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.