Theoretical bravery, above and beyond the call of duty

Cartoonist Ellis Rosen in The New Yorker nails it, then hangs it on the wall for all to see (via Mustang Bobby). It makes you wonder whether the Commander-in-chief has been getting the virtual heroism of Call of Duty mixed up with real life. Active shooter, first-person shooter, it must be easy to mix the two up. It wouldn't be the first time:

Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced a delivery of F-52 fighter jets to Norway as a gesture to bolster defense in Northern Europe. There’s only one problem: the F-52 is a fictional plane from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

That was Heather Alexandra, reporting from Virtual Trumpworld back in January.

Divergence wins bigly

"Divergence wins: Brexiteers claim victory after Chequers talks", it says here.

And it looks as if they're right. Following the official announcement that divergence had won the day, the UK's main opposition party diverged from the government-led consensus that Brexit means no single market and no customs union, by embracing "a" customs union (AKA "the" customs union, rebranded to save face).*

Meanwhile, the Scottish government apparently wants to diverge from the "no single market" bit; "BREXIT Minister Michael Russell will tonight warn that the Scottish Government is prepared to pass its own laws to protect the country's place in the European single market".

Yep, divergence seems to be on a roll, all right.

Oh, hang on, apparently that's not what they meant by "divergence".

Honestly, there's no pleasing some people.

____________

*Update and correction - it would be "a" customs union, as the UK couldn't leave the EU and still be part of the existing customs union. Although I was right to imagine that some degree of face-saving would necessarily be involved - agreeing "a"customs union EU would necessarily involve some of the same restrictions as being an EU member, only without the influence:

An independent trade policy would be restricted by a common external tariff, as Turkey demonstrates. If the EU grants preferential tariff reductions to a country, Turkey must also do so – but without being party to the agreement. Turkey has been unable to reach agreements with Algeria, South Africa, or Mexico following their FTAs with the EU because its tariffs (a key bargaining chip) have already been liberalised. In this scenario, the EU would partly dictate UK trade policy, as the UK would not be present in negotiations that directly affects its market.

And it goes without saying that the EU has absolutely zero incentive to make "a" customs union for the awkward member who just flounced out of their club a better deal than "the" customs union enjoyed by fully paid-up members. I'm still not seeing any plausible version of Brexit which is an improvement on what the UK currently has as an EU member.

"I shall give you Jerusalem"

"If you send your warriors as promised and conquer Egypt, worshipping the sky, then I shall give you Jerusalem. If any of our warriors arrive later than arranged, all will be futile and no one will benefit. If you care to please give me your impressions, and I would also be very willing to accept any samples of French opulence that you care to burden your messengers with."

From a letter sent in 1289, by Arghun Khan, ruler of the Mongol Ilkhanate, (the remnant of Genghis Khan's empire based around Persia), to Philip IV of France, making him an offer which, it turned out, he could refuse.

Unfortunately for Arghun, his letter arrived when rulers in Western Europe had curbed their enthusiasm for Crusading, in favour of securing and expanding their lands closer to home. So Philip is remembered for fighting the English, suppressing the Knights Templar and expelling Jews from France, not for recovering the Holy Land thorough a Franco-Mongol alliance (in any case, given the catastrophic failures of the Fifth and Eighth Crusades in North Africa, the ability of the Europeans to deliver on their side of the bargain was pretty questionable).

Argun also approached Edward I of England, who had been on Crusade in his youth (assisted, at one point, by Mongol warriors) but, like Philip, Edward's priorities lay closer to home: securing and expanding his territories by fighting the French, the Welsh and the Scots ... and expelling Jews from England. I don't know why we see all this anti-Semitism at this specific point in history, but it's tempting to see the end of Crusading as ending the offshoring of religious bigotry - why go abroad to oppress non-Christians, when you can do it from the comfort of home?

The most interesting figure in the story of Argun's failed attempt to form an anti-Mameluke coalition was his ambassador, Rabban Bar Sauma. Born around 1220 at, or near to, the site of modern-day Beijing, Rabban Bar Sauma became a monk of the Nestorian Church of the East in China at the age of 20.  As a middle aged monk and religious scholar, he set off to make a pilgrimage from China to Jerusalem, accompanied by one of his students, Rabban Markos.

The roads to Jerusalem through southern Syria being too dangerous, the two travellers visited the Patriarch of the Church of the East, whose Baghdad base was in Ilkahnate territory, ending up at the court of the Ilkhan after delivering messages on behalf of the Patriarch.

Rabban Markos must have been an able student, because he was promoted to the rank of Nestorian bishop on his travels and, when the Partiarch died during their stay, he was elected the next Patriarch of the Church of the East, under the name of Yaballaha III.

As Wikipedia notes, it was the elevation of Rabban Bar Sauma's former student to high office that propelled his teacher to medieval Europe:

It was Arghun's desire to form a strategic Franco-Mongol alliance with the Christian Europeans against their common enemy, the Muslim Mamluk Sultanate at Cairo. A few years later, the new patriarch Yaballaha III suggested his former teacher Rabban Bar Ṣawma for the embassy, to meet with the Pope and the European monarchs.

It was a pretty eye-opening journey for the one-time boy from Beijing:

He traveled overland through Armenia to the Empire of Trebizond or through the Sultanate of Rum to the Simisso on the Black Sea, then by boat to Constantinople, where he had an audience with Andronicus II Palaeologus. Bar Sauma's writings give a particularly enthusiastic description of the beautiful Hagia Sophia. He next travelled to Italy, again journeying by ship. As their course took them past the island of Sicily, he witnessed and recorded the great eruption of Mount Etna on June 18, 1287. A few days after his arrival, he also witnessed a naval battle in the Bay of Sorrento on St. John's Day, June 24, 1287, during the conflict of the Sicilian Vespers. The battle was between the fleet of Charles II, who had welcomed him in his realm, and James II of Aragon, king of Sicily. According to Bar Sauma, James II was victorious, and his forces killed 12,000 men.

He next travelled to Rome, but too late to meet Pope Honorius IV, who had recently died. So Bar Sauma instead engaged in negotiations with the cardinals, and visited St. Peter's Basilica.

He then travelled to France, where he met both Philip IV and Edward I, before returning to Baghdad in 1288, laden with gifts and replies from the new Pope and European monarchs to the letters Bar Sauma had delivered from Arghun. It was in response to these letters that Arghun wrote to Philip, with his scheme for a joint attack on the Mamelukes.

The well-travelled Rabban Bar Sauma died in 1294, in Baghdad. I don't know if he's as well known in China as Marco Polo is in the West, but he deserves to be - he gives us a unique glimpse into how the different parts of the medieval world were occasionally more interconnected than we think.

Dances in the dark

Musical discovery of the week, courtesy of BBC Radio 3; Icelandic Dances, Opus 11, by Jón Leifs. Maybe it sounds characteristically Icelandic, but without anything else Icelandic to compare it to (other than Björk), I wouldn't really know.

To my ears, the first dance has a slight Chinese quality (or at least the quality of a Western pastiche of Chinse music), while the second definitely has a Scottish feel, as if the players were imitating bagpipes.

My favourite, though, is the wild, raw theme in the third dance,* which alternates with contrasting quiet, pastoral passages. I don't know whether it's typically Icelandic, but it's certainly got an epic quality that would provide an appropriately steely soundtrack to implacable Atlantic storms, longships** and erupting volcanoes:







*"Allegro moderato ed energico"and 7' 45" in, if you want to skip to the best bit (IMO).

* *"their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf", to quote Joyce's fantastic line from Ulysses.

Damning yourself with faint praise

Did somebody forget to send me the memo about this being National Self-Incrimination Week? First, we had Oxfam's Mark Goldring jumping into the hole dug by a depraved minority of his colleagues and grabbing the shovel:

"The intensity and the ferocity of the attack makes you wonder, what did we do?

"We murdered babies in their cots? Certainly, the scale and the intensity of the attacks feels out of proportion to the level of culpability. I struggle to understand it. You think, 'My God, there’s something going on there'."

No, nobody ever suggested that Oxfam was about killing babies. People just had a reasonable expectation that Oxfam was about altruistically helping the most needy, as opposed to coercing the poor and powerless into abusive sexual relationships. That's what angered most reasonable people.

Sure, there are some spiteful individuals in politics and the media who hate Oxfam just for existing and being bleeding-heart do-gooders who give help and comfort to "undeserving" foreign people, but I'm afraid that being hated by terrible bigots doesn't make their staff any less guilty of a terrible act when they sexually abused vulnerable people. Better to just take it on the chin than plead mitigating circumstances, as Mark Goldring acknowledged when he rightly apologised for this comment.

I had high expectations of Oxfam and was disappointed. My expectations of David Davis are so low that he couldn't possibly fall short, could he? Oh yes he could. Now he's "reassuring" his straw man critics that Brexit won't see "Britain plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction."

For a man said to be pushing for an "ambitious" post-Brexit deal, this reassurance is rather lacking in ambition. If you want to reassure people about the results of a policy, the bar is pretty low - if you can make a credible case that doing it will make things better (or at the very least, no worse), than doing nothing, you might change some minds.

If the best you can come up with is "this policy won't actually turn the country into a lawless post-apocalyptic wasteland, ravaged by murderous gangs of desperadoes", then don't expect to capture many hearts and minds. The UK's population didn't end up hungry and cowering in terror, as they were hunted down by vehicles full of heavily-armed psychopaths desperately seeking the last few litres of unleaded, as a result of notorious policy failures like the Suez invasion, the Poll Tax and the 2003 Iraq War,* but that doesn't mean that any policy that doesn't result in civilization collapsing should be viewed as a success.

Although to be fair to David Davis, I suppose he could have scored an even worse dystopian fiction own goal. At least he didn't cite The Road, only to find that the Brexit memes had got there before him:

Apocalyptic sarcasm shamelessly nicked from Gerry Lynch

*It's ironic that the Iraq War is the one decision of the three that some people still hail as a success, as opposed to an object lesson in catastrophic failure, given that it was the one which came closest to delivering a Mad Max-style outcome (not here in the UK, but for any Iraqis who had to live through the subsequent breakdown of law and order, followed by a spell under the dystopian rule of a heavily-armed cult of violent fanatics, who were every bit as terrifying as any fictional gang of road warriors).

Ukip - probably worth less than nothing + VAT

Back in September, Ukip's latest ex-leader, Henry Whatsisname, boasted that the party had avoided becoming the "UK Nazi Party" by astutely electing him, instead of the candidate who'd run promising a Final Solution™ to the Muslim Question.

Poor Henry

Sadly, we didn't have long to get to know Henry. If he had any interesting policy positions, beyond being anti-Nazi and pro-badger strangling, we didn't have time to find out before his tenure ended prematurely, not with a whimper, but with a bang, when he was caught banging a glamour model who was into experimenting with policy positions at some uncomfortable distance from anti-Nazism.

“I was working as a racist in a cocktail bar, when I met you” pic.twitter.com/1iRlBaLh4b

— Scott Ballantyne (@Moosedog23) January 18, 2018

A new leader has yet to be elected, but given the new acting leader's keen interest in the Muslim Question and fondness for "I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Soros" dog-whistles, it sounds as if Henry's warning about the "UK Nazi party" wasn't too far from the truth. According to some of the lovely people at Kipper Central, a Gerard Batten-led Ukip could quickly become a Nazi tribute act, even attracting its own cadre of ex-Friekorps types, in the shape of entryists from something called Veterans Against Terrorism (VAT):

Veterans Against Terrorism held a march in Newcastle yesterday and below is a report on that march. Significantly for UKIP they also praise our new interim leader, Gerard Batten as a “working class man of the people” who will “transform the Party”.

They pledge to join the Party en masse and take part in that transformation as committed activists as per our previous report that they will join in their thousands and set UKIP on track to consign the Labour Party to the “dustbin of history”. 

Angry veterans on the streets. That usually goes well...

Are these the new Stormtroopers who'll take to the streets to intimidate the traitors, the enemies of the people, the Jews and the Reds who'll be accused of stabbing the Fatherland in the back, once Brexit inevitably delivers hardship and humiliation, instead of the promised victory?

Actually, I'm not yet that worried. The most significant problem is that Ukip seems to be bust - they couldn't even afford to pay their last leader a salary, they're on the hook for £200k as a result of the Jane Collins libel case and the consensus is that they probably don't have enough left in the kitty to fund the forthcoming leadership election.

And they don't have that many members - about 34,000 as of December 2016, a number which has almost certainly reduced, given their poor showing in the last election and comically inept post-Farage leadership. Even if VAT march to the Kippers' rescue, they have a maximum of 8,500 members (that figure came from the Express, so should be treated as being as unreliably exaggerated as the paper's hyperventilating weather warnings). In which case Ukip + VAT = fewer members than the Green Party. And our first past the post system is rarely kind to third parties, let alone sixth* parties without any money or a single sitting MP.

Without funding, I think that any Fascists hoping for the resurgence of an even more alt-right-ist Ukip will be disappointed. As will some leftists and Remainers - let's face it, standing up to Nazis sounds badass cool.

Unfortunately, our most powerful enemies are a lot less impressively evil -  the hapless, broken automaton otherwise known as the Prime Minister, those badly-drawn P G Wodehouse caricatures, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, David Davis, who looks like an elderly uncle who's the only one in the family not to realise he's losing the plot, Liam Fox, who never had the plot in the first place, and the various faceless policy wonks and empty suits inhabiting the spiders' web of obscurely-funded right-wing think tanks and lobby groups without which terrible ideas like Brexit would never happen.






*In sixth place, by membership, behind Labour, the Conservatives (I assume, although they don't publish membership data in their annual accounts), the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens.

Government of the think tanks, by the think tanks, for the think tanks

Now the government's own studies show that every version of Brexit will make the UK worse off than no Brexit, why is Brexit still a thing? Because Brexit is the unchangeable will of the people. Specifically, the unchageable will of the people in radical right-wing think tanks:

 A transatlantic network of conservative think tanks accidentally published its secret plans to influence US-UK trade negotiations, Unearthed can reveal.

Documents outline plans to form an “unprecedented” coalition of hard-Brexit and libertarian think tanks, which will call for Britain to ditch strict EU safety standards – including rules on food and pharmaceuticals – in order to secure a sweeping US-UK trade deal.

The group will hold “shadow trade talks” in Washington and London to “hash out an ‘ideal’ US-UK free trade agreement (FTA).” It hopes this will form the “blueprint” for the real negotiations between the British and US governments.

Lawrence Carter