trouble accepting the ‘commoner’ Kate Middleton as ‘one of us.’ Nor do they seem unduly troubled by someone like Prince Andrew, whose close friendship with a convicted pedophile and his role as an arms dealer has never invited the kind of morbid scrutiny directed at Markle.

It’s difficult to separate such hostility from Markle’s mixed-race heritage that once led the Daily Mail  to describe her as  “almost straight outta Compton” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), and which inspired former BBC DJ Danny Baker to post an outrageously racist tweet suggesting that she and Harry had given birth to a chimpanzee.

All of of this has clearly been intensified by the fact that Markle is a woman who has opinions –  opinions that are liberal and progressive – and which do not belong in the reactionary feudal themepark in which royal women are expected to breed, look pretty, and patronize the occasional uncontroversial charity.

Princess Diana broke this mould – up to a point.  But even when she was supporting demining campaigns she was always ‘one of us.’

Now Markle, the  golddigger who came over ‘ere and married our prince and became a duchess (the cheek!)  has had the temerity not just to edit Vogue, but to use it as a platform to express her opinions, and rightwing commentators across the nation have been dribbling spittle all over their keyboards and reaching deep into their bottomless reservoirs of spite and condescension.

Much of this rage has focused on the front cover.  Markle broke convention by not appearing on the cover herself.  Instead she asked Vogue to photograph what she called “women of change”.  These women include climate change activist Greta Thunberg, Nigerian novelist Chimanda Ngozie Achicie, Jane Fonda, New Zealand premier Jacinda Aherne, disability campaigner Sinead Burke,  and supermodel-turned- mental health campaigner Adwoa Aboah.

Many of these women are women of colour, and they are also on the liberal-left activist spectrum.   Now some may have reservations about ‘change’ coming from rich royals living in taxpayer-funded luxury, and might point out the limitations of a magazine selling expensive clothes to rich women to remind readers ” to use their own platforms to affect change.”

But Markle’s sincerity is clear, and the cover is a striking and moving celebration of the women who have inspired her, many of whom do not fit conventional stereotypes of what women should be.

All of them, in their different ways,  have done some remarkable things, and the same cannot be said of most of those lining up to attack Markle.  In his Sun column, the bloated racist Rod Liddle has called the cover ‘vomit-inducing’.  A man who once punched his pregnant girlfriend and abandoned his wife for another woman while on honeymoon excoriates Markle for not celebrating the Queen, who Liddle describes as “a woman who knows the meaning of dignity, responsibility and duty and is the perfect role model for Meghan herself.’

Dignity, responsibility and duty are not words that one normally associates with Liddle, for whom ‘vomit-inducing’ is definitely more appropriate.  Demonstrating once again the extent to which the Sun has become a variation on a  BNP leaflet, Liddle condemns the “ultra-woke couple” Meghan and Harry for announcing their decision to have only two children, and declared “How about you encourage birth control in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the problem really lies?

Not much need for nudge nudge wink wink required for that one.  Elsewhere in the more highbrow Times, Melanie Phillips has called Markle’s “woke” cover as “shallow and divisive” – which is a bit rich coming from one of the most prominent bigots in the UK media.  Another mainstream commentator who has eagerly embraced alt-right terminology, Phillips accuses Markle  of “virtue-signalling” and “reflecting the shallow aspirations of a social justice warrior.”

Dame Phillips waves a stern finger to remind Markle that “as a member of the royal family, she now needs to be apolitical and no longer make herself the centre of the story” .  Even Markle’s silver mirror image is just “egotism …clothed as altruism.”

Meanwhile, over at the Daily Mail, Sarah Vine,  Michael Gove’s Poundland Lady MacBeth can be found accusing Markle of hypocrisy, disdain for the British people and a failure to understand the profundity of royalty and public service etc.   If you married Michael Gove, you clearly didn’t win life’s lottery, and the same could be said of Gove himself, though he may have felt differently when the cocaine was flowing.

In any case, Vine’s article is steeped in the kind of nouveau riche spite, condescension, and jealousy that would give any psychiatrist or social scientist a field day.  Don’t expect me to link to this obnoxious drivel, but the following extract should give you the flavour of fruit that has most definitely withered on the vine:

A guest editorship of Vogue featuring a list of inspirational women, half of whom no one’s ever heard of, many of whom are just celebrities, and all of whom have been seemingly chosen more for what their inclusion says about you than anything else.  Meanwhile, you fail to nominate the one truly inspirational woman in your life, the Queen, whose years of selfless devotion to this country knock all of the others into a cocked hat.

I hate to break it to Madame MacGove, but Markle is the one who decides which women have inspired her,   and just because Vine hasn’t heard of the people she chooses, doesn’t mean that others are not aware of them, and might now be more aware of them, thanks to Markle’s cover.

There is so much more where this came from, from Toby Young, and of course from Spiked, which inevitably describes Markle as “the worst kind of snob.”

Of course she is.  You nailed it guys, as usual.  And  there is Piers Morgan, proving once again that hell hath no fury like a celebrity-narcissist spurned, working himself up into a rancid lather at Markle’s “shameless hypocritical super-woke issue.”

All this is disgusting and contemptible.  And the fact that some of the nastiest people and newspapers in the country all hate Megan Markle tells us more about them than it does about us.

And it also tells us something about the wider cultural ‘revolution’ that is transforming the country into a bleak reactionary backwater in which everything liberal, left and ‘woke’ is always bad, and everyone who expresses such views is always a hypocrite and an ‘elitist.’

And that’s why I’ve written about Vogue and fashion today, and don’t worry, because it probably won’t happen again.

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Burn Baby Burn

There are many reasons to despise and resist the rightwing ‘populist’ politics that are poisoning democracies across the world in the second decade of the 21st century.  The racism and white supremacism that so often underpins these movements; the dehumanisation of immigrants; the authoritarianism; the deep seam of dishonesty if not outright corruption that so often seeps through their ‘antiestablishment’ agendas; the anti-intellectualism, paranoia, and fanaticism; the nationalist hubris, the gloating cruelty and spurious victimhood –  all these tendencies pose a direct a clear and present danger to democratic politics, to social coexistence,  to the rights of migrants and minorities, which is likely to increase in intensity unless we can find a way to stop them.

But there’s another urgent reason to oppose these movements which tends to receive less attention: their deeply-rooted climate change denialism and hostility to environmental politics.

Evidence of these tendencies isn’t hard to find.  Last month Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic,  vetoed efforts to reduce C02 emissions by 2050 in line with the Paris Agreement.  In May this year, the deforestation of the Amazon reached record levels, with the disappearance of 739 sq km in 31 days – the equivalent of 2 football pitches per minute.  In the United States, Trump has gleefully torn up much of the environmental legislation of the last few decades to reward the fossil fuels industries that funded his campaign.

For these governments and for many of their supporters, the notion of a ‘climate emergency’ tends to be dismissed as ‘fake news’ or a leftwing conspiracy.  In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s foreign minister Ernesto Araújo described climate change as a ‘Marxist plot’ designed to ‘instil fear’.   According to Araújo  ‘The left has sequestered the environmental cause and perverted it to the point of paroxysm over the last 20 years with the ideology of climate change, climate change.’

One can only wonder at the unbounded evil of ‘the left’ and its mysterious ability to get the world’s leading scientists to do its bidding.  In rejecting a scientific consensus that is virtually unanimous on the human contribution to our warming planet and presenting anthropogenic climate change as another expression of ‘woke’ effeminate liberal-left ‘culture’, populist climate change denialists like Araújo are not only making it more difficult to take mitigating or preventative action to deal with  our ongoing climate emergency; they are actually taking action to accelerate it.

For these movements, anything that ‘the left’ supports is fake, wrong, or irrelevant.   Their ‘scepticism’ isn’t only due to the ideological ‘culture wars’ being waged by rightwing populists and the organisations and individuals that support them.  Material interests are also at play here.   Many of the groups that attack environmentalist activists like Greta Thunberg are funded or part-funded by fossil-fuel industries.  The conservative student organisation Turning Point has solicited funds from what its founder Charlie Kirk calls the ‘fossil fuel space.’

Here in the UK the former revolutionaries-turned-rightwing libertarians at Spiked Online have received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation.  The co-owner of Koch Industries does not give money like that away for nothing, and no one will be surprised that Spiked have made climate change denialism one of the hallmarks of its dreary ‘contrarian’ provocations.

Similar connections can be found in the rightwing populists now waging war against ‘liberal elites’ across the world.  Jair Bolsonaro’s election campaign received strong support from Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector.   Since his election, and Bolsonaro has stripped power from indigenous communities to decide land claims in the Amazon and handed it to the Agriculture Ministry.

This is not just a threat to Brazil’s indigenous communities; the rampant deforestation that Bolsonaro has unleashed poses a direct threat to the planet itself given the crucial role that the Amazon plays in carbon sequestration.  None of this bothers the fascistic president, who now boasts that ‘the Amazon is ours’ – a first person plural that essentially refers to the industries that he represents.

All these movements are coming to power at a critical period, in which the action that we take or don’t take will determine whether or not the planet remains habitable in the future.  This summer fires have raged across the Arctic – reducing one of the earth’s great refrigerators while simultaneously burning through carbon peat stores and releasing more greenhouse gases. Temperatures across the world have broken records this summer, as they have year after year.

Again and again scientists have warned us that we need to take urgent preventative action immediately.  From Bolsonaro to Trump, to the hard-faced zealots of Turning Point and Spiked, the new populists turn their stony faces away and dismiss all this as a leftwing conspiracy or an unjustified panic designed to impose unjustified regulations on the fossil fuel industry.

Even as these individuals and organisations rail against ‘metropolitan liberal elites’ they act on behalf of powerful industries that are relentlessly driving our species towards collective  self-destruction.

Where Sarah Palin once gloated ‘ Drill Baby Drill’ while lobbying to open up Alaska to the oil industry, the new populists might well chant ‘Burn Baby Burn’ as the planet gets hotter, and the hotter it gets the more unlikely it is that we will be able to do anything about it.

These movements often base their appeal on their calls to protect ‘our people’.  But the gross irresponsibility of their spurious culture wars, their trivialising of our collective crisis, and their shameless kowtowing to the fossil fuel lobby makes it clear again and again that they don’t  really care about any people at all.

All of which makes these would-be populist saviours not just a danger to their countries.  It makes them a danger to humanity.

It’s absolutely tragic that right now, when we need politicians and movements with the courage, the vision and the sense of urgency to take collective action to ensure that our planet remains habitable, that we have been saddled with a poisonous, vindictive and phony ‘anti-elite’ movement that is determined to prevent any action at all and refuses to believe that is even necessary.

So look more closely at these populist rebels as they rail against ‘globalist elites’, and you will find some of the most powerful elites in the world today, gazing down from their skyscrapers on our burning planet with the same old sociopathic gaze.

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Johnson and His Cabinet: A Confederacy of Bastards

Watching Netflix’s documentary The Great Hack last night, I was struck by the ‘Breibart philosophy’ ascribed by one of its contributors to Steve Bannon, to the effect that it is necessary to destroy and break countries in order to be able to rebuild them on Bannonite lines.

Yesterday marks another milestone in our ongoing collapse as a serious country, that Bannon will surely take some satisfaction from in his ongoing ‘culture war.’

It was a day when 0.13 percent of the British population replaced the worst government in British history with the worst government in British history, when a politician with an unrivaled reputation as a liar and a charlatan devoid of any principles beyond his own advancement became Prime Minister, in order to pursue a political outcome – leaving the EU by 31st October –  that, as things stand, will plummet the UK into an economic, social, political and diplomatic crisis without precedent beyond wartime

As is his wont, Johnson celebrated the occasion with a jingoistic outpouring of meaningless verbiage, filled with promises that can’t be kept, jokes that aren’t funny, and empty protestations of ‘belief’ and ‘optimism’.

Depicting your political opponents as the ‘doubters, the gloomsters, the doomsters’ who ‘bet against Britain’ – in other words, as traitors – may not seem the most promising strategy for ‘uniting’ the country.  But there was more, so much more.

In Johnson’s post-Brexit wonderland we will have a new NHS, more police, better broadband, a ‘fantastic new road and railroad infrastructure’.  There will be ‘equalities’ – for everyone!  ‘whether  race and gender and LGBT’!

There will be ‘ battery technology to help cut C02’,  ‘thousands of high-skilled jobs in left-behind areas, ‘ UK assets orbiting in space’, ‘ blight resistant crops that will feed the world.’

Of course there will be free trade deals.  Dozens, hundreds of them, all to be signed off – poof! Just like that! – now that ‘three years of unfounded doubt’ have been superseded.   And there will no checks on the Irish border and no backstop either.

Poof!  All gone with a wave of the Great Man’s wand, dispensed to the realms of doubt and disbelief, replaced by herds of unicorns and flocks of flying pigs that will proliferate through our green and pleasant lands, as soon as we have freed ourselves from foreign domination.

‘With high hearts and growing confidence, we will now accelerate the work of getting ready,’ he promised.  ‘And the ports will be ready and the banks will be ready, and the factories will be ready, and business will be ready.’

All will be ready, because the blonde bombshell says so, and even it isn’t, we will still have £39 billion for ‘extra lubrication’  and if there are ‘difficulties’, no matter, because ‘ I believe with energy and application they will be far less serious than some have claimed.’

So all this was a moment to savour, for those who have abandoned any capacity for critical and rational thought, at any rate.  For the likes of Trump, Salvini, Pauline Hanson and the AfD, who sent Johnson their congratulations.  Such friends no doubt have their reasons for feeling so happy on our behalf.

There were also the likes of Piers Morgan, who chuckled happily at the thought of the ‘PC snowflakes’ on Twitter who are not enjoying Johnson’s coronation.

Last, but by no means least there was Johnson’s team – a government which even before it has done a single thing has already become the last thing that any country facing a crisis should have to rely on.

It includes onetime ‘rebels’ like Nicky Morgan and Amber Rudd, who had once promised they would never serve under Johnson or contemplate no deal, and how now shed those principles like last year’s skin in return for avoiding the wilderness of the

If you think they lack scruple, consider men like Grant Shapps, a politician who once lied about a second job, who was forced to resign from government after he ignored warnings about the bullying of a young Tory activist who killed himself.

There was the truly awful Priti Patel, who was also forced to resign after conducting her own foreign policy in Israel while on holiday, and who suggested that development money should be channeled to Israeli hospitals in the Golan Heights treating Syrian ‘rebels’ who may include Islamic State or al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

More recently Patel recommended that the Irish might be pressured with the threat of hunger into doing the UK’s bidding.   Now – hallelujah! – she’s Home Secretary.

And let’s not forget Dominic Cummings, the former Vote Leave campaign director already found to have been in contempt of parliament, who once claimed that ‘accuracy is for snake-oil pussies’.  Or Matt Hancock, who was rewarded for weeks of shameless and contemptible sycophantic groveling by keeping his job as health secretary.

And Liz Truss or ‘the Truss’ as she calls herself, – the same Liz Truss who once said that drones were frightened by dogs and will now be pursuing those fabulous trade deals for us.

And then there Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary, the man who admitted that he hadn’t even read the Good Friday Agreement at a parliamentary hearing to discuss the Irish border, who didn’t understand the significance of Dover or Calais to the UK economy.

Not to mention Gavin Williamson, forced to resign for leaking details of  national security council briefing, now resurrected as…Education Secretary, which makes about as much sense as asking Frank Spencer to give a Reith Lecture.   Even Rees-Mogg has found a place in this government-of-the damned, because Johnson is loyal – for a while at least – to those who serve him.

In short, the hellmouth has truly opened, and every kind of monster is here, in a hard right, hard Brexit government that is currently locked in headlong pursuit of the unobtainable with nothing but bluster and fantasy to sustain itself.

This is what we have done to ourselves.  We, the public, and our politicians.  We might take some consolation from the very likely possibility that a government like this cannot succeed in anything it tries to do, but its failure will also be ours, and right now, you would really have to inhale some of Johnson’s ‘optimism’ and ‘belief’ not to believe that, beyond this collection of bastards in this fuck-you cabinet, there may be even worse things waiting in the wings.

All of which may please Steve Bannon, but it really doesn’t make me feel very good at all.

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