Cassandra Voices

Author: David Langwallner

  • Is George Orwell’s England Now Home to Fintan O’Toole’s Swivel-Eyed Loons?

    It was flattering to read Fintan O’Toole respond, however oblique, to my criticism of his generally hysterical book on Brexit. In an Irish Times article on February 19th he claims the English eccentricity I praised has morphed into sinister idiosyncrasies, personified by what he impolitely refers to as the ‘swivel-eyed-loon’ Brexiteers. The association of physical disability with an opposing point of view is a low blow indeed in a bigoted article attempting to define apparently timeless national traits.

    As a last throw of the dice O’Toole adduces evidence from George Orwell to the effect that the English have always been, in actual fact, rather a conformist lot, now queuing obediently for the train marked oblivion.[i]

    O’Toole realises you cannot blacken the reputation of all things English, and seemingly as an afterthought, invokes the authority of the English secular saint. Never mind that Orwell actually credited his compatriots with an abiding belief in the Rule of Law and in holding power to account, a trait the once inquisitorial O’Toole seems to have forgotten.

    It is fair to say that Orwell has never been unfashionable, but the spectre of his ideas is much evident in this zeitgeist. Beyond even his novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), which define and anticipate the nature of totalitarian rule, Orwell was probably the greatest essayist of all time, foreseeing, like a clairvoyant, so many of the problems we now confront. He still stands for decency and humanism.

    O’Toole, in a spurious impression of radicalism – reminiscent of an intellectual Father Brian Trendy – appeals to the baser instincts towards English-bashing in Ireland; essentially condemning the vainglorious Brexiters for cutting off and undermining our gravy train of inequitable farm subsidies.

    Unlike O’Toole, Orwell respected the common sense of the common man, and never resorted to popular prejudice or vulgar nationalism.

    In ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1940) Orwell claimed that English people held a belief in justice, not a fear of power. He further argues, in ‘Inside The Whale’ (1940), that this stemmed from a lack of experience of government repression:

    With all its injustices England is still the land of habeas corpus and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence and illegality.[ii]

    In ‘Homage to Catalonia’ (1938) he shows how extremism imposed no restraints or boundaries, leading to a descent into lawless banditry. England today is still suffused with moderation, incrementalism, and the population are not generally exposed to licensed thuggery.

    In my experience of living in the country, people commonly still do not understand and do not tolerate the manipulation or abuse of law by Power. In this respect they are increasingly alone in Europe, with Spain mounting show trials against Catalan ‘putschists’ for daring to hold an independence referendum, and fascist taking power in Hungary and Italy.

    O’Toole could profitably read various pieces I have written on the Rule of Law and corruption of state agencies in Ireland.[iii] These are all available for free online – unlike the subscriber-based Irish Times. He should take note of the following points, which might cause indigestion in his pampered readership of retired, or retiring, civil servants.

    1. An Garda Siochana, the Irish police force, has been a criminally-led organisation.
    2. A politically-anointed judiciary have contributed to the undermining of the Rule of Law by supporting this police force, and have failed to build on existing Constitutional rights to alleviate the Housing Crisis.
    3. Government agencies have framed ‘enemies of the people’, who blow the lid on corruption (Orwell in ‘Such Were The Joys’ is remarkably insightful about the manipulation of children, whereas O’Toole, with a unique platform in the Irish media, does nothing to draw attention to ongoing injustices).
    4. Ireland is the perfect neo-liberal shit storm, where high economic growth is an illusion, as evictions continue apace, amid spiralling inequality.

    Without succumbing to timeless stereotypes, I suggest the English still commonly believe, in the confused conversation around our global meltdown, that the underdog should be protected. As a barrister I have found that the obligation to vindicate the Rule of Law against the interests of the powerful, and holding elites to account, is taken seriously. Among the myriad motivations for the Brexit vote was a discomfort among ordinary people with the idea of being undermined by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

    In contrast Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times upholds the obligation of the common man to repay his debts to predatory international financial institutions.

    In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ Orwell also notes how the English instinctively despise miscarriages of justice and hold power to account, believing in the impartial administration of the law by independent magistrates. In contrast, I find little attention being paid to the daily injustices occurring in Ireland in Fintan O’Toole’s current output.

    Orwell is also very attuned to misuse of language. A prevalent theme is how expression should be clear and unequivocal, and in a plain style that emphasising informality and flexibility. He would have no truck with the cheap rhetorical devices O’Toole trades in.

    In ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946) Orwell intimates that the enemies of truth and freedom of thought are press lords and bureaucrats. In Ireland today a preening Irish Times sits atop the tree, reassuring all and sundry about what a wonderful creative country this is – and never mind you can’t find somewhere to live.

    O’Toole’s sanctimonious brand of journalism works a treat, offering sufficient distraction to the little people to allow the ‘adults in the room’ to get on with plundering the larder.

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    [i] Fintan O’Toole, ‘The English Love of the Eccentric has Turned Sour’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-the-english-love-of-eccentricity-has-turned-sour-1.3797907, accessed 22/2/19.

    [ii] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/english/e_itw, accessed 22/2/19.

    [iii] David Langwallner, ‘The Fragile Rule of Law in Ireland’, 18th of February, 2018, https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2018/02/unruly-2/, accessed 22/2/19.

  • The Limits of Multiculturalism

    I have previously warned that austerity economics and moral relativism are giving rise to a new fascism, last seen between the World Wars. First published in English in 1926, perhaps the most influential text of that period was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, which blamed Slavic and other ‘degenerate’ races for Europe’s impoverishment. The counterpoint of his argument was that ‘noble’ Aryan blood, whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon, was the highest expression of humanity. This slow train of pseudo-scientific conjecture terminated in the nightmare of the Holocaust, or Shoah.

    Until recently merely of historic concern, debased Social Darwinism is back in vogue. I fear a new corporatised Shoah of economic liquidation and social-atomisation is on the horizon. The rehabilitation of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s reputation by Steve Bannon, and others, is laying the tracks.

    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.’[i]

    There is evident an increasingly 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’Etranger ‘The Outsider’ is writ large in our culture.

    Within this discourse lies the vexed question of immigration or mass migration. Who should be expelled? Who can stay? And why?

    The mainstream Left – the hopeless and incoherent Left – has hitherto uncritically endorsed mass migration and diversity, equating any form of immigration control with incipient fascism. This is the soppy, unthinking multi-culturalism of ‘Nadia’ Guardian reader. During the Blairite regime one of his ministers Barbara Roche, gave carte blanche to unrestrained abuse of the asylum system, telling officials, ‘Asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Britain. Removal takes too long and it’s emotional.’[ii] How times have changed.

    A Wandering Cosmopolitan

    Let me lay my multi-racial and cosmopolitan cards on the table. I am a mongrel breed of Irish Catholic – a disease from which I am still recovering – Austrian Catholic; with a soupcon of Jewry, and distant Welsh. Educated in Britain, America, and Ireland, and much travelled, I am a shaggy dog of various stamps. Labels of multiculturalism and internationalism are plastered all over me. Paddington bear from Peru arrived in London. I have no built-in prejudice against other races in the pot.

    I believe in the idea of the best man or woman for the job, but baulk at political correctness, affirmative action or quotas, and all other self-protectionist strategies that justify the promotion of the indigent or semi-competent. I also believe that anyone should be given the opportunity to develop and fulfil their potential in a chosen fields, now increasingly difficult in a world of zero-hour or short-term contracts.

    Britain in Brexit limbo is a crucible for these cross current. Babylondon, a Babel’s Tower of voices and many vices; a petri-dish for immigration policies over which I have had a ringside seat in London’s extradition courts for the past year

    It is taking on the appearance of the coliseum with non-nationals being thrown to the lions, for the amusement of a generation of global political leaders on a spectrum from Caligula to Nero; Gore Vidal’s ‘United States of Amnesia’[iii] has gone viral.

    In the 1930s the UK was a refuge for those extirpated by fascism. Freud fled to the UK in 1938, alongside numerous Jewish intellectuals, including the historian Eric Hobsbawm and jurist Hersh Lauterpacht, who nourished the UK’s intellectual life for decades. That was then, and British tolerance, an indicium of the national character, is not as open to the reception of the poor huddled masses today, while under Trump, America is developing a siege mentality.

    The idea of American universities being staffed by left-wing intellectuals such as Thomas Adorno and Hannah Arendt, as in the 1950s, is now decidedly quaint. In Trump-land even moderate liberalism is an invitation to censure or disempowerment by squeamish authorities. A quick word from our sponsors. A quiet petition. A public shaming for the temerity to speak the truth in Post-Truth-land.

    The New Determinants

    The reception of the genuinely talented, who add spice to the melting pot, is still desired by the UK authorities, and perhaps America. The question has narrowed to what adds and what detracts? These new determinants are increasingly based on financial calculation, or on the requirements of the service industry; servility and obsequiousness have acquired a new currency.

    As a result of its colonial heritage, the UK had to accommodate former imperial subjects from the Caribbean, South Asia, and even its neighbouring island. Now the Home Office is rigorously scrutinising all claims, as I discovered in the case of a white South African client invoking the ancestral clause.

    The apocalyptic warning by Enoch Powell at the time of mass immigration in the 1960s was of ‘Rivers of Blood’. The inflammatory racism was reprehensible, but Powell’s prophecy was not entirely without foundation.

    The question of how those communities would ultimately integrate has been inadequately settled, with Asians in a city like Bradford still ghettoized: a sealed-off and closed community, not so much Rivers of Blood, as opposite sides of the fence.

    Norman Tebbit’s famous remark that to be properly British one should have to pass a cricket test of loyalty is apposite in that many second generation Asians still support Pakistan or India in cricket. The same can be said of the Irish in their preferred sports.

    Upon migrating anywhere it is surely advisable to wear the colours of the host nation, without necessarily negating your own inheritance. There is an obligation to adapt and make reasonable accommodations, and the host nation may absorb aspects of your culture too, just as the Indian curry has been taken to the bosom of the UK, all too literally in some cases.

    Caribbean, and indeed Irish communities, have settled better, but racially targeted police surveillance was a phenomenon in places such as Brixton, and IRA bombings led to the false prosecution of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six.

    Acceptance is often on the terms of the host nation. The integrated Irish now excel at light entertainment, from Danny La Rue to Graham Norton via Tony Clare. They offer amusement but not much more. Perhaps we have found our level, considering public intellectualism is virtually extinct in Ireland. At home, indulgence of ‘the craic’ has brought sub-Trumpean political discourse, and the circus clowns of our political, legal and media classes.

    New Species of Racism

    The Labour Left in its present UK incarnation displays a distinctly contradictory attitude towards multiculturalism, and indeed racism. Ken Livingston was surely not an isolated case of virulent antisemitism. Unfortunately anti-Zionism easily morphs into outright antisemitism in supposedly radical left circles. Why?

    Even before fascism there was widespread hatred of the shadowy figure of the cosmopolitan Jewish financier, epitomised by members of the Rothschild family. Anti-capitalism easily falls prey to fictitious Zionist financial conspiracies to rule the world, regurgitating tropes from the Protocols of Zion forgery. The ingenuity and wit of hard-working Jewish communities around the world is rarely acknowledged. This attitude is not evident across the Left, and certainly not in Corbyn. But it is there.

    Also – and here I enter transgressive territory – the rise of antisemitism is linked to the influence of the rich Asian community within the Labour Party. The hostility of Islam towards Israel and Judaism has transmuted into discernible antisemitic attitudes in a purportedly tolerant and multicultural party. The Jewish community can be forgiven for sensing a throwback to another era.

    Brexit extremists are also hostile to multiculturalism, and inheritors of Enoch Powell’s odious strain of English nationalism. The objection to Europe is at one level an objection to undeserved immigrants poaching ‘our’ jobs. It is Spenglerian in that much of the ire is directed against the Slavic ‘degenerate’ races, and despairs at how a ‘nanny’ state permits degenerate lifestyles among the indigenous English working class.

    Puritanism often morphs into sexually-sanitised racism, just as J. Edgar Hoover targeted Martin Luther King’s tomboy promiscuity. It is no coincidence that non-nationals are often portrayed as sexually degenerate, while the religious mania of the U.S. Republican Party promotes a generally hypocritical sexual purity.

    We are seeing a growing hostility towards miscegenation, mixed marriages and corruption of bloodlines. This is apparent in Ireland, where members of the blue-blooded, ‘Anglo-Norman’, Fine Gael party display an absurd sense of entitlement.

    The Right also adduces arguments about abuse of welfare or health care entitlements by migrants. Socio-economic rights are often denied altogether. It all leads to the impression that migrants are sponging off us.

    Other disturbing trends are also on the rise. The vigilante Catholic Right inveighs against alleged paedophiliac Asian men, while ignoring the litany of its own abuses.

    Britain is enmeshed in Brexit dialogue, and arguments about multiculturalism are also pertinent in other jurisdictions. Indeed it has become the burning European issue.

    Thus in France their version of a cricket test was to ban the wearing of garments such as the hijab in public institutions. This was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in S.A.S. in 2014[iv]; where it was justified within the parameters of secular ordre publique. The consequences were profound: civil unrest, bombs, and murder of journalists and cartoonists.

    Yet orthodox Islam has no truck with the core Enlightenment principle of freedom of speech, which an English judge describes as the ‘lifeblood of democracy’. As Stephen Sedley points out, the word ‘lifeblood’ is particularly apt, since ‘free speech enables opinion and fact to be carried round the body politic.’[v]

    But extremism is not restricted to Islam. The Marxist and gay Italian film director Pasolini may have alienated the Roman Church, and mafia, in his 1971 One Hundred Days of Sodom to the extent that he was murdered at their behest on a beach near Rome, with a gay hustler framed for the crime.

    Let us nonetheless hesitate before regulating expressions of culture, particularly as Muslim women see their dress code as an expression of who they are, and ignore the views of some American feminists. The Turkish secular state set up by Ataturk took a similar exclusionary stance towards religious garments; yet, as Orhan Pamuk’s splendid 2002 novel Snow illustrated Turkey was still beset by religious fundamentalism. Liberty demands tolerance of cultural distinctions, albeit there are limits.

    It is clear that excessive multicultural tolerance has permitted the rise of religious fundamentalism, extremism, and indeed terrorism in ‘Londonistan’. Fundamentalism is not, however, limited to Islam, and actually the word can be traced to descriptions of early twentieth century Protestantism. Catholicism has a similar strain – seen vividly throughout Irish history under autocrats such as Archbishop McQuaid.

    The Outsider

    I recently read The Meursault Investigation, written by the Algerian writer Kemal Daoud in 2015. The book is a rebuke to the greatest Algerian, and indeed French, writer of the last century Albert Camus, and his iconic The Outsider, about, as aforementioned, killing an Arab.

    The book is implicitly critical of Camus’s putative racism or imperialism, or at least, a lack of empathy with the murdered Arab. It is certainly not univocally hostile, and the author himself has been the subject of a fatwa, and clearly despises what Camus presaged, namely the rise of religious extremism; one aspect of the multicultural meltdown.

    The book concludes with a consideration which Camus would identify with, namely how do we hold on to the precious commodity of truth?

    The attribution of racism to Camus has been made by others, including Edward Said in his 1993 Culture and Imperialism, which argued he essentially approved of French dominion over Algeria. But Camus is unfairly criticised. He was in origin a member of the French community in Algeria, doubly despised by mainland French as a pied noir outsider, and by the Islamic majority population of Algeria as an occupier.

    Above all he was a product of the Enlightenment, and the French tradition of letters and reason. A devotee of Voltaire with an epigrammatic style redolent of Pascal. There is an austerity about his prose, but also a romantic lyricism born of a mongrel Algerian background.

    In his writing on Algeria – as in his 1951 The Rebel, a book length treatment of secular extremism in the French Revolution – there is a distaste for fundamentalism, secular or religious, which is why he remains relevant. It should be stressed that he advocated co-existence between the transplanted French and native Islamic population in Algeria and condemned the torture and the death penalty inflicted on the Islamic population by the French authorities, graphically conveyed in the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.

    This all seems impeccable multiculturalism, but Camus saw clearly that there was going to be bloodletting in Algeria. He despised religious fervour, just as he had contempt for the secular extremism of the French Revolutionary Terror. Those qualities of middle-of-the-road restraint are in short supply today.

    So what conclusions do I draw from limbo Brexit-land, and with Euro-wide fascism and racism on the rise, about multi-culturalism?

    Here are some tentative, provocative and perhaps disturbing conclusions.

    The liberal consensus based on such values as the Rule of Law, humanism, tolerance, the promotion of excellence irrespective of race, and affirmative action to compensation for historic discrimination has broken down. In an Age of Extremes, the Left and the Right are demonising each other. Reason and moderation are in desperately short supply, as are the Enlightenment values of Camus. Alas, extremism will continue to rise even in multicultural Britain.

    The Extradition Courts in which I appear are going to be flooded with cases resulting in deportations of ‘undesirables’. Only economically productive non-nationals will be allowed to remain in post-Brexit Britain. All non-nationals, perhaps even Irish, will become part of the precariat. Racially motivated crimes and targeting will continue apace, unchecked by an increasingly authoritarian state.

    Merkel’s Open Door policy cannot last, there are limits to the number the continent can accommodate, and the interests of indigenous workers are damaged by an incessant stream of migrants willing to work for less and longer.

    But given the state of Europe with fascist enclaves in Hungary, Poland and the iridescent fascism in Austria – no to mention the deep-seated extremism of Irish neo-liberalism – Britain will probably be the last place to see the Rivers of Blood flow. There are still residues of those precious qualities of rationality, rigour, tolerance and humanism espoused by Camus.

    All is not lost in Britain, but 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, class warfare, intimidation and social fragmentation. The European experiment is over, in truth, having contributed to its downfall, but islands of humanity endure.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [i] Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, London, Pushkin Press, 2014, p.425.

    [ii] James Slack, ‘Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM’s betrayal bare’, The Daily Mail, February 27th, 2016,  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3466485/How-Blair-cynically-let-two-million-migrants-Explosive-biography-reveals-PM-s-conspiracy-silence-immigration-debate.html, accessed 6/2/19.

    [iii] Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation, p.55, London, Little, Brown, 2006.

    [iv] Eva Brems, ‘The European Court of Human Rights and Face Veil Bans’, E-International Relations, February 21st, 2018, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/02/21/the-european-court-of-human-rights-and-face-veil-bans/, accessed 6/2/19.

    [v] Stephen Sedley, ‘The Right to Know’, 10th of August, 2010, The London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n15/stephen-sedley/the-right-to-know, accessed 6/2/19.

  • Fintan O’Toole’s Brexit Myopia

    As a freshly UK-embedded Irish barrister I am adjusting from confronting Ireland’s problems to addressing those of my new home. Worlds’apart, in a global village. In terms of Brexit, as far as the Irish media is concerned the Backstop, and a recrudescence of the ‘Irish Question’, is the only story, but from my perspective the border issue pales by comparison with the precarious position of Irish nationals resident on the UK mainland. All bets are off. In the Westminster extradition courts there is a growing apprehension among all non-nationals, amidst a descent into political farce. Eastern Europeans in particular are on red alert.

    I recently immersed myself in the Brexit literature (word used advisedly), a choice not unlike Christopher Hitchens consenting to undergo waterboarding. Most offer blow-by-blow accounts, and are an utter waste of time.

    By far the most useful and simultaneously useless book to emerge has been from that august man of letters, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole. His Heroic Failure Brexit and The Politics of Pain (London, Apollo, 2018) suffers from a cultural myopia bordering on xenophobia. This account by an Irish-resident journalist is useless at providing any insight into the English character, but serves, nonetheless, as a useful vantage on the general superficiality of Irish political discourse.

    O’Toole rightly inveighs against neo-liberalism throughout his text, but fails to recognise the extent to which the Brexit vote was in certain respects a reaction to the rampages of this pernicious ideology of free market free-for-all. For some, Brexit embodies an attempt to preserve an innate decency in the English character, rather than selling-out to multinational or Eurocractic control.

    There endures a residue of decency in ‘old’ England – informed by secular and Christian socialist or liberal values – which are dying out rather faster in Ireland. Moreover, many argue that the UK should run a mile from the imposition of the austerity policies that liquidated the social structures of Ireland and Greece.

    O’Toole’s argument that Jacob Rees-Mogg, and others, are seeking detachment for the sake of further wealth accumulation is valid, but the denunciation of Brexit as economic folly and a lapse towards an unrealistic autarky is less persuasive. Seeing Brexit as simply a manifestation of national self-pity, combining grievance and superiority, or a racist attempt to curb immigration, neglects to consider the rising indignation that many British justifiably feel at the encroachment of faceless bureaucrats intent on imposing austerity. This is coupled with a rising contempt for a New Labour-led political correctness that never confronted the downsides, in terms of labour protection and integration, of mass migration.

    It is not simply a product of racism, a label O’Toole is too fond of flinging. Quoting Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech is the sort of simplification favoured by those who reach for the Hitler label at student debates.

    Lazy Stereotypes

    Neo-liberalism favours immigration in order to drive down labour costs. O’Toole is thus passively endorsing that which he purports to condemn when he decries how lazy the UK workforce has become. He ought to acknowledge that the Irish workforce has not always been renowned for its commitment, which protected some of us from a premature death through exhaustion. Indeed the flâneur is a fabled specimen in Irish literature.

    As the jokes runs (in a droll Dublin accent): an Irish professor of literature was asked by his Spanish host at a conference in Spain whether there was a Gaelic word similar to the Spanish mañana. ‘Sure’ said the professor, ‘we have five words similar to mañana, but none convey quite the same sense of urgency.’

    Like O’Toole, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar favours a productive, early-rising population, shoehorned into unthinking and robotic work, leading to death on the instalment plan; zero hour contracts; meaningless corporate jobs; and the siphoning off of wealth to vulture funds controlled by off-shore multi-nationals.

    I vote for more leisure time. Who knows, it might lead the charmless O’Toole, and Varadkar his intellectual consort, to greater depths of analysis and cultural refinement.

    Fintan O’Toole fails to comprehend that Ireland is the perfect little neo-liberal shit storm, which has prompted the aforementioned Rees-Mogg to invest in our little meltdown, after the double-whammy of liquidation by the ECB and American transitional corporations.

    Britain, in its post-Brexit phase, cannot be described, as O’Toole purports to, in a reductive way. Yes, it is a society in existential crisis, but with many cross-currents. One cannot reduce this to a superiority complex, or colonial hangover. The pantomime villain qualities ascribed by O’Toole to the UK’s political caste are increasingly evident in politicians the world over.

    Boris Johnson may be an opportunistic clown, but he rarely put a foot wrong as Mayor of London. His books are even sometimes well written. If he is a clown he is a more civilised prankster than our gang of horribles: the tasteless Varadkar, gombeen Kenny, blathering drunk Cowen, and the good ol’ boys of the Law Library.

    Boris Johnson: a superior clown to our own vaudeville acts..

    O’Toole commits the common Irish error of confusing speaking seriously on serious issues, which he does not understand, with being serious. Gravitas should be leavened with wit, not outright hysterical or self-righteous condemnation. The clownish but observant Johnson actually realises the necessity for laughter in the darkness, in common with the more sinister congeniality of the arch-Machiavellian Michael Gove. They are smarter than O’Toole allows.

    Turning the lens

    The unvarying narrative in the mainstream Irish media is that Brexit is a disaster, not just for Ireland but also the UK. About this I am not so sure. Cultural imperialism and splendid isolationism are distasteful aspects of the British character, but Europe was always an uncomfortable fit for other reasons too. Snap judgments are misleading.

    Irish commentaries inevitably turn to what is in it for ‘us’, whether Europe, Brexit or anything else. Grubby calculation is an increasingly odious national characteristic, which clouds any assessment of whether it is the right path from a British perspective.

    Let us recall that the Irish brand of disaster capitalism involves the state providing tax breaks for multi-nationals, and appeasing Canadian and American vulture funds; the destruction of not just the working class but increasingly the middle. According to Social Justice Ireland, last year 790,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 250,000 were children.[i] How is this possible when GDP per capita is at almost seventy-five thousand euro?

    Though he condemns neo-liberalism, and indeed endorses legitimate outrage against European excesses, O’Toole is incapable of turning his lens on Ireland’s failings; or the receding possibility of reforming an EU increasingly beholden to corporate lobbyists.

    Superiority and self-pity are characteristic of Irish attitudes too: the no longer purring Celtic Tiger is a Paper Tiger. For generations we endured the lachrymose nationalism of a failing state, now we talk ourselves up as the best little country in the world. As Flann O’ Brians put it: ‘Moderation we find is a difficult thing to get in this country.’[ii]

    This sentimental patriotism fed into a grotesque over-estimate of our exceptionalism, which now permits the Mussolini-lite fascism, embodied by the grandstanding Varadkar, to go unchecked. Give me the incrementalism and resistance to the grandiosity of grand ideals that are a hallmark of historic British decency – tempering other aspects of the national character – any day.

    The English Sausage

    On a more mundane level, over breakfast in Bloomsbury, I reflected on the humble English sausage which helps gives an appreciation of the national character. Reading O’Toole’s overblown account of the British objection to EU bureaucratic regulation I found it a pity that he failed to mention the British sausage.

    The sausage is a geopolitical signifier. Its fate a precursor to Brexit, the fons et origo of all that has gone horribly wrong.

    Cast minds back to a kerfuffle at the inception of the EU, regarding the standardisation of the British sausage, and how incensed people became. With hindsight we see what could have gone wrong, and now has.

    As an Irishman, albeit one who is partly Austrian, and an internationalist – effectively now a mongrel warrior – I recall how we derided the British for being so small-minded about their precious sausage. Hindsight is of course twenty-twenty vision. The British were perhaps right, then and now. They were outraged, and continue to be, by a foreign order of bean counters telling them what to do, and preaching to them about standards. And what role models and standards emanate from the EU exactly?

    Then the story descended into silly season farce, but I think it remains emblematic and prescient of the tensions that have always existed between Britain and the EU.

    If they regulate a sausage then who is next among the pantheon of eccentrics that populate English public life, excoriated by O’Toole. People are increasingly standardised, like sausages, in modern Ireland. As an unapologetic eccentric, I am dismissive of technocratic robots and muppets. If the political consensus leads to neo-liberalism then give me the oddness O’Toole attacks, any day.

    The reclamation by O’Toole of British decency towards the end of the book, citing Orwell and parts of the Bloomsbury set, does not atone for the cack-handedness of his analysis of the English character.

    Face it Fintan there is something rotten in the state of Brussels

    Let us focus on what has been wrong with the EU from the outset, and which O’Toole unsatisfactorily broaches. Foremost has been the appointment of faceless bureaucrats at levels removed from local concerns, who impose a levelling conformity – here I am providing a clear distinction between standards and standardisation. Technocrats are invariably drawn from a privileged elite, selected through education for conformity, political-correctness and reliability. Then they are insulated in their silo bubble of privilege from the experiences of the common person.

    The salaries, junkets and gravy trains engender a bland sub-Americana esperenta by degrees; an Orwellian doublespeak that passes for education, breeding compliance and homogeneous uniformity.

    The idea that breaking down trade barriers and permitting the free movement of labour (including myself), capital and goods would promote tolerance, and enable cultural exchanges, amid the fiction of economic growth-without-end, made superficial sense at the outset. The very simple idea of Erasmus programmes and scholarly exchange has been a boon. The benefits are considerable, but the downside is increasingly apparent.

    Let us face it Fintan, the EU has become an instrument of international global capitalism, encouraging the mass migration of workers who are willing to work for less, and harder, than their domestic counterparts. Nothing wrong with hard graft and thrift, but what if indigenous jobs are threatened, and employment rights done away with? Why should people feel compelled to work themselves to an early grave, as in Japan? Unrestricted labour mobility suits the corporate agenda, but not workers. The British are entitled to be lazier or less hard-working than their European counterparts.

    Brexit is certainly in part an objection to mass migration. The moral evil of racism has been at work, but that should not be used as an excuse to suspend all judgment on the desirability of mass migration. A sovereign country ought to have some control over who enters, and on what terms; while those who settle in a new land should expect to make reasonable cultural accommodations. If unrestrained, multiculturalism can generate extremism among indigenous and new arrivals.

    The other major downside of a German-led EU has been the imposition of austerity policies, generating social fragmentation and breakdown, in Greece and Ireland in particular. Austerity, as all the best evidence indicates, rips societies apart and delays economic recovery. It represents the triumph of what Naomi Klein termed the corporatocracy,[iii] bringing control of the world to the mega-rich, who inflict poverty-by-degrees on the rest. Thus the transnational law firms and multinational corporations lobby the EU for TTIP, which would permit them to sue local governments for any diminution in their clients’ profits.

    Our increasingly neo-liberalist EU promotes the boom and bust cycle of the shock doctrine, pioneered when Milton Friedman visited Pinochet in Chile in the 1970’s to unleash his brainwashed Chicago graduates on the local population; just as Ireland was treated after the Bailout.

    Growth and development is achieved not by austerity but by the mixed social democratic economy, which provides incentives, but allows individuals to recover if there businesses fail.

    A Sovereign Nation

    Let us turn now to the vexed question of sovereignty, or domestic jurisdiction, not simply policing borders, but the internal assertion of national protectionism. Brexit, at one level, is no different from the Boston Tea Party, a nationalist assertion, insisting enough is enough, particularly if a foreign power is draining, not contributing to, the well-being of the local population.

    The protection of small and local business is crucial, even ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, Margaret Thatcher, another devotee of Milton Freedman, conceded as much. Now, seemingly inexorably, the local bookstore is giving way to the chain shop, while the bakers, butchers and greengrocers are superseded by the supermarket. European standardisation has facilitated this baleful transition. Communities, being torn apart in Ireland, are built from the bottom up. Small is beautiful. There are as many antiquarian bookstores in the small town of Dorking as there are now in Dublin.

    Theresa May has proceeded with caution, amidst mounting opposition, towards a smooth exit. She and her more moderate cohorts must know that a deal has to be struck in the national interest, now that the path of risk has been chosen. Britain being Britain it has, in a cri de coeur, insisted on its rights being respected. It still has values and pride, unlike Ireland, which meekly accepted the role of a vassal state during the Bailout.

    Fintan, this is a difficult but unpalatable truth: the British people may have been right in thinking that there is no future for the EU. Could it be time to consider an Irexit? For just as the medieval Hanseatic League collapsed, so will the EU. A rising fascist triumphalism has already attained power in Hungary, Poland and Italy. It may be time to circle the wagons of democracy and the Rule of Law, for a spell at least.

    If our contemporary Hanseatic league is collapsing, a negotiated departure of our own may have a salutary outcome, giving way to looser affiliations, and a greater degree of national autonomy to protect indigenous populations against the rampages of global capitalism. Perhaps the British have grasped we are facing a gathering storm, and are muddling through. It might of course end in disaster, but their difficulties in many respects compare favourably to our Irish dependence on footloose multinational corporations, and an EU-subsidised agri-food industry.

    Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose portrait ages while he is blessed with a seemingly eternal youth, in his account of Brexit, Fintan O’Toole shies away from reflecting on failings in his own land. His book demonizes the assertive neighbour, along the well-trodden path of lachrymose patriots, and ignores what is staring him in the face.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [i] Cillian Sherlock, ‘790,000 people living in poverty in Ireland: Social Justice Ireland’, Irish Examiner, December 19th, 2017.

    [ii] Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles, Dublin, Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.

    [iii] Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine, New York, Vintage, 2008.

  • Review: Rather His Own Man by Geoffrey Robertson

    In his autobiography– in itself an unusual exercise for a lawyer – Geoffrey Robertson QC, refers to himself as a ‘Baby Boomer’, and devotes a chapter to that generation. Although of Generation X myself, we share similar career trajectories in our commitment to human rights, which is probably why Geoffrey kindly sent me this biography, Rather His Own Man, for review.

    The title is revealing on all sorts of levels. First, there is no doubt that he has ploughed a creative and perhaps lonely furrow on legal and societal issues, enhancing the cause of human rights in the UK, and throughout the planet. Compared to other Baby Boomers his contribution has been largely positive, which could not be said for his birthfellow Mr Clinton.

    Secondly, though every inch a hard-working scholarship boy from an ordinary school in Sydney, it may be argued that the opportunities he was afforded, notwithstanding his obvious dynamism and drive, were not commonly allocated to Generation X. With fewer aspirants in the 1960s it was easier to forge the path of an international human rights lawyer. He might concede that to achieve his level of dominance and fame would be impossible now for anyone starting from a lower rung on the social ladder. More to the point, the cause of human rights, something I will return to, is dying. Thirdly, and I think most importantly, in the present age – more so than ever – remaining your own man or woman is increasingly difficult, or even nigh on impossible.

    At one level the autobiography is a unique insight into a fading life experience of a somewhat gilded age. He is, as he intimates several times, at the end of the Biblical cycle of ‘three score year and ten.’ The death of his parents at the end of the book are engendering in a personality – one suspects of huge warmth and decency – intimations of mortality. The dying of the light.

    As the great chronicler of our age, and perhaps the foremost Baby Boomer Bob Dylan put it ‘It is not dark yet but it is getting there.’[i]

    There are many aspects of his upbringing which startled me in the realisation that they were similar to my own. We are both bibliophiles, with a love of the great works of literature. Omnivorous in that respect. The first few chapters of the autobiography offer an immersion into the great fictional and non-fiction books he has absorbed. This very defined liberal arts background is no longer typical of lawyers, but is surely crucial to his eminence.

    Elsewhere among his corpus of works there is strict legalism, such as his textbook on Media Law, but he has also put the whole justice structure under a microscope, and has placed law in a sociological and philosophical and indeed historical context.

    He epitomises the paper-giving public intellectual practitioner, which are increasingly being replaced by robotic technocrats. To speak and write as mellifously, and occasionally orotundly, as he does might invites caricature and ridicule among the dominant philistinism of today.

    He is a non-conformist in the best sense and has represented far from popular people. In this respect, Alberto Moravio’s novel The Conformist (Secker and Warburg 1952) shows how the bureaucratic conformity evident in many lawyers leads to the endorsement of fascism. As a cosmopolitan London QC, something one senses he is hugely proud of, he had the protection and freedom to remain a non-conformist, immune from parochial pressures. He flew the coop and in hindsight is quite prescient about how scholarship decisions, which reading between the lines were marginally in his favour. Expatriation gave him a distance from, and perspective on, his native land; about which he writes with a tint of nostalgia and doe-eyed remembrance, in common with Irish Americans recall of their ‘old country’.

    It should be stressed it cannot have been easy to ascend to his level even in more informal times. He tells an interesting anecdote of his first appearance at Knightsbridge Crown Court, representing an indecent t-shirt seller, where his ‘irritable vowels’ of Australian slang lead a snobbish judge to rebuke him. The t-shirt my lord he intoned ‘Says Fuck art, let’s dance.’ To which the judge responded with a reference to his Australian inheritance you surely meant to say: ‘Fuck at, lets drance.’

    Elements of the English establishment may have embraced him but one senses he is still a quintessential outsider.

    As an aside, just as Geoffrey Robertson aspired in his childhood to appear before the Old Bailey so did I, managing to do so very recently. I recall saying in front of my peers when I was sixteen precisely what he had: ‘I want to be a barrister at the Old Bailey in England’, and being greeted with the same jeering laughter and bemusement.

    Now I doubt suburban Sydney is as bad as suburban Ireland in its contempt for that particular courthouse, but I recognise that he had many barriers of prejudice to surmount. It should be stressed that his affectionate evocations of the Australian bar are quite different from my view of the Irish bar.

    He makes the point several times and he is absolutely right, that all true change comes from troublemakers, dissenters and muckrakers and that the bland technocratic and compliant conformity of our new world order needs to be resisted.

    Yet the vanity, though not in a bad way, of the narrative is quite breathtaking. It is almost like reading Katherine Hepburn’s autobiography, simply entitled Me (Knopf 1991), as if everybody should know who that is. Well of course they do, and there is nothing wrong with subjectivism, or an element of personal vanity as long as it leads to the whole series of achievements and good deeds he has accomplished.

    One is dumbstruck at the litany of the high profile representations, and wonders how he has done it. Not least physically. Leaving aside enormous ability, other aspect of his personality emerge, which might be open to censure. He is a total social butterfly and name dropper, and his friends and associates are all glittering examples of the chattering classes, as are many of his amours. Now I would imagine this pronounced maven-like networking ability is a huge asset and he has effortlessly glided between different worlds in the cosmopolis. Is he a lawyer? Is he a  public intellectual? Is he a media don? Is he just another part of the culture of solipsism and celebrity?

    I do not mean to be dismissive and am not. That maven-like ability and his ability to interact at different cultural levels, I suspect, is why he has achieved as much as he has done. Like all great advocates he is an everyman, and complex creature. But to be this unclassifiable is now no longer, in my view,  an asset, but a liability. The lawyering caste, and the world at large, is now populated by arcane specialist, not generalists, however Olympian.

    Robertson is clearly the thinking woman’s lawyer. The alpha-male-minus of the Baby Boomer generation. Man, the very man, but not a caveman. A feminist success. He is very critical, as am I, of corporate lawyers and the vast wealth they accumulate doing no good at all. I think he is very proud in hindsight that he has fulfilled his potential and has been a conventional success by pursuing a less than conventional path.

    There are little clues though to the alpha-male-minus that I must say I do not like. He sees nothing wrong with academic Stalinists no platforming people. But I do. His fellow Baby Boomer and Australian Germaine Greer was no platformed for saying that a man who becomes a woman can never truly understand what it is like to be one.  He is rightly indignant, as am I, about Catholicism and how its institutions have covered up child abuse, and in fact wrote a beautiful crisp book on that theme called The Case Of The Pope (Penguin, 2010). What he neglects to deal with is that now in Ireland this specialist knowledge base on child abuse has been used by a corrupt state to make false accusations and frame people. Thus the sins of the clergy are recast to target those who dissent and challenge the cosy consensus, led by lawyers often religious in orientation.

    I attended a CPD session run by his chambers. Most professional it was, but one was not oblivious to the anti-corporate corporatisation. The slick presentations, the office marketeers and managers. Doughty Street Chambers is in many respects a factory for the good, and he presides over it all like a latter day Friedrich Engels. And he is very proprietorial. At times the CPD was so slick I wanted to holler. But that is too trite a judgment and perhaps reveals my own parochialism.  Doughty Street Chambers, of which he is rightly enormously proud, is a totemic achievement and he presumably knows in this age of advertising and soundbites that in order to take on corporatisation one has to adopt their methods, or at least know a bit about branding. Robertson has been brilliant at marketing himself and his product.

    I applaud him for this, but I doubt the backbiting Australian legal community are quite so approving. From reading this book I do not think he is anything other than a deeply humane man with an acute and developmental sense of justice, along with a terrific eye for detail, nuance and erudition. He is very prescriptive that a lawyer needs to know the hard data, know his onions before grappling with the ethereal world of human rights. Hard Graft. Sydney scholarship boys grow up harder, and are less tolerant of those that have had it handed to them on plate.

    He is very interesting on the nature versus nurture question, having been been given opportunities to grow and develop, thereby escaping the shackles of his background. He has not blown these chances. By contrast, by and large Generation X has had to make more sacrifices and often settle for less. Much less.

    He writes  with great precision about the secular religion that is human rights as an ethic for our time, but it sounds like the lilt of a dying generation, or generation a their song. It is fin de siècle and the new zeitgeist, which I imagine troubles him, as much as me, is resurgent fascism, the decline of pluralism and multi-cultural tolerance, along with the utilisation of surveillance, which he eloquently conveys in his analysis of his client Julian Assange, under an increasingly oppressive state. Human rights lawyers are the new subversives, as defined by state criminals. The dangerous rise of what Chomsky captured as a triage of evil: postmodernist relativism, neo-liberalism and religious fundamentalism; our post-truth universe, so alien to the truth-telling barrister.

    He does mention the word postmodernism favourably once, and such intellectual artifices have probably influenced him unduly, as indeed has an overly-attuned political correctness, but he has had to, and done so brilliantly, navigate some choppy waters.

    He defines himself as a Gladstonian Liberal and a Cromwellian Puritan. I am with him on the former, but not the latter. Puritanism far too easily morphs into Brahmin self-righteousness. Also, dare I say, to define oneself in such sonorous terms, is an echo of a different age. Based on his positive ambivalence towards Lord Denning and enthusiasm for U.S. Legal realism as well as the Harvard Socratic method he seems to be a pragmatist, like myself. Castles in the sky, I would imagine, he has always resisted.

    The most interesting part I found was his analysis (pp. 446-447) of the ‘banality of evil’ – to appropriate Hannah Arendt’s phrase – among government, judicial and state officials, which I witnessed in Ireland. Bean counters absolve themselves of responsibility for evil deed by claiming they had to feed their families. Evil is incremental and increasingly apparent in our times.

    Just as Eichmann saw himself as only putting people on trains, and a mere functionary in Hannah Arendt’s description, so austerity cost-cutters render a decent existence for many people a huge struggle, if not an impossibility.

    I think Robertson accepts he – and I hope he does not take offense – is now a  banger, a cab rank tart and a gun for hire, even for the right reasons. I doubt he has ever considered himself anything else and there is underlying the ego a deep-seated modesty, and acceptance indeed, of the absurdity of the human condition.

    He is prescient about knowing when enough is enough. Experience and judgement are all assets, but not if mind and body are failing.

    It is a remarkable life, and for a lawyer almost unique. He is also still fresh and childlike and a real force for good. In this day and age that is a huge achievement.

    To revert briefly to Irish, or Australian, begrudgery, it just shows how far you can go with the gift of the gab. But the light is dying for the good. It as if we have stepped into Jean Renoir’s 1939 film La Regle De Jeu, on the precipice of an environmental and economic collapse that collectively we are sleep walking into. Robertson has stood bravely resisting the subversive tide. But the tide is high, and what can this King Canute or Rumpole of the legal profession do apart from

    Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas: ‘Let us Not Go Darkly Into That Night’ (1952)).

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

     

    [i] (Dylan: Not Dark Yet from Time Out of Mind (Columbia 1997).

  • Post-Truth: People of the Lie

    Morality is the basis of things and truth is the basis of all morality.
    Mahatma Gandhi

    Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani was recently asked whether his boss had a case to answer arising from the conviction of his former associate Paul Manafort. He responded with the not-altogether-original, but nonetheless all-too-convincing argument that ‘truth is not truth.’ It seems we have entered a virtual reality nightmare.

    Of course times passed have been consumed with other disturbing ideologies such as, Social Darwinism, racism, Fascism and Communism. More recently we have seen neo-liberalism reign supreme, giving rise to Francis Fukayama’s foolhardy vision of an End to History.

    Just as Marxists shibboleths about the inevitability and finality of Revolution ignored reality, the neo-liberal world order is disintegrating before our eyes, a point which Fukayama now concedes; recently he meekly acknowledged there had been a decline in faith in democratic institutions, and that democracy was now moving backwards.

    So perhaps Post-Truth will be a passing affliction. Alas I doubt it.

    Post-Truth, or truth decay, has been coming for a while and its origins need to be traced as it dictates the activities of the Trump administration.

    I – Post Modern Nonsense

    First came the purveyors of nonsense, and incomprehensible prose, the Structuralists and Post Modernist poseurs of the Sorbonne.

    They united in rejection of universal values, while espousing a gospel of relativism, thereby ditching the inheritance of the Enlightenment. This led to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision, and all the integrative forces that holds society together.

    Noam Chomsky in this context wrote a passage worth quoting in full:

    It’s entirely possible that I’m simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made — but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I’m missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it’s all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I’m just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I’m perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

    Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.”

    It is, in other words, nonsense on stilts, that degrades our culture. But it has gained traction, and power, and should not be underestimated.

    Relativism, which should never have gone beyond those flaneurs, has been hijacked by the Populist Right, including Climate Change Deniers, Anti-Vaxxers  and Creationists, who insist on balanced coverage for their ludicrous views, each one as ‘valid’ as the other, in Post Modernist hell. This reaches an apogee in the churning garbage emanating from spokespeople for the Trump administration, especially the deranged President himself.

    The gospel of relativism brings contempt for truth, reason and evidence. It entails the rejection of scientific methods, order and the Rule of Law.

    The first point to note about Post Modernism is that it encourages distrust in established truth, and generates an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, where arguments are accorded even and equal weight, even if lacking any substance. The misplaced logic is that since all views are equal, all views should be aired and taken equally seriously.

    The late David Foster Wallace described this as ‘an epistemic free for all in which the truth is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.’

    ‘Balanced coverage’ and ‘tolerance’ of opposing points of view in the media often leads to the elevation of nonsense, or lies.

    Balance should not permit the assertion that Climate Change is a fraud. Undue weight is being accorded to marginal opinions and minority views, which simply should not be given a platform. Abandoned is the quest for an elusive truth. The media is giving a microphone to divisive extremism.

    This nonsense is creeping into our culture, our media, our law courts and is a form of brainwashing.

    Relativistic and structuralist ideas, such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language opens the way for Trump and his acolytes to say that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida contradicts itself, Trump similarly can make contradictory statements, from one tweet to the next.

    II – Holding to Truth

    As a lawyer I have been trained to consider distinctions between fact and opinion. I understand how an apparently established fact can actually be the product of manipulation, distortion or outright fabrication.

    In my work for The Innocence Project in Ireland I found many instances of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts, or really pseudo-experts, leading to false conclusions and erroneous convictions. Innocent people are often incarcerated on the basis of lies and this false expertise.

    In this Post Modern zeitgeist we privilege opinion over knowledge, and feelings over facts. This includes confirmation bias where people rush to judgment and follow their prejudices, rather than properly evaluating sources.

    Indeed, with regard to so-called expert witnesses I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous comment, itself capable of multiple levels of interpretation: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wittgenstein, 1922)

    As difficult as it is to establish the truth, and as complex as it may prove to be, we must continue to strive for it, and not succumb to relativism, or take refuge in Post-Truth nonsense.

    This pursuit is indispensable for penal and judicial decision-making, as well as the pursuit of social and economic justice. Acknowledging there truth helps inform political and personal choices arising from our interactions with banks or politicians, or indeed with respect to one’s health.

    The truth protects us against those who mislead, dupe or destroy us. Better to acknowledge ‘home truths’, and act accordingly, rather than be seduced by banalities. But it is often difficult to determine what is genuine when you are being bombarded with disinformation.

    As Pope Francis sagely remarked: ‘there is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’

    So in a sane, rational universe that is how everything should and ought to be decided. Except that is not what confronts us today.

    III – Info-tainment

    Following the degradation of so many discourses, our media is too often consumed by ideological representations of alternative truths – and at worst utter nonsense – in a misplaced quest for balance, or pandering to vested interests.

    News programmes generally adopt a Punch and Judy format, rather than providing serious analysis. We are addicted to what Susan Jacoby termed ‘info-tainment’ (Jacoby, 2009).

    In this respect it was noticeable that the intellectual level of the Clinton-Trump Presidential debates had reached a nadir. For anyone who has listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates of the early 1960s, or indeed many subsequent electoral ones in the US and Britain, it was simply not a debate.

    It was more like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. But the vaudeville act, the circus clown that is Trump, is actually now President of the United States, having manipulated a series of communications both in the debate, and the media, which were exercises in falsity, total inconsistency, randomness and communication in proto-fascist mode: lashing out at the outsider.

    People were brainwashed into believing that he would help them. The disenfranchised working and middle class reached out to him, and he responded by appointing three members of Goldman Sachs to his cabinet; a classic instance of what Zizek terms ‘ideological mis-indentification’ (Zizek, 1989) with the marginalised voting for self-destruction.

    Print media has also dumbed down. The reasons are obvious. Vested interests have to be appeased. In addition megalomaniac owners cannot be criticised. Things are known, or suspected, but left unsaid. Independent courageous reportage, beyond The Guardian or The New York Times is increasingly rare.

    The so-called text generation, drowning in email communication and other digital ephemera, exacerbate the problem.

    Admittedly, my own emails appear like hieroglyphics – ungrammatical and unpunctuated – so I am scarcely one to talk. But in my defence, I simply cannot take the medium seriously, whereas the rest of the world seems to have lost any interest in oral conversation, or expressing themselves in permanent written form.

    The Internet is a truly poisoned chalice: the major problem is that people feel free to utter whatever they like, however bizarre, extreme or libelous. This accentuates the disentangling of truth from fiction, and facts from lies.

    The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen has argued that the Internet has replaced genuine knowledge, but that is undifferentiated knowledge derived from the crowd, or mob, which blurs any distinction between fact and opinion.

    Established ideas are under threat and rationality jettisoned, replaced by subjectivism, the pseudo-expert, and elevation of the opinion of the equivalent of ‘the man on the Clapham Omnibus’. As Tom Nichols wrote: ‘every opinion on any matter is as good as every other (Nichols, 2017)’; I am also reminded of William Burroughs’s famous statement that: ‘Opinions are like assholes everyone has one.’

    Another problem is information overload. We are creatures of bounded rationality that can only absorb so much. We have to filter. The Internet presents us with a cacophony of competing voices, all clamouring for attention. This desensitises, and makes it impossible to disentangle valid arguments from nonsense. In effect we are being deceived by a web of deceit, semi-fact, mumbo jumbo and plain nonsense.

    III – Bad Education

    Perhaps most disturbingly, our education system is producing ill-informed, philosophically illiterate, and indeed often genuinely illiterate children. We are operating in a post-Gutenberg Galaxy, where even lecturers and teachers generally no longer read books outside their specialisms, and are insulated from intellectual cross currents. Goethe’s ideal of a civilised education, which inoculates against fascism, no longer abides

    A partial education breeds the self-righteousness of fascism. Why appeal to true argument when your thought processes stands unexamined and your prejudices go uncontradicted? In these circumstances, the gutter press finds a ready market.

    Information is not gleaned from the close reading of texts, but from online synopses. Superficial knowledge and semi-literacy accentuate the perversion that everyone has a right to express their opinion, no matter how ludicrous.

    Let us be clear, academic degrees and education are distinct from one another. We hand out qualifications like confetti, but true education is lacking. Yet, apart from foreign direct investment, the education sector appears to be the biggest growth industry in Ireland. But what kind of person is it producing?

    We find an emphasis on narrow technocratic skills and rote learning, where teachers slavishly adhere to syllabi. Books go unread, but instead are summarised on Internet sites. The standardization of learning outcomes breeds bullshit, piled on bullshit.

    As an established lecturer I have encountered increasing nonsense about balance and standardization. In the ivory tower the careful weighing up of argument has given way to an obsession with footnotes, and citation, and a narrowing in doctoral work; most baleful, is the decline of the academic as public intellectual.

    In this respect we should note the important contribution of perhaps the only acceptable Post Modernist, Michel Foucault. He argued that the more severe punishments of earlier times have been internalized, through insidious methods of control in schools, hospitals and factories.

    In a 1978 interview he remarked:

    In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a carceral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour) (Foucault,1980).

    This leads to a social hygiene, wherein people are assessed not on what they have to say, or the quality of any service they may provide, but more on their attire; or whether they wear a uniform that conveys a false sense of expertise and arrogant authority; cleanliness next to a self-serving godliness. Give me someone with an occasional slovenly appearance and I see a degree of human fragility.

    Intolerance and contempt for human frailty, except of course by the power elite who act as they please, marginalises real authorities from making contributions to society.

    In our glorious colleges and universities and schools worse is happening. First and foremost there is a suppression of speech and discourse, with discussion confined within narrowing parameters, and divisive subjects omitted.

    We are in an age of conformity where obedience to authority has become a sine qua non of success. The great old days of uninhibited debate are disappearing from campuses.

    One aspect of this is the so-called ‘snowflake’ phenomenon, leading to anything remotely controversial being deemed offensive. This is used as a method of thought control, and heralds the gradual erosion of criticism of vested interests.

    Moreover, within the college structure promotion and preferment are linked to an increasingly controlled discourse, where ideas that cut across the norm are penalized. Those countervailing ideas often do not sit comfortably with elites, and are usually tinged with leftism or anti-authoritarianism, or involve discomforting truth-telling. Alas, the paradigm of discourse is neo-liberalism, and increasingly a knee-jerk conservatism, which is morphing into outright fascism.

    IV – No Platforming

    The academic community is also responsible for other outrages attacking freedom of speech. One truly sinister development is a phenomenon known as ‘no platforming’, whereby anyone presenting dissident views is barred from campus appearances.

    There are acceptable reasons for exclusion of errant views. For example the trash talk of the fascist historian David Irving, who condones the Holocaust, or at least intimates it never happened, is an obvious case in point. But he is a denier of truth, and his lies should be restrained.

    Recently the ‘no platform’ lobby barred the eminent feminist and author Germaine Greer from speaking in UK campuses, as she had argued many years ago that a man who becomes a woman can never fully understand what it is like to be a woman.

    The ‘no platform’ lobby which secured her ban was made up of transsexual academics. Take note, these are not necessarily trans-sexuals, but a lobby group. They are also proto-fascists and part of a new semi-literate cabal of arcane specialists.

    It is academic Stalinism, or Fascism if you prefer. Such groups use the immense power of blackmail, intimidation by social media and character assassination, to put fear into often squeamish academic authorities.

    V – Anti-Social Media

    Social media is unraveling our social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears and character assassination. As Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay put it: ‘The monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart.’

    The use of trolls and bots to spread disinformation by Trump, Bannon and Cambridge Analytica undermined democratic institutions, as well as fact-based debates.

    Cambridge Analytica specialised in forms of artificial intelligence that look set to nurture a new species, a new form of human identity, who become bland consuming nodal points, and receptors of a barrage of disinformation and nonsense.

    This paradigm shift in our culture, will curtail necessary criticism and free thinking and is already afflicting the media. Before appearing on radio shows I myself have been told what I can and cannot say for fear of upsetting a vested interest. Instead, increasingly lobby groups of the most extreme nature are invited on shows and their views accorded credibility, when they have nothing of substance to say.

    We are creating a new generation of technocratic fascists: selfish, materialistic, ultra-conformist people receptive to Post-Truth. A new Dark Age looms with the Far Right gaining increasing authority, as the edifice of neo-liberalism crumbles, and social support structures are dismantled.

    Post-Truth has I fear already taken hold. The truth does not matter; what is important is convincing someone of the truth, often through advertising. Stories are planted and lines between fact and fiction disappear.

    People are buying the bullshit. The sensationalism and gossip of the gutter press is now being taken seriously. We are holding court to pseudo-expertise. Lies have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction; The People of the Lie as in the title of the seminal book by M. Scott Peck in which he conflates evil with untruth. He contends that this undermines life and liveliness, transforming people into automatons.

    Such people are not up front but operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others: since they consider themselves repositories of perfection, they must demonise ‘the other’.

    This leads, ineluctably, to hostility towards the foreigner and migrant, the recrudescence of tribalism, and a denial and rejection of reason; a veneration of the past and the equation of disagreement with treason; a ‘them and us’ universe.

    Evil people prevent us from exercising reasonable choices, where we grow in integrity, courage and self-esteem. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by those in authority, who undermine growth and development.

    Evil is surprisingly obedient to authority. The truly good in times of acute stress do not desert their integrity, maturity, sensitivity. They act on principle, not regressing in response to degradation, preserving empathy for the pain of others.

    *******

    Hannah Arendt would recognise our current descent:

    The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.

    The ‘People of the Lie’, the powerful and corrupt, project their deviance and criminality onto others. Morality does not apply to them, and those they disagree with are deemed enemies of the people. All that matters now is to win, and to mask untrue intentions in order to survive.

    The really important values of truth, integrity, sincerity, depth, originality, creativity are being abandoned. Alas, the lunatics have by now taken over the asylum.

    Truth is not truth. The imitation game has won. How can we retain our individuality when fact is replaced by semi-fact or worse? When we are assailed by streams of advertising; nonsensically balanced coverage; relativism and Post Modernism; bogus standards in high places; putative expertise and ass-hole opinions?

    Instead jaded rituals, religious and secular, particularly in countries like Ireland, desensitise us to reality.

    References

    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, Berlin, 1951.
    Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (edited by Colin Gardner), Pantheon, New York, 1980.
    Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason, Pantheon, New York, 2009.
    Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.
    M. Scott Peck The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Keegan Paul, London, 1922.
    Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, 1989.

  • There is Something Rotten in the State of Democracy

    On a recent visit to Athens I chanced upon the supposed tomb of Socrates near the Acropolis. Socrates chose to remain in the city after being found guilty on trumped up charges of corrupting youth. For this he was handed the ultimate sanction of a death sentence, to be self-inflicted with hemlock. By receiving his punishment he was making a statement to posterity to the effect that the Rule of Law was of greater importance than the individual injustice being inflicted on him. The operation of the law would just have to improve, the alternative being anarchic barbarity.

    Nearby, somewhat hidden and a tad derelict is perhaps the most historically-significant structure in Athens, the birthplace and site of Athenian democracy, and thus the birthplace of democracy itself, where the impassioned speeches of the great orator Pericles (died c. 450 BCE) set the small polity on the destructive course of the Peloponnesian War.

    More recently, Randy Newman’s song about America,‘In Defense of Our Country’ from Harps and Angels (2008) expresses a cautious, pre-Trumpian optimism that the political leaders of a decade ago were ‘hardly the worst / This poor world has seen.’ But presciently he references Caligula, the emperor which President Donald Trump best resembles at the fag end of American empire. But Trump actually democratically won the Presidential election, at least the electoral college, just as Hitler achieved power through elections, before dismantling the Rule of Law.

    I have expressed reservations in the past about democracy, and I despise demagoguery. But let me construct a few words in its defence.

    I – ‘Benevolent Authoritarianism’

    A comment often attributed to Churchill is that democracy is the least worst form of government, which I consider trite, and perhaps untrue. The enlightened despot may prove more effective, as the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed.

    Similarly, David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (Profile Books, 2018) endorses the concept of benevolent authoritarianism. Such is the luck of the draw, however, that a benevolent oligarchy almost invariably leads to despotism of the Right or Left, and utter disaster.

    Let us nonetheless lay out the positives of what Pericles effectively pioneered. First, in the immaculate expression of honest Abraham Lincoln ‘the rail splitter’ in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 it is governance by the people. On the scene of the Civil War battlefield that would eventually end slavery he resolved:

    these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    So it is that “we the people” are sovereign, as opposed to governance by faceless corporations, multi-national banks and nefarious corporate law firms, purchasing our political class.

    We also find governance by the people for the people in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), the first modern constitutional statement of democracy.

    At least in theory. The problem is our public representatives are beholden to the crypto-fascist advocates of neo-liberalism. The Irish state, for example, is effectively run by Goldman Sachs, corporate law firms, Vulture Funds and banks for their own enrichment. The people are irrelevant, and many among the judiciary, mired in debt, seem to be in on the act.

    The people are drip-fed justifications by the establishment media for austerity, on behalf of these global parasites, and conditioned to accept inflated house prices, robber baron banks, besides substandard and ludicrously expensive rental accommodation. The abolition of pensions, and death on a hospital corridor are the new reality.

    Our Brave New World of the Internet is incubating a dangerously compliant and accepting population, reflected in Trump’s ability to win over the American people, who he persuaded to consent to their own demise. This, what Timothy Snyder called ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Snyder, 2017)  involves going with the flow of home seizures and deportation of untermenschen migrants, until at last they come for you, at which point there is no one left to protect you. As Pastor Neimoller put it under the Nazis:

    First they came for the socialist 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.

    So stand up and be counted. Hopefully it won’t require you to walk out in front of a tank, but be prepared.

    II – A Final Solution

    At the Wannasee Conference of 1942 the Nazis under Reynard Heydrich decided on the Final Solution, or genocide, of the Jewish people. The transcript is available, and captured on celluloid in Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2001).

    A modern incarnation of this is the secretive and monastic meetings of the Bilderberg Group – once chaired by our own late unlamented Peter Sutherland – where the spoils of an utterly unsustainable and unequal economic system are divided.

    The modern Wanasee meetings are no doubt attended by a phalanx of pseudo-experts, or even genuine experts, working out what to do with the troublesome poor of the Earth.

    I suspect their plan is to to undermine democracy on behalf of the world’s corporate elite. People are commodified by banks and financial institutions: there are far too many of them, and their number needs to be reduced. Liquidation can occur by degrees: beginning with withdrawal of social support and evictions, which leads to suicide, addiction, health collapse and early death. In the Third World it will be far worse for those in coastal regions when the storms hit. Meanwhile, the good ol’ boys of Steve Bannon et al will continue to reap the harvest.

    People are often ill-informed and vote stupidly. Trump was elected on a ballyhoo of promising the disenfranchised working and middle class social protection, and job creation, after stoking fears about a foreign Other. What happened both with the election and since is the most nefarious soap job since the Nuremberg rallies.

    Trump appointed to his cabinet three Goldman Sachs officials, who were responsible for much of the mess that people find themselves in the first place. He has also appointed mad dog generals, and cosies up to vile dictators. The spectre is truly frightening.

    Trump immediately set about dismantling Obamacare and tore up the Paris Climate Change Agreement. With two strokes of the pen much of the Obama legacy was lost. The smooth-talking Obama is now a political eunuch.

    The elite are intent on making ‘difficult’ decisions, which will reduce the population of the world. This will require ‘strong’ government and the maintenance of ‘public order’ when disobedience appears.

    Neo-liberal policies will certainly not be in the interest of the people who voted Trump in. As the former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis put it, ‘And the weak suffer what they must.’

    The democratic problem is that ‘we the people’ did vote for neo-liberals in Ireland and for a long time in the U.S. Even Viktor Orban in Hungary has a democratic mandate, and Brazilians have voted for a New Age conquistador in Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile the National Front are on the threshold of power in France. Democracy is electing fascists.

    Why? Well genuine democracy requires mass literacy and proper education, which is diminishing, as is access to accurate information. Bannon and Cambridge Analytica have used artificial intelligence to influence voting patterns, and warp the human mind. We are witnessing the dissemination of disinformation, and what Zizek calls ‘Ideological Misindentification’. People are buying the bullshit, even though, at heart, they know it is untrue.

    Nonetheless, declining adult literacy and the use of sophisticated triggers have conditioned people into buying advertising as argument and substituting soundbites for subtlety and nuance. Hysteria, semi-baked nonsense and shrillness is replacing rational discourse.

    In the Post-Truth zeitgeist appeals to emotion have replaced the importance of facts, and fascists have always enjoyed rituals and symbols. Whenever anyone talks of nationalism or the national interest I am reminded of the adage that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’

    The Left are nostalgic and see opportunity in Austerity but, lest we forget, after the Wall Street Crash the Weimar Republic did not witness a Populist socialist insurgency but Nazism. Our present economic collapse is ineluctably leading towards a new form of corporate fascism.

    If the Left is to salvage democracy it must borrow the approach of Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s, which is to construct a cultural hegemony with a receptive middle class (especially now as the distinction between working and middle class is being obliterated). This will involve an expansion of state institutions and husbandry of natural resources to bring an electable and progressive broad social democratic front to power.

    I do not think this is impossible, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human heart’ as Alexander Pope put it, but democracy needs leadership of a kind that is not apparent at this juncture.

    III – A Lost Leader

    On my plane journey to Athens I read an extract from a speech by Mr Obama about visiting the same birthplace of Periclean democracy I had visited. He expresses himself beautifully: precise, as is his want; erudite (something he is given too little credit for); and with pristine socially-democratic-convictions. But he is now disempowered, and his legacy is being dismantled by Trump.

    This brings us back to Roosevelt, and one major problem with U.S. democracy, at least. Obama was prevented from seeking a third term by rules introduced in the wake of Roosevelt’s becoming electorally unassailable, primarily because he was obviously acting in the interests of the people. If the rules had not been changed the American public would not have had to face the unenviable choice of Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, with the former the lesser of two evils.

    We need a new Obama, or better still a new Roosevelt, a leader with vision and with purpose. We may need many of them, but few are apparent. Direct democracy and referenda by the people are also required.

    Further, we need to steel ourselves for civil disobedience to aid in the vitalisation of our democracy.  Instead we have a spectator democracy, or passive democracy, controlled by vested interests. When the institutions of state and the state itself act criminally the obligation for citizens is to fight back in proportion to the force they are confronted with.

    We also need proper information, and since it is not coming through mainstream media, which has been bullied into submission, the new radical press is the only drip feed available for the vitalization of the body politic, alongside similarly-motivated NGOs.

    The truth is indeed in some respects the only weapon as Havel put it while imprisoned under another dictatorship: ‘If the main pillar of the system is living a lie then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth (Havel, 1991).’

    IV – A False Dawn

    Ethical decisions are indeed complex: the suppression of fearless criticism is a negation of ethics. The obligation of professional ethics should be fearless truth-telling. Standing up to the power.

    Democracy dies when it denies the legitimacy of the opposition, when the Rule of Law is set aside, and when authoritarian politicians act subversively, and in a concerted fashion, to undermine civil liberties and human rights by criminalising and prosecuting dissent or opposition.

    Using the excuse of such shibboleths as national security, public order and the common good, rogue state institutions classify their enemies as criminals and subversives.

    Other characteristics of failing democracy include a breakdown in forbearance and the utilisation of constitutional hardball, such as Trump stacking and weaponizing the Supreme Court.

    Democracy is dying  because  our elected leaders rather than distancing themselves from extremists are embracing them. In fact they are the extremists. Let us be clear about this: we are seeing state fascism.

    There are insidious forms of subversion: a coup can really be governance by the grey, for the grey, where small but influential think tanks and special interests pull the strings.

    If it inconveniences these elites, the democratic will of the people is ignored, as in Greece, where Alexei Tsipras twice received a mandate to counter austerity but was ignored.

    Greeks must honour their debts even if they were induced into them by Goldman Sachs and its acolytes. The banal refrain is that Greeks do not pay their debts, but the same could be said for all the banks that have had their debts written off.

    While the Greek electorate recognised where their true interest lay, by electing a radical socialist, in most countries passivity has created a consumer model of democracy that has lost any bite.

    The real source of a failing democracy is found in vacuous digital communication, and the passivity wrought by blanket advertising. The false dawn of online democracy through social media is proving to be a chimera. The sharing of inconsequential thoughts in organisations that purport to be democratic, produce sound chambers that operate like cults as David Eggers splendid fictional book The Circle (Eggers, 2013) documents.

    A cult of mindless belonging to nothing is manifest, and it is not the only mindless cult around. We also have scientology, our esteemed religious traditions, and of course the neo-liberal cult itself.

    I fear that humans are becoming increasingly robotic, technical machines. Altruism, compassion and a concern for the plight of others is being eliminated.

    So leadership is what is needed but the Leader must like Churchill have ‘nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and Tears.’ And yet I retain faith that we will fight back against the fascism which Madeleine Albright, no less, believes has returned (Albright,2018).

    We are drifting towards this precipice incrementally, led by a coalition of interests inculcating robotic consumerism, passivity, environmental destruction and widening inequality. The democratic order has been subverted by rogue states and the corporatocracy.

    The Barbarian hordes are at the gates and a new Roosevelt must emerge to save democracy.

    References

    Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning. Collins, New York, 2018.
    Dave Eggers, The Circle, Knopf, New York, 2013.
    Vaclav Havel Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, Faber and Faber 1991.
    Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017.

  • The Towering Qualities Needed in an Advocate

    Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’ is a short history, and valedictory, to the tradition of songwriting, fusing aphorisms and personal reflections on failure with nostalgia and regret. In this ‘Tower’, like that of Babel, the songsters of history communicate unsatisfactorily:

    I said to Hank Williams “How lonely does it get?”
    Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
    But I hear him coughing all night long
    Oh, a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song

    Cohen also hints at the immortality of his verse:

    Now, I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
    They’re movin’ us tomorrow to the tower down the track
    But you’ll be hearin’ from me, baby, long after I’m gone
    I’ll be speakin’ to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.

    As advocates barristers, especially those representing criminal defendants, see themselves as part of a great tradition: maintaining a vocation in eliciting the truth, and telling it. We also trade in ambiguity, testing the veracity of an opponent’s case in order to establish reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury.

    What sort of qualities should an advocate have? Fearlessness is intrinsic, which does not mean hysteria or histrionics. Flailing arms should give way to precision bombing, and the careful assembly of evidence.

    A true advocate is honest, and never misleads a court, or fabricates evidence: offering persuasion within ethical bounds.

    Nonetheless, the best bend the rules, leading a witness through examination-in-chief, at least until challenged.

    An advocate should be unafraid to criticize the vectors of established authority. Thus Sir Edward Carson, frustrated by the proceedings of a tribunal presided over by a judge, who claimed he was not acting in his judicial capacity, responded: ‘Any fool can see that’.

    Another great skill is knowing when to keep shtum. Silence can be golden, and verbosity pointless. This extends to deciding who to call as your witness. The old lawyers’ joke is that your client is your worst enemy. A question too far, when you cannot anticipate the answer, is a journey into unknown, perilous territory.

    Advocacy is more art than science, and thus demands a high degree of creativity. It requires nimble thinking, judgment, and a degree of circumspection. This branch of alchemy cannot be taught in law schools, as is assumed in the United States.

    It often benefits from non-linear sequences of thought that are the hallmark of a person who is out-of-the-ordinary. This may involve throwing out the rule book for that most devastating of interrogations: the surprise question. This remains the height of creativity in the often gentle, though far from gentile, art of cross examination.

    Great advocates have their idiosyncrasies: from the thespian US lawyers, or indeed the late Adrian Hardiman in Ireland, to the blind courage and rhetoric of the aforementioned Carson, who displayed a unique combination of fearlessness and cold judgment.

    After being frustrated by a playful deluge of responses from Oscar Wilde on his apparently innocent relationship with boys, Carson asked him about one Graingier, and, ‘had he kissed him’?

    Wilde fell for the trap, responding, ‘oh no he was far too ugly’, and Reading Gaol beckoned. Implicitly he had revealed that his relationships with boys was of a different order.

    It goes to show that a witness should never be over-confident. A witness box is the last place to send a stage performer, or for anyone who plays to the gallery.

    Cross examination involves strategies, ruses, subtle discrediting, and of course laying traps. The strategy should be mapped out in advance, and requires the prosecution’s evidence to be parsed meticulously, in order to be dismantled.

    In appealing to a jury, the great advocate often eschews the chronology of a case, instead presenting a fluid and protean account. They often mix it up, and it may not be initially apparent what they are getting at.

    Any aspiring advocate ought to study and indeed listen closely to how senior advocates go about their trade. To attain greatness anyone must commune with the dead, and living, and be humble.

    Increasingly, I believe great advocates should have a commitment to social justice. Alas, few do. Victory and payment is one thing; serving the community, or that nebulous notion of justice, another. Amidst the scramble for Mammon this often gets lost sight of.

    The greater the capacity of an advocate for empathy, the more she will be prepared to do on behalf of her client, though it should be noted that even the best have their foibles.

    I am deeply skeptical, from wide experience, about the motivations and funding sources of the human rights industry, and the type of advocacy we often hear that arrives in the form of sound bites. This is safe sex advocacy on politically correct issues such as gender equity, funded by shady organizations like the Ford Foundation, while ignoring far more pressing issues of homelessness, poverty and social exclusion.

    The crucial test is whether you are willing to represent the wretched of the earth: including the gangster, the property speculator and the drug baron.

    I intensely dislike those who take up causes driven by populist bandwagons. These are not advocates, but politicians in disguise.

    The world is full of public avengers, and family lawyers often deserve contempt for the fake outrage and indignation peppering their speech, while they enrich themselves on cultivating misery with contrived, and even state-sponsored, fabrications.

    As mentioned, advocacy intersects with creativity, which always contains an element of mystery. As when a tennis players enter the ‘zone’, great advocates are often inscrutable in their methods, and react instinctively. Great, as opposed to good, advocacy cannot really be taught. That ability is innate.

    That is not to diminish the value of the science behind the trade: a closing speech should scrupulously assemble the weaknesses of the opponent’s evidence, establishing corroboration, or otherwise, and exposing holes and contradictions.

    From his rhetorical palette the advocate paints in mosaic, fusing a degree of passion with calculated mind games.

    An advocate should be a psychologist in his approach to keeping a jury as a criminal barrister, or judges elsewhere, on side.

    What should be said before a judge, as opposed to a jury, is markedly different. A judge is case-hardened, and less likely to be swayed by the tricks of the trade, unlike a jury, whose affection should be courted.

    But trial courts are becoming increasingly like reality television, or beauty contests. It is getting like Crufts, or a horse parade.

    As I have indicated, a much underrated virtue is discerning when to leave something unsaid. Evidence that may seem advantageous may remain unexplored in a closing speech for fear it will generate ambiguity, and even implode another argument. But this should not lead to timorousness. Points should be put decisively, which may border on stridency.

    I am increasingly of the view that advocacy is a necessary life skill, with application far beyond the courtroom. We all have to sell ourselves and relate to others: our daily lives involve persuasion, and to be too timid in discussion may invite disaster.

    It is important to be confident and assertive, but never too sure of yourself. The minute you believe your own hype, or that you are the cleverest man in the room is when you need to get out of there. This unfortunately is often a feature of the ruling class of any country.

    Like artists, most great advocates are assailed by doubt. These are complex and ambiguous creatures, whose practice of the dark arts may lead to a perception that there is something of the night about them. Perhaps as a result, the burden, and not just of proof, can be onerous.

    In our times public advocacy, not confined to the court room, is in high demand. As Leonard Cohen sang:

    Now, you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure:
    The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
    And there’s a mighty Judgement comin’ but I may be wrong
    You see, I hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song

    The world is completely out of balance and spinning towards the disasters of an economic and environmental apocalypse. The acceptance of neo-liberalism dogma is accelerating the prospect of social and economic collapse.

    This has been steered by a diabolic trinity of religious fundamentalism, neo-liberalism, and the post-truth peddling of relativists in the universities: academics who sing for their supper. But there’s a “mighty Judgement comin’”.

    Public advocacy from the likes of Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy and our own Cassandra Voices is rising up.

    Where better to learn advocacy than in the criminal and public courts of the Tower of Song? For the advocate is a truth-teller, who exposes bullshit wherever it is found. Real training in these skills is difficult to find. The art is increasingly diminished by failure to engage in adequate self-reflection.

    The mark of the truly great advocate is a resolute independence. He is never a dutiful servant of the state: the best would never dream of acting for the prosecution. That is left to careerists, and others who can only dream of advocacy’s Tower of Song.

  • We Need Another ‘New Deal’ and Umbrella to Unite Under

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), U.S. President between 1933 and 1945, was born to enormous privilege. He came from one of the most aristocratic families in America. A distant cousin, Teddy, had even been elected President.

    In his youth FDR was a bon vivant and ladies man, who strayed from Eleanor, his saintly but still formidable wife. This blue blood seemed an unlikely person to buck the entire system of US capitalism. He remains a hate-figure for U.S. Conservatives today.

    Any account of his life should include the enormous personal tragedy of his incapacitation due to polio. He could not walk, and this disability may have broadened his empathy for others’ suffering.

    Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 on a platform of change: to provide a New Deal to the American people after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing global depression. The destitution of the American people is movingly depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, where a group of ‘Okies’, led by Tom Joad, are ruined by dustbowl conditions, and the calling in of loans by ruthless bankers.

    Similarly, devastation arrived in the urban centres, captured in the lyrics of the song and Broadway musical E.Y. Yip Harpurg’s ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime’. Even brokers were forced to eat from soup kitchens, as erstwhile respectable folk were reduced to ‘hobos’.

    What had happened was that the bull market of speculation had simply collapsed. The unregulated free market had built mountains of sand out of folly and greed. A dominant economic philosophy of laissez faire had brought light touch regulation and government passivity, as with our own, similarly hegemonic, neo-liberalism.

    The view then, as today, was that government had no business interfering in private transactions and that wealth, growth and efficiency are best achieved by the operation of the invisible hand.

    The crash beginning in 2007 was not that different from the 1929 version, and the political consequences are increasingly similar too. A neo-liberal consensus endorses a shock doctrine allowing crisis to follow crisis, precipitating social and economic collapse.

    FDR adopted the seemingly paradoxical, and certainly heretical, advice of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes that to save capitalism it was necessary for the government to intervene in the market. Thus Roosevelt set up national agencies and support structures for aid and assistance. It was a bailout to protect the poor and disenfranchised, not the rich.

    His New Deal was in the national interest. Not a shibboleth or paper mask, cloaked in woolly ideas, to protect vested interests.

    The Supreme Court initially blocked New Deal legislation, rejecting what the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes contemptuously branded social statistics in his dissenting opinion in Lochner Herbert Spencers. He insisted the court had no business varying contracts.

    ‘the switch in time’

    The assumption of liberty of contract is that anyone has the freedom to enter into a bargain under whatever terms they choose, and once a contract is struck they are bound by their word. But that is based on the pretence that the market is a level playing field, which it never has been. Many still sign on the doted line without fully understanding the implications. Moreover, neo-liberalism sells short term fixes which often fail.

    An exasperated Roosevelt informed the Supreme Court that if they did not approve his legislation he would appoint new judges, which soon led to a change of heart. This became known among wags as ‘the switch in time that saved nine’.

    Roosevelt displayed an ambivalence towards democracy, but was the best of all leaders: a benevolent dictator. He favoured those at the bottom of the social ladder, who were increasingly aware that democracy had been sabotaged by vested interests. At that time, just as is the case today, transnational corporations and law firms were dictating to governments.

    Roosevelt revived the U.S. economy, with Keynesian pump-priming: government expenditure increasing aggregate demand. It did not lead to a bail out of corrupt banks, but their nationalisation. This brought investment to help ordinary people, not the infliction of wanton cruelty in the form of perma-austerity, which runs contrary to even capitalist logic.

    The best evidence is that a mixed economy, combining private enterprise and public initiative, with social safety nets and public assistance for small enterprises, is a model that works best for society as a whole, rather than the cartelisation of wealth, under the voodoo promise of trickle down.

    Keynes was right then, and still is, but over time he became unfashionable and was derided.

    In late 1970’s Britain, in particular, the excesses of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three-day-working-week, litter on the streets, and the stranglehold of the Unions. With initiative thus stifled, Thatcher and Reagan championed the old formula of untrammelled free markets: new clothing for old and obsolete ideas of unregulated markets, conveniently referred to as neo-liberalism.

    The ideological underpinning came from the Austrian Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago school under Milton Friedman. The curious assumption was that wealth would trickle down like manna from heaven from rich to poor, if a market is left alone. Instead we got the yuppies, like Donald Trump, who siphoned off great wealth.

    Over time we have seen the dismantling of the welfare state; the removal of social protections and safety nets. More sinister developments are of a more recent vintage.

    ‘the new serfdom’

    Firstly, a rapidly declining percentile of the global population is controlling an ever-increasing share of the wealth and resources of the planet, with everybody else increasingly impoverished.

    As a result the distinction between working class and middle class is being eroded. The new class system is a reversion to a medieval pyramid of landlords and serfs: feudal capitalism.

    This blurring of class boundaries is an important point to appreciate, making Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an accommodation between working and middle class interests more compelling than ever. Old-fashioned Marxist class divisions no longer make sense, amidst corporate feudalism, where working and middle classes are both succumbing to serfdom.

    Conversely Hayek, one of the architects of neo-liberalism, actually called socialism the new feudalism or serfdom. It is ironic in the extreme therefore that his ideas have led precisely to what he sought to avoid. Socialist brainwashing has been replaced by neo-liberal.

    More to the point, the unprecedented banking collapse after 2007 led to bail-outs being award to those responsible who were responsible, and the infliction of austerity on the wretched of the earth. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stieglitz, referred to this false paradigm as ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’.

    Those countries which adopted ‘Roosveltean’ or Keynesian approaches, including nationalisating banks, such as Iceland have been vindicated. This brought stabilisation and recovery.

    Ireland achieved the worst of all possible ends. It established a bad bank NAMA, which cut deals with failed property speculators and lawyers and the congeries of the corrupt. As the IMF and Europe imposed austerity on the defenceless masses those responsible were bailed out and their debts cancelled.

    The fraudulent Irish banks had made their money on misrepresentations, and providing negligent lending advice about the value of stocks, investments and credit ratings. This had caused the economy to overheat and generated a property bubble that many had warned against.

    Now the institutions foreclose against the poor and defenceless, as sanctity of contract is insisted on. The perversion of the system it that the richer you are, the more easily you can cut a deal: the logic of ‘a bank too big to fail’.

    homo economicus

    The neo-liberal recasting of homo sapiens into homo economicus, also initiates a new form of Social Darwinism, permitting only the survival of the fittest or rather the most ruthless in a dog eat dog universe.

    We have seen a slippage in standards, where the young are habituated to lying, as deceit has become the norm among holders of high office. The lines between fact, semi-fact, lies and deceptions have been blurred entirely. Even in the courts of law fabricated cases have reached pandemic proportions.

    It has also led to increasingly vicious tactics against those who demure: like a plague the corruption of banks has spread to other private agencies and even state institutions, where those who blow the whistle or otherwise expose toxic levels of corruption are systematically destroyed.

    In this distorted universe the mugshots of those that should be acclaimed as heroes of our time, now feature in rogues’ galleries of infamy and subversion. The indicted include human rights lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, publicly-minded citizens, and anyone with a shred of a social conscience.

    It is a divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ social setting. ‘Them’, the poor, the migrant, the displaced, the activist, the troublemaker, the public intellectual, are all marginalised and insidiously destroyed in increments or possibly state-sponsored murder, as in the case of journalists in Malta and Slovakia.

    Targeted assassination by the state is now the norm, and not just under Mr Putin.

    Making Hodge-Podge of Everything

    Even though I am a Harvard law graduate I doubt whether Mr. Trump would grant me leave to enter the United States right now. I am no longer one of ‘us’ but one of ‘them’, what Franz Fanon called The Wretched of The Earth. I should not have given unconditional praise to human rights activists, who impede capitalist interests.

    Our corporate suzerains lead people to safe issues around individual entitlements. We are all in favour of gay marriage, gender equity and not criminalising someone for puffing on a joint. But what about more fundamental rights intrinsic to human life, such as health care, housing and social support? If you argue in favour of this just see what happens.

    Around the world courts are rapidly evicting and rendering homeless surplus populations and in India dumping them on the streets. Housing, either buying or renting, is increasingly unaffordable, diminishing the prospect of human flourishing.

    The privatisation of health care has ineluctably led to life or death being a matter not of right or entitlement, but of affordability.

    There are other sinister ramifications. Those teachers, academics or professionals in badly paid but socially worthwhile occupations must toe the line, and are fired for exposing corruption. In order to survive they have to sing for their supper, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.

    The wise sensei or village elder is no longer looked up to, but instead the old are being asked to quietly await their death.

    Intelligence and achievement have to be costed and channelled into wealth producing activities. You are not a man if you do not descend to the mentality of the hunter.

    Short-termism both in contracts and thinking, has led to reactive decision-making, wherein people are desensitised to the suffering of others.

    In my view these depredations being heaped on society are deliberate. The tactics of social disruption peddled in Chile and Indonesia by the neo-liberals in the late 1970s are now being replicated in Ireland and Greece, among other places. It is a social experiment assessing what level of suffering is required to bring compliance to authority, and obedience to the will of the mega rich.

    This is accompanied by cuts in funding for socially useful public agencies, such as libraries, which are being gradually eliminated. There have also been huge cuts to legal aid, imperiling the ability of the innocent to defend themselves against criminal charges.

    It brings to mind the prescriptions of one Dostoyevsky’s Devils Pyotr Stepanovich who advocates the ‘systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society an all its principles’, which would: ‘demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything’. Then, ‘when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical, and sceptical, but still with a desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self preservation’, his faction would, ‘suddenly gain control of it’.

    The New Deal

    We demand a New Deal. But what will that entail today, and how could it be feasible?

    1. Urgently in Ireland, and other neo liberal countries, the courts need to recognising housing (even without recourse to Article 45), including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as access to health care, as fundamental human rights. The courts need to show leadership and recognise the common good of protecting people against the corporate predation by vulture funds and transnational interests.
    1. We urgently require Keynesian stabilisation including support for small businesses, social safety nets and structural regulation of a wildcatting private sector.
    1. The EU needs to be streamlined to a form of looser associational ties, which do not impose austerity or globalisation of capital, but reinforce standards and regulatory protection of rights and resistance to the interventions of globalised capitalism. There is no point in Brexit if it is replaced by the interests of Steve Bannon and other American ranchers.
    1. The power of officers of the state needs to be strictly regulated. We are living in an age when an over powerful state and police force is intruding unconstitutionally in private lives of others, and state sponsored is increasingly apparent. Where subversion is emanating from the state, and where criminalisation is opaque and multi-faceted: where many of the real problems of criminality can be traced to the state itself.
    1. There is a paucity of political leadership at national and international level. The possibility now exists that various NGOs raising awareness on the impact of Climate Change awareness, miscarriages of justice and social and economic rights, band together in an alternative transnational organisation fronted by the good and the wise. To oppose internationalisation we need an alternative internationalisation lobbying not for growth but sustainability, conservation and a reverse to small is beautiful and artisanal livelihoods. We need to remould human nature to promote altruism, community and compassion for others, engendering a New Deal of collaborative and associative responsibilities.

    So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a New Deal for the world.

  • Steve Bannon’s Tour de Farce

    Donald Trump’s former confidante Steve Bannon has been on a latter-day American Grand Tour around Europe. But rather than making his peace ‘With learned Italian things / And the proud stones of Greece’, he embarked on an ideological excursion through the newly constituted enclaves of extreme right wing Populism; spreading a gospel on behalf of his erstwhile ally Mr. Trump, who unceremoniously dumped him last year.

    At one level this is a rapprochement with a mentor, who he praises gushingly when given the opportunity, and also an exercise in lobbying on behalf of the corporate interests he serves. All of this is treated as Populism, which originated as a recognition of the socio-economic rights of the working class.

    The U.S. Populist Party was a movement of the 1890s, involving Midwestern and Southern farmers and some labour unions, which denounced an economic system in which the fruits of the toil of millions has been stolen to build colossal fortunes for a few. It was also laced with religious fundamentalism. This latter is also an important ingredient to the Trump formula too: the rights of the poor are ultimately subordinate to the Never Never Land promise of an afterlife. Some consider Trump a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar, ‘sent by God to wreak vengeance on an idolatrous and wicked people’.

    In Europe Populist movements have also been left wing, and even Communist: including the Popular Front governments of France and Spain during the 1930s, which ultimately succumbed to Fascist invasions. Mr Bannon pretends to be unconcerned whether Populism is of the Right or Left; although Mussolini, who he praises for his virility, was also in some respects a Populist, having begun his political journey as a socialist.

    Usage was revived, erroneously, in the 1950s to describe the ‘Populist’ anti-Communist ‘witch hunt’ of Joseph McCarthy, reflecting how Populism had drawn closer to an appeal to prejudice and selfish sectional interest.

    On his recent tour Bannon sang the praises of recently elected Populist governments in Italy and Hungary, some of whom bear more than a family resemblance to fascists. Power to the people. As long as they vote for us of course.

    I – Ordinary Working Joe

    Bannon paints a picture of conflict in broad brush strokes, between a global elite and the Ordinary Working Joe. A distinction is drawn between populist nationalism, and the global establishment of what he terms ‘crony capitalism’.

    This passage from a recent Vanity Fair interview puts this in perspective:

    Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.

    I was reminded of the famous description of Richard Nixon being about as honest as a three dollar bill, and, as Noam Chomsky puts it: ‘language in the service of propaganda’.

    Let us ascertain what Steve Bannon is really saying: he wants national sovereignty reasserted against the global elite, but curiously Populist governments, such as his own, tend to favour the global elite in their tax programmes.

    There is ample resistance in Europe to transnational corporations, so Bannon’s real mission appears to be to retain European markets, and undermine the European Union, which brings unnecessary encumbrances to the interests of his sponsors: American elite capitalism; his cronies; his global elite; his gang.

    The real objection is to those global elites that threaten the agenda of Goldman Sachs and transnational U.S. capitalism. He does not appreciate the “crony capitalism” of those elites that are not his cronies.

    Superficially he favours the working man and protection of indigenous citizens. Meanwhile his mentor, after riding a wave of blue collar support, displayed his gratitude by dismantling ‘horrible’ Obamacare, ironically affecting his own constituency far worse than Democrat voters.

    By reneging on the Paris Climate Change agreement, and placing industry ‘yes men’ in the EPA, Trump and Bannon may precipitate another Dust Bowl in Middle America; creating new Grapes of Wrath, and accelerating the destruction of blue collar America, which voted for him under false pretenses.

    In the words of Zizek the working class are being sold ‘ideological misidentification’, which Marx understood as a form of brainwashing to vote contrary to one’s interests.

    II – The Scapegoat

    How better to pander to the working class than by invoking the threat of a Satanic Other, or enemy within, such as the Jews were defined by the Nazis. Today we have undocumented aliens stealing ‘our’ jobs, or foreigners polluting ‘our’ gene pool.

    Bannon emphasises sovereignty and economic autarky, but this should not prevent the free flow of ethnically-diverse American business people – commonly referred to as ex-pats – from selling into European markets.

    On the other hand, the surplus populations of the Global South and those fleeing war zones such as Syria – which he expressly invokes in the context of Hungary – are to be stopped at the borders and their human rights annihilated. The quid pro quo for adopting U.S. economic norms is that populist European states can maintain their ethnic cleanliness.

    Syrian refugees strike at the platform of Budapest Keleti railway station, September 2015.

    Their exile is of course the responsibility of the Military Industrial Complex that Bannon serves, which destabilised the Middle East. Although he criticises Bush and the GOP establishment, one wonders how much of this is a smokescreen.

    Those legal Hispanic and working class Blacks workers that are pandered to will be abandoned when their American Dreams turn to nightmares. They will remain poverty-stricken, working longer hours for less, without health insurance or pension entitlements: a source of cheap labour. ‘Power to the people’ is a carefully constructed ruse. They will have no power and be told what to do.

    Critical media has to be aligned with Globalised capitalism, or treated as an enemy of the people. They cannot be allowed to speak the truth to power, or at least to Mr Trump. Such people do not answer questions which are asked of them because they avoid them.

    Mr Bannon speaks and writes in carefully-crafted soundbites and pseudo-intellectualisms, which do not stand up to serious scrutiny. His new-found Populist narrative requires Bannon to ignore his long association with the handmaiden’s of globalisation, Goldman Sachs, while Trump’s administration comprises an assortment of cronies from the global elite.

    Ideological opposition to NAFTA, which serves certain U.S. interests, does not extend to supporting the EU’s current stance on the TTIP, which would allow American and other corporate interests to override national sovereignty, and sue the living daylights out of national governments and small businesses.

    Steve Bannon is against radicalisation, which is given an etiolated definition as anything that exposes his agenda. The new radicals he despises are liberal professors, human rights activists and journalists who expose the horrendous economic and environmental effects of neo-liberalism. In short, those who speak candidly on the media, and cannot be bought.

    The new generation of soft-skilled snowflakes cannot be exposed to what the likes of Steve Bannon has in store for them. They must be compliant and vote for the Right candidates. Self-immolation of the innocents.

    Interestingly, Bannon is now appealing to Bernie Sander’s constituency, as Sanders is the real deal and must be neutralised, and his ideological clothes appropriated. For a genuine Populist to represent working class interests would be disastrous.

    Bernie Sanders, the real deal.

    III – Calling a fascist a fascist

    In a very sinister way Steve Bannon talks about the inherent dangers of biotechnology and artificial intelligence and the challenges it presents. Yet he and his eccentric billionaire friend Robert Mercer have used artificial intelligence in Climate Change Denial through the Heartland Institute.

    Mercer funded Cambridge Analytica, whose advertising played on people’s emotions having profiled them to good effect, a key strategy in orchestrating Trump’s electoral success.

    Bannon opposes artificial intelligence and robots as China has stolen a march on his Capitalist cronies. He wants his artificial intelligence and his robots.

    I regard Steve Bannon as an ubermensch fascist who believes in Social Darwinism, and the control of the worker by the insanely rich. He does not care a jot about the working class, save as objects of exploitation to be duped.

    He is a shameless transnational capitalist, and only opposes it when regulation (referred to as red tape, as if polluting a river is just a matter of red tape) challenges his interests. He is a demagogue, who preys on the insecurities and prejudices of the working class to buttress his faction.

    He is aware of an impending environmental and economic meltdown, and is recommending compounds for the mega rich, who expect to be enriched further through his propagandistic grand tour to the now proto-fascist and compliant enclaves of Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

    He is even more dangerous than Trump because he is cleverer, his rhetoric a disturbing marriage of psycho-babble and neo-liberalism.

    What is needed to counteract him is what he despises: fearless criticism, and genuine Populism divorced from religious fundamentalism. This is coming from Bernie Saunders, NGOs, human rights activists and anyone who still believes in a liberal education, the Rule of Law, and sees the dangers inherent in an appeal to the mob.

    *******

    The aspiring Emperor Bannon has no clothes, and offers hope in the manner of a quack doctor or false messiah.

    Behind the toxic combination of Neoliberalism and demagoguery, the presentation of relativistic half-baked shibboleths, is what Chomsky describes as the most dangerous organisation on earth: the right wing of the Republican Party, controlled by religious maniacs envisaging the end of days.

    Steve Bannon is of course carefully providing escape hatches for the mega rich to weather the coming storm in compounds away from the Populist mob, which they simultaneously exploit and undermine.

    Death on the installment plan, as mortgage owners in Ireland find out, or as George Orwell put it: How the Poor Die.

  • If on a Winter’s Night a Lithuanian Spoke with Leo

    The great Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities imagines a conversation between the Mongolian emperor Kubla Khan and the legendary traveller Marco Polo. Kubla Khan asks Marco Polo to describe for him the great cities he has visited.

    After a number of vivid and enthralling accounts it becomes clear that Marco Polo is confining himself to a description of his native Venice, as if the rest of the world counts for little, a view for which I have some sympathy.

    Let us imagine another fictional conversation, set in contemporary Ireland, in which Taoiseach Leo Varadkar encounters a non-national – from Lithuania we’ll say – and asks her for a description of Dublin and its hinterland.

    You will indulge this far-fetched conceit I hope, dear reader, of our imperator deigning to converse with a migrant of modest means.

    Suave Leo will be confident– ‘our GDP growth is off the charts’ he assures himself – in a favourable verdict on his achievements as Taoiseach, and the state of the country after almost a decade of Fine Gael in power.

    ‘She will surely recognise this as ‘the best little country in the world to do business in’, with near full employment; an economic powerhouse, like Venice in its day – they might have built St. Mark’s and the gondolas, but we have the Dundrum Shopping Centure and the M50; a land of céad míle fáilte – as long as you are an ‘an ex-pat’ with a decent credit line; of milk and honey, so much dairy in fact that we are the second leading exporter of powder milk to Chinese mothers, who can now work longer hours to produce the consumer goods we don’t need; of comely maidens at cross purposes. The boom is getting boomier, again!’

    Using the structure of Calvino’s book let us imagine her response, chapter by chapter.

    Chapter 1

    She concedes Ireland has given her employment:

    ‘Which requires me to work long, often anti-social, hours, though I am grateful for it, as others haven’t been so lucky and ended up on the street, or involved in organised crime. But I have to say that since the economic crisis I have encountered significant hostility from native Irish, even though I speak perfect English – perfect you understand – albeit with an accent.’

    ‘Taoiseach I can’t help feeling I have had to work significantly harder than the younger generation of wealthy Irish, who don’t recognise my achievements. I am well educated but my academic qualifications are often disparaged. There is a Little Islander mentality, though I guess you might find the same attitudes if you came to work in my ex-Soviet republic.’

    ‘We Lithuanians are also a small nation, like your own Taoiseach’, she says, pausing to reflect that he might empathise with her plight, given his mixed-race background.

    ‘Currently I live in a satellite town of Dublin, where I work and have studied in the past. I find the environment harsh and uncomfortable, and public transport pathetic, which forces most people into their cars.’

    ‘Many Irish people I meet seem very nice, but this can be superficial, and I have been subjected to racist abuse for speaking Lithuanian with my friends on the bus.’

    ‘I have the impression the country is being run for the sake of a privileged few. I have found out quite a bit about your country Taoiseach, and it seems there are dynasties that run it, especially in politics where I see the same names cropping up again and again, just like the former Soviet officials who re-invented themselves as democratic politicians where I am from.’

    ‘I have also heard there are certain private schools in Dublin which most the top lawyers and businessmen attended, and now send their children to, and I think a lot politicians were educated in one of them too, including, if I am not mistaken, yourself. Do you work on behalf of these people or the wider community Mr Varadkar?’

    Leo feigns a smile that looks more like a grimace – he’s hoping the conversation won’t go on much longer, but realises he can’t ignore the woman as someone might have their camera on him. He interjects, summoning all the charm that bewitched his party when Enda finally fell on his sword: ‘Look at me, I am half-Indian and gay. I made it the top, and so can you.’ But strangely he doesn’t look her in the eye when he speaks.

    Chapter 2

    The Lithuanian lady responds: ‘As I said Irish people are very friendly, but sometimes this masks a lack of emotional depth. They love to talk but prefer not to listen. They are highly sociable, but drink to excess. They fill their minds with absurd patriotism, and tell lachrymose tales of hardship and grievance. They give out, but generally do nothing. They are often obsessed with trivia, or with pop culture, and televised sport. Politics seems to be reduced to personalities rather than the issues.’

    She continues, a steely determination entering her voice, aware that this will be her one opportunity to speak candidly to a person in power: ‘Politics, Taoiseach, is about the issues and nothing else. Irish politicians are economical with the truth, and often, frankly, lie. Compromise is not always possibly, and sometimes harsh words are required. Cover-ups of corruption are not conducive to a well-ordered society.’

    ‘More generally, it is difficult with such overt friendliness to work out when to take people seriously. In this context I have, as a young attractive woman, experienced numerous protestations of love from inadequate men, who only dare speak to me when they are drunk.’

    At this stage Leo is getting exasperated at how ungrateful she is for all the country has given her. But he manages somehow to contain a rising disgust.

    Chapter 3

    She continues: ‘when people get to know you on a personal level they are nice and there is still a strong sense of community in the rural areas I have worked in – social supports and community among the older generation. But this is nowhere near as prevalent in Dublin, where I encounter greed, selfishness and casual disregard. Homelessness is rampant and, I am telling you, you would not want to get sick. The one medical emergency I experienced I had to wait for hours in A&E, and I felt the treatment was inadequate.’

    ‘I have now taken out private health insurance – as you advised young people to when you were Minister for Health – but even still I face queues, and that is the experience of other people I know in the same situation.’

    ‘And my experience with the private sector, especially the banks, is that people are not that competent, often downright rude, yet curiously patronizing.’

    ‘But really Leo the police are particularly rude and judgmental towards non-nationals. In my community I hear a lot of complaints about them. Some of their conduct seems to be legalized banditry, as corrupt as … any country on earth. Yet I read in the newspapers that your party does not have the will to deal with the institutional scandals, or train them properly. Frankly Leo they are in many respects as bad as the criminals they are supposed to police.’

    Leo is now seething and on the point of flying off the handle. She is questioning the very essence of his Ireland, despite the opportunities it has given her. He turns accusatorial: ‘But we welcomed you, and you have lived here for over 10 years. Of course we are not perfect but which country is?’

    Chapter 4

    She responds: ‘It is true there is sufficient food to eat, but as for the standard of living, or quality of life, it doesn’t compare favourably with other countries, unless you are privileged. There is a glass ceiling on how far a non-national can climb in this country, and you Taoiseach are the exception that proves the rule.’

    ‘Non-EU migrants especially have had to endure victimisation, and the barbarities of Direct Provision. My humble abode in the sticks is far too small, and cost a ridiculous sum for negligible space, which eats into my meagre income. All around us people are being forced to live in ever-decreasing spaces. This is not conducive to emotional or intellectual wellbeing.’

    She is becoming forceful again: ‘Even applying your capitalist logic: you cannot produce creative or productive people if they are forced to live in shoe boxes. People will want to leave. They will have had enough. Even if I wanted a family that would probably be impossible, which I find quite depressing.’

    Leo, now astonished and increasingly irate at this candid and uniformly negative response, asks, with a surprising, but revealing, innocence: ‘well who is responsible for these mistakes?’

    Chapter 5

    ‘Without naming names Taoiseach, I’ll offer you a biblical reference, which became an Italian film and a byword for corruption. Ireland is becoming ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, or at least Gomorrah. No one has any confidence in many of the state institutions or private actors; there is a sense that the political class is corrupt and self-serving; dispensing patronage for favours and committing the sins of simony with Big Business and the professional classes. Our banking structure is a farce: why didn’t we just nationalize them like Iceland, which got out of its recession much sooner?’

    ‘I have to confess Taoiseach that I bought my apartment at the height of the boom, and now have difficulty making repayments. The bank won’t allow me to get back on a tracker mortgage, even though they promised to do so. The interest rates are crippling me. I want out.’

    ‘My friends who are renting are in an even worse plight, and are often randomly evicted by the purchasing power of Canadian and American vulture funds linked to Goldman Sachs. This is not right. Further, it seems to be a society where, if I may be so bold as to quote an Irishism: ‘it is not what you know, but who you know ’, that gets you ahead, which is not meritocratic.’

    ‘I am sorry to be so forward Taoiseach but governance here does not conform with that of a functioning European social democracy. I am hesitant to be so candid as my culture has imbued me with a formal politesse and deference. I am a decent and civilized person. But Ireland has the resources to become a genuine social democracy, but can’t be as long as you misapply and mismanage your revenue.’

    ‘Also the endless diet of violence both real, and magnified by the press, is undermining my quality of life. As a woman I am alarmed the stories of sexual assaults I hear in the press. Whether real or exaggerated, I do not feel completely safe walking the streets of Dublin at night.

    ‘Newspapers trivialise and sensationalise, and do not report the truth at times. Violence has unfortunately become part of the entertainment industry, but increasingly truth and fiction are difficult to disentangle.’

    But Leo, a crackle of emotion in his voice, at last gets a word in: ‘surely the youthful energy here can make this society work?’

    Chapter 6

    She replies: ‘Ah yes the youth. The youth want to leave Leo for a better quality of life. Many older people too. The brain drain is continuing. Even young native Irish in creative fields don’t have career opportunities, and prefer not to work for multinational companies. They don’t want to live in a satellite town in order to live independently of their parents. The environment you live in impacts significantly on your self-esteem Taoiseach.’

    Some of the younger generation in Ireland are doing well of course, and there is a culture of entitlement, both boorish and materialistic. Culture is commodified, and it is almost impossible for independent artists to live here with the inflated cost of living. Irish people don’t seem to read the ‘big books’ that I grew up attached to. Ignorance seems to breed a culture of compliance. Of course this is what happens when survival is the main priority. The desperation for money and pervasive avarice have coarsened social interactions. You have lost God and embraced Mammon. It is not that I am particularly religious, in fact I am an atheist, and I too want enough money for a decent standard of living, but this society seems rudderless, and unprincipled.’

    This continues on for many more chapters.

    Endlessly critical, endlessly precise, endlessly judgmental. Lucid, and scathing. By the end, Leo’s world is falling apart and he implores his vengeful demon to offer a dose of optimism.

    Chapter 7

    ‘The countryside is beautiful’, she responds, ‘in particular the Atlantic coastline. Connemara is one of the most glorious places I have ever set eyes on. I often try to hike in Wicklow, which is nearly as wonderful as the West, but much of it is inaccessible without a car, as the bus services is almost non-existent. An American friend of mine also says that Ireland is a good place to play golf. And at times in bars and socializing ‘the craic’, as they say, is ‘mighty’. But Leo not even the Irish can live on craic alone, which has its disturbing shadow.’

    She then stops abruptly and bids adieu. She has to get up early in the morning for a job interview in London, assuming, post-Brexit, she can get a visa. She is increasingly conscious of how perilous being a migrant is, and may be, throughout Europe in the future.

    Her parting shot is that it is not just Ireland, but Europe and the rest of the world, that is increasingly hostile to migrants. She may be confronting a future of further displacement.

    Leo sighs bemusedly – remaining convinced of his beneficence. He will consider carefully what she has had to say. He will make Ireland better for those willing to work. But soon the failings she has pointed to slip his distracted mind, and as the problems multiply, he sees no obvious solutions: ‘Let’s just keep it business as usual’ he says to himself.