Cassandra Voices

Tag: Stefan Zweig

  • On the Question of Immigration

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

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

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

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

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

    — CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 3, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

    Image: Matt Barnard

    Vexed Question of Our Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sideshow and Deflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Franz Fanon

    Reproducing Colonialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    End of an Era

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

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

    The Post Second World war humanist consensus is almost gone.

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

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

  • War Crimes: Collective Guilt

    As events in Ukraine demonstrate, ineluctably, war diminishes our humanity, possessing men – and mostly men – of a callous disregard for life, and a capacity for often inexplicable cruelty.

    As such, the invasion of one state by another without a casus belli – as we have witnessed in Russia’s essentially unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and also with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and other incursions since – has long been considered an injustice: any aggressor thus bears a level of responsibility for what follows.

    This does not, however, absolve an injured party from guilt for mistreatment, or worse, of prisoners of war, or other breaches of the Geneva Convention; notoriously described as ‘quaint’ by George W. Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with apparently horrifying consequences.

    Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.

    A Single Murder

    In peacetime the violent ending of a single life is newsworthy, but during a military conflict the deaths of thousands are often defined as mere casualties, calculated to diminish one side or another’s capacity to wage war. A cold-blooded logic often underpins such strategic analysis.

    ‘What was a single murder’ Stefan Zweig asked of World War I, ‘within the cosmic, thousand-fold guilt, the most terrible mass destructive and mass annihilation known in history?’

    Beyond the mindless trench warfare of World War I, the twentieth century also produced the exquisite evils of World War II, when the carnage reached the civilian sphere as never before; the leading industrial nations harnessing advanced technologies to produce Concentration Camps, Gulags, carpet bombing, and of course – supposedly bringing wars between Great Powers to an end – the atomic bomb.

    In that war’s wake there emerged a new understanding of international law, previously dominated by an insistence that this should only apply between states, as opposed to allowing individual rights to be enforced against officials of an offending state in a foreign jurisdiction.

    This traditional understanding was emphasised by a British official during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I: ‘The new League of Nations must not protect minorities in all countries,’ he complained, or it would have ‘the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from the more serious problems such as the Irish.’

    According to Phillipe Sands: ‘Britain objected to any depletion of sovereignty – the right to treat others as it wished – or international oversight. It took the position even if the price was more injustice and oppression.’ [i]

    But the depravities of World War II changed the global mood, even if Hermann Goering could persuasively assert that ‘the victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’ Indeed, there is a reasonable argument that Russian, American and British officials should also have been in the dock to account for what occurred in Katyn, Hiroshima, Bengal and elsewhere.

    Nonetheless, the universal ambit of human rights was one of the great advances of the post-Second World War period, culminating in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In theory at least, it was no longer permissible for states to act with impunity even within their borders, as the Rule of Law gained universal jurisdiction, at least where atrocities were concerned.

    Looting of an Armenian village by the Kurds, 1898 or 1899.

    Genocide v. Crimes Against Humanity

    Thus, charges of Crimes Against Humanity and, arguably more problematically, Genocide, were laid against leading Nazi at the Nuremberg trials.

    Coincidentally, the two Polish-Jewish jurists Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht responsible for developing these novel concepts both studied in the University of Lwów, a Polish city between the Wars, before being annexed by the USSR at the end of World War II. Today Lviv, as it is now called, is the main city of Western Ukraine.

    Amidst accusations of war crimes, including that of Genocide, being levelled against Russia, it is worth considering important distinctions between Crimes against Humanity and Genocide.

    The author of the former concept, Hersch Lauterpacht argued that ‘The well-being of an individual is the ultimate object of international law.’ In contrast, in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Rafael Raphael Lemkin adopted an approach which aimed to protect groups, for which he invented the new crime of ‘Genocide.’

    In response, Lauterpacht worried that the protection of groups would undermine the protection of individuals. He challenged the ‘omnipotence of the state,’ suggesting atrocities against individuals should be referred to as Crimes Against Humanity, whereby no longer would officials from any state be free to treat their people with impunity.

    Lemkin also wrote of the misdemeanours of the ‘Germans’ rather than the Nazis, arguing that the ‘German people’ had ‘accepted freely’ what was planned, participating voluntarily, and profited from their implementation. This was similar to the War Guilt Clause contained in the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which was deeply resented by Germans.

    Genocide concerned acts ‘directed against individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups.’ For Lemkin Germany’s terrible acts reflected a militarism born of the innate viciousness of the German racial character. He selectively included a quotation from Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt who noted that one of Germany’s mistakes in 1918 was to ‘spare the civil life of the enemy countries’[ii] and that one third of the population should have been killed by organised under-feeding, but not all Germans shared this mentality.

    Collective Guilt

    The difficulty, therefore, with the crime of Genocide is that in purporting to protect one national, ethnic or religious group it often implicates another via its ruling authority; this may perpetuate racial stereotypes, such as innate viciousness, and contains a potential for indiscriminate reprisals, or even further wars.

    Under the original conception of the crime of Genocide, any Russian, even an expatriate opposed to Putin, might be held responsible for the conduct of the Russian army in Ukraine. This idea of collective guilt – a species of Original Sin attached to a national or racial group – generally based on supposedly timeless national characteristics, could also permit crippling sanctions and even bombing campaigns impacting on civilian life.

    Punishing an entire nation for the conduct of its government – even if that government is democratically elected – is therefore unjust, not least as it tends to bolster the authority of belligerent elements within a state – who may point to the aggressor posture of the opponent – diminishing the likelihood of lasting peace.

    Far less problematic is the idea of Crimes Against Humanity, which simply asserts a universal jurisdiction for atrocities committed by the officials of any state, including ‘legally’ against their own people.

    But charging Russian officials with Crimes Against Humanity might lead us to consider whether the leaders of other nations, including the US – which along with Russia (and Ukraine) is not a party to the International Criminal Court – should be similarly indicted.

    Drone Strikes

    Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the US has been waging warfare through extra-judicial assassination operations: drone strikes, aimed at suspected ‘terrorists’ living in some of the world’s most deprived and defenceless countries. As of 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that there have been at least 13,072 confirmed drone strikes on Afghanistan alone since 2015.

    These remote attacks represent a new phase in the cruelty of warfare, as the leading Superpower maintains a social distance from each hit. The consequences, or ‘collateral damage’ is rarely investigated by a mainstream media that now howls in anger at Russia’s excesses.

    As LSE’s Maarya Raabani puts it: ‘Buoyed by mainstream media, an alarming preponderance of metaphors and passive-voice reporting have denied any chance to hold drone atrocity perpetrators to account.’

    Moreover, ‘Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,’ said Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. ‘These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the U.S. government that owes the public an accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.’

    In July 2021, U.S. President Biden announced the adoption of an ‘over the horizon’ counterterrorism strategy. According to the Brookings Institution:

    The new plan would rely on armed unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones — to respond to terrorism threats around the globe without deploying American boots on the ground. But although the strategy was designed to overhaul policies that had kept the United States embroiled in conflict for 20 years, it failed to address the unintended consequences of counterterrorism strikes, namely civilian casualties. On August 29, 2021, with most U.S. soldiers withdrawn from Afghanistan and regional bases shuttered, this challenge became clear. The U.S. military conducted a strike that killed 10 civilians, including women and children, rather than the intended target.

    TAS13: GENOA, JULY 22. Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and US President George Bus.

    In striking unison, mainstream media in the West has reacted to the invasion of Ukraine with outrage, and conveyed statements of the President of Ukraine with uncritical approval. Russia certainly deserves opprobrium for his war of aggression against Ukraine – and its officials may be responsible for war crimes – but the failure to interrogate the actions of the US and its allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia over many years makes the self-righteousness ring hollow.

    Russia is operating in a context established by the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that destabilised the Middle East causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Putin exploited the anarchy in the international system with his invasion of Georgia in 2008, having divined that the rules of the game had changed. There is a continuum between Russia’s attacks against Georgia, the Donbass and Crimea campaign in 2014, and this latest invasion of Ukraine.

    Once Western leaders and their allies are also held accountable for their actions we may move to an environment where the Rule of Law attains a universal character; then the invasion by one state of another without a legitimate casus belli may become unthinkable.

    Unlike during the period of the USSR, Russia exerts little ‘soft’ power. Putin’s propaganda relies on the hypocrisy of the West, especially the US which continues to baulk at becoming a party to the International Criminal Court and allies with rogue actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Confronting Russia should also involve Western governments pursuing morally consistent foreign policies.

    [i] Phillipe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, (Knopf, New York, 2016) p.72

    [ii] Ibid pp.82-184

  • Public Intellectuals: Hannah Arendt

    A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    It is, perhaps, notable that as a young student Hannah Arendt was the Nazi-sympathising philosopher Martin Hedeigger’s lover. His little Jewess trophy, perhaps redolent in his mind of Weimar Republic decadency. Surprisingly, she never really developed a hated for him, intellectually at least, despite his stunning failure in selling his soul to the Nazis.

    In contrast to Heidegger, the ultra-conservative German burgher Thomas Mann chose exile. His rather clunky prose is excused on that point alone, and, suitably, his best work arrived after decamping to Switzerland. This includes especially Doctor Faustus (1947) an oblique portrayal of an actor and academic visited by a Mephistophelian figure, who sells his soul to the Nazis – a Heideggerean type in fact.

    Arendt’s background, steeped in the great German philosophical tradition, but rejected as a Jewess – and even subjected to a period under Gestapo confinement – gave her an unparalleled vantage on the great evils of the twentieth century, and the perils of ideological conformity that corrupted even the most elevated intellects. A failure to exercise a moral conscience in performing actions is a recurring failure, even where we do not see the extremes of totalitarian rule.

    Arendt and Albert Camus

    Arendt is among the most important public intellectual of our age for a variety of reasons.

    First,  she witnessed at first hand the rise of antisemitism in Germany, before migrating to the Americas, along with others from a golden generation of great mitteleuropean thinkers – many of them also Jewish – such as Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin. She was young and resilient enough to avoid the despair that led many to suicide, or to expire prematurely like Louis Althusser, whose structuralist influence has had a less than positive influence.

    A migratory professor with lifestyle “issues” including a nicotine habit that has become increasingly unacceptable in America, Arendt’s cosmopolitan “Europeanness” was tolerated in her time. In a bygone age the Frankfurt School colonised American academia, and a person such as Vladimir Nabokov – a different beast altogether – could became a professor in Columbia. Imagine the uproar if his Lolita was published today?

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

    In some respects her Gallic twin – and the other indispensable public intellectual for our time – Albert Camus also disavowed extremism, strict ideological conformity and what may be described as scientism. Both firmly rejected a positivism identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions according to Camus ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’

    According to Camus, Comte conceived of a society whose:

    [S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priest who reign over everything.[i]

    As today we hang on the pronouncement of anointed scientists who decide our intimate social lives, it would appear Comte’s vision has come to fruition. Thus, one of the latter-day hierarchy, Professor Niall Ferguson in an interview with The Times revealed his amazement at the power he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    Likewise, Arendt equated Comte’s hope for ‘a united, regenerated humanity under the leadership – présidence – of France’[ii] with the idea of a ‘national mission’ used by English imperialists to justify global expansion during the late nineteenth century. Arendt also pointed to the danger of the positivists’ assumption – evident in totalitarian Soviet propaganda – ‘that the future is eventually scientifically predictable’.[iii]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem

    Eichmann on trial in 1961.

    Arendt’s fame rests especially on the proverbial shitstorm caused by her coverage of the former SS officer Alfred Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She coined the immortal phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe how under Nazism ambitious functionaries and bean counters – such as Eichmann – climbed career ladders without regard for the supreme brutality of their regime. This was not apparent to them in their day-to-day lives; so out of sight was out of mind. In any age, including this, we should be wary of a cost-benefit analysis of life where board room decisions decide the fate of human beings and the natural world.

    Indicatively, in Ireland between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112.[iv] It is now clear that bean counters and bureaucrats dominate our lives. Although many may not seem like villanous characters, any buffoonery on display should not be a source of reassurance. As Arendt describes Eichmann:

    Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.[v]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem highlights how an obsession with compliance and promotion blunts moral sensibility; and how a cognitive dissonance takes hold where slavish obedience leads to a failure to question one’s actions. This is the moral corrosion generated by a lack of consequentialist or moral thinking.

    The Human Condition

    I would argue that The Human Condition (1958) is central to understanding our age, in that it emphasizes the good life, and a need for Aristotelian measure and moderation in pursuit of eudaimonia. As the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics puts it: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good.’

    The Human Condition emphasizes a moral conscience that should ideally inform all our actions, especially politics. And she warns of a detachment from human realities that may occur once the “pensionopolis” of an entitled state class have no concern for trade or manufacturing:

    No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufacture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the “pensionopolis” with a “proletariat of consumers”[vi]

    It is insufficient to perform a deed in isolation; you have to understand what you are doing and for whom and why. Or at the least investigate and interrogate your motivations, while avoiding the pitfalls of perfectionism. As Voltaire put it: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, a point seemingly lost on certain scientific authorities in their utopian pursuit of ZeroCovid.

    Arendt also warns against the scientism in our public discourse, or more crucially the triumph of a form of mathematical intelligence, which is often divorced from moral decision-making, with Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ after the launch of the atomic bomb an obvious statement of this pitfall.

    It is a point the philosopher Mary Midgley (above) has also made in response to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to the wife of a deceased physicist that ‘people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’[vii]

    In response Midgley wrote:

    if reality was indeed something that only physicists could reach – if everybody else was wandering clueless through a hopeless maze of illusions – there would be a crucial difference between these scientists and the rest of us. We are being told that we are mere peasants, helpless “folk-psychologists”, and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult “you are nothing.”[viii]

    Thus Arendt, along with Midgley, warns against placing too great a premium on mathematical intelligence – and those who may consider lesser mortals as mere nothings. Arguably, this can be seen in the all-too-ready acceptance of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday mathematical modelling for Covid-19 mortality last year, which proved to be wrong by a significant margin. According to Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times, Ferguson’s interpretation was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    More widely, the contemporary veneration of science has spilled into worship of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, and the triumph of homo economicus. This represents a negation of critical human identity through a hyper-inflated economic reality of survival. That any critical intelligence endures, divorced from corporate ‘influencers’, is almost a minor miracle.

    The Human Condition also ably demonstrates that when the sphere of political engagement and the public sphere become redundant and private interests control democracy, then it has given way to something else

    Technocracy

    Arendt warns of the dangers of technocracy, pointing to the blunted moral conscience of an Eichmann, who reasoned that he was only putting people on trains, and did not have the intellectual curiosity to consider their destination and the likely outcome, or was casually indifferent. Arendt understood that he was more concerned with consorting with powerful people, and networking in a moral oblivion. One might add that being exclusively within one’s own silo bubble, or online echo chamber – as all too many are today – is recipe for serious trouble.

    Likewise, Jurgen Habermas has warned of the danger of technocratic solutions devoid of a moral compass, coining the phrase the public sphere.

    Juergen Habermas

    To offset growing consumerism Arendt advocates the Vita Activa of civic engagement. She remains even-handed, recognising that scientists should of course be listened to – providing crucial specialisation – but it should be understood that many lack a moral or philosophical education, and without ethical training ultimately hold no allegiance to the truth.

    In our time, all too often, political debates reach a point of paralysis in endless arguments over statistics; we are to quote Peter Greenaway ‘Drowning By Numbers’. Arendt’s analysis demonstrates how number can give rise to anti-humanism, perfectionism including an obsessions with tidiness, and other forms of anal retentiveness that inhibit our development as human beings.

    Science detached from philosophy is divorced from ethical considerations, and thus can be deployed for great evil. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which ‘science’ [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.’[ix]

    Banner of Stalin in Budapest.

    The Origins of Totalitarianism

    The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951) is the seminal account of twentieth century totalitarianism – as distinct from the ‘mere’ fascism of figure such as Mussolini – of both the Nazis under Hitler and Communism under Stalin. It offers a series of reflections that should serve as a warning in our time – when we cannot be said to live under totalitarianism – but where, nonetheless, an unmistakable shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the individual. Thus measures that no government would previously have contemplated – from lockdowns to curfews – have been normalised in many countries, and controls have even been tightened in Ireland at precisely the point when a declining number are dying from the disease. Coincidentally, ‘terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition.’[x]

    We cannot overlook the damage of enforced social isolation, as Arendt put it:

    What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the nontotalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of ever-growing masses of our century.[xi]

    Arendt also well understood the fictions that underpin our understanding of the world, and a tendency to embrace conspiratorial ideas in the absence of reasonable explanations:

    Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. Man, who has not been granted the gifts of undoing, who is always an unconsulted heir of other men’s deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequences of an unending chain of events rather than unconscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future seems to be concealed. Legends were the spiritual foundation of every ancient city, empire, people, promising safe guidance through the limitless space of the future. Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.[xii]

    Thus, it is essential that in responding to the damage of contemporary social atomisation that we do not succumb to ideologies that sow further division.

    Arendt observed how allegiances break down when Populist mobs gain traction. Initially the targets are those of no influence or assets, but essentially anyone is guilty under the arbitrary laws of totalitarianism in power. Thus she recalls:

    It is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible – not in order to prevent discovery of one’s secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain sense of future trouble, all persons who might not only who might have an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

    Sadly, this agitation seems reminiscent of the states of mind actually cultivated by government scientists, who have deployed ‘fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China,’ according to Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist. Nowadays, instead of being imprisoned, we contend with social shame and even loss of a job for heinous crimes such as meeting a friend for a pint or taking a hill walk.

    Radical Evil

    Arendt observes a failure ‘inherent in our entire philosophical tradition’ to conceive of a radical evil.[xiii] Such a blind spot she argues means, ‘Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’[xiv]

    Moreover, it is important to note in our present state of enforced isolation:

    [I]t has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical governments is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror, it certainly is its most fertile ground, it always is its result.[xv]

    So let us be wary of the strongman leaders who have emerged to ‘guide’ us to the promised land during a pandemic, which shows up the damage of their own making; and who now argue that solutions lie in asserting the very neoliberal values that brought us to this impasse in in the first place.

    Sadly Burkean and Habermasean moderation has been lost in an age of tribal nationalism. The handmaiden’s of the strongman leaders are in fact a grasping “pensionopolis” that are removed from the dramatically worsening poverty in countries such as Ireland caused by the pandemic.

    This sadly is the digital generation of what are, in effect, fabricated human identities – a kind of unreal Blade Runner replicant. Homo faber has given way to homo economicus, as the law and economics ideologues put it. Craftsmanship and intellectualism are despised, and the public space denuded of significance.

    Finally, and perhaps more optimistically, Arendt clearly distinguishes between loneliness, and solitude: ‘Solitude requires being alone, where loneliness only shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ Let us thus endeavour to accept solitude as a temporary gift and resist the loneliness which is fertile ground for the infliction of terror.

    [i] Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin, London, 2013, p.145

    [ii] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.237

    [iii] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.454

    [iv] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12

    [v] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, New York, 1963, p.55

    [vi] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p.37

    [vii] Mary Midgley, Are You an Illusion, p.136

    [viii] Beard, Ibid, p.138

    [ix] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.453

    [x] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.514

    [xi] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.627

    [xii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.271

    [xiii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.602

    [xiv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.603

    [xv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.623

  • 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.