The Gulag Archipelago

I’d been putting off reading this book for a long time and found that once I started reading it, I could only progress in small increments. It pulls no punches in describing the living hell that was the Soviet Gulag system and I could only take so much before having to switch to another book to take my mind off it for a while. It is absolutely gut-wrenching. It is no exaggeration to say that the terrible knowledge Solzhenitsyn bequeaths us in The Gular Archipelago opened the eyes of the world to Stalinist horrors and played a key role in bringing down the Soviet system. 

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 but was unable to attend the ceremony. After surviving a KGB assassination attempt in 1971, he was arrested in 1974, charged with treason, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union. His charge of treason was lifted in 1991 and he returned to Russia in 1994.

(The Audible audiobook version is very good and is read by his son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn.)

Sohail Ahmed Interview (Former Islamist)

Sohail Ahmed is a hard man to get a hold of. A reformed radical Islamist, he was instrumental in exposing the prevalence of radical Islamism in a number of UK Universities. Today, he works as a counter-extremism & counter-terrorism expert, offering advice to UK government agencies and a number of NGOs. He has appeared in the media in the UK and the US and written about his personal journey in a number of publications. He also campaigns for LGBT rights in the Muslim community, and has been a strong steady voice against Islamic extremism.

I’ve known Sohail for many years and have wanted to interview him about his life for a very long time. As you’ll hear, it’s quite a story. We cover his growing up in a radical islamist environment, the process through which he was further radicalized and how he eventually broke free from that environment. We talk about Islam today,what a progressive version of Islam might look like and how we could get there. We talk UK politics and immigration and about how his views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict changed over the years.

I hope you enjoy this discussion.

On YouTube:

On SoundCloud.

The Sandman on Netflix

So is the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal work “The Sandman” any good? Well, on the whole, I’d say it does a fair job of bringing the story to life. Just to get this out of the way at the start, there is quite a bit of graphic violence in it so I would not recommend it if you have a weak stomach, but if that sort of thing doesn’t put you off, then read on. 

Of the eleven volumes of the original work (excluding important companion works), I find that the first three are the weakest. When Gaiman wrote the story in the late 80s-early 90s, he was in Terra Incognita, having resurrected an obscure character from the DC universe and been given, for all intents and purposes, carte blanche under a newly established DC subsidiary called Vertigo, specifically targeting adult readers. Vertigo published a bunch of very good works over the years (Fables, Transmetropolitan, Y: The Last Man, to name but a few) before shutting down in 2020, but the work that made everything else possible was The Sandman.

In the beginning of the story, Gaiman has a bunch of loose ideas that he throws around hoping they will somehow stick together. Neither the final destination of the story nor the major waypoints to getting there seem to have fully coalesced in his mind while he is writing these chapters. While the events seem to transpire within the DC universe, with some DC characters making cameo appearances, he persistently picks at loose threads, testing and experimenting with boundaries before, somewhat miraculously, it all comes together and the story becomes this totally new thing tracing its own course. Yes, there are some hints and foreshadowing of what this will eventually become storytelling-wise, notably in “The Sound of her Wings” episode or the side-story with Hob Gadling, but much of the rest is exploratory at this stage. Season one on Netflix only covers the first two volumes and some of the events and characters introduced will have some role to play later in the story. The DC influences present in the comics have, thankfully, largely been left out.

The casting choices were, for the most part, very good and the CGI ranged from tolerable to excellent. Looking forward to season two.

If you’ve already seen it and are hungry for more here are a few recommendations:

• Read the original comic series (or graphic novels if for whatever reason the term comics offends your sensibilities)
• Check the companion stories “Death: The high cost of living” and “Death: The time of your life”
• Try to find a copy of Hy Bender’s “The Sandman companion” which goes really deep into literary influences
• Read “The Interpretation of Dreams” by Freud and “The Archetypes and the collective unconscious” by Jung
• Brush up on your Greek and Norse mythology
• Read, or even better, go and see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest by Shakespeare 
• Read the Bible and Apocrypha

PS: I think the main reason why I find this series so revolutionary is this: Gaiman is extremely well read and has a deep knowledge and understanding of Myths and Legends and their semiology. He is familiar with the traditions that generated them and appreciates the historical and cultural contexts. Throughout the Sandman, he introduces minor and major figures from the canon of different historical and mythological narratives that have been molded by hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and recasts them in a new light, thus robbing them of their traditional meanings and symbolic power. In doing so, he makes them relevant to today while pointing the moral compass toward the need for true humanistic values and the inevitability of change.

Ukraine is not a proxy war

The Kremlin argues that this is fundamentally a war between Russia and the US with Ukraine as a proxy.

I understand and appreciate the geopolitical concerns of Russia and accept that both the US and Russia, like every country, pursue their own national interests.

However, I cannot consider both on equal footing and it is not only because one is a democracy, despite all its flaws, and the other, for all intents and purposes, an autocracy.

Let's look at the particulars.

There is no argument that the US has pursued its interests, often aggressively, including the invasion and occupation of third countries for prolonged periods of time.

Even though almost all of the countries the US invaded were autocratic with a long history of abusing their own people, in many cases these actions were taken unilaterally without UN approval, without carefully considering the aftermath, and with no solid reconstruction plans that would bring the countries back into the international community.

Where this applies, I believe that condemnation is the appropriate response.

In comparison, Russia is an autocracy that has a similar history of invading and occupying countries and instituting regime change.

Even in the worst cases in recent history (as far as I know and correct me if I am wrong) the US has not sought to deny the right to existence of the nations it has invaded and has not sought to annex their land and make it part of the USA. 

In comparison, Putin’s Russia denies the existence of a Ukrainian national identity and is seeking to annex land and subjugate the population. It is not clear what the ‘denazification’ plan exactly entails.

Thirdly, for the lands the US invaded, it had not already bound itself with an international treaty to guarantee their borders after asking them to disarm.

In contrast, Russia was one of the international powers guaranteeing the sovereignty and borders of Ukraine on the condition that they hand over their nuclear arsenal, which they did.

Russia unilaterally proceeded to violate that treaty.

The reasons Russia presented to justify this invasion have been largely dismissed as untrue by official organs of the international community after careful investigations.

Ukraine is also markedly not an autocratic regime. It has a somewhat progressive democratically elected government that Russia is trying to overthrow.

So, Putin might indeed view and present this as a conflict between the US and Russia for zones of influence, denying the right of self determination of smaller countries, but, fundamentally, for the reasons stated above, it is not. And indeed, if you read Putin’s own statements, this is an attempt to ‘reunify’ historically Russian lands, as he sees it. 

Russian expansionism was enabled by strong economic engagement by the West, the profits of which Putin used not to improve the living conditions of Russians, but to enrich himself, consolidate his power, violently suppress opposition and build up his military infrastructure. This is all very well documented.

The West believed that economic freedom and engagement with autocratic regimes would gradually lead to greater political freedoms and democracy. Given the history of the last two decades and in particular what is going on right now, it has become apparent the West was wrong in this assumption and we are now watching a major shift in policy.

Putin's propaganda paints the West as evil and hateful towards Russians. Granted, there are bad feelings from ex-soviet republics, who suffered tremendously under Soviet rule. But most Westerners genuinely want Russians to do well and be part of the international community.

There are still a lot of bad feelings for Germany as well, perhaps even more so than for Russia, but it cannot be denied that today’s democratic Germany is an integral part and equal partner of the international community.

Putin denies this future to the Russian people.

The final piece of the puzzle for me is that the USA, at least in recent history and despite the hawkish language, has not threatened the world with nuclear holocaust. Which the Kremlin is doing. Right now.

Anyone who, at any time and for any reason, suggests, either implicitly or explicitly, that mutual nuclear annihilation is a reasonable strategy, is by definition a psychopath.