Simon Jenkins is an lean, skinny idiot and otherwise right as often as not

 

In my previous exchange, if you call it that, with The Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, emphasising his support for - I will not call it otherwise - the Assad regime's imminent victory in Syria, describing beyond all reasonable doubt that it was a good thing, and that all former colonial powers - as well as non-French or -Turkish ones - should merely stand idly by as this passing of inexorable phases of human conduct occurred, I held the view that he was, and likely would continue in a state of being, wrong as well as cynical. Being a keen, educated, sophisticated - to a degree - liberal columnist, and emphasising his support so civilly for a pan-Arab, national socialist dictator (I'd say fascist, but in solidarity with undue victims of the phrase, I stand by the longeuresque designation) was worthy of some scorn. But like to hate as you may, his previous, just as defaitist - and far more relevant - critique of western inability to align interests in Syria with not-as-bad dictator Putin, rang a sordid and very evident truth. I have spoken, too little, of the need to ground reasonably sceptical views of foreign, authoritarian superpowers - I am talking, again, of the great red dragon - in coexistence with a post-Communist Russian state, whether a fascist or democratic-robber baronesque or their synthesis, the Putinist one - and in the Syrian case, the decision or non-decision to walk alongside Assad's daring bluff to turn the conflict into one against audacious bath-robed, Kalashnikov-wriggling blackbeards has certainly left an open hole void of reason and tactfulness in failing to synchronise efforts with Russia's colder, but just as emphatic and, I suppose, correct derision against said blackbeards in order to contain its own very real presence of such forces within her (recognised) borders. Well, in a world where foreign policy is not governed by Palme-esque idealist loudmouthery (and for all said or shouted on the subject, it very seldom is) one would tend to cooperate with actors with similar interests, and similar foes. Whatever could be spoken of Nixon, could not be said of Clinton, and often in the negative sense. And the failure to conscript, as well as lift, a post-revolutionary, post-authoritarian Russia into just that, and a beacon of liberty and light or something vaguely resembling it, and even a member of the western alliance, is returning like proverbial roosters, now sordidly recognised as the most undesirable aliens. 

On this topic, now brought into the very present and a presence by the edge of "Europe", however defined in Western (European) terms, has now elongated into a very real proxy war between "West" and "East", as the factual "East" is still rising. And whatever could be spoken on the subject of arming an enemy of Russia, as well as a former subject-republic, in open war against its former master country, the inability to provide direct or adequate aid, the repercussions and consequences of the frozen wasteland the elongated frontier is coagulating into, we must countenance that the prime act of Western effort, or aggression, of toppling the Russian economy and isolating it in a fashion akin to, say, the former Afrikaner regime, has utterly and at the same time gradually failed. Whereas "stronger than ever" is a cliché, and while the many outrageous rumours of Putin's crumbling health cannot conceal the inevitably descendant circle of his natural age and the political repercussions it will produce - now being the longest Russian leader since Stalin, he has soon outlived him too - there is absolutely nothing we did not know a year, or eight years in the past, which suggests that either he or the Russian state is crumbling. And for his very questioned longevity, the two are not the same. A successor, let alone a Navalny, may be a tougher nut, and more fatal. The benefits of Putinism, for those who would recognise it, may not be (truly) recognised in Grozny, but a hand has been continuously offered, prodded, waved off and slapped, and only sympathy for the former subjects of the Russian yoke has kept it in the cold. Now, my question is, how much longer will the West endure, in the faint hope that our grand strategy would result in what Western leaders have wanted for decades, nay, centuries; a complete Russian collapse and a new order in the East, by whatever name and nature it is desired? 

I think, with all the unrecognisable variables in the air, that the situation is like to remind of the "solutions" of 2014 and 2015, with the war grinding down, greater Russian bounties to a higher and higher price, and a final - if unspoken - settlement. This may be for the sake of bringing peace, or restoring Europe to something before the energy crisis, or for the actual purpose of bettering the conditions of the subjects of Putinism - who must then just as well be more likely to rise up and alter the system which, we hear, is not theirs - but under no circumstances will the current war of roubles and dollars last, unless it is upped in direction of total and complete annihilation. This should never be ruled out, but I hold it as unlikely as Europeans, emphasis on Germans, will look in direction of different solutions. In this, Ukrainians will only serve as cheaper and cheaper pawns, and while Putin's aim of distancing Ukraine from the west has forever failed - at least for any such future he may be part of - it is a knowledge he must hold closer to heart than Ukrainians, or Russians, ever were. 

The French Resurgence

 

The Empire which, with the exception of the Napoleonic project, endured a stylish and ludicrous crawl towards obscurity, has nevertheless displayed a stunning ability not to die. And with the self-expulsion of the United Kingdom from the European community, and not just the union, and Germany's haphazard and nothing if not reluctant attempt to rise from the long struggle of not-quite-sovereign nationhood imposed alongside liberal democracy, and which has marked (or marred) the federal republic, France still stands - or believe itself to be. 

The books that defined a quarter century

 Anything said in retrospect of J.K. Rowling's momentous Harry Potter novels would risk underestimating, as opposed to the common rule, the momentous and against-all-expectation momentum these books rode on when dumped on the bookshelves, strictly short-term. I remember myself perfectly well, walking into a store in Uppsala in 2000, finding a stack of the second book - then just translated into Swedish, with the wonderful - and far less vexing than the first - cover by Tiden's Alvaro Tapia, as well as the original letter font, and being told by the nice lady that, as of that date, I couldn't have one. 

Being en route to Santorini (as I persist in calling it; if Mussolini be pleased to hear the word, who am I to deny that?) and with no ability to get a Swedish copy until our return, my mother insisted. And got through. As the wheels were turning to make contact with the tarmac on my journey home, I very memorably pushed through the scene where a shrieking, palsy-ridden Tom Riddle is lost in thin air as the first of many his horcruxes is destroyed by a yet again mortally wounded bespectacled boy of twelve. The first novel I mostly remember for jogging and spooling through in competition with my dear cousin Lotta - though not skipping, except for reading that short, fateful first sentence of the last chapter, "The Man With Two Faces", perhaps the best part of the novel, I must admit, and the only one I didn't quite enjoy reading (the fifth being a chunk of slough, but so was Godfather II the first time). The second through sixth, as far as I got before Tom Törnblom - "Thornflower", a surname being almost Harry Potter-adequate in its Englishness and brusqueness, and revenge I got years later, if somewhat imbued by the whims of Stephen King - ran across the stone-covered Hogwartsian hallway and cried out the words signalling the demise of Dumbledore, and by whose hand (I wonder, now more frequently, whether he actually got through to the momentous chapter which outlined whose hand, or rather words, guided that venomously self-loathing uttering of Avada Kedavra) it was. Then there was silence, and as I discovered many other things - the English language, for one, which I hadn't really tasted throughout those first six years - while Harry remained on the shelf. 

And then came the year 2009 and the sixth film. I had missed out on the fifth, in part a demonstration of which I had already, if just as passively, expressed against the more profound novels, but soon came to regret (and regret still, if not for the narrative or storytelling qualities of Mr. Yates, great as they may have been already then, and whose faults seemed to be identical to those of the one-off Mr. Goldenberg). Not for the sixth installment though, which for indescribable, inexplicable reasons I looked very much forward to watching, and did watch - somewhat troubled, as the only film where I had not, painstakingly, not fully read - with two dear friends and a great candy bowl which I believe I still possess (the contents being, through force of cinematic endurance, vanished as through magic, with other things). It was a slightly transcending experience, or at least enough for me to recommend it to a drove of people, including the (perhaps superior) novel on which it was based, and which had - I must admit I felt the gist of this, and lived it fully as I turned those pages to a conclusion already told, at least twice - resurrected Harry from the half-dead spun into my mind, quite more alive than he had ever been. Upon discovering this, I was only too late, in my judgment at the time, but precisely two years late (as I had, I guess, for the English edition regarding the first book) to acquire and read the final of finales, and in an experiencing only passably able to rekindle and appreciate the fact that it remained unspoiled but for the predictions of my mind, and oh... what a conclusion. Perhaps not so much as I expected, but in hindsight I can say I truly enjoyed it, and had the pressure been on my shoulders to conclude this adventure, and preferably quickly, with the gazes and desires and letters of the world adding to that pressure, I could only and justly have felt quite alright at penning those last words (not of the epilogue, which I fully believe preexisted them, in a reflection of that other writer, George of the lands in the West, where Catelyn and Robb were proclaimed dead before the party had even ceased).  

Colony, continuity, correspondence, colonoscopy...?

 

I first thought to name this article "the scourge of colonialism", but only one who has not thought fully or truly on the actual scourge of the Opium Wars, and their legacy, and the efforts sturdily "required" to ameliorate them once the dragon had raised its head throughout, 

On the issue of the treaties, I would expect no less from old Qing - even the ageing and collapsing older Qing - to approve of the treaties that so much bore the badge of colonial subjugation. Whether they were formally recognised, I would hold no jaw to drop were that the case, although if such a sentiment prevailed (and in my best guess it did not) the subsequent friendly cooperative readressment 

The Monarch

At the start of the last century finished, there was one queen whose reign was unlikely to be rivalled. In a sense it was, by the king-emperor Franz Joseph, who had followed her after eleven years and survived her by fifteen; a period best forgotten by those of that class to have seen it. And perhaps in this as well, the ruminations as well as the glories of the monarchy being at their very best in this new golden age of a sun already bent on setting. Why? 

Elizabeth never served as Empress, missing out of that chance by mere years of her father's placable health, which would eventually collapse and ensure her a reign longer than her namesake - or even  

The Scourge of Henry

The man who - perhaps fittingly - made his last, and perhaps ultimate, appearance at Davos World Economic Forum this week, had only just escaped the clutches of the Nazi state in 1938, at a time when its territorial ambitions were as limited as its bloodlust was teetered (and limited to scions of its ruling party, its immature, unruly military wing, and thousands of Basque subjects of still-emerging Head of State general Franco) as Prime Minister Chamberlain - also just appointed - made a Faustian, or possibly Trumpian, "deal" with Chancellor Hitler over not only the disputed, and mainly German, Sudetenland but selling off Czechoslovakia as a whole in exchange for said Chancellor's autograph. Now, at the ripe age of ninety-eight and celebrating, presumably in Switzerland, a mighty riper ninety-nine tomorrow (thus entering his hundredth year) the old bastard and first European-born Secretary of State (preceding the pre-Munich-Czechoslovakian-born, and recently predeceased Madam Kunin) proposed to end the emerging security crisis-turned-disaster over Ukraine by a similar Faustian, or Munich-ian proposal of ceding Crimea, formerly Russian and more lately a claimant for independence, and its majority-Russian population, into the clutches of very-current and mighty active, for a near-septuagenarian and in age of being Henry's child, president Putin.  

In this, and in giving the Devil his due, I deem him right. Whereas the dilemma already postulated in his twenties, of a world where one - and then two - superpowers, armed with immensely destructive weapons well beyond the range of their own destructions, mankind (as it was then, and even 20 years later) must finally learn to behave. In light of this knowledge, matured into wisdom and praxis, the price of nuclear war over parts of Ukraine would seem a more ridiculous price than Korea, or Hungary, or even sweet Berlin. How such a handover, of undeniable Munich-esque proportions, is to occur - and not stretch beyond the Sudeten analogy into "Ukrainian Ukraine", for just as sure as Crimea may be just as, or decidedly more Russian, so Mr. Putin's speech is irredentist dogma in its denial of the Ukrainian nation undeniably, if regrettable to some, developing out of the eternities of geographical and topographical differences, centuries of linguistic, cultural, ethnic recompositions and realities of frontier life, and now decades of semi-self rule. His speech is as unlikely to vindicate a (self-assured) Russian spirit in independent Ukraine as he is to be elected its president, too, after a free multi-party election, or his stooges Pushilin, Pasechnik, Balitsky or Saldo, which itself would require the ejection of every Russian under arms from its space. Crimea is different, not only for security purposes but the popular sentiments "on the ground", so firmly expressed by the referendum of the rifle when green men overran it so effectively in 2014, and then pulled the trousers from the ostensible order of the past quarter century. While the efficiency, and subsequent slyly waged proxy wars, clearly concealed the Russian military might in its true glory, they also reflect a hard truth too substantial to be swallowed in tablet form, or resolved through calls for genocide. 

My ability to aptly finish biographies, long denied to reemerge with the Englishman Jackson's great De Gaulle biography last year, has been recently allured by Niall Ferguson's project to - with the statesman's ostensible cooperation, although we may wonder how far - 

Jackson's and Ferguson's countryman (still, in the latter case) Hitchens may have pointed out 

So, apart from that, what is he? 

Roe, and and the terrifying virtue of precedent

For the entire life of my great-grandfather, who I knew and remember quite well, up until him having aged into the second half a century of his existence, and for several years before his conception, the Supreme Court of the United States did uphold the now much disgraced notion of "separate but equal" for being, in fact, a thin veil over a reality of the most egregious inequality in American education. It has been said, by constitutional scholars across the proverbial but now ever-increasingly concrete aisle, to be a super-precedent. This term has been flung about not least in the now penultimate confirmation process, hurried and rushed over in much heat and fray, at the close of 2020 with an election already undergoing, with the question fluttered across news outlets 

The paradox, or reliance and innate flaw of legal reasoning, and the ability of a decision so wrongly decided to endure and flourish, is at the heart of the legal argument concerning Roe v. Wade and the actual, governing precedent currently subject to debate, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Casey so often, or sometimes, discussed being the much-dead (and long before without a heartbeat) Democratic Governor Casey of Pennsylvania, who mixed pro-union and workers' right policies with pro-gun and pro-life (or should I say anti-life and anti-choice) policies, represented nobody's actual belief - save, perhaps, the centrist Justices who crafted it out of the crumbling tower of Roe, but nonetheless is upheld as the shield safeguarding the most-spoken right of American women. Whereas the current senator Casey, of the body of voluntarily ejaculating Casey Sr:s body, has very much been touted in line with a new Democratic orthodoxy, whether of the neoliberal or of the extreme left (I think a little of both, in a ghastly mixture challenging the old left coherent with a more Democratic-governed, as well as more equitable America) the battle lines have been greatly redrawn, with the example of Governor Kennedy of Louisiana - one of few blue states in a red band of ostensible backwardness - being mostly ignored, when not condemned. In this realignment, casting the GOP as the now abominated party of cranks and puritanical extremists ostensibly  wishing to impose, by the point of a gun, a Calvinist autocracy (ostensibly welcoming the Papist likes of Casey, who argued the case of life before the Supreme Court by crafting the pitiful law then challenged) and the Democratic party as, well, "not Calvin, not Hitler, not the rape and destruction of the Earth within the next electoral cycle". In the context of abortion, this spells to the maintenance of a right either clearly spelled out in the constitutional ahadith issued throughout a period of the 1940s through 1970s or in the metaphysical realm of natural rights, versus the gradual disintegration of said constitutional (if not metaphysical or natural) jurisprudence. 

On the question of jurisprudence, in essence two camps have emerged, with a number of (symptomatically more intelligible) voices pressing the virtue and value of the precedent, whether it can be salvaged through the preserving mists of time, but in essence talking - or sputtering - their gall against the object allegedly worthy of the greatest scorn: The draft itself (this not being an opinion, and much less law, and even as the final majority opinion it would not redraw any existing law) or the leaker (whose hand thus, again ostensibly, could shape and twist the minds and hands of the supreme nine so as to change the governing majority) and the poor example set by unleashing, let alone regarding ulterior motives concerning the final result, this half-baked fetus or jurisprudential change, tantamount to revolution. 

It has also been said, very vitriolically and (it must be said) frivolously, that Brown v. Board of Education, Obergefell v. Hodges and possibly Lawrence v. Texas (in short, the great legacy of the ever-praised Justice Kennedy) would be evicted similarly, and very lately, in spite of - shall we say - substantial reliance interests. We know, 

This in effect 

On the question itself I suspect, as had also been said, if