The great Bill Gates conspiracy. A bit of context

In my previous post about the strange case of the Bill Gates conspiracy theory, I talked about those curious aspects of it that are, when all’s said and done, common to all such theories.

They’re impervious to lack of evidence. The fact that there’s nothing at all to prove that Gates is engaging in some sinister plot against the whole of humanity only shows how clever he is at covering his tracks.

Equally, no contrary evidence has any value. Any story showing that it simply isn’t true that Gates is doing any of these things, or even that they’re actually impossible in the present state of technology, are obviously wicked inventions by his acolytes, insidiously fed out to the gullible individuals who believe his protestations of innocence.

Well, as I said, this is the stock in trade of any conspiracy theory. But there is another specific aspect of the Gates story that’s worth looking at. That’s the global context in which it has emerged. Which is almost enough to make me want to launch a conspiracy theory of my own.

Look around the world today.

In China, we have Xi Jinping. He has had the constitution of his country changed so that he can remain in power more or less indefinitely. He’s been in the news recently for the way he has, at a legislative stroke backed by violent police power, wiped out the partial liberties that Hong Kong had enjoyed before.

More sickening still, around a million Uighur people, Muslims from Western China, are being held in what the regime calls re-education camps, and anyone else calls concentration camps. The figure of a million is a bit of a guess and the real figure may be much higher: the regime isn’t particularly forthcoming with the statistics.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have a Donald Trump for whom nothing matters other than his own advancement. He works to divide people, he advances racism, and he incites violence from some of the most despicable individuals in the country. And all the time, he has presided over the worst economic collapse the nation has known at least since 1929, and the deaths by Coronavirus of over twice as many Americans as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam war.

His own incompetence contributed to both those disasters.

Turning to a less significant country (but don’t tell its conservative voters – they like to think otherwise), we have Boris Johnson in Britain. He has in recent weeks defended, and ultimately failed to take any action over, Coronavirus lockdown breaches by his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and one of his Ministers, Robert Jenrick. Again, the mortality due to the virus in the UK is far higher than in might have been, entirely down to the incompetence with which Johnson has addressed it.

Top right: Mark Zuckerberg, the enabler
Then, clockwise: Trump, Putin, Bolosonaro, Xi, Johnson

And the list goes on. Brazil has Jair Bolsonaro, a man presiding over the devastation of his country by Coronavirus, and who, after months of denying there was a problem, and refusing to wear a mask, has now tested positive himself. Or Vladimir Putin in Russia who has gone down the Chinese road, of a constitutional amendment to keep him in power for a lot longer, and who is almost certainly involved in a real conspiracy, to try to influence the US Presidential election through dirty tricks on social media.

Talking about social media takes us, of course, to the dominant figure in that world. Mark Zuckerberg continues to refuse to act against hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook. There are allegations that the massacre of the Rohingya in Burma was promoted through Facebook. And Zuckerberg can play his role, unaccountable to anybody, and free from any kind of control, regulation or sanction. He is one man, elected by no one, and running on his own authority a communications system that feeds information, or disinformation, to 2.6 billion people around the world.

So we we see these characters at work across the globe. Some of them are preparing conspiracies. That’s likely to be true of Putin, and his people will use the means provided by Zuckerberg. But others aren’t even trying to work conspiratorially. We know what Trump’s up to, we have a pretty good idea what Xi Jinping’s doing too.

And in this world, we pick on Bill Gates? Because he correctly predicted that pandemics might be more serious than war? And contributed money to combating the present one?

Why, it’s almost as though someone were trying to deflect attention from some real villains. Distracting us because they’re working to a hidden agenda we know nothing about. Spreading disinformation, perhaps through Facebook, so we don’t look at the people who really deserve our suspicion and distrust.

Curious, isn’t it? Is it just a coincidence that Gates conspiracy theorists are putting this kind of stuff out right now? Or is it something more sinister?

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.

Visiting the Infant Jesus

As you can imagine, I’m sensitive to the privilege I’ve just enjoyed. I’ve been visiting the Infant Jesus. Or, as they say in Rome where I’m writing these words, il Bambino Gesù. English or Italian, it’s an honour.

The colleague who met me there drove into town. That’s never easy. First, there are the dreadful traffic conditions (I saw two small accidents in just an hour – it made me almost nostalgic: clearly, Roman driving hasn’t improving since I was a child in the eternal city). And there’s the parking: as in most major cities, spaces are scarce.

My colleague solved the first problem by leaving home far earlier than one might have thought necessary. And she solved the second by leaving the car in the Infant Jesus’s own car park. That seemed fine to me, since why would a child need a car park? After all, children aren’t even allowed driving licences.

It felt particularly appropriate to be making the visit the day after Twelfth Night. That’s the feast of the arrival of the three kings to worship the Infant Jesus, in the manger where he lay. I wouldn’t have wanted to get there before the kings – that would have been disrespectful – so the day after felt about right.

Adoration of the Magi by Gerard David
Nothing like my visit

Still, there was no ox or ass, no manger with a baby, no Mary or Joseph. I didn’t even see any gold, frankincense or myrrh, however hard I looked. Not that I’d have a lot of use for frankincense or myrrh, but a little gold never goes amiss. But, given the financial pressure on hospital budgets, I wouldn’t expect gold to last long in any of them – it would be immediately invested in more care, or for paying down debt (certainly the latter, in the UK).

In fact, we saw no child at all. The place was full of them but none, to my knowledge, made any pretence to possess messianic qualities. Those are only claimed by the present occupants of the White House or Kremlin. Or, I suppose, the holder of the post of leader in the British Labour Party, though in his case the claim is only made by his worshippers, Corbynism having done away with the milksop notion of mere supporters.

No, Bambino Gesù is a world-class paediatric hospital. For very ill children. Which means the staff frequently have to deal with distraught parents too. So it was still a privilege to be there. As it was invaluable to meet some of the people who have to deal with those harrowing difficulties.

We weren’t there to sell them anything. They weren’t buying. We were listening and learning. About how they’re trying to involve patients in decisions concerning their care, though often that means the parents rather than the patients themselves. It means informing them of the options before them, the risks of each and the possible benefits, to help them reach a choice. Sometimes it means making every effort to disabuse them of certain alternative-medicine notions: no, for instance, cancer really can’t be fought by using the patient’s own energy.

It was a good meeting. Though I was amused by the name of the hospital. In England, we tend to be less inclined to wear a religion on our sleeves. Yes, there’s St George’s in London but the Pope doesn’t even regard George as a saint any more. Even in England he’s more of a figure in exciting tales for kids, riding around and fighting dragons.

And no one calls St Bartholomew’s that any more – it’s plain Barts. Like St James’s in Leeds, fondly known as Jimmy’s. More secular, you see. Perhaps more detached.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the visit. And, in any case, I was pleased to be in Rome again. What a great city, what a joy to have an hour to wander around it in the winter sunshine…

Rome: always a delight to visit

Happy 2017

1861 was a lousy year for the United States.

It started with southern States tumbling over each other to get out of the Union. Then in April civil war broke out. That was followed in July by the inexplicable conversion of the major Union victory at the First Battle of Bull Run into a catastrophic Union defeat (though it should be said that the notions of ‘major’ and ‘catastrophic’ would have to be significantly revised later in the war).

It’s no surprise, then, that on 31 December diarist George Templeton Strong wrote:

Poor old 1861, just going. It has been a gloomy year of trouble and disaster. I should be glad of its departure were it not that 1862 is likely to be no better.

155 years on, I feel we can safely echo Strong’s words. Particularly as 1862 turned out not only to be no better than 1861 but was, in fact, considerably worse. A feat 2017 is likely to repeat with respect to 2016.

The year just ended was one where many people, tired of the consensus that has predominated since the Second World War, decided that building bridges was no longer the way to go and we should have some new walls instead.

In June, the British people voted to turn the Channel once more into a moat rather than a mere waterway. Those who knew the sixties and seventies will remember the troubled times in which a former imperial power struggled to find a new vocation. By joining what became the European Union, Britain seemed to find one: no longer merely a diminishing force in the world, it would be a major contributor to the emergence of the Continent as a world power.

In deciding to leave, it has chosen to go back to the time of its decline. Those were the days when Britain was regarded as the sick man of Europe, plagued by poor productivity and constant strikes, where only the wealthy could enjoy a good restaurant meal or a holiday abroad. The nation steadily sank through the economic league table, with Italy at one point celebrating il sorpasso, the moment when its economy overtook the UK’s.

The EU turned that around, but it also opened the doors to immigration from Continental Europe. Those arrivals continue to play a vital role across the British economy, in the health service, transport, farming and catering. Such, however, is today’s fear of the outsider that most voters preferred to give up on the benefits of EU membership in the hope of controlling immigration. Ironically, the hope is likely to prove vain. The loss of benefit, however, will be real.

The American vote, however, was far more significant than Britain’s. It’s sad, though constitutional, that the victor took nearly 3 million fewer votes than his adversary. Donald Trump’s lack of a popular mandate is, however, going to have no impact on the way he exercises power in a democracy.

He’s the wall-builder extraordinary. Not that the one he promised, along the Mexican border, is likely to be built. Even if it is, he’s already made clear that much of it will be fence. But that’s part of his style: he feels he can make any promise he wants, without being bound to deliver – presumably, he has convinced himself that his intentions are pure and, in our post-truth society, honouring his word matters less than getting into a position in which he can mould it as he feels it needs.

His principal concern seems to be to make a friend of Vladimir Putin and an enemy of China. Whatever he does with physical walls, he has a metaphorical one in mind which will include Russia on his side and China firmly on the outside.

Aleppo: handiwork of Trump's pal Putin and his mate Assad

Putin has shown himself to be a strongman and supporter of strongmen, such as Assad in Syria or his new-found friend in Turkey, Erdogan. It’s telling that Trump wants to be associated with that club, perhaps because he also rather likes the homophobic, patriarchal and autocratic views it represents. If so, the US is going to become a considerable less pleasant place to be if you’re gay or a woman (how long will abortion remain a right?) and a great deal more unpleasant for African Americans, Hispanics or Muslims.

Meanwhile, we’d better hope that his attitude towards China represents another promise he has no intention of keeping. If he sticks to the collision course he’s plotted so far, the Trump presidency risks being not just bad but terminal.

Oh, well. George Templeton Strong survived 1862. He got through the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. He saw the US reunited and prospering. We too may need to keep our nerve and nurse our patience and wait for better days to emerge in the future.

It happened for Strong, so it could happen for us.

In the meantime – happy New Year!

Cockup or conspiracy, and Turkey in trouble

Given the choice of explaining events in terms of conspiracy or cock-up, I’m always far more inclined to go for the latter.

This is because, while I’d never underestimate the sheer devious malice of many powerful people, I’m not as impressed as they are by their intellectual capacity. Nor do I have confidence in the ability of people to keep their mouths shut for long enough to pull off a really comprehensive conspiracy, especially if there are a great many of them involved or it lasts long enough to give them multiple opportunities to boast about it to their twelve best friends.

So I’m prepared to believe that 9/11 happened as a result of a conspiracy between a relatively small number of people headed by Osama Bin Laden, though even then I’m astonished that they were able to be quite so ruthlessly effective in their planning and secrecy. I’m utterly unable to believe that it was all a conspiracy stage-managed by the Pentagon, since that would have required 10,000 people to work in coordination, with not a single one of them spilling the beans since.

Why am I talking about all this now?

Because last Friday a coup was attempted in Turkey, a nation that was already well on the way to autocracy under the leadership of its remarkable and charismatic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In passing, let me saw it’s men like him that make charisma deeply suspect to me. 

He’s quick to defend democracy when it comes to defending his grip on power, which he indeed established by election. He’s much less so when it comes to protecting those other, less convenient if not downright irritating democratic values, such as the right to freedom of speech, to oppose to government or, even, to expose corruption.

Erdogan: smart operator who's been dealt a winning hand
But as briiliant as he believes? A champion plotter? I think not

Indeed, the Turkish experience is an excellent illustration of how holding elections, though a necessary condition for democracy, is far from a sufficient one.

The coup, as we all now know, fizzled out when the majority of the army failed to rally to it and Erdogan was able to call out large numbers of civilians to resist it. Now he’s in the wonderful position, for a man of his authoritarian inclination, to round up all his opponents – and he has some convenient little lists ready, of people who really wouldn’t be missed, at least by him or his followers. And he’s in the glorious position of being able to do it all in the name of democracy. To protect freedom from military intervention. To defend the core rights of the people to choose their government freely. Or at least, all those people, and it may be a majority, who vote for him.

Among the opponents he deals with over the next few weeks, you can be sure there will be quite a few who took no part in the putsch and were as opposed to it as he was. But they were opposed to him too and, sadly, by an unfortunate administrative error, they will be caught up in the post-coup oppression too.

Since only he seems to have benefited from the coup attempt, and it’s given him just the opportunity to move against the opponents he was targeting anyway, it is indeed easy to imagine that he was behind it in the first place. Who does it benefit, we ask? Him, obviously, so isn’t it possible that he or his agents ensured the attempt was made and crushed, to strengthen the strong man? 

It’s a tempting hypothesis. But not to my taste. I just can’t believe that Erdogan is quite that intelligent. He’s a highly effective bully, and perfectly smart enough to pull a faction together and use it to crush his adversaries. However, smart enough to get people who hate him to act in precisely the way he wants them? To go out on a limb and, as it now appears, put their lives on the line by doing something so completely half-baked, all because they’d fallen for Erdogan’s snake oil selling skills?

I don’t see it. On the other hand, my faith is deep and unshakeable in the capacity we all share to delude ourselves. It strikes me as far more likely that the men who led the putsch thought they’d get away with it. Just like the men in the dying days of the Soviet Union who thought they’d overthrow Gorbachev, and only got Yeltsin instead – with Putin not far behind.

In both cases, rebels got their tanks out without being sure of the backing they needed. They went into battle against men whose skill exceeded theirs only far enough to ensure they had more support than their opponents. These were not brilliant poker players turning the cards they were dealt into winning hands; these were one set of cheats outsmarted by the other.

In both cases, the ultimate victim was any hope of democratic development. Back then, the final price was paid by the Russian people, as now it will be by the Turkish. But it was down to cockup by putschists, not conspiracy by their opponents. Opponents and beneficiaries.

Uneasy lies the head that wields a vote

It’s been fun to be out here in the US and see a bit of the Presidential race up close, even if briefly and only in a thoroughly unscientific and anecdotal way.

Most of the people I’ve met over the last week have, I believe, been Republicans. They’re coy to admit it, but that’s how I read some of their comments and their body language. Perhaps their coyness too.

Most strikingly, they’re stumped.

How can they help decide who should win their party’s nomination? Cruz, the candidate placed second to Trump, is far too right wing, it seems.

“What,” I asked, “is Cruz to the right of Trump?”

“Way to the right,” I was told, “because he really is of the far right. Trump’s just erratic. You have no idea what his position is on anything until he takes it.”

“And not even then,” I was tempted to add.

It’s tough. Since Kasich and Rubio aren’t going anywhere, the choice seems to be between Cruz and Trump. Which is a choice between the unbearable and the unconscionable – and it doesn’t much matter which you consider to be which.

So most of the Republicans I met seem increasingly resigned to voting, against their conscience and their inclinations, for Hillary Clinton in November’s general election. No one is inspired by her. No one particularly trusts her. But given the likely choice of candidate on the Republican side of the fence, most of the people I met are resigned to having to vote Democrat and, specifically, for Hillary. And to do so only because their own party is going to put up a candidate it would be horrific to see in the White House.

Which creates an even deeper dilemma if Bernie Sanders pulls off the unlikely feat of beating Clinton to the nomination. He seems to be generally viewed as more honest and more likeable but, as I have been so frequently told, “this country isn’t ready for a socialist president.”

Preferable but unelectable? Believe me, we’re familiar with that dilemma in Britain.

Trump, Clinton, Cruz, Sanders
Decision time. And it’s a tough choice...

Equally, we British have often had to vote with a clothes peg on our noses, as we choose candidates we dislike only to avoid something much worse.

In France, too. I was there back in 2002, when the Centre-Left presidential candidate Lionel Jospin ran such a lacklustre campaign that he was knocked out in the first round, leaving only Conservative Jacques Chirac to face off to the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second. That was certainly clothes peg time, and Le Pen was trounced by more than four to one.

Funnily enough, Le Pen is one of the foreign politicians to have endorsed Trump, as is Vladimir Putin. There’s a French saying, “tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are.” Putin and Le Pen: appropriate company, one can’t help feeling, for the authoritarian Trump.

As it happens, there are also plenty of foreign leaders lining up against Trump. Unsurprisingly, the Mexican president and two of his predecessors have denounced him, but then Trump is proposing a wall to keep Mexicans out and, to add injury to insult, wants to charge them for it. But the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spoken out, as has the German Vice Chacellor Sigma Gabriel, and even British PM David Cameron.

That’s unusual: the convention is that politicians say nothing that could be interpreted as an attempt to intervene in another country’s elections. But if he’s anything, Trump’s unconventional. Even so, voices in the US are being raised against foreign interference. For instance, although she’s not a Trump fan, Republican and foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, pointed out:

It’s none of their bloody business. This is our election, not theirs.

Well, up to a point. When you’re talking about the wealthiest nation and most powerful military power on Earth, choosing a leader with at least a modicum of rationality is a matter that affects us all.

On the other hand, seeing how much Americans who actually have a vote are struggling with the decision, perhaps it’s no bad thing we don’t have to. Or would it be any kind of struggle at all for voters outside the US?

The joy of a new puppy. Even for an (older) cat.

It’s odd to have a puppy in the house again. Odd but pleasurable, though in the case of Misty, our cat, the pleasure took pretty well a week to be felt.

She’s called Lucy. Though it seems I’m not allowed to spell her name like that. Her original owner was Hungarian and gave her the name Luci – it’s a specialty of the Hungarian language that it makes even the simplest things more complex, or even incomprehensible: in Budapest I found it easier to read the occasional sign that appears in Russian, than the Hungarian, and I don’t speak Russian.

All I know about Russian is that “nyet” is something we should be saying more often to Putin, with little expectation that he’ll listen.

But I digress.

Luci has all the quiet reticence you’d expect of a four-month old dog. I took her for a walk at lunch today, so in the early afternoon she was blessedly quiet and asleep next to me on the sofa. At 4:00, however, she woke up, but in the sense that a previously dormant volcano wakes up. She decided that she had energy to expend.

She wasn’t actually bouncing off the walls, but she certainly did some bouncing off me: she invented an excellent game which consisted of jumping on to the sofa, getting a bit of momentum going along its length, leaping on to my chest and bouncing off back to the floor, at which point she would race round the back of table in front of the sofa, to be able to start the whole enthralling process over again.

When she got tired of bouncing off me, she decided it was Misty’s turn. Which takes me neatly to the subject of his reaction to all of this.

The first time he became aware of her presence in the house, on coming downstairs after an innocent day’s sleep on our bed last Sunday, he reacted like a NATO soldier whose vehicle has been hit by an IED. Post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t begin to cover it. He was out of the cat flap and we didn’t see him till the next day.

Over the next few days. he kept well clear of the house. He’d come in late at night when he was sure not to meet anyone, gobble some food and find himself somewhere quiet to rest. The next morning, it was another snatched meal and out once once more.

On the rare occasions we could get near him before he decamped, we’d stroke him and pet him. I even went so far as to explain to him that, though a nuisance, Luci had many fine redeeming features, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

Finally, on Friday, we caught him indoors and shut the cat flap. He was stuck. The introduction would have to take place.

The effect on Luci was electrifying. She’d seen so little of him that she’d even started barking at him, as an intruder, on the few occasions when their paths crossed – not something that helped cement a budding friendship. But now he was indoors, in her space, and staying.

She’s smart. You could almost see her saying to herself, “just a minute – I’d better revise my notions – he isn’t an intruder, he belongs here. So I don’t need to chase him out. Instead – I can play with him. Brilliant!”

Misty in his magnanimity had retreated to a chair under the dining table, where he stayed sulking behind a fold of the table cloth. So Luci took to racing round and occasionally darting in to bark at him. In a friendly way, mind. This was playing, not guarding.

Eventually, Misty had to react. A growl. A hiss. And eventually a strike to the head – but, we quickly noticed, with a velveted paw, no claws showing.

Luci was impressed, but not terrified. She fled but came back within minutes. And, funnily enough, something happened inside Misty. Her obvious interest in him must have been a little flattering, after all. 

Luci having a sniff. And Misty putting up with it

Within a while, he was sniffing her. She, naturally, returned the compliment in spades. But, as soon as he felt she was going over the top, out came the paw, and Luci would be batted away; sometimes there’d be more growling and a hiss or two, just to emphasise the point.

But Misty’s sulking was over. He’s returned to the house, to reclaim his own territory. He’s even been to sit on our laps, despite Luci’s presence on the same sofa. And what’s been most interesting has been to watch him training her: he’s never hurt her, but he’s found it easy to communicate his displeasure. Misty’s rising eight, he’s a steady fellow with habits he doesn’t intend to see overthrown. So he tells her when she’s being too boisterous.

But he’s come to like her. He’ll rub himself against her if she behaves, purring as he does it. And she, as I said, is a quick study. She knows what he won’t tolerate. It doesn’t stop her pushing the limits and getting batted for her pains, but what child was ever otherwise? When reprimanded, however, she backs off fast. Misty no longer has to prolong the chastisement.

"Play with me, Misty, play with me"

Odd, as I said, having Luci with us. But pleasurable, and all the more so now that all of us are sharing the pleasure.

Even Misty, though he’d never admit it.

Impressive and harrowing, or pleasant and anodyne: that's my choice of from films this weekend

We saw a strange pair of films this weekend. Neither of them particularly uplifting, but one was insightful, the other entertaining. Though to be merely “entertaining” is a sad indictment for one of the great directors of of the seventies and eighties, now long past his best.

First the insightful piece: Leviathan, a 2014 production by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. As soon as I say “Russian”, you naturally understand that we’re not talking anything “light-hearted”, let alone “amusing”. “Feel-good”? Forget it.

The film is set in a sadly reduced fishing village on the Barents Sea, where mild weather means that the puddles thaw. So picture spectacular views of wide open spaces, desolate and windswept, great sweeping views of cliffs and a sea that doesn’t begin to tempt you to take a dip, plenty of derelict boats and buildings suggestive of a long-past period, a golden age when people merely suffered from poverty and boredom but didn’t yet have to cope with the enlightened rule of Vladimir Putin.

Yep. Spectacular. And that's about as cheerful as it gets.

Putin's portrait hangs in the official buildings. There’s rather a good scene in which the main character, Nikolai, goes out with his supposed friends from the local police to do some target shooting, and the most senior cop produces a serious of portraits they can fire at: Lenin, Brezhnez, Gorbachev… None of the present regime, though: there isn’t yet sufficient “historical perspective.”

In this setting we’re regaled with a long tale (two hours twenty minutes) of betrayal, infidelity, oppression and corruption, against which there is no effective remedy, but only the temporary anaesthetic of vodka by the tumblerful. It’s a powerful tale, well told, but if you’re looking for a happy ending, look again.

It seems the Russian Minister of Culture didn’t like the film, which he felt gave a view of his country which he didn’t recognise. It seems the Ministry is proposing guidelines that prevent films being made that denigrate the national culture. That rather suggests Zvyagintsev got it about right.

This morning I heard US commentator Joseph Nye on BBC Radio 4 describing Russia as a “nation in decline”. I can imagine Putin’s Culture Ministry wouldn’t be keen on that view, and it’s certainly what comes across from the film: Nicolai declines rather more quickly but one can’t help feeling his country’s not far behind.

The other film? Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight. Normally I’d do everything in my power to avoid using the word “nice”, but this is certainly a “nice film.” Or more precisely a “nice little film.” Fine stereotypical characters, especially well-portrayed by Colin Firth as the hard-boiled rationalist who’s never going to be fooled (or will he be?) by Erica Leerhsen, the spiritualist fraud (or is she a fraud? You won’t find out till the end of the film – that’s how exciting it gets – but if you’re worried about the stress of the suspense, don’t be: believe me, you’ll cope with it.)

As an antidote to harrowing tales from the shores of the Barents Sea, Magic in the Moonlight works perfectly. Even as a pleasant hour and a half on a much warmer sea – it’s set on the Côte d’Azur – when you’re too tired for anything more challenging – or indeed more rewarding. Besides the film’s made by a great lover of jazz and set in the jazz age, so the music’s fun.

Pretty camerawork
And you'll never guess what happens between these two

As a piece worthy of the director of Annie Hall, Manhattan or even Mighty Aphrodite and Play it again, Sam, it leaves you wondering how far the mighty can fall.

Still, there are worse ways of passing the end of the evening. As for Leviathan, well it certainly won’t cheer you up, but it you like your magic realism gritty, it won’t disappoint either.

Beware the Russian bear, especially when he's wounded

For the first time for over twenty years, I was woken from a dream which I had several times as a teenager or a young man. A dream of planes, large and somehow cumbersome, moving apparently slowly across the sky as they seem to do in films, though we all know they travel at speeds almost unimaginable on earth. The fly towards me and I know they’re about to drop nuclear weapons.

In the dream, cowering around the corner of a wall from the blast, I don’t hear the noise but see the blinding light, again as shown in countless films.

Russian bombers: the stuff of dreams

Now I attach no significance to dreams. All this one represents is preoccupations that have resurfaced in my life, in all our lives, and which had receded for quarter of a century. Because Russia has moved firmly back into the “watch this space” category: it’s going broke, it’s shown no hesitation about getting aggressive with other nations, and it’s nuclear-armed.

Yesterday the rouble lost half its value against the dollar. The Russian government took emergency measure after emergency measure against the failure of its currency, but couldn’t stop it, even when interest rates went up to 17% (you’d think somebody would want to invest for that return, but no one believes the fall has stopped – so they don’t invest and the fall continues).

Part of the problem is that the oil price is on the way down (curious that energy prices in Western countries haven’t yet started falling as dramatically – curious, but not at all surprising). And Russia remains as dependent on raw material as any third world country, specifically that raw material, oil.

The Russian government has done a great job of making a small number of people extremely wealthy, but has done little or nothing for most of the people.

Nothing like Britain, you see.

Strangely, Russian voters don’t seem able to grasp that they’ve put in power people who are going to fleece them, so they keep voting for them.

Again, not at all like Britain.

The second factor is making the situation a great deal worse: Western sanctions. Now, I can see a good argument for saying that Crimea ought to be part of Russia: it always was, and was handed over to Ukraine by Kruschev, in a clumsy act of arbitrary rule. On the other hand, I can see no good argument for saying that the problem should have been resolved by force of arms.

Nor can I see any good argument for infiltrating troops and arming lawless militias in other parts of Eastern Ukraine, but Russia keeps doing it. As a result, they’re under an increasing burden of sanctions, which are making a desperate financial position still worse.

But will this undermine Russian resolve to keep on stirring things up for Ukraine, and for the West?

t’s far more likely to have exactly the opposite effect. Voters already committed to Putin to the point of fanaticism, will in all probability back him still more strongly. And they’ll want to lash out against their perceived enemies more brutally, if only to make themselves feel less bad about themselves.

They’ll justify their position with words like “pride” and “honour”. We’ll probably hear expressions such as “it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”

A man to inspire confidence. And reassurance about peace

That’s always struck me as a particularly short-sighted view. Die on your feet, and you don’t stay on your feet. Live on your knees and there’s a chance you might be able to get up again in a while. No one has ever stood up from being dead, except allegedly one man in Jerusalem a while back, and I’m not wholly convinced by the evidence I’ve been shown.

The sensible position would be for Russians to say “it’s bloody cold around here in the winter, and food prices are shocking already. Let’s come to an accommodation with the West and even with Ukraine, and live to fight another day.”

They won’t. There’ll be stiff backs and stiffer upper lips all over the place. Stiff necks too. And there’ll be a powerful surge of support for getting their retaliation in first.

Why would they stop with Ukraine, seen as a surrogate for the West, when they have the missiles to get at the West itself?

Because, and don’t you forget it, Russian’s nuclear-armed. Well nuclear-armed.

Sweet dreams, everyone.

Crimea: flashpoint towards another war?

I’ve been taken to task by a friend for not backing the obvious will of the people in Crimea, for reintegration with mother Russia. That will was expressed in the referendum held there on Sunday 16 March. The result, we’re told, was a 97% vote in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation.

It seems likely to me that there really is a majority in favour of joining Russia in Crimea, which is 58% ethnically Russian. And I’m in favour of determining this kind of question by the will of the people: if it looks as though a majority of the Scots, for instance, want independence from the United Kingdom, I’d be strongly in favour of their being able to leave, though personally, as an Englishman, I’d dread their going: we’d be stuck with Tory governments for years or possibly decades.

In addition, Kruschev’s cavalier decision in 1954 to hand the region to Ukraine, without logic or reason and certainly without consulting the population, was high-handed and ill-advised. It makes sense to correct that abusive action now.

However, only a year ago, polls showed just 41% of Crimean voters favouring reintegration. And 24% of the population is Ukrainian, while 12% are Tatars, descendants of the original inhabitants, known to be strongly opposed to joining Russia. It seems highly unlikely that many of those groups voted ‘Yes’ on Sunday.

Indeed, even among the Russians, it seems unlikely that the proportion in favour of leaving Ukraine has grown quite so much in just a year, despite local misgivings when the Kiev government of Viktor Yanukovych, ethnically Russian strongman, elected legally though behaving abusively, was brought down.

So the chances that the vote really was 97% in favour strikes me as utterly unbelievable. Especially as no observers were allowed to supervise the voting or the counts. And as we all know, it isn’t the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes.

Besides that, with the Russian Navy still using the peninsula as its Black Sea headquarters, and with its soldiers in the streets – pretending to be local self-defence militias – it’s not clear to me that the referendum in any way represented an exercise in democracy. More of a simulation of democracy under the barrels of a gun. Indeed, the only concession to democracy seems to have been the Kremlin’s willingness to allow that 3% voted against; in Soviet days, majorities generally exceeded 99%.

Guardian picture of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory:
'democratic' muscle for the 16 March referendum

If that’s progress, it only shows how far today’s Russia still has to go.

Even more sadly, however, Putin’s behaviour doesn’t just recall the excesses of the Soviet Union. It recalls an earlier and even more disastrous spell in our recent history. As does the weakness of the Western response to Russia’s behaviour.

In 1936, long before Germany had rearmed, Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, demilitarised by Treaty since the end of the First World War. The democracies protested but took no action.

In the spring of 1938, he annexed Austria to the Reich. The democracies protested but took no action.

In the autumn of 1938, he occupied the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia. The democracies had protested, but instead of taking action, had agreed to allow him to take over those areas. The agreement was the now infamous ‘peace in our time’ document.

In the spring of 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. The democracies protested even more loudly but again did nothing else.

Finally, in September 1939, he invaded Poland and the democracies at last reacted. This was the start of the bloodiest conflict in history, the Second World War (well, the European bit: it had been raging in the Far East for several years already).

The question remains, would that have been avoided had France and Britain, even maybe the United States, reacted powerfully to the occupation of the Rhineland?

Putin has in effect annexed Crimea. Now he’s talking about the calls of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine for reunification with the motherland, just as Hitler had justified his actions in Czechoslovakia in the name of the rights of the Sudeten German-speakers.

We’ve probably left it too late to do anything about Crimea. But if we do nothing about Eastern Ukraine, will we just slip further down the same slippery slope that took us to war in the thirties? And might a more powerful response stop that? Say, economic sanctions that bite, even if they cause us pain too, perhaps even the stationing of token troops in Ukraine, so that it’s clear that an invasion would bring Russia into conflict with far more than merely the Ukrainian army?

After all, surely we’ve learned from the Second World War, that the pain that awaits us at the bottom of slippery slopes may sadly be a lot worse than taking effective action now.

October revolution: good to commemorate, not to celebate

Today’s the 96th anniversary of the October Revolution, as you might expect since it’s the seventh of November. 

It’s a measure of just how deep ran the refusal of Tsarist Russia to reform, that nearly two centuries even after conservative Britain, it had failed to align its calendar with the Gregorian version used by the rest of the world. It therefore regarded the day of the revolution as the 25th of October. 

Since the word ‘Tsar’ is derived from ‘Caesar’, I suppose it might seem appropriate that they stuck with the Julian calendar, called after the Julius who made the word ‘Caesar’ synonymous with imperial power.

The revolution was fought on a slogan of ‘bread, land and peace.’ In the middle of the First World War which Russia was well on the way to losing, and losing big, these were three things that the regime couldn’t provide. Lenin, always quick with the ingenious, even devious, stratagem felt this made the slogan revolutionary: if the regime couldn’t meet a demand agitating the whole people, they would bring it down.

The reasoning sounds plausible, except that for the next eighty years the new regime wasn’t particularly good at delivering bread or land, and didn’t manage peace all that well either. On the contrary, what it chiefly accomplished was to wipe out a great many more people than even Nazi Germany (but then, to be fair, the Soviet Union did have seven times longer) and to create a wonderfully privileged über-class, the ‘Nomenklatura’ of named senior Communist Party executives who enjoyed lives of luxury while the rest of the population queued for basic commodities.

Vladimir Lenin.
Inspiring, perhaps, but what did he actually deliver?

To picture what the Nomenklatura was like, just think of leaders of the similarly named Communist Party in China, or bankers and Fortune 500 executives in the West.

So the October Revolution led to no sunlit uplands or the achievement of any ideals. On the contrary, it degenerated into brutality and sordid corruption.

The result was that the end of regime was greeted with a new burst of joy when it followed the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Once again, optimism abounded amid worldwide celebration.

Russia seldom seems to be out the news these days. Run with an iron fist by Vladimir Putin, it attracts a lot of attention. For instance, for the kind of friends it likes to pick, such as President of Assad in Syria, a key Russian ally even when he gasses his own people.

Meanwhile, we follow with appalled fascination the tale of the Bolshoi ballet dancer, in court accused of throwing acid into the director’s face. That’s hardly the kind of ethereal beauty once tends to associate with that particular art form.

Elsewhere in the Moscow court system, nearly eighteen months after the street protests against Vladimir Putin’s contentious re-election as president, some of the rank and file – not the leaders – have at last been brought to trial. Long periods in remand, small hope of fair treatment, and the targeting of ordinary protesters is a sharp way of making clear that getting involved in any kind of protest against the regime is bad for your health in today’s Russia.

Meanwhile Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the Pussy Riot singer condemned to hard labour for having offended right-thinking Putinites and the Orthodox faithful by a protest inside a Moscow church, has disappeared from sight and is now believed to be on her way to a prison even more remote from family and friends and above all far from any media attention. Four time zones and 2000 miles from Moscow, deep in Siberia, her treatment feels like nothing so much as the kind of exile the Tsars liked to inflict on anyone with the temerity to oppose their rule.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
Victim of the latest Vladimir, Putin's reincarnation of the Tsars

Ninety-six years after the Russian Revolution and twenty-four from the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that progress has been limited and glowing expectations dashed. A chastening thought as we remember those stirring events in Petrograd all those years ago. They’re worth a brief commemoration, but not, I think, a glass raised in celebration. 

After all, Russia continues to present an image that is always fascinating, occasionally even entertaining, but noble or edifying? Not so much.

Island life without Putin

I was greatly amused to read that Putin’s spokesman had apparently described Britain as ‘a small island no one listens to.’

Not sure how keen I am on having that guy listening in

Well, I’ve been saying for years that all that nonsense about Britain ‘punching above its weight’ needed to be put far behind us. It’s salutary to be reminded that when our leaders speak out on the world stage, the audience may be texting friends.

In any case, look who those leaders are. When Big Dave Cameron or his little sidekick George Osborne speaks for Britain, I can’t blame Putin for stopping his ears. I try not to listen either.

Of course, Putin’s denied every having made the comment but then he would, wouldn’t he? Strikes me that Putin’s default position is denial. Ask him whether he knows the time, and he’ll deny ever having seen a timepiece and go on vehemently to proclaim that the US government has in any case unilaterally decided to set its nation’s watches to run several hours adrift of the correct time, which is only properly determined in Moscow.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying life in our little island. One of the more appealing aspects of the insular existence is that it tends to be unpredictable. So many people, for instance, announce with portentousness seriousness what the weather’s going to do, including some who do it officially and in good suits on the TV. They’ve actually got a lot better at it recently. They’re quite often right, when they’re talking about weather arriving in a few hours, and seldom go wrong when it’s actually happening already. But they persist in claiming to be able to speak for the weather several days ahead.

So it was particularly enjoyable to go out yesterday in the pleasant warmth of late summer under blue skies, when the so-called experts had spent the week telling us to expect a catastrophic fall in temperature and torrential rain.

Today’s dawned just as lovely too. Time for me to go and enjoy it with our dog. And to indulge the thought that if our leaders could occasionally produce such cheering little surprises as the weather, instead of boring us to death with the same old threadbare nostrums, it might be worthwhile paying more attention to them.

And if Putin’s not listening to my inconsequential remarks about how lovely early September can be and how uninspiring our politicians are, does anyone honestly think I care?

In any case, the NSA in the States and GCHQ over here are allegedly listening to every word we say already. Why would I need Putin eavesdropping on me too?

The Russians are coming

Seems we’re facing a renewed red menace. Without reds.

As I pointed out recently, we seem to be as concerned with the Russians now as we ever were in Soviet times, which rather suggests that the problem wasn’t Communism, but Russia itself. And Russia seems intent on living up to the West’s jaundiced view: Vladimir Putin has been making conciliatory noises about Syria, even stopping the supply of missile parts, but has made it clear that if the US goes ahead with missile attacks without UN backing, Russia reserves its right to retaliate.

He refuses to say how, but as he’s reinforcing the Russian naval presence in the region, he has options to play with. As Georgia learned to its cost, he's not above using military muscle if he thinks he can get away with it. And as Ukraine learned, he's also more than happy to resort to other means of signifying his displeasure, such as cutting off gas supplies – a move which turned out also to be of considerable inconvenience for much of Western Europe.

Russia’s reaction is one of the factors the US Congress has to take into account in weighing Obama’s proposal for launching missiles against Syria. 

Just as in the days of Kremlinology, when observers around the West tried to work out what could possibly be going on in the minds of the Communist leaders in Moscow, so today it’s not easy to predict what Putin might do. 

Are his attempts at conciliation sincere or just a gesture to make for an easier G20 summit starting tomorrow? 

Once the summit’s over, will the smiles vanish and the aggressive glower return? 

Is the iron fist being clenched in the velvet glove?

What’s certain about Putin is that he’s a man without humour and entirely intolerant of anything that seems to undermine his standing. We know of the opponents in gaol or threatened with it, we know of the dead journalists, we know of the Pussy Riot members still rotting in a labour camp.

Why, we even know of Konstantin Altunin. He produced a painting of Putin arranging Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s hair, both of them in women’s underwear. The authorities’ response was swift and uncompromising: the museum was raided, the painting was seized, and Altunin fled to France for his own safety.

Not Putin's taste in art

Now I don’t know about the artistic value of the painting, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t likely to be regarded as flattering by Putin (or Medvedev either, for that matter). But – it was a painting. It wasn’t going to damage either man’s health or wellbeing; the worst it could do was upset their dignity. 

But Putin’s simply not a nice man. In fact, he’s just the kind of guy you’d expect to be a friend of Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s. 

If he reacts with that brutality to a painting, how will he behave if his mate's country finds itself on the receiving end of Obama’s missiles? He might show restraint, if only because he’d be up against the world’s most powerful nation, but who’d count on it? He’s not always shown himself a fan of restraint.

In the days of the real red menace, we were quite careful about not stirring up the Russian bear. I’m not saying we should never stir it up now, at any cost – that would be craven and expose us to all sorts of danger. But if we're going to provoke him, we’d better at least be sure if it’s for an awfully good reason. I’m not at all sure that missile strikes that will kill civilians and probably achieve no military aim, even come near to fitting the bill.

It would be deeply depressing if missile strikes merely provided Putin with the pretext to prove, in a some fiendishly clever way, exactly how wise the British parliament was in refusing to endorse the military action. 

I wonder whether Obama really knows exactly what he’s wishing for? 

It's official: no more beastliness in politics

That new age of civility everyone's talking about these days, seems already to have dawned, over here in England.

The heart-rending events in Tucson show how things can degenerate when an atmosphere of hate prevails. What a relief it is to find that on this side of the Atlantic we live by higher standards.

On Thursday, a by-election was held in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency, which covers part of Greater Manchester and some glorious countryside up into the Pennine Hills (we don’t do mountains in England). Less enviably, Saddleworth also provided the setting for the notorious Moors Murders.



The moors at Saddleworth: a pretty setting for ugly deeds

 Labour had held the parliamentary seat at the General Election in May, but by a wafer-thin majority of 103 over the Liberal Democrats. This time they extended that majority to 3500 and the Conservatives came a distant third.

It was a bad result for the coalition government of Conservatives and Lib Dems, but all I'm going to say about my sorrow over their discomfiture is that they are most deserving people. For now, what interests me more than the outcome is the reason the election was held at all.

It seems that when Phil Woolas, then the sitting MP, clung on to the seat in May, he did so at least in part by accusing his opponent of being a supporter of Moslem extremism. Or was it being in league with the devil? It doesn’t really matter, because these days the accusations are pretty much interchangeable.

Anyway, a court convened to consider the matter, and decided that Woolas had indeed made the allegation, that it was untrue, and that it may have materially affected the outcome. The court banned him from holding elective office for three years and ordered the election to be re-run. It was the first time for 99 years that a member of parliament had been forced out in this way.

Isn’t it great how the courts have their fingers on the pulse of daily life? Consider the judges (for there were more than one, of course, for so weighty a matter). You can picture them, can't you, spluttering with indignation in the privacy of their chambers?

‘Good Lord,’ says one, ‘this young popinjay has been positively beastly about his opponent.’

‘And what he said wasn’t even true,’ replies the other, scarcely able to contain his consternation.

Perhaps they both made some kind of propitious sign to ward off evil influences.

Because they're right, aren't they? We just can’t have politicians being nasty to other politicians. And getting away with saying things which don’t meet the highest standards of respect for accuracy.

What sort of world would we be living in if they could get away with that kind of behaviour?

Next week: Silvio Berlusconi mounts a campaign to raise moral standards in public life and Vladimir Putin offers a series of lectures on the benefits of democracy.