Brexit, EU, disinformation: three good reads

The first is by the supreme stylist of the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole,

the second by the outstanding author of The Capital, enlarging upon his time in Brussels,

the third an alarming but by no means despairing sequel to the writer's chronicle of where it all began, during his time in Russia.

The rest of the pictures, for punctuation's sake, are drawn from our last big march in October, as jovial and inventive as the others; we missed the bout of rain, having retreated to the ICA for lunch, meeting the same folk with 'my' Tillmans T shirt as before - pictured below - after which I went down to Parliament Square and caught the last four speeches).

Meanwhile, to the books. All three give us a bigger perspective than you can glean from journal or newspaper articles. Fintan O'Toole traces the Brexit delusion to England's (note: not Great Britain's; O'Toole is careful to make the distinction) swivelling between abjection and grandiosity after the Second World War, the self-pity of winning the war but losing the peace (including resentment that Germany prospered thereafter).

 'In the English reactionary imagination dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality', and O'Toole uses an address to the anti-European Tories of the Bruges group as one example.

The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefor the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope being used in the Brexit campaign. 'Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,' Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on 15 May 2016, a month before the Referendum.

O'Toole tracks Johnson's mendacity back to the beginning, too. It's why he was able to paint such a devastating portrait for the New York Review of Books, 'The Ham of Fate', last August. I learnt much more that was painful-funny here, including the absurd and slippery speech the person we must now know as Diana Ditch made for his selection as Tory candidate in the safe seat of Henley-on-Thames. All O'Toole has to do is quote the supposed sleight of hand with which he turns his selfish act of depriving his pregnant wife of toast in hospital into his attempt to buy some more, only to find that 'you can't pay for things on the NHS...we need to think of new ways of getting private money into the NHS'. Job done; Johnson replaced the retiring Michael Heseltine, irony of ironies (MH is our greatest Remain speechmaker, if you didn't know).

There's more, including some outrageous playing with facts about our not-so-easy-to-check medieval history. O'Toole refers to La Ditch's brand of absurd equations as 'Brexit camp...edgy clowning in which everything is at once very funny and highly sinister'. But I hope no-one's laughing now. Those who vote for this criminal liar, and they include Theresa May, happy to canvas for someone she has said has no 'moral integrity', have given up any moral pretence whatsoever.

It has to be admitted, though, that while Diana and co were playing with our future, successive governments did next to nothing to enlighten us about why the European Union matters. Which is why Robert Menasse's Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits should be essential reading everywhere, not least in schools. It presents as a rather dry little handbook, but Menasse's style, as translated by Craig Decker, is anything but. Arriving in Brussels for his research period, he notes his objections to the project, and how pleasantly surprised he was at both the openness and the anything-but-faceless so-called bureaucracy. But while he praises the Parliament and the Commission, 'two supranational institutions, which are truly European in their aspirations and duties', Menasse is critical of the Council, 'an institution in which national interests, national sensitivities, national fictions, etc. are defended', thwarting 'logic and rationality in a wretched game of national affectations and so-called interests'. And the power of that Council has been strengthened, not weakened.

For whoever supports nationalism - 'because that's just the way people are' - will be swept away by nationalism, because in the European Union and the globalized world, national furore can never really be satisfied. And the rage will become extreme once people realize that the 'defence of national interests' was a fraud from the get-go. The only things being defended are the interests of the national political and economic elites.

Sound familiar? One of Menasse's solutions is for the EU to abandon nations in favour of regions, the only areas in which we're truly rooted. 'Europe, in point of fact, is a Europe of regions. The task of European politics should therefore be to systematically recognise and develop what Europe, in fact, already is'. And has already been acknowledged as such through the European grants to restore deprived areas like Sunderland and Cornwall (who collectively were too stupid to realise that where their government had deserted them, the EU stepped in). Cultural diversity must be celebrated, too, and yet the EU's cultural department is, in budgetary terms, the worst off. That has to change. And I think it already is changing. Let's hope against hope that little England will not be cut off from the move.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, about his time in Russia, was a work of tragicomic despair. There's more hope about This Is Not Propaganda, interweaving the present information war with the tale of Pomerantsev's dissident parents, pursued by the KGB before they made a new life in this country, in that it cites the marvellous people around the world trying to fight misinformation and tyranny with their own tools - Srdja Popovic with his worldwide training courses, courageous Alberto Escorcia in Mexico, Babar Aliev in Eastern Ukraine, to name but three. Escorcia sums it all up when he defines the Internet as 'a great battle between love, interconnectedness on the one side and fear, hate, disjointedness on the other'. It seems as if the fear and hate are winning at the moment, but all is not lost.

And the UK's ties with the rest of Europe won't be broken, whatever happens. Recently took delivery of the latest Europe Day CD, and though it's a real shame that, in a convoluted chain of ever more surprising disingenuousness, Eldbjørg Hemsing refused permission for her brilliant part in the spectacular finale, Cristian Lolea's arrangement of Enescu's First Romanian Rhapsody, to appear, there's plenty of top-quality nourishment here.

Its sequel will be a 10th anniversary disc of highlights from the concerts across the years. So much to celebrate!

Tsars now and then

This one

stands roughly in relation to that one

as did Boris Godunov (c.1551-1605)

to Ivan IV, 'the Terrible' (1530-1584)

Why do I make the point? Because until Russian history stops repeating itself, we are likely to go back to truth-telling poets of the past to find the present in what they write. It was a scene in Pushkin's Shakespearean history-drama Boris Godunov not in either of Musorgsky's operatic versions which pulled me up short in the opera class last week. The poet uses one of his ancestors, a not exactly admirable plotting noble, to make the second of the comparisons above. 'He rules as did Ivan,' claims Afanasy Pushkin in James E Falen's admirable trnalsation:

What good that public hangings are no more;
That on a bloody stake, for all to see,
No longer do we sing our hymns to Christ;
That we're not burnt alive upon the square,
The Tsar to rake our ashes with his staff?
Are our poor lives in any way more safe?
We're threatened every day with some disgrace:
Siberia...the dungeon...or the cowl,
And there, in some forsaken place, to die
From hunger or a strangler's knotted rope...

Remove the religious associations - though those, of course, are coming back under a repressive Patriarch - and subtitute the psychiatric ward and the carefully chosen poison* for the cowl and the strangler, and you have a proper equivalent to how Putin wields his power as a Stalin for our times. In one way, it's devilish cunning: as Peter Pomerantsev puts it in his giddying evocation of his recent years in Russia, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, this political system thrives on 'democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent'. Plus the belief that if you lie often enough, people might start to believe you (look at Medvedev's bare-faced declaration that Russia is not bombing anybody but IS in Syria, that the west is creating a cold war. The Lithuanian President retorted that Russia is doing everything it can to make this a hot war.

Pomerantsev's subjects are chosen and paraded to give a lurid whirligig of absurdity and horror. He worked on Russian TV documentaries, so he knows that state control of Ostankino is making the country into one big grotesque (non) reality show. He gives us a terrifying portrait of Vladislav Surkov (pictured below speaking for his horrible creation Nashi, the new version of the Hitler Youth), the clever, cynical amoralist who has 'privatised the Russian political system', whose style of authoritarianism 'climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd...The Kremlin's idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movement develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state for bedtime'.

The different aspects are tellingly exemplified: the models and mistresses whose coaches turn back to pumpkins when their  multi-timing masters have tired of them, and who turn to the kind of cults not unknown here but operating on a more sinister scale there, a route ending in madness and suicide; the businesswomen who finds herself, totally innocent, caught in the mesh of corruption and an imprisonment which she's told can only be terminated by a large bribe to a lawyer - she turns to another route which only works because of a bigger political expediency; the hood who's a hero in his home town; the brutality facing army conscripts; the Russian 'offshore' in the rest of the world; the very differing fates of the former oligarchs now that all wealth is under state control: and the wholesale destruction of old Moscow - I knew very little about this and haven't been back since 2000 - so all businesses can be physically close to the Kremlin, the dead centre of all things.

What's fast being knocked down is chronicled by one of the few good guys in the book, Alexander Mozhayev, a kind of architectural Pimen (and definitely not to be confused with the pro-Russian separatist). What's going up, in the plethora of kitsch styles, includes such throwbacks to the 1950s as this

and this.

All government-approved politicians are adept at using the jargon of western capitalist companies, a trick learned by the proliferation of the latter in Russia during the 1990s. And everyone plays the game, knowingly or not; a dissident individual or organisation can be given a brief limelight, only to be dragged out of the spotlight the next day.

In fact this is the most potent aspect of the whole thing which reminds me what I read about Stalin's game - the rules could be changed daily or by the week, so that no-one ever knew where they stood. Keep everyone in a state of fear. At the moment, this is why it's impossible to win within the country, though some unimaginably brave individuals still keep on trying. Eventually this madness has to come to an end, but will Putin have succeeded in his biggest wish, to drag down Europe before Russia itself totally implodes? I know this: that I have never lived through worse times for the world. This article on The Interpreter, superbly expressed, offers no comfort at all.

We have our own Surkovs, of course, though they're not as clever. Thankfully we also have the freedom to bring pressure to remove them. It's hard work but it can be done.

Please sign this UK Government and Parliament petition against one of the biggest liars in the Conservative Party (and that's saying something) before he takes our precious NHS beyond repair. A reminder, too, that the ENO needs saving from its own management in a microcosm of what's happening with the junior doctors (chorus and orchestra shouldn't be in the line of fire). If you haven't already done so, sign and comment on The Spirit of Lilian Baylis's petition.

*17/2 Monday's announcement of the death of Nikita Kamayev, former head of Russia's anti-doping agency Rusada, prompts the worst thoughts in the wake of the doping scandal. A heart attack at 52? Well, it's Russia and men die young there, but still...he's the second person in the organisation to disappear conveniently from the picture within the past couple of months.