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. 

Obituary Over A Decade (measurements!)

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

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

The difference, and thus difference across this decade, is 

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

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

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

Obituary over the Undying

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

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

The steward walking unhesitantly, already moving past the leader.  

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

The Emperor of the Fifth Republic

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

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

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