28 October, 2023

Behind the headlines

Protesters in London earlier this month. Aisha Nazar/Getty

The warped logic of “oppressors vs oppressed”

Why is it, says Yascha Mounk in The Spectator, that after the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust, huge demonstrations filled the streets of Berlin, London, Paris and Brussels, “not in solidarity with those who had been brutally murdered, but in support of the terrorists”? The most charitable interpretation is that protesters were expressing a desire to protect Palestinian civilians from Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. But if that is the true motive, where were the throngs of people mourning the hundreds of thousands of Shias – “or, for that matter, 3,000 Palestinians” – murdered by Bashar al-Assad in Syria? Or the millions of Uighurs oppressed by the Chinese government in Xinjiang?

The “simple, sobering truth” is that the progressive left has largely ignored these appalling crimes, and instead reserved its rage for the “only state in the world that happens to be Jewish”. To understand why, it’s important to see how “the meaning of racism has changed”. Where once it meant simply believing that a person with a different ethnicity is inferior, the new definition divides the whole world into “oppressors and oppressed”. By this warped logic, Jews, who have been in the Middle East for thousands of years, become “colonisers”; Israelis are viewed as whites, and thus incapable of being victims. As Vice Magazine says: “It’s literally impossible to be racist to a white person.” The progressive left claims to be fighting colonialism. The irony is that ignoring the reality of non-Western countries and blindly imposing quintessentially American ideas on the rest of the world is itself a “neo-colonial enterprise”.

👍👎 Opinions in Britain on the conflict fall along predictably tribal lines, says Aris Roussinos in UnHerd. Yet not so long ago the poles were entirely reversed: support for the “Israeli socialist experiment” was the “righteous left-wing cause”, and sympathy for the Palestinians was an “almost parodically right-wing opinion”. In 1948, The Spectator was heaping praise on the Arab Legion’s “Bedouin chivalry and élan”. In the late 1960s, Martin Amis wrote a letter home from Oxford marvelling that he had met an “incredible reactionary yesterday who supports the Arabs vs Israel”.

Heroes and villains

Leon Neal/Getty

Villain

Rachel Reeves, whose new book appears to have plagiarised other work. The Women Who Made Modern Economics reproduces “entire sentences and paragraphs” from Wikipedia, The Guardian and various blogs, says the FT. Ironically, one of the book’s themes is “women not receiving credit for their work or ideas”.

Hero

US Senator Chuck Grassley, who has developed quite the reputation as a matchmaker. This week, the 90-year-old Republican celebrated the marriage of the 20th couple who had met while working in his office. Singles in the Washington DC area have asked on social media whether he has any job openings.

Villains

Organisers of a Swiss ski competition, who have been accused of stealing snow from a nearby glacier threatened by climate change. A Zurich newspaper has released footage of diggers harvesting snow from the Theodul Glacier, near Zermatt, which has shrunk by 10% in the past two years. Alpine World Cup officials allegedly scooped up five football pitches’ worth of the white stuff for their November tournament, which was cancelled last year due to lack of snow.

Hero

Giorgia Meloni, for flying the flag for “heartbreak leave”. The Italian PM was recently confronted with footage of her long-term partner making suggestive comments to a female colleague, after which she announced their separation and took a “personal day” off from her party conference. Quite right too, says Elle Hunt in The Guardian. Sometimes, people are “too heartbroken, too tearful, or simply too sad to be able to work”. Credit to Meloni for admitting it.

Property

THE PIED-A-TERRE This one-bedroom penthouse in Holloway, north London, has floor-to-ceiling windows along one side, filling the flat with light and affording far-reaching views over the leafy canopies of Highgate Wood. In the newly renovated kitchen, a wall of bespoke joinery provides extensive storage above a dining area with built-in bench seating. Terrazzo flooring extends from the well-proportioned double bedroom into a brightly tiled bathroom with walk-in shower. Archway Tube station is a 10-minute walk. £465,000.

Books

Ullstein Bild/Getty

George Orwell’s peculiar palate

George Orwell had peculiar taste in food, says Gustav Jönsson in Jacobin. As a new biography by DJ Taylor recounts, the author’s wife once went out for the night, “leaving a shepherd’s pie in the oven for her husband and a dish of eels on the floor for the cat, and came home to find that Orwell had eaten the eels”. He would wolf down meals that even wartime Londoners would reject. After a Fleet Street lunch with the anarchist writer George Woodcock, consisting of boiled cod and turnips “so foul that Woodcock sent them back”, Orwell patted his stomach and remarked: “I never thought they’d have gone so well together.”

Though the writer talked up his poverty, he was “comfortably off” after joining the BBC in 1941, and “outright rich” once Animal Farm was published four years later. “He’d make a point of showing up to smart cocktail parties in his shabby corduroy suit, but everyone could plainly see that it had been cut by an expensive tailor.” In 1933’s Down and Out in Paris and London, he neglected to mention that his aunt lived a few blocks from the hotel where he was supposedly starving, and that he might have “popped in for the occasional meal”. Likewise, he omitted that he was only reduced to working as a plongeur – a dishwasher – “because a prostitute nicked his wallet”.

Orwell: The New Life by DJ Taylor is available to buy here.

Zeitgeist

Students at King’s Canterbury: still going after 1,426 years

The perennial fashion for catastrophe

The fashionable term among those keen to “come over terribly serious on the international conference circuit”, says James Marriott in The Times, is “polycrisis”. It is a “usefully impressive” way of saying everything is going wrong at once: “pandemic, wars, autocrats, AI, climate change”, you name it. Just glance at the “topical non-fiction” on display at Waterstones and you will see the “morose consensus” among our public intellectuals: End Times, The Uninhabitable Earth, How Democracies Die, Why Empires Fall, Doom. A recent survey found that 39% of Americans believe we are living in the “end times”.

But while it is vogueish to “eyeroll at naïve liberal fantasies of progress”, irrational faith in catastrophe is no more sophisticated than blind optimism. The history of our “prosperous and stable democracy” is haunted by fears of “collapse, revolution and crisis”. Those on the right who fear the “death of the West” through decadence or the rising East repeat century-old prophecies that have yet to materialise. On the left, dreams of a “final crisis of capitalism” are at least as old as Karl Marx. “The underrated force in human history is stasis.” Human institutions are far more resilient than we often imagine. The great fifth-century basilica church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome has been tending to its flock for a millennium and a half, only a little longer than the King’s School Canterbury has been educating children. Parliament is plausibly 800 years old and our monarchy 1,200. The fashion for catastrophe is really just historical narcissism – the equivalent of the self-pitying egomaniac’s cry: “Why does everything bad always happen to me?”

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Life

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The Yellow Pages of the criminal underworld

Dave Courtney, a former London gangster who has died aged 64, was known as “Yellow Pages” for his criminal connections, says The Daily Telegraph. The index to his memoirs – serialised in a tabloid newspaper under the headline “I STUCK A FORK IN HIS HEAD” – was littered with the names of former associates: Caesar the Geezer, Fred the Head, Jimmy Five Bellies. In 1995, Reggie Kray asked him to oversee security for his brother Ronnie’s funeral. Courtney recruited a small army of bouncers – “With this lot,” he mused, “I could have invaded Poland” – and wore a floor-length, silk-lined Versace coat that made him look, in his own words, “like Darth Vader”.

Born in Bermondsey, southeast London to respectable working-class parents, Courtney started out by supplying security guards for London nightclubs and (somewhat forcefully) collecting debts. He soon built up a lengthy rap sheet, serving a year in Belmarsh for an incident involving “six Chinese waiters, a meat cleaver and a Samurai sword”, and once trying to “steal a spider monkey from Crystal Palace Zoo”. But he loved the spotlight: he turned up for one court case dressed as a jester; after being acquitted for murder in another case, he announced on the court steps that he was, in fact, guilty. He also loved what he saw as the “glamour” of criminal life. In 1999, “dripping in gold bling”, he attended Ronnie Biggs’s 70th birthday party in Rio de Janeiro, with a card from the notorious prisoner Charles Bronson. “For want of a better word, it’s Romantic,” Courtney said, tears in his eyes. “I feel like I’m living a part of history.”

Weather

Quoted

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”