The globalisation of the anti-globalisation movement

"Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?" - Harry Lime, The Third Man

In the last year of the last millennium, protest groups gathered in Seattle to demonstrate against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference meeting there.  Erupting on 30th November (soon to be monikered 'N30' after the Global Carnival Against Capitalism on 18th June of the same year became 'J18'), the massive street protests - and the police response - had their effect on overshadowing the negotiations.  With even the lowest estimates stating the crowd at 40,000, it was far larger than any prior reaction against those organisations considered agents of economic globalisation.  Over the next two days, with police using pepper spray, tear gas and stun grenades and the National Guardsmen being called in to intervene and a renegade group of 200 protestors engaging in a rampage of destruction on shop fronts and cars, while the peaceful majority disrupted WTO delegates reaching the conference centre, the events became known as the Battle of Seattle.
This was no flash mob, with planning for the demonstrations beginning months in advance to bring together a loose coalition of disparate participants - NGOs focusing on the environment and consumer protection, labour trades unions, students, religiously based groups seeking debt relief for poorer countries and anarchists.  The last group viewed the Seattle WTO protests and riots as a positive outcome, highlighting 'anti-globalisation' dynamics for the American and international media and forcing the journalists to ask why anybody would oppose the WTO.
The progeny of this genesis has, ironically, gone global.  The latest outbreak of campaigning against the Establishment and The Man occurred in Frankfurt am Main.  As the new European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters was due to be officially opened, in the hours leading up to it violence broke out close to the city's Alte Oper concert hall, starting with tyres and rubbish bins being set alight and evolving to police cars being torched and stones thrown against law enforcement (the prevalence of 'stones' in hitherto pristine urban streets in the developed world suggests those attending come prepared for trouble).  These 'Blockupy' activists are a Europe-wide spin-off of the Occupy Movement, formed largely of trades unions and the far-left political force Linkspartei and are vehemently against the prevailing European mantra of austerity.  Its rallying cry is, "They want capitalism without democracy.  We want democracy without capitalism."  Democracy can be a fluid term though and fighting for it shouldn't automatically lead to violence.  Dozens were hurt and 350 arrested.  The police said roughly 80 of their officers had been affected by pepper spray, stone throwing and, a worrying development, acidic liquid.  Nevertheless , the police have a duty to show restraint to legitimate expressions of free speech, more important than ever as more and more public spaces become commercial no-protest zones.  In earlier disturbances, riot police used water cannon to disperse hundreds of anti-capitalist demonstrators who had gathered around the new double tower skyscraper base for the ECB.  Constructed at a cost of 1.3bn euros and at 185m high, its central banker occupants can have daily moments from the film The Third Man, where Orson Welles' Harry Lime sneers at the 'dots' far below him.
Actually, of the 'troika' of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the ECB, the latter may be the least responsible for the back-breaking economic conditions dictated to the European Union's southern rim.  As Mario Draghi, the ECB president, said in an inauguration speech away from the tempestuous scenes surrounding the future HQ, "it may not be a fair charge" to charge the ECB as the driving force behind the imposition of austerity.  As an Italian himself understanding the situation in his own country, the subtext was look to Berlin, not Frankfurt.  He added, "Our action has been aimed precisely at cushioning the shocks suffered by the economy.  But as the central bank of the whole euro area, we must listen very carefully to what all our citizens are saying."  It could just be cynical public relations but Draghi has already pushed through Quantitative Easing (QE) in the teeth of opposition from the Reichstag.  Having helped out big business through QE, his message is for the governments of the Eurozone to start thinking collectively rather than nationally about those who are sinking further into poverty for a flawed, though not necessarily doomed, project.

Just sickening

With the Germanwings crash, the investigation deepens the horror and some 'facts' are contradicted a few days later in some sort of 'fog of war' - first Andreas Lubitz only had a medical not a psychological check-up, then it seems he had psychiatric counselling up until the day before the doomed flight and then there was a torn-up doctor's note.  Whether claims are true that he was dumped by his girlfriend may not be all they seem to be, but if true, this was more than a psychotic breakdown, it was revenge of the most evil kind.
It's largely true that those who feel suicidal never think about the pain of others derived from the consequences of their actions, rather they think about the burden they think they are or will be to their loved ones.  The Guardian (of course) said we mustn't talk about the mental health of the co-pilot because that 'stigmatises depression' - so this lefty viewpoint means we should just let the mystery of the locked cabin door go unresolved because in some nebulous way it might hurt unknown others.  No sane or sober person thinks that every person who suffers depression is a potential mass murderer and to suggest that some might propagates indirectly the stigmatisation of depression, making more people feel uncomfortable in seeking help because The Guardian says that society blames them.  I'm sorry but Lubitz had mental health problems and he was his own person.
Thinking of the American captain who had to be overpowered by passengers when he started wild rantings about bombs, my view softened towards Lubitz that there were other motives besides becoming famous by going out taking 149 innocent people with you.  Maybe it wasn't twisted infamy he was after.  His family are inevitably going to be targeted - they may have to leave their homes, change their names, pull their kids out of school.  But he may not have been thinking of that.  But if he was dumped by his girlfriend then this smacks of him trying to guilt her in the most unbelievably barbaric way, as if she is responsible for 150 deaths and despite that she bears no responsibility for this, it will haunt her for the rest of her life.  The worst thing is, if true, Lubitz has got everything he wanted - the 'thrill' of power through killing others, the posthumous notoriety, the 'guilting' of his ex.  Just sickening.

To boldly go but not as often

Kimberley woke up at 3.15am this morning.  Altaa brought the distressed one from her cot into our bed.  As she settled between us, she turned to me and said, "Monsters in the cot."  Really?  Shit!  With my mouth parched by sleep, I of course did not share these thoughts with her at her disturbing statement.  On reflection, I regularly call her a little monster and she may have been referring to the toys in her bed rather than a cluster of malevolent homunculi.
Altaa thought differently.  Drawing on her nightmare - coincidence or not - after watching Frozen with us, possibly from the abominable snowman, she suggested that the aliens in Star Trek: The Next Generation were of sufficient distinctiveness as to unnerve her subconscious.  I still remember being five years old and fearing the appearance of Darth Vader's visage rise up in the toilet window when I made a night time excursion to the water closet - this deriving from a Universal film.
SyFy run a Star Trek: TNG episode in order almost every weekday night from 7 pm.  Star Trek: Voyager is from an hour earlier but it never formed a great part of my 1990s experience.  Now I get a chance to relive part of that and witness the episodes I missed or partially saw.  Kimberley gets decanted into her bedtime routine around 8 pm but before had often watched it with me.  No more it seems and I'll have to watch on SyFy+1(hr).
Though I may be cutting down on my consumption.  Recently, I came across the episode Cause and Effect which reignited my interest in seeing Star Trek: TNG again, where the Enterprise explodes several times.  SyFy is similar in being on a time loop - when it gets to the final installment of series seven, it goes right back to the pilot of the first series again, ad infinitum.  So I am back to the spot I was last year in the midst of series five (with the overall narrative getting ever stronger).  It was a little cheeky of SyFy to refer to Unification, featuring Leonard Nimoy's cameo as Spock in TNG, as a tribute to Nimoy, when it was a pre-arranged order of sequence that would have occurred had Nimoy died or not.  Interestingly, Unification [Part] I actually had an in memoriam message lamenting the passing of Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator, who had died shortly before the original broadcast of the episode.  Therefore, it was an odd counterpoint to Nimoy's demise.

Bully beef

In 2010, as the General Election inexorably approached, the Conservatives thought they were onto a winner when they uncovered testimony about Gordon Brown's behaviour that could be characterised as bullying.  Steve Hilton, David Cameron's special advisor, thought it would drive a stake through the heart of Brown's claim to moral probity.  Instead, Brown's polling figures went up!  Suddenly stories came up about how Churchill was a bully and how one needs to be ruthless and not suffer fools gladly when one has one's hand on the tiller of the ship of state.  It backfired on the Tories because people had always kind of half-suspected it about Brown and this didn't change anyone's mind who had already made it up of the prime minister.  Instead, there were those who warmed to it as a display of passion that could occasionally go too far but only to ensure that the country could recover after the Great Recession.  However, did it also display a sneaking tolerance, if indeed not admiration, for bullying?
After weeks of intrigue and innuendo, the worst kept secret in media broke as Jeremy Clarkson was sacked from the BBC today for gross misconduct.  Because he was given cold cuts of meat at the North Yorkshire hotel (as it was late at night and the kitchen had closed hours before) instead of hot steak and chips, he launched into a rant about the catering to a producer - Oisin Tymon - of ten years standing, shouting at him with many expletives for twenty minutes, calling him a 'lazy Irish' and saying he would lose his job before punching him in the face and continuing to verbally browbeat a man shorter than himself thereafter.  All because he was given unwarmed meat instead of warm beef.  As the BBC report said, it was unprovoked and Tymon did not fight back at any point.
Even though Clarkson reported himself to BBC Compliance (suggesting he was looking for a way out and hoping the BBC would make him a martyr), more than a million people demanded that Clarkson keep his job as if the arrogance of privilege entitled Clarkson to any sort of action.  There were many who viciously aimed horrendous calumny at Tymon, who was blameless in all this and had kept it to himself, worried about losing his job.  If Clarkson's behaviour wasn't an example of workplace bullying at its very worst, I don't know what is.  A million people can't be wrong, can they?  Well, yes they can.  Millions have been seduced by bullies and tyrants and madmen throughout history.  The signatories liked to think of Clarkson as a 'naughty boy bending the rules' who just wanted 'a bit of laugh'.  How often was that used to defend the actions of school bullies, making it out to be the victim's fault?  Clarkson moreover portrays himself as raging against the establishment when he is at the heart of it - having intimate dinner parties with James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron (as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister) and using his Sunday Times column as a, ahem, bully pulpit.
High-profile backers were not in short supply, not least in Cameron himself.  Allison Pearson, the influential columnist, saw it as a politically correct plot (but then she sees everything as plotted politically correct).  Louise Mensch seemed to condone bullying when she said people should stop being so 'wimpy', completely misreading the entire story, maybe wilfully.  James May, brought in (all those years ago) for the second series of the relaunched Top Gear and beholden to Clarkson as an odalisque to a sultan, said it was a 'tragedy' it wasn't all swept under the carpet instead of 'made into something big'.  Which kind of suggests it happens in the studio regularly but kept under wraps - this time it happened in the public setting of a hotel.
May concluded his lament to journalists with, "he's a knob [as if this is the maximum level of criticism Clarkson deserves]  but I kind of like working with him."  Imagine it in court, the defence barrister saying, "My client did rob that old lady and it is clear he is a knob but he is liked by a lot of people.  I expect an acquittal."  Apparently, Clarkson dished it out to May and Richard Hammond on that fateful night too.  I felt like tweeting to May "@James May - like a wife who suffers domestic abuse bt still excuses hubby. Obvs loves a bully (like many, sadly)" and girded my loins for the inevitable Twitter backlash from Clarkson's and May's supporters.  Yet when I came to May's homepage, I was disarmed by his easy-going cheeky charm - his hashtagging #StillUnemployed and #SU was self-indulgent and narcissistic but his annotated examples in relation to this was amusing and I succumbed.  Then I thought 'what good would haranguing James May do?  He's not going to change his mind.'  Worse, I felt it would turn me into a troll and I despise those.  Admittedly, I would be challenging him to confirm or deny whether he thought Clarkson was a bully rather than another contributor who wanted to "bum this c*** [asterisks added by me] into oblivion" (May pointed out it came across as contradictory).  Twitter is a place to vent but not at others - too often emotion trumpets judgement for keyboard warriors however.  Selfishly, they want to make themselves feel better by directing their anger in a way they would never do face to face.  Twitter should be constructive yet of course it frequently veers to the dark side.
May is not alone, as proved by those million signatories and others threatening to stop their licence fee payments because they only watched the BBC for Clarkson (plus May and Hammond).  I wonder how many of them were bullies or hangers-on of bullies at school.  Beyond that circle, there is wider complicity, implicitly if not explicitly.  I think bullies are those who never grow up i.e. mature - a nightmare version of Peter Pan.  There is talk of zero-tolerance of bullying at school and in the workplace but it seems worryingly large numbers of British are willing to provide the practitioners of cruelty with considerable latitude, especially if it's all 'for bit of a laugh'.  Like racism, it's a common stain that goes under the radar.

Alps crash

For a long time, the French town of Barcelonette was principally famous for being a 'gap' in Louis XIV's 'iron frontier' of fortresses through which foreign armies could invade France and one which the Sun King and his ministers desperately tried to plug with more defensive fortifications.  Now it has a more macabre resonance with 148 people - including 16 German children returning from an exchange trip to Spain - perishing as the plane they were travelling on plummeted 30,000 feet into the Alps.  Barcelonette is the closest urban centre to the crash site.
The remote wilderness of the debris-strewn area is hampering recovery efforts but in some ways was essential to avoiding any more fatalities.  Aeroplane disasters are incredibly rare in north-central Europe and the last one to afflict France was Concorde's last flight in 2000 when it fell from the sky killing all onboard and four on the ground.  Unlike Concorde which was an ageing unsafe design, the Airbus A320 has arguably allowed the European aerospace company to supersede Boeing by being the workhorse of the aviation world from the 1990s onwards.  Checked routinely only the day before (albeit not a full in-depth check as is carried out every 18 months), this was just supposed to be another routine flight from Barcelona (no relation to Barcelonette) to Düsseldorf.  The impeccable safety record adds to the mystery.
It is always the most heartbreaking when children are killed in any circumstances and certainly in something as senseless as this.  The accoutrements of childhood as chilling memento mori of life never to be fulfilled, snatched away before they had any time to truly experience it.  A wealth of memories from the exchange trip annihilated.  It is comparable to the 45 Russian children killed in 2002 Überingen mid-air collision when an air traffic controller mistakenly directed the civilian aircraft into the the path of a cargo transport plane (though managerial incompetence and negligence of the privately run air traffic centre was the true guilty party).  By coincidence, their destination was Barcelona.  Überingen had a gruesome legacy as the air traffic controller was murdered (in front of his wife and three children) by one of the grieving fathers.  The killer was imprisoned before being released because his mental condition had not been sufficiently considered.  Like the (dubiously) convicted Lockerbie bomber's arrival in Libya, the Russian received a hero's welcome in his region of North Ossetia (where blood feuds are common) and was appointed a deputy minister.  There is no politics in today's Alps tragedy, just pure, horrific sadness.

Child's play

One of my daughter's favourite nursery rhymes involves 'Five little monkeys jumping on a bed," usually popping into her mind as she herself jumps on our bed - the 'big bed' as she calls it.  It came to mind when I read a BBC headline that rhythmically elided with the song - "How many Russians fighting in Ukraine?" (9,000 - 12,000).  The Russian version could go on for some time though.
"Five little monkeys jumping on the bed,
One fell off and bumped his head,
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said,
'No more monkey jumping on the bed'.
Four little monkeys jumping on the bed..."

"9,000 Russians fighting in Ukraine,
One shot down, left undeclared dead,
Putin called Merkel and Merkel said,
'No more Russians fighting in Ukraine'.
8,999 Russians fighting in Ukraine..."

How far back to take it?

In 2007, Poland, under then prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński (one half of the twins who ruled Poland at the time, with his brother Lech as president), caused consternation in Germany and indeed throughout Europe when it demanded extra voting weight in European decision-making (proportionally allocated to population size) because of all the Poles murdered by the Nazis in World War Two.  To compare Germany's current politicians with the Third Reich was unspeakably rude and did not advance Poland's cause one iota.
Previously, the twins had accused Berlin of 'historical amnesia'.  Similar phrases are now emanating out of Athens as the wrangle over Greek obligations within the Eurozone continues.  Similarly to the abrasive Kaczyńskis, high-ranking Syriza members (the dominant coalition party in the Greek government) are claiming they will not pay any scheduled debt until Germany compensates Greece with reparations for all the war damage inflicted upon the 'cradle of European civilisation' during World War Two.  If we want to go back in history, what about charging the city of Venice and the families of the German mercenaries employed in trying to dislodge the Turks from Athens at the start of the 18th century; the Venetian-employed mercenaries identified the Parthenon as harbouring a major Turkish gunpowder magazine (not to mention a refuge for women and children) for the Turks thought no-one would ever shell such a cultural artefact.  The Turks were wrong.  The Germans mortared it, blowing up the gunpowder (and the women and children to pieces) and sending the canopy of the Parthenon crashing to the ground.  If we are going back far enough, the island of Melos should reassert its independence from Athens, declare itself not a party to Greek debt and there resolve a 2,500-year old injustice.
The ironic thing is that Germany has largely come to terms with its Nazi past through a very painful process, exacerbated by being divided into two states.  Angela Merkel, on a recent visit to Japan, was right to point out that Japan never had to undergo a pentitential process and because of this, positive relations with its neighbours are not possible.  There are major sections of Japanese society who still believe their last war in the Pacific was a defensive one, that China and Korea were relatively untouched and that no war crimes were committed.  School textbooks have been sanitised to omit uncomfortable truths.  Whereas Germany was divided, Japan had no such existential partition and was quickly built up by the West to stand as a bastion against Asian communism, the zaibatsu corporations not being broken up as they should have been.  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to change the Japanese constitution to permit troop deployments abroad but until the Empire of Nippon has a reckoning with its past, this is very bad move.  The next time some unpleasant maverick wants to equate Germany now with Germany of 1933-1945, they should be shouted down but we should also think of Japan too.

Gear change

Success covers a multitude of sins, in Jeremy Clarkson's case more than most.  His legion admirers who in the past have excused the kind of casual racism that had long seen Bernard Manning, Roy Chubby Brown et al ushered from our television screens are now queuing round the block to act as apologists for his latest misdemeanour.  Actually 'misdemeanour' is too soft a word and plays into the hands of those who see as the naughty schoolboy cocking a snook at the establishment (myopically ignoring that he is part of that establishment).  More than 600,000 people have signed an online petition demanding Clarkson's reinstatement after the BBC suspended him.
Why did the BBC take this drastic step for its most bankable star?  After issuing a 'final warning' after he he provocatively used the 'n word' (but we all used it in our childhood say his defenders, like we all used to call Asians 'slopes'), there was a period of calm.  Now, though Clarkson has been accused of being in a 'fracas' (the delicate phraseology worthy of the licence fee alone say general BBC supporters), namely he punched or threw a punch at a Top Gear producer he thought was responsible for providing a cold platter of food rather than a steak after a day of filming.
To hurt (or at least try to hurt) someone, who may be entirely blameless for the catering arrangements, because you want a slab of cow in front of you is disgraceful.  To do it to someone who has been with the programme for ten years and thus someone you know fairly intimately is betrayal of any form of shared humanity.  Part of the Chipping Norton Set (containing the loathsome James Murdoch, the odious Charlie and Rebekah Brooks and of course, David and Samantha Cameron) - the exclusive club you least want to be a member of - Clarkson is also a Chelsea FC fan and so suffered a form of abstract punishment as his team not only lost and crashed out of Europe's premier competition before even making the quarter-finals, but lost in a humiliating fashion. 
As he sat in the stands, he watched Chelsea striker hurl someone to the ground, plus much other argy-bargy and probably felt in good company.  But José Mourinho, the supposed arch-tactician, was out-thought, as Chelsea - who had enjoyed a week's rest while their opponents Paris St-Germain had played on Sunday - laboured against ten men at home for 90 minutes after PSG's star player Zlatan Ibrahimovic was sent off in the 31st minute.  Was this a worse performance by Chelsea than when they lost 4-2 at home to lowly Bradford City in the FA Cup?  Was Mourinho being his usual sarcastic self when he said his players cracked under pressure from the opposition were reduced to ten men and under the pressure of playing at home?  In the night's other Champions League match, Bayern Munich showed how to beat at home over ninety minutes a team numerically disadvantaged.  Shaktar Donetsk had a player sent off in the third minute and Bayern ran out 7-0 winners.  Pressure, what pressure.
To return to Clarkson though.  Top Gear's remaining three episodes of the current series will not be shown as scheduled.  Clarkson will probably decamp to ITV or, more likely, Sky to present another motoring TV magazine, probably taking his colleagues James May (who is out of contract next month) and Richard Hammond with him.  Thus the damage he will suffer is only reputational and for a man like Teflon to his fans it won't matter.  For all those hundreds of thousands who signed a petition to reinstate Clarkson, they should be punched in the face and then made to reconsider if it's not a sacking offence before asking for him to be reinstated again.

Debating society

If not everyone remembers the first presidential debates broadcast to a national audience, people remember the lessons.  In the first debate, John F Kennedy triumphed via television, looking tanned and fit, while Richard Nixon, having refused studio make-up (unlike Kennedy) looked pale and shifty.  This was crystallised by those who had listened it to it solely on radio believing Nixon had won the debate.  Fewer recall that there were no more TV debates of this nature until 1976, when a president - Gerald Ford - lacking in credibility having not been on either a presidential or vice-presidential ticket sought to bolster his flagging support - and blew it.  Before that, Lyndon Johnson did not deign to debate with Barry Goldwater, sealing the Democratic landslide, while Richard Nixon, as incumbent, treating another political maverick, George McGovern, the same way eight years later.  In between, with a Democratic party in disarray following the stepping down of Johnson and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the rise of the segregationist Dixecrats, the returning Nixon had no need to debate.
The upcoming British General Election on 7th May looks likely to be even more messy than 1968 was for the USA and throw up far more permutations than the 2010 election.  Believing they lost the chance of an overall majority by consenting to debate with Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg, Conservative Head Office are keeping David Cameron in isolation.  The prime minister himself has been receptive to abandoning TV debates altogether.  First he wouldn't debate unless the Green Party was included in at least one of the TV debates - the Greens though only have one Westminster seat, so the broadcasters felt compelled to bring in the better represented Scottish and Welsh nationalists, as the national parties would be competing against the likes of them too.  This brought a howl of protest from the Northern Irish parties and so, reneging on his pledge to debate if the Greens were included, Cameron took up the cause of the Democratic Unionist Party (the DUP) and others in Ulster.  Having thrown up so many impediments, for Cameron then to declare to the broadcasters that his 'final offer' to "unblock the log jam" (which he himself has created!) was one debate, 90 minutes long, with Labour, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists was at such a level of patronising arrogance as to induce nausea.
Frankly, if the three debates do go ahead and the broadcasters 'empty-chair' him, they should leave a very telling empty podium in each of their studios too, to reinforce Cameron's contempt to show his face in public alongside fellow party leaders.  The debates should also be staged in the middle of the election campaign proper to further embarrass Cameron's no-show.  George HW Bush was called 'chicken' when he expressed his reluctance to debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992 - his subsequent performance (including at one point looking at his watch to see how much more of that particular debate he would have to endure) proving why.
The BBC has rightly said that the Northern Ireland parties would be excluded from the TV debates, first of all because the set-up would be even more chaotic than it already is (seven parties will reduce leaders' responses to mere soundbites) and secondly, the Conservative and Unionist Party are the only major party contesting seats in the Six Counties, Labour and Liberal Democrats traditionally fielding no candidates there.  The DUP, sympathetic to Conservative ideals, has threatened to take this ruling to judicial review, imperilling all the debates.  If the leaders' debates do not proceed this year, it could be another 15-16 years before they are revived.

India's Daughter Proves BJP's problem

In 2011, Werner Herzog, the maverick German film director, released a documentary called Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, which analyses the case of Michael Perry, who received a death sentence for murdering a nurse in Texas.  Perry was also suspected, but never charged, with two other murders.  There are interviews with victims' families, law enforcement officers and, notably, Perry himself, whose final dialogue is recorded only eight days before his execution.  As a result of the surge in interest in capital punishment, Herzog went on to write and direct a mini-series called On Death Row, shown on television in 2012, where in each of the four episodes he investigates the circumstances of convict sentenced to death.  As with Perry, this is not to ascertain guilt or innocence, or to 'humanise' them, but treat with them "simply as a human being, period."
The Storyville strand of documentary-making took on a similar theme when producing India's Daughter, directed by Leslee Udwin.  It focuses on the gang rape of Jyoti Singh, a 23-year old student out with her boyfriend at around 9 p.m., in December 2012.  Jyoti later died of the injuries from the subsequent beating she took from the attackers and became known as India's Daughter, the symbol for any daughter in the subcontinent.  In a striking turn in a democracy, this week the ruling Bharitya Janata Party (BJP) condemned the programme, prompting the police to introduce a restraining order and a Delhi Court to ban its broadcast in India.
The BBC, concerned at such political meddling, brought froward the UK airing from Sunday 8th March to Wednesday 4th March, with 300,000 watching it on YouTube.  It was such a late move that digital listings on BBC Four still had Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice highlighted on the television, despite the clearly different context.  It carried interviews with Jyoti's mother and father and friends, with police and high legal officials, with the defence counsel and the families of the rapists and also controversially with one of the rapists.
The incident happened in a bus commandeered by the gang to which the unwitting Jyoti and her boyfriend stepped aboard.  Mukesh Singh claims he was just the driver and did not participate in either the rape or the beating.  Yet, as has been widely circulate, he showed no remorse for the fate of Jyoti.  Mukesh blamed her for being out 'late' at night to the extent that she was more responsible than the attacker for what takes place and that Jyoti deserved to be taught a lesson.  Further, he said that woman should only be concerned with housework and housekeeping, that victims should not fight back when being raped.  Worst of all, he said that applying the death penalty to rapists will encourage future perpetrators to kill those they have violated, not leave the girl "like we did," unconcerned that Jyoti had suffered mortal injuries at the hands of Muskesh and his friends.
During the trial, the defence councel unsuccessfully tried to argue that it was thee victim's fault and that the men were not responsible for their actions.  One of the lawyers, ML Sharma stated in a mixture of nationalism and chauvanism, "We have the best culture.  In our culture, there is no place for women."  Th other member of the defence counsel, AP Singh, stated after the conviction that had a female member of his family committed a 'disgrace' as he perceived it, he would burn her alive.  A misogynist of the first order, in the documentary he stood by that position.  In a Western society, he would be struck off from practicing law.
The conservative BJP was a negative force for tolerance and civil liberties the last time it held the reins of national power.  Following its assumption of power in New Delhi, the mask of probity has slipped rapidly.  India's Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, threatened YouTube with broadcast of the video and pledged to find out and punish the officials who allowed a film crew access to a convicted rapist.  Rajnath spoke darkly of permission being given "under the previous tenure," a clear threat to halt law enforcement cooperation with future documentary makers.  As Gopal Subramanium, Senior Advocate at India's Supreme Court and member of a commission reviewing rape law in the wake on the attack on Jyoti, said on the film, "When you demand accountability, administrations feel threatened."
A rape review commission was only set up after massive protests across India in sympathy for Jyoti and hatred for the rapists.  Yet gang rapes have occurred since then.  In early 2014, two teenage sisters from the Dalit caste (commonly known as 'untouchables', who suffer widespread discrimination) were gang-raped and then lynched, which may have provoked Mukesh Singh to issue his perverted warning about introducing the death penalty for rapists.  Officially, India has one of the lowest incidences of rape in the world but according to Sudha Sundararaman, general secretary of the All India Democratic Women's Association, only 1 in 10 rapes in India gets reported, compared to 32% in the US, either through fear of retaliation or humiliation.
Not all of India's politicians were committed to censorship.  The Congress Party, the leading opposition political organisation supported the film and criticised the ban.  What Werner Herzog could do in the USA is in stark contrast to BJP-run India now and by acting in the name of India, the BJP bring shame to the whole country.
Leslee Udwin said in defence of her film that what interested her the most was the rapists were unremarkable men.  Mukesh Singh had a family - a distraught mother, a disbelieving wife and a very young son.  For Udwin, these men who attacked Jyoti were "not the disease but the symptoms of the disease and that disease is gender inequality."  Acid attacks, domestic violence and female foeticide are highly prevalent.  For Udwin, India has enough laws to deal with the problem, it is the implementation of those laws that is the problem.  Unfortunately for Indian women, gender inequality is not something the BJP wishes to hear about and instead of acting against it, prefers to close down avenues of discussion.

The human urge to destroy

Last week, there was a big outcry from western cultural experts and those in the West more attuned to international events as the extremists of ISIS proceeded to smash the museum artefacts of the Mosul, some of which were at least 2,700 years old, dating back to the glory days of the Assyrian and Mitanni empires.  There was a hope that these were replicas and the originals were squirrelled away safely but no-one seems sure.  The ostensible motive given was that they were un-Islamic but that they had survived so long under ISIS' aegis suggested that they were selected in assymetric revenge for the reverses suffered by their forces after months of pounding from the air by the USA and certain allies. 
In this, they recall the Baedeker Raids of April-May 1942 by Nazi Germany on English targets of immense cultural and historical significance outside of London.  By the middle of World War II, Bomber Command's operations against the Third Reich were beginning to have a serious effect, hammering Lübeck and razing seven-tenths of Rostock.  In revenge, the Nazis sought to demoralise the British by attacking treasured cities such as Canterbury, Bath, York, Norwich and notably Exeter, the latter "a gem," in the words of one gloating Luftwaffe officer, "before we came."  Though cultural targets were bombed further in the following 18 months too, they never reached the intensity of those fateful Spring months and were discontinued after heavy losses for no material gain, another quixotic foray by the Nazis that reaped no rewards for their war machine.
Bomber Command had long memories.  In addition to the nutjobs in Mosul on their demolition job, in recent days it has been the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden.  The east German city was of arguably even greater cultural worth than Exeter and crucially was only a transit point in the sense that it had roads, possessing no industry or war-making capacity of note.  It was though a prisoner of war destination and as the Germans knew the Allies knew it, left it little defended thinking that Allies would not imperial their own.  For two days, Bomber Command and the USAF rained down firebombs.  Quite aside from the human cost - the people in their air raid shelters melted alive to form a hideous gloop, the children evaporated - it was a fantastic own goal as Allied prisoners shared the same fate as the townsfolk.  The cultural heart of Dresden was ripped out.  Coventry (from 1940), Exeter and the others had been 'avenged' but it was a quite unnecessary.  In my educated opinion, it did not shorten the war by one day - it was, in fact, a war crime and it overshadowed all of the other important,if ugly, work of Bomber Command to the extent that it took until the 21st century before their contribution was recognised and even then it took public subscription rather than government funding to raise a memorial.  In the weeks following, Churchill is recorded as disavowing the Dresden raid once the magnitude of destruction became clear. 
The historian Andrew Roberts has vehemently affirmed the need to attack Dresden, Roberts' credibility is largely shot on matters of World War Two after he compared before the invasion of Iraq by George W Bush's USA, Saddam Hussein in 2003 with Adolf Hitler in 1939 in terms of likelihood of invading his neighbours, when in fact Saddam - monster as he was - had a toothless aspect after years of sanctions and no-fly zones and was victim of a gratuitous war of choice.  The leader with the closest comparison to 1939 Hitler in 2003 was Dubaya himself, but Roberts' right-wing ideologue blinkers would not permit him to be rational.  Roberts' was possibly being obsequious about Dresden to obviate the air crew as being war criminals, something that could not be swerved by saying "we were just carrying out orders." More truthfully than Roberts, my grandfather, a teenager at the time, when I saw him ten days ago still expressed his satisfaction at 'hitting Germany' - the human and cultural cost was irrelevant, it was about revenge, no matter how blunt it was.  Prague, tellingly, was left untouched by Bomber Command.
The East German communists rebuilt Dresden (bar the Cathedral, which had to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall) as their fellow socialists in Poland resurrected Warsaw, but it impossible to say how much was lost.  On a lighter note, a German teacher of mine, when she visited Dresden on a personal visit, asked if the blackened walls were a result of the bombing and was told by her guide that it was actually caused by the notorious belching pollution of East German cars.
Over the past years, it seems sites of incredible historical import have been wantonly trashed by extremist Islamists - Bamiyan by the Afghan Taliban, Cairo by Salafists following the fall of Mubarak, Timbuktu by Malian al-Qaeda, Krak de Chevaliers by ISIS, with the further loss of the great Bazaar in Aleppo in fighting and the looting of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities following the lawlessness in the wake of the 2003 invasion.  But we in this country have historical acts of destruction to suit our own ends.  There was Henry VIII's Year Zero with the Dissolution of the Monasteries - architectural marvels reduced to ruins.  Sir Francis Bacon, the late Elizabethan and early Stuart polymath, lamented the decline of English castles through neglect - this was before the English Republic 'slighted' many castles that had been held by Royalist forces with stacks of gunpowder, the spiteful attention given to Corfe Castle particularly distressing to modern sensibilities.  As the British Empire expanded, we burned the Grand Bazaar in Kabul after the massacre of 16,000 British and Indian settlers/occupiers in the ill-fated First Afghan War, we connived with the French in the destruction of the sumptuous Summer Palace of the Chinese Manchu Emperor in 1860 and we looted Abyssinia in 1867 to punish the eccentric emperor for his taking hostages after his letter to Queen Victoria was snubbed.  Even in peacetime, the British demolished Euston Station's Doric Arch with St Pancras Station narrowly avoiding the same fate and countless handsome town houses were pulled down (the survivors now sell for millions) to build hideous, shoddily built, crime-ridden blocks of flats which killed communities in the name of architectural ideology.
Such an ideology is little different in terms of a mindset to ISIS.  Mongolia lost more than 90% of its centuries old monasteries because they were 'feudal'.  The Russians accidentally destroyed the Amber Room of Catherine the Great looted from Tsarkoe Selo by the Germans as the former pounded an ancient East Prussian castle.  The totalitarians in the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and (not as extensively) Italy destroyed countless monuments and works of art that didn't fit with their views.  The Franks justified their sacking of Constantinople ex post facto because the Byzantines were 'heretics' (though this excuse didn't convince many in the West, not least because the Crusaders were excommunicate themselves after attacking the port of Zara).  The first (Chin) Emperor of China implemented a burning of books that wasn't rescinded until the second Han Emperor acceded the throne. Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist ruling family have obliterated 80% of historical Mecca since they took over in the 1920s.
There are so many more examples of the dark side of humanity in destroying things that would otherwise have benefitted future generations.  Vandals have existed for millennia (and not just briefly in the 5th-6th centuries AD) and continue to do so.  Buildings, art, literature and other artefacts are lost, never to be seen again.  We create, we wipe out some of it, we create more and later some of this is intentionally wrecked.  Of course, creation can take years, destruction can take seconds.  I have become phlegmatic when some new outrage is perpetrated on cultural icons because that is the history of human nature.  It's desperately sad but if not now, it would have happened at some point in the future.  We may think we hold ourselves to higher standards but it so easy to slip. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  We lose; however, we also replace. This is precisely why human life is worth preserving above all else - savagery is part of us but it is just a part, the essence to better things (in a non-destructive fashion) is so much more powerful an urge.  One human life is more precious than all the art in existence and has ever existed and the most important to preserve.  It is that to which we must hold.

Thoughts here and there

I was very busy last week, if not with looking after Kimberley after packed days of work and getting a heft of church papers ready, there was the weekend when Saturday was taken up first with going to Oadby (via Leicester) to visit my grandfather, popping back home briefly before going out to Canterbury for a friend's birthday.  And then on Sunday I was looking after Kimberley again.
One of the things I didn't watch was The Great European Disaster Movie, mostly scripted by Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist, which was slated by The Telegraph as the most patronising piece of TV ever.  Not surprising but the reviewer Gerard O'Donovan should have been careful with his language when he described it as a "mish-mash of fact, fiction and wild speculation" - this the modus operandi of The Telegraph's star economist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (who has been predicting the imminent demise of the Euro for at least seven years).  Then Toby Young produced his own widely partisan and highly selective rebuttal - the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People really does know how to do that - the best bit his eulogy of Norway for providing a model for Brexit; this would be the same Norway that has adopted more of EU law than Britain and has absolutely no say over it, the same Norway whose population is twelve times less than the UK's but has a far bigger reserve of oil to exploit.  But Young doesn't dislike the EU, he hates it so no-one should expect an objective riposte when he can pen an article for 'clickbait' purposes.
Anyway, enough of that.  Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on the SyFy Channel and noting the steady improvement in narrative since the mostly unimpressive first series (despite the hot outfits assigned to all non-security female staff, apart from Counsellor Deanna Troi after the pilot), it always is a source of satisfaction to see continuity errors series apart.  In Ensign Ro last night (fifth series), Captain Jean-Luc Picard served an admiral struggling with an illness a hot ginger tea, something Picard mentioned was his grandmother's way of tackling the common cold.  Even though the admiral admits that it is a Cardassian virus, Picard's own youthful experience seemingly contradicts Wesley Crusher who explains to Data in Datalore (in the first series) that 'a cold' was something humans used to have a very long time ago, suggestively longer than the 30-40 years in difference between Picard and Crusher.  The Simpsons dealt well with such fan criticism in The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochy Show, so it is wise not to pursue it further.
I was sad to hear of Sir Malcolm Rifkind's fall from grace, Jack Straw not so much.  Even though Straw offered far less, he did it in his parliamentary office, a clear breach of the rules.  Sir Malcolm's grandiose grandstanding was not illegal and it is quite natural to gild the lily to acquire a sinecure.  In fact, what might have sealed his downfall was his unrepentant response to the recordings in contrast to Straw who referred himself to the Standards Commissioner. I still remember Sir Malcom in the 1997 Tory wipeout in Scotland when he lost Edinburgh Pentlands, the electoral ousting of a serving Foreign Secretary complemented by the toppling of then Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, in Enfield Southgate.  This removed two potential leaders for the Conservatives in the rebuilding process that took place thereafter, with William Hague's time coming too soon (the Tories had a net gain of one constituency seat in 2001 - Labour retained its hegemonic majority of 160+).  Now, not only was Sir Malcolm forced to step down from the Intelligence and Security Committee and suspended from the Conservative Party but will be forced to relinquish the ultra-safe Tory seat of Chelsea and Kensington - Boris 'The Animal' Johnson must be kicking himself for not waiting and going for the still safe but less rock solid seat of Uxbridge.  Straw was already stepping down in 2015, so it is sad end to Sir Malcom's political career (that place in the Lords probably won't happen either).  His 'crime' is small beer to the vast networks of corruption that cripple the US Congress.  Because of lax rules that constitute a breach of the law only in regard to a direct quid pro quo, lobby groups have captured almost every member on Capitol Hill, with the 'pay-off' coming further down the line rather than immediately. It has got to the extent that elected representatives rarely resort to filibusters because they are so busying contacting lobbyists to secure extra funding.  We shouldn't judge ourselves by those who are worse but the 'sins' of Sir Malcolm and Straw are miniature in comparison.

Murder sums up Russia moving backwards

- “To the decision-makers in the Kremlin, heirs to a militaristic and often paranoid tradition of statecraft, Russia appears surrounded by [its own] crumbling frontiers…”
           Professor Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 512

When Professor Kennedy wrote those words in the mid-1980s, he surmised that were the USSR to withdraw its forces from its Warsaw Pact satellites in Eastern Europe, the Red Army General Staff feared that “it may be seen as indication of Moscow’s loss of willpower.” Vladimir Putin was stationed as a KGB officer in East Germany and was one of those withdrawn, returning to a country in chaos. This is why Germany and France negotiated a ceasefire deal in the Ukraine overwhelmingly favourable to the Kremlin because Putin and the security establishment to which he is beholden, would not permit anything interpreted as a loss of willpower. With the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister of the Boris Yeltsin years opposed to Russian action in the Ukraine, that narrative has a domestic focus too.
Nemtsov was to be one of the key leaders at an anti-war rally on Sunday 1st March dissenting from the nationalistic bombast and foreign meddling of the establishment hierarchy. Instead, the protest became a memorial for a man killed within sight of the Kremlin walls in a drive-by shooting. Like the contract murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, for which five men were convicted last June, it will probably never emerge who ordered Nemtsov’s elimination and for what exact motive. Putin may denounce it as ‘vile’ and there will be no paper trail leading back to him (Russian authorities are very good at destroying computers as FIFA’s flawed inquest into the bidding process for the 2018 World Cup discovered), but all roads leading back to him and his coterie, if only for the siege mentality atmosphere. Having criticised Russian intervention in the Ukraine, Nemtsov was walking with his Ukrainian girlfriend when he was gunned down, so it is possible that a nationalist group unaffiliated with the government could have been responsible. It is unlikely, given the professional nature of the assassination but if true, this action was given cover by the tone of the Russian government, with its talk of internal enemies and fifth columns.
It is a paradox of Russia’s political climate that it permits protests despite the steady squeezing of political and civil rights. The security elite are relatively well ensconced in power with stage-managed ‘sovereign democracy’ and Putin’s own high approval ratings, stemming from the widespread belief that he prevented the disintegration of Russia when he assumed the reins of the last day of 1999, means that there would be have to be a very sharp economic shock to provoke widespread discontent. As such, protests are tolerated and disparaged, if not ignored altogether. They also allow the security services to identify key members of the opposition and circumscribe them – Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Putin and the Kremlin, is currently under house arrest.
Nevertheless, an estimated 70,000 marched through central Moscow on 1st March at what had become a memorial rally, with a further 6,000 in St Petersburg. The crowds may have been lower had Nemtsov not been murdered, as some attendees have attributed their presence to international media. Unlike the march in Paris in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo/Jewish supermarket attacks, no world leaders turned up to join them, contenting themselves with the hue and cry for their own domestic audiences that they have issued since the uprising in Syria began.
At both demonstrations the mood was sombre and largely silent, in contrast to how the . In Moscow, they gathered at Slavyanskaya Square, proceeded to the bank of the Moskva river before turning right to the spot where Nemtsov met his end. In this way, it was a secular marking of significant death similar to the religious commemoration in the form of the construction of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood on the site where Tsar Alexander II suffered mortal injuries at the hands of anarchists. The Russian Orthodox Church today is as full of fervent praise for Putin’s administration as it once supported the Imperial Family and it is unlikely that Moscow city hall will support a form of permanent remembrance of Nemtsov.
Ultimately, the marchers were as much committed to self-respect in their turnout rather than changing the political situation, bearing banners saying “I am not afraid.” That a forest of Russian flags were held aloft rebutted claims that they are traitors to the Russian state – indeed they are the people the country and the world needs. While Putin and his security cronies seek tactical victories in the east while fostering division in the west, Russia, in the long-term is doomed to decline with its catastrophic demographic shrinkage. Hiding behind the barricades while it withers away from within and investment is scared off is disastrous, not least in that it could lash out. As Professor Kennedy states, “historically, none of the overextended, multinational empires… the Ottomans, the Spanish, the Napoleonic… ever retreated to their own ethnic base until they had been defeated in a Great Power war.” Further, he adds, “such transformations normally occur at very great cost and not always in a predictable fashion.” How to coax Russia back into the comity of nations will be the supreme challenge to Western policy-makers, if they can even grasp it.