The Scourge of Honour

 

This last day, devoid of any accusations of an unseemly April Fool's joke by the smallest margin, the woman known (and often mispronounced) as Fadime Sahindal would have celebrated half a century on the earth, in an existence which would, then, have included Turkish Kurdistan (yes, the adjective is important and no, a sovereign, should-be entity of uncertain borders, government, composition and international relations does not yet exist), the once free republic of now-Swedish Jamtland, Kenya, and old Uppsala, where she drew her last shocking breath, before her father fired a piece of lead too close for comfort (or dare I say it, elegance) into his daughter's brain, a second into her jaw, as if in needless and b humiliation, a chastisement unfelt and backfiring. The picture painted in that stairway, a future snuffed out, which should have been "his", in the more general sense, with the 

She died, childless and bereft of her Swedish partner, because she wanted to be an individual  

This Age of Europhobia

Eurus, Phobos. To the many phobias haunting Europe, the one last added is the alleged disease of "Europhobia". While Russia wants to invest, to be engaged, to invade (in every sense), the alleged "America" wants to move out 

This is a smokescreen, of course, for at the moment  

Smoke and the need for screens

 

The smoke attack, which followed the legal (in every sense of the word) attack on the broader LGBTQ community and its ability to communicate and manifest its message in the old land of the Magyars, 

This law is passed in the name of 

It must be said, and asserted, that this sensation of attack on rights is not restricted . In fact, one would be remiss to deny such attempts - more so, the successful ones - are done in the name of (I emphasise, as gay people are not authoritarian and should not be equated to such policies) LGBTQ rights. Indeed, while Hungary may be considered a particularly (or moderately) conservative actor in the "free" or "Western" world, I would wager that Western, liberal democracies hatred against this community thrives where . If you ask me, would I permit gay marriage if . If I must, gun to the head, I would vote against both, and for the insecurity involved when the right of another to express h**self, as it should be. Any other policy, let alone one euphemistically and slovenly cancelling general political rights in favour of abstract rights of minorities, or a Christian majority, is an abomination, and those silently going along with it... well, I don't need to finish the comparison, do I? 

The common theme here is the right to , and common theme of pro-gay and anti-gay legislation alike? 

This November 22, revisited

 

In his epic (the term I would put above any other quality, including stellar acting, and certainly documentary integrity) JFK, the film of my year if not for the equal directorial qualities of Jonathan Demme and the stellar-is-an-understatement-exceeding ones of the great Welshman (nothing bad implied about Mr. Costner, who certainly put out one of his best performances, and from a position of more jovenly youthfulness) the near-eponymous Mr. Stone lays out a thesis of both profound clarity and a sprawl so wide it is resoundingly - with, I suspect, the sympathy of some moviegoers - rejected by the jury, spoilers abound. While this effort of failure, by Mr. Garrison that is (which he apparently didn't mind reminding the American and Louisiana public of, being present as the antagonistic Justice Warren, of California, the old double kingdom and the verdict marked in the name Myrdal, that is)  

Would I allow Ceausescu to run?

 

The epitome of vampirist (and conceivably racist) caricatures, the once sceptered but never crowned Nicolae I, would merrily be unable to run . In the end, death is the perfect disqualifyer. As knows tyrants around the world, including those preferring to extend this disbarment over far younger and (mayhaps) more competent, less As knew Mr. Routh, and as knew Mr. Crooks, presumably, although his preference for gross brain damage reducing the Republican candidate to a vegetable less appealing than the incesthysteria-spouting, board-grooming, recently-crowned and then abdicated Democratic versus death, direct and disqualifying, may have been one of as callous indifference as to the question of his own future as a voter, man and (conceivably) president.  

Why then do I favour assassination over barring someone for office? Well, for similar reasons that capital punishment - on which I have made my opinion obsequiously and quite abundantly clear - disturbs a constitutional, liberal order less than liberal (in the less attractive sense of the term) rules for imprisonment sans trial, such as those in merry Sweden, where the recently instated nine-month rule (apartheid South Africa allowed for 90 days, a move decried by Mandela as one against which "no dictator could covet more power") was almost as recently, and entirely predictably (without consequences) broken. Add to this the conditions of remand, which combines overcrowding with near-complete isolation of Florentine (yes, I hate that name too) conditions against the decidedly innocent, and the faux compensations gently exceeding American minimum hourly wages, per diem, and you have something more repugnant, and certainly more irreconcilable with democracy, than the notion of a Mr. Valjakkala, Mr. Arklöv or Mr. Eklund being escorted into a yard following three trials, further appeals and a request for mercy, to be very un-summarily shot. This latter image is distasteful, but so are the very real images of their crimes, living and dead, and their ended political aspirations would not, I think, affect the very partisan and ostensibly stable political system of ours more than the death of their banes (welcome and cheered, should it be delivered more brutally, without the benefit of due process). Nor should any party, of popular movement worthy of the name be hampered by the assassination of one, or three, of its members, or even Cole di Rienzi (plural). The ability to exclude a political candidate, otherwise qualified, on vaguely political grounds, is an inferno to the match of a single name, with no ability 

Whether this discretion could be employed... sparingly, should not be entirely dissuaded. In Germany, now without the "West" but very much of the West, and of the same constitution and Bundesverfassungsgericht, 

What then of the question, should we not safeguard this constitutional, liberal order with . Well, asides from the age-old question of Plato: , (further) translated into English as "who guards the guardians", the question which is outmanoeuvred with the same move as these undemocratic political actors, i. e. candidates not fit for election, now in the more literal sense, 

What then is to be done? Ignoring the persona associated with that phrase, and his view of an assembly elected but not yet seated, which could not be trusted with carrying out his objectives and where his party got only the second tally, we must ask for whom democracy is, and whence the legitimacy distributed comes. In the framework of the EU, this is more obviously . As Tony Benn said, evoking the (old-fashioned, bloody and decidedly toxic) English revolution, properly called if the later American and French nephews are, as well as the concept of popular sovereignty not merely as a tongue massage for certain lawyers, but as a real concept to be held in mind by the elected, from which they derive their powers, and to which it is stripped bare and returned and resurrected (or not) once a general election is held, "rather a bad parliament than a good king". While King Georgescu, just as his predecessors Ceausescu and Antonescu, may be maligned as a monarch in waiting, symbolically, . And so do the opposition, by which I mean the (opposition in mind to the hypothetic future) government, fit into the historic mold of oligarchy which, as any tenuous or gobsmacked student of the classics knows, is just as un-democratic and distanced from democracy. We ought to know now, with Senator Sanders denouncing the Trumpist oligarchy and its Märzveilchen as oligarchs and plutocrats (and, notably, less so the very same men when they sided with the party he himself now very obviously does, and not necessarily in the interests of a wide Popular Front for Schumer, Soros and Sanders, in Madrid in late summer 1936). The Russian subtext is clear, but so is the  . Lest we repeat history, in this case the eye shining towards the ancestral leaders of the ÖVP, and of Austria 1933. And maybe we should. But if we should; there are, as the Austrians learned, worse outcomes, but as with the 1930s Freudian-friendly dictatorship, the stiff medication may usher in the disease, and if unleashed, "we" must carry a substantial burden, one which cannot be redeemed by position and interest alone, and certainly not prejudice. Playing the role of Mahdi and pointing to a golden path seems incredible, in the literal sense of the term, and here, the drunkedness precedes the trip, with the most gouged-out eyes for the most predictable consequences.  

An old face, now doubly discredited. But would he have seemed as untenable in 1968? In 1945? We do not know, but cannot say, until it is too late. Unless we are to elevate ourself into a Shora-ye-Negahban of democracy. 

Brave New World Order

The speech - symbolic in its very name - in Munich by the youngest vice president since a much less torn and scorned Richard Milhous Nixon was certainly not received as a love letter by European colleagues less enamoured (dare I say it?) by the power of elections. In the most stunning, or even deserved, springs unloaded into the collective eye of the beholders the 40-year old tetragrammaton, VPJD, ripped into the independent (?) judiciary of Romania's decision to quash its recent presidential election, lambasting that such an action would not only undercut democracy - a fair assessment - but the credibility of European institutions and the legacy of liberty, ostensibly shared with the younger, nastier, sock-dologising American cousin, to the predictable reaction of support (if quiet) for this judicial coup itself, and scorn for the critique. 

Amongst other critiques, and the near-absence of the Ukrainian question - where Vance's views can be summed up by very wilful, if respectably mournful, passivity - but matters that can be summed up by the infamous First Amendment and its infamous (from the viewpoint of Munich, even in the present tense) scope. The notion of British man - the land of Locke, Milton and even the Human Rights Act ostensibly placing such rights over the arbitrariness of statutes - going to prison, or at any rate being led (or more metaphorically, "thrown" and "dragged") to the courts to face some stiff rebuke for public prayer - or, more tastefully put, a protest against the practice of abortion - under the rubrique of justice makes me, in an oft-used cliche, unable to keep silent, and so it should in your case. One may well voice whether it is the right place to speak of such things, or indeed to speak at all for an American vice president, but surely - under the weight of history - 

The implications of this speech of his on those negotiations of ours will put, sorely, the mark of "failure" - or success, viewed from some other voter's keyboard, or basement, across the pond - over the main topic of the conference. What if Ukraine is sold out, betrayed, rift of its territory, incapable of defence further on - from Munich, no less? But to those heralding the Munich analogy, predictable even with the current state of education and even without the auspicious location, one would have to ask where the might of the Führer, equally raised to a stature forbidden by the Versailles order to indifference, and indeed support, and his Wehrmacht had after three years of actual invasion failed to capture Prague would be in relation to concluding such a Czech War and continue into Poland, Scandinavia, the Benelux and France, for its bad reputation and sordid 1940 regiment of beards and failures the strongest on the continent, west of the common enemy in the East, that is. 

The sordid state, not only of the Ukrainian polity - whatever its past, and former subjugation to (or indeed topping of a much younger) Russia, decidedly an independent one, which should be afforded the integrity of its borders - but of the Russian effort to conquer and add it to its empire - if that is, or were, Mr. Putin's goals (as Ayn Rand said, this character deserves not the honourable implications of "President", but let's leave language policing and secret police-work at that) when he assaulted an already slighted, already amputated Ukraine with less than 170,000 men (Hitler and von Rundstedt would have had ten times the numbers and, yes, the sympathy of some Slavic boots and shoes amongst the population) to add to his desire to compare himself to the Tsars. A Czar, in one of the more lurid turns of American vocabulary, to Trump's Caesar (or is it Marius, or rather Sulla, but surely not Catiline?). If these are Putin's goals, they have not been well vindicated by his actions, not merely in the field of combat - where he keeps himself well scarce and absent - 

As you may guess, or indeed already know, my doubts as to these imperial, outdated designs of Mr. Putin have never quite been well and truly trashed, as hard as they may be to vindicate (although many, or a few good men in the West have tried) but the desire for a common security, indeed a political, common apparatus within a desired quasi-polity may make it a useful notion (if not quite a fiction). Against this stands the verdict of this brat from the outskirts of Ohio, the age of Emmanuel when he took up the mantle that was once (Louis) Napoleon, the new order not merely dominating but lecturing the old. More so, the generosity of offering these values as our shared European-American legacy, rather than an Anglo-Saxon invention (as far as parliamentary government and Bills of Rights are concerned) later exported, and representing more generally the common heritage of humanity. This conservative estimate of liberal democracy as European, or even Anglo-American, surely deserves scolding (although I claim it can be vindicated in large, and in Keir's kingdom by the virtue of near-340 years of parliamentarianism, a double since the days of Palmerston and still kept) just as much as the practice of liberal liberties within the "European-democratic" sphere (let alone Ukraine, if we're going to banish generosity to the back of the dictionary) now claiming, under the guise of protecting democracy, draconian and overtly authoritarian measures, jointly with denouncing the American populist surge for these very sins. 

I know not of any case currently of a journalist imprisoned in the United States; surely, there must have been a case recent, but I know for a fact that none of the examples made from Swedish (yet to be tried on appeal), English, Scottish and German cases in their very state of sordida would not be accepted within the liberal democratic framework Trump so evocatively (or am I being ironic?) praised and promised to defend, and occasionally - if not very consequentially, as of yet - scorning, lately with the battle waged by the unitary executive against the bureaucracy, with (parts of) the judiciary rushing to the latter's aid, posing again "democracy against liberal democracy" in a war where popular will may yet win but still crumble. What ought to be asked is whether it may lose, and thus crumble anyway, whatever the critics of undemocratic measures may hold...? These questions of the future itself does not, however, rip from the vice president's lapel the critique justly made, principally (or even bravely) spoken, and met not with negation, not with a better argument, but with the sheer contempt of the old man facing the wroth of the loathsome, but evocatively correct, prodigal son. As in Vinterberg's famous film and its anti-eponymous climactic scene, the accusation, to the accused, rebounds in itself, because it is true and not because it is, or has even been implied to be, fabricated. Here, 

What then of Ukraine, and this seeming, seething change of subject? Well, if these institutions are important, we should 

"The threat to our revolution does not come from France, but from within." The words may not have been spoken by Thomas Jefferson, but ring nonetheless strong, no less if the aged, once brilliant but now largely decrepit figure of Adams was correspondingly equated to the Europe now crying out for more American aid (in some sense vindicating the absurd, masochistic comparison to a babe, by some less than sober voices).   

The Damocles Gun: Part II

 

The question of general public safety, in relation to the possibility or - more or less surreptitiously - rights of either owning, carrying or effectively using arms - particularly, and essentially limited to the question of firearms or other "dangerous arms" - and the need for the state to balance these in a manner confirming to the interests of an obscurely defined individual, naturally arises out of the smell of blood and the cries of anguish arising from incidents such as that occurring now . In the Swedish case, with the titular "Damocles gun" being surprisingly hard to translate, this is hardly the case with regard to public safety versus firearms, or gunpowder and incendiary substances more broadly, given the vast . In this regard, the absence of (effective) customs and border controls - despite a generally beneficial geography, the substantial and less substantial land border being near-unused for this purpose and the free entry through the Eastern Sea being increasingly militarised, as the recent miniseries on Soviet (or should I say Russian) submarines and their concurrence with alcoholic beverages testifies -