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Posts Tagged ‘politics’

Brexit Means Brexit

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on June 6, 2017| Leave a Comment »

[guest post from the official #CthulhuUK campaign]

If you are exposed to a vacuum, the tears that moisten and protect the outside of your eyeballs will evaporate within seconds. I therefore urge you: DO NOT attempt to read the Conservative Party’s 12-point Plan For Brexit! I, mighty Cthulhu, guarantee the continuing flow of tears over moist, succulent eyeballs. My 13-point Plan for Brexit is truly of the abyss, not merely abysmal.

1. Certainty and clarity that the land *will* be laid waste and your children and grandchildren will curse your name as they cower in makeshift shelters from the Fungi from Yuggoth.

2. End feeble attempts of EU institutions to ban noble British tradition of human sacrifice.

3. Unite all parts of the Union in suffering.

4. Restore historical tradition of wrecking Ireland as well.

5. Cut off all contact with so-called civilisation.

6. Foreigners will be treated in just the same way as natives [evil chuckle]

7. Worker’s rights. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

8. Free cake.

9. Exciting new trading opportunities with Ulthar, Kadath in the Cold Waste and the Plateau of Leng.

10. A new technological revolution, as we return you to the Stone Age.

11. Full cooperation with global terror.

12. A smooth, orderly detachment of Britain from mundane reality.

13. Brexit means Brexit means Bragnarök!

A vote for any other party risks handing over management of the forthcoming apocalypse to weak, indecisive humans who are simply dying to backslide on the self-destructive instincts of the British people. Take back control from so-called experts and their rational calculations! #CthulhuUK

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Luxury and Munificence

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on May 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »

In this morning’s Grauniad, George Monbiot argues that the fundamental political decision of our age – not solely in Britain or Europe or the West, but across the globe – lies between “public luxury available to all, or private luxury available to some.” My immediate thought was of the famous lines in Cicero’s Pro Murena (76):

The Roman people hates private luxury, it esteems public munificence; it does not love lavish banquets, still less sordid behaviour and brutality; it recognises differences in services and circumstances, the interchange of work and pleasure.

I’ve no idea if this is a deliberate reference (Monbiot hasn’t responded to a query on the Twitter); rather like the “many not the few” line, it’s such a boilerplate contrast that the resemblances don’t necessarily mean anything. (more…)

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This Town Ain’t Big Enough…

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on April 26, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Wouldn’t it improve British politics (and probably the politics of many other Western democracies) enormously if we reintroduced the Athenian practice of ostracism – holding a vote to decide which disruptive and problematic individual should be packed off into exile for ten years? Actually my reaction when this was raised casually in a Facebook discussion this morning was: no, I can’t think of anything about this that isn’t deeply problematic – but, at the risk of using a sledgehammer to crack the proverbial nut, and not at all because I’m procrastinating about writing a lecture and revising a chapter, the reasons why it wouldn’t work are worth a brief discussion… (more…)

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If It Comes Up Mud…

Posted in Musings, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 20, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I am not a gambling man – but I know a pretty sure thing when I see one. David Engels has written a substantial rejoinder to the critique of his ‘The EU Is Doomed, Because Rome’ argument written by Roland Steinacher and me, characterising it as an Althistorikerstreit, and concludes with the suggestion that time will show whether he’s right or not. Fair enough; if over the next 20-30 years Europe collapses into civil war – and it’s worth stressing that this is not about a return to warring nation states, according to Engels’ model, but about conflict between suburbs and districts within different regions of Europe – and then willingly surrenders in toto to a single charismatic autocrat, then he wins, and as the prophet of the new regime will presumably be in a position to have me locked up and my property confiscated. We win if it doesn’t. My real problem is deciding what the stakes should be; let’s say 10 litres of fresh water, as that will be worth its weight in gold in any post-apocalyptical wasteland you care to imagine, and will be perfectly serviceable in any case. (more…)

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Welcome to the Toga Party

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , on January 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »

The idea behind a Toga Party is obvious: to elevate the conventional student pursuit of drinking to excess by associating it with the well-established image of Roman decadence. Vomiting down one’s front is legitimised by classical precedent! To paraphrase Marx’s 18th Brumaire, the participants find in ancient history the self-deceptions necessary to conceal from themselves the humdrum nature of their activities. In a similar manner, the spate of Roman analogies for the rise of Trump serves to present our current historical predicament in more elevated terms as the crisis of the Republic and the potential triumph of decadent autocracy, as historical events in the grand old manner, rather than any of that tedious or depressingly complex analytical stuff. We are living in time of Great Men and Terrible Villainy and Heroic Deeds and Grand Gestures! The fact that this all derives from a thoroughly old-fashioned and dubious conception of history, just as the toga party is based on multiple layers of literary representation and reception, is beside the point, except for pedants like me. No, the Romans didn’t spend their entire time eating honeyed dormice, shagging their sisters and changing the course of World History with their speeches or battles – but ‘The Romans’ did, and that’s what matters. (more…)

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2016 Part I: Aller Tage Abend

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , on December 30, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Death. Death. Crisis. Death. Crisis. Death. Death. That was 2016, that was. Good riddance, apart from the uneasy feeling that it may have been just the overture, and next year we won’t have the all-too-brief comic relief of England v. Iceland to cheer us up.

It’s all been very serious German novel. One of the themes on the blog this year has been the avoidance, if not fervent denunciation, of crass historical analogies, so I’ll save my next discussion of Volker Kutscher’s excellent Krimi series set in 1920s and 1930s Berlin [pervasive atmosphere of impending doom and dramatic irony] until the Tom Tykwer adaptation starts next year, by which time I may have caught up with the latest volume. Rather, I’ve been reminded all too often of Jenny Erpenbeck’s brilliant Aller Tage Abend (and I still dislike the English title End of Days without having a good alternative suggestion), in which the central character dies again and again – as a baby, as a teenager, at various stages of adulthood – with a constant dialectic between the hopeful counterfactual (if only this, then she would have lived…) and the inevitability of death, against a backdrop of twentieth-century horrors. That was 2016, that was… (more…)

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Into Darkness

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , on November 13, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The next generation of politicians, all as mediocre as one another, and competing with one another for primacy with little concern for the good of the state, abdicated the control of affairs to the whims of the people. They concentrated on their personal intrigues and ambitions instead of exercising any sort of leadership; they undermined any influence they might have had overseas, and plunged their own societies into factional conflict.

(Thucydides 2.65, very loosely adapted)

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