Politics
On the Thai Elections
The last years of Bhumibol coincided with the emergence of a new generation in Thailand, which grew up during a time in which the royal propaganda started to subside. Around this time too, the emergence of social media served to expand political horizons, showing young Thais how people fought for democracy in other parts of the world.
On Adam Phillips
It is significant that conversion, in its extremist form, comes on the scene when frustration is no longer bearable, as a failure of tolerance—the preeminent virtue of political liberalism. Phillips’s other watchwords are the familiar liberal ones of sympathy, negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. “Liberals,” he says in On Wanting to Change, “prefer conversation to rote learning, multiple perspectives to exclusive explanation, [and] dissent to conformity.” For those reasons, “Liberalism is by definition not something one is converted to.”
In Gaziantep
I notice Islahiye’s clatter when a hundred bystanders are told to go quiet so the volunteers can listen. You can tell who is tearing a wrapper or ruffling their puffy coat and where the caution tape flaps. The ambulance that recovers one life interferes with the search for another.
J. D. Vance Changes the Subject
Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening. This massive new collective burden was piled on a society already stumbling under the weight of organized abandonment, environmental racism, for-profit health care, and mass incarceration. Vance, in the end, cannot abide the idea that what he suffered has to do with any of that disabling stuff.
Constructing Fate
Taking a handful of men into custody does not constitute an acknowledgment of the party-state’s systemic refusal to enforce public safety requirements when its clientelist political economy was at stake. As a Turkish colleague put it to me in conversation, the culprits will not be held to account when the culprits and those holding to account are the same people.
Our Godard
“Art today is Jean-Luc Godard,” the French poet Louis Aragon wrote in 1965. “Godard is not satisfied with the world as it is, he remakes it in his own manner . . . in Pierrot le fou red sings like an obsession.” It would again, decades later, in The Image Book. Godard has long been one of the few who believe that color is not a given, that it is a craft like any other. If his movies—the ones with Belmondo, with Gorin, with Miéville—have staying power, it is because he never completed his own search, for color or anything else. It is customary for any legendary artist to lapse into an academicism of the self. They have figured out how to do what they do and do so indefinitely. Godard wasn’t like that.
Bad Kingdom (1972)
In 1972, the government drew up plans to construct a deportation facility off the coast of Ireland that could house as many as 70 million people - the entire population of the UK, if need be. The intention was to make it an exact replica of the United Kingdom and call it Bad Kingdom. Nobody, it seemed, fulfilled the increasingly stringent criteria of what it meant to be truly British.
Experts estimated that, by 2050, the United Kingdom's only remaining residents would be members of the Cabinet, the Royal family, and bald-headed perpetually enraged men with a poor command of the English language whose idea of patriotism was to attack with deckchairs anyone who so much as spoke with a foreign accent.
In all likelihood, without enough people to maintain a working infrastructure, these UK residents would have to sneak into Bad Kingdom in order to stock up on supplies and to have a shower, although doing so would be illegal and carry a sentence of deportation back to the United Kingdom where they risked being deported to Bad Kingdom, leaving the UK empty.
"Plan C" (1979)
This internal council document was only recently unearthed in our archives. It refers to a secret governmental emergency plan to "purify" the town following some kind of "infestation or plague," the details of which have now been lost.
Although we can now no longer be entirely sure what Plan C consisted of, the image of a nuclear mushroom cloud offers us a clear indication of the council's intention. Our archivists have postulated that the council might have thought it simpler and more cost effective to remove all living things than to target specific vermin and/or undesirable microscopic pathogens.
What also seems clear is that an unidentified but enthusiastic council employee took it upon themselves to extend Plan C to almost every eventuality, in effect making the nuclear Plan C simply the only plan.
The notion that the council planned to employ a nuclear option is further supported by a minor story in a local newspaper from the time. In October 1979, seven-year-old schoolboy Nigel Johnson, mixed up his family's contribution to his school's annual harvest festival. Instead of the intended box containing four cans of oxtail soup and spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce, he took a quarter tonne of enriched uranium and other weapons-grade nuclear materials.
The boy's father, a local councillor, when questioned how his son could have found such materials at home, claimed ignorance. "Boys are always picking up things like this in the playground," he said and added "it's the fault of liberal teachers and communist dinner ladies and I firmly believe they should be among the first to be cleansed."
Book at Lunchtime: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism
Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book:
The emancipatory promise of liberalism - and its exclusionary qualities - shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.
Speakers:
Professor Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. She is currently completing a three year Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, working on a new book on liberalism and the Jews, tentatively titled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights. Working in partnership with colleagues in the heritage sector, she is also leading a major four year AHRC-funded project on Jewish country houses.
Professor Simon Levis Sullam is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy. His fields of interest include the history of ideas and culture in Europe between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, with a particular focus on nationalisms and fascism; the history of the Jews and of Anti-Semitism; the history of the Holocaust; the history of historiography, and questions of historical method. His many publications include, most recently, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy.
Professor Adam Sutcliffe is Professor of European History and co-director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London. His research has focused on in the intellectual history of Western Europe between approximately 1650 and 1850, and on the history of Jews, Judaism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Europe from 1600 to the present. Professor Sutcliffe’s most recent publication, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose, is a wide-ranging look at the history of Western thinking on the purpose of the Jewish people.
Dr Kei Hiruta is Assistant Professor and AIAS-COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy and intellectual history, with particular interest in theories of freedom in modern political thought. His book Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity will be published from Princeton University Press in autumn 2021.
Government Self-Support Scheme Posters (1971-)
The government's self-support scheme launched in 1971. It's not known when the scheme finished because nobody could ever reach the government by telephone. Letters were returned with 'Not known at this address' written across them. Even when people turned up in London to complain in person, they discovered that many government buildings were just facades of the kind one might find on a film set. The Houses of Commons and Lords were in partial ruin, seemingly vacated years before, and had become home to goats, chickens and other livestock. This fact had only gone undetected for so long because the bleating and clucking of the animals coming from within the chambers was indistinguishable from those of their political predecessors.
