Aten vs Amun - Culture Wars reprised

Back in Ancient Egypt the land had many gods, who were worshipped more or less equally, to keep them all happy. Until that is one pharaoh came along and decreed that one god in particular was to be favoured - the disc of the Sun. This chap had been known as Amun-Ra until then; he became Aten. The other gods were to be neglected, abandoned. The world's first recorded culture war had broken out. And just as iconic images of women have changed today to feature huge arses, swollen lips, tiny waists and cartoonish features in a hideous distortion of the human form, they did exactly the same during the cult of the Aten. Distorted, unnatural.

Well the Aten thing lasted only about twenty years. Then the iconoclasts got to work destroying all those images of distorted people and throwing down the authoritarian decrees dictating what they could and couldn't say. Banned words were unbanned, and Egypt got back to normal, with extra sausages for all the gods who had been neglected for two decades and were feeling a bit miffed.

It was never about Sun gods, of course, just as the current culture war isn't really about black lives or pronouns or the rights of girls with todgers. It was an attempted take-over of Egyptian society by a metropolitan elite. That's not to say it didn't have a lasting effect - perhaps a greater prominence for the new ideas, a broadening of tolerance as established thinking shifted in its seat to accommodate the newcomer.

The Polish election is just another skirmish in the current culture war. Right now, as I write, it's too close to call. It's between a metropolitan liberal, comfortable with sexual diversity and open to new values and his opponent, a traditional maintainer of Polish dignity, big in the country and with those aged over 50. Whichever way it goes, it won't be an end of the schism.

And so with our own dear nation. The grounds of the skirmishes are rarely at the heart of the grounds of the war. We will see many small shifts of allegiances and mini-alliances formed and broken as a score of factions, a hundred factions, all jostle to be heard. Hey ho.

Huge arses and trout pouts are a feature of culture wars, it seems

Rogue nations, book burners and ethics

Many who have business or overseas contacts with not only Chinese but many people from SE Asia will know the importance of 'face' - and of saving and losing face. The raucous, primitive, violent and abusive nature of social media is not a happy place for those with such sensitivities, yet several times, normally after I have criticised China, I have received a wounded but polite little note. I suspect they're from Chinese students doing their compulsory two hours a day on the interweb defending the motherland - 'chide gently to bring offender onto path of righteous truth' or something. Yesterday China avoided the stigma of sanctions for human rights abuses announced by Dominic Raab in the Commons against named officials. The loss of face if Chinese individuals are named as human rights abusers would be grievous. 

He certainly managed to hit a spot with Russia, KSA, Burma and North Korea, though only the first three pretend to be liberal if not quite democratic. Chinese executions, concentration camps, organ harvesting and repression haven't earned them this disgrace as yet - maybe we still need their PPE. The latest repressive security law imposed on the people of Hong Kong literally encourages the book burners - books condemned by the Beijing regime are, even as I write, being seized and destroyed; Hague writes about it in today's 'graph. 

It is however Russia and China that are stoking the fires of the Culture War on the internet in an effort to destabilise the West. Whilst naive and credulous children are rioting on the street in London because someone called a trannie a tranny on the interweb, Sergei Magnitsky and Jamal Khashoggi, a lawyer and a journalist, were being murdered by their own state officials. 

And it's partularly important to distinguish between people and regimes, between holy Russians and Putin's gangster regime, between China's Beijing autocrats and the people of Hong Kong. These subject peoples simply don't enjoy the democratic freedoms that we take for granted; the rampant voting corruption even in Putin's most recent referendum on his own tenure is accepted with just a shrug of the shoulders. 

Whilst I'm encouraged by our finally moving out of the twentieth century and into one in which GRU assassins and CCP executioners, Korean torturers and Saudi head-choppers are not only unacceptable but that such actions have consequences, we cannot be complacent about the threats that such rogue nations pose to our liberal democracy. At least it seems we now accept that China, Russia, KSA and the like are not benign regimes but threats to our way of life. Now we must reform our economies to stop selling them arms and technology and buying from them factory goods and fuel that are killing their own citizens and undermining ours. 

The global corporates have been quick enough to respond to inconsequential movements such as BLM. Let's now test them with a commercial and trade policy in line with an ethical foreign policy when human lives and human freedoms rather than hurt feelings are at stake. 

Rogue states are once again burning books