E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

what happens when the leader is a charismatic charlatan? I have been watching the dawning, infuriatingly slow wake-up call Covid-19 has been for many Americans these past few weeks... as the Washington Post editorial goes, this pandemic will strip the United States of any pretence to normalcy or capability. Trump is one man, but he represents something the land of the free has indulged for decades now - a willingness to ignore science, fact, and reality, for pure partisan ideology and bias. This emotive, irrational and blind behaviour, aided and abetted by the right-wing, often religious TV and radio media and latterly, the amoral nihilistic Silicon valley companies, literally recreated a biblical-level-event Babel. Since America is ludicrously rich and powerful, it has had much capital to spend, even waste. But it has been too intellectually and morally profligate, and now has a gutted and aberrant leadership, unable to form coherent, rational plans, and project determi...

prepared for February... Historians may be forgiven for finding January 2020 more stuffed with signs and wonders, horrors and events, portents and peril, than the entire Game of Thrones arc; not yet over, this month has given us, unbelievably: - a week of thinking there'd be a World War 3 triggered by an American strike on Iran's top military leader; - the tragic downing of the airplane flying from Iran; - the crisis of the British Monarchy triggered by 'Megxit' and lingering concerns over Prince Andrew's lack of testimony; - Brexit (see next post); - ongoing fires and environmental disaster in Australia; - The Trump impeachment and the Republican failure to be non-partisan in the Senate trial; - the novel and deadly Wuhan virus becoming a global emergency. I know I am missing more memes, meaningful deaths, earthquakes, and accidents. The trend is not an arc towards justice, but to chaos, ethical duplicity, corruption, war, and environmental destru...

It will not surprise readers of this blog to learn that we are not major benefactors of Trump's campaign for re-election, or that we hardly favour his usual tactics or rhetoric. Even by his own standards, however, the threats of the past few hours have marked an escalation into territory more usually occupied by the Taliban, or other notable war criminals. The threat to destroy 'cultural' targets of value to the Iranian people and their civilisation, aside from anything else, is repulsive. Its barbarism is, frankly, against the grain of any optimistic hopes left to the human race in the few decades left to us. Should such destruction be visited upon museums, ancient or sacred places, monuments, or other national treasures, the whole world will be impoverished, both morally and culturally. Trump's behaviour of the past few days - beyond Nixonian - is beginning to confirm the worst fears many had upon his election - that if threatened he would stoop to Nero-level...

ON THE SUPREME COURT RULING AGAINST THE PROROGATION OF PARLIAMENT, two sonnets Rain is impartial, it falls On the client, the accuser, And the bewigged court, Without favour, without fervour; The rain functions like law, It delivers its decisions On days of death, days of birth; It touches the heavens, the earth, The in-between citizen; Unlike snow, love or hatred It never thaws; it flows Where learned minds have led… It arises, in distant tumult, Above mortal struggles of those Who would play gods to ants; To go below Machiavel faces, Reading past their blank pages, As a void, to where morals plant Forests that build up parliaments, The wood that grows strong vaults. Rain is not passionate, It is sane, measured, sober… You can drink the rain Unlike wine, and not go wild; Though sometimes, supreme, It makes people run in streets In what is only apparent chaos, To partially plan, partially drea...

In one of the oddest moments of 21st century history, the German Government has strongly laid claim to total responsibility for The Shoah (the Holocaust) as a rupture in human civilisation and argued it must continue to teach and defend this historical reading of German guilt. The gut-wrenching irony which is almost beyond my ability to comprehend is that the denial of this official history was presented by the leader of the Jewish state of Israel. Germany it seems is laying claim to its modern existential identity as the post-Holocaust nation as guardian of both guilt and solemn reparation. Whereas for Netanyahu the Holocaust seems to be a more free-floating thing capable of new definitions and even origins. For him the victims remain undeniably the same but the causation can be shifted without existential damage to Israel because in this new foundation story of the Holocaust the chief villain is not a slain ghost like Hitlerism but the current foe - Palestinism. Fascinating and w...

This blog has often over the past ten years grappled with issues of evil, and today reminds us that the human being is capable of atrocities that no animal could imagine. Indeed, Greene 's famous dictum that evil is a failure of the imagination is clever but sadly false - as is the idea that a lack of empathy is to blame - indeed, the deepest forms of evil require both imagination and empathy, in order to be executed with fully diabolical impact.  You cannot prudently hurt a creature you do not understand, except by accident. 70 years ago, the war against Japan ended. We have been reminded that during that war, among other barbarisms, Japanese medical doctors performed vivisection for medical students on Allied prisoners of war.  Human Vivisection is the worst crime imaginable - it is surgically altering a living sentient being for experimental purposes. I cannot describe these wretched and utterly degrading surgeries here properly, but medical students were forced to watc...

Eyewear is just a wee blog, and its editor is not a political scientist.  When we weigh in, here, on world matters, we do so as amateurs.  I have no insider knowledge of Nelson Mandela , the great political visionary who has sadly died.  I can only listen, read, watch, reflect, on what the media tells me.  I first heard of Mandela in the 1980s, via songs by the likes of Simple Minds .  The idea then was to free the man.  Then, when he was freed, there was great joy, and expectation.  The expectation was warranted.  The prisoner, famously became the president, and he was, by all accounts a merciful and kind leader, refusing revenge on his former captors.  Indeed, listening to Dr Rowan Williams today on Radio 4, BBC, it struck me that Mandela, in a quiet way, was the greatest Christian of our era - the person who best embodied Christ's near-impossible dictum, to turn the other cheek.  If only.  So few of us can do it on a crowded tu...

I always found Simon Schama vaguely annoying - but no more.  His Story of the Jews is a masterwork of TV history.  This is hardly new territory.  Few stories are more familiar than that of the exodus during biblical times; and the Holocaust is a known tragedy.  However, Schama finds a series of through lines - tropes, images, concepts - chief among them the book, language, itself - to trace the journey of the Jews.  Never boring, often exceptionally moving, and invigorating in its intellectual muscle, Schama trembles, berates, mourns, laughs, observes, and finger-wags - he lives - the processes he explores.  Indeed, last night's episode (Episode 3) became like a the best kind of moral thriller - a terrible historical tragedy - as we saw Moses Mendelsohn , that great mensch - build bridges with German culture and society - a bridge snapped in two by Wagner in 1850, with the repellent publication of Judaism In Music - and from there, anti-semitism re-emer...

Rarely has a day been so fraught with peril and possibility as St. Patrick's Day, 2011.  On the one hand, we have the potential for three or four nuclear meltdowns, that might wreak great havoc on Japan, and on the other, we have the danger that rebel-held Libya might fall to the brutal government forces.  In both ongoing dramas, each of the highest possible orders of importance, brave people are facing mortal danger to try and save the day.  In each case, the outcome is fully uncertain - will the rods be cooled in time, will the West intervene and stop the Colonel?  By the weekend, we may be looking at two compounded tragedies, or two upward trajectories to sunny uplands of hope and repair, or a mix.  Fingers crossed.

I didn't coin the phrase "psychofascism" - Reynolds in 1974 seems to have - and a few bloggers have used it since.  But I am one of the first to use it to describe the development of a new kind of leader - part-dictator, part-madman, such as we see in Libya, whose sole claim to power is that they claim power - the violent political version of the C-list celebrities famous for being famous.  Libya was of course an Italian colony.  Italo Balbo , afetr a violent pacification, put the Libyans under the jackboot of Il Duce . The original fascist control of Libya was not insane - it was dictated by economics and an imperialist agenda.  However, and sadly, Mussolini's murderous fascism has now transformed - and colonialism does this - the liberator into a menace.  Libya has had an unusually bloody history, even by 20th century standards. There is no likelihood of less blood in the sand any time soon.  Britain should intervene, perhaps with the Americans, and ...

Readers of Eyewear may cock an eyebrow at the title of this post - I am a struggling Catholic, after all.  However, today seems a bleak day in human history - by no means the worst, but one of those that marks the ways in which human suffering is accidentally and intentionally visited upon people, often innocent.  Exhibit A - the peaceful, decent and civilised city of Christchurch in New Zealand is shattered by an earthquake.  Exhibit B - the brutality in Libya.  Exhibit C - Iranian warships steaming into the Mediterranean for the first time in over 30 years.  Surely, war of some kind is at hand, in the Middle East - chaos looms.  Meanwhile, God, in his infinite wisdom, is apparently impassive as the horrors of history unfold.  It is up to each of us (with our souls) to try to fathom the impossible, the infinite.  Some days I am just, barely, able to glimpse the love of God working in the world.  It is, still, visible, in the kindness and co...

Like in 1989, or during the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, or the Prague Spring - the events in the Arab world of late - Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen - inspire and trouble at once.  The inspiration is easy to comprehend - what is not admirable about millions of people freely choosing their destiny?  Nothing much else is more moving than that sort of civic movement. The trembling at the threshold, though, is harder to put a finger on - and has led to some pretty ugly hemming and hawing from the White House, which talks a good talk about Democracy, except when it rears its ugly head.  And, was it Rumsfeld , or Cheney - those awful men - who said that democracy was messy?  Freedom is, despite the cliches, ungainly at the best of times.  It unleashes a Palin as soon as a Clinton .  But we mustn't fear what will happen in the Middle East - because, for better and worse - it will be what the people want. The masses are - on the whole - the b...

A number of British luminaries has set out to welcome "Pope Ratzinger" to Britain with a letter in The Guardian , which, among other things, suggests the Church has "resisted signing many major human rights treaties and has formed its own treaties ("concordats") with many states which negatively affect the human rights of citizens of those states."  It also calls the Holy See, as a state, a "fiction".  The letter is below. If the signatories of this dishonest and petty letter had made such conspiratorial claims about the Jewish faith (that it was simply an attempt to "amplify international influence") or the Islamic faith, they would be considered intolerant bigots.  But, this is England, this is anti-Catholicism, and no such boundaries of polite discourse exist.  I find it shocking, and frightening. A few brief comments.  In England, the rights of Catholics until recently were severely curtailed, and at the time of John Donne , a ...

David Cameron , British PM, has been over there in the US of A this week, bigging down his role as a junior partner.  Not a history boy, Cameron yesterday talked about, on TV no less, how Britain was even junior partner in fighting the Nazis in 1940.  Well, maybe to the Russians, but not the Yanks.  As every schoolchild knows, or once did, the Americans only entered in 1941, after Pearl Harbour.  Instead, the 1940 war period was Britain's "finest hour".  I wonder, will Cameron also acknowledge that WH Auden is really American, and thank the States for loaning "us" Eliot ?  Indeed, is British poetry, postwar, junior partner to the American stream?

Orlando Figes , a highly-respected academic in Britain, has been caught writing very negative reviews of his colleagues, and very positive reviews of his own works, on Amazon.  When caught, he denied this, and his wife, for a time, took the rap.  As often happens, this all came to a head because - like Wilde - he instigated a legal case against his accuser; unfortunately (and perhaps again like Oscar) he actually was what he looked to be.  It's been in the TLS and is now in the papers and on the BBC . Figes - who is now on sick leave - is clearly under great stress, and the potential decline and fall of his career - trumpeted in the media - cannot be helping him.  I wish him well.  Meanwhile, this sad case reminds us all of the seductive dangers of the Digital Age - how seeming anonymity, and the instant pleasures and powers of the Internet, offer many opportunities for self-destruction, as well as destruction of rivals.  Intellectuals and poets are not ...