The Voice of the Outer World

 

This day, once decade past I imagine, I was sitting in the then-brand new hall known as Lindellhallen, tuning into the news from the United Kingdom, and received word. The great voice, of our time and seemingly for a future both bleak and interesting and the prospect of facing it with better words, was no more. 

The Hero and his Time

 

Many would, though seldom able to describe the reasons and the moment that granted them that realisation, refuse to call former president Frederik de Klerk a hero. I myself, having just mused over the term "hero(n)", its ancients roots and their ramifications, and with that basis decided very much against it. For in the world of Hellenic myth and deed, he belongs on the Olympus, not as a muscle-bending Heracles - nor as Zeus. But with Minervine qualities of wisdom, properly defined and utilised, sprung out of, and in defiance of father Zeus, and more broadly being a man for the hour, rather than - as Robert Bolt undoubtably would have preferred - for all times, he expressed a rare and cherished-in-the-abstract quality of heroic unifier, pragmatist and conscientious to his bedrock, yet utterly moving and consequential. 

This all, as detractors have been moderate in expressing - with certain exceptions sure to be less about Frederik de Klerk himself as about the legacy of apartheid or even, more importantly, contemporary racial and cultural and above all economic transmutations undergoing in the United States - came out of a desire to save a white minority and their legal and economic privileges, for certain. But more clearly, as one would need to state when South Africa is the question and not North America, is the twilight hour of the Afrikaner people; hunted and scavenged into exile among the brutest corners of the earth, ruthless in clashing with the natives of the new land (Transvaal) they now claimed for theirs, equally admired as Africans - their preferred nomina in their own tongue - by their new competitors and ultimately, through the hail of British intervention, subjects. This critique strikes a parallell, though, because what ultimately doomed the system under which he was to grow, and outgrow, was not the inequities of the system itself, which indeed slowed and ground to more equal economic standing and life expectancy throughout the 1970s and 1980s (itself, of course, because of the dysfunctional presuppositions of the system itself, as defined through economist Paul Krugman as a gigantic boondoggle meant to ensure the employment, under Western European wage conditions, of the white, again, Afrikaner populus of the new republic) but the contemporary struggles and machinations in the United States, which by no means spelled the end of racial tension, but the public discourse monogamy of American citizenship and polity to a non-racial, if not exactly post-racial, national identity. South Africa has undergone no such thing, nor would it be fair to assess the Afrikaners - subjected and haunted, still, by a cruel expansionist tutelage which saw the coining of the term concentration and camp into a compound word - as mere colonialists (Verwoerd, symbolically, being something of an exception). As children and grandchildren and great-great-great-great grandchildren of colonisers, sure, but so are the Americo-Liberians to ruled a non-colony christened equally cruelly as Liberia for 150 years, without the anti-racists of the world rolling over in defiance of its participation in international organisations. Here, another point of contention could be raised too; if Mandela had challenged the Liberian regime of Tolbert in 1964, or his later friends Castro and al-Qathafi, we may never have known his name, except as a footnote, and any treason trial initiated in 1956 in any of the dictatorships or single-party states around the globe was certain not to last five years, let alone end in acquittal. In this regard, if not exactly by its own accord, British-inherited law and institutions, as well as the longstanding South African parliamentary tradition, managed to cull some of the excesses 

But I am both losing and getting ahead of myself. But it was in this environment, a barrister and graduate from Potchefstroom on the outskirts of Transvaal, age 20 at the commencement of said Treason Trial, that he grew into being, and well set for a career in the burgeoning new land of mirth and providence for the Afrikaner people. The rebellious Senate was being culled and swelled into impotency, the last hopes of the Cape Coloureds once a potent voting bloc, the judicial system undergoing its first obliterations of check and balancing the regime in Pretoria as resistance had mounted throughout the 1950s. Parliamentary opposition from lukewarm confused whites collapsed, being surpassed in media, and importance, by revolutionary zeal already destined to mark the arriving 1960s. 

He began his career, predictably in the ethnocracy that was the Nasionale Party - also undoubtedly, sine qua nullum, as a member of the mystical esoteric Broederbond - as a secretary . And in 1972, foregoing the 1970 election that was the baptism of fire of blood-born Prime Minister Vorster, "F.W." was selected for the NP nomination for the constituency of Vereeniging. He had already attempted in 1958, hoping to be dragged by the coattails of his father and the unending successes (and trickery) which solidified the NP:s position as the truly (if falsely) "national" party, at least to the white man. A 22-year old, he failed. If Mandela had been able to do so at the same age, he might have spoken out agains the Munich agreement - or indeed praised it sullenly - but this showed, from the start, that F.W. would not, at any stage, be received as a saviour, or be that refreshing, renewing spirit which Kennedy displayed a few short years later. Boer aristocracy or not. 

For all of these reasons, and more than most laureates of that contested prize, we should offer to De Klerk our thanks. 

The Final Chapter

 

"One of the jobs of a father is to get out of the way." 

Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949, d. 2011) 

I might not have associated the name - or the work of - old Hitch, now about to see his first ten-year anniversary (I'm sorry to say, for many reasons) with his greater and perhaps more outrageous contemporary James Bond - but apart from the subjects of booze, empire, masculinity and the unrestrained self struggling against a wanton world steadfastly revolving around me. His own father's sentiment, that sinking a Nazi convoy was the best thing - if not the only thing - he'd felt certainly and positively good about, echoes as well with a forceful and somber tone. 

Both these anecdotes, and not only because of the upcoming decennial, came back to me in the much-delayed (or perhaps too early to mark yet another decennial, even as we hold our hands and quake that the box office will not be too governing, or even appointing in itself) premiere of the long-awaited "next" Bond film, the longest-parted from its preceding one and in this case without a change of actor, a tightly connected to its fault prequel, the end of the Cold War (and, for a time, history) or the echoing debate, apart from that heralding our time, if our audiences need or should identify with the gritty, post-Second World War British agent, if somewhat boosted by the "merely" untimely and global release of a viral agent both echoing the themes and parodying them, 

The plot, again heralding the times, displays an intense meditation on the personal and greater-than-geopolitical: A hero grounded to pulps and groans and only the superhuman instincts and talents best put to the test by daring adventures, his once promise of family life and oblivion thrown against and fed into a chemise of the grand work - a Heracles for our time, if you will - but never, and here I grant my first praise, with the opening sequence, even as that downbeat ending of the misnamed Quantum of Solace suggested, overcome. His moment now salvaged and again afforded, as presented in the previous Spectre (without a cat-wielding Mr. Gardell, even if the cat, alongside many tokens and attitudes) a future with a potential mate for life juxtaposed to an enemy, 

The Good Constituent

 

When the memorable, if not for the reasons that typically nor ideally mark the passing of a represenative of the people, Jo Cox became the first Member of the House of Commons in a quarter of a century (the last case, Ian Gow, occurring just into the 1990s and the post-Cold War period and then as never obliviated into the very-long ago) and the first of her sex to suffer death at the hands of a political foe, constituent or not. Afterwards, in an undignified and haphazard celebration of a temporary one-party state, or status, the alternative Liberal and Conservative candidates obviated their candidacies in order to hand a seat lost back to its Labour "owner" (by-elections, being by nature held to ascertain who the proper owner, or rather member, is). Now, five years and only one more by-election in Batley and Spen, noteworthy on its own merit, a hypothetical imbalance was adjusted when MP David Amess, near 70, stubborn withdrawal Tory was stabbed without the smell of cordite, and without mercy, at a constituency surgery (a peculiar phrase) in his native city. Before dusk, he was passed beyond this imperfect world of parliaments and the House had lost yet another member to this peril, as I hope he would not mind me saying. 

Now, aside from the question of whether Labour and LibDem will, or ought to file candidates in the Tory heartland - which they should, or else cease to do so altogether - there is the question of what offence this does pose to democracy itself, or parliamentary rule and supremacy, as it ought be called, for all its recognised (including by Churchill, for many years the hind-est of backbenchers) flaws.  

I would like to support that sentiment, and in particular, the notion of a representative which (deliberately not "who") is just that: A representative, not of every constituent in spirit or opinion - likely not half, most of the time - but in the sense of putting constituents, as an entirety, beyond and before the prospects of advancement in the halls to where they, once upon a time, selected (from a slate of imperfect men, and, yes, imperfect women) to send him. 

For David Amess' positions were perhaps never fashionable, and a heterodox - not least in the time of Johnson and his Tories, if they can still be called that, except in the original invective - 

The pettiness of the act, smaller yet than the rather obliquely justified (compared to her, back then, male progenitors) assassination of Cox, somehow makes the sacrifice seem so meaningless as not befitting the term. Sacrifice, yes, over decades on the backbenches, never asking for higher office, making clear his duty was first, and second, to last, to his constituents, with his competence and, mayhap, family as only limitation. 

The Two-China Problem

 

After many decades of stern, stiff, sometimes very heavy-handed rhetoric backed by naval and aerial flexing of naval and aerial bi- and triceps, and the responsive and consequential shrugs, the vox of media descended into frenzy regarding a not exactly imminent, but decisively final once-it-occurs assault by mainland China, the proverbial "people's republic", against the remnants of the Chiang Kai-shek system and Guomindang rule, if not exactly in Guomindang's safekeeping, with Chairman Xi's speech 

And consequential as never, President Tsai - the most underrated president anywhere whether regarding handling of the Covid-19 crisis in face of overt sabotage attempts, salvaging a constantly besieged economy, or the unpredictable identitarian praise for a lesbian in a domain reserved for straight white (sorry, yellow...?) males not interested in gender-corrective surgery - stood firm and, in the name of the people of Taiwan, now all that but in recognition, and the green streak of her movement - also under siege, one should point out - by holding that, under no circumstances, would the republic having achieved not only independence but that most precious prizes of all, of liberty, usher in an era of Hong Kong-esque descent in barbarity and rule under the Zhongnanhai's boot. Surely any Western liberal enamoured by these questions over all else should draw their swords at the very disturbance in sleep that the China of old, fervently patriotic, militaristic authority waved its nails at the small, free, independent-in-all-but-name republic? If not for, say it, their pocket books and bloody ignorance? 

I use strong phrases here; indeed, this defiance may be held as the great prize, if one could call it that, from China's clumsily effective destruction of never perfected but long-lasting liberty in Hong Kong, from the closing of uncomfortable shops, a symtom frightfully recognisable in other parts of the free world, to outright , to the symbolic and seemingly needless gesture of removing a statue of indignity (again, signs...) commemorating the massacre, please don't call it thus, from the campus of Hong Kong University. Whether these gestures will have eradicated liberty or the idea of it from the Dragon City we shall not know for a long time, but my personal desires to visit (as I almost did in 2014, the dread of a comparison never made unnerving now, although comfortably at least there are braver souls out there to make it for me) and attend the merry mixture of Chinese legal traditions and Anglo-Saxon common law, with the strange spice of colonial overreach in the blend, may now have faded into unlikelihood beyond even the faintest hope. 

Could this have been averted? Well, likely not. But the sealing of the fate of Hong Kong, as it was or perhaps "as it ought have been" (or at least "as Chris Patten would have us believe it ought to have been", his wit and undeniably Cassandric qualities being greatly compensated by his lack of using them even to demonstrate, at the critical moment, his revulsion until fear had become reality) has certainly sealed another path, that of the republic being abolished in full, and the polity known to the world as "Taiwan" (and the Pescadores, and so on) until the point of combat and invasion being the all-expected path to such an outcome. The Taiwanese will never surrender, will never walk the Hong Kong dao (no one bothers to mention Macau, demonstrating; at least unintentionally their greater devotion to British norms) into the jaws of Xi. This posits, as it did in 1949 and perhaps more dramatically, the two-China problem. 

Both exist, both have wide recognition, of different sorts, and the undeniable retrocession question - not really a question, had not Chiang chosen and managed to salvage his "revolution" and "government" by absconding with its best resources and best men here, of all places - is a key factor in denying to Red China that which they, in all honestly, could otherwise take or "pacify" by force. Yet, Taiwan is not a country, the republic is dead, or so Sweden has held it to be since 1950, the United Kingdom even longer, France and particularly the United States, not quite so long. How is this to be reconciled, with an ever-belligerent, and ever-stronger, Red China, the China of the CCP, the people's republic, putting its hooves across the Pacific, and then opening his maw to roar his desires. The inevitable Hitler analogy is of course spurious, but not quite distasteful, at least not for anyone swift to throw it at elected politicians in France, the Netherlands or Finland, or indeed the United States, quite incapable of building or even having the designs to build a concentration camp. In Xinjiang, and of course Tibet, this is not quite so, and whatever the regime's lackeys would tell you, this is the great fake news, if there is any "narrative" worthy of this self-insulting label. 

How then, if this is again the object, and if this object is seriously taken, is the republic to be used against the "Red" China, resurrected wrothful China, the China which seeks to dominate, expand and aggrieve the world? And how, which would be the presumed solution, should they move about? These considerations, which should have been considered with Xi's rise in 2012, if not already around 1992, with Jiang, is what now clouds the minds of these Western advocates, who must now so cynically - if not wrongly - do this volte-face and manage to explain it properly. 

The End of Mutti

The long-heralded departure from German and thus, joint as these positions seem to be, European politics of Chancellor Merkel, suspended in disbelief and a seething kind of horror upturned in disbelief over what result the free election of a united German people might bring in, the ninth such under the federal constitution of which one - the 1998 "butter election" - won outright by the SPD, another in the wake of the 2001 reset by a margin of 6,027 voters, and perhaps by that margin ushering in an era as long as Kohl's, soon to be closed to tunes both pitiful and of sorrow uncertainty. 

And has thus the man now set to replace her, from a set of two perhaps as pitiful as the circumstances, reinvigorated the SPD, a historic force, christened by an eminence such as myself as one of the foremost of the Western world, alongside the British Tories and the American, non-Canadian Republican Party (to this, and scrapping the ambiguous Wayne-esque "Western", one ought to mention the Liberal Democratic Party, non-bird; the Gongchandang now soon two thirds the SPD's remarkable age, the Bharatiya Janata Party; prematurely but I would sooner play the role of Cassandra than Suetonius)? Well, taking into account the grand realignments supposedly at work in the Western political canon, and its limitations in the case of Germany (supposedly shielded from certain trends, most potently until the last Bundestag election which brought back ordoliberal sincerity as well as a curiously Ostalgic anti-European force for chauvinistic German hegemon... whatever, as well as the death of the most appalling scion of SPD who seemed, for a moment, crowned to lead its realignment) one could as well lean on the used, but very much un-disproved cane of flunctuation, with the party of power for 16 years being mathematically unsound to hold out for much longer, as it had been in 1998, despite obvious greater victories. The result? A half-invigorated SPD, polling six million votes worse than it did in 1972, three million worse than the catastrophic result in 1983, which consigned it to another 15 years in opposition. In truth, the result shows, apart from above-stated truisms of the inevitability of defeat the impotency of liberal-progressive as well as "alternative", alt-right (Communist-nostalgic) forces to prevail. The grand variable, heralded for long as the new force for German politics, and unlikely to escape that reality, is the sobering result of Die Grünen; not "the Greens", which would imply a comparison to the current within Swedish governmental politics far flung from the spirit of the 1970s/80s which spawned them, and so far from the clear-cut case of effective Green government, the case of Baden-Württemberg posing hopefully prophetic, that one would rather not mention them within the same sentence. Personally, I think, had the Grünen nominated Kretschmann, a sincere and seasoned voice and an outstanding head of government to challenge Scholz and Laschet in their supposed core strengths, we might well have ended with a green column closest to the ceiling, and shouts across Europe, including where no shouting is due (well, as the general murmured, we shall see soon enough). And a hotchpotch of coalition work to do, with a 23 % surging Greens working with a displaced and humiliated 22 % CDU and SPD at 21 %, either a humiliated and unreliable junior partner, and a strong FDP at 15 %, its near-historic resurge a mystery, the only certainty in such a reality - as in ours - being that while an increasing veneer of the German people have turned to the AfD for "alternative" politics, these must not be reflected in the executive branch, whatever the costs. Whatever will come next, that is. We will make it, fear not. Noch einmal, noch zweimals. 

The politics of coalition building, perhaps unlikely - and for that reason, very likely - to feature an inverted SPD-led cabinet of black and red, now nominally under Kanzler Scholz, will for all its familiar deal-brokering nonetheless be overshadowed by the mists of a new dawn, if not exactly in the foreign field. Investments in the military will continue, perhaps joined-rivalled by those in affordable housing, but I find it unlikely to be jolted to the tune of many volts we will see again a Keynesian "socialism-but-without-social-management" scheme. The reason for that, and the pinnacle which will have to be broken to restore that forgotten, fondly remembered and also very despotic and despised era I will discuss later, but it is not one like to be overthrown by Germany and never by one of the coalition partners. Investors, hold no fear. For as long as the scope of international free flow of capital and trade and the global distribution of production remains, we shall not tread on your interests beyond what is necessary to uphold them. Will not be questioned. Never. That door, while always bulking open and especially during election years is firmly closed, thank you. 

So, lacking another hagiography to write for the commendable and unassuming woman leaving the scene, and (yet) short of one to infer from the men standing in her wake, I will turn my eye to the realignment looming. The Liberals, under the same Lindner who returned the yellow to the Bundestag in 2017, a victory that always seemed a bit unearned and expressing the dissatisfaction with the all-powerful Union after her fateful 2015 slogan, will bear down on any attempt, now hardly looming, to force a left-wing turn gawked and bellowed out by ostensible left-wing publications (or should that have been "ostensibly"?). A red-green-yellow traffic light option, certainly the best way to read in the trends flowing - not a logic honoured during the past years, mind you - will risk being one of the quiet, status quo ante dominam centre, if even that. Thrusts and trysts between green and yellow will be multitude and risk capsising it on two fronts, even if the SPD will undergo a similar development and result as the new hegemon to steer (West) German Sozialwirtschaft, liberal democratic paragon. 

What about more fateful changes? Already, and well before the poll, the fortunes of the uncompromising opposition-marked AfD were changing. And since the NPD and any force beyond isn't exactly standing on its feet (remember, they held an MEP two years past!) and Die Linke is more politely but arrogantly snubbed as a coalition partner, if frequently included in the options and staples discussed, and has - with its power couple Oskar and Sahra - seemingly lost the prestige of a potent left-wing opposition as much as the SED did after the break of its wall. The future, if it is on the left, is also yet to spy its scion. Or could this be its man, the one promised by fate and the hopes of socialists coddled into obscurity and consensus by the end of the Cold War and this fateful peaceful reunification of not only "right-wing" and "left-wing" Germany, but of left and right? Well, he is not a Gerhard Schröder, nor - I think - a Karl Herbert Frahm, and for that reason may have grander impact on the policy field, less in the optical. His course is, almost inevitably, to be that of Mutti, even if he is not named the corresponding sobriquet - that, as well, if anything held by the great scion of the CDU, he who will not be surpassed, or we shall yet see. The defence budget and Germany's military role will increase, as will - inevitably, given the departure of the British - the need for German revival, now strengthened by their Catholic and Eastern European partners, in lieu of the French. 

The Strange Death of the conservative Party

Encapsulating my point in lower-key letters, the conflict now prevailing (as, ever, before) in the organisation usually described as the Grand Old Party, heralding greatness but also a sense of putrefaction, of a thing crawled out of the skin of former glories.

The snake metaphor is old, of course. For once, long before Obama's raging and seemingly pastoral cries for "change", smoked in the image of youth, there was William Jennings Bryan: A man of lesser hair, but , whose fiery oratory of both fire-and-brimstone Old Testament-like fervour and a radical cry for fundamental and economic "change", equally strong and blasphemous against current orthodoxies in its cry that the United States, a government of, by and for the people, "should not crucify mankind on a cross of gold". Well, gone - one hundred years hence - was the gold standard, and it was a GOP administration that did it, but gone was also the old Bourbon Democratic party. It had, frankly, been swallowed by something else, amidst a popular torrent. (This can be disputed, of course.) 

Another point made by the equally once-illustrious The Atlantic, a name befitting the once-unconquerable ocean gone beyond the age of simply being trod over by the now-deceased Concorde, is that she has been a GOP firebrand for all of Trump's policies, meaning the hardest thunderbolt self-hurled at the Democrats "until the insurrection". Well excuse me, but since when has this thing, I mean critique (quotation marks being perhaps necessary, but then superfluous) been a thing of the age of Trumpism or "Trumpianism"? It would feel too obvious to I also don't grasp how much power the lie of the stolen election ("stolen" being a rhetorical, rather than a legal category, with many considering the elections of 2000 and 2016 stolen in every way other than the courts having affirmed it (the case of 1960, where Nixon actually can claim to have won, if yet a sliver, of the popular vote over Kennedy's, in my view only more sordid in its amelioration as by the fact that indeed it seems to have been). 

The equally ludicrous proposition, now swiftly forgotten, that Cheney's lesbianism (or her fathers more-than-tacit liberalism on the issue, which exceeded of President Clinton or former president-elect Gore) should necessitate a more progressive, or "GOP Classic" agenda - the Trumpista movement being, of course, hallmarked by its rampant homophobia, as exemplified by its prime scion's stance on equally ludicrous, or let's say solipsistic "questions" over Mr. Jenner's bathroom of choice, or the more groundbreaking proposal by a GOP candidate that a clerk who refused to endorse gay marriage in her office should go to jail (you ask whether Kerry, or indeed Bush could have escaped without notice over that eleven summers before) - has not been left wayside either, however. In this cosmic, dualist strife, there can only be loyalty to my issues on the side of good. 

One would thus ask, to ascertain whether the grand old conservative party, and party of the people at least at some of the time, has 

For if anything, American firebrand conservative thought has been nothing if not principled, and simultaneously ready to set those values aside. For if the heart and soul of liberty, as the well-spoken (if not very much else) Ronald, as good a candidate from the right for kingship if there was any, is liberty, then steadfastness is, from the perspective of liberty, a virtue. But what principles? If Cheney, a congresswoman from Wyoming - can get away with this in one of the most red, and ostensibly conservative states in the union, if one is to forego it's birthday advent of the female franchise, for example, half a century before its supposed enactment throughout the United States, one would be forced to answer whether these principles are principles at all. More serious, and more chillingly, is the issue of fundamental constitutional liberties. But foregoing the debate on abortion rights, whether such a concept as "substantial due process" should or indeed was invented, the unquestioned (well, even here there is a history, a question of scope, whose end we may yet see closed in different tones) liberties of speech, press, of assembly and petition, and 

What then is this new GOP? It has, clearly, no burden to show loyalty to with regard to the brand of conservative. And yet, anyone noticing or even hailing the Trumpist-Kekist usurpation of the red, and of red states, would still necessarily notice a certain symbios, if not exactly congruence between the Trumpists and traditional conservative interests. Indeed, while Justice Barrett may be a fascist firebrand, et cetera, she is not out of fashion as someone who could one day have been nominated by Bush Minor, and perhaps without much blood-curdling, to this highest court in the land, perhaps even in the universe. For even the most fragrant, flagrantly vitriolic opponent find the old, reeking conservatives in the mold of George Will and Bill Kristol a step up (or ten) over The Donald's strangely more natural hair. At the same time, the Trumpost popular appeal among certain core segments - unspokenly thought of as core, that is - is as unsettling as it is, so to speak, impossible. 

Salman's Arabia, revisited

 

With plenty spoken of the Arab in this month, I must first begin with a solemn, if painstakingly inadequate sense of having been right in my first assertions of the kingdom's already heralded third-generation monarch. And just as the scions and concrete checks of liberal democracy have gone into stagnation at home, we ought well observe the relation between the good, the liberal and the democratic as fickle and not - at all - the same thing. 

Anyways, this bin Salman (the patronymic being key) will be the next king, a statement so certain that he might as well be called - and is indeed treated as if he were - king in all but name, and custodian in fact of the two holy mosques, the foremost treasure of the Sauds once the oil is used up or expunged from the global economy. While his program has been reform 

How much influence, we can ask at first, does he hold? His father, it should be said, served already under the eldest (surviving) brother King Saud (numbers are superfluent) as governor of the Riyadh province in the 1950s. A veteran player in this game of princes - or emirs - and by necessity approaching death must have weakened his spirit and prestige, if not (as is so very popular to assume) his mind. And with the old scion and master gone, this prince must manoeuver by his own path. He certainly seemed to have done that fateful day in 2018, when issuing a bloody (if nothing else) writ of horror to the world; this fate will befall any so harsh a critic as this Jamal, without the kingdom of the Saud and Al Wahhab, as - very well known - within. 

This cannot entirely be true, of course. While repression in previous years - Faysal, not necessarily Abdullah - has never been gentle or subscribing to the proclamation of 1945 which, in earnest, the old warrior officially decried, it has been soft-spoken in its dealings with the greater, outer world, and confined not only to the kingdom's very established borders - the defeat of the Ikhwan that had ensured their power, ensured that - and often erratic rather than bone-chilling. Reactionary politics may be softer, or less hard in its repression, but while the peace of the period inaugurated in February 1929 and enforced by the oil wealth discovered in the the first years of the new kingdom which followed, nourished in the following decade, is now certainly over and closed, a creaking hinge to the screams of the martyrdom in old Constantinople. And as the great Guinness spoke, though not in Lawrence in Arabia, that a strike from power for the destruction of this foe would in fact make him immortal, has so far proven satisfyingly truthful, if not shattering the order that the bleating of the Arab Spring as well failed to challenge. 

Also the bounty of the desert kingdom... at least for a few more years. One of many proposals, focused on attracting the kaffir, has been to convert these seaside oil drilling platforms into tourist attractions. 

What, then, can possibly replace it? The great century of the Sauds, inaugurated in the 1920s with bloody battles against the Jabal Shammer and the moderate - we must presume, out of fear for the predominance of our worldview - Hashemites of old Arabia; the old aristocracy, if we are to relieve by omission the Sauds from that insult, is now definitely coming to an end. And while father has seen the intricacies and demands of dynastic succession for long enough to solve it, that was a legacy too. Imagine, for ninety years, such fates, and how good a promise it would have seemed when the last blood had been spilled. Now, as with everything monarchy, it will be worthless unless consolidated for longer - and this much is known to him, and his many disgruntled uncles and cousins, if not much else. 

The petrodollar economy has been most dramatically introduced into a burgeoning stock market, now culled yet again but to the benefit of this yet oil-and-gas-rich tyrant, in order to replace its core feature by the new. These investments are indeed drastic, hopeful and even innovatory, but as with the wealthy man of decadence and consumption, any strategic move must be weighted in light of the mind that places it's needs, as well as its ambition. And a near-century of gluttony has made the needs of these kings, pressing as they may be within the close of this decade and the kingdom's centenary in 2032 under King Muhammed, now perhaps the First. Dented and dulled, packed with the audacity of youth - that force which, we are well informed, is so strong both within and without, and now demonstrated to its full extent - is less a recipe for success as the judicious, yet self-sacrificing - voice of experience. Of this Muhammad I has naught, except for the second-hand smoke he has inhaled and the rigorous studies he hasn't endured in the school of government and administration (being, to what extent he may be called what he wants to be, a soldier, a military man) except for the men - and, yes, few women - in his ranks. 

Litmus test as this may be, the way he responded with the 2017 purge to the snatching of Khashoggi's life in 2018, and the momentous decision of father to keep the cub in the pathway of power. From this course, he may hardly be dislodged - the the defence ministry which was, cleverly, the Sudairi's bounty for its many years of growth, the staircase pressing the heels of Salman. Now the pup must be key in reading his future path into the desert... and possibly out from it. 

Arabian Thaw

 

The now very discredited Arab Spring, heralded well past due as over, entered into an Arab Winter of less clear - other than that, unlike real and proverbial winters, such was not necessarily coming, and certainly not without a summer; cyclical histories being not in the fashion in a post-Fukuyama age still heralding to Fukuyama-ish creeds and principles - proportions, awakens the question of terminology now seemingly abandoned in all but name. If the core events of late 2010 to early 2011, perhaps extended to the late 2011 with the full blowout of military auto-kleptocrats (or tawagit, to borrow the bountiful if not auspicious dictionary of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its clients and many, virulent metastases) into a reality of exile (Ben Ali), downfall (Mubarak), death (Qathafi/Gaddafi/Khadafi) or the consummation of democratic, multi-party elections reaching even the largest Arab state (as opposed to the multi-candidate ones of 2005, now expanded to even the other half of the old United Arab Republic) or the degradation of full-scale warfare, lasting much longer, and doom impending (Assad, Saleh), as well as the end of those who had undergone many of these and decried of as part of this fallen epoch, rather than the pre-spoken shards of its fallout - in name, citizen al Awlaki and the notoriously citizenshipless Bin Ladin - are to be described as a spring, and the part-predictable, part-parodically obtuse wall of concrete faced by this seemingly unstoppable truck of popular rebellion encourage (but alas, do not force) us to dwell on the question of this winter, and when - if the metaphor is intended as serious - a blazing and equally extended summer will arrive. The climatological being opposed to the political, in this sense. 

But if we are not of the Hegelian mold, as so very few Westerners are, we must consider the possibility not only that a wave of liberal, constitutional republics emerging - yes, even in Saudi Arabia, and finally displacing this third and presumably last state, and paragon, of the Sauds - but the continuous movements towards "something else" eeking out a cry of change, but not in direction of the west but inwards, towards a core Islamic myth or, dare we speak it again, another caliphate? 

Analysing the separate cases, we may see the bonds and scars of colonial and post-colonial division, with the individual states of the Arab League being as illogical as individually tragic, now with a long term of 

What then is the cry of "the people", and which promises are the river they are built to cross in this auspicious year? If bread, peace and land were the phrases that won the day in 1917 - and much of the century - for the Soviets, what is now in demand? As often, if not ever and always, the materialist notions are universal, and those to harness the dream of them, those surest to triumph. This is not least true of the Islamists, this elusive term, 

The days of glory. The days of hope. The best of times; may they now arrive anew, for what we sow may be yet too bitter to understand. Yet renewed waves of clashes with the authority now supposedly subservient to their wishes will not end, the bleating of the fickle throng never be made blank again. 

Never abed, never to rest. A night of vigil that spanned a decade. The tumultuous changes undergoing across North Africa and the Middle East began a new era, and whatever its merits have never truly died down, even in the poster child of the Arab revolutions of 2011 and beyond. When is the appropriate "end date" of these events, begun by a frustrated vegetable grocer in late days of the first decade? 

Was the promise of a blossoming Arab Spring then a particular case of Tunisia, and its positive vision only to be finalised there? We should be careful about the merits of this singular, surviving child of the groundbreaking (and very deadly) street protests of late 2010 and early 2011, which turned the old Caliphate on its head, and destroyed and severely mauled both its incumbents and many of its new names. 

It is unlikely, and must never be believed, that the Brotherhood would accept the Western-liberal-constitutional system now putting on such a show, with the best backing from Western military and diplomatic power, after such a thrashing, yet again. But if their credo, the cries for which so many have screamed into death - or at least offered suffused throat-gargling cries and kicking feet - would be a primitive emirate. The labels "Islamist", "Salafi" and similar are often used not even sloppily, and although they intersect - the parliamentary results of 2012 being key - with each other and with frequent jihadist activity, the yet elusive Mr. Zawahiri and his Egyptian Jihad once elevating the mediocre pharaoh Mubarak (an ill-fitting name) being a good old example here, and testament to the cross-membership in even these most dogmatic and virulent of civil society activity. 

Ode to the Living

 

I must say, I do not write this particular post other than out of a certain morbid curiosity to revisit it when these times have, as Proust may have thought, fallen into the decay of time passed, partly out of a certain - and very much premature - sadness and regret I may not live to shake the hand of the very living Esteban Volkov and ask about his peculiar and uncelebrated lifespan, if I should be so lucky to replicate either. However, in a time where such possibilities are of the present, we may meditate on them and on how the past, as seen in this extraordinary destiny, continues to guard the present. 

He was born in 1926 as, the same year as my late grandfather, I should say, as Vsevolod Volkov, son and namesake of Mrs. Volkova, née Bronstein, younger daughter of the great revolutionary now known universally by his gaoler's name, Trotsky. Now, thus, and alone among the great Trotsky's grandchildren, he is ninety-five, and seemingly with a century of life within still-vibrant clutches, working as fervently as ever from his base in Coyoacán, where he remained (and became Esteban) after leaving his mother's arms to join his famed, and hunted, grandfather in a Mexican exile, invited there by president Cardenas (father of the frequent candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a name as contradictory as the PRI brand, who challenged the single-party rule instated by his sire from a left-libertarian position). The now thirty-five year senior guardian of his grandfather's, and grandmother's tomb has - in a sense - stayed in this moment in history, his journey ended in one way, albeit following everything which has surpassed since those momentous days of the very eventful summer of 1940. 

Shortly after the arrival of the Trotskys in Istanbul at the acceptance of Atatürk, his mother perished, seemingly in a gas accident or, the most cited theory, suicide due to the isolation and . Whatever the reason, she was the second of his children to die, followed by her half-brothers in the following five years, until only the elder statesman - the statesman who never was - and his young progeny remained, safeguarded by a collective of true believers, in a spiriting which never quite ended, even after boarding a ship in Norway bound for the distant Mexican state. It was, in this time of groundbreaking and menacing change, the only country which had supported the nascent and now very endangered Spanish republic, whose defence Trotsky correctly predicted was a question of the European security order, of the broader forces of progress against fascism, repression, darkness and, now undeniable, war. 

The Trotskys, arrived safely in Mexico. It would be the final home for all three members of the renegade family. 

What could have changed if he - the grandfather - had lived longer? Would they have enjoyed another stay, from Lev's perspective, another stay in Washington, invited (as Ernst Hanfstaengl was) to ? It is unlikely, though the unraveling of Stalinism as the prime ally of Western democracy (as its precedent was in 1914) and subsequent unraveling as its premier and deadly foe, might have provided this , into a Hanfstaengl-esque position of counsel to the very many-minded Truman's administration. If so, the seed of Trotskyite . Instead, he never sought, but came to remain behind, a shadow looming over his elder's tomb. 

Very tragically, he rejoined his sister in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, as the final vestiges of stalinism were definitively crumbling, but just as the structure itself and the Russia it gave birth to could hardly have amused him, he remained unable to talk sense to her, with his Russian so separated by time and culture and weariness that he could not understand her. Nevertheless, the rejoining of the two Trotsky siblings is sure to have felled tears in even so hard a man. 

The cultural legacy, or supposed such, of the great Trotsky did not alleviate or amuse him, and he joined the crowd of furious Trotskyites with a scathing, if very calm and informed review of the 2017 series (which from my lips garnered endless praise) Trotsky, a supposed attempt by Russian television to denigrate Lev Trotsky and the great revolution in its centenary by associating one with the other. In this, he remained very much the stern, humourless man of the 1920s revolutionaries, a scion of Lenin if there was one, but very consciously, selflessly and with exuberant energy devoted his time and work to the raising of new generations, very much in the plural, aimed at the cause of global revolution, from his Mexican home, a country now ever so changed, while that tombstone and the ashes below remained. 

For in the first, very serious - if not serene - attempt at Trotsky the Elder's life in the summer of 1940, Esteban was himself hit by the lead of Stalinist repression, penetrated by a bullet to the thigh - which, while in Pythonesque terms a flesh wound, could have proved deadly - and a reach which had no qualms about reaching across the globe. His grandfather, lying abed appropriately, would remark that this attempt, no doubt, would hardly be the last; to not much smaller doubt a statement to the afterworld that this man, who now faced death with a vigour very much known, and otherwise internal and just as certain, knew what he was walking into, but steadfast as ever. This steadfastness and sturdiness, the reliance on standing on principle - if yet principles bent so far they must be considered broken, throughout a life of revolutionary activity, and a decade in the halls of temporary power and the crucible which sealed so many fates of the twentieth century - would be the hallmark of Esteban, or Vsevolod as he might have been recalled by his sister, and a lifelong credo for this man who began, too early, from a boyhood on the run, disestablished and ripped from the comfortable position of meaning and provision which has the great revolution's ultimate promise to its votaries. Living, in an albeit revolutionary yet decidedly (state) capitalist economy, far flung from home, with no other relatives, his life had been anything but, and a footnote to the revolutionary life which now seemed so wasted, so laborious to the point of obsequious. It was as if time itself had stopped. 

What can we learn then, from this man? Well, first of all the Trotsky "brand" is not dead; while Leon, or Lev or Lova, lived to survive all his four (known) children, a fate few would consider illustrious or recommendable - and almost David-ian, in the notorious marital problems preceding and sealing such relations well before the bullet and baton of Stalinist repression - he bore a daughter who eventually fulfilled the Trotskyite dream of Trotsky returning to America, going north to gain position within the American bureaucracy and help improve the lives of the living, under the call of a doctor (or psychiatrist) and her grandmother's adopted name, Volkow. He began a life in the shadow of Lenin and Stalin and ended it ruminating on the ilk of Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin and - yes - Lopez Obrador and the afterbirth of the 2008 and 2020 economic crises, with every breath sharing a comment on the current state of affairs as obedient to the cause of "we, the people" as contrary to political authority, never losing the integrity which his revolutionary grandfather had, to maneuver the ship of state, had compromised, whether to the German, the Georgian, the goatee-and-crown figure enduring a ghastly position for all these ninety-six years, or Hades himself. In a sense, he was the twentieth century after its two momentous events and the definite closing of the old world in 1945, and the somber, distraught but never quite pessimist. And yet, his walk is far from ended. 

Gagarin - To the Might of Human Endeavour

On this day, sixty years past - the further sixty-year mark being the world of Victoria, her grandson Wilhelm II, or Leopold's Congo and Cixi's China, mind you - a man of humble origins stepped into a capsule with near-unmistakable thought of the poor canine which had preceded him. Yuri (Jurij, the Swedish transliteration being superior) Gagarin, "man of destiny", would not face the recognition of his American counterpart, I would say successor, Armstrong, whose death in August 2012 only just preceded my launching of my first pitiful blog post, on the question of Tintin and . But his were the first eyes to follow Tintin's own in beholding the might of the earth from above, not merely the soaring heights of birds, but beyond - as Star Trek would a few years later posit - the reach of men before him. So great was the event that 

More arses would follow in similar capsules, most notably that of Valentina Tereshkova, recognised again when young Samantha Smith toured the Soviet Union after her letter to Gagarin's namesake, then-General Secretary Andropov. Americans followed too, biting nails and subsuming shame with the ambition and long-term effort to reach the inevitable, yet seemingly impossible: Planting a pair of feet on the only celestial body in earth's orbit, or at least substantial enough to have been beheld by generations since the dawn of man... and even Lucy herself. It is thus a dream which may have seemed abstract, even to the science fiction writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but which opened a door to the , and the greatness of the 1960s, 

This Question of Islam

An issue which will remain unresolved in my lifetime, to which I have nonetheless spent and mobilised an immense amount of energy, investigation, dialectic exercise, vitriol, self-harm, perhaps - in the end - even scholarly wisdom at this point, is that of islam and its relation to the appendix of human achievement and culture described as, part derisively, and in any case partly of its loins, "Western civilisation". 

In this fight of values, posited by Samuel Huntington, negated by president Khatami, of a clash now seemingly well predicted, a late and very frequent contributor of sorts is the Swedish 

We may first state, or assume, the obvious and here unmentioned; that islam grew as an outgrowth or metastasis of Christian faith, that the writers, or infallible quoters of the Qur'uan certainly knew their theology as well as any patriarch or priest of Constantinople, and the heavy backbone of tradition eloped into greatness, now christened "Judeo-Christian" as well. And any voice that condemns islam as a force of regression either observes with delight (as I do) the fall of the Christian god as a meaningful power in the world of Western politics, indeed in Christendom (a term I know well how to spell, but even so my fingers hesitate) itself, or fails in his conclusions and conviction regarding the need to bifurcate and diminish the followers of Christ as well or as soon as those of Muhammed (who I will not refer to as "the prophet", more than I would Joe Smith or Lafayette Hubbard). In this matter, the sordid Mr. Jomshof MP has done little to some to maintain his consistency. 

The position of this islam in this "Western world" of ours thus posits the age-old question of tolerance, and to what extent the tolerant, or rather the faction of consensus, can commit to themselves the followers of another, sturdy fact or facet of a greater "truth" whose truthfulness is so beyond reproach it must be shielded by hooter and menace and blood, if necessary. My personal, and very polite answer is that to whatever may stand in the way of our great civilisation of tolerance will only destroy it if tolerance is permitted the liberty of absconding. This, however, cannot be described as the status now persisting, in which persecution - I should call it thus, at least pro tempore - of imams of particularly gruesome sermons, are coupled with the cry of abomination against those who hold, by whatever vitriol (insufficient to the believers) opinions widely regarded as quite reasonable. 

Why reasonable? Well, in this bifurcated society, where I will not presume to know a certain median, it would seem reasonable to assume that between those who flail at islam, and those who defend Islamic values to the point of "fundamentalism"; that is, usually questions related to sexual freedom and toleration, the separation of the individual from the family his usurpation by the state and its broader political goals - whether liberal, socialist or otherwise - is 

This question of what is fundamentalism, extremism, radicalism is at the heart of the debate on islam, and indeed of any such conversation regarding Abrahamic faith. While MP Jomshof presumes to know the nature of islam, and that whatever it is is far closer to a presumed bronze aged, primitive theocratic junta, embedded within the national consciousness of the nations of the Dar al Islam, now without a caliph, and ready to evolve (or regress) into the shallow and sullen cry of Allahu Akbar. Why he would posit this, in the case of Sweden, and not the case of Hindutva extremism, or of Shinto-Buddhist suicidal warfare, we need hardly ponder on. Everyone whose eyes are open, and especially gouge out or doused with acid, knows why the question of islam posits the hard question of our time regarding the intersection of culture and immigration, including in the merrily un-halal West. 

With this protest of islam as retrograde, authoritarian, sexist and so on, we have a growing phenomenon of Western islamitude, and even of Westerners tuning in to islam - though conversions, it should be said, is a rare freakshow, often resulting from personality crises and the decline of Christianity, which picks up its adhrents as well. This miniscule question of conversions aside, it seems we have not had enough conversing, and perhaps less and less of it. Even to invoke the words of an imam, except as some distant, raucous figure presumably violating a hate speech statute (one of the constitutional rights I would begrudge, and indeed defend enthusiastically, being that to preach and posit, even proselytise) would seem a distant unknown, even more so than the merry preachers of the ostensible far right (the imams, while not being branded as left, for obvious break of the brain, being posited as "anti-right"). 

In the face of this mess, and the misguided attention it undeservedly issues - both at the presumed defenders of Western secularism, such as Mr. Jomshof and his ilk, whether secular liberal or aggressive Christian nationalist (the second cousin of the "Islamism" properly described, when using the term, as the attempt at a "nationalism for the Ummah") and the presumed excesses of a supposedly growing, and eventually guiding, Islamic West, only the sound of mind survive. And while I would seem 

En Elegy to Catalonia

 

I did not write (much) on the then-up-and-exploding crisis on the long-simmering Catalan independence-versus-self government-question, despite it being an island of labour and the occasional elegant sentence, and thus so greater the reason to recapitulate the question and its developments now that one (well...) term in office of the post-referendum Parliament of Catalunya has now passed. 

The result, in a way, needed no mention, and hardly got it outside the realm of old king Philippe - as he would be known, in the land of his Bourbon ancestors, if only he knew - and of old Francisco, now displaced from both his Jefatura and his eternal place of rest. Whether the unearthing and reburial of long-rotted carcasses can or should be undertaken for the purpose of vindicating those left in the soil, or unearthed under circumstances both more and less dignified, is a question I shall not even try to ponder, but rather waste my living breath on the question haunting successive governments to such an extent there is no ability, no ice-breaker, to break the bonds and deliver a new future by merely, well, stomping across it until the very bones are broken and eaten and only words remain. 

Given this array of problems, which would have seemed so comparatively small for most of the Francoist (or Franquist, paying homage to the trend of originalism in language) regime, one would think the fourty-five year-old carcass of a short and pitiful and now very, very dead man would face less priority to the Santos government than the Catalan issue the right-wing government . Or, as Nixon put it about Rajoy Brey's predecessor, now also Santos': "A loyal friend and ally of the United States. After a tragic and bloody civil war, he brought back Spain to economic recovery. He [re]unified a divided nation through a policy of firmness and fairness against those who fought against him." Is this, prays Santos, the hope for the future of the Catalans, who were at the end of so much "firmness and fairness"? 

The fairness of a fair and decent recovery, economically put, after years of war and famine and repression that saw not even a token legislature emerge - as it did in Portugal, and the Stalinist satellites - may have necessitated the firm brass of the garrotte, Nixon may have said if allowed (and properly prodded, as he later was) to go on. But if this past is to be addressed in such a fashion as to necessitate literal excavation, we may address - to this government of reconciliation and of apology and commutation to those who cannot even hear or rebuke such words - our discerning scepticism over the recent calamity in old Catalonia, whose token quasi-sovereignty was yet again rebuked and revoked only three and a half years past. This came not as a bureaucratic measure but as crown and rebuke following the accomplishment of ruining a plebiscite through the bussing in of Spanish (I should say Castilian with a risk of breaking sensitive emotions and adherence to Spanish unity in Leon, Galicia, Andalusia and so on) riot police in order to shut down polling stations and beating grandmothers' faces to a pulp. Following this slight infringement of Catalan, if not wholesale Spanish, democracy (the two being the same, according to the fuckers of Madrid). 

How, then, is a European community supposedly dedicated to the rule of law - and not in the sense of giving Francoist properly delineated punishments to trespassers of Francoist laws, or adhering to the core principle of broken necks for broken laws - deal with a government brutally repressing a democratic referendum, or rather the broken attempt at a democratic referendum and the exercise in popular sovereignty, with the purpose of breaking this sovereignty, indeed this populus, in two? There is, necessarily, only one available answer. 

The very question of popular, Spanish or Catalan - or, dare I call it now, Basque - sovereignty is not as simple as the purveyors of the referendum and of separation and republicanism, the Catalan republican left not the least, at least as far as international law is concerned. If a people is democratically sovereign, can it be forcibly kept in the bosom of a state which it does not want and which may - in all earnest brutal recognition of facts - does not want them? (That is, according to the old blood-stained adage; Wanting the territory, not wanting the people.) I cannot say, but I must, pinpoint the two cannot be separated. At the same time, as has been known for at least a century now, international law defines the state as subject and any derogation not explicitly permitted is read to permit the action, in view of the state's conduct and not an individual, organisation or province's desires to exercise similar rights, and any permissibility on the account of popular sovereignty as a principle would necessarily, if not too hastily, break down every country concerned to its smallest consenting building block. Catalonia or Catalunya, however, is not such a small and feckless hypothetical entity. If Algeria is permitted independence in spite of French designs and words of une et indivisible, your desires may be heard but the solution is ours, the majority, and history is a mere argument desiring a tear but not an exercise of rights, why cannot the Catalans - sorely oppressed, smashed and molded together by every measure short of outright genocide - as the phrase was used by Lemkin - and repeatedly held together by external and brutal efforts aimed at terminating that original freedom must necessarily be given a similar concern. If not, what is the difference? A small pond of water? A river insufficiently wide or salty? 

I would ask, given previous posts of French and otherwise defined European colonial rule, whether this principle can be invoked or must be practiced on request. If Spanish Morocco, once a quite larger thing than the twin cities of Ceuta and Melilla offering a scant passage to metropolitan Spain, was retained on account of the Spanish state's - as it was known - desire for it, eventually coalescing in a 92 % majority in Spain, opposite an even stronger majority in the opposite of any part of Morocco, would carry not far if the desires of Moroccans is that of paramount concern for their independence. That Catalans should have fewer rights, as a collective, on account of them being too much similar to their Castilian brethren? 

That being said, and not only with Catalonia in mind, there are numerous arguments put not only against the procedure - willingly diluted and destroyed by the authorities seeking by any means to quell it - but the underlying structural process and causes, as opposed to arguments, itself. For whereas as the political cause of Catalan independence - cultural, economic and linguistic as well as political - has reared its head in a startling roar more aggressively, the reasons behind it may not be as much of confidence as fear and desperation the designs of Francoist Spain - and before him, the Bourbons - be accomplished with peaceful means of intergration and absorption into a wider Spain and a wider Europe. 

Secondly, and not too much in line with the moral authority of Madrid, the European project is certainly not chided, or even questioned (quite humbly) by the Catalan liberationists, there is 

The case has aroused little homage in the cultural community, where Orwell once penned a passionate defence not only for liberty, for socialism, or for Spain, but the particular culture and circumstances making possibly its long-held resistance (being prioritised not quite so much as Madrid, and hardly even controlled by it) but some voices of fierce resistance. The most vitriolic, as well as not too eloquent, has been that of adopted Spaniard Mario Vargas Llosa, who did not steep to the depths of audacious eggshell with glasses Martin Schultz, who compared independentists in Britain to the attempt, then with steel and blood, of Germans to dominate Europe. Surely too, whatever the prospects of now-independent Britain, of Catalonia free of Spain but not of Europe, would be significant enough, but the hopes of Madrid pen on the notion that a fight will be too thorough and consuming and end the new country in a place where they simply are not, by their former masters as well as the wider European community and its interests, to act  

In this soup of toxins and unclear outcomes, there is no elegy easy of note to be sung. The demographic restructuring of Spain - there I used the term - will continue, and make the cause of independence feel all the more ancient, but then also a lot more relevant. The cause for independence did not flourish in the 1970s or 80s, when its promise should have been seen as more potent, let alone politically relevant and unlikely to face resistance of this kind. 

2021, 1912, and the future of the (not so) Grand, (no longer) Old Party

 

The increasing fragmentation of the old predominant party before our very eyes - one of the most influential since its founding, alongside the German SPD, the British Tory Party, as I myself remarked not too many years past - and now, without question, its degradation, is not one of having given birth to Trump, nor quite "enabling" him (53 % of GOP voters in 2016 wanted somebody else, I remind you) and not enduring, but rather "sticking with" the disgraced now about to be impeached without the boundaries of his office, physical and chronological, is a process only escalating towards a seemingly inevitable collapse or fatal (for its ambition to power) breaking. 

The question then is, would the GOP break? Rather than "will", the name associated with one of a handful of conservative ideologues getting off (to) the clanking of the Trump train, the party has uniformly - if not enthusiastically or, my attempt at Trumpian neologisms, "prettily" joined hands in facing the doomsday of the present-day Democratic party. Whereas this may also be considered 

The Trial, not involving John Grisham

The procedure waged against former president Trump, historic not only in the sense of being the first presided over not by a Chief Justice but a partner of Bruce Wayne (and declared foe of thugs), the last sitting of the Watergate Babies Patrick "Pat" Leahy of Vermont - scion of cheese and maple syrup and even the partial-birth abortion ban - but the second trial against the same president during the same term (half-term and year too) and one which has, aggressively if not numerically, transcended the solidity of partisan walls, in spite of expletives of the contrary. 

The rage that followed the rage of the mob, predictably aimed at removing the supreme executive magistrate of the republic, with himself having already stripped himself of any auctoritas and dignitas he had left (and very recognisably, the nuclear option) which would have seen articles being drafted even with a Republican majority, or so I believe, the incitement of a charge of the executive against the legislative on the sixth day of this newfangled year, a fortnight before the handover ultimately occurring in quiet solitude and poetry between the aggrieving and cordial parties, with a supposedly ultra-conservative Chief Justice inaugurating an alleged semi-communist mad dog arch-liberal, somehow someone had demanded this. Only the form, and the level of reprimand issued by the elephant leadership against the man they had permitted to ride him, at least through the instituting of open primaries and ballot-stuffing by appalling irresponsible grassroots already signalling their unrivalled hatred, was yet to be determined. 

And to be determined, it must also be said, is a question left to resolve. For nobody strongly believes, except those with minds so clouded by dread and desire in the short term, could possibly believe that this impeachment, for the same reasons as before - with the partial exception of 1868, when the GOP did possess a two-thirds majority required to usher in a parliamentary government, and did so, against the best efforts of Senator Ross of Kansas - would fail to meet, and for thus define, a required threshold since nearly two and a half centuries as "high crimes and misdemeanours". What are, once we liberate ourselves from the illusion of political impeachment constituting any sort of legal justice, these "high crimes and misdemeanours"? Well, as any jurist from Ulpian to Tribonian to Malik ibn Anas to Blackstone would have told you, that is a matter left for the judge, once all has been said and deliberated by, or eventually of, the views of the neurons inherent in the infallible legislator. This question, whether read by an originalist with a fetisch for eighteenth-century slavery, or a new-thinking , defining in the moment of a decision ad hoc a liberal ethos itself liberated from the individual selfish mind or intrapersonal desires and trends, 

Perhaps no better, or in the words of Lincoln regarding the immorality of slavery, put than if Trump is not guilty of these high crimes, they are yet to be tested by an unknown gargantuan entity of authoritarian audacity and as such, are likely never to be. I do not quite share the latter assertion, for while Trump may be finished - a prediction I merrily make yet again, now both cocksure and with lessons learned - the movement will unmistakably persist, in spite of efforts to suppress, silence or (literally) disarm it. All such efforts are now likely to ramp up, in the trial not just of the coup-minded ex-president, but of the entire Trump movement as well, and anything likely to seek replacing or supplanting it. With a blue house and, by a hair-thin threshold, senate and White House and a relatively sympathetic court (now to be filled by decidedly liberal justices, if almost as likely as replacement for existing ones) such efforts may seem likely to succeed; I am, however, in the face of an equally-divided Democratic party, led by increasingly incompetent and an administration poised to deliver "blue Bush-ism" and sunk into several crises both domestic and international, anything but a constitutional overhaul of Austrian proportions is unlikely to thwart this nascent, failing-while-succeeding Nazi movement. 

Ex-president Trump, best referred to with the prefix, is unlikely to be convicted, and while a gentle and conscientious slip into the night may seem appropriate and Nixon-like - he who did have a profound cause for complaint in 1960, but ultimately chose to heed the proverbial better angels of his nature, and anyway prove enough of a patriot not to burn the country in order to win it - but also unlikely. Short of a sudden stroke, or several strokes of further muddling of words and slips of the facts (here the Democratic victor is, again unbelievably, further down the road) he will rise again in 2024, should not constitutional procedure definitely slam his chances against a new-laid brick wall in a stunning bipartisan upset. Asides from principled arguments against this, the reasons of McConnell and others in the red against doing this are, of course, laden not only with a desire for a revanche in 2024, but ultimately of supplanting the leadership of the Trumpist or Bannonite movement while capturing its supporters. If the dethroned president's head in a guillotine was confined to his own health, the reciprocal loyalty from the Republican party would be measured in many pounds of cold steel. But this is not, no longer, in no credible sense their party, no more than it is the party of Lincoln. 

And with acquittal in the senate underway, and this dangerous or safekeeping precedent out of reach of a 67-vote majority, what rests in the future? Certain GOP voices have hollered and bawled to loudly they can surely not keep the peace again; a Trump resurgence in the 2024 primaries is sure to be contested, at least on principle, and face a disunited party even with the eclectics of a movement further duped by the great narrative of fraud and stolen ballots, but in the main of cordial adherence and, yes, sympathy, until his hour finally tolls. With this hour not too far away, let us say two presidential contests at the most, I would revert my original 2016 question in favour of this: If the internal struggles and authoritarian rebuke of the 2021 upset will spell the doom of the Democratic party as well, with(hith)erto doth the donkey want to carry us... and - for better or worse, but now seemingly universally endorsed, not the least in the country of my birth - the world? 

For the dragon will not, not alone. 

Twilight of the Demagogue

The seizure of the Capitol, now not nearly a question of "by the" or "towards" or even "near", nor quite a "grab" or power or even for power, has in an act of prosaic degeneracy expunged the Trump administration in the minds of the mighty from the expectations that, like the recurrent metaphoric uncle or grandfather (or even crazy aunt) at the family dinner, he may be ignored and dissuaded to a point of impotency until the moment the cab rolls down the street in a familiar decreasing velocity, the voices dying down, the facial gestures and hands saying goodbye for a final time as the expungers rise to their feet, into a somehow very expected and already-sung moment of apocalyptic (at the same time, equally preconceived and pathetic) proportions.

Leading the charge. Is this what the very symbolic, if equally impotent and futile, charge of the Curia Hostilia looked in 52 BC? Well, at least they won't have to choke on the stench of presidential flesh - or that of thousands of his supporters. While legal proceedings are now rampant, the price for participation in this charge against democracy is slight.

In rejecting the grab as for power, I am denying the existence of a coup, more appropriately an autogolpe, against the legitimate government - one branch of it, precisely - such as that pulled off by the equally ineradicable Fujimori after seizing the presidency, in the 1990 upset, from the unfit clutches of my great Peruvian hero. The mechanics of coups d'etat are notoriously complex, and usually shrouded in shadows long after the collapse of the regime it established, but a few key markings of such a process can be clearly inferred, or even defined, from the great professor Luttwak's 1969 study with its wonderfully notable title. Among these dwells calculated planning - although throngs of anger may be directed towards existing beacons of power, they must serve an intended purpose, beyond vague abstractions of fear and terror and division - and the oligarchy of disturbing and disconnecting other nodes of power. If the very purpose was to stop the certification, the last in this very arduous process that is the American presidential election, 

Genius and strategist - and not of the 2021 denial, if not overthrow, of the democracy he obligately served
 

In the time preceding, and very soon after the 2016 election I would have made great fuzz over attempts to describe the process, and therefore the result, as the "safest" in history. In many regards, this obsequious comment was of course an attempt to smooth over any possible crevice in the façade of legitimacy surrounding a very contentious contest. In fact, and due to circumstances beyond both Trump and any looming "establishment", whether global, national or undefined pecuniary, the presidential election of this last year saw a record number of absentee and pre-election day ballots. The celebratory-ritual value aside, of a united (if divided) electorate joining bodies in queue on a single date (this didn't use to be the case) in an orgasmic leverage of opinions - followed by four, or seven, or at least two years of impotence and undisturbed governance by the those unmerry few fit(ted) to make the actual decisions - has served a value . And just like the digital-based system of countries like Brazil, denounced by my former colleague Mikael Nordfeldth of the digital revolution Pirate party as dangerous to democracy as the result will always be open to changes slight or sudden, the cumulative adding of ballots before election date puts the legitimacy of the result in question. If you doubt this, ask any electoral observer exercising the vain clutches of the OSCE , and how many ballots are already laid - and perhaps mislaid - in Belarusian urns. A high pre-election date participation and, per analogy, postal ballots ripped from envelopes and then checked and transferred to a temporary resting place awaiting their rapture, is thus to be avoided whenever possible. And while this trial involved not only the mechanics and logistics of voting, but a worldwide pandemic unmatched since the 1960s, with its disproportionate effects on the already home-confided, so to speak, it is a feat which ought not be repeated - and to be fair is unlikely to in 2024. 

The increasing contest for political power in an increasingly united, and now divided, America... how would the founders see it? In which camp would they put the blame? 

As for other irregularities, or points of possible contention, I would hold only this: With regard to the counting, the bouncing of numbers, seemingly just in time to salvage a blue victory in hotly contested Pennsylvania (sometimes elsewhere) I would only say, in mirroring the , that it is, let's say, to be avoided. On the greater, and wholly undeniable problematics of delivering ballots post-election day, in certain constituencies or (let's not kid ourselves) states and not others, and refraining from hearing this issue in the Supreme Court on the (clearly outdated) excuse that no state has authority over another state's electoral system, or even reason to complain. 

In light of this, it is perhaps slightly more understandable to witness the actions of the (mainly Trump) voters, and surely a few abstainers, exercising their partisan unity by charging the institution they had - simultaneously with their president - supposedly elected. It is a well-known truth that Congress, without division in houses (the lower and more "democratic" having, in my fair guess, the lowest score) had single-digits support even before this riot, or uprising, or coup attempt, or demonstration (the latter two being, on account of intent and conduct, undesirable epithets) and without an overhaul in content or electoral system, or powers, will continue to do so, or the incursion (now, there's a word) of this week will not be the last - just as it was not the first. Notably, however, the parodically wielded Confederate flag has seemingly, ignoring its smuggling in through state flags which only just ended with Mississippi's hard-fought attempts to make itself history in this regard as well, been waved for the first time in the chamber, and by a seeming foe of the republic as well. My my. At the same time, and whatever the intents of men carrying cable ties, and guns, and Warcraft-esque uniforms into the chamber, the death toll was clearly in the somewhat lukewarm defenders' favour, having probably (and correctly) assumed that this charging barbarian horde constituted the people, or at least an undeniable part of it. This fact, of course, must be countenanced, if this unique uprising is not to be multiplied in a metastasis of continuing, and never definite, downfall. 

In the virtual, modern congress in 2121? Or rather, in 2131? Unlikely, all in all. 

How then is this to be avoided further on, and how "guilty", if such a term is to be employed, are the different parties? Parallells have been made to previous challenges to American democracy, the bulk of which may be summed up by the Democrats' hard-won attempts to make the nominal equality of Southern blacks a sham. Previous devices, while more far-reaching and definitive, were more honest - and besides in a period where the American republic was still the most democratic experiment, , and did sport (fragmentary) female participation... to the extent as it did the male upper and upper-middle class, that is. Later conspiracies against democracy, Watergate being the most recognised, have been simultaneously obvious and harmful, but ultimately - on that count at least, which the great Frank Herbert christen Nixon as his "favourite president" - strengthened American freedom and its peculiar, Janus-faced relationship to political authority. 

"The King has aimed a pistol at the nation's head, fired, and 

The clearest course would be to finalise the long-touched (for too long, being debated since before his inaugural) question of impeachment of the clear inspiration, if not exactly director of this foul uprising. I am not so optimistic, although clearly, to play on an overused phrase, if this does not rise to the height (or, appropriately, the abysmal depths) of high crimes and misdemeanours, few things will. Whereas the Clinton trial was clearly politically motivated, the first Trump one even more so (and egregiously marred, even from hindsight, by the involvement of his successor's oldest son) and to that marred with statements of grotesque partisanship which would have earned the insertion of Speaker Gingrich's or Hastert's shoe (or dare I suggest hand) into whoever's rapid-closed rectum in reward for being so earnest and broadcast it to a progressively depressed nation. The Johnson one, a response to the very existence of a Democratic president over the just reunited states of 1865, may in some sense prove a better comparison, and rightly repudiated in a rebuttal of the quasi-parliamentary system whose tide this lone jackass could not counter. But sad as I may be for Johnson, Clinton and Trump in his fourth year, there is only reluctance and the effort of the philosophical seminar in summoning support for the president now in his fifth, and hopefully very final year. 

Trumpism, as I have already claimed (and christened it) will not die with the death, let alone departure in full bodily functions of its author, nor can it in any serious sense be smoothed and written over by a trial, whether in the senate or a court or in the house, nor as many of the new Democrats would prefer, by the House (by the best of 1793 standards) or the emerging president. I stated before, with the sudden change of heart of president Obama on the question of legal recognition of same-sex marriage, that power alone keeps out a behaviour more befitting a Henry VIII, and while this is sordidly openly obvious in the case of Trumps (yes, even to many Republicans and oh yes, to Trump voters) would 

American flags, rather consistent since the founding, now turned against American democracy's most potent symbol (?), the alleged unclaimed third victim of the 9/11 terrorists; now defaced, if milder than in 1815, by a threat entirely domestic and homegrown. Although, I suppose, we should be grateful the mask-weariness did not extend to those so committed to the destruction of - at the very least - the current political order? 

Ultimately, the twilight of this demagogue was his gluttony, for a good run over the realities of office, for attention more than temporal power, for the raw opportunity of the moment, and whether he spawned this movement whose clutches reached well beyond what he intended, or could seriously imagine, is . In this, he represents an obliquely slanted or dysfunctional authoritarianism first and foremost of the melodrama, as many of us regarded him from the start. At 67, De Gaulle famously (and very publicly) stated himself unable and unwilling to initiate a dictatorship - though the obviousness of the statement, while technically with its limitations (once known to a people knowing the fetters of monarchy) sidelining the flame many, like Mitterrand, held to the remarkably autocratic nature of the fifth republic - and despite the increasing prestige of the medical profession, and of the nearly Trump (as well as De Gaulle) genes, well... at least physically, it was obvious the republic instituted by Madison, Jefferson and Franklin would not fall to the vain grasp of this pettiest of men. Well, even with him - as another Clodius, or I grant you, Caesar - out of the way, there are many others, and the republic demonised and incited against by the Clodii and Caesares of the 50s and 40s was, as any historian would tell you, already dying. 

Inexorable putrefaction and malignant coups aside, the gates, as one fisherman trying his luck in the Rubicon may have observed, are opened and may - as then - have been opened already since a century or many decades at least. In this regard, the twilight seen may live up to the gloomy expectations rightly set by so many to the alleged light of the free world, a city no longer shining, but very, very much vibrant and pluralistic... perhaps, as the new masters anointed by "we, the" people will say, to a fault. How this conflict will play out in the longer run, beyond the lifespans of Trump and Biden and other near-octogenarians may, in my best guess, perhaps not do so during my own.