Obituary Over A Decade (measurements!)

The second decade - not to be mingled with the 2020s, which saw a close still under the ever-potent and yet strangely normal aegis of Trumpdom - since the last centennial (the "zeroth" not being an option) now coming towards a close has indeed, and perhaps since before halftime, been commended, if not lauded, and epitomised as that which saw the break of seeming victories of the great undisputed twentieth century. And if that pessimism is to stand any merit, we must reflex over where we are now as opposed to late 1920, or the early 1920s, just as much as the early 2010s. In the early 2010s (that is, early 2010) I was myself under the tutelage of high school, or gymnasium as we call it (without the Germanic capital "G"), and for all its bondage it was a pleasant time; not so much for the presence of choices made, as the absence of the foolishness of my own, and the very compact presence of my time and my own thoughts on how to use it. But I am a foul man, and full of vice, and just as capable of sniffing out the Zeitgeist as the Geists in human skin doing most of the speaking, and in the worst of times the thinking, for us. 

I say this only to draw parallells, in the plural sense, to the seeming fate of the world, by which we would expect to mean the Western world, or what was previously the "free" world. For in a way not un-akin to I myself discovering myself not very free, compared to my eighteen- or nineteen-year self, I have noted not only the relative freedom and liberty of the non-Occident (if not exactly of the classical Orient) which anybody with eyes had minded, but moreover the bondage, restrictions, real perils and relative authoritarianism of the free world, both in reality and in potentia. Our democracy, and by now I am not exactly alone to say this, rests at a proverbial knife's edge, balanced only by some knives' edges held and reflected in a sense of virtue, and immediately and suddenly imperilled by those wielded by vice, or at least eager self-interest. 

The difference, and thus difference across this decade, is 

In late 1920, we were not so certain of this triumph of democracy, of course. We had, in Sweden, already passed - through an already democratic, at least in the sense of the revolutionaries of 1688, or 1832, assembly assembled mainly from the ideas of 1789 (the American 1789, not the French, mind you) through the most debate-laden and peaceful parliamentary procedure - the vote for women, and just before that for men, including in the electorate for the more, or until now more prestige-cloaked "first" chamber. In Germany, parliamentary liberalism had triumphed over the continent's supposedly premier authoritarian power. 

But in 2010, how sure were we not of all those things? Nobody would in 2010 have come to question the great German democracy, nor the great experiment in how one, far from the Anglo-Saxon waving fists and shouts of procedural trickery and hecklerism, whether parliamentary or congressional, could adjoint a government of red and black into a synthesis of permanent-democratism. This "democratism", or so I believe, hold the key to much of the frustration against it, for as much as representative democracy is not democratic, in the classical sense it would permit the electorate to actually rule themselves - and would never, not even in the very liberal powers which now embody it - 

How then are we to cheer or reckon this 2010s? Well first, through recognising the limitations of this democracy - or at least of this "democratism" and of liberal, representative systems - both in its appeal and security of persistence in the Arab world and elsewhere where it has not ever or seriously broken through, the Chinese-Confucian for instance, 

Obituary over the Undying

King of Clubs, Deputy of the Green Swastika, Commander of the Black Banner. Many titles could have been heaved upon him, and given his long and tumultuous history, he would hardly have eschewed any of them, with a smile already both charming and repugnant. In the long, strangely proud tradition of declaring dead those who still (or already, if we are to countenance actual resurrection) are able to complain about it, perhaps no man have eluded the tendency, or rather the explicit desire to bury in ink as well as dirt more than Izzat Ibrahim. Saddam's Queen regnant, and wise and tacit enough to elude, then as now, his many Henryesque purges.  

At 26 years and two weeks, he participated in the "glorious revolution", taking place in the July so prone to revolutions, including the memorable and recent 14 July (not the one you think about) establishing Arab nationalism outside, or alongside its blossom in great Misr, as well as eliminating the British holdfast in the heart of the old Caliphate and far older Mesopotamian cradle. But in fulfilling the promise made by Qasem's 1958 uprising, not only against a flawed and schizophrenic Hashemite monarchy but against disorder and revolution itself, its progeny would carry the promise of Ba'ath to fruition as a perfectly ordered police state, including a throbbing collision with its only twin and neighbour, the Alawite Assad-Ba'athist monarchy. For 35 years it would last, and Izzat Ibrahim would, strangely, follow it from the start to beyond its death throbs, including that very violent one christening itself the Dawlah al-Islamiyyah. Caliph he would never be, nor President, nor would he have wanted either, but in that small embodiment of power in the shadows, the shoulder beckoning between the head and the arm, always faithful, juxtaposing his quiet persona with a formidable presence in the ever-changing inner circle of the burgeoning Hussein dictatorship. After the bloody 1979 takeover, he just as quietly assumed the Vice Presidency the new ruler had left empty, and conjoined his obvious ambitions as Saddam's Dauphin to actual mingling of blood by marrying his daughter, one of an alleged 13, to the infamous Uday. Which of the bride's closest two men would have assumed power, if a third could not be produced and grow to maturity, we shall not know now, that the benefactor fell before his, in Tony Benn's and Jacques Chirac's view and, maybe, god's, time. Izzat would, perhaps the most remarkable (and on a personal level surely exhilerating) feat of the long and brutal dictatorship that took cue from its bloody inauguration - if one counts the takeover of July, yet again, 1979, that is - by compelling a divorce from the dictator in the wings by order of the current one. In this, perhaps, he also demonstrated an affection for his own blood which, typically for the Arab tribalist bonds that survive even the most strident and terroristic institutions of the regime, and perhaps fatherly affections as well. It was a suggestion that few would have dared. And seemed only the more respected and irreplacable for it.  

The steward walking unhesitantly, already moving past the leader.  

 

For the long, painful and glorious years that was liberated Iraq, he presided over a growing economy, a rapid expansion of the military, and eight long - and, again, dangerous not the least to those in positions of command - years of challenging the rivalling beacon, in many ways its supposed antithesis, in Persia, followed by an impossibly even more audacious challenge of its two main benefactors, King Fahd's Saudi Arabia and Bush's United States. And endured, at some point, what had just as likely been a death sentence by means of leukemia. A position in the highest ranks of the green would have allowed professional medical care, but Izzat hedged his bets by travelling to the European Union to ascertain treatments at a clinic in Vienna, avoiding arrest for the many war crimes piled up in the shadow of his master. Yet again, the grim face with the more eye-stealing moustache seemed to endure in its everlasting laughter.  

With the dusk of the Ba'athist regime, his would wait for another two decades, or very nearly so. The invasion of 2003 that toppled the government, Izzat went into hiding like his boss, and fellow Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, both executed in four years' time. And Izzat remained nowhere to be found. Due to his aged and always seemingly frail state, one might have expected him to be dead, or else in exile. But Izzat was not one to run, and his equally undying loyalty to the now very dead and deplored Saddam was expressed in the proclamation of his rise to national secretary of the party endured. As the merger of the Ba'athist regime, now a measly and outlawed party, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organisation, controversially present before the 2003 invasion (and thus by presidential fiat), soon an approved affiliate with the franchise-prone al-Qa'ida hawk whose shadow had supposedly legitimised the intervention, would soon make its presence known, under the brand of Islamic State of Iraq. Of all the top names testifying of the Ba'athist-Sunni blessing, or reconstitution, of the regime into a radical, populist, openly terroristic (without the prefix "state") organisation bent on establishing an actual Islamic State in Iraq, it was yet again in the shadow of civil infighting between Shi'ah and Sunni factions and the supposedly global Jihadi threat.  

Wrongful death. Of all the obituaries written over the dead, from Robert Graves to Ernest Hemingway to Christopher Hitchens, few have gained such notoriety - domestically, at least - and irony as the carrying to the final rest, a very restless procession, of the body of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri in April 2015. The Vice President of the regime now gone would not rest long before appearing to proclaim the premature nature of his demise.  

 

Arising as a very concrete and provincial power, and bent on - in some sense - resurrecting the Saddam regime, if not Al-Ba'ath, in its latest and most miserable incarnation, paranoid and prone to incorporate the latest Islamist and openly Jihadi trends in its secular law, formerly praised by zealous Westerners as embodiments of the alternative to repressive colonial and hibernated traditionalist dogma. Where the Ba'athists had proclaimed, more or less piously, lashings and brandings and amputations and beheadings, for the corrupt (not currently in favour), the promiscuous (likewise), the stealing (again...) and so forth, the new Islamist brand would practice its new-old creed through a lense of icily serious theology, killing and otherwise doling out justice before recognised in name as a state. For its breakthrough in Iraq, whereas its rise in Syria had been shielded by an optical pad of civil war, liberation and general chaos, he was instrumental in forging together tribes and veterans and criminals and business interests joined only by a common defiance of an evermore aggressive, near-genocidal Shi'ite-dominated conglomerate in Baghdad. From this common denominator of vindicated and besieged Sunnidom, a common formula was reached, and proved strong enough to vanquish the highly financed, and highly ineffective armed forces of Iraq now left to its own, now mainly proverbial, defences.  

A paragon of times seemingly gone. Yet the two forces he steered, never really recognised but unforgotten, may yet test the turbulent times that reigned before and after him.  

 

In all this, Izzat Ibrahim, the Devil's actual deputy for 40 years, continued for another eighteen summers in his waining twilight years, and grew into a man of his own making long before entering the stage as the chairman of this force which - bar his competitor in Syria, which at that point had died, replaced by a sordid, last-minute Dauphin by now reduced to tragedy and humiliation in his triumph - had once been assumed as the future of the Arab world, a face perhaps further away from Nasser's than any man. Yet, Izzat's face, that of the Undying, would live long after carried in a glass box to cheering crowds, to a quiet and barely even forgotten announcement five years before his already long-expected demise, perhaps represented Babylonia and its British-made current construct of Iraq itself; a cobbled construct, quiet and small, unassuming but able to punch well above his weight; his final years were ultimately as tragic as any of his age in such times, but he refused assuming the cloak of complete obscurity even as the entire world around surmised it. His hand helped guide Iraq throughout the entire Ba'athist epoch and well beyond it, transcending the supposed, equally false and cobbled divide between Ba'athist Islamist hand-and-head-chopping "secularism" in place in the early 2000s and the violent, supposedly Salafi-Jihadi but equally Sunni Arab identitarian movement we yesterday talked about as if it were the prime geopolitical foe of the day. Being a paragon of these two spent forces, he may represent the most pathetic and wasted in a man of supreme intelligence, sublime intrigue for which his tribe was never particularly known, and survival in a world where those who could save the day, it may seem, are already dead.

The Emperor of the Fifth Republic

His life, as the poet said, must not be measured by its worth; for then, it hath no end. This repeated catchphrase may not be one associated with the late, very belated Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the third man to serve as president during the fifth republic and captain of its empire and nuclear arsenal (sorry, Alain Poher, but you would go on to serve as the effectual dauphin in the shadows until 1992). But among the gallery of exciting men (sorry, Ségolène, though by your husband's merits you might not regret losing at the moment) he might be the most impressive, 

He arose to this most supreme office in a very narrow pushback - if yet the last - against the leftist incursion ringing its battle cry over France since the spring of 1968. But this was, as would later be apparent, a mere icing on the cake or a plateau on, or beneath, a series of careers in the service of the French magistracy and political administration emerging out of the revolution. At his birth, in Koblenz in then-occupied Ruhr, the Third Republic was into its second half-century, yet hardly measurably on the ropes. The Pyrrhic victory of the great war was felt, however, thus its 

I am convinced he was the greatest to hold the office, maybe since Adolphe Thiers, 

The Strange (Second) Life of Lech Walesa

"Of Wales", as his surname may be inferred in Russian (though it is, as I notice now, spelled differently) might have posed a good name, had he been half a century before less belated, to become a major - and in his home country perhaps less beloved - figure in the British labour movement instead, and lived up to his image. Rugged, simple and rough, with a brusque attitude and acerbic witticism for dialogue, his was a place seemingly more belated than Victorian Britain.

A republic, not a demo(no)cracy

The great manifestation this weekend, barely two weeks after the election this November the fifth, by which I mean three (in recognition of two of England's great cultural treasures) and about four before the actual election this December, British-born Hungarian (and thus authoritarian to the bone) intellectual hack Sebastian Gorka arose to give perhaps the most acrimonious, and certainly most arousing to the soul of a harshly battered Trumpista - or Kekist, as I have proposed to christen this movement once, if not now then certainly after the next election, it has passed the surly bonds of president Trump's example. In the million MAGA march, matching in sweet acrimony as well as the vitriol many examples set by the recent past of American mass movements, but surely not its most obvious reference in historical signifance. Dare I say it. But nonetheless, we should not dismiss this as a death rattle, no more than the Hundred Days of Napoleon was necessarily that, nor a divinely ordained return of grace. Only speculate whether it is part in the downfall of Kekist moment, or its re-christening under a different man, and not necessarily a presidential ("candidate" or "one", fill in the blank as you please) at that. 

This movement, echoing again the words of president-elect (without office but already with certainty) Santos, this movement was never about him, nor about Gorka, Jones, Spencer, or any of the profligates that have, independently long since or grabbing onto the coattails or a supremely stupid, ignorant, absent-minded (fill in fully at whim) bulwark that was the Donald, presidential now by definition. It was about, as I wrote in 2016, a rejection or five R:s, or something like it ( Although the media has poignantly asserted that Trump's overtures to overturn must be rejected, it is all but clear that this division away from an Archimedean solid point has affected or been brought about by all parties, with even VOX, that I just linked, asserting in faux-rhetorical format that "the Supreme Court [might] steal the election" for the Republican ticket, something not even stated (if not exactly never implied) in the long aftermath of the sordid and swiftly quickened (or even stillborn) decision of Bush v. Gore of late 2000. Of course, the 2016 narrative of an election stolen, if not outright by Trump or his menace in red, or their nefarious efforts throughout state governments, then by Russians and their collaborators (those who don't denounce the bear in the proud tradition of the watchful senator from Wisconsin, that is) 

All over this hovers the maxim, repeated into the modern period and proper American democracy of the post-1960s - also the era of imperialism and decay of what might have been considered the original American spirit, constitutional and federal in character and to the heart engaged in struggle against itself and its own legitimacy - of "a republic, not a democracy". This statement, preceded by Franklin and repeated by the more bulwark-conservative (and consummated never-Trumper) senator Lee, to Victor Davis Hanson, to "American studies" professor Bernie Dobski, to Gorka this year, of course, and no less in the aftermath of the refusal of democracy's mandate to concede to the GOP ticket (the 2004 election remaining, thus, the only time it has carried a majority or even plurality, if not a majority of states) has the insidious character of potentially denouncing democratic mandate in a subversive way, of which none would be more insidious, or more importantly destructive, than the destruction of the electoral result in the states where the count, and potential recount, is under assault. In this, however, these state governments must - I mean do already - partake a share of blame. For when a court would find the need, or at least ability, for electoral booths to keep open beyond the expected deadline, in particular states, in such a fashion could be expected to favour a certain result, the protest and appeal to have the "surplus" votes suppressed - lest the entire election is to be redone - . (This in turn, of course, is in rebuttal to the Republican, mainly, efforts to shut and limit and circumcise the opportunities to vote in particularly early and in absence, as well as Trump's personal war on the postal department in hope to widen the gap between postal and "real" votes to "normal", and I think desirable, proportions.)

In this new millennium, a decision to maintain - as in this last major decision of the last - may be as acrimonious as to overturn (unquestionably certain to slip loose the dogs of political warfare, even if the law indeed did state clearly the foundation for doing so). And if so happens, it will be not because of the honestly (if yet loudly) argued point, argued on the streets that is, that the Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and so forth electoral codes did indeed at onset favour the exclusion ensuring a Trump re-election, however slim. Rather, it will be because of the over-argued and well-put point that this movement which he has mounted (rather than given birth to) fears downfall, and - I would add - for all the right reasons. The remaking of the electoral map, unlike the sloppy notion of letting votes be cast without identification (something I've always showed, and would expect to be shown, during any election whose result I would consider credible) is a fair shot, however, and it is here up to the Republicans to ensure greater participation as well as favour for the Republican ticket in the conscience of "new" Americans (Anglo-Saxons and forward). In this, they have - without much singing - largely succeeded. African Americans voted in favour of Trump, it seems, to about double the tally of in 2016, if not exactly in Lincolnian or even Eisenhowerian terms, and latinos - rapists or bringing drugs or the dully, jolly unexcited - have shown similar, if not as stark numbers of surge, suggesting either that the joyfully capitalist-wokeist alliance of mainstream Democrats - and the stupid X campaign - have a negative appeal (or, as Swedish politicians would say, have "not been fully appreciated and understood"), or the America First-line not being out of touch with largely traditionalist, overwhelmingly Catholic ex-citizens of Latin America whose desires and expectations of America, bar "north", is aligned with an ostensibly conservative past. If this trend continues, the Democrats continuing their abrasive expectation that the Spanish-speaker and foreigner belongs to them (as they still may believe of the Irish; if they're still undesirable enough to be desirable) the results may, in the future, be astounding for those seeing in Trump, now leaving after his four years, a new Hitler. 

And what will come of this? Well, bar the expected delivery of a verdict, so long sung and (bar Bush v. Gore yet) unaddressed in reality, 

The Other Dylan

 

This day, last year, I commemorated the violent and - perhaps insufficiently - vitriolic end of the experiment to bargain a more open, democratic society through student protest at the Tiananmen square, with a somber and less melancholic-optimistic emphasis on the future, on two systems not so much destined as already clashing, and with the current events in the beacon of the West, we would do well to emphasise, in increasingly exhaustive contemplation, the fate of the East, their likely and our desired. But this day I would point to a fate and loss of less remembrance marked with this irredeemable date of November 9. 

He was never rewarded with the Peace Price, or even that for Literature issued in Nobel's actual hometown of Stockholm (there, I got you) but his work is still vibrant and living, in this second, and often quite extensive, lifespan of a poet. He was beloved, both by kin and foes - if one could say that of the English colonial-power turned nearly a subject by the emergence of the Liberal party, the working men, of Lloyd George at the turn of the 20th century - to such extent that his person or work was hardly ever denounced and could not be denied even in the turbulent landscape in which he walked and wrote. While American fantasy writer George R. R. Martin's first seminal work, just like his efforts to bring science fiction into modernity, may never be as known as even the ever-next suite of his magnum opus, quotations from having passed into extensive and equally never-ending use, that immortalised in his very first published title (or a novel, that is) is that of a truly immortal poem by the Welshman, and while "true" Welshman Richard Burton, born Ffyon Jenkins, made sure to make note both his love of the English verse during his moment in the light at Dick Cavett's show, as to his preferences to be buried in red when that moment - prophesised, if one can call it thus - during said exchange. 

Steadfastly Welsh, never an object of self-made hagiography. 

He was larger than that, however. Due to his inability to accomplish financial security from his talent, he was a man of real life and labour, of which he had time to go through 

The first paragraph was, only last year, immortalised to me yet again when fellow East coaster Bruce Springsteen noted he thought it would not apply to the now encumbered, then only so cumbersome, president. Well, we shall see. 

Do not go easy into the Night

Rage, rage against the dying of the Light... 

The Writer and the Roots

 

Had anyone asked me, say, ten years past, my likelihood of answering how I would describe Jan Myrdal's (now very recent, and having occurred almost unexpected) passing I would unlikely have found myself replying in the nostalgic, or even the most tedious, shambolic exercise of mourning. For decades he was a divisive figure of Joker-esque proportions, the first troll if you like (and if you've never heard of Socrates, or any of his more likely followers), a contrarian of majesty comparable to his parents or brother-in-law in their own respective careers, or even the Internet, was an issue for less divisive, though seldom as prolific, authors to consider. And in this sovereignty, if not always consistent, was his greatness. (And yes, I will return to Connery, the fitting antagonist to pass the same weekend, shortly. Image below, considering this, is very deliberate.) 

Always, without apology, without overt irony, the villain. The Devil of Folkhemmet.

Born to a womb and penile rapture - as he might have put it - then not yet in their prime, he might have been destined for greatness. But in his youth, Jan - Ian as he might have been known had he followed his instincts to stay and become an American, non-hyphenated - to purchase the great liberal struggles, as we may know them, for the First Amendment and a Marxist feminism in recognition of economic rights and labour and in opposition to the second and particularly third wave denounced by his follower, last millennium's inhabitant Björn Afzelius. Above all he possessed a desire for the contrarian, the provocateur without a cause (or rather as one who didn't need an explicit cause) for truth in all its forms. He became a man of the left, as his background may both suggest and disconcert, but certainly one his father would have, and did, disown as such, and ultimately a man who could only stick to - and sometimes alter - his own convictions. Like his detractor Per Ahlmark, who he preceded by one decade and outlived into another, he had issues with ever recognising this fact, but in his always-opposition nature and refusal to actually hold the reins he so dastardly endorsed, from time to time, in their most excruciating and destructive endeavours, and stubborn to foolhardy maintenance of the Enlightenment and revolutionary principles so contemporaneously discarded by "his" left (including, in many cases, his followers). 

His private life, so often intertwined with the public, the political, almost deliberately so, was no less publicised or, lacking a more precise phrase, discouraged. He grew quickly into a man but always remained the steadfast, stubborn boy at Central Station, eloping from school and family - with which he would break, still quite young, forever - into cohabitation and first marriage, the bourgeois institution with which he never managed to break. In one of the latter, equally entertaining and miserable, articles about his personal situation, he meekly and self-debasingly remarked that no woman would ever express interest at a 91-year old at Tinder, a fact he may have found misproven had he ever put it to the test. Jan remained a icon with the young and "revolutionary" bourgeoisie long after his heyday, and crowned his aging, if not ailing, career with successive, increasingly Hefner-like marriages with followers following the death of his impossibly long-lasting wife, Gun. Many came to lament, as they never outrightly condemned him, their fates, but the magnetic quality he must have possessed, yet never imbuing it with those qualities that mark a cult leader; the sarcastic, insulting, even self-abasing always taking heyday over the charismatic. Even as he praised the Cambodian known as Saloth Sar long after his death, one was left with little imagination of what would have been Jan's fate, had he joined that fateful struggle and bothered, as he always did, with speaking his mind. This watching from the barricades - and in the Cambodian excursion, very much near the genocide - of a new society forming well beyond the barricades and gates of his own cluttered-to-comfortable home, was typical and a focal point of admonishing critique; yet he never relented, preferring to speak his mind to a room, and develop his theory form the perspective and strategy of the strictly long term. 

Consistantly annoying, in constant review of the past. Leaving him into a legacy of public ownership is a library of Gladstonian proportions. How many - even of his contemporaries - have even beheld as many volumes, let alone fondled them?

Expelled from the PEN Society in the late 1980s after defending the crushing of the Tiananmen uprising, a tone characteristically taken by near-octogenarian autocrats in the Eastern Bloc (who he generally resented, or brushed off) and adding to the humiliation - if not his own - by defending the clerical death sentence against Rushdie as ecclesiastically (if not morally) upright, he both saluted the coming tide of left-wing neurotic self-abasement over the higher and less surrepticious tide of challenges to the Enlightenment, and particularly what fellow detractor Christopher Hitchens christened "fascism with an Islamic face". He never joined that train, or even came to praise it as fellow post-colonial scholars merrily did, but certainly angered - rightly - his fellows on the broader New Left and the Enlightenment-Americanophiles of liberal strands alike. His was, ultimately and strangely for a man of the progressive, ofttimes regressive (such as on the issue of Rushdie, and his Scandinavian descendents) left, a defender of the rights of small nations, of the sovereignty principle, of the plurality and difference in social and cultural customs, on whom he spent substantial chronological, intellectual and physical resources, which a non-imperialist world order would endure and toil under. While there would be little certainty for the principles of individual autonomy and free speech, above all, which he lauded in such an order, he was nevertheless vindicated again and again, and in the end - having alienated nearly everyone not of near-masochistically held views - refused to die. If the Sweden of the age of Folkhemmet and bureaucratic, intrusive, rights-denouncing (still a prevalent feature of our illiberal constitution; the one he denounced as well for cementing and centralising power with its elimination of the liberal elements inherent in its 1809 predecessor) state had indeed been a Soviet Union, as many of his detractors thought and as he might have implied in the lesser sense, he might have been a martyr of Solzhenitsyn's proportions. Whether his Churchill-like or Poirot-esque arrogance and consistently annoying relativism, and focus on the subjective and personalised, almost "yellow"-y autobiographical would have befitted such a character, or indeed made it more endearing, and branded a soul of courage and actual accomplishment, is a fact minted for the everlasting question of unconsummated opportunity. 

Solidarity is not the concern for the other, but concern for those things that are common. 

Jan Myrdal, 1927-2020, however he would describe himself

One election in December

The presupposed anomaly of the Electoral College, an 18th century institution (thus junior, by half a millennium, to the Anglo-British Parliament and the more compartmentalised body of the man who first summoned, and maybe even envisioned it) is not unlikely to come into question regardless of the outcome in the contest which, if we are to believe our compatriots, have come to signal the division in American politics, certainly from the liberal perspective that the once party of Lincoln - not unanimously heralded as beacon of decency, progress, unity in those days - has given up on democracy in favour of at best an oligarchic republic, at worst a ochlocratic-plutocratic tyranny - the terrible, uneducated masses once scorned by Madison, now by the most fervent supporters of the same masses - and the universal rule by the most wrinkled hand stuffing the least thought-out and clearly-marked ballot through a slit of peaceful, equal opportunity. One might be forgiven for believing the Democratic Party, either in its many historic (or its more histrionic) incarnations would adhere categorically to such an order, but 

My predictions, less exciting this time than last time I hope, sways within the very proverbial margin of error. A Trump reelection, an extension of the power grab (or grab by the power) for another quadrennial cycle (into his 79th year, lest we are finally to reconcile with the alliteration President Pence - socialists, Kekists and rowdy "conservatives" of shambolic ecclesiastical merits) would through the extension of this year of election - as opposed to a "mere (presidential) election year" - have evolved from quite likely, in face of unknown and certainly divided, if less than last time, again - and at any rate unstirring, if quite stirred, opposition, then into less likely with the onset of the pandemic - and the inevitable economic damage that would follow, humanitarian atrocity and rallying around the government (here questionable) nonwithstanding, into finally accepting the possibility that 2016 might be "repeated"; now with a soft whimper and a tedious proclamation, and little fear of Russian bots and hackers in the future sense, rather than a bang of fascist terror. 

Something you didn't expect to see four years past, right? Now did you? Like Piter, the servant Mike stands in the background, loyal to a certain point. If ushered in for another unthinkable quadriannual cycle, we may yet see how far. Unless, the impossibility striking again, the red team are all aligned to him, short of a few belligerent, quite ambiguous Gauls. 

In my view, if this were to occur, most of those most fervently proclaiming the rebirth of said fascism; not that of mass killings, concentration camps, swift and brutal suppression galore of opposition inside legislature and without, but of something akin to it, post-modern and soft and rhetorical rather than material (the latter, and the Leninist analysis of classic fascismo, begging the question why financiers, while seldom openly hostile, have not succumbed to avaricious support in face of this newfangled rainbow Bolshevism, and endeared to the case for capitalism to a tally far higher than the Trump campaign of 2016). Ah yes, add to that the successful, not in the trial in the Senate, but very rowdy impeachment of this year; the third of the republic, and to many seemingly as legitimate as the one that never was. Although, the question seemingly never posed by Pelosi, or anyone else, whether this opinion (or rather, as repeated beyond nauseatingly, sentiment) was held by the prospective median voter - and whether (s)he would remember it, a full nine months later. 

In this, I must admit I held the possibility open - for all the dullness that it seems to harrow - a Biden administration expanding on the never-inaugurated Clinton administration, a pang of historic accomplishment and adjudication followed by what was optimistically marketed and branded as a "third Obama term" (hence assuming we would forget the many reasons why, and attacks leveled to prevent or at the very least postpone the first) and by the laws of "normalcy" now broken (with an asterisk to professor Allan Lichtman whose formula, remember, now heralds Trump's defeat) would seem the likelier choice in such a time, and year, of tumultuous change and decay. 1968, with some care, would perhaps serve a better comparison than Germany in 1932, let alone in 1936, as we're now told is the relevant analogy. Now, Lichtman was not wrong in 2016, and as much as every confounded and exploded detractor of his thesis was even quicker to denounce the formula (at its arguably greatest hour). I would, perhaps, rather not make the same mistake again.

On the other hand, we must observe the impossibility of the cry of Make America Great Again four years past, the working but never more cordial relationship with the old party of Lincoln - now largely and speedily Trump's party, from the Appalachian trail to the border states, where Latinos (sans X, when addressed as a subject, rather than object of faux-radical dogma) seems to surge behind the red banner comparatively to last time, the years of talk of rapists and judges nonwithstanding. He now commands a majority, frail but possibly not, in the Senate, loyal grassroots and legislators happy for a string or conservative victories in the Reaganite, Evangelical or Tea Party mold (harkening back to the first, or second model in my prediction of his style) and ready to excuse his very last vulgarity, patent lie or un-republican tendencies (small r; keeping for himself a royal family of the already degenerate waiting in the wings, The First Sexist's daughter clearly posing the favourite for a future bid). His media presence, while not as absurdly subsidised by the fray and numbed as it may or may not have numbed the general public, is consistent, as are - or maybe not - his policies. Biden's America, apart from a Great Restoral and a National Bidet of sorts (I promise, it is clearer in Swedish). This year not even his greatest, most vitriolic but yet un-moved foe has managed to underestimate his chances, only curse them. 

Germany's election three years of Hitler's rise to power. The Führer got 98,8 % of the valid votes in his (second) re-election, sowing the fruits of original fascism. Without blimps, will the apprentice manage half as well, asks not only I but the most fervent critics? Why are we, as the saying goes, even talking about it, if that is the model? What were the expectations, and opposition leader vigorous or otherwise, for the Reichstag of 1936?

My hunch, I must say, leans slightly towards re-election, while my senses have mandated - as they did, albeit clouded by a less mature judgment - a Democratic victory, with a likelihood of about 60 % (not 60 % of the popular vote, if we will ever see that again). These days, as the ballots are cast and counted in the millions - the vast majority in Biden's favour, prompting a struggle over the electoral system as well which, somehow, was unsurprising and may come back to haunt whoever the winner - I would put down that estimate to 52-48 in favour of the blue. Perhaps more; as the popular vote, with increasing discrepancy of a "popular" third party candidate, surges. In this moment, I would sooner see, and in effect may have, a fifty-buck note triple from Trump's reelection rather than a few drinks Biden's secure surge. (The stakes, I say without hesitations, are clearly off.) 

My best guess, then. In a Biden victory, presumably Ohio and Florida may turn - as must Pennsylvania - and the impossibly-red "blue wall" states of the north. With such an upset, if not dramatic for the new waves of the Obama era, a further "third term" will be secure. But we should, with that mentioned, debate whether it will be restoration, so desired by so many (of the loudly clamouring), but rather a synthesis. Biden, if obviously stagnant within a once-mediocre mind, with his charismatic and organisational habits intact, will be the impossible extension of the old world. What the new will hold, and which relics will be kept in silence from the impossible Trump administration, America's first postmodern president, remains to be seen. 

Next year's president? While I have cherished experience, going so far as hope for Jerry Brown in the past, I must say Biden's signa, and perhaps greatest strength, is his unflailing ability to say nothing and alienate nobody. Sadly, the predictable opposition was either too young or too old-er, if in a better state, I think. 

In the event of re-election, I suspect 2024 - with Pence or Trump at the wheel - will be both more ugly and tedious. Ugly, not because the prospects of eight years of the incomparable will prove too heavy to bear (they were not, typically, fatal to many deranged by Obama's election and great transformation that... sort of never was) but because the continued derangement syndrome of the political spectrum and faith in the institutions, sadly expected to outlast Trump's administration and his lifespan, the derangement of individuals and a postmodern celebrity culture only certain to increase. (This may, of course, be true times ten with a resurrection of the "establishment", that is, the parts that didn't ally with Donald the Caesar.) Tedious, because the next four will be a sheer daunting wait, nobody acting in concert with their stated expectations of a coup d'etat, and so forth, and reloading their guns for the presumed eight-year cycle throwback. And Pence, if nominated, will not make an energetic candidate, either for the presumed future Republican voter, nor for Trump's base. In this field of audacious, daring, brash wordlords (how's that for a neologism), he is something of a principled stool, a Stannis, if not exactly that. Unless already established, and should the long-expected derangement of the Trumpian mind - the only one, his only constituent - degenerate beyond the supposed low mark, there will be heavy pushes from within. 

That's really all. Apart from my smirking Nazi-Birgit 500-buck note in the red field, for the audacity (the odds being, by virtue of being skewed, quite favourable) as for the mixed feelings, I can't say more. 

Uterine Scalia

The process of judicial confirmation, notably including but not limited to the Supreme Court - or SCOTUS, in American affectionate vernacular, with the sordid undertones of Freenewspeak - has unquestionably being on a slough towards judicial Gomorrah, or at the very least utter delegitimisation, the institution now elevated as well as debased form of super-legislature with cynically black-garbed old men (and, since decades, women in the plural) issuing votes from increasingly extensive but haphazardly short-circuited life tenures. Now - with the sudden death of a conservative lion and very conscientious retirement of thoughtful and quasi-liberal scarecrow - the final blow against a supposed liberal lock, by the words of progressive scions utterly condemned and all but eradicated, was delivered with the expected but given the chronology unfathomed death of liberal hawk Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now the first woman Justice to serve out her life tenure, eleven score and eleven years after the first swearing in of this supreme paragon of the third branch, object of worldwide veneration and ofttimes, it seems, suspicion and condemnation (for all the unpronounced esteem held in the great Verfassungsgerichthof of Karlsruhe, I dare you to utter the name of one of its clerics in red, or any retired or dead president).

Somehow I expect the instinct of Trumpista and Senate Republicans to replace her before the election, as well as the reactions to this fact, were equally expected. None had thought, after the sordid affair of the Bork nomination, now immortalised in the questionable taste of fashioning into a verb (e.g. Lynch) as borking (small b) - one of the finest judicial minds in the republic, and among the poorest fitted to times then under then so immense division and lack of candour - that natural relations between the lawyer profession of those most supremely qualified, the legislative factions and presidents now utterly politicising appointments before the seats are cold, or even left vacant. 

Despite the best reactions, none could evade the fact they must have expected it, as well as the upheaval this death would work as a fulcrum for; even after the sordid promise framing the magic of Garland-traded-into-Gorsuch replacement for the Old Lion himself (now stoutly watching from above beside his thinner, but no less evocative, amusing or legendary contemporary) invoking an age-old precedent that no man, or even a glass-breaking woman, would be nominated during the final year of a presidency cannot have been expected from Ole' Mitch. This supposed precedent holds a long term of exercise, and been broken a myriad to spite that sweet face of tradition, and it remains to question whether a Clinton administration with an incoming - perhaps even elected - Republican Senate would have rushed to confirm one of her younger and more faithful (as well as fateful) scions, a pronounced Ruth the Second but younger, more eager in movements, lesser in bipartisanship and tact (and perhaps more colourful as well) or the balks of tradition would have held firm. Here, the traditionalists have all beyond abandoned them for the desired lock already met with calls to "expand" and "pack", without irony or scorn. (S)he who calls for the composition of a court to be altered in order to meet the desired outcome of its future decisions, and perhaps to change those of the past in violation of the stare decisis so recently praised, with selective memory. 

A lion with its prey... or is it bait? Although lauded, or booed, as a gate-breaking force, heralding an era of judicial "conservatism", he evidently often found himself a lone voice, a solid bulwark against a court rearing its head against the other branches. 

This lioness to replace a lioness, then, who is she? 

I feel I speak it in the loud. I resent(ed) the treatment of nominee Garland, for although this principle may have been invoked, it was a blockage so outrageously opportunistic, so ungraceful, so wishing to delay the selection into an administration the red majority may not even have wanted, that not a soul alive in the chamber could have thought it a stand on principle; and a foul, naked and short-sighted as the man himself disrobed (I mean Mitch; Merrick, I must admit, would be perhaps the fairest of The Nine, as far as drafting from their ranks to a pornographig piece, and not verdict, was wanted). This should also, with a twist of revulsion, be said of the treatment of eventually successful Judge Kavanaugh, but whereas Garland - here I fear(ed) my liberal credentials came into play, so I will do my best to disspell them with facts - bore his tribulations (smaller, admittedly, but more successful in their aim) with grace, and may yet see a position similar or yet grander, the most recently confirmed Justice broke the unspoken rule of non-partisanship nominally still observed by spouting his contempt and tears over the obvious, arguably ingallant and guerrilla-like, resistance from the blue. Perhaps these tribulations were, although beyond the emits of law and by the pedigree of trial-in-fact not so very convincing, self-imposed. And perhaps not so, or not remembered so in the faintest (is there a relevant difference here?). I am inclined, where such substantial doubts linger, be opposed to the maxim regarding Caesar's wife, and not subdivide my rulers as well as my friends between those never-ever, to occasionally, by one of poor standing, to those rife with stories and editorials and even accusations - I use the word in the strict, legal, proper sense - and judge before from bleating and a game of image well (or sordidly) played. At the same time, even my senses are tested, and the outcome is like to sordid (verb) the face of any man so scarred, even innocently (as he, lacking the ability to resurrect an expired matter or the likelihood of sentencing someone on the word of the accuser alone; both necessary things, I think). Be, or having been such as it may, the unscrupulous dialectic of Garland, Kavanaugh and "next contested nominee" - "contested" seeming fit to be struck well before unveiled - it is unlikely to repeat in the present, but the ease of a near-united bloc of Senate Republicans holding onto the majority (as they're likely to do for at least much of the next term, barring a blue upset in the Old Dixie they so tolerably resent, and have a record of nominees so grand and strong in wit and soul) to pass this one candidate in complete opposition, for a third time, will bear generational consequences.  

But generational consequences is the cry of the opposition, as it has been for at least a generation in aforementioned darling pieces of case law. The cry that abortion, secured not by Roe v. Wade but the much later and perhaps dreaded (given the name opposite the plaintiff) Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey, Democratic governor and father of supposed maverick molded by the beats of blue Washington into a pulp now certain to oppose, will eventually be prohibited - in the states selecting to prohibit or, more likely, restrict it severely by statute, and nowhere else - has rung, or rather been rung since the earlier, lapsed precedent was already contested and dry ink on the then-adolescent body of case law under the cloak of stare decisis dubbed "substantive due rights". In short, the idea - envisioned by Enlightenment thinkers, innovated by 20th century jurists, utterly rejected by a new generation and completely denied in the halls of the highest court in the land; Sweden's Högsta Domstolen, to be clear - that some space, outlined by the same jurists, mind you - is not fit for government overreach, or any reach at all. Overreach, in the spatial confines set by Griswold and then, in an arguably more public matter in Roe, was demarcated as the first and (partially) second trimesters, the quasi-medical terminology introduced by Justice Blackmun and trashed in his presence by Casey, where a re-vamped, pro-life quorum including only Republican appointees - including a fairly fresh Scalia - and Roe-bashing Justice White (soon to be succeeded by the RBG and now, I think, Judge Amy) reset its ambition not in favour of shredding its own work, but along the lines of a shared inherent logic of viability, hence demonstrating the power of both stare decisis and its obviously limited viability). This viability, equally and explicitly enshrined in the Swedish Abortion Act of 1974, stricter - in time, by far - than the 20-week ban Paul Ryan historically, for all its modesty, pushed through a Republican-dominated House, and which McConnell failed to push through the equally Republican-dominated Senate despite much-spoken of but reluctant support from Casey Jr. and two other from the blue team - but none of them named Doug Jones, as in the historic conjunctive Alabama Democrat, a regretful choice in the coming days . Few Alabama voters, after all, sport less conservative credentials than Swedish liberals, barring its very alive pentecostal roots (nor are they likely to forget the name of a child-eating predator when gazing down the ballot). 

"This nominee, if confirmed, will upend decades of progress", it has been said. But in order to ascertain the extent, quality and durability of this progress, the case aforementioned being exempli gratia as well as exempli bonia, likely and proven, we must look into the power of precedent so frequently discussed, including here across the pond, including dead cases, such as Roe v. Wade (or, dare I say it even beyond the rebuffing shield of parenthesis; Dred Scott v. Sandford, not Gloucestershire). In particular, how much does the conservative, if that is the proper term, amour reach across the blanket of settled cases? 

Well, not terribly far. Robert Bork, never-Justice Bork, famously stated in a talk with the great, both admirably and poorly aged Peter Robinson - depending upon how we judge the presence and prestige of the Hoover Institution; actually named from the then-Secretary Hoover, not the president and certainly not the (in Bork's tongue) sodomite-in-chief - that while this Supreme Court may err without damage well beyond its own pride and sense of infallibility, fairly well-kept I would say, the erring in constitutional cases justifies its revisiting them (here, not remarking let alone meditating on, as Scalia did, easing the amendment provision). But how easily, and does not this cheerful open-door policy undermine not only the security of pillars of case law called stare decisis et non quieta movere, but of the notion of a super-Senate or House of Lords, exclusive by one-digit numbers, serving life tenure? Well, the notion may also express, as voices of honesty as not a never-Justice may never speak, recognising actual realities. For if it errs, it must be free to err again. 

Already then a burdened man. The ghosts haunting Bork's service in his brief stints as solicitor-general, briefer as attorney-general, when plucked "[out] of the muck of Watergate" by Reagan, plucker and benefactor of legacies so different as Kennedy, O'Connor and Rehnquist, not to mention Scalia, he was already lost for the youth and relative virginity now sought. 

Thrust particularly into the figurative limelight has been her clerkship to Justice Scalia (if not, at least, to a Justice Bork) dubbed "lion of the law" and utterly "consequential" by the last two presidents, flailing to replace the two seats symbolically held by the lion(ess) of "left" and "right", respectively. If Trump succeeds where Obama could not, we must consider that a shift of the most noxious, or at least noxiously audacious character, has indeed been endured. But must the roots of a candidate's (presumed) selection govern with certainty over a future not yet written and sealed with the mark of the highest court of the land? History tells us it must not. For while aforementioned deviations of constitution and precedent have evidently occurred at least since Marbury v. Madison, the prime case to discuss if loyalty to the foundation - locked into a moment - would be taken seriously, 

The dimension of her sex, over-expanded and at the same time ignored compared to, say, former president Obama's delinquency of nominating women from religious minorities to the bench (no religious majority existing, one should add, although until Scalia's death the court was majority-Roman Catholic, the speedy approval of judge Garland having made it majority-Jewish, a "representation" for those thinking of numbers indeed irksome) would seemingly stand opposed to the presumption of wanting to re-demarcate, or shred, this precious (being no longer precocious) statement of now-all dead men. The willingness to reconsider is certainly riddled with hypocrisy on "both" aisles, as we would see, adding to the contempt likely felt by many watching the procedures. Senator Hirono's question, whether the nominee judge had not just been convicted, or indeed arraigned for certain felonies. Caesar's wife, or a Justice of this Supreme Court, must be above suspicion. And with suspicion being a dish freely distributed, at least from the mighty and their scions, one must plan for a court of fools or nobodies. Certainly nothing, from Mrs. Hirono's view, and that of her enemies, would serve the legislature better than bland rabid-passive dog tactics, biting whenever expecting to bite, else resting in sullen recognition. The questions imposed by other senators ranged form impressiveness and deference - not only those in red - to amazement, to shock, to resounding but polite rejection, earmarked for her nominators rather than her philosophy or judgment (mind you, senator Coons). In no way, it must be said, was this to be a repetition of the sordid affaire of 2016 or that of 2018. But behind this scenery remained a sordid division, with the only question open whether one of the oft-spoken liberal, decent or fateful Republicans (often made synonymous with women from the Northernmost states, a targeted but sometimes highly-regarded camp) would vote in the affirmative. Senatrix Collins, where are your manners? 

Finally, the mad - from the perspective of Congress - notion of cooperation and conjuncture must be discussed. Here, the trail of Scalia leave little doubt of creative and often evocative dissidence, something we may hold in esteem. In fact, most cases involve near-unanimity and some unlikely alliances and bridges, such as the lately and - in my Magna Carta-junking mind - cheerful minority in Gamble v. United States, where the Ruth the lioness joined hands, or at least paper and paragraph, with terrible Trumpista Gorsuch in seldom-praised defiance of the "dual sovereignty" doctrine used to undercut the ancient right of double jeopardy or, in the Roman law space where it is honoured in words if not exactly in practice, ne bis in idem. Mind you; a precedent-breaking matter, or restorative of long-trounced ancient civil liberty, but a great deal's worth regardless of the school or left-right dogma supposedly controlling the hand that wrote it. Here, not in the least, I would have liked to see his predecessor's hand, and had the case been decided with Amy nominated instead of Brett, whether only a two-thirds majority for the power of raw government could be accomplished. My compliments, in limbo, to her in case she would have thought it where the law takes you. The alternative, precedent or not, may be some very dark place indeed. 

The first African American justice to swear in a colleague, and the youngest woman appointed to the court at that. The proposition here, albeit the symbolism of Scalia would have been as impossible as that of her predecessor, the stout and infamous and ultimately short-lived RBG, the very image must be haunting for many, for a generation of decisions sure to change the very weight of the final court.

So what would be the conjuncture of this? In the mind and path of Scalia, overtly if not uncritically praised, her path would be one of judicial conservatism, indeed reactionarism, but the previously discussed term of "strict constructionism" must be held as a further juncture. The Bill of Rights must be upheld against efforts, not seldom by Democratic (as well as democratically selected, and unattending) politicians, to overreach into the private lives, and rule of law guarantees afforded citizens, residents and others alike since before their grandparents' birth (lest your first names are something as unlikely as, say, Harrison Ruffin, whose grandfather John was indeed a babe of neither speech nor privacy as the first ten amendments were being debated and ratified, a stirring fetus of indeed some protection as they were proposed, in late September 1789). This include, if the trail of Scalia is leading, the venerable defence of the right of confrontation, dialectically erected and, as the times may have required, near-butchered in Ohio v. Roberts, restored to former glory in Crawford v. Washington, and then again, if not finally, cropped in Michigan v. Bryant). It includes, more importantly or at least immediate to me, stern defence of flag-burners and mongers of pornographically violent video games so abhorred by "liberals" Stevens and Breyer, respectively, in Johnson v. Texas and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Here one must remark not only a bulwark of the individual and a deviation from near-Justice Bork, but also, it cannot be denied by any lover of the revolution and of Anglo-Saxon liberty, rigorous liberal credentials. Yes; even for someone who does not believe a right to abortion or marriage with anyone, although by god not several at once (the possible revisiting of Reynolds v. United States, one of my darling cases for slightly different reasons, indeed for its reasons rather than the outcome itself) existed as the liberal Amendment march began in the 1790s and was continued, belatedly but with renewed ambition and perhaps overreaching zeal, from the 1860s. Indeed, in defiance of governmental power, of "protection" bracket of politics, and in defence of this great beacon of liberal Enlightenment in its rigour, he merits the name of liberal. Well, to the question posed by the world and an uneasy minority in the senate; will she as well? 

Well, . Whether in time she may not only be indicted for sexual transgressions but indeed convicted and impeached, remains to be seen. In this dedication to tradition and precedent, at least, we ought - as we have, in fact, for nominees of the past 47 years, and must - allow this uterine Scalia a go. My greatest fear, as it is, would be a lack of ideological consistency which cheerfully marked her forbearer, or the courage of the woman previously incumbent in that seat. For whatever price the Democrats may exact in the next Congress, or the one after that, in the long tradition of borking (a verb so overused in practice it has lost its actual use), the institution may be of greater value than partisan impact. Lest we are, in this time of uneasiness for conventions (cheerfully, the great Malcom remarked the intersection - to coin a phrase - between furry conventions and the word chosen by the Democratic Socialists of America's recent excuse for a convention; indeed, also by the DNC and RNC joint travelers in buffoonery) better to avoid a "ConstCon", at almost any cost. For this, at least, I am a supreme conservative (if not exactly a reactionary) but one of taste and aim, rather than at conservation itself. That I leave to the judgment of judges and (dare I call them) Justices, now in full numbers, emerging from Iustitia's Minas Morgul. Thunder aims at the horizon, and soon the Nine will ride in full again. 

The Irony of an Antagonistic Lecture

Today, after the first (the second swiftly following the first, with eery predictability of what follows next) casualties from the Swedish Covid-19 swathe of the now pandemic proportions of this global disease, Chinese authorities issued a stern warning with much more resemble of a rebuke, claiming first that Swedish countermeasures were belated, insufficient and clearly marred by indecisiveness, second a (possibly even more rebuking) call to the European Union to chastise its member state. Having followed this - as we may sternly call it - health crisis since inception, China being the author written on its premier Swedish victim and so far the one to recover, I cannot but sternly agree with the claim.

Why, you may ask? Apart from the somewhat contradictory and clearly discomforting (as one might expect, if not from a figure of authority lending his voice to a stunned public when outlining a plan and measures for which they have supposedly been trained for years, if not decades) representatives of competent authorities, which went from claiming the pathogen had reached Sweden but once the impossible (and arguably inevitable) had been confirmed, had also been confined to an apartment in Jönköping for eventual, if not immediate destruction inside the host who had brought it there. Then, after a month and furious debate fanned by the flames outside the realm, the swiftly emerging crisis and Iran and the calls - whether prejudiced or, as we may presume now, only concerned or perhaps even rightly so -  for an Iranian airliner to be halted or at least isolated, then for temporary guests in Italy, a known path for a previous as well as pervious pathogen even in the minds of the most uneducated, to be tested upon reentering the kingdom now supposedly salvaged, and amidst promises of preparations, more alarming promises from authorities more or less not in position of power that such plans were insufficient or would at least not be imposed to the extent required, we have now to stare into a bloodbath of sanguinary proportions, and the unerring plausibility of an economic downturn as rippling as that we have emerged from only so seemingly unscathed. 

To suggest this is a calamity necessitating national unity - the call to which is, in my view, so over-estimated, even in "peacetime" - seems somewhat dubious. But surely we who are most vulnerable - having stocked among the least equipment per capita and, for all the excitingly advanced high-tech quarantine units perfectly fitted to keep the lid on a strain of ebola, should it appear at Arlanda or Malmö (or in Ystad, or Jokkmokk) should attempt to limit the spread by comprehensive and largely mandatory measures. "Distancing" is a myth, for it does not contain any more sense than that people already know; hand-washing need reminders, of course, but so was the case already, and particularly in care facilities (where strict quarantine procedures should be ready for a lockdown decision, not needing government approval, in an event such as this). Information itself cannot be enough. And, as one must need fan the flames of another viral strain already prevalent rather than ignoring it, we ought of course put a particular eye to the conditions in densely-inhabited "problem areas", where this virus of 2020 is all but certain to fester more comfortably. 

All of the measures so far taken speak of impotency: Authorities would - rightly, if one believes in the supremacy of elected officials - 

[Modification 

The Tyranny of the Crowds

The decision, hailed and demanded in expectation by his own (?) son, to withdraw the genius-perpetrator Woody Allen's memoirs might have been expected against even an icon so entrenched in his supposed genius and wickedness. Expected, for so few supposedly stood against the tidal wave of condemnation and - moreover - demand that condemnation be issued not by the institutions of justice - so very marred by their impartial, slow progress of the senses, of sensitivity - into a beacon of justice for all, no matter how small, but foremost against those already put in the dock. 

Censorship has, for want of desire for nuanced term, an ugly history, and as experienced in the latter decade's increasingly prevalent, absurd and - all at once - relevant discussion about "private censorship", in other words, the unkeen (and instinctively irrational) tendency to deny treating with 

The opening of the gates of hell, and the limits of barbarity

This date, succeeding better than that loudly (and more immediately) proclaimed by president Roosevelt as one which would "live in infamy", marked in its infancy by the liberation, release and reinauguration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, has been observed with increasing vigour as surrogate voices of the damned and negated are evidently carried on, with decreasing frequency, by their luckier - at any rate, breathing - peers, whose lives would nevertheless go into a lifelong encapsulating of a truth now known to all, to bear witness to that which surely no one would question...?

On this severity, the last and greater Israeli Nasi HaMedina, then about 90 and soon to celebrate a full term as head of a nation only approaching conception and nativity as the gates of barbarity swung definitively open openly quipped that while the massacres of the Armenians only a sibling-space before his own birth would have been a very fresh wound, its butchers and torturers and killers still very much alive and already (and certainly now) forgotten, despite brave and sometimes relentless efforts of diplomats such as Henry Morgenthau Senior (the man whose breed would threaten to repay the Germans in kind) and Erwin Scheubner-Richtner, the only person to play a role of note (if rather symbolic and very posthumously in the latter case) of the Armenian and German cases of this very intense exercise in barbarity. (I'm sorry, I said "Armenian", surely I meant Ottoman-Turkish-Caliphian?) 

On the Austro-German case - what we may call the Holocaust - we need not fear the oblivion of disinterest, being a seminal event ventriloquised in films and series every year, echoing strong even in the minds of those of scant education (in our part of the world, to be preciser). For now, that is. Having become, one must pronounce, a hagiographic symbol of depravity, destruction and debasement of a great culture and language, perhaps even of evil (if such a thing exists, and can be measured) but also of hope and wisdom and redemption - if not by its commissioners, at least sometimes by its many profiteers - we do pronounce the most fundamental verdict of these first qualities on anyone perceived wanting to reanimate or destroy the society we now inhabit through the very mention of these doctrines which nearly brought it to a (supposedly definite) halt, or synthesis? 

 Beginning with a condemnation of late Nasi Peres for having - feloniously, were he to set his foot in the wrong country, in want of the this office of "prince" - negated and denied the genocidal claims well established (here we must credit aforementioned Scheubner-Richtner, as well as the Morgenthau name bearing the resemblance plan of reducing Germany from its piedestal of nationhood as well as military power) but perhaps not so well as expressed through the same act of hagiography against the Ottoman regime repeated on a designated date annually, we may as well proceed to the wider, as well as far narrower, debate on the Holocaust or, as Raul Hilberg christened it in his 1961 seminal work, the Destruction (Förintelsen) of the European Jews - incomplete, mayhaps, but behold the figures and you get a grim measurement of success. The role of this first genocide-so-christened during its commission in the politico-cultural struggles of this next century and new millennium, in soon-christened Israel and in commenting recent events and procedures (and occasional swift repression) in Germany. Whereas the liberal crowd most eager to single out die NS-Regime, Nazi-ism and a kaleidoscope ostensibly fascist movements, including the rare self-affiliated, but often excluding the most powerful derivate, al-Ba'ath (nationalism being, after all, a kettle best be judged by its colour) as a unique evil bent on resurface, thus urging its most fanatic opponents to don a gown of the unique intuition of prophecy and, above all, mobilisation of all fulfilling their human need and duty to combat it, whether to either the apocalypse of annihilation continuously, until their own. 

This hagiography of tears, understandably aroused against a unique, in its own kind, of severity of barbarous conduct, taking place in the heart of Europe until then (or at least until the rise of the literal Generation of 1914 who were, about 1941, prepared to consummate its ideals) regarded as the apex not only of its own loins, but all human civilisation, with preponderance of cruelty both individual and institutional (today we might say "structural", to escape the distinctions as well as uphold them) through a comprehensive plan - I should say this now, not one I believe was consummated in 1919 or 1923 or 1933 or even in 1939, but rather with increasing intensity and determination through a havocial bureaucracy of competing as much as institutional joint action octopusically subjected to an apex grasped by a-mind-as-twisted-as-ingenious - was enough to merit longtime and near-universal condemnation even without the merits of Hilberg, and Bauer, van Pelt, Aly, and their less distinguished compatriots (Dawidowicz, Goldhagen, Cesarani) for as long as the memory of man, and even more woman, endures. Its stories, such as that of Maksymilian Kolbe, and its legends, including that of the soap, will be retold for centuries even given a nuclear decimation far outweighing it, and then perhaps its relevance. But after, admitted through the same breath of condemnation, is a fear; what to do with it once it is mere story, reduced to letter, footnote and - the difference enveloping 20th century genocides - photography? 

 On this I have no definite answer, other that just as the name Hitler, or even "Adolf", was never so strong as never to justify comparison with the long-standing fear of Attila, Genghis khan, and "the Swedes" - long after the last struggling breath of a Swede that once may have breached the gates of Prague. (Without an ounce of pride, I must observe the name of "Heydrich" has not quite acquired this rare sobriquet in Bohemia, nor will it carry it in the next century.) Nevertheless, compassion for the many unknown victims of the Taiping movement, or the ghastly and equally openly committed - and financed - rubber terror of the Congo - both matching both the death toll and arbitrary cruelty of the death camps, and surpassing them in zeal and avarice - or the broader colonial abuses of the time of The Scramble, or the Mongol invasions - a neat whisper, at most, but bearing testimony of millions put to death at the knife, millions only at the wrecked and pitiful city of Mary one day in 1221, seven hundred and one score years before the consolidation of Nazi doctrine and genocidal reality into open Vernichtung - would seem just as warranted. And now, perhaps, pointless. Perhaps wrongly thought so. Perhaps ignored at out own peril. Perhaps. 

What to do, then, with those who would air the disgusting, and potentially disastrous view that it did not occur? One would, or should be careful to take tongues, as the dwarf presupposed, and in our civilised and connected world, one possibly cannot but without generating a maelstrom of (un)warranted attention, followed by more condemnation that the act of repression was so soundly condemned from among the throng it was supposedly cursing, misleading or even proposing, in fact, to exterminate. Nor will petty "peaceful" efforts work very well practically, or morally. Depriving a Google guest of curiosity the ability to find - hardening the task, I should say - sources of information where the word of systematic mass murder is omitted does not make his mind more clearly set in favour of truth. Nor does it even serve good. After the webpage mentioned ensured nobody entering the first letters of "did the Holocaust happen", the algorithms reconnected this small effort to sources (quotation marks, if you can see them) debating to discrediting to outright denouncing the less firmly established Holodomor instead. 

But on the great question of severity, we must not falter nor linger in long moments of doubt. I have always reasoned that the minds of Swedes, waking to the reality of the house - or at least the house opposite the street - being ransacked by foreign, if well-recognisable police officers, a foster father or long-loved elder brother being dragged out writhing, spitting, kicking the chains to rattle, then the subsequent inevitable - as it must have been seen then, and thus leaving less open the question of sordid Siegerjustiz, compelling as Herr Skorzeny's lawyer, or any Japanese burgher of the once ancient city of Nagasaki may have understood it - trial and tribulations out of the courtroom, as particularly interesting, as opposed to finding out - as the New York Times did, already during the first war to end all wars - that Russia, the great obstacle not only to the Carolean Army but civilisation and decency and, in time, constitutional government itself, had carried its grim, Dark Age prejudice and tradition of annual bloodshed into a feast of slaughter enveloping millions, and at any rate of truth a daily rate, of its subjects. Whether the Anglo-Saxon notion of the "Hun", moving this frontier of barbarity far westward of what may have intimated Peter the Great, the ransacker of Belgium, committer (quite verily) of grim colonial era crimes that may have inspired Hitler as much as the, forever questioned, Armenian question and its attempt at finality in resolving, aggressor in numerous European wars touching continents far beyond its shores, militaristic pugnacious Prussian factory of lethal weapons and of hard men fit only to utilise them, is a more compelling question. But whereas the crimes of Cambodians and Rwandians and Serbs - particularly the Serbs, of the former Yugoslav nations - are being yet investigated, perhaps to a conclusion, the guilt of the Teutons having now firmly been established and soon in a position meriting only posthumous research, seems to bear everlasting. When, and why not, go on arraigning the dead over the dead? As far as this ritual goes, it would seem an almost arbitrary point to end it. But still, 

This barbarity, so christened (and here without quotation marks) as a symbol of everlasting condemnation as emotional as factual, may thus consciously be dropped with the wailing of the winds and the eventual decay - not physical - of the camps into objects of the long-lost and ancient, just as the names of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Mary Trostenets, even Treblinka, where nigh a million souls savour unsteady rest in grounds where a pellet of the infamous Zyklon B may never have been released, and let alone the ditches and copses where so many perished without passers-through having a neuron to spare in their once-existence, have now gone into near-equal oblivion for all but the peculiarly interested. Just as the Colosseum, its high hopes and excitement as well as the monstrous crimes committed within it have been reduced to less than the state of the Armenians or Congolese mentioned, a mere spectacle of distant history, how may we fear, striving clear of the word "confront" here, that the barracks, the train tracks, the once-electrified fences, will not face the same oblivion? Well, just as the mention that war was never to be after the second (the numerals here spoiling their hopes in the very mind) we cannot be sure that generations unborn, including of the progeny of these camps - and of the benefactors who then lived and chose differently - will not go on and on ceasing to care. While Jewish history, admirably, has a quality to ratify and reiterate the pains of the past, this one marking as powerful a piece as those witnessed in the age of Mordecai, Josephus and Spinoza, that Schindler of Judaism itself, and thus making it as immortal as itself, the difference in the hagiographic and historical, in the ancient sense, is pressing. Thus this intensified urge to condemn, to press charges, to confront (without many sentences of commemoration, let alone independent thought) in order to remember that which in the closest years did hardly even have a name apart from that still recognised in these parts as "the war", and just as fervently, with a whimper of indifference, will be the going-on to succeed it. On the day when not seventy-five but one hundred years have passed since the opening of the gates and the release of barbarity into the passages and annals of debate and commemorance, the fiftieth anniversary seeming close indeed, there will still be people left to stand, assisted, to talk and tell the stories of how their lives could have ended so much sooner, but already at this point the memory will seem aged and already fit to be put in the earth, along its antecedents and descendants in the exercise in barbarity. Whether this finally restores us to humanity or increases aforementioned fears, uttered at least as verbal prophecy and surely not as hasty rhetoric, regarding its repetition I cannot say; only that the lesson from the second war was more sobering and fitted for the human existence than those exercised and the deeds committed in the wakes of - the painstaking alterations of the freely debated, at the expense of boredom - proverbial first.