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The Chinese artist is interviewed in the Telegraph and says some interesting things.
'He picks out China’s zero-Covid policy as an example of an authoritarian state exerting its dominance. “It has become a kind of psychological warfare to prove what China is capable of,” he says. “They are doing it through the strongest system ever seen in history. China has 1.4 billion people, and among them are 90 million Communist Party members who have to do whatever the Party wants them to do and keep the Party’s secrets. This is how every day they silence people.” In Xi’an, the central city that has been in lockdown since December 23, “where you find maybe a few thousand cases in something like 70 million people, they make sure to control them all in isolation, in a very dramatic, ice cold, cruel way.
'He has strong views, too, on the likely origin of the virus: “I made a film in 2003 about Sars, my first documentary film, which is where my understanding of these Chinese institutions comes from, and how it works. And it’s obvious the disease is not from an animal. It’s not a natural disease, it’s something that’s leaked out, after years of research.”
'There are those who think that premier Xi Jinping is pushing China back towards the all-controlling personality cult of the Mao Zedong era. Is Ai one of them? In some ways, he says, the two leaders “are similar because they have the same kind of ideology. They strongly believe China can take over.” He pauses. “They might be right.”'
It's much too long. Sometimes I noticed it was inaccurate (Viktor Orban is described as an antisemite - he should sue - Ken Livingstone too). It is not well written, it's bitchy in a boring way (bitching is an art), it's not objective but it is informative. I was forced to skim and skip.
My feeling reading his story to 2015 was that this man was outrageously incapable of being Prime Minister.
Then beginning with 2015 I started to like him much more. As Tom Bower intends.
Boris's decision to back Brexit is seen as a fairly principled one.
I imagine it was, though mostly informed by his desire to win party members' support in order one day to succeed David Cameron.
David Cameron seems to imagine only opportunism could be Boris’s reason and this is how many Remainers think. National independence is what swivel-eyed loons, nutcases and racists care about.
When Theresa May (Bower accurately calls her 'an overpromoted junior officer') makes him Foreign Secretary 'in order to destroy him' Boris becomes the hero and the villains are the appalling Mrs May, the Woke Sir Simon Macdonald the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office (interested more in gender equality than extending British influence) and the Europhiles in the Foreign Office.
They, including Mrs May, were consciously and constantly trying to sabotage their own Secretary of State.
So was his Minister of State, Alan Duncan, who leaked information to the Labour frontbencher to enable him to ask Boris hard questions.
On the other hand, to Boris's great discredit, he wanted to intervene in Syria.
This is one reason why I think he is Hillary in drag.
The New Church of St George at the end of my street on a cold, bright day. We are having a very mild winter, by the way - it makes me wonder if climate change is really a thing.
"The West believes in nation states, composed not so much of ethnicities, though these are often the genesis for those states, but citizens united by constitutions and principles. Russia is appealing to something older, cynically invoked perhaps, but spiritual and genetic - a unity that rolls over borders and crushes reason. The parallel is with Taiwan, a country that is ethnically consanguineous with China, yet which has a right to exist because it wants to exist and which defines itself by ideals that the West sees as inalienable rights: to vote, to speak your mind, to change those in power. Beijing, a Taiwanese diplomat once patiently explained to me, isn’t communist anymore. It has reverted to an earlier ethnic imperialism. This can be hard for Westerners to process because we’ve been raised to think of life as a contest of ideas, between left and right, prim socialists and cavalier conservatives, but much of the rest of the world operates according to the logic of blood."
Paul Gottfried observed that for the neo-cons it is always 1938. The Churchillian mythology of the origins of the Second World War is a powerful as ever or more so judging by people objecting to Robert Harris, in his film screenplay about the Munich crisis trying to rehabilitate Chamberlain.
It seems the neo-cons or people who think like them are running things again in the US and UK. I don't think they went away but under Donald Trump's administration they were suppressed. They are the foreign policy arm of the Swamp.
The British defence secretary who regrets not taking in many more Afghan refugees has sent materiel to Ukraine.
He thinks Russians invading Ukraine are a threat to Great Britain. Meanwhile several Afghan refugees who hope to go to the USA are held in Kosovo suspected of being terrorists.
Pat Buchanan is right. NATO should declare that it will not admit any new members.
When Fukuyama declared the end of history I thought him absurd. I was a foreign policy realist without knowing it.
Much later I came to understand the foreign policy liberals - why should free democratic countries make war one another?
But Austria, France and Germany had universal manhood suffrage in 1914. (England, Hungary, Turkey and Russia did not.) More recently we have seen democratic countries start a number of wars to export their democratic liberal values.
What liberal or former liberal would want to find themselves in an ideological movement in which opposition to the right to abortion, opposition to no-fault divorce, and a nostalgia for the era before the invention of the pill are commonplace? This isn’t to say that the conservative movement in America should not make these arguments. They can make them as much as they want. But they can hardly be surprised if others outside of their flock refuse to join them as a consequence.
'At the heart of this lies a centuries-old tension in America between the worlds of politics and religion. It was always said that the genius of keeping religion in the background during the founding of America was that it allowed it to flourish in the foreground later on. By contrast, the centrality of the established church in England almost guarantees the obscurity of religion’s place in public life.
From Douglas Murray's latest article, about American politics, yesterday in Unherd.
I read that with great interest. It explained why I didn't think Margaret Thatcher ever did anything conservative. I had in mind the sort of conservatism he thinks former leftists find repellant, now called social conservatism.
In fact I was wrong - her economics were an important part of conservatism, and restricting the power of the trade unions and governing without prices and incomes policies was a huge achievement which seemed quixotic in 1979.
Almost all criminals are right-wing conservatives. The exception are serial killers who are quite often left of centre and take the Guardian.
Countries like people can go mad. America is having a nervous breakdown and infecting the rest of the Western world. Russia and China are immune - were they to ally they would be a formidable foe to Biden and the Swamp.
Sir Keir turned into a self-adoring giggle-pot and spent the entire session smirking, laughing, rolling his eyes, tossing his head, and throwing up his hands in contemptuous disbelief. All done to humour his baying supporters. He’s over-excitable. No gravitas. Today he simply needed to do his ‘disappointed waxwork’ routine and let public anger fill in the gaps. Instead, he tittered and simpered like a teenage boy who’s just been kissed.
“I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take.
“Yesterday he did the opposite of that.
“So, I will remind him of a quotation which may be familiar to his ear: Leopold Amery to Neville Chamberlain.
“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.”
“I must say to him, I don’t know what he is talking about.Everyone in Parliament except perhaps the most uncultured and ignorant Labour MPs knows that famous quotation. Boris, who wrote a book about Churchill, certainly does.
“What I can tell him, I don’t know what quotation he is alluding to."
How surprised can we really be about Boris Johnson’s No 10 shenanigans? He has always been a rule-flouting, outrage-inducing politician – that’s why he managed to deliver Brexit, save the Conservative Party and win the biggest majority they’ve seen in a generation. Covid-19 restrictions are now being dropped because his vaccine programme (again) triumphed. He has arguably achieved more in 30 months than John Major did in seven years – and he gets kicked out because his staff held a few parties?
But then again, think of all that hypocrisy. No one forced him to send the police after those who broke lockdown rules, but he did so anyway.
Damian Thompson, former editor of the Catholic Herald in London, wonders if China pays the Vatican and this is why the Pope cooperates with the Communist regime to the detriment of the previously underground Church in China.
How Beijing uses its billions to buy political influence around the world
I asked myself if China gives money to the Vatican and buys favours.
