Saturday 20 August 2022

GAS LIGHT


I'm not a football fan and probably know more about Ryan Gosling than Giggs, but one aspect of the latter's current trial grabbed my attention: he has been accused of 'gaslighting' his girl friend in addition to battering her, and that term is now to be regularly heard on mainstream TV news.

The term has become part of the lexicon of identity-political complaint in recent years, alongside others like 'doxxing', 'grooming', 'swatting' and many others, but I imagine few people who use it know where it came from. Wikipedia correctly asserts that its current use derives from the 1944 Hollywood thriller 'Gaslight', by George Cukor, in which a villainous husband deliberately tries to convince his young wife she is going mad. It also mentions that that movie was in turn derived from a UK stage play 'Gas Light' written by English novelist/playwright Patrick Hamilton.
Hamilton, who died in 1962 is one of my very favourite authors, though his reputation is sadly depleted nowadays. He was a difficult character, alcoholic and misanthropic, but an excellent prose stylist and a political radical, unlike contemporaries Waugh and Wodehouse who were firmly of the Right (Wodehouse very much so). My favourite of his novels is 'Hangover Square', a grimly comic satire of London bohemian life just before WWII, but closely followed by 'The Slaves of Solitude', which seems rather horribly appropriate to our present situation. It's about an assorted crowd of people evacuated from London during The Blitz and thrown together in a suburban boarding house. Mr Thwaites, perhaps the nastiest creation since Dickens, is in perpetual argument with the heroine Miss Roach.
I'm reminded of Thwaites every time I hear Truss, Sunak, Raab, Shapps or Gove on the box, and find myself thinking Miss Roach's famous closing line, delivered to the sound of falling bombs, which rather surprisingly is a prayer: "at last she put out the light, turned over, and adjusted the pillow, and hopefully composed her mind for sleep - God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us."

Wednesday 2 March 2022

CULTURE WAR BECOMES WORLD WAR?

What if the charmed lives we "baby boomers" have lived are owed to a happy historic accident, namely the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933? At that time the isolationist wing of the US Republican Party would have been happy to see Hitler take over Europe (as without US intervention he would surely have done). But as Robert Reich points out here, we can rely on no such luck this time around.

Putin's cynical abuse of the Soviet-era rhetorical goals "anti-fascism" and "de-nazification" to justify his invasion of Ukraine is a disgraceful insult to the millions of Russians who died fighting the real thing in WWII, and the naivety of those on the UK Left who accept such excuses is equally disgraceful. Putin may be keen to create historic parallels with anti-fascism and de-nazification, but actually far better parallels are with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. In both cases pro-democracy insurgents were portrayed as "fascists" in order to excuse massacring them with tanks, as will soon be happening in Kyiv and Kharkiv. 

We should be slightly encouraged that our own government seems to have finally seen the folly of its shameless courting of Putin, but the records of their party's donations from Russian oligarchs must cast some doubt upon their commitment to effective sanctions:


 


GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...