The wrong David Mitchell

"I didn't know that man from Peep Show wrote experimental novels and had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice", said my girlfriend, leant over her copy of Repubblica. "Really?" "Yes, apparently he's got a new novel coming out about cultural dissonance, set in Japan in 1799." All that, I thought, and Have I Got News For You.

The intellectual grotesquery of Benedict XVI

It is easy to be outraged when the Pope blames Nazism on atheists but I think it's important to also understand the basis for his wrong-headedness.

I do not believe the author of a series of encyclicals that is essentially a Catholic/ Existentialist death-match (next, Pope Benedict and Jean Paul Sartre!) has not thought this through.

Benedict's experience of growing up in Nazi Germany may mean he associates God-lessness specifically with a world in which Man's power was unleashed in a perversion of Nietzsche's conception of the "Superman". So, perhaps also projecting a certain amount of guilt for not having done more to resist, he may possess a particular dread of the God-less state, and associate it automatically with Nazism.

But he is wrong to conclude atheists "created" the Nazis - atheism may have been a characteristic (and not much of one at that - witness Himmler's attempts to re-imagine Nazism as a Pagan cult) but Christianity was arguably its genesis.

In Straw Dogs John Gray demonstrates how despite having "murdered" God, the post-Enlightenment West and its ideological off-spring remain culturally Christian, particularly in a tendency to promise Heaven here upon the Earth - Utopianism.

It's a destructive fallacy we cannot shake off - from the Jacobite Terror, through Stalin and Hitler, to Neo-Conservatism. Unlike the Greeks and Romans Nietzsche admired (and whose age he wished to recreate, free from the shackles of "slave" religion), all have peddled the idea of a "promised land" - and led their followers to destruction.

For a man so supposedly endowed with intellect to ignore this is a considerable flaw. To enlist the Jews, for whom 2000 years of Christian persecution culminated in genocide, to make his point, is simply grotesque.

Uses for old buildings

Since records began...

It's not often my eye is drawn to a story in the Daily Express...

POLICE have been sent on a training course to prepare for a massive earthquake, it emerged last night...

Yet over the past 1,036 years since records began in 974 only 11 people are known to have been killed by earthquakes in Britain. And the last one of any size was nearly 80 years ago.

I love that over the past 1,036 years.

Jerash

The book cover

Although the book itself is still at the printers...

Our local Anarchist's Circle