The New Cold War is already here! The ‘Enemies’ are Russia, China and Iran, with a minor, but pivotal role, for North Korea. Mr. Ganesh writes ‘as if’ this doesn’t constitute the present political reality. Joe Biden’s choices of Blinken, Powers, Wendy Sherman,Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer are, if not the same shopworn technocrats, share the same views of Obama Clinton coterie, who control the New Democratic Party.
I was pondering, over the long holiday weekend,in America, how much I missed Ganesh’s telling aphorisms, that flow from his pen, like the dialogue in the plays of Oscar Wilde: to be savored in the moment, as the play continues its forward momentum. Instead I confronted with a maladroit pastiche of Machiavelli’s Prince.
These shadows of Ganesh’s talent:
None of the other answers to the nation’s disunity is even faintly adequate. Better-regulated social media, more competitive congressional districts: these reforms are sensible on their own terms. But the mismatch between the depth of the problem and the fiddliness of the solutions is the definition of bathos.
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Because they give up so much to acquire power, politicians tend to overrate how much policy can ever achieve against structural and historical forces. The US did not enter an age of discord because of some technical faults in its political system. It will not escape the mire by fixing them.
Then he lapses into the prescriptive:how must the Enemy ‘be’ to meet the needs of the Hegemon? The quotation from Georgi Arbatov, almost acts as a compensation for the absent aphoristic Ganesh!
“We are going to do a terrible thing to you,” Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet adviser, is said to have told an American audience in the 1980s. “We are going to deprive you of an enemy.”
Should the regular reader of this newspaper be surprised at this paragraph in this ‘news story’ about Le Pen?
Headline: Marine Le Pen purrs as President Macron’s attack dog scampers round to the right
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It is Macron himself who is likely to be squaring off against the leader of the National Rally in April 2022 in a rerun of the duel he won so decisively in 2017. Yet it was Darmanin, 38 — whose views on immigration and religious separatism are not far from Le Pen’s own — who was chosen as the attack dog to take on the cat lover.
This CNN report on the 2017 French election, has escaped the attention of the Times’ reporter, in Paris, Peter Conradi? That details the election results of 2017.
Headline: A record number of French voters cast their ballots for nobody
Emmanuel Macron’s triumph over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election has been hailed as a landslide victory for the centrist candidate and a widespread rejection of his rival’s far-right platform.
But Macron’s mandate may not be as overwhelming as it seems. A record number of French voters were so dismayed by their options that they either skipped the election or cast their ballots for no one at all.
The so-called “ballot blanc,” or white ballot, has a long history as a protest vote in France, going all the way back to the French Revolution. This time around, nearly 9% of voters cast blank or spoiled ballots – the highest ever since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
For now, the votes, which are counted towards the turnout, are largely symbolic. But there is a movement underway for the blank ballots to count as a share of the overall election vote. According to a recent Ifop poll, 40% of French voters said they would cast a blank vote if it were recognized under French law.
More Abstentions that those who cast Le Pen. 832, 000
The total of Abstentions and White or Spoiled Ballots: 15, 461,849
Abstentions and White & Spoiled ballots out number the votes cast for Le Pen by 4,877,440
These statistics demonstrate that Macron’s ‘victory’ was about an electorate deeply divided: 26,046,307 ‘voted against Macron’ , to put it more self-serving terms. The Times just follows the Corporate Party Line on Macron.His ‘Jupertarian Politics’ has been abandoned, in favor of hard-line and unapologetic Neo-Liberalism. In sum he has become Francois Fillon. To see what is actually going on in France, all the reader need do is go to twitter and enter the words ‘gilets jaunes’ !
This political Melodrama begins with David Brooks in the New York Times of January 28, 2021:
Headline: Children Need to Be Back in School Tomorrow
Sub-headline: Teacher resistance is a disaster for the most vulnerable.
There’s a wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping America. There are people across the country who deny evidence, invent their own facts and live in their own fantasyland. We saw it in the Republicans who denied the reality of the Biden election victory and we see it now in the teachers unions that are shutting down schools and marring children’s lives.
What are the facts when it comes to Covid-19 and schooling?
The first fact is that remote learning is a disaster, especially for disadvantaged students.
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Its easy to identify who the ‘villain’, of this Brooks Political Melodrama ! It’s not Teachers but ‘Teacher Unions’ who stand in the way of an ‘enlightened’ return to the classroom. The animosity of The Right to Teacher Unions gave birth to the ‘Charter School’ movement, that seeks to not just undermine these unions, but to decimate both Public Education and these powerful Unions. In sum to place Public Education in the hands of for profit Corporations.
The third fact is that teachers unions don’t seem to have adjusted to the facts. In Washington, Chicago and elsewhere, unions have managed to shut down in-class instruction. The Chicago public schools union is on the verge of an illegal strike, even though 130 private schools and 2,000 early learning centers have been open safely since the fall.
Mr. Brooks’ concern for ‘poorer Black and brown students’ is a pose, to understate the matter!
The fourth fact is that this situation is especially devastating to poorer Black and brown students. Many affluent kids have fled the public school disaster for private schools. It’s Black and brown kids who live in cities with progressive mayors and powerful unions, and those are the places where in-school learning has been closed down.
The reader need only look to the title of the Hartney/Finger paper, cited by Brooks, to gain insight into the political/economic stance of this ‘Report’ :
It reeks of a platitudinous Neo-Liberalism! Is this anything like a surprise?
When all else fails attempt to change the subject: the Republican Party is on trial ! Not to forget that Brooks has been a champion of very specific kind of Anti-Intellectualism: he’s like J. Edgar Hoover, a Leftist under every bed. In this case its ‘Teachers Unions’!
The reader wonders, what is the value of one Student’s or Teacher’s life? Not a question that occured to Brooks?
Headline: Reopening Schools Has Become a Bipartisan Issue. Why Isn’t Biden Pushing Harder?
Sub-headline: Biden’s goal should be to exert every ounce of influence that he has to get kids back in the classroom — for their own good and that of the country’s parents.
It’s an old political trick to make an easily achievable goal sound vauntingly ambitious in order to brag about it when it’s inevitably met.
It takes another level of chutzpah, though, to set out as a target something that has already happened.
President Joe Biden sounded pretty resolute about the need to reopen schools on the campaign trail, and the press has portrayed his goal of reopening the majority of K-12 schools in his first 100 days as so far-reaching that the timeline might have to be extended.
Enter White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who explained on Tuesday that the administration defines a school as open if it holds in-classroom instruction at least once a week.
By this metric, the goal isn’t really having more than half of schools open — it’s having more than half of schools still 80 percent closed.
Not only is this a ridiculous standard — four days instead of five of remote instruction wouldn’t be a difference-maker for kids or parents — the country’s schools have already cleared the bar.
According to Burbio, which aggregates event data and runs a school opening tracker, nearly 40 percent of K-12 students are attending in-person schools, and 25 percent are attending hybrid schools. Only about 35 percent are virtual-only.
This goal post moving, from a 25-yard field goal to one that has already cleared the uprights, exemplifies how the Biden team isn’t pushing nearly hard enough on school reopening.
This is an issue that has gone from being something of a red vs. blue battle line last year, with President Donald Trump’s blunderbuss (if correct) advocacy for reopening making it more contentious, to a cross-partisan area of consensus. More and more people realize that on top of a public health and an economic crisis, we have an education crisis with myriad dire consequences, thanks to schools closing or relying on remote instruction.
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Appealing to a readership of American Football Fans? He frames his comment in references to the game. The foppish Wm. F. Buckley Jr. would recoil! And rest assured, it’s those ‘Teachers Unions’ that appear as the enemy of an enlightened education policy, during the Pandemic. It the evolving Party Line of the ‘Conservatives‘. It is part of changing the subject, or just shifting the focus, away from the Republican Party on trial!
In intellectual and moral terms, the debate over reopening schools has been won, but political progress has been slow, mainly because powerful teachers unions are standing in the way, especially in big cities.
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Nonetheless, teachers unions have fought reopening and help stymie reopening in cities and blue states around the county. Most schools in California have been remote. Elementary schools reopened in New York, but not middle schools or high schools. Chicago just finally got a deal with its union, which was threatening to strike.
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After intense lobbying by the unions, most states have put teachers near the front of the line for vaccines (even though Biden’s CDC director has said “vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools”).
The Economist’s contribution to the question is a 39 minute podcast:
Headline: School’s out—getting America’s children back into class
Our weekly podcast on democracy in America
NEARLY HALF America’s children are yet to return to the classroom a year after the pandemic began. President Biden says it’s a national emergency, but he has already diluted a pledge to reopen the majority of schools in his first 100 days. Why is getting back to school so hard?
We hear from The Economist’s US policy correspondent Tamara Gilkes Borr and Adam Roberts, our Midwest correspondent.
John Prideaux, our US editor, hosts with New York bureau chief Charlotte Howard, and Jon Fasman, US digital editor. Runtime: 39 min
John Prideaux, at his plummy Oxbridger best, tells the listener about the longest Teachers Strike in American History, to open this podcast. So without delay, we are in the same territory of both Brooks and Lowry! ‘What are the political lessons for the new administration’ is the question Prideaux seeks to consider, with his guests, all Economist employees, and all three Americans. This portion ends at the 15: 45 mark and is succeeded by a commentary on the birth and evolution of the SAT, and its eventual use in college admissions. Mr Priseaux opines ‘The SAT has not solved the problem of equity in in college entry’.
I will place my faith in the Teachers Unions who have intimate day by day contact with students, and know better than journalistic technocrats, employed by Corporate Media, whose politics reflect the need to follow the Party Line: in sum, the self-serving mendacity of Public Sector Unionism.
My bookshelves contain too many books about Heidegger. My curiosity, interest in Heidegger began with this essay by Thomas Sheehan in the New York Review of Books: A Normal Nazi. I read from cover to cover, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader edited by Richard Wolin. (Later I would read Wolin’s ‘The Politics of Being’.) This exchange in The New York Review of Books simply added to my interest, curiosity :
My interest, curiosity has waned, Heidegger demands patience in abundance! I ran out of that ‘commodity’ on page 213 of John van Buren’s ‘The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King’. I will return to this book, I can do no other! Heidegger remains of interest, I found ‘Transcendental Heidegger’ edited by Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpus both challenging and rewarding reading.
Reading this collection of essays, titled Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 edited by Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, was simply confirmation of the most irrefutable kind of Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism. This was not a surprise , but the evidence of its pervasive toxicity …
War-Monger & ‘The Bell Curve’ advocate/apologistAndrew Sullivanattacks The New York Times & Dan-el Padilla Peralta for attacking the ‘The Classics’!
Headline: He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?
Sub-headline: Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.
Read the first comment from ‘Pat’ in Virginia, that places Andy’s hysteria into a kind of perspective, that councils restraint.
Why will I stop reading Juvenal, Lucian, Plato, Aristotle etc.? Andy just needed to work himself into a fit of political hysteria, because it is his habit of being.
In 2017 The Scientific American published this on ‘The Bell Curve’:
He’s back. Recent college protests have propelled Charles Murray into the news cycle again, and his resurging book sales show the publicity’s not all bad. Attempts to fully discredit his most famous book, 1994’s “The Bell Curve,” have failed for more than two decades now. This is because they repeatedly miss the strongest point of attack: an indisputable—albeit encoded—endorsement of prejudice.
Where does the reader of Mr. Sullivan’s essay find Dan-el Padilla Peralta in Rachel Poser’s essay? In the classroom, doing what a teacher does, teaching students! These two paragraphs demonstrates the prima-facie value of Dan-el Padilla Peralta and what he stands for: a committed critique within his area of speciality. What does education mean? The ability to apply critical thinking to any set of problems, beliefs, ideologies?
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To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments. But many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture. “There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.” Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
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Ian Morris makes plain what Sullivan dare not face: ‘“Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,”.
Title this ‘The Enlightenment of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ ? Mr. Ganesh doesn’t need to dust off his Madame Arcati shtick, he uses C-Span to demonstrate that Bill Clinton’s utter betrayal of the New Deal Tradition, in America, might just work in Britain: thus was born, the post WWII Labour Party and its Welfare State morphed into ‘Thatcherism Light’? Political opportunism, wedded to what would evolve into the myth of ‘The Third Way’ (Edward L. Bernays wrote the manuel.)that led to the economic/political catastrophe of 2008!
The archive of the US broadcaster C-Span is among the internet’s little wonders. In January 1993, an “Anthony Blair” toured Washington with another British MP named Gordon Brown. Their brief: to divine how president-elect Bill Clinton had won office and what their four-times defeated Labour party might learn. Their interview with a C-Span anchor of the just-the-facts school (“How many MPs in the House of Commons?”) is immortalised.
That ‘C-Span anchor‘ is Brian Lamb. He conducts a polite, and informative interview, aimed at an American audience. Not much more to be said. Except, of course, from Mr. Ganesh’s lofty perch.
Then the reader confronts more Ganesh mis-readings, misapprehensions, or just ideologically inflected chatter e.g. :
President Joe Biden’s centre-left peers are out of power and often out of sorts in the UK, France, Australia and the Netherlands.
A vexing question arises: how can a Neo-Liberal be ‘Center-Left’? The ‘Center’ in Western political life is now defined by the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives. Such is the toxicity of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism, that an actual rational political Center cannot exist. Except as a pose, a self -created mirage, a simulacrum.
If the Democrats stand out from a centre-left malaise, it is for reasons that are not much imitable outside the US.
I’ve run out of patience with Mr. Ganesh! How telling that Right-Wing Populism is the watershed of a failed Neo-Liberal Swindle? After the Crash of 2008, the fate of the Working and Middle Classes left to a rapacious Capitalism, and a politics controlled by sycophants to that Capital, and their Media allies.
On that ‘Center-Left Malaise’ in Europe see Phillip Ther’s ‘Europe since 1989: A History’ Chapters 4 & 5 that describes the toxic effects, that a fully embraced Neo-Liberalism, that left the Mitteleuropean states ripe for the Populists. That might just be first step toward an understanding of the ‘center-left malise’? Mr. Ganesh’s ‘center -left’ could be a stand-in for ‘Liberal’ or even ‘Left-Wing Social Democrats’?
With his political parameters in place, Mr. Ganesh is at full political gallop, the ‘Left’ in all its political iterations, is the enemy of choice. But the garnish is all important, the catalogue of reasons, a political symptomology is offered.
What can the reader make of the continuing rebellion, in France, against the Neo-Liberal Macron, which the Corporate Media ignores, although twitter is its life blood. And Corbyn’s ‘Project for Peace and Justice’ are the signs that the ‘Rebellion Against the Elites’ has simply reached a new stage of political development, maturation?
Mr. Ganesh final paragraph, the highfalutin notion of ‘the social contract’ dresses up his intervention with a quandry, or is it a conundrum?
What is distinctively American is the gap between the two parties on the social contract. And the subsequent indispensability of the Democratic voice. That the Biden and Republican plans for pandemic relief are $1.3tn apart could not be more eloquent of the stakes. To look at their electoral record, then the lot of the US poor, it is hard to tell if the Democrats are the most successful progressives in the rich world or the most consistently disappointing.
Even Anthony Julius, the most trenchant Eliot critic? in his book ‘T. S. Eliot: Anti-semitism and literary form’ receives its due, as argued by Mr. Baddiel.
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Time for a more classic literary example: on New Year’s Day 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Jeremy Irons reading from the complete collection of T. S. Eliot’s poems, almost in their entirety. And this meant the inevitable inclusion of the following lines from “Gerontion” (1920):
My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
And, from “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920):
The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot.
I remember listening, and wondering how the BBC would get round this. When it came to these particular poems, they enlisted the help of Anthony Julius, a Jewish lawyer, and the author of T. S. Eliot: Anti-semitism and literary form (1995), who prefaced the readings with his theory of how the highly prevalent, fashionable antisemitism of the time informed and possibly even enhanced Eliot’s work. To simplify considerably, Julius believes that Eliot was such a great poet that he could – almost uniquely, although there is of course The Merchant of Venice – make antisemitism into art.
I wrote to Julius after this because I think his position is wrong. I’m an Eliot fan, but I think the poetry does not redeem the hatred. We ended up some time later having lunch and talking about it for three hours (a very, if I might say, Jewish reaction to the whole thing). But none of this shook off the feeling I had, on that New Year’s Day 2017, that, however great the writer, however great the writing, no other minority group would be compared to rats, or envisaged as any similar negative racist stereotype, on Radio 4. It is not inconceivable that the BBC might read a whole Agatha Christie book on New Year’s Day. It is, however, inconceivable that anyone will hear Jeremy Irons’ voice saying, “And now, Ten Little N****rs”.
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The curious reader need look to a Sunday 24 February 2019 essay/news report in the Independent.
Headline: Blackface still dominates pop culture – but feigning ignorance is no longer an excuse
Sub-headline: We may not readily admit it, but for all the self-assuredness with which we celebrate British comedy, blackface has played a curiously prominent role in it for much longer than we realise, writes Kuba Shand-Baptiste
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David Baddiel also famously blacked up in Fantasy Football, playing footballer Jason Lee, who was subjected to racist abuse over his dreadlocks at the time. The list goes on, from slightly forgotten, but no less bold examples like Facejacker to disputed caricatures like The Mighty Boosh’s dreadlocked Spirit of Jazz or Howlin’ Jimmy Jefferson, based on the voodoo loa (god) Baron Samedi.
Headline: David Baddiel on The Infidel: ‘I’m not worried about a backlash’
Sub-headline: My film is a buddy movie, and it comes from a place of love, warmth and affection
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It’s not my job to promote interfaith dialogue and tolerance – I’m not a community relations officer – but I do think the movie comes from a place of love and warmth and affection, and that laughter is a good way to make people feel less tense about their status in a multicultural society. What the film is really saying is that our cultural identity can’t be easily defined.
The Corporate Press’ hostility to Corbyn is a fact, so the attack on one of his loyalists, or thought to be loyalists, is unsurprising! From February 24, 2019, written by Dominic Sandbrook is pure political hysteria mongering!
Headline: Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac
Sub-headline: If Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister, he would easily be the most dangerous, most indolent and least intelligent holder of the office in history
This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It is a forensically detailed portrait of a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness, a private schoolboy who failed one A-level and got two Es in the others, a polytechnic dropout whose first wife never knew him to read a book.
It is the story of a man who does not appear to have gone to the cinema or listened to music, takes no interest in art or fashion and refused to visit Vienna’s magnificent Schönbrunn Palace because it was “royal”. It tells how he bitterly opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, deeply regretted the fall of the Berlin Wall and praised the men who attacked New York on September 11, 2001, for showing an “enormous amount of skill”. In some parallel universe, this man would currently be living in well-deserved obscurity. In reality, Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition and the bookmakers’ favourite to become our next prime minister.
David Baddiel writes ‘history made to measure’ or more pointedly propaganda! That allows him to the play the victim of prejudice/oppression. The Jew as Eternal Victim of oppression, rather that the actual political role he plays. As the practitioner of oppression, in the self-serving role as defender of a version of political rationalism. This might appear to be circular, or even contradictory, to some. Propaganda is never about argument , but about emotional manipulation: Black and Muslim stereotypes, are the foundational caricatures of both his ‘comedy’ and his politics. Neither can rise above their assigned places, in his ‘world view’.
Read this January 31, 2017 interview with Anthony Julius on the question of Anti-Semitism in Britain, and the Labour Party, headed by Jeremy Corbyn, is explored. David Baddiel’s quarrel with Julius is confined to his Eliot book?
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Julius fell out of love with the party even before Corbyn came on the scene, switching to the Liberal Democrats in 2015 “because I had no conviction young Miliband was going to make a good fist of being prime minister”.
Would Corbyn?
Julius laughs at the suggestion: “He’s not a leader of a party I would want to support.”
While Corbyn’s supporters keenly point to his record of fighting against racism, his critics say he too blithely looks past the antisemitism of those he considers allies. So, was Julius not surprised by the anti-Zionist and antisemitic stuff coming out of the Labour party last year?
“No, because I had studied the question of left antisemitism generally, and knew something about the provenance of the new leadership of the party including associated groups, political friends, and so on,” he says. “So the sense of being given permission to [express] that kind of language and sentiment was so strong.”
And where was that permission coming from?
“It seemed to me to be tacitly sanctioned by the new leadership. I don’t mean that anyone asked permission to say these things, but that there was a sense of: ‘What a relief: what we want to say is now also being said – or has been said – by the leadership, too.’”
It’s interesting that Corbyn and George Galloway have been so happy to appear on Russia Today and Iran’s Press TV in the past, I say. So, on the one hand you have Donald Trump sucking up to Putin and, on the left, you have Corbyn on Russian state TV.
“Yes, the French say the extremes touch each other. But I’m not even sure if it’s reasonable to talk about the left any more,” he says. “There isn’t a left. You get the sense that our deepest-held categories through which we see the world are ephemeral.”
And what does he think of Trump, who hires people from Breitbart, which peddles antisemitic headlines, and works closely with his orthodox Jewish son-in-law?
“I think one can only make sense of it if one abandons all conventional categories, the left and right categories,” he says.
But note that Anti-Corbyn hysteric Jonathan Freedland calls Julius out on the vexing question of ‘Zionist excesses’ :
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Julius fell out of love with the party even before Corbyn came on the scene, switching to the Liberal Democrats in 2015 “because I had no conviction young Miliband was going to make a good fist of being prime minister”.
Would Corbyn?
Julius laughs at the suggestion: “He’s not a leader of a party I would want to support.”
While Corbyn’s supporters keenly point to his record of fighting against racism, his critics say he too blithely looks past the antisemitism of those he considers allies. So, was Julius not surprised by the anti-Zionist and antisemitic stuff coming out of the Labour party last year?
“No, because I had studied the question of left antisemitism generally, and knew something about the provenance of the new leadership of the party including associated groups, political friends, and so on,” he says. “So the sense of being given permission to [express] that kind of language and sentiment was so strong.”
And where was that permission coming from?
“It seemed to me to be tacitly sanctioned by the new leadership. I don’t mean that anyone asked permission to say these things, but that there was a sense of: ‘What a relief: what we want to say is now also being said – or has been said – by the leadership, too.’”
It’s interesting that Corbyn and George Galloway have been so happy to appear on Russia Today and Iran’s Press TV in the past, I say. So, on the one hand you have Donald Trump sucking up to Putin and, on the left, you have Corbyn on Russian state TV.
“Yes, the French say the extremes touch each other. But I’m not even sure if it’s reasonable to talk about the left any more,” he says. “There isn’t a left. You get the sense that our deepest-held categories through which we see the world are ephemeral.”
And what does he think of Trump, who hires people from Breitbart, which peddles antisemitic headlines, and works closely with his orthodox Jewish son-in-law?
“I think one can only make sense of it if one abandons all conventional categories, the left and right categories,” he says.
Well, perhaps. But surely we have to acknowledge Israel’s power.
“We must acknowledge Israel’s power,” he bursts out, as though the issue were so obvious it hardly needs mentioning. “We must also acknowledge the suffocatingly short-termist perspectives of Israel towards the Palestinians. I mean, you just can’t look at the political situation in Israel without despairing, without feeling acute anxiety,” he says, rubbing his eyes sadly.
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What seems to have escaped the notice of Julius is that Corbyn has been unapologetic,in his support of the Palestinians. The invincible lawyer facade recedes, just enough, into the equivocation of ‘the new leadership‘, subject to a bit of politic reductionism?
Mr. Acherson’s essay in the December 17, 2020 edition: ‘Who Betrayed Us?’ was so helpful in understanding the time, place and the politics of Germany of the period, not a very original comment. Yet reading the 1918 & 1919 entries in the diaries of Thomas Mann, which I’ve had since 1980, provided a reveltory history of the political actors and their contexts. In his review of November 1918: The German Revolution by Robert Gerwarth.
Ascherson’s essay helped to understand this ‘nonpolitical man’ as being very political, when it came to the ‘Left’: ‘Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartakus League’ .
StephenKMackSD
P.S. I had forgotten about Colm Tóibín’s essay of November 6, 2008 entitled ‘I Could Sleep with All of Them’ a review of ‘In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story’ by Andrea Weiss, that provides insights ,or perhaps a better descriptor, a family portrait of the Mann’s .
How will Joe Biden’s attempted self-rescue, almost before the fact, from historical/political failure be accomplished? The question is at this point is moot. But Mr. Ganesh offers the compromise position in the ‘Two Biden’s Mythology’, the reader is offered this political miniature. (Note that the first sentence is not just wide of the political facts, the ‘Left’s best case against Biden’ was about ‘tactics’ not about ‘ideology’, in the 2020 Campaign? Per example : Medicare For All was ideological!)
The left’s best case against the Biden candidacy was always tactical, not ideological. It posits that a man who entered Washington in 1972 has never quite adjusted to the rise of partisanship. Such is his trust in the good faith of his opponents, that he would be easy meat for them. Such is his commitment to the oneness of America, that he would prefer a bland presidency to a provocatively active one. His half a century in public life would appear to make them right. But the platform that he ran on and still espouses points quite the other way. The next four years hinge on which is the truer Mr Biden — the bold manifesto or the emollient tone — and on whether he is even conscious of the tension.
Mr. Ganesh joins Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Turley, in their stern warnings, that Joe might just be going to fast, in his approach to governance, Post Trump. Mr. Ganesh expresses it in another, but more highfalutin, rhetorical key.
Political Reporter
P.S. Mr. Ganesh can’t resist his love of evocative authorial embroidery. The companion to his telling aphorisms…
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