Meet Ukraine's New Bosses (more or less..) the Same as the Old Bosses

The celebrated, if rather pompous, UK professor of history, Timothy Garton Ash, repeated a now sorrily familiar canard on the BBC World Service on Sunday when he said that what had happened in Ukraine is “definitely a revolution”. The next day I read in the International New York Times that the revolution in Ukraine may need to be “better represented” in the about to be formed interim government.

When analysts comment about Yemen it is sometimes said that the Gulf Arab-backed interim deal that changed the president, and consequently the government, did not represent the “revolutionary forces”. That is perhaps a better formulation.

The “revolution” in Ukraine hasn’t really affected the apparatus of the Ukranian state, even if it has weakened the state’s writ. Despite Yanokovich having something akin to a democratic mandate, the revolution obliged him to depart and has aided the chances that his nemesis Tymoshenko, a failed premier, will take over. In the meantime the speaker of the old parliament keeps the presidential chair warm.

The revolution hasn’t affected the structure and membership of the police, intelligence services and the military, but it has succeeded in giving the interior and defence ministers the sack.

The revolution has seen self-appointed groups enforcing popular justice on the streets of Kiev, but is being actively resisted in the east of the country.

Egypt is going through a comparable (non) revolution. In either case was it the popular will or the shadow state that wrought the change? In Ukraine the oligarchs didn’t like the former president’s method of crowd control, in Egypt the military initiated two changes of president in two years and are about to finish the job by once again assuming the country’s political leadership. However perhaps one of several differences is that, while Egypt cannot control the Sinai, it doesn’t any longer fear the loss of part of itself to a powerful neighbour. 

Meet the new year, hopefully not like the old year

Good riddance to 2013. I could say my discontent with this fast fading year, and for that matter 2012, is all about the poor Middle East, but it isn’t. For the most part genuine popular grievances were expressed in 2011 and, quelle surprise, they met the fearsome resistance of authoritarian states ruled by unaccountable narrow cliques. In Egypt the state’s ruling backbone reasserted itself after the Muslim Brotherhood interregnum. In Syria the ruling clique and their allies are, quite literally, fighting for their lives. Frankly, what else was expected? Oh and Libya was an apparently “necessary” western intervention to prevent a massacre in one city that helped to destroy an already weak state and replace it with the anarchy of multifarious militias. Good decision, western and Gulf leaders. 

No, none of that makes me “hope for a better year” in 2014. If “all politics is local” then all of my preoccupations are personal. I don’t have a runner in the Mid-East race, but I do have some family left in England. Some of it has, tragically, gone belly up over the last 15 months, but a lot of it remains, and some of it is even renewed, revisited and meaningful. So here’s to them (they know who they are), and here’s also to that small, diminishing, but valued, group of friends I have actually seen this year. 

Shaw’s Major Barbara at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin

“Major Barbara”, currently showing at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, is not a must-see performance. However it has some very good performances, and, despite being over 100 years old, many still relevant themes.

In a moment of almost childlike Marxist didacticism, Paul McGann, playing the splendidly saturnine arms manufacturer Mr Undershaft, tells the audience that European governments do his bidding. Written less than 10 years before World War 1, the play’s author, Irishman George Bernard Shaw, is celebrated for his apparent power of prophecy.

Yet GBS’ more telling, and more pertinent observations for today's audience, concerns liberals self-righteously raging at the world’s many inequities. Undershaft, a man born of East End poverty who married into an Earl’s family, is the play’s only morally uncompromised character. GBS enjoys giving him many of the play’s wittiest and most perceptive lines. Undershaft’s morality is based on a gospel of material salvation that only money can bring. Socialists of the time scared this businessman by also preaching material solutions to soulless drudgery. However his daughter, “Major” Barbara, played by Claire Dunn, is rather less threatening. She sees the Salvation Army as the surest solution to want: bread and treacle in exchange for a (declared) devotion to God.

The least satisfying part of the play is Barbara’s naive, soul-searching, purity amidst more worldly compromises. At times hammy in actualisation, the difficulties of her role are only compounded. Sadly, but inevitably, it is Barbara’s declamations that end the play. Her “realism” has led her to embrace the pragmatic (or cynical) Adolpus, her fiancé, in his apparently reluctant decision to agree to run (and one day inherit) Undershaft’s business. Her reasoning is that she can then focus on converting less materially-needy souls at his factory. This version of changing the system from within smacks of the same simple-minded wisdom that Lady Britomart (Barbara’s mother, wonderfully played by Eleanor Methven)  elsewhere dismisses as typifying the insights of The Times newspaper.

The most witty, incisive, and electric dialogue is that between Undershaft and Adolphus in the second act. The former, ironically perhaps, often carries the audience in his deployment of well-informed cynicism against the almost puritan pleadings of his soon to be son in law whose version of changing the system from within leads him to imagine that he can make the arms trade more moral. The final line of the play is Undershaft saying to Adolphus, a man of normally more leisurely hours, that he will see him at the factory at 6 am.

Undershaft’s signature claim that only a willingness to kill can change anything, whereas voting only changes the names of cabinet members, suggests a utilitarian use for arms. Eleven years after this play was written, WB Yeats observed that in Ireland a terrible beauty had been born. In Egypt a willingness to kill, or more likely be killed, is convulsing that country, although the most likely outcome is regressive.

This is an antidote, perhaps, to Undershaft’s contempt for the naïve parliamentarianism expressed by his son, Stephen. Either way, “Major Barbara” speaks straightforwardly and often entertainingly to many complex and still contemporary issues.