The first time I saw Alexander Shishkin, the greatest Adolf Hitler lookalike in the history of the planet, I was in awe. This tall, cadaverous man didn’t just look like Hitler, he looked like a Hitler that had died and been dug up again. It was eerie: the sunken cheekbones, the severe parting and of course the black moustache were almost enough to persuade you that Hitler was indeed back from the dead.

Last week I found out. He had returned to his home city of Tashkent in Uzbekistan, where he spent the last eleven years of his life living on a pension of $17 a month. Then he died. The obituaries had few details, just his real name (the first time I had heard it) and a few facts: he was the son of a Red Army pilot; he used to appear on stage with the Russian heavy metal group Korroziya Metalla; he was once photographed with Boris Yeltsin.

I wanted to know more. So I did some research using Russian language sources and was able to flesh out the skeleton of his strange life.

Shishkin’s father was indeed a Red Army pilot. But he was shot down in 1941 and spent the war in a POW camp. Once it was over he was condemned to 25 years in the Gulag as an “enemy of the people” and his son was prevented from entering educational institutions. Eventually he trained in aeronautics, and then again in theater criticism, graduating in 1979. But Shishkin never worked in his specialty: instead he joined Uzbekfilm as a “simple worker,” scraping by on five rubles a day (extras made six).

And so Shishkin eked out this dismal living, and he was only occasionally bothered by people telling him that if he grew a moustache he would look just like Hitler. He married; had a daughter; got divorced. Then he played Hitler in a movie in which the Fuhrer had survived the war and was running a restaurant in Kazakhstan, playing the accordion for customers while Eva Braun danced. In 1990 he flew to Leningrad to participate in a lookalikes contest. There were many VI Lenins and Saddam Husseins. Shishkin was the undisputed champion among the Hitlers.

And so a star was born, of sorts. Shishkin returned to Tashkent to play Hitler in local films, before embarking on a tour of the USSR with other doubles and the cheesy pop singer Igor Talkov. Everybody wanted his picture taken with Hitler. In 1993 he appeared in a movie, “Cage” which was aired on Channel One, making him even more famous, but he remained hungry and impoverished. In 1995 he met Spider, leader of Korroziya Metalla. Spider wrote a song for him – Nicht Kaput, Nicht Kapitulieren -- and Shishkin was a regular fixture at the band’s concerts until 1998, snarling in German at the audience, which responded with boos and Nazi salutes. But Spider was “pathologically stingy” and Shishkin still had to scrape by on the money he made posing for photographs on Red Square.

By the year 2000, the weight of history was starting to crush him. Lenin, also from Tashkent, was locked up in an insane asylum for a while. But on his release he went to the Arbat, where on Victory Day he and Nikolai II made $1,000 each from posing for photographs. Hitler on the other hand was attacked by cops, chased and beaten, or simply abused: “You started the war! You, Hitler, get out of here!”

Exhausted, alienated, lonely and depressed, Shishkin left the cold, gray megalopolis for the sunny skies of Tashkent in 2001. There he was promptly ripped off, selling his ground floor apartment for $3,000 when, he subsequently learned, it was worth around $60,000. He was incredibly poor, but his Uzbek neighbors took care of him, sharing a bowl of plov and whatever else they had with this strange Russian “uncle”. He rode the trams of Tashkent in full Hitler gear, attracting attention and smiles. “The Uzbeks don’t know Hitler,” claimed Shishkin. Those who did invited him to their weddings.

On New Year’s Eve Shishkin broke an arm and a leg. No source I have found explains how this happened. His suffering lasted three months before he died from “complications.” It was a bad death after a difficult, yet interesting life. His neighbors and friends spoke well of the Hitler from Tashkent. He was a “quiet, honest person,” said the Uzbek writer Rifat Gumerov, “with a purely soviet upbringing”. He had been planning a return to Moscow, Gumerov added. But having “flourished” in the nihilistic 90s, and then disappeared in the cynical 2000s, I doubt there would have been a place for him in the new world that is being born, whatever form it finally assumes.

RIP.

Originally published at RIA N, home of awesome

Recently I started a daily ritual of watching Euronews after dinner. I’m not sure why I find the channel so absorbing, as when I actually lived in Europe I found it incredibly dull. And not dull in a smug, irritating BBC way but just… soul-crushingly boring, as is characteristic of anything that begins with the chilling prefix “Euro-”. Perhaps it’s only now, after years spent in a land where the news is delivered exclusively by pompous, Botoxed egomaniacs that I can appreciate the channel’s relatively understated style. Or then again, maybe I’m just digging the stuff I can see in the backgrounds.

Consider for instance Euronews’ reporting on Greece. It seems obvious that the country’s economy is doomed and that the latest raft of bailouts amount to just more money tossed on a bonfire. I mean, haven’t they tried that already? And how many times? Well, whatever. As a result, each report on Greece blurs into the last one, like some weird kabuki play in which the cast lifelessly perform their allotted roles over and over again. They show us some ugly people in suits sitting in a room in Greece looking sad; then some irritated Germans in suits laying down a new set of conditions for the miserable Greeks; then some depressed looking Greeks standing in the street talking about their feelings of powerlessness. Occasionally a fight breaks out. It feels like it’s been going on for forever.

Since it’s essentially the same set of ritual gestures repeated ad nauseam, I recently stopped listening to the dialogue and started studying the scenery in the backgrounds. Now that was interesting. I mean, have you noticed how rubbish Athens looks? It’s just a bunch of shabby, concrete buildings, crumbling roads and duff cars- and that’s the birthplace of Western Civilization! Incredible! Even the ruins of the Acropolis look decrepit and sad, completely lacking in the dilapidated grandeur you find in Rome.

Inspired by my Greek revelation, I was soon ignoring the content of the actual reporting whatever the country, and paying much more attention to the environments in the background. As a result I’ve made some interesting discoveries, foremost among which is how sad and tired the world looks, like Athens, only worse.

Last night for instance I saw a report on the latest futile attempt to stop the violence in Syria. Unhappy people were lining up for aid in a landscape of dust and shabby concrete. Of course, Syria, like Athens, should have its fair share of amazing structures and ruins. But wherever they are they clearly don’t impinge much on people’s lives. According to Euronews, the Syrians endure a fear-filled existence filled with rubbish and mediocrity. Senegal is even worse: this week Euronews reported from the country several times, where many people are angry over the geriatric president’s declared intent to run for a third term in office, in defiance of the country’s constitution. The angry Senegalese were rioting in a variant of the concrete-and-dust landscape I saw in Syria, only even more run down, amid a preponderance of hand-painted signs. At least the weather was nice.

I have also learned something very surprising about Iran: there are no mosques in the revolutionary Shiite theocracy. No, seriously, when I watch images from Tehran, all I see are cheap cars on dusty roads and dismal low-rise concrete apartment buildings, plus the occasional fuel rod being inserted into a nuclear reactor. The only major structure in the country appears to be that weird arch thingy they show as an establishing shot in every report, which I assume is a monument to some martyrs or other. Or possibly the occulted 12th Imam, who knows?

Of course not all the world is full of poor people living amid dust and concrete. Rio de Janeiro is a big alley inhabited by exuberant samba dancers wearing bejeweled bikinis and bright feathers. Brussels is a clinical Science Fiction dystopia of glass and steel populated entirely by pallid zombies. Reports from France can’t quite conceal the elegance of the buildings in the background, while all of the former USSR consists of a series of holes in the ice in which naked people are swimming.
Pakistan meanwhile doesn’t appear to have any buildings at all, but is instead an enormous crowd of angry people who are always shouting about something. Last week it was Saint Valentine’s Day: a group of women shrouded in black were burning a love heart and shrieking about the evils of this pernicious infidel holiday while some thuggish chaps with beards looked on approvingly. A week later a much bigger group of women had gathered and they were even angrier, protesting about their lack of rights. My sympathies were with the latter assembly, but I empathized with both groups of women. They were alike the victims of the chaps with beards, even if the aforementioned gentlemen only appeared to be lurking in the background, at the edges of vision.

Originally published by RIA Novosti, the home of awesome

Following the recent street protests in Russia, international attention has been focused on the country’s political scene. A young person tuning in to the news coverage might be confused by all the long names ending with –ov and –sky, and the series of heads that resemble slabs of meat, lumpy potatoes or some other comestible. Too much of the commentary is targeted at initiates; beginners need a jumping on point. After all, today’s 20 year olds were barely crawling the last time Vladimir Zhirinovsky scored serious headlines in the West. So strap on your shapka and let’s go!

Part I:   THE ESTABLISHMENT

VLADIMIR PUTIN: In 1999, when V.V. Putin was appointed prime minister by the celebrated disco dancer Borya Yeltsin, many articles appeared in the press noting that all he had to show for a long stint as a KGB agent in the 70s and 80s was a bronze medal from the Stasi- the implication being that he was a lightweight, a gray mediocrity, etc. Nobody remembers that stuff now. He is a master of political chess, and- whether you like him or not- compares favorably with most (perhaps all) Russian leaders of the past 100 years.

DMITRI MEDVEDEV: An elusive, mystical figure who has shown world-historic levels of personal restraint since winning the presidency in 2008. Indeed, he is very possibly the first man in history to rise to supreme office and then volunteer to return power to his predecessor. Historians shall ponder his enigma for centuries to come.

That’s all you need to know about the establishment. Now let’s get down to the parties of disgruntlement.

Part II: THE UPRISING

THE PROTESTORS: Russia has experienced anti-Putin protests for years, but until 2011 the crowds consisted of marginal types such as communist pensioners, rabid nationalists and international chess grandmasters. This changed in the aftermath of last year’s Duma elections which were widely viewed as rigged. There is nothing new in that criticism, but- perhaps inspired by events in the Middle East- individuals who look surprisingly middle class have started to object. Alas for them, the opposition is completely useless.

Part III: THE OPPOSITION

GENNADY ZYUGANOV: In all the breathless Western media coverage of Russia’s street protests what most journalists have neglected to mention is that the largest and best-organized opposition force in Russia is… THE COMMUNIST PARTY. That’s right, the party of Stalin and Brezhnev, which has a long tradition of tyranny and disastrous economic policies! Gennady Zyuganov has run the show since 1993, when everybody with talent and ambition abandoned the party to make $$$$. His is the saggy-jowled face of stagnation, the root vegetable-shaped head of hopelessness.

VLADIMIR ZHIRINOVSKY: A professional clown from Kazakhstan famous for his long-running performance as a radical nationalist. Not to be confused with an actual idiot, Zhirinovsky studied Turkish at Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Countries, then law (also at MSU) and finally landed himself a PhD in philosophy (also at MSU, although he attained that last qualification in the 90s when standards had slipped). Impressively, he has never once broken character in twenty years of playing “Zhirik”, the burly, brawling politician-buffoon. Slyly subverts the very concept of “opposition” by endorsing everything Putin stands for whenever called upon to vote in the Duma.

MIKHAIL PROKHOROV: Russia’s third-richest man- worth $18 billion according to Forbes- and yet he has never shared any of his coin with me, the swine. Owner of SNOB, the magazine of Russian bourgeois self-satisfaction, and the New Jersey Nets basketball team. When he declared his candidacy I assumed he was a Kremlin double agent, however the numerous sympathetic articles about disgraced 90s billionaires that have appeared in SNOB lead me to suspect he is sincere in his opposition to Putin. Apparently not joking when he floated the idea of making the loathed ex- billionaire and current convict Mikhail Khodorkovsky his prime minister, this goes some way to explaining the 3% support he currently enjoys in the polls.

SERGEI MIRONOV: Some dude with a beard who, last time he ran for president, said he would vote for Putin rather than himself. Now supposedly an actual gen-u-wine enemy of the establishment, he poses absolutely no threat whatsoever.

BONUS MENTION:

GRIGORY YAVLINSKY: When he was disqualified from running for president following the discovery of thousands of forged signatures on his application, this was reported around the world as something significant, possibly an act of skullduggery on the part of the establishment. In fact, Yavlinsky is a has-been with miniscule support among Russians, even if he means well. Fun fact: in 1990, while still a member of the Communist Party, he co-authored a surrealist manifesto masquerading as a serious proposal to transform the USSR into a market economy in 500 days!

CONCLUSION:

Of course, many blame Putin for preventing a viable opposition from emerging on Russia’s political scene over the last twelve years. If that is true, he has been highly successful- I mean, presented with that selection of candidates, who would you vote for? Be honest, now.

Originally published at RIA- Novosti, the home of awesome

Recently I was browsing in a used book store when I stumbled upon a soldier’s Japanese phrasebook from World War II. Between faded orange covers I found a treasure trove of fascinating words and phrases- certainly it’s the most useful text published by the U.S. War Department I’ve encountered since that pamphlet on sexual hygiene for GIs I found in a Texas ghost town a few years back. It does lack for detailed diagrams of human genitalia, however.

Like most phrasebooks it contains all the standard terminology related to greetings, asking for directions and finding lodgings, but the structure and at least half of the language is strictly determined by the context of war. Thus it begins not with “Hello” and “My name is…” but rather a set of “Emergency Expressions” the very first of which is:

Help! ta-SKET-ay!

Now that is definitely useful, so long as you are talking to friendly Koreans or “Formosans” and not a platoon of Japanese soldiers. Other handy emergency expressions include:

Where are American soldiers? Ah- may-ree-ka no hay-ee-TA-ee wa DOAK-o-nee ee-MA-ska?

Are they our enemies? KA-ray-ra wa tek-ee DESS-ka?

And:

Don’t shoot! OO-tsoo-na!

Only once this type of thing is out of the way does the War Department get down to teaching the basics of polite conversation such as:

Good morning o-ha- YO

And

Will you have a cigarette? Ta-ba-ko o DOAZ-o?

Frequently the phrasebook offers both polite and imperative forms for the same expression. According to the foreword you should be respectful when addressing prisoners in the officer class, but bark at their underlings- that’s the Japanese way, apparently. Thus, when interrogating gentlemen of breeding you say this:

Please tell the truth hoant-o no ko-TOE o eet-TAY KOO-DA-sa-EE

But when it comes to enlisted men, you say this:

Tell the truth! Hoant-o no ko-TOE o ee-YAY!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no polite form is supplied for the following:

Obey or I’ll fire! Kee-ka NA-eet-o OO-tsoo-zo!

Of course, there are long lists of vocabulary dedicated to rank, terrain and military hardware. A lot of the combat stuff would not be very useful today however…unless you are attacked by a rogue member of the apocalyptic Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo:

I was gassed doak-oo-GA-soo nee ya-RA-ret-ah

I was surprised to find that Section 3 was filled with detailed terminology related to fine dining:

I want it- – koo-da-SA-ee
Cooked or boiled nee-TAY
Raw NA-ma-day
Rare na-MA ya-kee-nee SHTAY
Well done YO-koo YA-ee-tay
Baked or fried YA-ee-tay
Fried in deep fat ah-GET-ay
Roasted RO-sto shtay

War is hell but evidently that doesn’t stop you from squeezing in a good meal whenever you can.

Next come “health” words, which for seriously wounded soldiers would surely have meant the difference between life and death, e.g.:

I am hurt in the crotch/privates ma-TA ga ee-TA-ee
Stop the bleeding shook-KETS o-toe-MAY-yo
Quick! HA-ya-koo!

In conclusion, I’d say that the U.S. War Department did an excellent job of putting together this little phrasebook. The only thing that’s missing is a section dedicated to prostitution, which would have been very useful for some of the GIs, I’m sure. Oh yes, and also: “Where did all these severed heads come from?” an essential phrase for any English speaker en route to Nanking while it was under Japanese occupation in 1937. But then again, America wasn’t in the war yet. Heck, there wasn’t even a war on!

As evocative of a soldier’s reality as any memoir or novel, the War Department’s Japanese phrasebook made me thankful I was born in a different time, and did not have to face death in a hostile jungle. Which reminds me: my well-thumbed copy came to me with the previous owner’s name still penciled on the cover: Captain Pilch. Thus as I flick through its well-thumbed pages (the Captain clearly saw a lot of combat) I draw even closer to that moment in history and ask myself: Did the captain survive? Which phrases did he use the most? Could the Japanese understand him? There’s no way to know. But I am grateful to the Captain for his notations, such as REI for zero which the War Department omitted even though Eastern mathematicians were using it in their calculations long before the turn of the first millennium.

Who knows, perhaps this book even saved Captain Pilch’s life! And just on the off chance that he is still knocking around, aged 95 or so, I have a request to make. On the front cover the phrasebook is marked RESTRICTED. The first page elaborates that “… restricted material may be given to any person known to be in service of the United States and to persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion who are cooperating in government work…” But otherwise that’s it.

Now I’ll admit that since anybody could have constructed this phrasebook out of a big enough dictionary, I don’t quite understand why the War Department felt the need to keep its contents confidential. But I shall defer to their wisdom. So don’t tell anyone I told you all this stuff, OK? For Captain Pilch’s sake (and mine, I suppose).

Unless you happen to know for certain that the RESTRICTED classification has been lifted. In which case tell anyone you like.

Originally published at RIA- Novosti, the home of awesome

I first encountered Rammstein in an almost empty cinema on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, during an afternoon matinee of the largely unloved David Lynch movie Lost Highway. Balthazar Getty had just broken into a house, a porno starring his lover was unfolding on a giant screen, and something was about to go very wrong — a point underscored on the soundtrack by sinister chanting, tolling church bells and an impossibly low German voice muttering words I didn’t understand. It was ominous, bombastic, absurd, utterly hilarious- and yet also thrilling:

Was ist das? I thought. The credits revealed that it was an outfit called “Rammstein”, but that meant nothing. A few weeks later however I was back in Moscow where I lived at the time, shopping for sounds in the open-air pirate market Gorbushka and lo! I stumbled upon a weird cassette, featuring six oiled, naked from the waist-up Germans posing in front of a giant flower. This, apparently, was Rammstein, and track eight — “Heirate Mich” — was the song from the movie.

At the time I was more of a 70s art rock/Algerian Rai man than a fan of Teutonic heavy metal. But beneath the grinding riffs, the guttural vocals, the industrial synths I detected something unexpected: a gift for melody, a sense of rhythm, almost, at times, a groove. It was, in other words, sehr gut:

Mere weeks later Rammstein released their second album, Sehnsucht which featured more grinding riffs, a female vocal and a bit more synth. It also contains what is probably the band’s signature track, “Du Hast” which became briefly notorious in the US since the Columbine killers dug it big time. Note the martial beat, and the obvious pleasure lead singer Till Lindemann takes in enunciating the sounds of his native language. Like Kraftwerk before them, Rammstein embraced their Germanic identity, albeit very different aspects of it:

The clip above is from the concert film Live Aus Berlin, when their stage show was big but not yet the epic piece of infernal rock theatre it would become. It also dates from a period when Rammstein’s sense of the absurd was less on display. Two tours later, and some members of the band had abandoned the “scary cyborg” look for lederhosen and even (in guitarist Paul Landers’ case) a monk’s tonsure. However Lindemann’s unique body language has always remained constant  — a champion swimmer in his youth, he is a huge presence on stage, alternately doing the “Rammstein squat”, pounding his fist on his knee, or staggering around looking alienated from his own ageing carcass, a profound melancholy in eyes.

I was lucky to discover Rammstein in Russia, because they were massive over there. Each release was an event, rather than an esoteric fringe thing as in the UK or US. The Mayor of Moscow was outraged by their sturm und drang stage antics, thought they were fascists and banned one concert I had tickets for lest Moscow’s many skinheads were inspired to go on the rampage. A year or so later he relented, which was good because it meant that after I had cleared multiple police barriers I could enjoy a live performance of “Mein Teil”, a song inspired by the penis-munching German cannibal Armen Meiwes:

Both “Du Hast” and “Mein Teil” are present on the recently released overview of their 16 year career, Made in Germany: 1995-2011. Putting together an effective compilation is an art, and Rammstein kept the track list secret until the last moment, making fans such as myself nervous. How could you select a single disc worth of songs from five excellent studio records (the band have in fact released six, but Rosenrot was rubbish). Would the sequencing work? I feared a travesty like the cult British band Pulp’s Hits- an incredibly lazy serving of four songs each from their four Island albums, presented in chronological order. Dreadful.

Fortunately, the sequencing of Made in Germany is excellent. The thing about Rammstein is that they sprang fully-formed from the head of Wotan. Membership of the band has remained constant, and they have always worked with the same producer. Rather than mess about with different styles, they have rather refined and explored the sound they were born with. Thus although the first six tracks were recorded over a period of almost ten years, the riffage is consistently mighty, whether exceedingly brutal in the case of “Links 234” a military march proclaiming the band’s allegedly leftist leanings (they were tired of being called Nazis), or exceedingly brutal, as in the case of “Keine Lust” in which Lindemann laments his lack of desire to do ordinary things such as masturbate or chew food, whereas those things he would like to do- say, have sex with large animals, involve rather too much risk. This fine song was accompanied by a rather entertaining video (available on the luxury box set edition) in which the band perform in fat suits:

It’s not all brutality and perversion however. Rammstein may operate within strict sonic parameters, but this does not stop them from experimenting with their sound. Thus track 8, “Mein Herz Brennt”, begins with a rising swell of strings, as Lindemann sings the opening narration from an East German kid’s show “The Sandman” rendering it into something anguished and nightmarish:

Indeed, Rammstein’s lyrics are well-written, featuring neologisms and word-play, while also being steeped in such fine German traditions as romantic and decadent poetry, porn and, er, sadistic stuff in the newspapers. Lindemann published a volume of poetry in the early 2000s and when the German composer Torsten Rasch took Lindemann’s lyrics and melodies and rendered them as orchestral lieder nobody laughed — in fact, one reviewer at the UK’s conservative Spectator magazine selected it as his best classical recording of 2002:

Attentive listeners will have noticed that the last two videos are in fact the same song.

One of Rammstein’s great strengths vis a vis American heavy metal is that they are not inspired by rage, with its drastically diminishing returns (see the career of Metallica for an example). Rather they do melancholy, perversion, yearning, grief. Lindemann was already 34 and a divorced father of two when he became successful. Knowing the hardships of adulthood, and the deprivation of an East German upbringing, he is not inspired by adolescent themes. Rather, he is inspired by the thought of Snow White enslaving the seven dwarves and doing coke, before dying of an overdose in the bath:

My only substantial complaint about Made in Germany is the quantity of tracks (five) selected from their third album, Mutter. Sure it is a work of art, possibly their finest recording, and it was their major international breakthrough. But they could definitely have cut the title track in favour of, say, “Heirate Mich”, which I linked to above. Meanwhile their sixth album, Liebe ist fur alle da is represented by an odd song selection, which might dissuade a neophyte from investing in a copy when I’d rank it as one of their best. Tokenism then lumps us with a track from Rosenrot which could easily have been omitted in favour of something better. But that’s what the skip function on a CD/MP3 player is for- so you can hop over minor mistakes to enjoy tracks such as this:

Some of the missing classics appear on the CD’s second disc, albeit in remix form. I’m not sure whether this second compilation will make much sense to those unfamiliar with the originals, but it’s a lot of fun nevertheless. I suspect Faith No More thought they were taking the mickey when they reduced “Du Riechst So Gut” to romantic strings and voice. Little did they realize that Rammstein were in on the joke already, and would go much farther in their pursuit of radical or frankly bizarre reworkings of their songs. In many cases the heavy metal guitars disappear completely, and the focus is on electronics and voice, such as in the trancey remix of “Stripped” by Tiamat, a Swedish black metal band. The somewhat tiresome satire “Amerika” is rendered into a boppin’ bossanova, while “Rammlied” becomes a polka, complete with banjos and yodelling. And if you have ever wondered what the Pet Shop Boys would sound like with a guttural German bass baritone as their lead singer, why not try out their disco version of “Mein Teil”? The best remix however is probably Laibach’s version of “Ohne Dich”. The mega-bombastic Slovenes were a major influence on Rammstein’s sound, imagery and provocative tactics- something, it seems, the band was for a long time wary of fully acknowledging. But Rammstein never really got into Laibach’s ultra-arch, cerebral irony, which left their elder Slavic cousins the creative space to make this preposterous/awesome version of Lindemann’s mournful, melancholic ballad:

My verdict: Rammstein: Made in Germany gets eleven stars out of five. Give the gift of Teutonic metal this Christmas. Wait a minute, Christmas has already come and gone. Never mind, give the gift of Teutonic metal anyway.

The year 2011 was an alarming one for dictators, as a series of mass uprisings toppled several authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. The so-called “Arab Spring” inspired wild hopes, with some optimists even declaring that the 20th century phenomenon of the dictator was finished, and a new era of democracy was dawning- just like in Eastern Europe in 1989. True? False? Let’s survey the Year in Dictators and find out!

The action started in Tunisia in late 2010, when a man named Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated to protest the rule of President Ben Ali, and immediately triggered a mass uprising. By January, the hitherto unassailable dictator was in exile in Saudi Arabia and lots of politicians and journalists were pretending to know something about the country. Tunisians are secular, they told us, so don’t worry about religious radicals coming to power! A few months later, an Islamist party won 30% or so of the vote, making it the largest bloc in Tunisia’s parliament, with great influence over the country’s new constitution. Awesome! Which brings us to…

Egypt – not only the most populous country in the Arab world but also home to the University of Al- Azhar, the world’s most important center of Islamic learning. Starting in February, a series of protests led to the downfall of long term dictator Hosni Mubarak, who learned that America is only your friend until she isn’t, as Obama urged his nation’s faithful ally of three decades to stand down so that some reactionary, authoritarian anti-Semitic types could take over. Well that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s obviously what was going to happen, and it’s what’s happening right now. Awesome!

Then there’s Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi learned the hard way that it doesn’t pay to give up your weapons of mass destruction, or to hang out with Tony Blair. After 41 years of doing his own thang, he was faced by an immensely incompetent uprising which would have failed had not a NATO mission led by Britain and France with major support from the US eventually assisted an unappealing mob of ex-Al Qaeda men and other unlovely sorts in killing the Brother Leader. At least 50,000 people died in a haphazard military campaign that was supposedly waged to save lives, and which had nothing to do with regime change, HONEST! It’s hard to say what’s going on there now because the media isn’t doing much reporting, but I do hear that Gaddafi’s son is yet to see a lawyer after weeks in captivity and that polygamy is now legal. Awesome (if you’re a dude)!

There was unrest elsewhere in the Middle East, but not much change. Bahrain held firm. I think something happened in the Yemen, but nobody reports on it that much. Let me Google it…

….no, the president is still hanging on, although he’s supposed to be gone by February. In Syria Bashar Assad has responded to unrest like a proper dictator and killed lots of his own people. Will his regime fall in 2012? I have no idea. But having seen what happened to Gaddafi he has a pretty strong motivation to keep on killing.

And that’s it for the alleged Brave New World of democracy. Elsewhere, 2011 was not bad at all for dictators. Consider the ex-USSR for instance:

In Turkmenistan former dentist Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov switched the portraits of his predecessor Turkmenbashi for his own years ago and nobody noticed any difference.

In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov has ruled with an iron fist since the country was part of the USSR. His repressive system is working well, and the jails are nice and full.

In Tajikistan, ex-collective farm boss Emomali Rakhmon is still rocking the presidential palace. Not long ago he banned all religious education for those below the age of 18; he’d rather everybody read his own books about Zoroaster.

In Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev continues as president of the country his daddy used to run.

In Kazakhstan, oblivious to the lessons of Libya, Nursultan Nazarbayev recently started hanging out with Tony Blair. Blair denies he is making any money from the friendship, but the Kazakhs claim he already has a gleaming new office in Astana, the capital.

Meanwhile I hear Africa still has some dictators, and there are also a few dodgy fellows knocking about in Latin America. North Korea just swapped one psycho for his puffy faced son, while China remains a one party state. Russia which although not a dictatorship is certainly authoritarian, recently experienced some uprisings but the challengers Mr. Putin faces for the presidency in 2012 are (as usual) discredited frauds and rich dilettantes doomed to failure.

Authoritarian rule is the norm rather than the exception in human history and even in liberal democracies many yearn to impose their will on others. In the EU for instance, whenever the public makes the wrong decision in a referendum, their leaders make them vote again until they get it right!  In the Middle East meanwhile I suspect that secular dictators are about to be replaced by religious dictators- plus ca change, and all that.

Happy New Dictators!

Originally published at RIA Novosti, the home of the awesome

Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New Cold War™ that they refused to address why the president was so popular in Russia. I suspect this is because many of them missed the 1990s, when Americans and Europeans had enjoyed near godlike status. Yeltsin had been no catastrophe for them, even if he was for 99.99% of everybody else.

However, Putin was genuinely popular and until a few weeks ago seemed unassailable. A generous man might read this as proof of success: that life in Russia has improved to the point where citizens are no longer willing to accept corruption in exchange for stability. When I lived in Russia, I attended some entirely futile anti-government rallies comprised of pensioners, punks and nationalists; the latest protests are larger, much more diverse and the Kremlin obviously hasn’t decided what to do about them…yet.
It’s ironic, meanwhile, that these demands for democracy are occurring twenty years after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus unilaterally declared the USSR dead, thus overriding the democratically expressed will of the majority of soviet citizens who had voted in referenda earlier that year for the Soviet Union to remain united (assuming we can trust those results, of course).

That two decade anniversary also makes me think of the erstwhile soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe which had seized their liberty in 1989. All of these countries- from Estonia to Bulgaria- almost immediately applied to join the EU, membership of which is now making them, ironically, less free again.

Of course, there’s a world of difference between the totalitarian USSR and the impotent, soft authoritarian EU. But how the citizens of these nations, who are still resentful of Moscow’s long dominance of their internal politics, can so freely submit to oversight of their national budgets by an unelected cabal in Brussels, or worse, meekly acquiesce as entire populations are forced to vote again whenever a referendum in the EU brings the wrong result… well, it blows my mind, man.

I come from a small country. I understand the advantages of an alliance with a bigger neighbor. But I am not seduced by the vague, utopian EU goal of ‘ever closer union’ and I don’t subscribe to the comic fantasy that the EU could ever rival the USA or China as a world power. The fear/shame stigma surrounding nationalism is largely a continental issue, not a British one. Thus while passport free travel is nice and Brussels surely provides pleasant sinecures for national politicians who can’t be bothered with elections any more, I fail to see the point of surrendering to the Franco-German axis at its heart.

So what is its appeal? Let’s ask Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor:

“There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone to bow down to as soon as possible.”

Hmm…

Well now that makes me think of Egypt, where following the so-called Arab Spring, a majority of Egyptians have just voted for reactionary parties such as The Muslim Brotherhood or worse, the Salafists. Of course, this is not surprising if you consider that Egypt is a very traditional, pious society, which has been governed for decades by a corrupt military junta. Who were the people going to vote for, the parties that claim to embody the Will of Allah; or that wee man with the moustache who used to lurk about the UN?

It has been vaguely amusing (while also pathetic), to watch the American leaders and bien pensant media types who were so wrong about the meaning of the uprising now argue that political power will make the Brotherhood, which has over eighty years of hardcore Islamist pronouncements behind it, less radical. Such stupidity is nothing new. Apologists denied the obvious extremism of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin for a long time. In the 60s, many European lefties loved Mao. One of Jimmy Carter’s advisors compared the Ayatollah Khomeini to Gandhi. Don’t worry, say the useful idiots, it will all be OK.

Not likely. Remember the 2004 uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan? Well, in Ukraine the guy who (allegedly?) stole the election is now president, while the “heroes” who defeated him are either a) in prison or b) in disgrace. In 2008 Georgia’s president launched an attack on his own citizens and lost one third of his country’s territory. As for Kyrgyzstan… well… yeah.

Thus, when I watch the rallies in Russia, I celebrate the protestors’ loss of fear, but wolves are always waiting in the wings. And yet for all that, sometimes things actually do improve. However fatuous the EU may be in its goals and deeds, it’s far better to be forced to submit to Merkozy than to be devoured by Stalin, if that’s the choice history offers you.

As for Egypt, however, I’m considerably less optimistic.

Originally published at RIA Novosti, home of the awesome.

For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later.

That was the plan at least. Unfortunately as I came up with this idea the day before leaving, I had no time to reorganize my MP3 player and so the music I brought with me was just stuff I had picked up recently- Television, Bonnie Prince Billy, Arcade Fire and a few others. Immediately after I arrived I was too overloaded on sensations to listen to any of it. And besides, I hate earphones. Playing the tracks back now, they evoke nothing. However, the Black Eyed Peas’ criminally awful My Humps-which was playing everywhere in Turkmenistan- immediately transports me back to that shitty nightclub in Turkmenabat where a fat girl with a moustache kept bumping into me on the dance floor. Then there’s the acoustic version of Hotel California, which summons unpleasant memories of the gruesome meat market in Balkanabat, from which I fled into a night that stank of burning petrol and despair. But those two fusions were all accidental- like Rock Me Amadeus on the ferry. Maybe that’s just the way it works and the experiment was doomed from the start.

But there was an exception, a moment when my plan transformed a song and the contents of my skull forever, giving me one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life. This is how it happened: I was standing on the edge of a vast pit of fire inthe depths of the Kara Kum desert.  In that abandoned nocturnal wasteland, the burning hole seemed almost mythical, even though it was just a crater accidentally created by Soviet engineers digging for gas, and then set on fire by a nomad worried the methane odor was poisoning his sheep. At that moment however, it was as awe-inspiring as the Mouth of Hell itself. After gazing into it transfixed for about fifteen minutes, I realized no photograph could do the hole justice, and the memory would rapidly fade. Suddenly I remembered my plan, to fuse a song with a landscape. I searched through the MP3 player and found some Rammstein- infernal yes, but rather redundant when confronted with an actual pit of fire. Next came Roy Orbison’s In Dreams. Immediately I stopped- this song was already rich with meaning, memory and images for me. Nevertheless, mysterious and perfect as it is, I knew it could absorb more. Better yet I thought the bizarre contrast between eerie 60s pop and satanic inferno would give me an authentic, almost classical surrealist experience, like something straight out of Andre Breton’s manifesto.

But as soon as the Big O started singing in his lower, ghostly register the experience went way beyond surreal. There was no bizarre collision, but rather the music actually fused with the moment, with the desert, the night sky, the dancing flames and the epic emptiness. In fact, as the song continued I realized that that strange, miniature symphony of obsession and dark longing had never sounded so haunting, so piercing, so perfect. I played, and replayed, lost in the song, the heat, fire and darkness. Clearly I had just discovered the perfect conditions for listening to Roy Orbison: on the edge of a pit of fire, in a void. My friend Joe appeared at the edge of the hole. I called him over – I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t suffering from an aural hallucination brought on by the psychic deprivation of the desert. Joe stood there, entranced by the fire and the music, playing and replaying the track. When he finally gave me back the earphones he was wide-eyed:

‘That was almost a shamanistic experience,’ he said.

I understood what he meant. Songs for Orbison were incantations of power, gateways to other worlds. This meek, shy man with a passion for radio-controlled airplanes sang of dream realities where his fantasies came true, where the grim world he inhabited was transcended, even replaced. In Dreams makes this urge to cross into a better world explicit in the lyrics, but even in apparently mindless pop such as Pretty Woman Orbison describes an individual who, by the power of his will and growl, can force a woman to do his bidding- like a medium summoning the dead at a seance. There is always something slippery going on in Orbison’s songs, and he is not always opening the door he thinks he is. I’m not sure which door I’d stepped through, myself. There were no intoxicants in my system, but high on music and fire and the desert and the bottomless sky I was now somewhere else entirely. I spent over an hour wandering through the burning dream palaces of Roy Orbison. Then, I’m not sure what happened. Something moved me to step back from the pit of fire. I turned and saw a hill. It was blacker than the sand, blacker than the night sky, an eerie pyramid of negation in time and space. I was close to where Zoroaster, the world’s first apocalyptic prophet had heard God talking and founded a religion that had dominated Iran for a millennium before the Islamic conquest. Perhaps, perhaps if I climbed that mountain… well, what exactly?

I switched off the music and started walking. The hill was about half a mile away across a flat plain, but it seemed to take an eternity to reach it. It took even longer to climb. And once I reached the top I wondered what I was doing there: there was no hole in the sky through which I might perceive the color out of space. Mildly disappointed I descended and returned to the camp, where my friends were waiting.

Between my ears however, deep in the meat in my skull, Roy Orbison, the Great Shaman of the Kara Kum Desert now lurked, imprisoned forever, waiting to be released like a djinn from his bottle only when I played that song. And when I do, he summons the flames again, and the desert and the darkness, and I step into that burning dream palace, and spend a little more time wandering its corridors and rooms. And the world is transformed- for two minutes and fifty seconds, at least.

In memoriam Roy Orbison (1936-1988) and Barbara Orbison (1950-2011)

In June 2009, I found myself glued to the TV set, watching the crowds in Tehran protesting the rigged reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran. I was amazed that things seemed to be falling apart so quickly for the motley crew of thugs, thieves, killers and millenarian fantasists that run the country. After all, their despotic regime was only 30 years old, and at that age the USSR was in the full, terrifying flower of Stalinism. It would be another four decades before it collapsed due to institutional senility and internal decay.

Eh?

Like most Britons, I long ago accepted that our island home is a small, increasingly insignificant place, populated by a mild-mannered people who meekly submit to the highest degree of government surveillance in the Western world. Our public services are mediocre and our TV is largely rubbish. The notion that the ineffectual clique of ex-public schoolboys running this minor power could mastermind an uprising in Iran- or would even want to- was definitely worth a chuckle or two.

What I had forgotten, of course, is that in the Middle East people have very long memories. The Iranians recall the days when Britain had an empire, and stern, ascetic men fond of a good spanking liked to fiddle with the internal politics of faraway places. To the Iranians, apparently, Albion is still perfidious, the “Little Satan” manipulating the oafish Great Satan of America into doing its bidding: a bit like the Elders of Zion, only even more devious.

Jeez, I thought, those Mullahs have got to catch up with the times… watch a bit of UK reality TV or something. Those imperial guys might as well be aliens for all they have in common with their descendants. Didn’t the Iranians notice that the last time they kidnapped a bunch of British soldiers some of them burst into tears?

On the other hand, I thought, this should make those “experts,” who doubt that Ahmadinejad & co. are serious about all the apocalyptic stuff, think again. If the Iranians can believe this about the UK, then the notion that the Hidden Imam is about to return any day now and usher in the End Times is eminently plausible by comparison.

Of course, it’s very likely that the regime didn’t really think Britain was responsible, but was merely indulging in the usual scapegoating that occurs whenever rotten, tyrannical regimes seek to explain to their people why living/political/economic conditions are so awful: it’s the Jews! It’s the Americans! No, wait, it’s the Jews and the Americans! And the British!

Thus, when I learned on Tuesday that a mob had stormed the UK Embassy in Tehran I assumed that the Mullahs had been whipping up yet another anti-British frenzy to cover their own wickedness and incompetence.

And yet, as I read commentary on the rampage, I discovered that this time the Masters of Iran might actually have genuine cause to be angry at Britain. Apparently, following the latest report from the UN stating what has been obvious to everyone for, oh, the last eight or nine years or so (that Iran is actively seeking nuclear weapons) the British government banned all Iranian banks from trading in London, which, according to people who understand economics better than I do, will have disastrous consequences for Iranian access to European markets.

Now that does sound annoying, especially as the Iranian economy is already a disaster area. Of course, there’s not much behind the threats of “serious consequences” that were made by the small bald man who purports to be Britain’s foreign secretary. But the real attack on Iran has already been launched.

What next? I don’t know, although I suspect that the system built by the Ayatollah Khomeini will totter on for a while, before it collapses in on itself, or perishes in fire and blood. Given that Iran is home to a truly ancient civilization, and was (probably) the birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster, who may have been the inventor of linear time, the idea of apocalypse and many other concepts common to Judaism, Christianity, Islam (and by extension much of mankind)… I kind of have high hopes for the place. Certainly the Iranians deserve much better leadership than is provided by the current crop of bearded obscurantists.

Meanwhile, I find myself struggling with a strange stirring in my breast. It’s not quite pride, but it’s definitely a sensation of surprise, possibly even pleasure. For some time now, the UK has been a world leader in meaningless gesture politics, particularly when it comes to environmentalism and the developing world. But this action on the Iranian banks, well it just might have actual consequences for that most pernicious of regimes. Certainly the Mullahs are peeved.

Rule Britannia! Hail (The Little) Satan!

Originally published @ RIA Novosti, the home of awesome

On Sunday, I was leafing through People when I spotted somebody I used to work with in the gossip pages. Apparently she’s dating a movie star and they are about to get married.

Wow.

The fact that she was marrying a movie star didn’t shock me so much (her sister is a well-known actress) but rather that somebody I knew had made it into the pages of a tabloid. A law of nature had been violated: celebrity magazines should contain pictures of people I don’t know, like Angelina Jolie, or Jennifer Aniston, or Michael Jackson’s (ex) doctor.

So, I thought if my former colleague can get in then why not me? All it takes is a chance encounter. Last week, for instance, I read about an actress on some cop show that left her rock musician husband for a pizza delivery boy. For three years she and the pizza boy lived together. I saw a picture of him with her on the red carpet. He looked embarrassed.

Actually, now that I come to think of it, this isn’t the first time I’ve been surprised like this. A few years back I was riding on a bus in Ukraine. Remarkably, the bus had a TV and a DVD player on it and for a few hours I watched a terrible Russian Die Hard knock-off in which Chechen terrorists took an entire circus audience hostage. Suddenly a dude I knew appeared on screen. He was playing an editor at CNN.

I was so startled I wanted to tell the other passengers: Hey, see that really bad actor on the screen, the big fat guy? I know him! But it would have meant nothing to them, so I kept silent.

That kind of thing used to happen to my brother all the time. He went to Cambridge University, which (along with Oxford) is where many of the people who run the UK’s media- politico-business establishment spend their wild youths taking drugs, sleeping with each other and sitting the occasional exam. Shortly after graduation he started seeing lots of people he had known showing up on children’s TV shows, writing for newspapers, or (in one instance) even co-writing a movie with Mel Gibson. Some of them were genuinely talented; just as many were hacks.

My brother was perplexed. Coming from a small town where nobody does anything or goes anywhere, he had naively spent his time at Cambridge getting a good education, not realizing that the actual purpose of the institution is to make lots of contacts within Britain’s nepotistic establishment. Doh!

As for me, I don’t know anyone famous. However, I have had a few encounters with the press whenever I’ve written a book. At first I hated posing for pictures so much I used a wooden effigy of myself instead. These days I wear a hat and dark glasses.

The truth however is that in Britain, and especially in America, writing a book is considered such an eccentric thing to do that you’re in no danger of becoming famous unless by some miracle you make a mountain of cash. But once I went to Poland for a book tour where some of the socialist era- reverence for the written word still remains. My first appearance was with a very famous Polish author. A TV crew had shown up and they wanted to talk to me. Why? I asked.

But that was only the beginning. Everywhere I went, I was interviewed. My face was in the papers. People knew who I was. It was a very strange sensation. Then I got home to Texas, where I resumed my position on the social ladder slightly above a homeless person- which was a relief, I can tell you.

That kind of attention, even on a small scale, can be very seductive. My ego was delighted in Poland. But just take a look at ancient rock stars like Mick Jagger, or Paul McCartney and you can see the deleterious effects of flattery on a person. Long after the creative spark has sputtered and died, these old codgers continue prancing about in public just so they can score another hit of the ultimate ego-boosting drug, adulation.

But back to my acquaintance in the gossip magazines: later that evening I was standing in line at the grocer’s when I picked up a copy of The National Enquirer. The cover screamed CELEBRITY PLASTIC SURGERY DISASTERS! and I couldn’t resist.

So there I was, reading about Britney’s great big chemical breasts, when I turned the page and… it was my ex-colleague again! This time the story was different though, she had been introduced to her fiancé not by her sister but rather MERYL STREEP!

Well, who was it? I wondered, my mind nearly cracking under the strain.

Guess I’ll have to buy next week’s issue to find out. Then again, I could just send her an email.

Originally published at RIA Novosti, the home of awesome