First irl event for the book, at Nottingham's wonderful @fiveleavesbookshop - who also publish my great aunt Liz Cashdan's poems (97 and still writing!) - nice to be among friends.
The far right isn’t going away. So how can we defeat it?
Read Daniel Trilling piece on the lessons history has already taught us.
Read more at zeteo.com, link in bio.
Back in the home town for a bit and the first thing I see outside the bus station is a group of teenage boys sitting on the grass chatting in a language different to mine. At a guess they were from east Africa but I really couldn't say. What it reminded me of is how often I've seen young men and women sitting around in groups like that, but bored and tired. At the docks in Sicily, salt sweat stains on the clothes, scorched by the sun and motor boat oil. Shivering besides a canal in northern France. Almost always one or two zoning out of the conversation with a thousand-yard stare. Here there's none of that, they just look chilled out. It's unremarkable, really. But as a sliver of the people I saw at those waypoints over the years have managed to make it to relative safety here, the more we have been ground down by the propaganda set against them. We are letting ourselves be forced into bargaining: yes the system is a mess, but it's bad policy; they're not the enemy, the real enemy is XYZ. Maybe so. But also: it's not a problem that people get to sit on the grass on a sunny afternoon and not get tear gassed or tortured. That they get to wander aimlessly round the same city centre I did when I was their age. It's a good thing. It's a good thing that they didn't do what they were told and wait politely to wither or die. It is good if they broke a rule or two to get here. It is good that activist lawyers and the NGO industrial complex and anyone else gave them help. And it is good if we say so, and defend our right to do it.
Sorry for spamming you about the book but it'll all be over soon... today is publication day 📚📚📚 via @picadorbooks ✏️✏️✏️
This is a worrying time politically and I wrote IF WE TOLERATE THIS to help people (including me) get their heads around the problem. But if there's one thing I want to get across, it's that the slide into far-right nationalism is not inevitable.
I would love it if you could help me spread the word. You can buy the book, of course - it's available in hardback, audiobook (read by Olivier award winner Rory Kinnear 👻) and ebook.
But also do please tell people, including people not on socials, about it. If you know a library that would like to stock a copy, or someone who wants to review it, or a bookshop that might host a conversation, let me know!
Dreamy eve lying on the floor with a bunch of (mostly) strangers, listening to Terry Riley and Steve Reich, courtesy of @thesquatney and friends. The world sucks but the music is right.
Old fashioned, I know, but I thought I'd start posting on here about books I've read.
First up is Here Where We Live is Our Country, by @mollycrabapple (and apols for the pic of the dodgy proof copy).
It's a history of the Jewish Labour Bund, the socialist, anti-zionist workers' movement that was born in the dying decades of the Russian Empire and which helped organise resistance to the Nazi genocide.
This is a fantastic piece of work - Molly spent years researching it, her interest sparked by her great-grandad's connection to the Bund, even learning Yiddish as part of the effort. The story is romanticised in the right places (the vivid portraits of men and women at the centre of the action) and generally unsentimental where it matters, ie the politics.
The Bund's response to persecution and oppression was to argue that true safety for Jewish communities lay in a defence of their existence wherever they lived - and that this defence was the first step towards solidarity between peoples, rather than a retreat from it.
The Bund lost. Having helped build a movement - the Bund was once the largest socialist party in the Russian Empire - they were squeezed out by the Bolsheviks, who were hostile to autonomous expressions of identity. As Europe disintegrated into ethnic and territorial nationalism in the 1920s and 30s, the Bund's call for solidarity was drowned out by an antisemitism that neither began nor ended with the Nazis. They opposed zionism on the grounds that Jewish safety could not come at the expense of another people - and that a national project founded on dispossession would lead to an undemocratic, murderous garrison state. But by 1945, their alternative was gone: the world the Bund sought to defend, along with most of its people, had literally been erased.
Yet as Molly puts it, the fact they lost does not mean their ideas failed. The Bund's wager was that identity and culture do not need to be a zero-sum game - and that multi-ethnic democracy is the only way we are all getting out of this alive. On this they were, and still are, right.
A few days in Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot on Poland's Baltic coast, not exactly to escape the world (you can virtually see part of Russia from here) but to at least pretend. Lots of pretty artifice that quickly gets murky if you look harder.
Gdansk's Hanseatic old town was rebuilt from rubble after 1945, removing 19th-century German details but preserving the 'authentic' renaissance ones. The main streets are ornate but as soon as you step away from them things become more austere and functional. Inside some of the buildings you can see the exposed concrete frames on which the façades are placed.
Gdynia, built by newly independent Poland in the 1920s, is all pre- and post-war modern (plus a bit of postmodern shipping-themed business park). Its train station was built in the 1950s, to bombastic Stalinist order - except, apparently, for the murals in the dining hall, where the artists seem to have been allowed to run with occult "symbols of travel", as I saw them described. The fact it's now a McDonald's only adds to the portal-to-another-world vibe, in my opinion.
Sopot is a beach resort that my granny used to visit on holiday from Berlin in the 1930s for the while that such things were possible for her. It's cute but here's a pic instead of me contemplating a "kawa literacka" (a big brandy with a small coffee). Thanks @owenthomashatherley for the Gdynia mini-itinerary.
In 2009, I was a journalist who thought Capitalist Realism deserved coverage. I worked at a magazine whose editor at the time had a deep suspicion of left-wing thought, but I met up with Mark and we tried to plot a few ways we could get his ideas into the pages. (I also corrected a few typos in the proof before it went to press, which is the sum total of my contribution to the critcal theory canon.) One success was a piece Mark wrote about the joint 30th birthday of hip hop and neoliberalism, a few months before CR was published. Mark's idea for a "cancel the 2012 Olympics!" special issue, not so much. I love seeing his ideas get the afterlife they deserve, but I like it even more when the media makes space for people who think unconventionally while they're still with us.
Had a go at making a full arrangement... this is Arvo Pärt's Da pacem Domine, reimagined for the Sega Mega Drive sound chip. (And a picture of a moth outside the flat last summer.)
