December 2024

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as I did a few weeks ago. A former journalist turned fixer told me there were ‘no foreign tourists and journalists, no income for us and, with no development aid from France, most social development projects have come to a standstill’.

The world has been Surrealist for a hundred years, though the adjective that people turn to in trying to describe their ever more pervasive feeling of shocked disbelief in the face of history and its discontents is ‘surreal’. André Breton hated most of the things that anyone outside his movement did with its terminology, and spent much of his time booting followers and collaborators out in order to be able to disdain them too. He also loathed any suggestion that Surrealism was just one more artistic movement thrown up by the innovators and shakers of modern culture.

The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation last month, five days after the publication of an independent review into the Church of England’s handling of half a century of testimony concerning the sexual sadism and spiritual abuse by a lay Church officer, John Smyth QC. The Makin Report, commissioned in 2019, describes a culture of ‘abuse hidden in plain sight’ and ‘active cover-up’ by the Church. It found that Justin Welby had ‘acted within the policies in place within the Church of England at the time’ but had not fulfilled his ‘moral responsibility’ to pursue the truth of the allegations. Welby continues to maintain that he had no ‘idea or suspicion’ of the abuse before August 2013 though the report says that Smyth’s crimes were an ‘open secret’ in ecclesiastical networks.

While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in a world of phantom reflections. Normal organisms are kept in check by an ecological balance between their death and growth rate. But without any predators, mirror bacteria that escaped a laboratory might grow exponentially, even with a lower growth rate than normal bacteria.

As the microblogging site proposing to supplant Twitter, Bluesky at first ignited pundit suspicion, with columnists denouncing echo chambers – as if the first thing you’d do to improve your online input wouldn’t simply be blocking them. Indeed, what the wild west internet of yore mostly offered was escape portals from the opinion-making complex, towards unplanned surprise.

Security footage showed the suspect stopping at a Starbucks before the shooting. He’d worn surgical gloves to handle his coffee cup. While the police were searching for him, something else – a ‘ceaseless feast of schadenfreude’ – was spreading online: ‘Prior authorisation is required for thoughts and prayers’; ‘Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage.’ 

Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid collapse is that his international backers – Russia, Iran, Hizbullah – were all at the same moment distracted or weakened. But that doesn’t explain why the regime had been unable to strengthen itself in the preceding lull. Since 2020, the intensity of the civil war had declined. The half-hearted attempt by the US and its allies to fell Assad was in the past. The armed opposition was for the most part contained in Idlib, and the Syrian Kurdish forces remained in the north-east. Under those conditions the regime might have consolidated its hold over the areas still under its control. It is now evident that it did not. Perhaps US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, played some part. But clearly the Assad system of minority rule by brutal repression was also exhausted.

‘How has this year been for you?’ a musician friend from the West Bank asked me when we met for the first time in several years. ‘For us, we have been through a lot before, but we were never scared,’ he said. ‘Now, we do not know. I could have a chance encounter with an Israeli soldier who does not like the look of my face, or my instrument, and just shoots me. It is like the country is in its death throes.’ I didn’t know how to respond. Attempts to reassure or reframe are an insult to the intelligence.  

Romania’s Constitutional Court has annulled the first round of the presidential election on 24 November, won by the far-right nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu, with 23 per cent of the vote. The court decision follows the declassification of secret documents showing unprecedented Russian interference involving large-scale TikTok manipulation, vote buying, cyber-attacks and illegal financing, all in favour of Georgescu.

Kendrick Lamar, who calls himself a ‘certified boogeyman’, is a contemporary Dracula guy, wending his way onto the dance floor; he’s someone who ‘wiggled through that sentence’, as he puts it in one of his new songs, then into your subconscious. Lamar’s latest album, GNX, released unexpectedly on Friday, 22 November, is both a music box and a jack-in-the-box in the tradition of ‘Bad Times’: a forum for groovy, spooky, electro-influenced West Coast sensibilities and a meditation on ego death, false humility and braggadocio.

Just like after the US presidential election in 2016, we are hearing endless exhortations from pundits (and some Democratic politicians) to make an effort to understand Trump supporters, to earn their respect, to be curious about them, not to be condescending etc. There are two obvious problems with this kind of rhetoric: first, nobody asked Trump voters after 2020 to show empathy with, let’s say, African American women and try to comprehend why they had strongly supported Biden. As so often, the lazy talk of ‘polarisation’ obscures a profoundly asymmetrical situation. Second, the ‘arrogance’ of liberal elites is largely an invention of right-wing media.

Seventeen years ago, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first person to hold the post of prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, decided to push international criminal law to a new boundary. He would make a head of state into a fugitive from justice. His target was the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for crimes in Darfur. The current ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, has thrown down another gauntlet.