Category Archives: Culture and Politics

Between the Peak and the Abyss: Conspiracy and Superstition

20 Thursday Aug 2020

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Albert Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, as an allegory of French society under German occupation. Reading from 2020, however, it also describes with some accuracy the social impact of an actual epidemic. The sense of time suspended, of activity deferred, of relationships interrupted: “As it was a case of marking time, many hundreds of thousands of people were still kicking their heels for endless weeks […] nothing more important happened than this great marking of time.”

And into this space come comparisons, analogies and theories, to fill the empty time and make sense of the chaos and disruption, invented by the mendacious to manipulate the confused. Camus lists the different types and it is impossible not to recognise the stories in the newspapers that blow down our streets, their relevance superseded by new developments.

Some predictions were based on bizarre calculations involving the number of the year, the number of deaths and the number of months already spent under the plague. Others established comparisons with the great plagues of history, bringing out the similarities (which these prophecies called ‘constants’) and, by means of no less peculiar calculations, claimed to extract information relative to the present outbreak. But the ones that the public liked best were undoubtedly those which, in apocalyptic language, announced a series of events, any one of which might be the one that the town was currently enduring, their complexity allowing for any interpretation. Nostradamus and Saint Odile were thus consulted daily and never in vain. What remained common to all the prophecies was that, in the last resort, they were reassuring. The plague, however, was not.

I wrote a while ago about the parallel infodemic coursing through society, as we all struggle to make sense of the senseless, to order the chaotic. Graphs, charts, dashboards, bulletins, maps, timelines: every manner of device intended to help synthesise and distill the rush of events into orderly narrative and discrete data sets. And as Camus said, these are reassuring: not because of their content but because of their form. A viral contagion can be truly controlled only on the page or the screen: every graphic contributes to our sense that because the situation can be described, it can be (or is being) managed. Every rumour, false hope or faked accusation contributes to a sense that the sky is falling.

For this reason, it is unsurprising that conspiracy theories have been part of the year. In March and April, telephone engineers were assaulted and mobile masts set on fire by people who believed the virus was connected to the 5G network upgrade. Paradoxically, they also think that the electronic media is a good place to promote this: I suspect these people are (because things are their opposite) the most fevered users of electronic devices. They seem to patrol the virtual world as they might have once walked the streets, howling about Armageddon and inveighing against the shadows.

I have seen the low-tech versions too, though. Walking through a locked-down Kentish Town, I saw a flyer pushed through the letterbox of a charity shop, its quality print daring the reader to dismiss it for the ravings it contained. I have seen other slogans and warnings, scrawled on signs and bus shelters, painted on doors. They are the inevitable detritus spawned by confusion and despair. And just as surely as the maps of where the virus has taken the greatest toll, they are indicators of deprivation: warnings and fears given venom by resentment. They are the signs (as in Camus) of “those who are looking for reasons and who are afraid.”

In such a context, it was inevitable that antisemitic conspiracy theories should have a resurgence. The Community Security Trust has published a report on the antisemitic tropes and canards revivified by the pandemic. From positing a Jewish conspiracy behind the virus, to using the virus to celebrating Jewish deaths, to using the virus to kill Jews, all the classic elements of the oldest hatred are present. Whether from the right (QAnon) or the left (AntiVaxx) the elements are tiresomely predictable, and make it hard to tell one from the other. As Robert Eaglestone has observed about varieties of Holocaust denial: “these distinctions are rarely fixed, as they demand too much consistency from the world of bigotry and false argument that these people inhabit.”

A survey of the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, a notable member of the conspiratorial elite, shows the usual distinctions of politics breaking down. Combining the family pastimes of preaching to the choir and never changing his mind, he at once quotes Toby Young and his band of right-wing “Lockdown Sceptics”, argues that Black Lives Matter is a conspiracy funded by big business, claims that man-made climate change is a myth, and that vaccines are designed to control us; and that George Soros, “Rockefeller” or Bill Gates is behind it all.

The left-wing “commentator” Kerry-Anne Mendoza yesterday peddled a more belt-and-braces version of the way the Holocaust can be folded into these discourses of hatred. Not as a conspiracy theory, but just as a lazy juxtaposition. As though the death camps were a punchline rather than an atrocity.

Similarly, the mural Freedom for Humanity by the artist Mear One has been doing the rounds in meme form. This is an image even Piers Corbyn’s brother Jeremy belatedly acknowledged as “deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic” – some years after invoking “Rockerfeller’s” [sic] attack on Diego de Rivera in its defence. Like Mein Kampf, (a major source text for Jewish conspiracy theories) these ideas always find Jews responsible for the evils of the day, placing grimly-eroticised spectres and fantasies of “Jewish influence” where the facts should go.

Into this volatile mixture of paranoia, half-truth and pure fantasy, the FBI yesterday decided to publish its records on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic conspiracy ur-text, without commentary or qualification. When I last checked, the material had been retweeted 16,700 times. By comparison, its belated clarifications (below) had barely been noticed. A lie is, as ever, twice round the world before the truth gets its boots on.

The resurgence of conspiracy theories and panic in a period of intense anxiety and confusion is not a surprise. If you want a funny and informative introduction to why this is the case, follow Marlon Solomon (@supergutman) whose monologue “A Lizard’s Tale” is a chilling and hilarious primer in the back-and forth between claim and counter-claim. Dave Rich (@daverich1) noted in an article published earlier this year that “if it is true that Jews play a central role in conspiracy theories, it is also true that the concept of a conspiracy plays a central role in the history of antisemitism”. Conspiracies and antisemitism are linked by methodology, purpose and personnel.

But nor, it should be underlined, do these theories and fantasies restrict themselves to antisemitism. As documented by the charity TellMama, COVID-19 has prompted attacks and libels on Muslim communities. Stonewall documents the impact of the pandemic on LGBT individuals and communities. As so often, the events of this year show that hatred knows few distinctions and appeals to no logic other than the belief that since the individual is powerless in the face of events, those events must be controlled by the powerful. And since there is nothing more powerful than that which provokes fear, the two must be identical. “It is very tiring to be a plague victim,” wrote Camus, “but it is still more tiring not to want to be one.” And given time to brood, the most illogical solutions acquire the clarity of mathematical proofs. But for the conspiracist, as for their cousin, the perfect Orwellian product of totalitarianism, if the right person says it, 2+2=5.

So what can we do against this tide of reckless hate and thoughtless invective? As Camus recognised, the purpose of these ravings is to provide reassurance against the unpredictable and invisible workings of fate. And like his hero (and unreliable narrator) Rieux, we have to recognise that the answers are not glamorous: “this whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” We carry on, we do our best, we remember that common humanity and common confusion are often the same thing, and we do our jobs, however small, to make the world better.

A Tragedy of Errors

15 Saturday Aug 2020

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Autumn leaves on a social distancing sign in Alexandra Palace, London. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, August 2020. More of my photography can now be seen at http://www.framingthemoment.gallery

The chaotic and careless handling of this summer’s exam results has illustrated (along with so much else), the rank inequality of our society and the almost comatose carelessness of our government. If you want expert and incisive analysis on this particular tragedy of errors, then you should follow either (but ideally both) @debrakidd or @teacherhead on Twitter and read their recent posts (they also have WordPress sites – see links below). The piece by Tom Sherrington in particular is a rare sighting on the internet: measured and thoughtful reconsideration of a view in light of developments. Debra Kidd offers a passionate analysis of why the disaster really wasn’t much different from business as usual, and why therefore it needs to change.

I don’t have the standing to criticise either of them, nor would I wish to. Their insights and advice have been inspiring and helpful in my journey as an educator. On this occasion, though, their writing and thinking has prompted a few thoughts in response.

Firstly, the piece by Tom Sherrington. As he makes frequent reference to in the piece, he assumed that common sense would prevail, or at least be applied at some point. This is an alluring thought but, since “They can’t be that stupid, can they?” has been close to infallible as a predictor of this government’s actions, perhaps slightly misplaced.

Sherrington’s uncharacteristic lapse is understandable: my brother’s drum practice this week may have knocked him off his game. (I’m not joking: see my Twitter for the exchange.) Also, as a highly intelligent and informed expert, his expectation that basic common sense would be applied was, well, reasonable. It turns out, of course, that not only was common sense and expertise apparently not sought, it wasn’t applied when literally delivered to those who needed to act on it. See the devastating critique of the OFQUAL algorithm by Dr Huy Duong, submitted in evidence to Parliament earlier this year, here.

Two meta-thoughts. First, when the historians of the future come to write the history of 2020, there may be a debate about the degree to which ministers listened to expert advice from SAGE. I would suggest that the decision to ignore Dr Duong’s analysis may be instructive in understanding the governing culture. This government, despite being presented with progressively more complex problems, is still “tired of experts” and only allows them a voice if they are docile. The disappearance from view of openly dissenting scientists from the daily press briefings if they ventured opinions in line with medical training, published law and common sense, is a chilling insight into the degree to which the government cannot brook dissent. For professors of medicine and public health committed to the public good, outward conformity may be an acceptable (if high) price to pay for ensuring they retain some purchase on events, but it is not a choice they should be asked to make.

Secondly, I wonder if a meta-understanding of our current plight is also bound up with the notion of common sense. It is certainly bound up with the sense that panic is always an inappropriate reaction and that everything is manageable. But, if quickly mastered, panic is a very useful indication that events are either imminently or actually out of control. Someone who doesn’t panic a little in the face of a global pandemic or blighting a generation’s life-chances perhaps has yet to fully get their arms around the problem. As Basil Fawlty responds when told by Polly not to panic: “What else is there to do?!”

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that Fawlty Towers is a model for responsible government. Governments led by chancers, sociopaths and inadequates (though the vogue in global leadership) rarely make good decisions. The chronically dissociated always think in terms of brutality, and those struggling to win approval care more about appearance than outcome.

In Debra Kidd’s case, my objection is slightly more technical. She suggests that a return to modular exams and AS levels would have averted this crisis. This is true, but the price of a cohort with (some) concrete results this year would be a cohort next year with nothing: after all, their AS levels would have to have been cancelled and calculated by algorithm – along with next year’s results, which are unlikely to escape the effects of COVID. The government response has been to multiply problems rather than solve them, but another “peacetime” solution would have had different problems. The basic problem with exams as currently constituted is that they are in general simply a final chance for students to prove spreadsheets wrong. When that final chance was removed, disaster was always a strong possibility.

More broadly, the consequences of AS levels were not all positive. I would suggest that the stress of three consecutive years of important assessments contributed materially to the sharp rise in mental health problems among British young people in the first fifteen years of this century. I am also not sure that increased testing is an answer to a failure of grading. But her central point about the negligence and cruelty of the current system is inarguable.

We need – as in so many areas – a more interesting and comprehensive rethink than endlessly switching between linear and modular qualifications. I’d like to see, in my own subject of History, a more actively collaborative externally marked coursework process. But everyone has a wishlist.

Whatever the repercussions of #alevels2020, I hope that both Tom Sherrington and Debra Kidd are among the experts who lead that process of change. Hopefully with a very different government, committed to finding sensible, informed answers to the problems that COVID exposes with such grim regularity.

Meme Fever

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings, Uncategorized

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2020.

The era of COVID-19 has seen two processes of contagion. The first is, of course, the disease itself, with its terrible toll on individuals, communities and nations. The second, however, is what the WHO and others have termed an infodemic: defined very precisely a couple of weeks ago by a working group.

An infodemic is an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020)

I’m working on a more detailed piece about the infodemic, to go alongside a collection of my photos from this year. In the meantime, however, I’ve been looking at the memes shared in my social media echo chambers. Sometimes they make me laugh but as a class of discourse they make me profoundly uneasy.

Memes are directly compared to viruses by the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski in his book, The Rules of Contagion (2020). He notes the problems posed by “simplistic anecdotes and ineffective solutions” for disease control and begins the book with an account of how he (accidentally) caused “a small outbreak of misinformation.”

The irony is that memes are simplistic anecdotes masquerading as panaceas. Like viruses, memes have no function but their own reproduction with no regard for the health of the host. Matters are further complicated by the fact that social media offer a perfect environment for them to thrive. Back in the day, “Frankie Says” was a meme, but it’s harder to edit a t-shirt than it is to share something online. One meme in particular recently caught my eye.

This meme is part of longer and bigger debates about education, race and identity. I do not claim any priority for this meme’s importance other than the fact I’ve spent my adult life teaching and learning about the Holocaust and for that reason find it deeply problematic, educationally and philosophically. My experience allows me to locate the sources of my ire because I have expertise: itself a suggestion that the reduction of history to lessons without content is not very practical. But I digress.

Firstly, the idea that the second and third parts of the statement can be accomplished without the first is problematic. Without the murder of six million Jews being remembered, the second statement makes no sense: what is the “it” that was required? And in the third statement, the “history repeating itself” is the murder of six million Jews that apparently the author thinks is optional to remember.

Second, and much more problematic, is the weasel formulation of the first statement. If the word “only” or “just” were added, the sentiment might make more sense (though as I’ve just explained I don’t think it really does). But as written it comes very close not to suggesting that education cannot be reduced to simply memorising (which of course is true and something that all good teachers work hard to ensure) but that education equals not remembering the murder of six million Jews.

This ambiguity is difficult because with a negative reading of an oddly formed sentence, the meme seems to be suggesting that instead of anchoring our understanding of the world to historical facts and debates, it should instead come from belief in an unstated mechanism that led “ordinary Germans” to be “convinced that it was required”. Setting aside the complex historical debate about degrees of knowledge, cooperation, acceptance and resistance this dismisses (the author of the meme can’t be bothered so why should I?), the implication is that children should be “educated” in some unstated monocausal view. Another word for this is indoctrination.

One of the key aspects of indoctrination is ignoring facts in the interests of clarity: such as, for example, downplaying the importance of the victim group of “what happened”. The sleight-of-hand with which this example severs meaning from content (thus rendering it meaningless) is the primary source of my anger.

Ironically, the indoctrinated have historically been very bad at spotting the writing on the wall because, well, they were indoctrinated to believe it wasn’t important. Such a process seems to have taken place very imperfectly in Nazi Germany, chiefly because the Third Reich only lasted twelve years. The debate about why and how this happened, which the author of this meme either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about, is ongoing. But the desire to present children with “lessons” without evidence is certainly among the phenomena involved: along with ensuring that the benefits of oppression and murder were widely shared, and that perpetrators were placed in stressful, confusing situations with alcohol to dull the senses when reality could no longer be explained but simply avoided. But reiterating the nature of that reality is crucial, educationally, because without it, the question “Why is this important?” is hard to really answer.

Because, finally, let’s not forget that forgetting victims is only in the interests of the perpetrators. Himmler termed the murder of European Jewry “a glorious page in our history that can never be written”. Hitler asked “Who now remembers the Armenians?” This meme asks us to forget the Jews and replace them with an amorphous “victim” group that makes the “lessons” meaningless. The Nazis oppressed and murdered a whole range of groups and individuals, but to try and remove their primary victim group is an assault on memory and an abuse of education. Subject (the Nazis) verb (murdered) and object (six million Jews) are all required for any conclusions to have any relevance. This is true, by the way, in teaching anybody about anything. The nature of the offence is a fundamental part of teaching to understand the past and (hopefully) avoid its repetition.

This is just one meme in an ocean of memes. As in Hamlet’s soliloquy, it is tempting to think we can “take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.” But this is a metaphor for futility. We are adrift and lost: what we can do (all we can do, perhaps) is sound out the ideas beneath the surface of individual examples in the hope we will find solid ground underneath.

Never Again, Again (Warning: distressing content)

09 Saturday Sep 2017

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“It happened, therefore it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen anywhere.” – Primo Levi

The events unfolding in Myanmar at present have all the worst ingredients of a tragedy after which we will solemnly intone “Never Again”. A complex history, a world distracted by other things, and, worst of all, geographical distance – which is a tactful way of saying that since neither the victims nor the perpetrators are European, the violence will probably be allowed to burn itself out, leaving only a gaping hole where the Rohingya should be.

Though its government disputes this, the Rohingya have lived in the area of western Myanmar called Arakan for centuries. The first mention of them in western sources was by the East India Company in 1799. Rohingya were central to the administration of Myanmar (or Burma, as it then was) until 1982, when the military dictatorship removed them from the list of “official” nationality groups. Since then their conditions have steadily deteriorated. As the organisation Global Citizen puts it, they are “unable to claim citizenship in a country that refuses to recognise them.” Forced Migration Review explains how forcing statelessness on people violates both the 1956 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the reduction of Statelessness. But we have known what statelessness means far longer than that. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, statelessness means that people are consigned either to the law of exception or complete lawlessness. “Since [the stateless person] was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for [him] to become an anomaly for which it did provide: that of the criminal.”

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have both called for action amid growing concern since October, though some sources highlight that there has been violence since at least 2012. A United Nations report from February did not pull any punches. Based on interviews with more than 200 of the approximately 66,000 refugees to Bangladesh, the evidence they collected was clear.

“According to the testimonies gathered, the following types of violations were reported and experienced frequently in that area: Extrajudicial executions or other killings, including by random shooting; enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention; rape, including gang rape, and other forms of sexual violence; physical assault including beatings; torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; looting and occupation of property; destruction of property; and ethnic and religious discrimination and persecution.” (p. 40) 

What this means on a human level is, as always, perhaps beyond description if not beyond words. Even the bald breakdown of the testimonies makes for hard reading:

Extracts from a few of the testimonies follow. Please be warned, they are not subtle, though these are some of the least graphic. Page references are to the OHCHR Report.

“The day the army attacked my village, my father and I had just come out of prayers, when we heard sounds of shooting. We had just walked to a farm, where we were sitting and talking to the owner of the farm. While the firing was still going on, my father stood up, which is when a grenade came and exploded close to us, killing my father, the farm owner’s son, and severely injuring me and the farm owner.” (p.14)

 “I was in front of [my grandmother’s] house, playing with some other boys when the helicopter came. I was shot from the helicopter, other boys were too. Six or seven of us were hit by bullets from the helicopter.”

 “When my two sisters, 8 and 10 years old, were running away from the house, having seen the military come, they were killed. They were not shot dead, but slaughtered with knives.”

The report is equally blunt about the possibility that the statistics derived from these testimonies are just the tip of the iceberg. They emphasise not just that they are only reporting what they have testimony to support, but also that the sexual nature of the crimes means many victims are too traumatised or ashamed to speak of what has happened to them.

In terms of perpetrators, the report is clear that they include members of the Myanmar armed forces, border guards and police, along with ‘irregular’ units of armed locals, sometimes wearing borrowed uniforms. As is depressingly standard in such cases, witnesses knew some of these to be civilians because they were their neighbours.

The response from Aung San Suu Kyi, the former dissident, Nobel laureate and human rights activist who now de facto leads the civilian administration, has been disappointing, to say the least. In a conversation with Turkish President Erdogan, she blamed “fake news” and in a press conference she claimed the government was still trying to decide “how to differentiate terrorists from innocents.” A place to start might be asking them their age.

The UN report stops short of terming the persecution genocide, though it makes clear that the events constitute “[what] has been described in other contexts as ethnic cleansing.” (p. 42)

Definitions are both problematic and essential. For us to respond, we must name what is happening, thus fully bringing it into reality. By naming a crime, we identify it and can prosecute it. Genocide and ethnic cleansing, because they are definitions devised partly in order to suspend the normal rules of sovereignty, are likely to be applied too late: we only know for sure with the dreadful clarity of hindsight. Though one should always remember the macabre evasions of the Clinton White House during the Rwandan Genocide of 2004. A particular exchange between Press Secretary Christine Shelley and reporter Alan Elsner has acquired almost iconic status (some readers may recognise the dialogue from an episode of The West Wing). There is video of the exchange on YouTube.

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In fact, a State Department document very clearly stated “Be careful … Genocide finding could commit U.S.G. to actually ‘do something.'” As we know now, the cost of the ‘formulations’ was between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths in just under three months: a rate of killing which outstripped that of the Nazi death camps. At that rate of slaughter, all of the 2,000,000 Rohingya could be dead in six months. In Rwanda, the bodies of men, women and children clogged rivers as the world debated definitions. As a survivor who spoke to the playwright J.T. Rogers for his play The Overwhelming prophesied, the cycle of violence has not stopped: “Now it is two hundred percent safe here. But until when, I don’t know. Rwanda is like a fire underground: the killings will come again.”

There are always (frequently craven) reasons not to intervene. There are always (weak) arguments for waiting. There is no defence, however, for saying nothing. The preoccupation of British politics with the EU withdrawal process is crowding out any other discussion. This must stop. Sign the petition. Demand action. When the petitions committee reconvenes this month to start a new session, I’m going to start a parliamentary petition (if an NGO doesn’t get there first) to demand that our elected representatives are at least forced to consider what they refuse to act upon. For now, there is a change.org petition gathering signatures and a letter from the All-Parliamentary Group for Democracy in Burma. We know more than enough, about both genocide in general and this crisis in particular, to expect more than the silence the Prime Minister has so far responded with.

I want to finish with some words from the Nobel Lecture by Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012. Remember her acceptance of the prize in 1991 was made by her son: her lecture was made possible by the pressure from governments and thousands of individuals to free her from house arrest:

“To be forgotten. The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out: “Don’t forget us!” They meant: “don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.” When the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to me they were recognizing that the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognizing the oneness of humanity. So for me receiving the Nobel Peace Prize means personally extending my concerns for democracy and human rights beyond national borders. The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.” 

A door in the heart should not wait for definitions to be confirmed before opening once again. Words will never be enough. But they may be a start.

Postscript: like many of us, I’m guilty at times of the delusion that things only happen when I’m looking. A friend of mine, a passionate advocate of and activist for peace, wrote this and I thought it should be attached to this piece: a reminder that terrible things are happening all the time and that the work of trying to stop them is constant.

Shocks, Forks and Fractures

01 Friday Sep 2017

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The title story of The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon (Vintage, £8.99), 347 pp.) is a harrowing account of how an idyllic seaside afternoon in the 1970s turns to tragedy. In spare, compelling prose, Haddon describes the initial warnings as the rivets holding the pier together progressively fail. ("There is a faint tremor underfoot as if a suitcase or stepladder has been dropped somewhere nearby.") He describes in merciless detail the fracturing of a summer afternoon into fragments, neatly chronicling each death and the aftermath as normality slowly settles over those left apparently unscathed. ("None of the survivors sleeps well. They wake from dreams in which the floor beneath them vanishes. They wake from dreams of being trapped inside a cat's cradle of iron and wood as the tide rises.")

Haddon's prose captures the way in which trauma is observed from the inside: slowly, but too fast to fully register; completely, but only in hindsight. Another word for this is shock. As Naomi Klein has recently written, "A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them."

Britain in 2017 feels similar to the disintegrating pier in Haddon's story, shuddering as the rivets joining us to the EU are worked loose, the fissures in our society are thrown into ever-sharper relief, and international politics seem more and more threatening. It's the shock that many of us experienced last year in the sweaty early hours of June 24, watching the numbers move like a tide, rolling upward until, as the dawn broke, the result was confirmed.

Many of us experienced that feeling of shock again in November as we watched Hillary Clinton's chances of being President go from being assured, to doubtful, to impossible. A feeling which deepened in January as Trump's inaugural speech made clear he intended to govern as he had campaigned: boorish, aggressive, chauvinistic.

Most importantly, it's the feeling as we watched the flames sweep across Grenfell Tower. Knowing what the inexorable progress of the wall of fire meant – as human beings, unable to stop ourselves imagining ourselves in the place of those inside – but powerless to stop it.

It's a feeling I've revisited many times this summer, as different journeys have taken me past the tower: blackened and silent, the sun still catching on glass that has not been shattered, a grim negative of the neighbouring towers. ("A moment's weakness had caused this horror, the way a single spark from these struck flints bloomed into the fires that surrounded her.")

The footage from Houston this week has brought that feeling again. Watching the waters rise and the roads disappear beneath the floods should remind us that we are always vulnerable to the environment we build through and over (instead of around and with). The levees and dams have creaked and overflowed, and the bonds of society have proved correspondingly frail. Looting and unrest have necessitated curfews, as stretched civil authorities focus on the crisis. President Trump's response, ("The storm, it's epic what happened. But you know what, it happened in Texas and Texas can handle anything.") encapsulates the dogma of small government and its failure to appreciate the importance of collective action to avert rather than manage times of crisis. ("He's never thought it this way, that lives are held in common, that we lose a little something of ourselves with every death.") In situations like this, the heroism of individuals needs to be backed by the state rather than left to fend for itself. We cannot allow ourselves to be flattered for our self-sufficiency by those whose job is to prepare.

In India, Bangladesh and Nepal, far worse flooding seems to be producing a different reaction to similar problems. The Times of India shows crowds working with rescuers, bringing food and helping to clear rubble. At root, though, the complaints are similar too: "Why does nothing change? Why are we left to fend for ourselves when they had weather forecasts warning them of extremely heavy rainfall?" asked one Indian columnist quoted in the Guardian. The residents of Grenfell know the feeling, as did the inhabitants of New Orleans in 2005.

In Britain, meanwhile, we continue to make our own weather: working toward "freeing" ourselves from the EU. The Brexit negotiations have resumed and it's clear that this government is determined to ignore the reality that 27:1 make for unhealthy odds. On Ireland, on the single market, on the customs union, on free movement; the position of Her Majesty's Government is that cake policy must remain separate from eating policy.

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said this week that the government was determined to try and discuss the future trading relationship alongside the withdrawal deal, despite the insistence of the EU that this won't happen. As any country that has negotiated EU accession could tell you, negotiating with the EU on these matters is not a negotiation as conventionally understood. In accession negotiations, the only question is when, not if, individual countries would accept EU law and regulation (this, by the way, is a powerful practical argument for remaining). In our case, we lit the blue touch paper by triggering Article 50 and now require all 27 member nations' agreement to blow it out again, even temporarily. British inability to understand collective behaviour is quite profound (at least among politicians, who are usually happy to talk about what they claim people want but often less keen to engage with what they need).

Internationally, meanwhile, the Prime Minister arrived in Japan at an interesting moment, her plane presumably virtually banking to avoid a North Korean missile. Asked about the escalating (or at least not subsiding) crisis in South-East Asia, she termed the launch "outrageous" and suggested that the UN Security Council should resolve the problem. Collective solutions are good sometimes, it would seem, though the structure of the Security Council gives Donald Trump (along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jingping) a veto on any solution, so it's likely to be a question of state-to-state solutions in the end.

Haddon's stories have at their core an awareness that traumatic events alter our histories, both individual and collective. ("Today will be different, not simply shocking but one of those moments when time itself seems to fork and fracture and you look back and realise that if things had happened only slightly differently you would be leading one of those other ghost lives speeding away into the dark.") He skilfully evokes the sensation of escape and the chill of privilege it occasions. ("Everyone can feel the thrilling shiver of the Reaper passing close, dampened rapidly by the thought of those poor people.")

The stories also underline, however, that those forks and fractures are constructed of choice. Some choices are positive: in the final story, The Weir, a lonely divorcé rescues a young woman from suicide by drowning, forming a friendship that sustains them both. Mostly, though, the choices of Haddon's characters are negative. In Wodwo, Gavin, a venal middle-class TV presenter, shoots a stranger who interrupts a family Christmas. The stranger makes a macabre recovery, promising to return the following year: Gavin struggles to cope with his actions, becoming homeless before being found by the same stranger and sent back to his family home to interrupt the next Christmas. He approaches the same French window, seeing the changes wrought by the year in his family. And then they look up: he has become the stranger, even to himself. ("The intruder light clicks on. He knocks twice on the glass. As one his family turn to look at him.") What could he have done differently? What can we do differently? Who's making the choices? We need answers but first we have to ask the questions.

The Boy Who Cried Nazi

17 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Footage of Hitler reflected in a glass display, IWM 2016. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

As a blogger with a background in Holocaust Studies, Godwin’s Law (sometimes the authoritative-sounding reductio ad Hitlerum) presents some problems for me. As originally formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990, it runs:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1.

While I appreciate that as a Holocaust scholar and educator I’m a bit of a niche market, this commonplace of Twitter put-downs raises some problems for me.

First, from my perspective, there’s the problem that since I’ve invested an awful lot of time and effort in trying to understand the Holocaust and the Third Reich, the likelihood of my seeing resemblances that others don’t is slightly higher than average. At a recent session run by Robert Eaglestone of Royal Holloway on the cultural impact of the Holocaust, he asked the group to identify resonances between the Third Reich and the Harry Potter books. He said there were eight. I got to ten at a rate that slightly alarmed my ‘pair’ – though this may have been the fact that a grown man is so familiar with the differences between Purebloods, Half-bloods and Muggle-borns. (I will obviously refrain from repeating what Malfoy calls Hermione in Chamber of Secrets.)

The point here, though, is that neither I nor Eaglestone is suggesting that one has to read Harry Potter either as a neo-Nazi code or a passionate anti fascist parable. We’re suggesting that ideas and images from the Third Reich, World War II and the Holocaust have woven themselves deep into our subconscious, both individual and collective. Eaglestone’s most recent work takes as its starting-point the words of the late Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz, who in his 2002 Nobel Prize speech spoke of the “broken voice that has dominated European art for decades”.

My work, as I have described before, is concerned with the ways the Holocaust has become a mythology – in the sense used by Roland Barthes of “a language in which one speaks” of other things. In this sense, resonances and echoes are what I look for. Sometimes this is educationally effective, as when pointing out the “magical thinking” in the term “brainwashing” which many students use to talk about attitudes to persecution amongst “ordinary” Germans. Some of the problems faced by those who attempted to try and apportion responsibility for the Nazi era can be seen in the comment by Barty Crouch Junior (while disguised as Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody) in Goblet of Fire:

Scores of witches and wizards have claimed that they only did You-Know-Who’s bidding under the influence of the Imperius Curse. But here’s the rub: how do we sort out the liars?

To be clear: I wouldn’t suggest anyone quoted this in their History exams, or that the world created by J.K. Rowling is simply a vehicle for allegory. There are, however, some obvious ways in which the Harry Potter books are (in Eva Hoffman’s phrase) after such knowledge. Rowling’s magical hierarchy is, consciously or otherwise, very similar to the race laws of the Third Reich. That such pseudo-mathematical pigeonholing of human beings is not confined to that era (look up the word octaroon) also means, though, that we have to ask why these atrocities have caught our imaginations, both cultural and individual, so powerfully.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw attention to the resemblances where they occur. Not least because it allows us to critique more problematic examples of Holocaust discourse, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which is most intelligible as a sentimentalised garbling of Holocaust representations rather than a response to the history itself.

In addition to the presence of Holocaust consciousness in fiction, there is a long history of invoking the Holocaust to describe the present in ways that are problematic. Peter Novick, in The Holocaust and American Life (1999), wrote of the ways in which the Holocaust had been instrumentalised by different causes: right, left and centre. Michael Marrus (in his 2016 Lessons of the Holocaust) has also questioned whether “universal lessons” are easily drawn, arguing that “lesson seeking often misshapes what we know about the event itself in order to fit particular causes and objectives [with] frequent unreliable basis in historical evidence and their unmistakable invitation to avoid nuance.”

A quick google of ‘abortion holocaust’ (a target of Novick’s) provides a case in point. Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust attempts to mobilise support to restrict the rights of women through a twisted appeal to high school social studies. Its assertion that “Any person born after January 22, 1973 is a survivor of the abortion holocaust” is as mendacious as any Holocaust denial website but in its cadences and vocabulary mimics the rhetoric of Holocaust remembrance just as its website attempts to mimic graffiti. Their Twitter feed also provides examples of Holocaust discourse, as well as sub-Trumpian attacks on “fake news” and Hillary Clinton: dire warnings of what would happen (in their view) if a woman’s right to choose stretched as far as holding high political office.

In instances like this, Godwin’s Law is not just a useful reminder that comparison can be emotive rather than accurate or helpful. It’s actually an alarm for dishonesty.

But this doesn’t address the real problem of whether a particular group can be termed “Nazi” or “fascist”. It does, though, bring into focus that Holocaust discourse and imagery is employed in many ways that stretch the facts. I became concerned that I had broken Godwin’s Law last week in referring to the events in Charlottesville as a “Neo-Nazi” demonstration. Was I ramping up the rhetoric without sufficient basis?

In the case of Charlottesville it seems that there were a variety of extremists present. Its very title, “Unite the Right”, indicates that it was intended to bring together disparate factions. The cause around which they came together, the statue of Robert E. Lee, was an American one. Images suggest the Confederate flag was as popular as any – though unambiguously Nazi imagery was certainly also present.

This diversity of extremity has made the search for an umbrella term rather difficult, not helped by the White House’s struggle to formulate a response that reaches (let alone goes beyond) equivocation. Not Nazis or fascists or white supremacists, they insist, but the “Alt-Right”.

(Only yesterday, He-who-should-not-be-president has attacked the removal of these monuments as “the history and culture of our great country” being “ripped apart”. Rather appropriately, his stance on this could be a line dance: one step forward and two steps back.)

But what does that mean? Does “Alt-Right” denote something new and different or is it just a marketing exercise; a veneer of respectability over old nastiness?

Part of the problem is that defining what MacGregor Knox termed the “fascist minimum” is not straightforward, since far-right movements are much more locally specific than others. If as Roger Griffin suggests, “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” (the extreme nationalism of national rebirth) is a good working definition, then umbrella terms will always be difficult to find. An Italian Fascist was different from a German Nazi, and both were different from a Spanish Falangist. Insistence on local difference and superiority will mean that “fascist” is likely to be an adjective ascribed by others rather than a name chosen by the group or individual in question. Though I would also point to images from Charlottesville which suggest there were plenty of people apparently flaunting their fascist or Nazi beliefs.

On these grounds, I’m happy to describe “Alt-Right” as an American fascism: insisting on a vision of racial superiority and the restoration of a mythical past (former “greatness”) through violence while positing “degeneracy” (of others, of course) as the root of all that is wrong: thanks to Rebecka Klette for highlighting this element.

That these views find expression amongst those who feel economically dispossessed and disconnected, and/or threatened by progress in social relations, merely lends weight to the comparison. An apparent obsession with a particular version of muscular, military, anti-intellectual masculinity lends more. The first target of Nazi book-burning was the Institute for Sexual Science run by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld: fear of other sexualities was a major part of the Nazi profile. Finally, one should remember that links between these examples go both ways: eugenics and biological racism were essential parts of the American view on race and German “racial science” acknowledged the debt.

But does this still make the label “neo-Nazi” overly reductive and unhelpful? Perhaps, but here’s the rub. If “Alt-Right” is the label these people prefer, then I choose to find something else, something less palatable in Peoria. If “neo-Nazi” causes the biggest shrieks of indignation and the most absurd verbal gymnastics to refute it, then I’ll use that, on the grounds that it clearly touches a nerve. In this instance, I’m with Mike Godwin, who tweeted the other day: “Referencing the Nazis when talking about racist white nationalists does not raise a particularly difficult taxonomic problem.”

Sign at the Womens’ March London, January 2017. Photo: Jaime Ashworth. 

Historical comparison is never exact and always requires a light touch: the sign above from the London Women’s March does the job with admirable clarity and a touch of humour. Situations arise in unique combinations and contexts, the actors similarly unique. But as long as we recognise that, we can also do what humans do best: use lessons from the past to guide future action.

To address the title of this piece: it should be remembered that the boy who cried wolf was eventually faced with a wolf. I suspect that we may have come to that point: whether all of those who gathered in Charlottesville last week were programmatic Nazis is beside the point. That their agenda and actions were not immediately and roundly called out by those in power is the problem. Keep shouting “Nazi”: even Mike Godwin is ok with that.

Crisis of Illusions

13 Sunday Aug 2017

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Image: Jaime Ashworth, 2017. 

This is getting serious. I wrote a couple of days ago about the resemblance between the events of the past week and the summer of 1914: mostly suggesting that the isolation and unreality both the Trump presidency and the North Korean regime exist in contribute to attempts to ‘win’ Armageddon. As though a mushroom cloud could ever be something other than a Pyrrhic victory.

The neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville (see picture below for evidence to support the name) and the subsequent limp dumb-show of concern from the White House lead me to suspect that the resemblance between the present United States and late Imperial Germany may go deeper still.

In 1961, Fritz Fischer, a professor of History at the University of Hamburg, published Griff nach der Weltmacht (published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War). In it he argued that Germany had exploited the crisis of 1914 in a deliberate attempt to become a world power. In a later book, War of Illusions (1969) he argued for Primat der Innenpolitik, the primacy of domestic policy: the idea that the German government, threatened by rising demands for democracy and especially by the success of the Socialist Party in prewar elections, used the foreign policy crisis to distract from domestic problems.

The idea that politicians use foreign policy to distract from or even solve domestic issues is by now a commonplace. From Nixon to Obama, US presidents have faced the charge that they have bombed their way back into the polls. Some have even been successful.

(Sidebar: any UK readers feeling smug at this point should remember the post-Falklands “khaki election” of 1983 and the “I support our troops” boorishness of the early Afghan and Iraqi campaigns.)

Fischer’s ideas have been subjected to criticism, most substantively on three grounds. Firstly that, while probably decisive, German actions in 1914 were reacting to a crisis that existed without them; secondly, that other powers (notably Britain) may have seen an opportunity to retard growing German influence; and, finally, that the document relied upon by Fischer was not produced until September 1914, after war had broken out.

Historical comparison requires a light touch. Situations are never replicated and lessons are learned. JFK, for example, was influenced during the Cuban Missile Crisis by Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914 which emphasised the need for clear thinking and communication during crises.

But the parallels are striking. An overprivileged and spoilt leader with a penchant for intemperate comments and no clear grasp of diplomatic realities (Trump’s tweets, the Kaiser’s Kruger Telegram). Domestic unpopularity and the need for a unifying external enemy. The sense that other powers are threatening to eclipse a power clinging on to hegemony by its fingertips: America first, Trump says, but first before whom?

None of these are necessarily novelties. Trump’s awfulness is blurring the memory of George W. Bush and his use of the military to play out a family feud in the desert of Iraq. The underlying problem of perceived American decline has been an American concern since before the decline really started, somewhere in the late 1960s. But now, in contrast to the late Cold War (when US dominance was ensured by the structural weakness of the USSR) there are several plausible rivals to the US: most notably China, which has intervened this week to remind both sides that they are bickering in its backyard and will pick sides based on who strikes first. The brief glow of pride in moving from a bipolar world (US/USSR) to a period of hegemony by default has faded as China and India rise, the EU has solidified into more than a trading bloc (if not a state, federal or otherwise), and even Russia has reacquired a measure of its former confidence.

So how does this link to the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville? Am I suggesting that they are part of a conspiracy to force the President to push harder? No, while shocked by his refusal to condemn them I don’t believe this was orchestrated in the crude sense: this is the third time such protests have been held. But the tenor of the Trump presidency since his inauguration has given them insidious permission to act out their fantasies.

In other words, they are in the grip of the same crisis of illusions as their president (chanting “Heil Trump” in some cases.) Their toxic attachment to the symbols of racial oppression is what got Trump elected and it’s the base to which he panders as his core support becomes his only support. His slogan of “Make America Great Again” allows his crowds to insert their own vision of American greatness to re-aspire to. Whether “greatness” signifies the genteel, syrupy savagery of the antebellum South (Gone with the Wind), the complacent vanilla of pre-desegregation suburbia (Mad Men), vacuous 1980s opulence (Dallas and Dynasty) or a post-apocalyptic redneck Reich (think Deliverance meets Mad Max) is up to the individual.

But all of these visions are pop-culture simulacra of things that either never existed or needed to end. And those shouting the loudest don’t know what to replace them with. The uncomfortable truth that their privilege was not just unearned but extorted from others just drives them further into fantasy. For all his bluster, Trump cannot deliver solutions that will address the problems of 2017 with the solutions of the 1930s. So he is left with what Fischer termed flucht nach vorn: flight forwards, from the economy, from healthcare, from (thankfully) failed immigration policy to…who knows.

Does Trump know the answer? It may be comforting to think he is simply #bereftofreason but the footage of him refusing to answer questions about Charlottesville told a different story. A man who tweets at the TV in the small hours of the morning refused to be drawn on the major story of the day. The much-tweeted commentary by the far-right drew attention to the lack of censure for them, characterising it as tacit approval. The blanks left in journalists’ questions are eloquent in themselves, as is Trump’s nonchalant body language ignoring them.

Remember this is a man who is so free with his opinions he started a nuclear crisis off-the-cuff. If he doesn’t speak, it means something. We must read into his silences that he is at least unconcerned or possibly actively pleased that his base is more concerned to preserve the legacy of the Confederacy than ask him to deliver, as long are there is an “Other” to disturb their nostalgia.

The exact nature of links between the Trump presidency and what its apologists term the “alt-Right” should be a matter for a Congressional grand jury and will be a concern for future historians. They may also try and establish links between this week’s events that go beyond them happening at the same time. They may even find them. What they will almost certainly ask is why those in all three branches of government did not do more to stop this. This is a crisis and requires the shedding of illusions by those who can stop this legally. Trump must be stopped.

Where were you when..?

11 Friday Aug 2017

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2017.

The current crisis over North Korea seems even more absurd when viewed through the umbrella of a pina colada. Gazing up at the palm trees, feeling the warmth of the Spanish sun and the breath of the breeze as I churn through paperbacks between swims, the idea of a crisis that threatens international stability seems very difficult to imagine.

Yet it is happening: thousands of miles away, a puffed-up incompetent is trying to bolster his ego with incoherent threats of the power and range of his nuclear arsenal. And apparently Kim Jong-Un is making some statements too. (Though I do want to know which ad agency focus-grouped #bereftofreason for the North Koreans: whoever it was, they scored, bigly. But then, as a character in Mad Men once observed, “Bombs are the ultimate product: they cost a fortune and can only be used once.”)

I have no way of changing whatever is going on in the Oval Office, but note that much of Trump’s rhetoric actually seems to be coming from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Since every day is a bad-hair day for the 45th US President, I assume the crisis stems from too much time in the sand traps: the only kind of bunker he should be allowed anywhere near, frankly. Or perhaps he’s having trouble swinging his wood. Either way, bringing the world to the edge of nuclear Armageddon is a drastic way to console himself.

But the golf club is a broader metaphor. A secluded and secure spot where the rules are predictable (if obscure), social interaction kept within limits (the faces on the website seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to his cabinet, being mostly male and white), and the most important qualification for entry is wealth. It’s effectively a womb with manicured lawns for the rich white male. The only difference between the golf club and the current White House is that the former clearly has balls (monogrammed with the Trump crest).

While our hotel is somewhat less exclusive than the Trump National, Bedminster, I can relate to the sense of security and predictability. I had a good breakfast, a nice swim and am writing this from a room just restored to pristine order by a smiling cleaner. I don’t want to leave, and can certainly relate to the rather remote view of the wider world that living in such enclaves year-round might engender. If asked to slide a paw out from the sun lounger to end life on Earth as we know it, it’s entirely possible that my first question would be whether I could order a cocktail with that.

But (thankfully) I’m not a world leader and the most complex choice I have to make this week is between varieties of cheese at the copious breakfast buffet. I am concerned, though, from my own recent tourist experience and looking at the reports of others via social media that we are shaping the world too much to suit the (relatively) affluent population’s notions of comfort and authenticity rather than engaging with the struggles of those around us.

Over dinner the other night, at a resort where every other vehicle seemed to be Italian and a phallus-replacement, African vendors passed among us at intervals trying to sell trinkets and knock-offs. Periodically they met to talk, their voices drifting over the sand, their shadows lit by flashing Minnie Mouse ears: their presence as disposable to many of the diners as the merchandise. They may have taken my refusal to engage in many ways, but essentially I was embarrassed (again) that people have to live this way.

In January, the body of a six year-old was washed up near Cadiz, though it didn’t receive the same coverage as the death of Aylan Kurdi two years ago. We’re not solving the problem, just ignoring it until it interferes with our summer holidays. There is footage this week of a boat of migrants/refugees landing in the middle of a tourist beach.

Across the world, the tension is rising and the spectre of another crisis is being evoked. This, we are told, is a rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m reminded of the words of Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, describing the middle of the crisis in his memoirs:

It was a perfectly beautiful night, as fall nights are in Washington. I walked out of the president’s Oval Office, and as I walked out, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday

Similar hardware and strategic questions lend a superficial resemblance to Cuba: once again, the key question is whether missiles have sufficient range to reach an island target. To me, though, the current crisis seems much more similar to that of 1914 than 1962.

Firstly, the competence of the protagonists. Although JFK and Khrushchev both made mistakes, neither was unaware of the seriousness of the situation and measured their words and actions accordingly. In the back-and-forth of soundbites, threats and counter-threats, the US and North Korea are behaving like the monarchs of Europe in 1914: making policy on the spur of the moment and thinking they see how to ‘win’ Armageddon. Trump’s statement today that the US is “locked and loaded” reduces international politics to a bad TV cop show. Instead of taking tea at a palace, Trump is slicing into the rough in New Jersey.

Secondly, the complacency with which (from my bubble) this seems to have been received. Someone has put a giant chicken/Trump inflatable behind the White House, in the belief that the moment to tease an idiot is when he’s down. Or maybe they just want to be on the TV. When words and weapons are put together without thought, the result is bloody, as the leaders of Europe discovered a century ago.

Perhaps the answer is to give Trump a genuine bubble, in which he can be President of his own delusions in perpetuity, the burble of the (fake) news only just louder than the sprinklers. What seems certain is that if he continues in his current state of unreality while commander in chief of the most powerful military the world has ever seen, the end result will not be pretty.

The Menace of 45

09 Thursday Feb 2017

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2017. 

There’s been a post circulating through my echo chambers on Twitter and Facebook the last day or so enjoining readers to refer to President Trump by some sobriquet rather than his name. (In the interests of fairness, its text is reproduced as an illustration below.) I think this needs to be opposed.

I should make clear before doing so that I respect the source: the daughter of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King would be worth listening to even if her mother’s words hadn’t been treated with such disrespect this week, along with the other brave woman persisting in being heard. There is much wisdom in what she says: I’m questioning its deployment by others as a deflection of outrage. It’s much too early to withdraw.

unnamedFirstly, the problem is his title. If Trump were in a post commensurate with his skills and aptitudes – say, Dogcatcher and part-time Village Idiot of Wherethefuck, Iowa (population 48) – he’d just be another of his voters, his misogyny and bad temper known only to an understanding television and a long-suffering dog. That he has the chance to shout his ignorance from the bully pulpit is exactly what’s so worrying rather than a side issue to be kicked into the long grass. The world must be acknowledged before it can be changed.  

People hating Trump being President is feeding his ego because it makes him feel important. His desire to feel important is what has brought us here. I acknowledge there is a circularity here. It is hard to draw attention to an attention seeker without giving him attention. He thrives on attention whether good or bad, so on some level, opposing him makes him feel just as wonderful as congratulating him does. 

But that’s no reason not to call him what he is. (And if the cost of calling him what he is, is making him feel a little bit more puffed up and preen his feathers, I can live with that).

Because the alternative is to imbue him with the magic of a taboo. He’s not Voldemort: he’s a dangerously unstable inadequate with the most powerful job in the world. If calling him President massages his ego a bit then at least his weirdly tiny hands are being kept away for a while from the big red button marked ‘Warning: ends all human life’. 

Calling him ‘The Menace of 45’ (as I’ve seen a few times) is also lending his inarticulacy an all-American grandeur that he conspicuously lacks. ‘The Menace of 45’ sounds like a movie starring John Wayne. The kind of square-jawed, lean-eyed man who wants to make ‘Merica Great Agin’: whose flinty eyes stare down the threat from beneath a stetson.

President Donald Trump, by contrast, is an obnoxious and boorish oaf in a baseball cap whose expression of vacuous and malevolent narcissism is more reminiscent of someone attempting to hold in a really, really bad fart on a big phone call. Or, more charitably, the non-speaking role in that notable presidential movie, Bedtime for Bonzo. 

bonzo

Ronald Reagan advises a young Donald Trump on the set of Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)

Much of the rest of the advice in the post is take-it-or-leave it. Emphasising that Trump is joined by a band of under qualified bigots and enabled by people so rapacious they make the velociraptors from Jurassic Park look like the cast of Fraggle Rock is good; more of that please. This disaster has been brought to you by a Republican Party which couldn’t scrape around the bottom of the barrel to find a better candidate: we should definitely keep reminding them that their spineless venality is part of the problem.

Absolutely do argue with those who support him, however. If we allow lies to go unchallenged we have lost. There’s no point checking your facts and then keeping them to yourself, nor is preaching to the choir likely to make much of a difference.

And as for remaining positive: if the news is bad, it’s bad. Commenting on the way the band is keeping time isn’t much use if the boat is sinking. Address yourself to change but let’s be clear: racists, bigots and idiots are taking the controls of the most powerful nation on earth. There isn’t a positive spin on that fact: the only way of finding a bright side begins with acknowledging what is the case. Anger and fear are bad, but power can be found in identifying what must be challenged, however depressing that is.

And by all means, support the arts: sensitivity, kindness and beauty are vital, as well as powerful forms of protest. The subaltern voice is never so audible as when it expresses through art what logic can only hint at.

And we’re all going to need a laugh, as well as reminders of what we’re fighting for. Many of the brightest moments at the march on 21 January were the witticisms. The Devil is a sourpuss: if you want to make him mad, laugh at him. 

But use Trump’s name. In the interests of terminological exactitude, we need to be clear. A spade is a spade; a turd is a turd; and a turd is the President. Don’t let anyone forget that, because if we do we lose any chance of defeating him.

This is a revised version of this post.

Normalisation and its discontents

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Culture and Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

I like it when my musings on Twitter are acknowledged. The sense that you’re just part of a vast crowd baying at each other subsides and you glimpse the original purpose: to find new ways to connect. Many of my favourite tweeters and I have linked through debate and the recognition that their voice is worth listening to.

I also – I have to be honest – like the micro-massage of my ego that a ‘like’ or a retweet gives. ‘Oh, I might be making some sense is the thought that goes through my mind, though I appreciate that using cyberspace as an arbiter of sense is not a strategy without drawbacks.

But I was nonetheless pleased that a comment I made regarding the Trump presidency and fascism seemed to be picked up, albeit in a small way. To use the rather concerning metaphor of infection that tells us so much about the internet, I was barely communicable, much less viral.img_2470

My opinion, by the way is based on the work of Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell, as well as twenty years of trying to understand the Nazi regime and its murderous policies. I was pleased that the comment was acknowledged and therefore curious when I received a fairly bald refutation in response.

img_2471I stopped for a while and considered what he had said. Was I becoming obsessed? One of those people who relies on third-hand summaries of second-hand accounts of made-up comments? Or could something else be going on? I retorted and await a response.

I was struck, though, that already the ‘reasonable’ voice is starting to be heard. We should be practical, it says. We should be realistic. We should be sensible. This isn’t fascism because it doesn’t threaten concentration camps or wear a uniform other than cheap baseball caps with a vacuous slogan.img_2473

In the Observer this morning, John Daniel Davidson attempts to argue that this is the hysterical reaction (his misogyny, not mine) of a liberal elite whose grip on power has been shaken by “millions of voters [who] have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.” Perhaps if the Republican Congress had passed a better and easier ‘Obamacare’ things would be different. Instead, they shouted ‘Socialism’ very loudly until the cries from the emergency rooms they underfunded were drowned by shots from the guns they wouldn’t control.

In the Sunday Express, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warns of “hysterical overreaction that poses a danger to the kind of constructive relationship we should have with the President.” The newspaper resorts to its favourite bromide in its headline: ‘Keep calm and Carey on’. For myself, the idea of the world’s only remaining superpower abandoning basic standards of truth and decency makes it impossible to keep calm and hard to carry on.

Meanwhile, a US court has upheld the suspension of the immigration ban introduced into law on Holocaust Memorial Day is unconstitutional. A wave of consumers protesting against strike-breaking by Uber seems to have led to its CEO resigning from an economic council advising President Trump. You could be forgiven for thinking that things are settling down, that perhaps the forces of reason are on the move, marching to their inevitable victory.

As a teacher currently dealing with the Nazi era and the early English Reformation, I’m struck by the way my students struggle with the idea of belief. Looking at the persecution of the Observant Friars by Henry VIII, one of my students looked up and, with the dismissive confidence that only teenagers can summon, asked: “What’s the big deal? Why couldn’t they just change their minds?” The idea that people might have believed in these ideas so passionately that they were prepared to suffer or even die for them was utterly alien, to be greeted with rolled eyes and a complacent assertion of modern (or rather, post-modern) superiority. It is this sense of ideology as a joke and the importance of the subjective over the empirical that has paved the way for ‘fake news’ and the peddling of ‘alternative facts’ by senior members of the Trump administration.

Looking at the Third Reich and its maintenance of a peacetime regime, students’ initial responses have (predictably) focused on the terror state. After absorbing the fact that the Third Reich could not have enforced security without the consent and collaboration of large numbers of its population, I have struggled against the notion of brainwashing, as though pervasive propaganda removes the need for moral choice.

Only as we have started to look in more detail at the crimes committed against Jews, Sinti and Roma, the disabled, homosexuals and people of colour have students really considered whether passive acceptance of propaganda is sufficient to explain silence in these things, let alone the cooperation that was required. Lists do not make themselves; doors do not unlock themselves; cars and trucks and trains do not drive themselves. A bullet can only be fired after a finger pulls the trigger. Claudia Koonz wrote in The Nazi Conscience that “what is frightening about the racist public culture within which the Final Solution was conceived is not its extremism but its ordinariness”.

The widespread lack of awareness (see the result below from a nationwide survey of secondary schools) that there is no recorded instance of any perpetrator being punished following a refusal to kill is an important social fact with implications for educators across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. People have choices: the consequences of the perpetrators’ actions and choices were neither remote nor hard to discern.

ucl-hol-perp-results

Stuart Foster et al., What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English secondary schools, UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, London 2015, p. 163.

In February 1933, the Austrian-Jewish journalist Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig about the Nazi regime:

“You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private — our literary and financial existence is destroyed — it all leads to a new war. I won’t bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.”

Roth died in Paris in 1939, an alcoholic émigré unable to find work. As I watch the way the media and others are circling to tell us what to think, how to be sensible, I’m reminded of the shattering end to Primo Levi’s essay ‘The Grey Zone’:

“…we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility: willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the trains are waiting.”

Yesterday, a friend of mine, the granddaughter on both sides of people who survived the Nazi era despite being marked for death as Jews, described how she was depressed by the constant flow of negativity, writing vividly of jogging through a Berlin forest to escape, finally stopping, hyperventilating into the icy fog of the morning. She concluded, though, by reminding us that “This may be bigger than us, but it is not stronger, nor smarter than our energies combined.” We keep shouting, keep focused on the truths that we can see are self-evident: that there were fewer people at the inauguration of 2017 than that of 2009; that there was no Bowling Green Massacre: this is not normal. We are not in the ghetto: though the lords of death may seek to reign they can only do so if we let them.

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