At the end of October, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, began an eighteen-month jail sentence, following contempt proceedings for breach of an injunction. This is the fifth time Robinson has been sentenced to prison since he began to play a leading role in the far right including – the moment that brought him to worldwide attention – his imprisonment for ten months in 2018 for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial in Leeds.
Following last week’s floods in the city and province of Valencia in eastern Spain, a spectacular blame game began between the authorities in Madrid and the regional government of Valencia. It had to be someone else’s fault that the southern suburbs of Valencia flooded so badly.
The parliamentary resolution, entitled ‘Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany’, was jointly conceived by the three governing parties and the opposition Christian Democrats. Hours after Olaf Scholz sacked his FDP finance minister, bringing an end to the governing coalition and heralding new elections, the Bundestag passed the resolution this morning by a large majority. The AfD also voted in favour. Its deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch (a scion of the royal House of Oldenburg whose maternal grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister), paid thanks to the parties behind the resolution, in particular the Greens, for following the AfD’s lead in linking antisemitism to immigration, the left and Islam. ‘Reality has caught up with them,’ she said. ‘The proposed solution in their motion also goes in our direction … Put Muslim antisemites on the plane and back home.’
Nabatiyeh, south Lebanon, after a night of Israeli airstrikes. Sunday, 13 October 2024. Photo © Alamy / AP / Mohammed Zaatari
The death toll in Lebanon has now risen past three thousand with more than thirteen thousand wounded. Schools have been turned into shelters, making it difficult to resume the school year even in areas considered relatively safe. Yet even the schools cannot hold enough people; tents and makeshift homes have been built on the corniche and in the public square in central Beirut. You would not recognise the city, my friends there tell me.
Our first stop in east Las Vegas was drenched in ersatz gore: fake zombie limbs, scattered femurs, a plastic skull. ‘GET OUT’, screamed drippy red letters painted on a bedsheet. A second bloody bedsheet said ‘HELP’. Mixed messages. I imagine the residents kept up their leftover Halloween decorations to dissuade the likes of us: coastal canvassers begging them to vote for Kamala Harris.
On Monday, 28 October, six small book collectives, including the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), published an open letter signed by a thousand writers (I am one of them) pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’ and have ‘never publicly recognised the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law’. This is the boycott that Palestinian civil society began calling for twenty years ago.
Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern. People today also often take their cues from business leaders, in particular a pop culture figure like Musk. All the self-serving talk of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable, as can the studied neutrality of oligarchs who not only own their own rockets, but their own newspapers: refusing to endorse Harris sends a signal that it’s rational to be intimidated by Trump.