Cassandra Voices

Author: David Langwallner

  • Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch Challenges Gangsters Inc.

    At their inauguration, public leaders
    must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
    to atone for their presumption to hold office –
    Seamus Heaney, ‘From the Republic of Conscience’

    With a Dublin Central by-election on the horizon, Irish politics appears to be descending into GUBU. The ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ prospect of alleged crime boss Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch taking a seat in Dáil Éireann looms large in a May by-election triggered by the resignation of former Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe.

    Supreme Court Justice Peter Charleton once inquired as to why I pleaded for John Gilligan not as a gentleman, but as a self-employed businessman. Gilligan’s singular presence and the shadow over the murder of Veronica Guerin engendered the Criminal Assets Bureau and The Proceeds of Crime Act 1996. This was the beginning of the end for Due Process in Ireland. In the interim, one form of organised crime mutated into another via NAMA and offshore accounts. Thus, Ireland’s Gangster Inc. of Cuckoo and Vulture Funds was born.

    Of course, Gilligan never held political office, but Hutch’s candidacy and near election to the Dáil in 2023 begs the question as to whether an alleged crime boss ought to be barred from holding political office. Any such prohibition would raise questions of definition, and indeed whether the activities of present or former office holders, including at least one former Minister for Justice I can think of, might fit that description.

    There are obvious examples of corrupt politicians such as former Fianna Fáil T.D. Liam Lawlor, paid a small fortune by Beef Baron Larry Goodman, who remains one of the state’s richest citizens. During the 1980s a rogue’s gallery of grafters made their home in Leinster House. Today’s white collar criminals keep their finger nails clean, if not their toe nails, which remain firmly embedded in the dirt.

    A drawing of Ned Kelly on a wall in Melbourne.

    Art Imitating Life?

    A hagiographic play recently staged in Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre offered an alternative take on the staid format of the party-political broadcast. Remarkably, the eponymous hero of ‘The Monk’ made a surprise appearance on stage on the opening night, taking part in a fictional live question-and-answer session with playwright and performer Rex Ryan.

    The lineage of conventional – as opposed to de facto – Irish gangsters proceeds from Martin Cahill to Gilligan and the Kinahan Cartel, and on to Gerry Hutch. The Irish media display a morbid fascination mixed with veneration for their undeniable chutzpah – Martin Cahill’s costume clown appearances on multiple court appearances springs to mind.

    It is certainly not an exclusively Irish phenomenon. In his autobiography, Geoffrey Robertson KC describes his fellow Australian’s veneration of the Wild Colonial Boy, Ned Kelly. Further evidence emanates from the global success of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1970), or the many films of Martin Scorsese exploring mobsters’ lives.

    It should be acknowledged that politics has always had close associations with crime, and not just in a state such as Italy under Andreotti or Berlusconi. The distribution of patronage and the promulgation of laws are often to the benefit of sectional, corporate or individual interests, who endeavour, and often grease, political machines with filthy lucre.

    A dirty business requires forensic and independent journalism, and may even compromise those intent on cleaning it up. JFK’s brother Bobby went full throttle against organised crime post-election, but the former seems to have relied on shady elements to win the Presidential election. That unrequited love may have led, one way or another, to Dallas, Texas.

    As Boby Dylan put it in ‘Murder Most Foul’:

    Then they blew off his head when he was still in the car
    Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
    ‘Twas a matter of timing and the timing was right
    You got unpaid debts and we’ve come to collect
    We’re gon’ kill you with hatred and without any respect
    We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face
    We’ve already got someone here to take your place

    …

    That’s the place where Faith, Hope and Charity died

    That infamous day certainly paved the way for the cabal now in office: ‘Business is business and it’s murder most foul.’

    Terrorist to Law-Maker?

    A criminal and law-breaker, or even a terrorist, can also become a unifying figure like Nelson Mandela, a national hero such as Michael Collins, or more ambiguously, a peacemaker like Gerry Adams. Perhaps Gerry Hutch is on his own Road to Damascus. He certainly portrays himself as a latter-day Robin Hood, bent on exposing the criminality of  Garda Síochána. Who knows what he’d come out with under Dáil privilege. If so what could he achieve?

    Gary Gannon, the pearl-clutching Social Democrats T.D. from the same constituency claimed to have been shocked at seeing Hutch on the ballot paper last time out. Former Taoiseach, and legendary recipient of brown envelopes, Bertie Ahern described Gannon’s comments as ‘absolute nonsense,’ and noted with moral ambivalence and some subtlety:

    Gerry Hutch has been around as long as me. I won’t get into morals or ethics but I have trampled that ground for 40 years and Hutch has been kind to the community in Dublin Central in indirect ways. Whether we like it or not, he is respected by people which explains his 3,000 votes. It is not just younger people voting for him, older people I know voted for him. We can all say the self-righteous things we want but the reaction is what it is.     

    It is noteworthy that Ahern’s political machine was colloquially known as the Drumcondra Mafia. At least when Hutch was growing up in the area, there were few options other than criminality for raising oneself out of poverty. Moreover, as Balzac put it: ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime’ Which among the wealthiest individuals in Ireland have not soiled their bibs?

    The distinction between conventional robber and a new breed of corporate robber barons is unclear, or how to evaluate it in ethical or moral terms. Perhaps the writ of the Monk is preferable to the Cuckoo Funds making housing unaffordable for most of the population?

    George Galloway making his post-declaration speech at the 2024 Rochdale by-election.

    Protest Vote

    By-elections are an ideal opportunity for one-off protest votes. Consider the recent case of George Galloway who won the seat of Rochdale by a landslide in 2023, before losing it in the 2024 U.K. General Election.

    The Irish diaspora have long been adept at bringing out the vote, arranging transfers, and indeed scouring electoral registers for the dead and the dying. Gerry Hutch has called on disenfranchised citizens to register to vote – just as the Democrats in the U.S. continue to leverage disenfranchised minorities.

    His candidature is not unlike what one used to see in the U.K. with the Monster Raving Loony Party and Screaming Lord Sutch. Yet Hutch stands a real chance. And what if one were to advise him, however guardedly, on how to beat the established parties?

    Garnering acceptance among floating voters, and picking up precious transfers, would require him to articulate political objectives, at least in outline. Apart from being critical of the conduct of the Gardaí, what does he stand for?

    The Dublin Central constituency has some of the worst poverty in the state, alongside new hipster wealth and significant immigration in recent years. A manifesto of sorts would be worthwhile, addressing the concerns of native Dubliners in particular, and hopefully encouraging greater acceptance of diversity. Tony Gregory brought great benefits to the area. An independent candidate like Hutch might be able to perform a similar role.

    Corruption ought to be condemned, but violence should never be condoned. A reformed Hutch might have greater clout among troublesome elements than most politicians when addressing the current wave of violent crime. Recent fuel protests reveal Ireland to be on the brink.

    It remains to be seen whether Gerry Hutch has any real ideas for addressing the enduring problems of access to housing, health and education, or the increasing lawlessness in city centre, as the State continues to fail in its primary duty to keep the peace.

    Tom Wolfe in 1988.

    Radical Chic

    Tom Wolfe in his 1970 New Yorker essay ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers. Wolfe’s concept of radical chic lampooned individuals (not unlike jet setters such as Paddy Cosgrave and his ‘Whistleblower’ Café) who endorsed leftist radicalism to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions.

    In short, Radical Chic is described as a form of highly developed decadence; and its greatest fear is to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle-class. One suspects, however, that their Irish equivalents would be wary of Gerry Hutch, but let’s see.

    At one level I endorse his candidature as a means of giving the establishment a kick up the posterior, but it remains to be seen whether he possess any real ideas for addressing the issues I have alluded to. In the Kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Perhaps the best that can be said of Gerry Hutch is that he might prove to be a superior form of gangster than the rest.

  • In God We Trust Inc.

    Ryszard Kapuściński in Imperium (1993) warned of three plagues, or contagions threatening the world: nationalism, racism and fundamentalism. He further identified one shared trait or a common denominator in ‘an aggressive all powerful total irrationality,’ arguing that ‘[a]nyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits its sacrificial victims.’

    The lunatics have now well and truly taken over the asylum worldwide. We are now witnessing a new unholy war being led by evangelical Christians against Islam, just as earlier crusades emanated from Europe in the Middle Ages. And like those earlier wars, the acquisition of plunder is clearly a motivating factor.

    Noticeably, the clearly sociopathic Pete Hegseth talks of the Iran war as God’s War, and the soldiery are briefed accordingly. Trump uses similar language, but holy wars often occlude terrestrial agendas. Add the dimension of rampant technology, wherein war is conducted remotely in video game sequences and one reaches a level of savagery reminiscent of the 1940s. Meanwhile AI plunders our libraries and distorts our reality with propagandist bombast.

    Hegseth’s macabre ceremonies in the White House have included Doug Wilson, the founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He has stated that homosexuality should be a crime and that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. As editor of The Princeton Tory, Hegseth also suggested that homosexuality was immoral.

    In March 2026, soon after the start of the U.S./Israeli attack – branded with the biblical denotation Operation Epic Fury – it has been reported that military leaders told their service members that the war was ‘part of God’s divine plan,’ and that President Donald Trump had been anointed by Jesus. One commander quoted the Book of Revelation, and said the war will bring the second coming of Jesus Christ. The whole exercise has a distinct air of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1959).

    The legendary punk band, The Dead Kennedys album In God We Trust Inc (1982) curiously presages our times, but none of what is being done in God’s name is properly Kennedyesque, or indeed genuinely Christian. It appears to be an extension of what Eisenhower warned of the existential threat of the Military Industrial Complex. Wars. As IG Farben and Bleichroder knew, wars are a great source of revenue.

    The leading Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis is also a believer in God’s law. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman and purely for procreation. He considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful. In Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) he compares abortion to carpet bombing civilians. Sadly, murdering the civilian population of Iran does not appear to bother the zealots in the White House to the same extent as interfering with women’s reproductive rights.

    Jonathan Sacks, the leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K. railed against extremism. In Morality (2020) he outlined positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good. Is all of this now lost on the Likud faction in Israel?

    Christian jihadism, historically, also includes the horrendous conquest of South America by Spanish Conquistadors. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched at one level in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in securing oil. The war in Iran, now engulfing the entire Middle East, also has significant acquisitive elements, but is more obviously an attack on what is perceived in racial terms as a satanic culture.

    Shortly before his death Sacks equated altruistic evil with the neoconservative group, who held themselves to be good and their opponents to be evil. This leads to the arrogant imperialist assumptions that ‘we’ are inflicting punishment for ‘their’ own good, and that killing multitudes will pave the way to democracy.

    Both the late Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily pointed at Islam. Islamic extremism does provide graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists. There is also evident in Britain a lack of integration, and a secessionism unconducive to any kind of harmonious multiculturalism. Recourse to genocide, however, seems to be the preserve of evangelical Christians and Zionists.

    Osama bin Laden (L) sits with his adviser and purported successor Ayman al-Zawahiri (Foto: HO/Scanpix 2011)

    Islamic Rage

    Much of the Islamic rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East. The current phase began in earnest with the invasion of Iraq, and has culminated in this attack on Iran.

    Christopher Hitchens’ worst intellectual error, inexcusable in my view, was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. He was, indirectly, supporting, though he might not have seen it, an even worse form of religious fundamentalism directed against another.

    In works such as Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Orientalism (1978) the Palestinian author Edward Said author asserted that ‘Patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds can lead to mass destructiveness.’ He cites our own Conor Cruise O’Brien to the effect that imagined communities of identity are hijacked by the petty dictators of state nationalism, like Benjamin Netanyahu.

    In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education. We have seen an all-too-great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.

    In these straitened times extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies even self-immolation.

    As the wheels come off the neoliberal economic system and the societal bonds wither, extremist Christian nationalism and the demonisation of the other has stepped into the void to provide solace.

    Passion Conferences, a music and evangelism festival at Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, in 2013.

    U.S. Evangelism

    In the United States, we are witnessing an unholy synergy between Evangelical Christians and racism. Far-right demagogues have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism espoused by liberal elites, Harvard or straight socialism. All of these apparently emanate from the decadence of a mixed race cosmopolis. The fire is spreading to Europe, U.K and Ireland too.

    Thus, we find a global descent into the extremist and racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. This is a product of a dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This leads to the demonisation of those we disagree with, evident also in social media vilification.

    What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the rich chosen people from the disaster they inflict on others.

    The now tarnished Noam Chomsky once claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history.’ Chomsky also claimed in a BBC Newsnight interview that nearly 40% of the American public believe that the Second Coming will occur by 2050. So, Pete Hegseth may be preaching to the converted.

    Brazilian President Lula with Pope Francis 21.06.2023 
    Foto: Ricardo Stuckert/PR

    Religion as Agent for Good?

    Alternatively, in The Godless Gospel (2020) Julian Baggini calls for forms of religion shorn of hatred so we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion. He envisages a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth, causing as little harm as possible. There are clearly good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion presently lacking in moral clarity.

    Above all, the atheist and perhaps the leading intellect left on the planet Jurgen Habermas recognises how religion engenders social integration, and can be a basis for communicative action, his core concept. As far back as 1978 he argued, from a secular perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. These would be religious ideas where we learn to communicate reasonably without resort to falsetto Jihadism.

    The former Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires also appear to have shaped an empathy towards the wretched of the Earth. He preached tolerance and engagement, as well as social and economic justice. The present Pope has, encouragingly, in un-American fashion, condemned what is happening, however mutedly. Let us hope that he is untainted by the dark money of the Vatican and does not go the way of John Paul II.

    Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.

    Neo-feudalism

    We appear to be witnessing Old Testament fury, but beyond the zealotry it seems that neoliberalism is morphing into neo-feudalism. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the Earth, which appears to be permitting a scorched earth approach, but this is a smoke screen. Institutional Evangelical Christianity is wedded to the exchange of goods, along with the exchange of gods. Drill Baby Drill.

    The last word I leave to Clarence Darrow, who represented a progressive America of another era in his closing speech in The Scopes Trial:

    Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.——-, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

    Those who suffer from toxic nationalism, toxic religious mania and toxic racism are beyond reason and must be overcome.

    Feature Image: Some of Pete Hegseth’s tattoos, 2021

  • Political Art – from Banksy to Weimar

    A reliable source, who happens to be representing him, now informs me that Banksy is to be prosecuted over his RCJ mural. This form of artistic censorship, leads me to consider the important role that art has played in terms of political commentary, and how some of the masterpieces in this genre resonate with contemporary events.

    Many of the atrocities of our time are today hidden from view, as computer game technology permits de-humanised genocide. War reporters are often banned from reporting on the ground, or if they do they are generally ’embedded,’ as tools of propaganda. There is no Robert Capa or Don McCullen visible in this age. As a result, death and barbarism are remote, with disinformation omnipresent. Thus we rely on an artist such as Banksy to redress the imbalance, and provoke a moral response.

    Today we can, at best, only partially bear witness to our reality. The news media offers up a version akin to a flame throwing shadows on the wall of a cave. Previously art engaged more closely with politics, but today few artists speak to our time.

    Many great artists throughout history have of course remained non-political and focused on the human condition. Moreover, political art often veers into dogmatism – recall socialist realism or Italian fascist art. One must carefully distinguish art from propaganda. Satire and caricature walk an uneasy path in this respect.

    The origins of European art lie in the depiction of mainly Biblical scenes, which yielded little of an overtly political nature, although the proton-surrealist work of Hieronymus Bosch especially ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ (1490) speak of a world of chaos and brutality. This is not dissimilar to our present universe. Depictions of hell provide a commentary on social entropy and evil.

    Among the pioneers in depicting ordinary human life was the Flemish master Peter Breughal the Elder. Scenes of social gatherings and festivities contain subtle and unobtrusive political messages. So, for example in the ‘Census at Bethlehem’ (1566) you have to look very closely to find Jesus and Mary arriving in on a donkey and trap amid representations of peasant life. His paintings provide hints into the nature of the institutions and practices of the time, and the plight of poor folk.

    In Renaissance Italy Titian and Raphael’s Cardinals often show cruelty or majestic temporal power. In those hardened faces one often gets a sense of that time. The demonic religious paintings of Caravaggio are almost a textbook exercise in conspiracy, murder and intrigue. How much fun would he have hid with the Jeffrey Epstein revelations!?

    Mary and Joseph are registered in the census at Bethlehem.

    Durer and Beyond

    The only Renaissance giant who is markedly different, and often avowedly political by way of mysterious and hidden social commentaries, is the great German painter Albrecht Dürer. It is the woodcuts and the lithographs where the apocalyptic commentary is most evident. The fourth woodcut of his Apocalypse cycle ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, (1497) depicts the first four of seven seals that must be opened for the Apocalypse to begin, These are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. All are now evident internationally.

    In the famous engraving ‘Knight Death and Devil’ (1513) the knight seems resigned, and his facial features are downcast with the devil enveloping him. It is believed the portrayal is a literal, though pointed, celebration of the knight’s Christian faith, and of the ideals of humanism threatened or protected by the fox.

    The engraving Melancholia (1514) is a magus of ideas, clearly influenced by paganism, alchemy, and astrology – the dark demonological arts. It is also a cold mathematical work and exercise in numerology. It contains a brooding central figure, best represented as an allegory of the limits of reason, and a personal or collective descent into madness when reason no longer makes sense. To anyone scrolling through Twitter on a daily basis this may sound all-too-familiar.

    William Hogarth’s tremendous political engravings are also worth mentioning in respect of contemporary afflictions. His most famous print, Gin Lane (1751) graphically depicts infanticide, drunken oblivion, disinterment of corpses, starvation, beggary, poverty, impalement, suicide, debt, debauchery and the collapsing buildings of society. Also notable are his anti-corruption election cartoons such as An Election Entertainment (1757).

    Hogarth’s only contemporary competitor was James Gilroy and his famous ‘Plum Pudding in Danger’ (1805), which seems most apt for our present world, dividing into competing trading blocks. In this Napoleon and Pitt divide the world up and gorge themselves. Napoleon is cutting away a slice of land to the east of the British Isles marked ‘Europe’, but his piece of land is much smaller than Pitt’s portion of sea. The inscription reads: ‘state gourmets taking a little supper’. Greenland, Ukraine take your pick.

    Goya is the greatest political artist of them all in my view. In his oeuvre we encounter a treasure trove of commentary for our time. First and foremost, there is the incredible execution painting ‘The Third of May’ (1808), revisited by Manet, as well as lithographs of torture and brutality. His work curiously presages contemporary debauchery and cannibalism, societal and solipsistic that is.

    French Revolution

    In the same period there is the great portrait painter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era Jacque-Louis David. Some might consider his Neo-Classicisal style a little austere, but it’s nonetheless worthwhile visiting the main gallery in Bruges just to see The Death of Marat (1793).

    David was a propagandist for the Jacobins. Marat, the Montagnard faction, was murdered by Charlotte Corday, who supported the opposing Girondins. She blamed Marat for his involvement in numerous executions that had taken place during the Terror quite correctly, but the painting strengthened support for the Montagnards as David successfully presented him as a tireless revolutionary betrayed by conniving forces. A martyr covered in a holy glow, taking his last breaths, with revolutionary pen in hand.

    Indeed, the Reign of Terror only heightened after this painting’s release and after the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David shifted allegiance to the Emperor Napoleon, for whom he produced fawning political art including The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). Admirers of the Marat painting should read Albert Camus’s The Rebel (1951) as to the true Marat and the extremist terror.

    A near contemporary of David, Delacroix of course creates the famous painting of the flag and revolution Liberty Leading the People (1830), but we should be cautious about that French notion in its unrestrained form, certainly at this juncture, although the argument for protest and change are greater than ever.

    Death of Marat by David

    Greatest Epoch

    The greatest epoch in my view for political art was just after World War I. Many artists experienced the devastation of the trenches, and used this to condemn bellicose militarism. In the Weimar Republic we find the apogee of political art and social commentary through caricaturists such as George Grosz, and Otto Dix. No wonder the Nazis considered this degenerate art.

    If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926) – with the superior subtitle Shit for Brains – you will see one of the paragons of virtue, with, well, shit for brains. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapses, while the Nazi judges and commissars worked hand-in-glove with their jackboot associates.

    The etchings and paintings of Otto Dix also perfectly capture the collapse, most obviously The Match Seller (1920), The War Triptych or the engraving Stormtroopers Advance Under Gas (1924). These are among the greatest anti-war works. He survived the Somme and intellectual pretentiousness to produce paintings of the calibre of Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).

    Close to the Prada hangs the most monumental work of political art. To see it in the flesh is extraordinary. That is Picasso’s fatal depiction of the massacre of the innocents during the Spanish Civil War Guernica (1937). It now hangs symbolically now over Gaza or The Ukraine as a rebuke, as is the core symbol the dove of peace.

    The Spanish Civil War produced many other great works of art particularly the photography of Robert Capa, which is disturbing in its brutality, as are the later pictures of Cartier Bresson after the liberation of Paris where collaborators were made examples of. Likewise, the extremism of our time cuts in all sorts of ways, as does the demonisation of those we disagree with.

    Other great war photographs show the aftermath of Hiroshima and the liberation of the Concentration Camps, documented in Resnais documentary Night and Fog (1945). Unforgettable also is the photography of the bullet to the head of the Viet Kong activist. Even in this de-sensitised social media age that still has the capacity to shock.

    Picasso’s Guernica.

    Animation and Cartoons

    Animation substantively begins with Walt Disney, and his films are at times wonderful and at other times an expression of crass American values. The figure of Cruella de Ville from The Dalmatians appears crucial to our time, conveying the theme of the murder of the innocent for personal self-aggrandisement. A few contemporary figures would appear well equipped for the role, Ghislaine Maxwell in particular.

    The greatest cartoonist of all was the Belgian Hergé (George Prosper Remi), who has been accused, unfairly, of fascism for writing for Le Soir during wartime. This is an accusation almost as absurd as that levelled against P.G. Wodehouse, which is not to say that the character of the creator of the immortal Tintin is unimpeachable.

    Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès identifies the character of Tintin as representing a personification of the ‘New Youth’ concept promoted by the European far-right. Indeed, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) was a work of anti-socialist propaganda, but then, in fairness, Tintin in America was designed as a work of anti-Americanism, highly critical of capitalism, commercialism, and industrialisation.

    Many would counter that Hergé was far from right-wing, as exemplified by his condemnation of racism in the United States in the introduction to Tintin in America (1932), and that the wonderful The Blue Lotus (1936) took a distinctly anti-imperialist stance, unlike Tintin in The Congo (1931), which has shades of Colonel Kurz. During the fascist era he did not join the far-right Rexist Party, later asserting that he ‘had always had an aversion to it’ and that ‘to throw my heart and soul into an ideology is the opposite of who I am.’

    From his earliest years, Hergé was openly critical of racism. He lambasted the pervasive racism of U.S. society in the prelude to Tintin in America published in Le Petit Vingtième on 20 August 1931, and ridiculed racist attitudes toward the Chinese in The Blue Lotus.

    Whatever the ambiguity, the art is riveting as Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen observed: ‘Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.’

    Of moralism and cartoons Roald Dahls illustrated by Quentin Blakes books are less ambiguous and more unsettling as portrayals of human evil and the macabre. not least the character of Willie Wonka. His character anticipates the soma-induced greed of our age.

    Animation has of course transmogrified into manga and anime, where the master is Miyzaki. In My Neighbour Totora (1988) the forest is warding off the evil spirits. Gai regenerating as when the industrial demons are confronted and beaten in his ecological masterpiece Princess Mononoke (1997). A little spring blossoms.

    Preserve his Anonymity!

    The important role of art as a form of political commentary should be re-asserted, and the forthcoming prosecution (if my source is to be believed) of Banksy sets a very dangerous precedent. It sends out a clear message to other artists, and will have a chilling effect in all likelihood. At the very least Banksy’s anonymity should be preserved in the event of him being prosecuted. Very few comment in a visual form so presciently on our times. He is the greatest political muralist since Diego Riveria, and the world needs more, not less, political art as a way of vitalising people and as an antidote to propaganda.

    Feature Image: The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray

  • On the Question of Immigration

    The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is perhaps best understood as the culmination of the Enlightenment tradition of constitutionalism, hedged in legalistic language of proportionality and balance. It asserts that people have a right – or at the very least the right to have rights – to rely on the Convention when a domestic state has been derelict.

    It has been invoked successfully on many occasions against Ireland, most obviously with Mary Robinson’s enlistment by David Norris in 1990 to establish his right to privacy in terms of the criminalisation of homosexuality, in circumstances where the Irish domestic Supreme Court decided against him. That challenge fell within the rubric of Article 8 of the Convention: respect for your private and family life.

    The prohibition against torture and inhumane and degrading treatment under Article 3 of the Convention has protected Irish people in the infamous H Block 5 techniques case Ireland v U.K. (1979).

    Using the same Article 3, the ECHR sanctioned the rogue police state in the Greek case of The Regime of The Colonels (1966), and multiple human rights cases for the actions of various police forces not least in Turkey – referred to in a recent Cassandra Voices Podcast and article. It is noticeable that it has been extended to mental suffering, including demonisation by race. With ever more advanced techniques of torture, abuse and degrading treatment that extension was a jurisprudential necessity.

    A new podcast and article discuss fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, with Fatima Akman Lehmann joining Luke Sheehan.https://t.co/nQzOJ3bxCP

    — CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 3, 2026

    The track record of Ireland’s noncompliance does not make for pretty reading, not least the Norris Case. In many recent cases, given the fractured incorporation of the Convention, we have witnessed the development of the sinister interpretative obligation where the Convention is ignored if a constitutional principle applies, however dubiously, or as in the recent cases of Quirke and Dwyer, where the Irish courts used police powers and data protection to sidestep the Convention and thus entirely undermine its legal application.

    Along with others, historically we have been a rogue state in Convention compliance terms, and contrary to the view of Gerard Hogan our Constitution is a paltry substitute, not least given the diminution of Due Process by the Irish judiciary, which, in fairness, Hogan sedulously opposes.

    Now, with Minister for Justice O’ Callaghan leading the way, a joint statement of The Council of Europe calls for Article 8 of the ECHR, which protects the right to a family life, to be ‘adjusted so that more weight is put on the nature and seriousness of the offence committed and less weight is put on the foreign criminal’s social, cultural, and family ties with the host Country.’

    It also call for the crucial Article 3 to be ‘constrained to the most serious issues in a manner which does not prevent State Parties from taking proportionate decisions on the expulsion of foreign criminals, or in removal or extradition cases.’

    The joint statement also stresses the importance of ‘a states’ right… to control the entry, residence, and expulsion of foreigners from their territories, which should guide the interpretation of the Convention.’

    Image: Matt Barnard

    Vexed Question of Our Age

    Immigration has been the vexed question of our age, and the use of the word foreigner in the above statement is a deeply divisive word. There should be no such expression allowed in any language, only people. None of us are pure blood. The word “foreigner” in this context is meaningless.

    My experience of the ludicrous Irish refugee tribunal system was that the vast preponderance of claims were rejected, and if a tribunal chair had the temerity to admit to more than a minuscule amounts of claims he or she would be removed. The Cosma case (2006) – involving suicidal ideation – I litigated with Gerard Hogan in the High and Supreme Courts sidestepped Article 2 of the convention, in circumstances where there were tangible psychological reports. English tribunals are better but increasingly restrictive, albeit educated English judges tend to respect the Convention.

    In the Irish system I encountered judgments of monumental absurdity, involving ill-informed credibility assessments.

    It should be born in mind that many of those who seek asylum have been falsely convicted or framed by state criminals. Turkey comes to mind. When someone is accused by criminals of being a criminal the term loses any meaning.

    In all this the lessons of history and the reason why the Convention was founded are lost. Let us consider, therefore, given my mixed Austrian-Irish heritage, the respective experiences of forced or compulsory immigration in both these countries.

    In some cases, as in that of legendary Austrian-Jewish writers such as Joseph Roth, Stevan Zweig and indeed the very elderly Sigmund Freud forced migration was a consequence of real or prospective political persecution, and what is known as non-refoulement is a central part of immigration law, which is a well-founded fear of political persecution.

    That was during the last epoch of real barbarism. It’s clear that we are now returning to similar depravities, as the gyres of history turn.

    Apart from writers and intelligentsia who were often thoroughly disenchanted with the place, most of those leaving the country have done so for economic reasons. In more recent times, if not always, we have been welcomed into the U.K. and U.S.. Sadly, we no longer live in a world that extends a welcome to the poor huddled masses. And despite others welcoming the Irish, apart from welcoming tourists and accommodating multinationals, we have never really been the land of a thousand welcomes.

    Sideshow and Deflection

    The immigration issue is in fact a sideshow and deflection, where fag end capitalism foments hatred and discord, turning people against each other. It is often used to deflect attention from governmental inaction in housing and substantive equality matters.

    The Irish approach seems to be move immigrants down the canal, or use Gastarbeiter who pay exorbitant fees to shady educational institutions, but keep refusing them settled status.

    In a separate initiative O’Callaghan has a point about working immigrants contributing to accommodation costs, and no doubt family reunification issues do require careful consideration, especially with respect to the costing of whether those who come in can be supported by family members, but any denudation of Article 3 opens up a dangerous vista.

    Violent demonstrations and attacks on particular nationalities suggest that Irish parochialism and indeed racism have reached unprecedented levels. This is also the case in the rest of Europe and the UK. Let us consider the larger context.

    First published in 1918, and translated into English in 1926, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was perhaps the most influential text of the 1930s. Spengler  blamed what he saw as a declining European civilisation on the dilution of a mythical Aryan race – whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon. Spengler influenced Hitler and provided an ideological impetus for the extermination of undesirable races in the Holocaust or Shoah.

    Moreover, our age of chaos and uncertainty allows strongman leaders like Viktor Orban (whose Hungary signed this document) to assert as policy demonization of the other. If you listen carefully enough you will recognise that the Social Darwinism of another age is also the rallying cry of neo-liberalism, as an age of cartels and select groups brings exclusion and enforced conformity against others.

    It hardly matters to racists, who do not believe in science or empirical evidence, that there is zero evidence for the concept of race, as geneticists have worked out that every person on Earth can trace a lineage back to a single common female ancestor – a Mitochondrial Eve – who lived around 200,000 years ago.

    Franz Fanon

    Reproducing Colonialism

    Who is not a foreigner and what the hell does that mean? In works such as Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Orientalism (1978) Edward Said argued that ‘Patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds can lead to mass destructiveness.’ He also cites our very own Conor Cruise O’Brien to the effect that Imagined Communities of identity are hijacked by the petty dictators of state nationalism.

    Meanwhile, Frantz Fanon’s seminal anti-colonial text The Wretched of the Earth (1961) demonstrates how the indigenous population is required to pay the debts of the occupying powers.

    This is now being reproduced in our own societies in the form of austerity. The occupying powers are now the corporatocracy, or those with inherited wealth. The only difference from the colonial period is they no longer exclusively come from a distinct ethnic group. In fact, a veneer of diversity is achieved with the promotion of a few specimens with varied pigmentation. Leo Varadkar comes to mind. As long as they embrace safe, politically correct policies that ignore structural racism they become one of us.

    What Fanon said is true both of former colonialism and now internal colonialism by corporate vulture and hedge funds with politicians as puppets: ‘The people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’

    Furthermore, with respect to the assault on Article 3, certain Irish nationals might nativistically welcome this without understanding that its denudation, in conjunction with the already denuded due process, ushers in the potential Article 3 violation of Irish citizens in Ireland.

    We are on a slippery slope to a larger police state.

    The previous site of the heavy gang on Harcourt Street may already be equipped with physical and newly given psychological torture techniques derived from American institutions. Be careful what you wish for citizens.

    Thus we find an increasing differentiation between ‘them’ and ‘us’, involving unedifying forms of class warfare and demonization of those outside the dominant culture, whether foreigner, migrant or displaced. ‘Killing an Arab’, the central theme of expurgation of ‘the other’ in Albert Camus’s L’ Étranger is now writ large in our culture.

    Camus, in my view the greatest writer, humanist and intellect of the 20th Century with his Shakespearean mixed-race native ambivalence is a ghostly prophet of the way we live now.

    Well before fascism there was of course widespread hatred of the wandering and or wealthy jew. The rebranding of Herzog Park in Dublin might be part of a resurgent anti-Semetism. Why not rebrand it Wittgenstein Park, after one of the great intellects of the 20th century, who is merely awarded a humble plaque in the Aishling Hotel.

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    End of an Era

    We are seeing a growing hostility towards miscegenation, mixed marriages and corruption of bloodlines. Members of the blue-blooded, ‘Anglo-Norman’, Fine Gael party display an absurd sense of entitlement, while many Fianna Fáil members appear to be card-carrying racists, while a vigilante Catholic Right inveighs against alleged paedophiliac Asian men, while ignoring the litany of its own abuses.

    All is not lost in Britain, though the rise of Tommy Robinson and co does not augur well. Even in the polyglot cosmopolis – the ultimate melting pot that is London – the sense is that multicultural tolerance has been eroded substantially, and is being replaced by fractious intolerance, racism, class warfare, intimidation and social fragmentation.

    The Post Second World war humanist consensus is almost gone.

    The words of Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in Brazil after fleeing Hitler’s Europe are returning to haunt us: ‘I feel that Europe, in its state of degeneracy has passed its own death sentence.’

    Feature Image: Syrian and Iraqi migrants arriving in Lesbos, Greece, in 2015 seeking refuge.

  • Hooligans, Thugs and Gangsters

     

    Our world, especially the United States, is now becoming a Gangster Enterprise where brutality and soma-induced compliance maintain the ruling order. Sadly, the weapons of resistance against authoritarianism are not readily apparent. Housing rights and in some cases a right to life are threatened at all levels. We experience deep-seated inequality and a worldwide Ponzi-scheme, not least in Ireland. This is a country where the banksters and their political apparatchiks are in charge. Welcome Paschal to the knowledge base of the World Bank.

    The global population, apart from a small coterie of the rich, are reduced to corporate and other forms of slavery and servitude. Dissidence and criticism is categorised as disruption or even criminalised. It is a situation unprecedented since medieval times, but then the lord of the manor often took care of his vassals. Not any longer.

    In this respect, the definition and etymology of three terms hooligan, thug and gangster has become central to any understanding of this New Dark Age.

    In general, the term hooligan is closely related to rioting, disorderly conduct, bullying and vandalism. Today, either actual violence or the threat it is omnipresent. Often, regrettably this emanates from those in authority in corporate organisations, schools or other institutions.

    Hooliganism is fundamentally about brutality, and it is telling that brutalist architecture began to arrive in Italy under Mussolini. This is where veneration of the strongman – or Big Fella in Ireland’s case – really began.

    Today, true strength is associated with brutality and the strongman, one of Umberto Eco’s canonical definitions of fascism, has reemerged. Prole workers are being bullied in a period of an unregulated free markets, not unlike that which obtained at the turn of the twentieth century in America in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1905).

    The word hooligan is in fact Irish or perhaps Scottish in origin. Thus, the Victorian novel Hooligan Nights (1899) is based on the character of Patrick Holohan a.k.a. Hooligan. The Scots, as anyone who has spoken in the Glasgow Union would attest, have also a form of attribution for that term in that General Wade during the Jacobite rebellion in 1794 referred to the Scots as hooligans.

    The word first appeared in print in London police reports in 1894 referring to the name of a gang of youths in the Lambeth area — the Hooligan Boys.

    The Daily Graphic thus records  in 1898: ‘The avalanche of brutality which, under the name of ‘Hooliganism’ … has cast such a dire slur on the social records of South London.’

    Modern Hooligans c. 1990.

    Extortion is intrinsic to gangsterism including its corporate version. As a barrister I am aware of how blackmail cases have a particular flavour of awfulness, involving emotional and financial manipulation, fear of disclosure, along with physical and psychic violence.

    H.G. Wells wrote in his 1909 semi-autobiographical novel Tono-Bungay:

    Three energetic young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were packing wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw and confusion.

    And then we arrive via the Blueshirts, Blackshirts et al at the football hooliganism from the 1970s and 1980s, which was referred to as ‘The British Disease,’ but was also evident in Italy, Russia and elsewhere.

    A hooligan is, above all, someone who has no consequential respect for other people, their privacy, or their values. They nonchalantly damage the lives of others. The word thug is often used in this context or in the legal profession, a not dissimilar expression is boot boys with brains. Our learned friends.

    But it is far from exclusively British in origin or orientation, although the late Martin Amis suggested that the yobs are taking over, and certainly that is the theme of his uneven Lisbon Asbo (2012).

    Group of Thuggees, c. 1894.

    Thug and Gangster

    The word thug is derived from the term for the cult Indian sect thuggee, and is often associated with excessive nativism or colonialism. It should be stressed that the thugees caricatured in Gunga Din (1939), or in the Indiana Jones movies, were in fact actively engaged in deception and motivated by religious fundamentalism. So, one of their mantras is: ‘God is all in all, for good and evil.’

    Well, that could be a slogan for the activities of the fundamentalist Evangelical robber barons of our age. Our new thugees?

    Gangs or gangsterism is also a-turn-of-the-century phenomenon. Thus, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) portrays The Bowery Boys immortalised by Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher. They were nativistic Americans and viciously anti-Irish. Today of course we have vicious Irish nativists, wishing to exclude others. Ignorance disinformation and stupidity, as Karl Krauss historically indicated, is now apparent in every direction.

    The terms gangster is centrally associated with the Costa Nostra or the mafia, and it is revealing that this develops after the decline of feudalism and the rule of primogeniture. In Marxist terms the freeing up of the alienation of land created the possibility of exploitation.

    The Italian aristocrat Tomasi di Lampedusa’s extraordinary novel The Leopard (1960) was written under a settled hopeless expectation of death. It was filmed brilliantly by Visconti and is a crucial portrait of Italy in revolution, just as feudal entitlements are stripped away. The abolition of feudalism was replaced by sharecropping and small holdings, which ushered in the opportunistic mafia and robber barons.

    Today wealth is channelled to a small minority, and everyone else is left scrambling for a living in worldwide corporate serf-Capitalism or, in some respects, serf-Communism. Take your pick. The gangsters corporate and their role models worldwide engage in blackmail, deceit, and manipulation.

    How do you expect the wretched of this Earth to behave? What with the lure of consumerism and an endless media barrage of lifestyle choices, hedonism, and easy money.

    The gangster drug problem in Dublin, for example, essentially stems from an abject failure in urban planning, moving people from solid working class communities into squalid estates as well as the tower blocks of Ballymun, which spawned drug-infested infernos. Naturally, these buildings were modelled on the brutalism of Le Corbusier.

    Roberto Saviano exhibited his expertise in the Italian drug trade in his book Gomorrah (2006), which demonstrates the economic rational and organisation of the drug cartels. His subsequent book Zero, Zero, Zero (2016) makes the following crucial points:

    First, the gangster drug cartels of South America and Italy among other places created a model of business organisation and funding that corporate organisations have emulated. What difference in moral terms is there between vulture funds, Goldman Sachs, and drug barons? None at all. The business of America is business. Or of Ireland or, more pertinently, of China.

    Secondly, this model has become, through both its ruthlessness and an omertà code of compliance, the model for corporate business organisation. The transnational vulture funds and purchasers of Canadian, Chinese and American origin presently destroying Ireland are, in moral terms, equivalent to drug cartels.

    There is, no moral distinction between Steve Bannon, the late Peter Sutherland, Xi Jinpeng and Pablo Escobar. Corporate law firms’ bankers share the same dynamic as the drugs trade.

    Piazza Pretoria, Palermo.

    Visit to Palermo

    I recently visited Sicily and while in Palermo stayed in a beautiful old hotel with a golden bath frequented by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for under fifty pounds. I chose the restaurant because it was recommended by Peter Robb in Midnight in Sicily (1996). It was just around the corner.

    Before leaving the concierge said to me: ‘Oh no, Sir, we will order you a taxi, the alleyway is bad.’ You could walk around it, but that would take an extra forty-five minutes, while a cab will take fifteen minutes, and it’s a beautiful drive.’

    And so it was. When I arrived in the restaurant, serving the fantastic Sicilian dishes recommended by Peter Robb Pesto Al Sarna, I noticed the adjacent table had lots of guns on the table, and from the alleyway the hotelier referred to gun shots were audible.

    Agrigento is of course very close to Corleone a town with many limousines with blocked windows and a dislike of visitors. The next day on the drive there I was greeted by half-finished buildings. Unfinished, because of backhanders to the mafia. Reminiscent of the false promise of housing from Mr Martin.

    Thus, we are rendering housing, both for the rentier and mortgaged class, impossible in Ireland. We are destroying the next generation from living happy and fulfilled lives, as we embark on the road to an ever-compliant mediaeval feudalism.

    Beautiful spaces and buildings create balanced, adjusted people, as Alain De Boton rightly argues in his book about buildings and urban spaces The Architecture of Happiness (2006). And yet the tribalistic veneration of gangsters from Ned Kelly to Don Corleone to the Irish variations in Martin Cahil and Gerry Hutch persists.

    Gerry Hutch has been around as long as I have. I won’t get into morals or ethics, but Hutch has been kind to the community in Dublin Central in indirect ways, as Bertie Ahern put it. Whether we like it or not, he is respected by downtrodden working class Dubliners, in a way that the legal class is not. I doubt Rossa Phelan, another person who secured a not guilty verdict in a recent murder trial, will be going up for an election any time soon.

    The solution to all this is the reassertion of community, fraternity, equality and of course respect, but this must be earned rather than inherited. Their wise talk is about trust and respect which leads to kindness and inner warmth. Openness to chat.

    Feature Image: James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces, 1938

  • Distortions Of Language

     

    What tangled web we weave when our intention is to deceive?
    Sir Walter Scott

    The distortion of language lies at the heart of the greatest of threats to human civilisation. It now effects all aspects of the public and civic sphere, from court rooms to journalism to the expression of corporate-political elites. It is what allows atrocities to be sanctioned or airbrushed.

    The distortion of language fundamentally undermines the idea of shared and purposeful communication, whether interpersonal or societal. This is what Jurgen Habermas, in a different context, referred to as Communicative Action – a term borrowed from John Austin’s idea of ideal speech language – effectively purging it of ideology and taint. Distortion undermines the use of language in terms of truth-saying or truth-telling propositions.

    Theodor Adorno famously argued that after Auschwitz to write a poem was barbaric, implying that nothing could conjure up or express in human terms such atrocities. Nevertheless, various accounts by Primo Levi as a survivor in books such as If This Is A Man (1947)  and The Truce (1963) did poetically express the horror and show how human resilience endured. Language survived in a humanistic age to express the terms of the horror, but we are now in a more obviously trans-humanist age, and remnants of civilisation are not as obviously influential or vocal.

    The propaganda and euphemisms leading up to the Holocaust involved the use of language as a masking device to conceal different meanings and agendas.

    Although I am wary of structuralism, I do believe it is often necessary to deconstruct meaning. That occurs when an expression is being used to conceal an ulterior purpose, or to make a horror more palatable. The object of euphemisms, buzz words and jargons is often to distract, deflect and misdirect.

    Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2011) effectively depicts the use by the Nazi High command at the Wannsee Conference chaired by Heydrich of the term evacuation, which of course really meant extermination.

    The phrase more typical of our age since Srebrenica has been ethnic cleansing, which is an opaque word for genocide, which at least has been used expressly in response to the actions of the Israelis, but even the utilisation of the appropriate word in a world of distorted coverage invokes fake well-financed indignation.

    In war or military matters historically, other euphemisms are collateral damage, friendly fire, or my favourite crew transfer question – meaning coffins for the dead bodies from the space shuttle.

    George Orwell.

    Orwell

    Any discussion of language in the context of war and politics leads inevitably to George Orwell.

    The term Doublespeak has been culled from Orwell’s 1984 (1949), although it was not used in the text where expressions like Doublethink and Newspeak perfectly express the nature of propaganda.

    In our time, political speech and writing are the defence of the indefensible… Thus, political language must consist of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms…

    Orwell elaborated on these themes earlier in his magisterial essay The Politics of the English Language (1946). He piquantly observed of political language that it ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ The essay chastises vagueness and prioritises clarity and simplicity over euphemisms.

    Thus, when defenceless villages are destroyed it is called pacification, and the plunder of property is called rectification of frontiers. One might think of other euphemisms in use today, such as affordable housing or even debt relief.

    Orwell’s essay is not confined to political language but includes all forms of distortion of language:

    The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

    Though he saw a terminal decline in the England of his time. He did suggest certain remedies well worth citing:

    1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speechwhich you are used to seeing in print. (Examples that Orwell gave included swan song, and hotbed. Such phrases are dying metaphors which a present speaker does not understand the context of, and the original meaning rendered meaningless because those who use them did not know their original meaning. The historical interpretation of the US Constitution by such as Scalia is like this.
    2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
    3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
    4. Never use the passivewhere you can use the active.
    5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargonword if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

    And the last canonical rule:

    1. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

    Linguistic Distortion

    Albert Camus is the great prose master both in terms of precision and sensuality. He can be quoted endlessly, but with respect to doublespeak there is this quotation from The Plague (1949) elaborating on Animal Farm (1950):

    There will come a time in human history when the man who says two plus two equals four will be sentenced to death.

    The criminally underrated Ernest Hemingway wrote a little known, but invaluable text called On Writing (1984), containing his observations about his craft, which curiously mirror that of Orwell.

    He advised writers to cut out the scrollwork of ornament. Stick to what is true and cut out the superfluous. Write about what you know. Like Orwell, he emphasises the active verb and the shortest word possible.

    With respect to the issue of immigration the word removal is now used without elaboration or explanation, notably at the recent Tory conference. The word disposal invokes similar considerations. Again, this involves a form of distortion and side-tracking of reality.

    A real problem occurs when bureaucratic language or legalese conceal infamy. People often buy into it for ease of mind, or owing to a blinkered or cognitively dissociated sense that nothing is happening – or that it suits their interests. This theme is beautifully expressed in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest (2023).

    In terms of the precise use of language to explain horror we have the Martin Niemoller parable during the rise of Nazism:

    First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    Contrast the clarity and sincerity of that with this from Donald Rumsfeld:

    Reports that say that something has not happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we do not know we do not know.

    Rumsfeld comments are wrought with care and are lying to serve a purpose or engaging in deception to so do. That is the point St. Augustine condemned in his categorisations of lying as the truly venal lie.

    Other awful phrases now creeping into our world of sound bites and doublespeak include the new normal. This is effectively a plea to accept degradation and Chinese corporate capitalism, as well as to be controlled and shrivelled in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Compliance is another dangerous euphemism.

    We have, conversely, also become obsessed with hygiene and health and are preyed on in that respect. Stay safe. Oh, and take our drugs. The slightest cold sets people off into hysteria, leading to limited physical contact and an increasingly asexuality.

    This new form of social hygiene divides the world into the pure and the impure. Corporate and advertising interests are adept at this. Virtually any episode of the Madmen series set in the 1950s demonstrates that. In legal terms there is always a degree of tolerance of puff and blow to use the contract law term until the disparity between claim and exaggeration meets the reality of what is being done. Simply the best. Largest in the industry.

    Advertising and politics are now so co-mingled, and have been for some time in the interests of big business, that there is now little difference between winning an election and selling tinned beans. Make the product be the change.

    Sadly, such approaches have also crept into the criminal justice system. Thus we find slogans such as no excuse for abuse, while in sex abuses cases the phrase there is no smoke without fire is migrating into closing speeches.

    Political correctness is the ultimate destruction of language, providing an excuse for no platforming people and undermining freedom of expression.

    Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange.

    Simplicity has its Drawbacks

    But with all respect to Orwell and Hemingway simplicity has its drawbacks. Camus was never simple.

    Thus, in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange reveals a universe of gobbledygook, much in evidence in social media, reducing language to that of Alex the Droog. The compression of meaning into shorthand symbols or abbreviations is a return to the planet of the apes, creating simplistic misleading forms of communication such as the flawed Me Too movement.

    In my view we should reformulate the legendary text by Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911-13) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devils Dictionary (1911), filtered through the legendary dictionary of Dr Johnson in terms of providing more amplified definitions of some of the distortions of language in our age. The expression used to be followed by the real meaning.

    As in the definition of ‘Pension’ in Dr Johnsons’ dictionary: 

    In England it is understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

    Or ‘Faith’ from The Devils Dictionary:

    Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

    Or Flaubert’s definition of sex as ‘Intimacy occurred.’

    I thus suggest a new dictionary of the real meanings of the doublespeak of our time, and indeed a reversion to old patterns of behaviour. This requires us to read books leading to an enhanced form of comprehension relying on clarity and simplicity.

    In this respect, self-reportage or sincerity can also be bullshit and ought to be treated with scepticism. Sincerely adopting your own euphemism can lead you to condone atrocities. It is precision and adherence to the facts that is crucial, certainly in political and civic discourse, which is not always easy.

    As Samuel Beckett, the master of succinctness once put it:

    Ever Tried. Ever Failed. Never Mind, Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

     

    Feature Image: Tamás Mészáros

  • Banksy and Protest Rights: The View from The Robing Room

    As I sauntered from the Old Bailey past the RCJ the Banksy painting caricaturing a judge attacking a protester was no longer even a ghostly shadow, but it very much remains in the public domain, after reports emerged that it had been reported as criminal damage.

    On September 25, on Old Brompton Road, a comprehensive exhibition of Banksy’s work opened, which brazenly included the mural stencilled onto a different surface. This raised all sorts of issues about the commercialization of art and the edge of protest, not to mention whether or not he should be prosecuted.

    Based on Fiat Justicia, Mr Bansky faces prosecution for the recent RCJ Mural as criminal damage. I also hear he may be charged with being in contempt of court, leading to his long anonymity being exposed. Being named and shamed is another feature of our hysterical times.

    Recently, a bit like the opening to a P.J. Wodehouse novel, an erudite discussion was held among learned friends in the robing room of Hove Crown Court, steered by the most venerable member, as to whether the t-shirts, now selling fast, of this auspicious work should be deemed the proceeds of crime. The consensus was that in the U.K., post-conviction, the seller is responsible. Perhaps that is fanciful, but you never know.

    Policy considerations were also broached, such as whether in prosecuting him would you create a martyr that would lead to more t-shirts being sold? Would the state then be complicit in facilitating crime not least by increasing his revenues.

    Charles Dickens, his work the subject of many copyright violations and thieving particularly by Americans in his lifetime, expressed the view in Bleak House that it was far, far better to have nothing to do with the law. Well, it is certainly far better for the law to have nothing to do with Banksy, or is it?

    The consensus in the robing room was that given he is profiting from the mural, there was a strong argument for a significant fine, with the trial perhaps being conducted through in camera proceedings, preserving his anonymity, with any receipts being diverted back into the criminal justice system.

    Further, the venerable member concluded that he was inciting protest. The discussion took place over an entire lunch, and if any of us were briefed it would have occupied many days of court time, but should it occupy any court time at all is the real question?

    Mr Banksy, I am reliably informed, arrived at around 4-5am masquerading as a delivery truck driver. There was just enough light to use his meticulously prepared stencil. It is not now simply guerilla art, but increasingly reflective on worrying times. Many people are in on the act.

    The recreated version of the mural by Diiego Rivera, known as Man, Controller of the Universe.

    Diego Rivera

    Among the greatest painters of murals was Diego Rivera. His famous mural in the Rockefeller Center in New York was taken down because of his cheeky insertion of Lenin contrary to the edicts of one of the citadels of world capitalism. They destroyed it in violation of copyright law. An integrity right protects a work from being destroyed, mutilated or defaced or put it in an inappropriate setting.

    Examples of violations include colorizing a black and white film such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), or including ad breaks during the Monty Python parrot sketch, or inserting cover ups of nudity, such as even in the Sistine Chapel, but outright destruction is rare. Indeed, there was uproar in Berlin when some of the murals on the Berlin wall were destroyed.

    The Banksy mural was an insertion of overtly political content in a work of art, and the destruction or censorship of protest art has always been a feature of oppressive regimes. So, was the reaction disproportionate or ill-thought out?

    Mr Banksy is a national treasure, and frankly as great an artists as any in England since Lucien Freud. I suspect any prosecution will backfire or has, revealing institutional incompetence and hubris.

    The Banksy mural has significant political implications and presents authoritarian judges and the state cracking down on protest, not least in response to legitimate public outrage over Gaza, but what’s good for the goose is also for the gander. It is legitimate political art, but the regulation of protest as opposed to protest art is more complex now.

    Jasper Johns’s ‘Flag’, Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood,1954-55.

    Protest Rights.

    The flag of St George is also copyright protected, and very similar to the flag of Switzerland and indeed the Red Cross, but it has been traduced by maniacs spreading hatred and division. The visibility of the flag has increased significantly across England.

    It is now the case that English, Irish and indeed American national identity is as fragile as the American flag fractured and loose as in the Jasper Johns painting. The Irish tricolour is also a symbol of unity of green and orange, but is now potentially divisive. Extreme nationalism, along with racism, is one of the scourges of our time. It is a reversion in my view to the 1930’s – symptomatic of a new dark age.

    There is, of course, a marked distinction between genuine patriotism and the revival of tribalistic, exclusionary and racist nationalism. Not all patriotism to reference Jeremy Bentham is the refuge of the scoundrel.

    But racism and chauvinistic nationalism go hand in hand and generally morph into fascism. The target is the excluded other, now the immigrant. Nigel Farage is now proposing to remove those without a settled status.

    Timothy Snyder recently came off the fence in On Freedom (2024) labelling the alt-right fascists, after considering the etymology of the term. But is he also an enabler given some of the neoconservative views he has expressed?

    Let us cease bandying about anodyne terms like crypto-fascism and use language with precision and exactitude. There are now fascists and a gathering mob, but this has been engineered by, and is under the control of, others. Who then are the enablers is the crucial question?

    Is Banksy an enabler? I am not so sure

    Source: BBC.

    London Protests

    On the streets of central London recently I was reminded of three things: John Reed and Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), his blow-by-blow account of the Russian Revolution; the scene in Cabaret (1972) where, semi-fictitiously, Christopher Isherwood decides to leave Berlin after hearing a version of Horst Wessel being sung. Finally, surveying the hate-filled eyes I was also reminded of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).

    I would argue that a similar species of Irish hatred is more vicious but far less powerful in electoral terms, bu there is now a real danger of the extreme right winning power in the U.K..

    Dozens of police officers were injured at the protests, yet only twenty-five arrests were made.  The counter demonstrators, understandably smaller in number, were non-violent, and let us be clear that a right to protest is intrinsic to democracy. Peaceful protest that is, an idea as old as Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Yet there were 500 arrests made at the peaceful Gaza protests in early October.

    This casts the right to protest into doubt, or at the very least demonstrates a need for greater regulation and proportionality. The insurrectionist riots and arson attacks on accommodation related to asylum seekers in Ireland in recent times is also a case in point, demonstrating the necessity of regulating (violent) protest.

    The Just Oil protesters, with others to come, were convicted under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (PCA) of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, in response to the M25 motorway disruption in November 2022. Judge Hehir dismissed the defence of mere political opinion and belief as excluded from the present English legislation.

    That decision undoubtedly opens a dangerous vista, but the crucial question is that of whether a demonstration potentially causes harm, and that one clearly could have caused harm, and it certainly caused a significant furore and inconvenience.

    “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

    Orange lily

    In the famous common law prosecution orange lily case Humphries v O’ Connor (1864) plucking an orange order lily from a woman in the nationalist area of Belfast was deemed a justifiable police act and regulation of protest, as the offending lily had the potential to cause a breach of the peace. This occurs when an individual causes harm, or if it is likely that they will cause harm to another individual or property, or if it puts another person in fear of being harmed.

    As Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 94:

    For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

    But what harm or public nuisance has Banksy caused? He has frankly adorned RCJ with better artwork outside than there is inside. Is it really an incitement to protest in contravention of the law or a protest to survive?

    Ronald Dworkin, towards the end of his career, wrote an article on the Right to Ridicule peculiarly appropriate to Banksy. There are, for sure, limits, such as Enoch Burke silently or not so silently protesting outside his school. He is not an artist and most decidedly frankly a nuisance, disturbing children being educated. So perhaps certain forms of protest should be consigned to Mountjoy. But there are also demonstrators from Stop Oil, Gaza Extinction Rebellion residing, perhaps excessively, in custody in the U.K.. Now, perhaps a great artist in will be in there next. But that mural was created before 150,000 people turned up in central London.

    The great political artist of our time, a private and ostensibly decent man, should not be publicly prosecuted for making legitimate points of criticism, with a drawing that Goya Picasso, Schiele or indeed Hergé would have been proud of. Hergé’s TIN TIN books were about the Manichean divide between good and evil. So who is the demon today, the contemporary Captain Haddock?

    Banksy deserves an anonymous knighthood not public humiliation. He should be known by his self-designation and not outed by a magistrate’s court.

    Whether he should pay a fine for profiting commercially from the mural is a different question. After all, would he not approve of charges being pressed against the fascist mob that attacked the police?  Perhaps any proceeds should go to police wellness programmes?

    In the film Cabaret the Isherwood character says: “do you really think you can control them?” Well, Banksy do you? And are you encouraging them or inciting the mob, the robbing room sagely discussed.

    It is crucial to realize that the Populist alt-right and indeed at times the extreme left have served to reduce speech and protest rights in an increasingly vigilante age, and now use protest to destroy democracy. So be careful about admonitions of judicial crackdowns even through art. For many are using democracy to destroy the social democratic consensus. And fringe leftist protests such as Just Oil are not much better.

    So, the legal arguments about disproportionately cracking down on violent or even peaceful protests certainly are no longer as clear-cut as the mural might suggest.

    In the robing room the venerable member concluded that perhaps an arbitral solution might involve a private settlement, i.e. a charitable gift. But none of that settles the regulation of the right to protest, which is now increasingly fragile.


    Feature Image: Banksy mural, 8 September 2025.

  • On Rhetoric

    What makes for fine rhetoric in an age of disinformation? Clearly, this is distinct from the techniques employed by corporate motivational speakers, tele-evangelists or self-help gurus. A useful starting point is to examine Aristotle’s views on Rhetoric, who argued that speech can produce persuasion (pistis) either through the character (êthos) of the speaker, the emotional state (pathos) of the listener, or the argument (logos) itself. Artistotle divides rhetoric into three branches. Deliberative speech that sets out to persuade or dissuade. Judicial speech that accuses or defends, and Epideictic speech that praises or blames.

    He sub-divides this into deliberative speech, where there is advice to do something or a warning. Churchill from the back benches warning about the rise of Hitler is a good example of this form. Furthermore, a judicial speech which is intrinsic to the advocate is what he terms an epideictic speech. These include, among others, funeral and celebratory speeches. Abraham Lincoln’s speech Gettysburg Address a good example of the last.

    In his dialogue’s, Plato, Aristotle’s predecessor, was primarily responsible for bringing the founder of all philosophy Socrates to the world. Unlike Aristotle, however, Socrates was deeply sceptical of all sorts of rhetoric. The Socratic method invites scepticism and ultimately may perhaps lead us into an intellectual dead end, in so far as it never answers anything but questions everything. Thus, the dark arts of rhetoric were despised by Socrates, which may have been a contributory factor to his conviction and execution for impiety, not least as a result of the play The Clouds by Aristophanes which satirises him.

    The Socratic method, however, largely ends in aporia, meaning a matter being unresolved. Interestingly, discrediting arguments is crucial to an advocate raising doubts before a jury. The Socratic method also utilises elenchus which discards unsustainable arguments one by one. Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927) puts it this way: ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

    The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).

    Stunned and Possessed

    Socrates was obviously a very effective persuader in the Aristotelian sense, or as another great orator Alcibiades put it, all who listened were ‘stunned and possessed.’ Nevertheless, he clearly had a point about the dangers of rhetoric. He encapsulated this beautifully at his own trial, which is referenced in Plato’s Apology

    How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was – such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me; – I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence.

    Used for a just cause rhetoric can be highly effective and great force for the good, either in the Aristotelian sense or in Aquinas’. Yet it can also be used for nefarious purposes. That distinction ought to focus the mind on what is good and bad rhetoric, or oratory, and indeed whether it is only good if the motivations behind it are good. Clearly bad rhetoric in the moral sense can be effective. Propaganda is probably best illustrated by Goebbels. This is what he said about the burning of the books before some 40,000 people in Berlin:

    No to decadence and moral corruption … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus, you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.

    Notably, in my last piece for Cassandra Voices I recalled the focus of Karl Kraus’ final anti-fascist text Third Walpurgis Night (1933) not on Hitler but on his rhetorician facilitator Goebbels. Or consider the facility with words of another satanic figure Aleister Crowley even in text:

    I am gold, I am God, 
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
    With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
    Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
    And I rave; and I rape, and I rip, and I rend
    Everlasting, world without end
    Hymn to Pan (1913)

    Unfortunately, practitioners of witchcraft, magic, or sorcery often seem drawn to the dark arts. In this respect the conventional definition of a warlock (a male witch) is an oath breaker, and no great orator or advocate intentionally misleads. There are other gradations of rhetoric as a dark art. Sorcery is low grade. Magic a higher form. Sorcery is merely results-driven. There is no consultation of principle. It has often been termed a crime against God and humanity. Thus, Goebbels and Crowley are examples of effective but morally bad oratory but given different moral positions in my view, distortion comes first as inappropriate oratory.

    Aleister Crowley.

    Legal Ambiguity

    Judicial or legal speech is ambiguous, and is capable of distortion, as when Cicero the great orator and trial lawyer defended Murena for bribing an electoral outcome against the highly ethical Cato. Cicero knew he got an obviously guilty man off for political reasons.

    As Aristotle recognised, however, any speech involves the effect on the listener. Thus, in Leni Riefenstahl’s classic documentary The Triumph of the Will (1936) the spellbinding oratory of Hitler is amply demonstrated, crucially with brilliant cross-cutting to the starry-eyed admiration of those choosing to believe. The film is not unlike watching an American evangelical Christian meeting.

    So, who were the great orators? Excluding examples from Classical Antiquity such as Pericles I discuss a few:


    Aneurin Bevin

    Aneurin Bevin was the architect of the NHS, who became the most loathed and loved man in England. This socialist gadfly with the sharpest of tongues engaged in a long-term sparring match with Winston Churchill. He was also intrinsic to Atlee’s resignation and Churchills appointment. Churchill once called him ‘a squalid nuisance’ not least when he was appointed Minister for Health in 1945. He was biased by a typically inappropriate Bevin question in 1942, at the nadir of the war: ‘The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.’

    Bevin had a real conception of the truth, describing advertising as ‘an evil service.’ He also welcomed an opportunity to prick ‘the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth.’ He was also clairvoyant saying: ‘Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets.’

    He was also remarkably acerbic in exposing stupidity. About his political opponent Anthony Eden he said: ‘Beneath the sophistication of his appearance and manner he has all the unplumbable stupidities and unawareness of his class and type.’ He described the Tories more generally as ‘worse than vermin.’

    Benjamin Disraeli

    Then there was the great adversary of Gladstone and architect, along with Metternich of peace in Europe, the Sephardic Jew Benjamin Disraeli, who also a great novelist.

    Disraeli loathed the puritanical Gladstone, who was also a great orator. Unsurprisingly, the feeling was mutual. At one point he differentiated between the words misfortune and calamity with reference to his foe: ‘If Gladstone fell in the Thames, that would be a misfortune. But if someone fished him out again, that would be a calamity.’

    Moreover, Mark Twain attributed a crucial phrase applicable to our age to the British politician: ‘There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.’

    He was also a master of rebuttal, a crucial skill for an advocate. A fellow M.P. once said to him: ‘Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease,’ to which he replied: ‘That depends Sir, whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.’

    Furthermore, he was acutely conscious of stupidity and pettiness, saying: ‘To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge;’ and ‘Little things affect little minds.’

    He also displayed a degree of Socratic self-reflexiveness stating that

    One of the hardest things in this world is to admit you are wrong. And nothing is more helpful in resolving a situation than its frank admission.”

     

    Winston Churchill

    The historical ledger reveals his role as First Lord of The Admiralty in causing the disaster that was Gallipoli, while the people of Dresden, who took seventy years to rebuild the Fraenkische, have never forgiven the actions of Bomber Harris, which admittedly Churchill was contrite about. Hitler’s great opponent was responsible for a long list of war crimes, not least a certain blindness to the welfare of other races – just ask the Bengalis – but as an Orator in a time of great crisis he was unparalleled.

    In his first speech upon uniting Labour and Conservatives against a common foe he said: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ And after the near-disaster at Dunkirk he said:

    This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large, or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

    Also, memorably after Montgomery’s victory at Tobruk, when the tide had turned he said:

    Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. 

    He was also given to witty if chauvinistic asides, sometimes difficult to disentangle from his evil doppelganger F.E. Smith, particularly with respect to Lady Astor the first female member of parliament. The following statement is said to have occurred with another M.P. Bessie Braddock. ‘Sir’ she said, ‘you are drunk,’ to which he replied:  ‘And you, Bessie, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly.’

    Clarence Darrow

    Clarence Darrow was the greatest trial lawyer that ever lived in my view, but also an inspiration behind progressivism, a desire derived from a group of like-minded people, including Oliver Wendelll Homes to improve society. His career is littered with triumphs, including the greatest plea in mitigation ever in Leopold and Lowe and his staunch defence of anti-racism in the Scottsdale case. Often considered merely a sophisticated country bumkin lawyer, he was in fact an incredible orator.

    This is what he had to say about criminal defence lawyers:

    To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person – few love a spokesperson for the despised and the damned.

    And in The Scopes Trial we find the greatest cross-examination ever of his opponent the prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and religious fundamentalist:

    Bryan:  A witness had testified on Bishop Ussher’s theory that the Earth was formed in 4004 B.C.

    Darrow: That estimate is printed in the Bible?

    Bryan: Everybody knows, at least, I think most of the people know, that was the estimate given.

    Darrow: But what do you think that the Bible itself says? Don’t you know how it had arrived?

    Bryan: I never made a calculation.

    Darrow: A calculation from what?

    Bryan: I could not say.

    Darrow: From the generations of man?

    Bryan: I would not want to say that.

    Darrow: What do you think?

    Bryan: I do not think about things about which I do not think.

    Darrow: Do you think about things about which you do think?

    Above all there is the famous peroration in that case

    If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and needs feeding.

    Darrow’s agnosticism, incidentally, may be attributed to a sense of doubt intrinsic to trial lawyers. Indeed, he wrote extensively about Voltaire, who was also a man of doubt, reason and with a sensitivity to miscarriages of justice.

    Martin Luther King

    First there was his description of wisdom: ‘In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.’ And on the subject of tolerance he said: ‘There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.’ Also a common theme evident in all the great orators, was his hatred of ignorance: ‘Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’ But let me sign off this article with perhaps the greatest public rhetorical statement ever, which remains apposite to our age:

    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

    Feature Image: A fresco by Cesare Maccari (1840-1919) depicting Roman senator Cicero (106-43 BCE) denouncing Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic in the Roman senate. (Palazzo Madama, Rome).

  • The Journalist as Public Intellectual

    Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.

    The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.

    There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.

    The Criteria

    A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.

    It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?

    Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healy éminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.

    1. Karl Kraus

    In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.

    Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.

    His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!

    In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’

    He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’

    Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.

    Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.

    Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.

    He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.

    The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.

    As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?

    The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.

    1. Jonathan Swift

    The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.

    Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:

    I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

    Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.

    How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape

    And out of context but an elaboration of the above.

    To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.

    Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:

    Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

    Or

    It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.

    1. H.L. Mencken

    In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).

    Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:

    Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

    The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.

    1. Christopher Hitchens

    Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view  The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!

    1. Ryszard Kapuscinski

    The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.

    Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, to preserve oneself within oneself.
    Travels with Herodotus (2004)

    Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:

    Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

    All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.

    The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:

    Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.


    Feature Image: Suzy Hazelwood

  • Public Intellectuals: Voltaire

    Voltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.

    It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.

    Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.

    So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.

    Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
    1. Freedom Of Speech

    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

    If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.

    Ronald Dworkin  towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:

    Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.

    Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.

    In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.

    Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having  They are merely his intellectual offspring.

    Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
    1. Religion

    If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

    The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.

    Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’

    Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.

    On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.

    Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.

    Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.

    In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”

    and

    God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

    Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
    1. Miscarriages of Justice

    It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

    In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.

    On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.

    At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.

    He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.

    He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.

    Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.

    In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.

    A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.

    He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:

    …You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?

    Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies

    Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’

    Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
    1. Post Truth

    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

    and

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other

    Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

    1. Self-Care

    We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s

    The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

    and

    Let us cultivate our garden.

    And he did so for twenty-five years.

    So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.

    He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.

    He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.

    Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon