Next Sunday, 9 March, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will be collaborating on an evening of music and readings inspired by Edward Said’s last, posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.
Juan Camilo Hernández was born in Caldono, in south-west Colombia, in 1977. When he was sixteen he took part in a day of collective work (minga) with the Nasa Indigenous people. A commission from the FARC, led by nineteen-year-old Betty Lorena Castro, showed up to help. An elder Nasa woman told Castro that they wanted no guerrillas in the minga, since the Indigenous struggle was independent of la lucha armada.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and soon to be chancellor of Germany, announced he was going ‘all in’ last month when he presented the Bundestag with his plan to turn asylum seekers away at the border. This meant openly courting support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose votes proved decisive. It was already clear that migration – not Ukraine, the climate or the recessionary economy – would be the dominant theme of the federal election on 23 February. But after a deadly knife attack by a rejected Afghan asylum seeker in Aschaffenburg on 22 January, Merz upped the ante. It was a characteristically impulsive and provocative move, without a clear purpose other than to prove his mettle by violating the taboo on co-operating with the far right.
As the two coffins were driven through the crowd, a deep, sorrowful voice came from the loudspeakers. The sound of a violin rose as the voice of the man receded. I texted people in Beirut to confirm that the music was playing at the funeral, not being added by the television broadcasters.
On 8 January I received an email from my boss at the health department where I work on social epidemiology. It was a message relayed from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ‘Data is the oxygen of public health,’ it said, ‘essential for improving health and saving lives.’ On 31 January, most, if not all, public health data were purged from the CDC’s website. Within hours of the erasure, health departments were stalled. If data were the oxygen of public health, then all the oxygen had just been sucked out of the room.
There is a troubling disconnect between the deterrent rationale and the mechanism that will be used to deny citizenship: the home secretary’s discretionary power to refuse someone on grounds of ‘bad character’. Perhaps the idea is that an asylum seeker has shown evidence of bad character by breaking the UK’s immigration laws, whatever the Refugee Convention may say. But this looks both implausible in itself and perversely at odds with other parts of the government’s rhetoric.
In a wiser and more competent – to say nothing of a better – world, the initial approach to Putin would have been followed by a consultation between the US, Ukraine and other European countries on their counter-proposals, and the pressure they could put on Putin if he refused to budge. Perhaps this will still happen. For the time being, Ukraine and the rest of Europe will be consulted in the way the residents of a village are consulted before it gets demolished to make way for a new airport.