Jeremy Corbyn: a sad case

There’s something sad about the latest episode in Jeremy Corbyn’s story, his suspension from membership of the Labour Party he led until a few months ago. But then, there’s been something sad about his relationship to Labour for quite a time, culminating in the disastrous defeat to which he led the Party last December.

Starmer, left, beginning to rebuild Labour
Corbyn, right, still stuck in denial

Something I regret about the suspension is that Labour needs to be what it’s always claimed, a ‘broad church’. That’s because no one current in the Labour Party can, on its own, command a majority in the electorate. If it is to win power, and without power it can achieve very little, Labour has to pull people together from the many different tendencies within social democracy, to build the majority it needs. 

I was sorry to see people from the right of the party, people like Luciana Berger or my local MP Gavin Shuker, leaving last year to set up a doomed alternative party, which lasted less than a year and disappeared into the depths leaving barely a ripple to mark where it once existed.

I shall be equally sorry if Corbyn’s supporters on the left now carry out their threat to leave the party. Many other Labourites say they’re happy to see them go, with some even calling for expulsions to hurry the process along. I especially dislike the talk of expulsions because that was precisely the kind of language Corbynites used when they were in charge, and I’d like to think we were better than that.

Besides, losing the far left would only narrow our broad church. It would especially weaken the party, since these are often the most active supporters we have. It would be far better to keep them as members.

That doesn’t mean we should let them anywhere near the top of the party. In 1983, under the nominal leadership of Michael Foot and the real leadership of hard-left Tony Benn, Labour had its worst electoral result since 1935. In 2019, Jeremy Corbyn managed to perform even less well than in 1983.

We ignored the lesson of where hard left leadership gets us once, let’s make sure we don’t ignore it twice.

An important report, intelligently received by Keir Starmer
Not so much by Jeremy Corbyn

This takes us to the saddest aspect of the latest Corbyn episode: it was entirely avoidable. The problem arose when the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published its long-awaited report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. It found there was political interference in the process of investigating cases of anti-Semitism, that the Leadership of the time (Corbyn’s) failed to train staff adequately to deal with anti-Semitism, and that the existence of excellent processes for dealing with sexual harassment demonstrated that Labour was capable of doing what needed to be done, but didn’t.

Keir Starmer, current leader of the Labour Party welcomed the report and committed to implement all its recommendations. He made it clear that there would be no tolerance for those who persisted in denying the importance of the charges against Labour, or in continuing to proclaim that they were inspired by political opposition.

How might Corbyn have reacted? He needed to say as little as possible. He needed to make a brief and anodyne statement, perhaps welcoming the publication of the report and fully supporting Keir starer’s commitment to implement the recommendations. He could have finished with something he actually did say, that he saw no place for anti-Semitism in Labour. 

While he didn’t have to, he might have added that he regretted any slowness in dealing with complaints of anti-Semitism while he was Leader. Not, however, that he would ever do that, because it would have meant admitting responsibility for a failure. That’s not something Corbyn can do, with denial at the heart of his approach to politics, as he and his supporters have repeatedly shown in their refusal to accept that he had anything to answer for in December’s defeat.

So he expressed no regret. To make things worse, he declared:

One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media.

In other words, Corbyn did exactly what Starmer said would not be tolerated. He tried to play down the problem. And he claimed complaints had been inflamed by political opponents.

Corbyn often makes me think of a line of Tom Cruise’s, as a Navy lawyer, in the film A Few Good Men: “my client’s a moron. That’s not against the law.”

Corbyn’s not particularly bright. Nor, as he shows in his refusal to accept responsibility for any action, is he particularly courageous or honest. Those are excellent reasons for keeping him as far away from a leadership position as possible.

But those failures are not, in themselves, a cause for expulsion. No rule requires members to be smart. For the sake of the broad church, it would have been good not to suspend him, and for his supporters not to leave.

On the other hand, a direct breach of a clear instruction from the Leader is a disciplinary offence. That can’t be accepted in anyone, not even a former leader. That made Corbyn’s suspension inevitable.

But it’s still a sad development for Labour’s future.

Offending Muslims: a right or an obligation?

It’s an old sport. Forcing Muslims to conform to the culture and standards of the non-Muslim countries of Europe. 

Christian imagery among the Muslim arches
of the Cordoba Mosque

I live in Spain these days, and there was a long tradition of that kind of behaviour in this country, perhaps best symbolised in the construction of a (small) Cathedral inside the great Mosque at Cordoba. That was a particularly dramatic desecration, because that Mosque, as well as being a place of worship, was also a centre of learning, where Muslims, Christians and Jew could meet and mingle and any of them could start lecturing anyone who cared to listen about any subject that took their fancy, just as long as they weren’t challenging the their rulers (who were Arabs) or attempting to convert Muslims.

Cordoba was for a time a major focus for European learning and, in my view, the starting point of the humanism that fuelled the renaissance. One of the greatest Christian intellectuals of the time, Saint Thomas Aquinas, would later say that the master of thought was Aristotle and the commentator on him was the great Arab, Muslim thinker from Cordoba, whom we call Averroes. 

Given that Aristotle’s philosophy would drive the initial changes which eventually produced the Renaissance and then the Scientific Revolution in Europe, that’s a pretty important role to assign to a Muslim philosopher.

So driving out the Muslims from Spain and planting a church in one of their major Mosques was a powerful way of saying, “don’t talk to me about what you’ve done for us, we don’t want you here anyway, and we’re taking over what you’ve got”.

Over half a millennium later, we’re still playing this fine, time-honoured game. Because a tiny number of wild Islamists are pretty foul, many of us in Europe or North America, tend to think of all Muslims as equally ghastly. Ironically, according to the Department of Homeland Security in the US, the biggest terrorist threats to that country at the moment are domestic:

Among DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists], racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists (WSEs)—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.

No one, however, talks about these threats as ‘Christian terrorists’. Of course, avoiding the term means that not all supposedly ‘Christian’ Americans are tarred with the same brush. However, referring to terrorism inspired by Islamic extremism as ‘Muslim’ does tar all Muslims.

An even greater irony occurs in France, where the opposition to Islam has been given the form of an onslaught against religious influence over daily life. France has set up the ideal of laïcité – secularism – as fundamental to what it is to be French. There is no established church, and all public services are religiously neutral. 

Now I’m not against that. My mother, who was Jewish, complained to the end of her life that her school persisted in holding religious ceremonies, which meant that girls like her would be sent away from the body of the school and kept in a separate room while the ceremony was taking place. That might have spared them some boring moments, but it certainly made it clear that they were ‘other’.

Keeping state education independent of religion is an excellent principle. 

But here’s the problem. What do we do if secularism itself becomes a state religion?

That seems to be happening in France today, with rules and obligations of laïcité as rigid as in any religion. You may remember the pictures of armed French police telling a woman in a burqini on a Southern French beach to – incredibly – wear fewer clothes. The burqini was an illegal public statement of faith.

Wear fewer clothes...

They don’t know what they want, do they? I remember women in my youth being told to wear more clothes on beaches. The common factor is that it’s men telling women what to wear.

And, of course, in this case the target is Islam.

The other apparent obligation of the secularist religion, at least in France, is to publish cartoons of Muhammad. Like many non-Muslims, such cartoons are a matter of complete indifference to me. But I know they are deeply offensive to most Muslims, whose religion bans such depictions of their principal prophet. I would, therefore, carefully avoid using any such cartoons unless circumstances absolutely required it. I can’t think what those circumstances would be, but I’m clear that I have the right, and should have the right, to publish those cartoons if I wanted.

I simply choose not to exercise the right, because I see little point in causing such offence, and I see no good in doing so. I’m offensive about Trump or Johnson, but that’s because I hope that if even a few people are swayed by criticism of those men to vote against them, I have done some good. I see no such good from distributing cartoons of Muhammad.

President Macron, on the other hand, claims that France will not “renounce the caricatures”. Clearly, he feels that Frenchmen have not only a right to publish them, but an obligation to do so. I suppose he feels that not exercising the right might lead to its withering away.

As for the offence, it seems that he and rather a lot of Frenchmen, don’t care a great deal. Offending Muslims? Perhaps it doesn’t matter much to them.

But then, after all, causing such offence has been a long tradition in Europe. Look at the Cathedral in the middle of the Cordoba Mosque. What’s happening in France seems to show that we honour such traditions.

But are they really honourable?

 

Integrating Immigrants

There’s no doubt that being white immigrants into a European country whose language we speak, however badly, produces a profoundly different experience from that of non-whites trying to fit into countries speaking a language they don’t know. 

One US President, Theodore Roosevelt, was quite clear about those foreigners who turn up insisting on speaking a different language:

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

The most strident voice of the racist right of the British Conservative Party in my youth, Enoch Powell, made clear that belonging to a different faith or ‘community’ wasn’t acceptable in an immigrant either:

To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.

And here, typically in a tweet, is another US President who has made something of a specialty of denouncing nasty immigrants (he wrote off Mexicans as ‘drug dealers, criminals and rapists’, a curious choice of words, since drug dealing and rape are crimes themselves):

In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!

Immigrants, you see, import the Invisible Enemy with them. In this case, that means Covid, nasty foreign infection (in Trump’s view, specifically Chinese) that good American stock would never have developed. Foreigners aren’t just pesky, you see, they’re pest-ridden. 

US border with Mexico: hardly the most welcoming sight

The curious thing about Roosevelt’s statement and Trump’s, is that those men led a nation built by immigrants on top of the ruins of the cultures they found there before them. Native Americans weren’t asked whether they were happy with these new arrivals sticking to their own communal rights (or rites). They just had an alien culture inflicted on them.

As I said, we’re Europeans moving to another European country and with a basic knowledge of the language. So we’ve escaped the kind of welcome Roosevelt, Powell or Trump might have offered us. However, the issues they raise apply to our case too, if in a less acute form.

The key question is whether the immigrants remain separate or integrate with their new community. Our decision was clear: we were going to integrate. We’ve been working on our Spanish. We’ve been working on understanding the customs of our new country. That’s across the board, including the knotty problem understanding the eating habits of our new host community. 

The day’s meals start with desayuno which it’s easy to translate as breakfast, since that’s what the word literally means: breaking a fast (not the same as a fast break, which is the specialty of snooker players or escaping convicts).

Then, especially in our province of Valencia, there’s the almuerzo. This happens some time between 11:00 and midday, so I suppose we can call it elevenses, a meal that has rather dropped into disuse in Britain, as in other parts of Spain.

That’s followed by comida, clearly lunch though it literally just means meal (well, actually, just food), at around 2:00.

I think that merienda, served at around 5:00 or 6:00, rather like the old institution of tea or high tea in Britain, a relic of last-century middle class life, is mostly for children now. But not exclusively. I’ve seen adults enjoying their merienda too (often down with strong alcohol, but then that’s often true of breakfast too).

And the final meal of the day, served traditionally at the ungodly hour of 10:00 at night (though that’s slipping forward these days, perhaps to accommodate the few tourists still coming here since Covid), is the cena or dinner.

Since we see fewer obese people here than we did in Britain, I can only suppose that not everyone eats every one of those meals. It’s more of a pick and mix. You know, maybe skip one and make more of a meal, as it were, of the next.

Danielle, wanting to adapt to local customs, and enthusiastic about the kind of meal you can serve late in the morning, has taken to inviting neighbours to occasional almuerzos with us. This has mostly been well received, particularly after we took the gentle hint offered by people turning up with bottles and offered wine with the meal (not my previous practice, I have to admit, until rather later in the day).

What shocked our friends, however, was the sheer amount of food Danielle would lay out on the table.

“This isn’t an almuerzo,” they would cry, in shock mingled, I think, with some delight, “this is a comida.”

Well, maybe there was an element of our providing something more like lunch at that time of day, used as we were to having our midday meal at a time closer to midday. They pointed out to us than an almuerzo, to them, was much more of a light snack. Still, no one complained, and we noticed that everyone seemed perfectly happy to enjoy a substantial meal at our almuerzos.

So it was a pleasure to be invited back for an almuerzo at the house of a neighbouring couple. We were immediately struck by the large quantities of food, more like our idea of an almuerzo than the light snack we’d been told was normal.

“Ah, well,” they told us, “we’re trying to integrate.”

Our neighbours Santi and María José
and the immigrant-scale almuerzo they served us

Enoch Powell would not have been pleased. Here was the local community adapting its customs to ours. We’d tried to assimilate to theirs, but gone way over the top. However, instead of haughtily explaining to us that we were badly out of line, they were following us over the top themselves.

And the worst of it? Everyone enjoyed it.

Mr Trump and Teddy Roosevelt would not have been pleased.

Is Donald running out of Trump cards?

You never want to lower your guard against a dirty fighter who’s shown he has no respect for the rules. 

Until he’s been definitively knocked out, and preferably carried out of the ring, you have to expect him to launch a sneak, low blow if you’re ever complacent enough to turn your back on him. So we have to expect Donald Trump, slow to do good but quick to brutality he thinks advances his interest, to come up with something pretty dire in the last two weeks of the Presidential election campaign.

Trump, not outstanding for his subtle wit
He needs to pull something out of the hat and fast

Even so, we can take some comfort from two things: his standing in the polls and, above all, his own behaviour.

The polls are averaging a Biden lead rather over 10%. At the same point in the 2016 election campaign, Hillary Clinton was ahead by just over 6%. The election itself gave her a lead of just over 2%, letting Trump beat her in the electoral college.

If Biden can prevent his lead diminishing by any more than the 4% Clinton lost, he would still win by 6%, better than Obama’s second win, and little behind his first. Besides, Biden’s lead has stayed steady, and even climbed a little, for months now. From today’s standpoint, he looks ready to win decisively, and perhaps crushingly.

Again, Trump could still unleash something deadly in the next two weeks. All we can say, is that it would have to be something stunning.

Which takes me to the question of his own behaviour.

Isn’t he beginning to sound like a beaten man? If there’s one thing Trump hates, it’s to be a loser. He’s always been careful not even to mention the possibility that he might lose. Or he was until a few days ago. Suddenly, though, he’s coming out with off the cuff remarks about losing. 

If he loses, he tells us, he would leave the US. That might sound like a threat to some. To many others – I hope rather more – it sounds like a promise. I suspect that, to far more still, it sounds like the plan of a fugitive from justice.

He has also said that if he loses, it will be to the worst candidate for the presidency ever. We didn’t need any further evidence of Trump’s utter lack of self-awareness, but it is astonishing that he apparently doesn’t realise than any plausible politician running against him can, at most, be the second worst candidate ever.

Again, though, the significant aspect is his even allowing for the possibility that he might lose.

Perhaps the most telling of Trump’s most recent outbursts has been his attacks on Anthony Fauci. Now Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has had a stellar career. He has been one of the most cited medical authorities in the world. He played a leading role in the fight against HIV, against Ebola, against Zika, and most recently, against Covid.

But Trump hates scientific information if it makes him uncomfortable politically (and Trump doesn’t distinguish between political and personal). So he has turned on him for giving evidence-based advice that conflicted with his own irrational notions. In vintage Trump form, he declared that Fauci had been around 500 years and called him a ‘disaster’, comments that attracted a cool response from the sharper and wittier Fauci.

That’s the problem for Trump: Fauci’s a great deal smarter, and he’s done a great deal more for Americans than Trump. He’s far more respected and trusted. A lot of people will be upset by seeing him attacked in this way.

That’s people outside Trump’s base. Within the base, this kind of abuse, like his bullying tactics during the first Presidential debate, plays well. However, as the polls show, he may be rallying his base but it’s shrinking. He’s made the mistake of not trying to attract people from outside it. This attack feels like the desperate ploy of a man trying to find a way out of the hole in which he’s buried himself.

Still. Let’s come back to the beginning of this piece. While his base is shrinking, it includes some vicious people, many of them heavily armed. White supremacists, most of whom are keen Trump supporters, have been declared a major threat, even by someone like Chad Wolf, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security in the US (isn’t it amazing how many of Trump’s senior people hold their positions in an acting capacity? It’s easier than going through a formal confirmation, I suppose, and Trump always prefers the easy way).

The kind of fans Trump called on to “stand back and stand by”
No joke for anyone attached to the rule of law

With such support, there’s still no guarantee that even if he loses, Trump will go. Beating him will only be a first step. We can only say that, by his own behaviour and the state of the polls, at least that first step now looks increasingly achievable.

Trump seems to feel he’s running out of cards. That must give many of us a spark of hope to enjoy.

Denying the deniers

You cannot imagine my guilt at having been a denier…

The words are from a Dallas Voice article by Tony Green, a self-declared gay conservative. He voted for Trump and he knew Covid was a hoax. Until he got it.

If he alone had got it, that might not have been too bad. But six had gathered in his house and from them it fanned out throughout an extended family, infecting fourteen. Some had no symptoms, or recovered fast. But many had a horrible time, including Tony Green, who thought he’d recovered only to collapse and wake up in hospital, surrounded by ten worried doctors. He went through a lot of suffering before making it.

Covid-19 can extremely unpeasant even if you survive

And two of the people infected didn’t make it at all.

He told the Washington Post:

This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.

He doesn’t even know whether it was he or one of the others who brought in the infection. It hardly matters. The only real point is that they found out the hard way that this infection is no hoax and that it’s brutal.

What’s most astonishing about the story, though, is that Green admits his guilt. He has the strength of character to accept that he was wrong. So many Covid deniers simply will not make that admission. Because their conspiracy theories are beliefs, not science, so they are based on faith, not evidence. No amount of evidence will persuade them.

Here in Spain, deniers were claiming back in August, when deaths hit the lowest levels we’d seen since the spring, that practically everyone was now surviving. So why would one bother with a vaccine? 

At that time, something like 275 patients a week were dying of Covid in Spain. In the UK, the figure was 276. It would take just a tad over three weeks for the UK’s Covid deaths to outstrip its total of murder victims in 2018. In Spain, it would take just over one week. I’m assuming no one would want us to stop fighting murder, on the grounds that practically everyone survives every year unmurdered.

Even at this low point, however, the United States, led by Trump, the congenial wit (sorry, I mean congenital halfwit), was averaging nearly 6700 deaths a week. Which means it would take around two and a half weeks to reach the annual level of murders. Since then, the Covid deaths in the US have fallen further, so now it would take nearly four weeks to reach the same level as murders.

Whatever the deniers say, none of these numbers are practically zero. Many more people are surviving than dying, but the deaths, to my simple thinking, are far too high to be acceptable. And, while they’re falling (for now) in the US, they’re climbing in Spain and the UK. Besides, as Tony Green points out, Covid doesn’t just cause death, it can cause great suffering too.

He learned to take it seriously. Why can’t other deniers do the same?

As Green wrote in the Dallas Voice:

…to do nothing is to be foolish. To ignore or question the validity of this virus, its contagiousness or the consequences of selfish attitudes is — at this stage — completely stupid.

There are sacrifices to be made, because whatever the deniers say, this level of pain and death should not be acceptable to anyone. Those sacrifices can be painful themselves, of course. For instance, we met an Australian couple the other day, keen to get home and to family before she gives birth to their first child.

Australia had just around 76 deaths a week in September, though the numbers seem to be climbing again.

The couple we met had just had their flight home cancelled. They’ve been told the Australian government is laying on rescue flights. “Rescue” may sound free, but it isn’t. They will have to find 5000 dollars to cover those flights, and be able to get to wherever they’re taking off from at short notice. They will then be flown to a quarantine camp in the Northern Territories, where they will be held for two weeks in huts in the desert, for the cost of a five-star hotel (2000 dollars). Next they will have to travel from Northern Territories to their home, at their own cost, and there they will have to quarantine again for two weeks, again at their cost.

I couldn’t help agreeing that this didn’t sound like caution. It sounded like the Australian government gouging its own citizens trying to get home. As though they were turning Covid into a business opportunity…

But then I remembered Tony Green again.

“I promise you, if we continue being more worried about the disruption to our lives than we are about stopping this virus, not one American will be spared.”

What he says about Americans applies to us all. We can perhaps be more humane than the Australian government, not known for its humanity. At the same time, we can be a lot more effective than the US or UK government, or the many quarrelling governments of Spain.

Above all, we can’t afford denial. I wish more deniers could learn that. Without having to go through Tony Green’s experience.

 

Getting fit doesn't have to be healthy

It had been a while since we’d been Nordic walking, a sport we engaged in pretty regularly last year. Well, lockdown rather knocked things on the head, and the new normal isn’t something you get back to, it’s something you construct. So it was good when we heard of a planned Nordic Walking trip up in the hills an hour and a half away, in the mountains of the Sierra de Espadán, just over the border from the Community of Valencia (where we live), in the neighbouring province of Aragon.

I enjoy the woodland near us, but it’s true that it’s nearly all evergreen. So it’s pleasant to find oneself among deciduous trees again. That’s what being in the Sierra does – you may only be 800 to 1000 metres up, but that’s enough to make a big environmental difference. The contrast between the pines and the autumn colours is spectacular and a refreshing change.

A pine in stark contrast to a blaze of autumn behind it

The company was excellent, the setting beautiful, our picnic (prepared by Danielle) delicious. So it would have been a good day even if it had included nothing more than that.

A great place to visit

But in fact, there was much more.

What had caught our attention in the information about the day was its reference to a famous Spanish drink. It was advertised as a Patzaran-making walk. Once we’d had our exercise, our coach was going to show us how to prepare it.

Now Patxaran – or Pacharán in standard Spanish – is a Basque drink, well known throughout Spain, and made from Aniseed spirit in which sloes (Aran in some Basque dialects) are steeped. But not just sloes: you add coffee beans, blackberries if you have any, cinnamon sticks, camomile flowers and, I’m sure, you could throw in other things to titillate the taste buds if you wanted to.

Now we couldn’t make the aniseed spirits since that would have involved operating an illegal still (as well as being a hard and time-consuming job). So for a small charge (the walk itself, as amazingly always seems to be the case with this kind of activity in Spain, was free), the coach would provide bottles and spirits. So essentially our contribution to ‘making’ the Patxaran came down to picking a few blackberries (there weren’t many left) and then a lot of sloes.

Let me say at once that picking sloes was quite time-consuming enough, before anyone points out that it’s a sloe business. I’m claiming that joke for myself.

A sloe, and prickly, business

Of course, picking them wasn’t that easy. I have the hand scratches to prove it. And we had to wash them and stick them in the bottles afterwards. With some coffee beans the coach kindly supplied (at no extra charge). The cinnamon and camomile we added at home.

The bottles filled, but the steeping barely started...
Note that the fluid remains clear

It was a lot of fun. And a most unusual way to end a session of sport. Proof, if any were needed, that while exercise makes you healthy, it can be combined with other activities which have exactly the opposite effect.

So now we have two bottles of sloes and other stuff gently steeping in the aniseed liqueur. I’m glad to say that they’re already beginning to look right. By February, the earliest time we’ve been told we can taste the product, it should really look and taste like Patxaran.

After all, it’s beginning to take on the tint already.

Patxaran, from Wikipedia (left) and our own.
Credit: By Ardo Beltz - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=872256

The irony is that I’ve never particularly liked Patxaran. But, dammit, I’m going to like this Patxaran. The walking and the thorns ensured that my sweat and blood literally went into preparing the drink, so nothing, not even my own taste, is going to stop me liking it.

Raising a glass. To a Culture. A race? A lethal Italian?

It’s the Spanish National day. The 12th of October. The anniversary of the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean. Our shops around where we live are closed, our friends are on leave.

In the US, it’s Columbus Day. But it’s celebrated right across the Americas, and in Spain, because what could be more appropriate for all those nations than to pay tribute to a remarkable Italian?

Not, of course, that they all recognise that he was Italian. I’ve had Spaniards tell me he was Spanish. Why, I’ve even had Portuguese friends tell he was one of their compatriots. Which, considering he was a native of Genoa, some 2000 kilometres from Lisbon, rather strains the imagination.

Confusing Genoa with Portugal is almost as bad as arriving in the Americas and thinking you’re in the Indies.

I’m sure there are others who claim Columbus for one of their own. I suspect that if you asked Trump (please wear a mask), he’d probably tell you Columbus was American. And, indeed, a supporter of his (Trump’s).

Columbus arrives in the New World
The sword and the cross are visible
The even worse scourge, disease, is there but hidden

To be honest, seeing him as a bit of a Trump man would be less implausible than some of the other claims. After all, Columbus’s arrival in what would later be called America inflicted a devastating pandemic on the Continent. Smallpox wreaked havoc amongst the indigenous population. Many authorities maintain that measles and flu added colossal numbers of dead too, but of course those fine authorities on medical matters, the anti-vaxxers, might perhaps question whether either of those diseases is really that serious.

The net result was a 90% reduction of the population over a bit more than a century. That’s 55 million dead. Hugely more than Trump has achieved, though he’s clearly working on it.

They didn’t all die of disease, of course. The conquistadors’ weapons couldn’t possibly do as much damage as the illnesses, but they did what they could. All for the glory of Spain (Making Spain Great For Now) and the triumph of the Christian Church (with miscreants burned at the stake or even, in one notorious case involving gays, flung to dogs to tear to pieces). 

In Spain, the day has been celebrated since early in the 20th century. It was initially called ‘The Day of the Race’, with the focus on celebrating the bonds between the Spanish and the peoples of Latin America who spoke the same language. Later on, given that racism began to be viewed as somewhat toxic, before Trump came along to make it acceptable again, the name was changed, in Spain at least, replacing ‘Raza’ by ‘Hispanidad’. I suppose that makes it the ‘Day of the Spanish-speaking peoples’. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue but it’s perhaps better than celebrating a race. A bit less offensive.

Anyway, it’s a big deal. And I hope all the people who celebrating it have fun. 

Happy Columbus Day to all my friends in the States.

Happy ‘Día de la Raza’ to my friends in Latin America who still call it that.

And happy ‘Día de la Hispanidad’ to my friends in Spain.

I’ll raise a glass tonight to Christopher Columbus, a native, as I am, of that fine country, Italy. Though given what his arrival in the Americas heralded, maybe I’ll not toast him with any great enthusiasm. Half a glass for him, I think, the rest for my own pleasure.

 

No democracy, or the Trump plan for America

“We’re not a democracy.” 

It’s a remarkable statement about the United States. Especially when it comes from a member of the country’s Senate. But those were the words of a Republican senator from Utah, Mike Lee.

Plenty on the left might well agree with the assessment. Can a country in which minorities are so routinely denied the right to vote, or black citizens so frequently subjected to police violence or even murder, or where money speaks with so loud a voice, really be called a democracy? 

At the very least, it’s clearly far from perfectly democratic.

But where are things any better? The British police, for instance, are regularly shown to be as discriminatory to the Black minority as their US counterparts. If they kill far fewer of their victims, that may be down only to their being less heavily armed. Money certainly talks loudly enough to drown out the British poor. And the current government in London treats parliament with contempt while it drafts legislation limiting the rights of citizens to sue it. None of this sounds like the behaviour of a self-confident and secure democracy.

Furthermore, Britain went ten years without a general election, between 1935 and 1945, with Parliament simply deciding that it could suspend that inconvenient practice while the country was at war. In that time, the US had three presidential elections, including 1944 when the country was locked in the greatest war it has ever fought, on two massive fronts (Europe and the Pacific).

It’s pointlessly utopian to go looking for an ideal democracy. We can only talk about relative degrees of democracy. And on that basis, the United States remains a nation that comes as close as any to realising the principles of democratic rule.

Indeed, perhaps we should forget about ‘realisation’ of democracy at all. What we should be looking for is nations which at least aspiring to democracy. That would make democracy a work in progress rather than a success. It would be an objective that no nation has yet reached. 

What’s shocking about the “We’re not a democracy” comment is that it suggests that, for Mike Lee at least, it isn’t even an aspiration. For him, it’s not just that the US isn’t a democracy, it’s that it shouldn’t be one at all.

With a typo in the word ‘prosperity’, Mr Lee explains:

Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that. 

I was fascinated by that comment. I’ve never seen democracy described as ‘rank’ before. It’s an adjective I generally associate with notions such as corruption or incompetence, but not democracy.

Equally, given that the wealthiest nations all tend to be democracies (in aspiration at least), and generally at peace, even if only internally and with each other, it’s odd to suggest that being democratic somehow undermines peace and prosperity.

Lee also wrote:

The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

It’s true that the word ‘democracy’ doesn’t appear in the US Constitution. But, given that he thinks the US should be a constitutional republic, he might have checked whether the word ‘republic’ appears in the Constitution either. 

It doesn’t.

US democracy, safe in their hands?
Donald Trump with his fan Senator Mike Lee

All this could be quite funny. Just the weird rantings of a politician who is perhaps rather past his sell-by date. Unfortunately, Lee is from the right of the Republican Party and a staunch supporter of President Trump.

Now Trump, as we know, behaves in ways that make some wonder about his own commitment to democracy. He’s not prepared to say he’ll abide by the outcome of the forthcoming election. He’s making every effort to undermine the validity of mail-in voting. His backers are working to remove potential opponents from electoral rolls wherever they can.

Worse still, as well as trying to make it impossible to vote anywhere than in a polling station, he is calling on supporters to enter polling stations ostensibly to observe the voting, in reality (especially as many will be armed) to intimidate voters. There’s nothing new about that: in the former slave states, whites would often show up with guns to make sure Blacks or other potential adversaries of their supremacy, were denied a vote.

With the likes of Mike Lee and Donald Trump in charge, there is little chance of the US becoming more democratic, and a serious risk of its being far less so. 

One of the big questions on 3 November isn’t just whether voters will loosen the grip of these anti-democrats on power. It’s whether there’s still time to stop them.

Not, I presume, that these characters want their contempt of democracy too widely known. Mike Lee may have revealed something deep inside the Trump faction of his Republican Party which it would rather have kept hidden. After all, clinging to the Presidency may be Trump’s only way of avoiding prosecution. Increasingly desperate of winning a fair vote, he may be happier than ever to try foul means instead, democratic or not. He may not want people to know in advance that his faction doesn’t regard the US as a democracy anyway.

Mike Lee’s words may have seemed crazy, but it’s possible they were just dangerously indiscreet.

Music can shake dictators. Or so they seem to believe

Music is powerful. So many claim.

Why, I’m even reading a book, by an excellent writer but which I find a little disappointing. It includes a lad who plays the flute to quieten quarrelling adults, hostile indigenous people of the Amazon, and even wild animals.

I’m not convinced that music can be quite that powerful, though I wish it were. Imagine how many unpleasant conflicts we could avoid if all it needed was to have a flautist standing by to calm things down.

There is at least one group of people who are completely convinced that music is that powerful. They apparently fear it.

These are autocrats. As far as I can tell, practically any new autocratic regime bans certain types of music. 

We have a Spanish neighbour who was brought up in the last decade or so of the Franco regime. Now, I’ve visited autocratic states – my father worked for a while in what was laughingly called the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’ (and is again today, though in between it changed its name to ‘Zaïre’). That was a regime in which opponents could disappear from one day to the next, vanishing in a highly painful and terminal way. 

As an adult, I spent three weeks in the equally laughingly named ‘German Democratic Republic’. There I met a young man who’d been condemned to a year working in a manual job for possession of Western magazines (curious that manual work was regarded as a punishment, in a regime that claimed to celebrate the nobility of the working class).

None of that, however, is the same as actually living under a dictator. After all, I would travel back to school in England from the Congo at the end of every vacation. And unlike the people I met there, I could take an underground train out of East Berlin whenever I wanted to.

It’s the ones who can’t get out who really know what autocracy means.

Paco Ibañez, who wrote and sang Soldadido boliviano
banned by the Franco regime in Spain

My neighbour, as a teenager, joined an anti-Fascist resistance group. They would print and distribute literature the state viewed as subversive. They would also sit around singing the songs the regime banned. Songs such as Soldadido boliviano, addressed to the ‘little Bolivian soldier’ who used his American-supplied rifle to shoot Che Guevara dead. Don’t shoot your brother, the song tells him.

That reminded me of a young Chilean I met in the late 70s. He’d been in the Revolutionary Left Movement in his country, so when the military dictatorship took power, he was one of the thousands of people arrested. Many were tortured and murdered. Well, he wasn’t murdered.

At one time, he was held in a ship converted into a prison. Manacles had been arranged on chains hanging from the ceiling, so that cuffed prisoners couldn’t get their feet fully on the floor, but had to remain balanced on their toes. He, however, discovered that he could slip one hand out of its manacle, enabling him to get both feet on the floor, and sleep fitfully for a time.

That’s what he was doing when he was woken by a terrible blow to the side of the head. A young soldier had just struck him, violently, with the butt of his rifle. As my friend told me, the soldier was a young conscript, a country boy, scratching a poor living from the land until he was called into the military. Just the kind of victim of poverty for whom he’d campaigned.

“Why did he do that to me?” my friend wondered. 

He had never regained full hearing in the ear that had been struck and doctors were still fighting to save the sight of the eye on the same side, damaged by an infection the blow had caused and which his captors, naturally, hadn’t treated.

So it’s not hard to understand why a song like Soldadido boliviano asks the questions it does. And why such songs were banned by the Franco dictatorship or, indeed, by the Pinochet regime in Chile. Which, in fact, murdered Victor Jara, a popular singer and songwriter who had been a member of the Communist Party.

Victor Jara, Communist Chilean singer
Far too dangerous for the Pinochet dictatorship

On a lighter note, during my childhood in Rome I met a lawyer who had graduated in the time of Mussolini. It was obligatory to wear a black shirt, the Fascist uniform, to sit public exams. He and a bunch of similarly left-wing friends rented a flat near the examination hall, where they would change into the black shirt before going in, and out of it as quickly as possible when they left.

One day a group of them went for a day to the seaside and some of them took a pedalo out to sea. While there, a long way out from the beach, they decided to sing all the (banned) left-wing songs they knew. As they got back to shore, they were met by friends who’d stayed behind, who grabbed them and whisked them as fast as possible to their cars and out of there. The singers hadn’t realised that the breeze had been blowing all their forbidden words to the shore.

When I was a student, a Greek friend also told me that he’d gone camping with friends, during the times of the dictatorship of the Colonels in his country. They had a battery-powered record player, on which they listened to music by Theodorakis, banned in Greece at the time. 

The next day, the village policeman came calling.

“Was that Theodorakis you were listening to last night?” he asked.

Oh, no, they assured him. And named another and innocuous singer.

“Ah, good,” he replied, “because I really liked your music, and of course I couldn’t possibly like Theodorakis.”

The power of music. It seems a dictator is likely to believe in it. And make life difficult, or painful, or even short, for people who listen to the wrong kind.

Sad. But it’s quite an experience to know people who’ve lived with such bans. Let’s hope that those of us who’ve only known life in democracies never have to undergo the same experience.

Trump: no gloating but no indulgence either

Who knows what to think?

There’s Donald Trump infected with Coronavirus. It would be massively impolitic to say he deserves it, but what about feeling that way? After all, though he’s the kind of man who would undoubtedly delight in an adversary’s suffering, we want to try to be better than he is.

It strikes me that the only way to proceed is to try to separate Donald Trump’s two roles. He is, first of all, a man. He may not be humane, but he’s undeniably human. There’s nothing attractive about human suffering, however unattractive the human. For Trump the man, we can only wish a rapid recovery and as little pain as possible.

But then there’s Trump the President. The worst ever US President, as Joe Biden so accurately told him at the first (and possibly last) Presidential debate. His mishandling of the epidemic, his confused and above all confusing messages have ensured that 7.5 million of his fellow citizens (whose safety, as President, he’s charged with protecting) catch the virus and, as of today, 213,000 have died.

Trump on his way to hospital
Wearing a mask. Just a tad late...

Even his own infection is down to his casual refusal to take even minimum precautions, such as wearing a mask. Indeed, at that same Presidential debate, he mocked Joe Biden for wearing his so often. He travelled and held meetings with others in closed spaces while infected, as did members of his staff, notably Hope Hicks who may well have been the source of his contagion.

It’s clear that this behaviour ensured that he’d eventually be infected. Now that it’s happened, it’s clearly a self-inflicted wound. He brought it on himself, and he deserves it.

But just how much does the President deserve?

Well, a bad case would indeed be entirely merited. After all, a lot of people have been through that experience because of his blithe ineptitude. Having him suffer a similar dose would be only just.

Intubation, however, I’d never wish on anyone, not even President Trump. No one should be forced to go through that if it’s avoidable. It’s an unpleasant, painful procedure, vital in certain severe cases, but not to be wished on anyone.

I certainly wouldn’t want to see him die of the disease. Firstly, and most importantly, because I oppose the death penalty in any circumstances. I wouldn’t wish death on anyone, not even President Trump, and certainly not Donald Trump, the man.

That’s the good and commendable reason for not wishing his death. But there’s another, less admirable maybe but, I hope, perfectly comprehensible. It’s by no means certain that Trump will lose the election in a month’s time. Right now, though, it looks like there’s a good chance he will. That would mean that after next January’s inauguration, Trump the man and Trump the (ex-)President will become one again.

If things go that way, I’d like him to face not only the despair of his own richly-deserved defeat, but also the trial he has certainly earned, the conviction and, one can but hope, the prison sentence to which it leads. After all, it’s a fate he and his supporters seem only too ready to wish on others. I see no reason why he shouldn’t undergo it himself.

So, it seems to me the right attitude is one of sympathy with the man. But no complacency over the President’s ineptitude. And still less for his crimes.

On the other hand, I can’t help admitting that there’s a lot to be said for the attitude in Linda Grant's tweet:

Shut up at the shitshow

It was a shitshow. That seems to be the consensus among commentators on the first Presidential debate of the 2020 US election. Which was anything but presidential. 

As others have pointed out, it was a startling contrast to the New Zealand TV debate between the two women running for Prime Minister, who contrived to stay polite and even find nice things to say about each other. The two men running for US President merely hammered on, though most of the noise was Trump’s, and it was more bullying than mere hammering.

Biden has been criticised for calling Trump a clown (a judgement unfair only to clowns), pointing out that he’s the worst president the US has seen (I can’t think of one who was worse), and saying “will you shut up, man”.

None of these remarks strike me as reprehensible. Surely, in calling on Trump to shut up he was only echoing what a lot – I hope a majority – of Americans were already thinking. In any case, I notice that the Democrats had a “Will you shut up, man” tee shirt out on sale before the debate had even come to a close, so they must have worked out that the reproach would strike a chord with many.

On the way to iconic status...

After all, we’re always being told that the only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. So why should Biden back down? It seems to me, that “shut up” is exactly what a bully needs to hear when he refuses to stop ranting.

Juan Carlos I is the former King of Spain who had to stand down (or abdicate since royals being ‘special’ have their own word for it) back in 2014. He did a runner a few weeks ago, eventually turning up in Abu Dhabi. Good luck to him, I say, because I can’t imagine I’d want to live there, and it seems he’s not happy about it either.

So he’s pretty much discredited now. But back on 10 November 2007, he won admiration around the world.

On that day, Juan Carlos attended a Spanish-Latin American summit meeting in Santiago, Chile. Also present was the late Hugo Chávez, the man who in his drive as President to make his people prosperous, set in train the process by which oil-rich Venezuela has become a starving basket case of dictatorship and corruption. 

At the summit meeting, Chávez did a Trump. That’s not surprising: these autocrats have far more in common than separates them, whether they’re from the left or the right. Chávez was just the same kind of authoritarian bully then as Trump is now.

He went into a great rant about the behaviour of the Spanish in Latin America. Spain’s behaviour in the Americas, like Portugal’s, like England’s, like France’s, was certainly appalling and unforgiveable. But Chávez tried to present it as a personal affront to him and his people by present-days Spaniards. That’s amusing, since most present-day Spaniards are descended from the ones who stayed behind and didn’t go to Latin America, whereas the majority of modern Latin Americans, including Chávez himself (despite his having some indigenous blood), are at least in part descended from the conquistadors who wreaked such havoc on the continent. If anyone needed to apologise for the historical atrocities of their ancestors, it would have been the likes of Chávez.

Juan Carlos, palm vertical, telling Chávez, back to camera to shut up
Prime Minister Zapatero, left of the King, had been trying to speak

There came a moment when the King could stand it no longer. Turning to Chávez, he barked at him, “¿Por qué no te callas?”, “why don’t you shut up?”

The meeting applauded him. Around the world, people applauded him. As with the Democratic Party today, tee shirts were made with “¿Por qué no te callas?” emblazoned across the front of them. Why, people even used the words as a ring tone on their phones. 

Sometimes “shut up” really is the only thing to say. 

Which puts me in mind of my son Michael and my daughter-out-law Raquel who, coincidentally, is Spanish. Her English is outstanding, but she does sometimes have a little trouble mastering some colloquialisms.

Now I understand that rows are rare between Michael and Raquel but they do occasionally – very occasionally – occur. During one recently, Raquel did a Biden against Trump, or a Juan Carlos against Chávez, on Michael.

“Just fuck the shut up,” she told him.

After three or four occurrences, Michael could cope no longer and burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded to know.

“The expression,” he assured her as he tried to control his laughing, “is ‘shut the fuck up’.”

She absorbed this for a moment and then, gifted with an fine sense of humour and that vital trait, a capacity for self-deprecation (missing in both Trump and Chávez), she burst into laughter too. Which of course ended the row and re-established equanimity between them.

Michael and Raquel
An unusual row with a memorable outcome

Today, no one can remember what the row was about. But “fuck the shut up”? No one’s going to forget that for a long time.

In fact, this summer I told my granddaughter this story. That’s my fifteen-year old granddaughter, Aya, not one-year-old Matilda, not quite ready yet to appreciate its finer points. 

Aya was amused.

The next day, I was gently teasing her, indulging as so often in a series of dad jokes – or perhaps, in this context, I should say granddad jokes – when she answered me, with calm and self-control.

“Fuck the shut up,” she said.

Hoist on my own petard! The very story I’d told her the day before, turned around and used against me. I was so proud of her.

Matilda and Aya
Two smart cookies, only one giving backchat yet

She (and Raquel) had underlined how enriching the demand to shut up can be, when aptly placed.