Tuesday, May 03, 2016

LIVINGSTONE, HISTORY AND "MASS KILLINGS"

Ken Livingstone and Adolf Hitler (International Business Times)
The political storm created by the former London Mayor, Labour MP and Leader of the Greater London Council's suggestion that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist shows little sign of abating. This post offers a guarded defence of Mr Livingstone, a long-time controversialist, whose comments have prompted some much needed historical and international discourse in British politics, without, however, supporting his version of history.

Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party as a result of his clumsy attempt to disentangle Anti-Semitism and Zionism. He was previously expelled from the party by the New Labour government and stood as an independent in the first election for a London Mayor in 2000 in which he won a decisive victory. He was later re-instated by the party and stood as a Labour candidate in 2004. On both occasions, London's ethnic minority communities were a key constituency for Mr Livingstone, along with other groups who felt under-represented in, or let down by, mainstream politics. Perhaps more than any other politician, Ken Livingstone has led the transformation of the UK's capital in to a multi-cultural global city, and compromised his left-wing credentials along the way. It is not without irony that Mr Livingstone - for his detractors one of the founding fathers of modern British political correctness - can be quite politically incorrect himself.

The reason for this, and indeed for Ken Livingstone's political success, is that he is in many ways the quintessential post-war Londoner. The "Life of Ken" is worth reading up on, not least because it has caused much more controversy over a similar time period than Monty Python's "Life of Brian" . Nevertheless, the notion that Mr Livingstone is in some way a Nazi apologist is completely absurd, nor in my view, is he Anti-Semitic.

What Ken Livingstone always has had, along with his onetime arch-enemy Margaret Thatcher, is a highly selective version of events (historical and contemporary), with a possibly even greater tendency to be over-influenced by particular advisers and intellectuals without giving full and proper attention to those with different views. In the present furore, Mr Livingstone has cited the work of the American Jewish Marxist historian Lenni Brenner as evidence of Hitler's early support for Zionism.

However, the wider historical consensus on Nazi policy towards the Jews is very different. For instance, writing in today's Independent on the subject of "Hitler and Zionism" Professor Rainer Schulze points out that:  "Claims that Hitler was a Zionist, or supported Zionism, before his anti-Jewish policies turned into murder and extermination flare up at regular intervals. They usually cite the controversial Haavara Agreement (Transfer Agreement) of August 1933 as the most potent evidence of a wilful cooperation between Hitler and the Zionist movement. When viewed in a certain way, this deal does superficially seem to show that Hitler’s government endorsed Zionism – but just because it was a mechanism to help German Jews relocate to Palestine it does not imply it was “Zionist”. Professor Schulze is General Editor of "The Holocaust in History and Memory" a research project led by the University of Essex and his article originally appeared in "The Conversation".

Returning to Mr Livingstone, his unwary, shorthand view of history has, nevertheless, unwittingly contributed to the Labour Party's new "Big Conversation" on the relationship between the past and present. As my own contribution to this discourse, I would strongly recommend that the former London Mayor, together with Labour's present Leader and his colleagues add to their summer reading - if they have not read it already - a recent book by the historian Timothy Snyder, "Bloodlands"  The subject of this book is "a zone in Europe where the Soviet and Nazi powers overlapped" and where at least 14 million people, mainly civilian or non-combatants, were "killed by purposeful mass murder associated with the above regimes" during the period 1933-45. Snyder purposely uses the term "mass killing" instead of "genocide" to describe the atrocities of the Bloodlands, of which the Jewish Holocaust is the most infamous.

Yet, as Snyder also points out: "During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine that anywhere else in the Bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the World". Indeed, Ukrainians have their own expression - the Holodomor - to describe "the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world" that killed between 2.5 and 7.5 million people in the period 1932-3 alone.

The term "Holodomor" is, however, little known outside Ukraine, currently engaged in both a "history war", and a real one, with Russia, and this points to a fundamental problem of modern history itself: that it can sometimes be as selective in its version of events as Ken Livingstone. Much of Timothy Snyder's work is based on "new" archive material that became available to North American and Western European researchers after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s. However, the partial narrative of mid-century European history also occurred because Russia became a Western ally after 1941, and it suited the allies to emphasize the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany rather than other mass killings that occurred in the Bloodlands between 1933-45. Of Snyder's estimated 14 million victims, "more than half died of starvation", yet as he also admits, the "Great Chinese Famine" of 1958-62 greatly surpassed even this figure.

When Labour's John Mcdonnell presented Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer with a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book last year he was making a serious point: "...We must not pretend to know what we do not know" By this action - which was misunderstood and much derided at the time by Britain's ignorant political classes - Mr Mcdonnell meant that George Osborne , who studied modern history at Oxford University, should seek to understand what the possible implications of an increasingly close economic and financial relationship with the communist People's Republic of China might actually mean for the UK.

I no doubt risk being ridiculed like John McDonnell in conflating the power of contemporary China with the problems of its quite recent past. However, the lessons for both George Osborne and Ken Livingstone, another Sinophile, is the perennial one of needing to understand the past in order to know the present. Unfortunately, we live in an age where the "New Opium of the People"  is  the promise of a digital utopia in which cheap, plentiful and high quality consumer goods continue to be supplied to Western and other consumers by the new Workshops of the World, particularly China. The shallow and materialistic lifestyles to which the post-WII generations - from Baby Boomers to Millennials - aspire has conspired to support an elite dominated by techno-optimist groupthink. It is hardly surprising that in such a millieu histories are often forgotten, spawning an ill-educated social discourse in much of the new and conventional media. So finally, let's thank Ken Livingstone for helping to rectify this, albeit unintentionally.

Postscript: May 2018 - Mr Livingstone has now resigned from the Labour Party.

Friday, April 01, 2016

MADONNA: THE EMPRESS OF MATERIAL GIRLS

The Queen of Pop - here riding a horse in her own video - has just returned to New York after another supremely successful world tour in which she reclaimed the title of highest-grossing solo touring artist Needless to say, the tour has not been without controversies, otherwise it wouldn't have been "Bitch, I'm "still" Madonna", the title of her latest single.

I haven't bought an album by Madonna since "Ray of Light" Her music of the 21st millennium doesn't much appeal to me, although I still love the early stuff. Madonna has always been a performance artist par excellence and, like the Empress Cleopatra, age has not withered her in this regard.* In other respects, her achievements are more mixed, and it may be argued that Madonna has played a significant role in creating - or at least facilitating - the modern shallow narcissistic social media culture in which appearance is everything. Discuss!

Yet that would be to sell Madonna, undoubtedly one of the world's most successful businesswomen, short. One might, alternatively, make a comparison with the visual artist Tracey Emin, another material girl but not in the same league as Madonna. I find Emin's art uninteresting, but what she says about her work is often thought-provoking. In Madonna's case, I can't recall her having said anything memorable, but what she does is interesting.

Whatever Madonna does, she does well. This includes horse riding, which the "Queen of Pop" only took up in middle age. Yet, having been out of the saddle for some time, here she is riding out in the style recommended by the great equine performance coach, and mentor of Victoria Pendleton, Yogi Breisner: " in balance, forward, with rhythm." That's how we all should try to live!

*"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.." (Shakespeare)


Correction:  the quotation assigned to Yogi Breisner actually came from his mentor Lars Sederholm.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

DECONSTRUCTING OSBORNE'S STATE CAPITALISM

Going Underground: George Osborne and Boris Johnson (Mirror)
Some where along the line, British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne became a state capitalist and so, arguably, did outgoing London Mayor Boris Johnson. In Osborne's case, this ideological acquisition may have been due to indoctrination during a gap-year visit to China as a young man, and/or the subsequent influence of Maoist - in their own words - Liberal Democrats like former Business Secretary Sir Vince Cable during the UK Lib-Con Coalition Government of 2010-15. In the case of Johnson, the embrace of state capitalism is more opportunistic, like the taking of a concubine who might be retained or discarded according to political expediency.

State capitalism, it may be argued, is the political expediency of the present economic age. Only yesterday, a Financial Times article entitled "Japan Inc: Heavy meddling" quoted the former head of the Tokyo Stock Exchange as saying: “The important thing about the rise of China is that most developed nations have seen that pure market-based capitalism sometimes cannot compete against the Chinese state."(1). However, Mr Osborne's enthusiasm for state capitalism goes beyond expediency and has more than a whiff of ideological fanaticism about it, although this may have something to do with the Chancellor of the Exchequer's austere dietary regime (2).

So it was a proposed "Sugar Tax" on soft drinks in yesterday's Budget to encourage the nation to downsize after the fashion of  "Little George", as former larger-than-life Chancellor Ken Clarke sometimes calls his Conservative successor, that most caught the attention of the British media (3). In fact, this budgetary item might be compared to the evanescent fizz in a large tumbler of lemonade given to the infants of the national press whilst the real business took place elsewhere.

As Sky news had noted on the eve of Osborne's Budget: "Infrastructure Giants Line Up For New UK Fund" in the form of a "British Infrastructure Club‎, which will seek to replicate the track record of leading state-backed investment funds." The report also points out that "the Mayor of London has been a staunch advocate of the creation of a UK sovereign wealth fund with sufficient firepower to invest in British transport, housing and other critical national infrastructure."

Someone called "Zzz" (apparently used to mean sleepy, bored or tired, or the sound of a person snoring) and the sole commentator on the Sky report astutely remarked: "Cut through all the distracting rhetoric, Osborne is setting up another quango to spend the tax payers money on vote catching political projects." So there we have it. The state capitalism of George Osborne and Boris Johnson is deconstructed in a sentence, or is it? According to The Economist's "crony-capitalism index" of "the countries where politically connected businessmen are most likely to prosper", the UK was ranked 15th in 2014 and 2007 (5). This seems to be an area in which the economy has consistently performed well, for politically well-connected business people at least.


References 

(1). http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0118e3a6-ea99-11e5-bb79-2303682345c8.html#axzz43A0DYjHa
(2). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11370930/David-Cameron-praises-George-Osborne-for-his-weight-loss.html
(3). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3495160/George-Osborne-shocks-Britain-including-sugar-tax-Budget-sends-soft-drinks-shares-freefall.html
(4).  http://news.sky.com/story/1660464/infrastructure-giants-line-up-for-new-uk-fund
(5). http://www.economist.com/news/international/21599041-countries-where-politically-connected-businessmen-are-most-likely-prosper-planet

Monday, March 07, 2016

IS A PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS?

Here's a photo of Winter becoming Spring whilst this blog pauses from written posts.

PS:  An interesting article from Turkey about Croci - http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/a-bunch-of-crocus-for-puduhepa.aspx?PageID=238&NID=96093&NewsCatID=473