Brains Before Breasts…

The soaking of Belgian archbishop Andre Leonard by members of the eccentric feminist collective FEMEN on the grounds of his opposition to homosexuality is proof that topless atheistic women can embody the same attitudes as berobed male Islamists. They are not equivalent to those who march against blasphemous films and bloggers, as the latter often hope to kill and not dampen their foes, but their fanaticism is unpleasant and irrational.

FEMEN claims to have attacked Leonard “during a session of public advocacy of hatred”. It was, in fact, a debate with the philosopher Guy Haarscher. Disrupting the free exchange of ideas? That is an odd way to stand up for liberalism.

The activists state that they were opposing Archbishop Leonard’s efforts to “impose…chastity on the gay community”. “Impose”? Belgium is a free state. Leonard can no more impose celibacy on its people than I can impose Seinfeld or sardine sandwiches on Britons. He holds obnoxious views – comparing homosexuality to anorexia – but people are entitled to obnoxious views. If you think they should be punished for their beliefs you are rather like the theocrats that FEMEN claims to oppose.

These women know their target audience, and the slogans daubed across their breasts, gleefully photographed by the paparazzi, were written in English rather than Dutch or French. “Anus Dei”, one of them reads, which sounds like a joke from a homage to The Da Vinci Code by the guys who made Epic Movie. “My Body My Rules” another claims. Where your body is, and what it is doing, is subject to rules, and rightly too. This is how civil societies protect the freedom of speech and association from the self-importance of the mob.

These raw revolutionaries are good at attention-seeking but hopeless in the defence of civilisation. I have little idea, indeed, what they hope to defend. Liberty is clearly held in low esteem, and beauty is only of use in attracting photographers. One of their early stunts, purporting to be a defence of Pussy Riot, involved the felling of a cross with a chainsaw. To aim such boorish insolence towards a symbol that is revered by millions of peaceful Europeans, and that has inspired much of our greatest art and architecture, stinks not just of callousness but of philistinism. The struggle against religious and political oppression is, as I have said, one in defence of the brain and the heart. Unreasoning thuggishness defies them both.

 

The Good Heart and the Congested Guts…

One of the odder sentences that I have written on this blog implied that post-war Italy had been, in general, okay. This was, in my defence, intended to suggest little more than that it had not descended into complete barbarism. The sceptical responses, though, alerted me to my ignorance of how enormously corrupt the nation’s state has been. They stoked my interest in the country.

While European nations were basking in the comfort of wealth it was easy to forget the troubles of their recent histories: of the oppression of Francoist Spain; the junta that ruled over the Greece; the wall that bisected Germany and the violence, conspiracies and paranoia that were features of the Italian Republic. The destabilising forces of the Long Recession have been opening old wounds and revealing infections that had quietly spread.

On the week of the Italian elections I have been reading Tobias Jones’ The Dark Heart of Italy – a decade-old critique of the state under Silvio. Berlusconi’s Quimbyesque faux pas and fornications have given him the image of a depilated Boris Johnson: corrupt, yes, but in a mischievous rather than baneful fashion. This is erroneous. A man whose ownership of the Italian media makes that of News International in Britain appear modest, this repugnant Narcissus has made a joke of law and order from his perjury in denying his membership of the sinister masonic elite P2 to his 2012 conviction for tax fraud. As he has swaggered from court to court, meanwhile, his neglected country has sunk into a mire of economic stagnation, cultural decay and rampant criminality. Having fleeced the place you would think that he would be greatful but he has had more kind words for Mussolini than his own citizens. Italy is, he says, a shit country that makes him sick.

Yet Berlusconi is a symptom more than a sickness – one that wreaks harm upon the body but is not the underlying cause of the disease. As Jones elegantly details, the Italian state is a bureaucratic monster designed to mimic the processes of investigation and accountability without achieving results. (This evokes thoughts of the country’s bowels rather than its heart.) Thus, the Piazza Fontana bombing remains essentially unexplained after three decades of investigation. Thus, Giulio Andreotti, a perennial wanderer of the corridors of power, was still imposing influence years after he was found to have colluded with the Cosa Nostra. Thus, an investigation named “clean hands” could turn into a corrupted joke.

This obstructs efforts to resolve the systematic problems that bedevil Italy. So, the state failed to address political alliances with the mafia after Paolo Borsellino, who, in his last words on video, warned of such collusion, was assassinated and now the Camorra is still dumping toxic waste around a cancer-ridden Naples; the ‘Ndrangheta is gobbling up millions in EU funds and Cosa Nostra is, though quieter, very much alive.

As Jones writes, too many Italians have found cause to accept the status quo: with an indifference towards society that has been abetted by some of the worst popular culture this side of the Jersey Shore; with a complacent catholic belief in absolution that is not allied to a desire to force the sins to end and, it seems, most of all, a stoical belief that nothing better can be expected. When, as it has seemed, everybody is corrupt why not elect Berlusconi? Better the devil one knows and all. When other investigations have been so thankless why bother trying to prosecute corruption? Life is finite after all.

This is a lamentable if understandable attitude that defies the achievements of much-mourned heroes of Italian life. I suspect that more and more people have recognised this, though. While your pockets, plates and glasses remain full it is easy to ignore the rot inside the woodwork but when coffers and stomachs are emptied the smell grows more offensive. Beppe Grillo may or may not be a force for good but the enthusiasm that has him towards power is evidence of great dissatisfaction.

The book has not dampened my interest in and enthusiasm for Italy. It is among the few countries I would dearly love to travel to. For the architecture, yes, and for the art, and for the food, and for the women, and for, well, the overarching appreciation of beauty that it is growing rarer in the modern world. Beauty, though, is not just inherent to aesthetic but ethical virtues. This is the beauty that – as in our country, and in others – can be observed in individuals but not the culture at large. It is the beauty of truth and courage: the beauty of Dante, and Garibaldi and Cavour; of Falcone and Borsellino, and Grassi and Puglisi. May it bloom like roses across our nations.

 

They Who Spoke and Raised Their Heads…

The most disturbing element of Alexander Stille’s tremendous Excellent Cadavers is not the brutality of the mafiosos it describes. They are hideous, of course, but anyone who keeps at least one eye upon the news will be aware of tyrants, terrorists and all manner of murderers who acquaint us with the depths of human nature. What I found more depressing than the psychopathy of the few was the greed and moral cowardice of the many.

In Calabria, for example, a butcher was decapitated with one of his own carving knives. His head was then used in the street for target for practice. Stille writes that it…

…had occurred in broad daylight in a central square of town and had taken some seventeen minutes, and yet no one had seen anything.

One can have some empathy with the self-preservation of the common man but the corruption, blindness and pusillanimity of the social elites was appalling. The few men and women who strove to face organised crime were met with silence and sneers. Dalla Chiesa was a respected general of the carabinieri who was appointed prefect of Palermo. His investigations were starved of political backing, and regarded with disdain by officials and the media, and he became an isolated and vulnerable man. One day he told the American consul of an occasion where a captain in the carabinieri had been threatened by a mafia boss…

[Chiesa] took the captain by the arm and began walking with him slowly up and down the main street. Everyone looked at them. In the end, this odd couple stopped in front of the house of the local mafia boss. The two stayed long enough to make clear to everyone that the captain was not alone. “All I am asking is that someone take me by the arm and walk with me,” the general said. A few hours later he was killed.

Gunmen on motorbikes forced his car off the road and showered it with bullets. Chiesa was found slumped over his wife in an effort to protect her from the gunfire.

It is sickening to think of how little heart and backbone men and women can display even when they are confronted with such evil. It is also frightening, because of what it says about humans and, more particularly, about the nature of the state. Much of the Italian officialdom had an active relationship with the Mafia but politicians needed no such distinct motives to hinder attempts to fight them. Political wrangling, bureaucratic pedantry and personal egotism bogged down investigative and prosecutorial efforts even as Sicilians were being killed by the dozen. What did they care as long as their behinds were sitting somewhere warm and comfortable?

What gives cause for hope, however, is the heroism of the men and women who did struggle. Their courage and decency seems all the more astonishing given their isolation. The most notable examples were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two magistrates who, more than anyone, strove to engineer the changes that allowed the laws to be tightened, the informants to emerge and, eventually, mafiosos to be jailed for life. One should not overstate the power of individuals to effect social change but they are undeniable examples of the good that can be done. With minimal support and regular obstruction they and their little band of magistrates struck the gravest blow to Cosa Nostra that it ever faced.

One should not forget the resistance of private citizens, whose voices echoed loud even if they were powerless to act. Libero Grassi, a clothing manufacturer, published a letter in which he defied the extortion demands of the criminals. He was isolated by his peers and gunned down by his enemies. Pino Puglisi, a Roman Catholic priest, was trained by one of a common breed of thick-headed clerics who denied that the Mafia was a problem or, indeed, a genuine phenomenon. He cared for the world beyond his church doors, though, and denounced mafiosos in his sermons. He was shot on his 56th birthday. “Is there any use in living,” said the investigative journalist Giuseppe Fava, who like these men, and like Falcone and Borsellino, was slain by the Mafia, “If you don’t have the courage to fight?” These men lived and died knowing that they were honourable. If their peers looked in or at themselves all they would see is black hearts and yellow bellies.

As for the Mafia: these thugs relied on the perception of themselves as men of honour, buoyed by myths both old and, thanks to Hollywood, new. It was a lie, of course. They kneeled before altars even as they shot priests; worshipped their wives and widowed others; claimed to represent the values of their communities as they showered them with drugs and soaked them in blood. Stille is interesting, though, when he writes of how their success was based on their appropriation of traditional values such as family, loyalty and respect. Virtues become vices all too easily when their application is selective or fanatical.

Self-aggrandising hypocrites though they were, they did have an internal ethic of respect and honesty. It was, indeed, when the Corleonesi, under their monstrous Napoleon Toto Riina, seized power in a hail of gunfire in the 1980s that Cosa Nostra was at its most powerful yet also its most fragile. Even the most lawless of organisations needs rules for itself, lest its members become insecure and the people it dwells within become hostile. Riina’s savagery inspired unprecedented numbers of betrayals from scared and sickened mafiosos and outbursts of anger from a horrified public. One of the greatest assets of the criminal is humility; the knowledge of their own limits.

Cosa Nostra have known this and, when they have been in danger, have withdrawn into the shadows to regroup and refresh themselves. It is this knowledge that makes it hard to know if the wounds inflicted by Falcone and his colleagues will last or if they will become as strong a force as ever. Their spiritual cousins in the ‘Ndrangheta and Camorra are still powerful, still destructive and still reliant on official corruption and blindness, and every now and then one hears stirrings from Sicily. It would not do to grow complacent when anger and resoluteness have been such powerful weapons.

 

The Personal and the Political…

I have often thought that if UKIP could get themselves a better name, a smoother leader and a renewed sense of purpose they could pick up disaffected Tories and youthful right-wingers and become a real force. I like Nigel Farage but his party has always reminded me of boiled cabbage, old sitcoms and colourful bow ties. Hey – perhaps that’s my problem.

They will doubtless exploit the case in which two of their supporters had their foreign-born foster children removed on the basis of the party’s anti-immigration stand. Who can blame them? They have long been grouped among the “extreme right wing”. A candidate of theirs was banned from Derby University by the Student Union this month for being “racist, fascist or extremist”. (The same Union, ironically, allowed a representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir to speak there.) Anyone in their position who gained public sympathy would milk the moment like Southampton F.C. would a home win.

What this case represents, like the sympathetic response to Adrian Smith, demoted for expressing opposition to gay marriage, is the failure of attempts, unconscious or otherwise, to promote the view that illiberal opinions are explained by personal animus. If nationalistic views are the product of xenophobia, as many have suggested, it would make sense to feel that nationalists are poor guardians for migrants. Yet being critical of immigration is not the same thing as disliking migrants and opposing the EU is not the same as disliking Europeans. Most British people wish to reduce immigration. Some liberals might double down and claim these folk are bigots but consider this: 39% of Asians in Britain feel that immigration should not merely be reduced but halted. I don’t think they hate themselves. As for the European Union: a majority of Britons wish that we were less involved with it or entirely unaffiliated but mention France or Spain and I doubt their response would be hostile.

The boundaries of legitimate opinion have, in many cases, been narrowed so far as to exclude masses of peaceful and well-meaning individuals who are, it seems, becoming discontented as they grasp the scale of their alienation. To be more receptive to their hopes and concerns would be a shrewd as well as honest tactic. This is not to question the fact that many people in this country are hateful bigots. Some, indeed, may be as baneful as the rare but hideously dangerous fanatics that scarred Norway and, it seems, threatened Poland. Yet one has to be discerning to isolate them and tarring millions is not, I think, the way to go about it.

 

Panic on the Streets of Sweden…

A Jewish community building in Malmö has been attacked with explosives…

The explosion took place early Friday morning, according to Fred Kahn, chairman of the board of the Jewish community of Malmo.  “There was an explosion and someone also threw a rock at the windows at the entrance to the community house,” he said.

33 hate crimes were directed against Jews in Malmö in 2010. That might not sound like a huge number but consider this: there are a mere 1500 Jews in Malmö. To put this into perspective, if the 1,500,000 Muslims in Britain in 2001 were experiencing hate crimes at the rate of Malmö’s Jews they’d have endured 33,000 of them. Realise that this was a significant decline from the previous year – when the conflict in Gaza helped to inspire a wave of anti-semitic violence – and you can see that this is a grave problem.

Malmö’s Mayor, an ageing, cranky leftist named Ilmar Reepalu, has responded by implying that Jews are merely stirring up intercommunal tensions; asserting that there’s no problem and claiming, when people took offence at his attitudes, that he’d become a target of the Israel lobby. Mr Reepalu seems to have said so much that’s foolish and done so little of worth that the most unscrupulous lobbyists for Israel would have no reason to smear him even if he was special enough to be their target. 400 Swedes – not including Reepalu – marched through the city in August to defy the hatred. The attack on the centre appears to be evidence that those doing the hating weren’t particularly bothered.

No British papers except the Jewish Chronicle have reported on the attack. The broadsheets have, indeed, with the exception of the Telegraph, paid scant attention to the sad phemonenon within the city. The Guardian’s only piece devoted to its underside doesn’t mention anti-semitism and ends by quoting an anonymous migrant talking about how safe the place is. This is no surprise. Though real or perceived anti-semitism in the intellectual classes often provokes storms of debate violent Jew hatred on the streets can be overlooked. I read more about Caryl Churchill’s “play for Gaza” in 2009 than the wave of racist bullying in Europe. The underprioritisation of the latter has a lot to do, I suspect, with the fact that it isn’t a top-down phenomenon and, thus, doesn’t sit well with present-day conceptions of racism. I suspect it’s also because of the demographics of the perpetrators.

As most people who acknowledge the fact of low-level Jew hatred tend to be of nationalistic persuasions it’s typically blamed on migrants alone. This is unfair as anti-semitism certainly endures among the people of the continent that did the most to invent it. I still remember when a Holocaust survivor came to talk at my sixth form college and a middle-class hippie asked a hostile and extravagantly off-topic question about Israel. Later, in the common room, he was heard to mutter that he’d never got an honest answer from a Jew. He was a peaceful if misguided bloke but others with his dark suspicions are more dangerous. Just under half of the identified perpetrators of anti-semitic incidents in Britain tend to be white.

Others are Eastern European and more still are black. A disproportionate number, though, are Asian and Arabic. People of such ethnicities are often raised amid environments where theological Jew hatred is rife and loathing of Israel is fervid. Living among Jews is, for them, a novel experience and some, doubtless encouraged by the cultural toleration of clerical promoters of bigotry, feel entitled to lash out. This is something officials in newly multicultural regions should have thought would happen and they’ve got no excuse for failing to realise it now. The problem won’t have disappeared when they’ve arisen from the sand.

British commentators talk a lot about Israel and their debates concerning anti-semitism tend to be influenced by their views regarding it. This might change around the time Hell undergoes a radical decline in temperature and pigs learn the secret of airborne flight. When peaceful citizens are threatened in the street, however, there’s no reason to care who they’ve been descended from, or for the part of one’s brain labelled “opinions on the Middle East” would to light up. It attacks the foundations of our society and it’s an affront to us all.

 

The Legend Of The European…

I’ll start by saying that contrary to popular opinion Ukraine isn’t in a state of race war; tourists there are likely to be safe and most Ukrainians are doubtless kind and friendly people. I’d propose that the fact that I can spot 8 Brazilians in their top-ranked club; 5 Brazilians and 3 Nigerians in their runner-up and 4 Brazilians and a Senegalese chap in their 3rd-placed side suggests that brutal supremacism isn’t ubiquitous among its football fans let alone its population. People must be cheering for ‘em. The subculture of violent racism that Panorama explored on Monday is, of course, nonetheless grotesque and disturbing – a phenomenon that demands state action before the random thuggishness becomes more dangerously coherent. But the startled British reactions to it – the shock and revulsion at the fact that such things could be happening in Europe – interested me. For all that the average Brit might assume that Germans tend to be humourless; Italians romantic and Frenchmen a little gay I think one of the products of European supranationalism has been the assumption that Europeans are basically the same kind of people, and that their cultures are essentially the same. We have a lot of things in common with our European relatives, of course – more than we might wi’ folks of other nations – but it’s easy to forget how different our historical experiences have been. Whereas British people spent the last century facing the prospect of being less dominant than they were used to, for example, the Eastern Europeans were busy being dominated by two of the evillest regimes that history can offer. It would be a miracle if their people’s perspectives weren’t significantly different. This is not to explain the unpleasant phenomenon we’ve had our attention drawn to – I have no better idea of its roots and form than anyone – but to suggest that rediscovering the fact of European nations would serve to benefit international accord inasmuch as we’d be less surprised by our mutual failure to conform with our expectations.

 

Fisking The Führer…

Tell me – is this necessary?

Mein Kampf, one of the most notorious polemics of all time, will enjoy mass distribution in Germany for the first time since the second world war following a decision by authorities to publish an annotated version of it, as well as bringing it out in ebook and audio formats.

…

Academics are working on producing an annotated version of the book which will include commentaries on the text that will seek to dissect and rubbish Hitler’s arguments.

One can imagine the surprise German readers will feel when they’re informed that global domination and Aryan supremacy may not, in fact, be good ideas. “I was gobsmacked,” Christian from Berlin will say, “All that stuff about invading Poland made a lot of sense before I read the annotations”. “It was a shock,” Fritz from Munich is going to add, “To hear that demonising a marginal ethnic group could be a dangerous thing to do. If only there was an infamous historical precedent that could have showed me this.” There could be a whole series of books in this style. I forsee an edition of Dianetics with “L. RON HUBBARD WASN’T A PROPHET” scrawled in the margin, or The Prince with “SEIZING DESPOTIC POWER IS NOT ADVISABLE”.

 

Europe’s Reluctant Radicals…

Marine Le Pen has won a record 20% of the vote in the French presidential elections and various commentators have been asking how her voters can “flirt with fascism”. This point could be relevant…

Using data from the 2007 French elections, a London research and advisory group, Counterpoint, has drilled down into the FN support and come up with interesting findings. Looking at 5,000 voters, it defined three main categories of FN support: “potential radicals”, who agreed with Le Pen’s ideas but said they would not vote for him; “reluctant radicals”, who said they were likely to vote FN but did not feel close to the party; and “committed radicals”, who said they would vote FN and felt close to the party.

Counterpoint’s research found that while 20% of the FN’s voters in 2007 were committed, fully 80% could be classified as reluctant, and 13% as potential radicals – a big group of swing voters, whose behaviour could significantly affect the 2012 election.

In other words, they needn’t have especial fondness for Le Pen pere or fille but see them as the least bad option; because, one infers, of the dearth of nationalist opinion elsewhere. Few Europeans are racial supremacists, historical revisionists, imperialists, skinheads or whatever else might be expected from the worst of the far right. Yet majorities of them dislike supranationalist officiating and endorse severe restrictions on immigration. This might contradict the values of liberal thinkers who feel humans should transcend the “myth” of the nation state but it’s hardly suggestive of Hitlerian tendencies (it would, after all, have applied to most of the people who were prepared to sacrifice their lives to fight the Nazis). Most people simply reject the universalism that’s so popular among the academic and, to some extent, political classes. Private citizens needn’t acknowledge or address this fact, of course, but it shouldn’t surprise them if their compatriots plump for candidates they view as especially obnoxious as their concerns are neglected elsewhere.

An intriguing question is why England hasn’t seen the rise of a comparable figure despite nationalist sentiments being more popular here. Perhaps it’s significant that voters are split between UKIP and the BNP but I’d guess it’s likelier that they’ve been sleazy and/or bumbling enough that they’ve entirely failed to capitalise on public opinion and such voters have, in large part, just stayed at home.

 

On The Withdrawing Of Fingers…

It’s odd – not unsurprising but still odd – how all the people who were clucking about racism in Europe when they thought the Toulouse gunman was a nutbag nativist have quietened now it’s said to be a Muslim fanatic. It’s the bigotry they feel the action might inspire, not the bigotry that’s thought to have inspired it, that’s being discussed. Why?

Outside of fractious debates on Israel and Palestine anti-semitism doesn’t receive the attention that bigotry against other minorities does. The reason, I think, is that it can’t be plausibly asserted that there’s an institutional bias against Jews. They tend to be as or more well-off than other Brits; they’re obviously not excluded from the higher rungs of the social ladder and our government enjoys friendly relations with the only Jewish majority state. While the boundaries of our discourse aren’t as fiercely policed as those of the States people who are thought to harbour ill-feeling against Jews are, by and large, unwelcome in the public sphere. (This isn’t always true, of course, but the point is that trying to make the case that society is geared towards keeping the Jews down would take an impressive feat of the imagination.)

I think people of a left wing and liberal persuasion tend to think that bigotry is a top-down phenomenon: emanating from the state into minds of plebeians. (Thus, when ethnic minorities are gunned down in France, the natural target for blame is the short man in the high places.) This is sometimes true – and European leaders have achieved it with daunting efficiency in years gone by – but it doesn’t hold as a rule. To a greater extent, I think, considering how few they are, than any other ethnic group the Jews face attacks in Europe, and by that I don’t mean voices of dim prejudices but the sort with bloodied bodies, smoking synagogues and desecrated gravestones. This, to some extent, can be explained by the fact that new arrivals have had virulent tribal hatreds among their baggage but that’s not enough to account for the trends. Assuming that the claims of a new ADL report are valid, a formidable proportion of the citizenries of Europe, especially Eastern Europe, hold today’s Jews responsible for the apparent death of a certain Jewish bloke two thousand years ago. (This has to be the most pathetic grievance ever. I’ve known rappers with more valid beefs.)

My point, in raising the spectre of one of civilisation’s oldest hatreds, is not to add my voice to the interminable if necessary debates around, say, when criticism of Israel becomes anti-semitic. It’s almost the opposite. It’s that the commentariat, if it wants to be relevant in any positive sense, should spend less time consumed by its internal habits and obsessions and reflect on what the great unwashed and ignored actually think and actually do.

 

The Shoelace Taste…

Nazis hate Jews and Muslims. Fanatical Muslims hate Jews and Muslim soldiers. Frankly, anyone who was confident about the affiliation of the Toulouse gunman was revealing their own prejudices. Those who just assumed it was the latter, despite the ambiguity of the attack and the spate of fascist massacres in recent times, displayed an unreasonable fixation on Muslims. But what of the people who assumed it was the former? All through yesterday I was banging my head on the screen as I read commentator after commentator all but blame the slaughter on Nicholas Sarkozy. There was Fiachra Gibbons in the Guardian…

Over the past few years of recession and regression, it has become a trite truism of European politics that you can’t go wrong going to the right…

Until today, they might have tried to argue that there was no harm in it, that it’s healthy even, a rebalancing of the scales after two decades of biting our tongues and creeping political correctness.

There was Baroness Hussein-Ece on Twitter…

And this from Lindsey German…

Such leftists and liberal commentators, as when they gratuitously exploited the attacks of the depraved Brievik, will make use of anything that might discredit nationalist sentiments and doubts towards the growth of cultural pluralism. The unpalatable haste with which so many launched their presumptuous blame game points towards a certain desperation. I think that attack has become the impulsive form of defence, yet as formidable as it can often seem if it’s misjudged it’s apt to leave one appearing vulnerable. And if weakness if exposed attacks have rather less force. Perhaps when people like Mr Gibbons have removed their feet from their mouths – and we’ve all had them there – a certain humility can temper the aggression.