Bleak Sign Ahead for Democrats in Decisive Midterms

Ulf Kristersson:

Recent polls on the popularity of US President Joe Biden have shown his low ratings among the American public, just as the Democrats are bracing for November’s midterm elections. The reasons for the declining support for the President varies from economic concerns to education and gun policy. Suzan Quitaz points out that “bread-and-butter issues” are taking priority over supporting the US stance on the Ukraine invasion. The soaring energy prices resulting from the war and the subsequent sanctions imposed by Western countries on Russia are taking a toll on the chances of the President’s party in the decisive upcoming elections. Quitaz highlights the US undiplomatic reaction to OPEC+ decision to cut oil production that was based on the economic policy of the member states. She argues that the Democrats propaganda war against the KSA for not doing them a “favor” is another example of “American exceptionalism.”

This week Ahmed Taher also writes about the Yemeni crisis being exploited by Tehran as a way to achieve gains in the negotiations of the nuclear deal and to divert attention from the domestic unrest in Iranian streets. He explains how the Iranian regional strategy is employing the Houthis to push Yemen to a dangerous escalation in the absence of major international powers.

Also in the Politics section, Jassim Mohamed discusses the EU schisms that are threatening the Bloc’s unity. He explains that the Union is being put to the test by the crises of energy, gas, subsidies, and arms supplies to Ukraine, as well as the rise of military hypocrisy and the adoption of new security and defense policies.

In the Art section, Bryn Haworth visits the art of Lucian Freud, drawing the parallel relation between the sitting process, in which the painter creates his work of art, and psychoanalysis sessions. In light of Lucian and his grandfather’s works, the writer delves into their concept of aura.

As football fans are gearing for the Qatar World Cup 2022, Sarah Gamal reviews the most prominent players who will be performing in their last international bid. Ten players are pinning their hopes to end their international career by winning the world title with their national teams.

Read these articles and more on our website eng.majalla.com. As always, we welcome and value our readers’ feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

A Weekly Political News Magazine www.majalla.com/eng

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napshot

Lebanon Solar Eclipse

Students look thorough a camera screen viewer, to watch the partial solar eclipse, at the Phoenician ruins, in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. AP

napshot

A worker adjust Bernardo Cavallino “Saint Bartholomew “ dur� ing a press preview at Sotheby’s New York October 25, 2022 for the Baroque: Masterpieces from the Fisch Davidson Collection Live Auction: 26 January 2022. / AFP

Sotheby’s Art Auction

EGYPT

Egypt’s Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla speaks during the Saudi Green Initiative Forum to discuss e orts by the world’s top oil exporter to tackle climate change in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, October 23, 2021.

Egypt’s petroleum minister con rmed on Tuesday a framework agreement had been reached to develop the Gaza Marine gas eld o shore Gaza and talks were under way to conclude a nal deal.

Egypt’s state-owned gas company EGAS is aiming to take over development of the eld, Egyptian and Palestinian o cials told Reuters earlier this month. If concluded, the agreement would be a boost for the cash-strapped Palestinian economy.

LEBANON

Lebanon's parliament failed on Monday to elect a president for the fourth time, with just a week left until outgoing President Michel Aoun's term ends and warnings of a constitutional crisis growing louder.

With parliament more fractured than ever after May's elections, political blocs have been unable to reach consensus on a candidate to succeed Aoun. The presidency has fallen vacant several times since the 1975-1990 civil war but a vacuum now would be especially worrisome. The government is already operating in a caretaker capacity and the country is sinking deeper into a three-year-old nancial meltdown.

Saudi Arabia's bin Salman were using manipulate

be to mitigate The comment President Joe the nation's lower gasoline elections on "It is my profound world that may be painful Saudi minister Investment

Arabia's energy minister Prince Abdulaziz Salman said on Tuesday some countries their emergency stocks to manipulate markets when their purpose should mitigate any shortages of supply. comment appeared to be a criticism of US Joe Biden's decision to sell oil from nation's emergency oil reserve as he tries to gasoline prices ahead of mid-term on Nov. 8.

profound duty to make clear to the losing (releasing) emergency stocks painful in the months to come," the minister told the Future Initiative Investment (FII) conference in Riyadh.

SAUDI ARABIA UAE

The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) state revenues totalled AED463.9 billion ($126.3 billion) in 2021, up 26 percent from 2020, state news agency WAM reported on Tuesday, citing the nance ministry. State expenditure totalled AED402.4bn in the same period, up one percent on 2020, WAM said. The gures pointed to an overall surplus of AED61.5 billion last year.

IRAQ

Archaeologists in northern Iraq last week unearthed 2,700-year-old rock carvings featuring war scenes and trees from the Assyrian Empire, an archaeologist said Wednesday.

The carvings on marble slabs were discovered by a team of experts in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, who have been working to restore the site of the ancient Mashki Gate, which was bulldozed by Islamic State group militants in 2016.

Fadhil Mohammed, head of the restoration works, said the team was surprised by discovering “eight murals with inscriptions, decorative drawings and writings.”

Gunmen attacked a major Shiite holy site in Iran on Wednesday, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens. The attack came as protesters elsewhere in Iran marked a symbolic 40 days since a woman’s death in custody ignited the biggest anti-government movement in over a decade. State TV blamed the attack on “tak ris,” a term that refers to Sunni Muslim extremists who have targeted the country’s Shiite majority in the past. The attack appeared to be unrelated to the demonstrations.

A

U.S.

The United States, Japan and South Korea warned on Wednesday that an "unparalleled" scale of response would be warranted if North Korea conducts a seventh nuclear bomb test.

Washington and its allies believe North Korea could be about to resume nuclear bomb testing for the rst time since 2017.

ACROSS

Hurricane Roslyn was expected to deliver a treacherous storm surge to parts of Mexico Sunday after plowing over the Paci c as a powerful Category 4 storm just o shore from the resort of Puerto Vallarta.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said early Sunday that Roslyn had become “extremely dangerous” with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kph). The storm was forecast “to bring damaging winds, a life-threatening storm surge and ooding rains to portions of west-central Mexico today,” the hurricane center said at 12 a.m. Sunday.

The center placed Roslyn’s core about 45 miles (75 kilometers) west of Cabo Corrientes — the point of land jutting into the Paci c south of Puerto Vallarta — and moving north at 12 mph (19 kph).

U.K.

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said on Wednesday she expects new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to steer Britain towards scal sustainability and said he was right to warn the public of di cult decisions ahead.

Speaking to Reuters in Berlin, Georgieva welcomed what she said was Sunak's clarity and constructive attitude that she knew from his time as nance minister.

ACROSS THE

UKRAINE

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia was aware of Ukrainian plans to use a "dirty bomb", echoing an unsubstantiated allegation repeatedly made by Moscow in recent days.

said steer sustainability ahead.

Speaking at a meeting with the intelligence chiefs of several former Soviet countries, Putin said that the risk of con ict in the world and region was high, and that security should be heightened around key infrastructure sites.

INDIA.

Indians celebrated Diwali on Monday as bright earthen oil lamps and dazzling, colorful lights lit up homes and streets across the country to mark the Hindu festival that symbolizes the victory of light over darkness.

CHINA.

The world faces the prospect of more tension with China over trade, security, and human rights after Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, awarded himself another term as leader of the ruling Communist Party.

Xi has tightened control at home and is trying to use China’s economic heft to increase its in uence abroad. Washington accused Beijing this month of trying to undermine U.S. alliances, global security, and economic rules. Activists say Xi’s government wants to de ect criticism of abuses by changing the U.N.’s de nition of human rights.

Xi says “the world system is broken and China has answers,” said William Callahan of the London School of Economics. “More and more, Xi Jinping is talking about the Chinese style as a universal model of the world order, which goes back to a Cold War kind of con ict.”

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Bleak Sign Ahead for Democrats in Decisive Midterms

By Suzan Quitaz

It is two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections that are taking place on Tuesday, 8 November 2022, in which all 435 seats in the House of Representa tives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested. President Joe Biden’s governing majori

ties are on the line in the coming midterm elections with voters to determine whether to give Biden’s Democratic Party another two years of unilateral control of the Congress or change its makeup to being more equitable and diverse.

Many experts have already cast their votes predict ing that the upcoming midterm elections are going

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

to be critical, with a high turnout that is likely to shake up the political landscape with the Re publicans gaining control of both chambers and possibly determining Biden’s political survival. While Biden’s name is not on the ballots, it is a common trend for midterms to be seen as a referendum on the president and his party’s performance. Professor Alan Abramowitz be lieves that, “The midterms are, at least partly, a referendum on the performance of the current president.”

President Biden took office in January 2021, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. His term has been marked by economic turbulence caused by the virus as well as his own misman agement of the economy. The rate of inflation was only 1.3% when he took office in January 2021, but jumped to 7% by the end of the year.

In late May 2022, Biden’s disapproval rating hit as high as 59%, almost a doubling from March, 2021, when it stood at 35%.

His unpopularity continues but is undulating in sofar as in some months he is less or more popu lar. But one thing is for sure, his approval rating stayed close to the lowest level of his presidency as the economy and education continue to be the top issues driving voters’ decisions for the 2022 midterm elections.

On October 24, FiveThirtyEight found that 54% of Americans disapprove of Biden, the findings were a conclusion of different pollsters on the subject “How unpopular is Joe Biden.” Ameri can Research Group reported a 55% disapprov al, while for Pulse Opinion Research and Ipsos the figure stood at 54% with Pew Research Center at 62%.

In mid-October, Morning Consult conducted a public opinion poll and its results showed that 78% of Americans are worried about the econ omy, followed by education at 52%, and gun policy in third place at 51%.

In August, Pew Research Center Poll, found that foreign policy is not on the top of voters’ prior ity, whereas 77 percent rated the economy as very important. On October 18, Reuters-Ipsos opinion poll found that only 40% of Americans approve of Biden’s performance.

Is the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine still a top priority for the U.S. Voters?

Biden’s popularity was boosted as a result of his

administration’s support for Ukraine. In March 2022, a month after the Russian troops invaded Ukraine, polls showed that 56% of all Ameri can voters said the issue of Russia’s invasion is “very important” when deciding for whom to vote in the midterm elections. For Democratic voters the figure stood at 64% and for Republi cans it was 54%, according to figures published by Morning Consult.

However, as the war progressed and started fueling a cost-of-living crisis, people around the globe started coming under immense economic pressure as result of Western sanctions in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, the head of the IMF warned that the war in Ukraine was creating a risk of shortages and social instability across the globe by driving higher prices. The second major area where the continued war is driving the cost-of-living crisis is energy. Russia is a major player in global en ergy markets, and is one of the world’s top three producers of crude oil and is home to approxi mately a quarter of the planet’s known natural gas reserves.

The EU, UK and US decided to impose a ban on Russian oil in a bid to hamstring Putin’s abil ity to finance the war. However, it backfired on them by causing energy prices to soar. Oil pric es shot up, reaching 118 to 116 Euro per barrel by March 8, 2022.

In April, the World Bank forecast that average energy prices would jump by 50% this year, making it the biggest increase since the 1970s. Statista Brent Crude oil price figures for Octo ber 17, 2022, show that the average crude oil price is USD$104.85 per barrel, while in 2021 it was a $70.68, and before the coronavirus pan demic it stood at $41.96,

The majority of Americans supported the ac

President Joe Biden speaks after receiving an updated coronavirus disease (COVID19 ) vaccine, onstage in an auditorium on the White House campus in Washington, U.S. October 2022 ,25.

While Biden’s name is not on the ballots, it is a common trend for midterms to be seen as a referendum on the president and his party’s performance.

tions taken by the Biden administration in re sponse to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, this support started waning as house holds across America began to feel the effects of the rising cost of living. As mentioned above, initially 56% of all voters wanted Biden making Russia a high priority. But by early September the support went all the way down to 29%, but rose a few percent by early October to 34%.

In all polls conducted across United States the priority of the Russian invasion is lagging be hind the bread-and-butter issues for ordinary Americans, such as putting food on the table

and heating the home. On October 15, Morn ing Consult reported that only 37% of all voters see the Russian invasion issue as important. The breakdown is on party lines: 47% of Democratic voters see this issue as important compared to Republican voters, of whom 28% see it as an important factor when deciding who to vote for. The United States has already spent more than £60 Billion on economic and military aid to Ukraine since the country was invaded by the Russians. Last week, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy warned that his party mem bers will not write “a blank check” to Ukraine if they win control of the lower chamber. Mc Carthy said, “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it (…). Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do [referring to Biden administration] and it can’t be a blank check.”

OPEC+ Oil Production Cuts and the Arrogant Drivel Coming from the U.S.

On Wednesday, 5 October, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC Plus) led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia an nounced that it would cut its oil production by

Sign directs voters to a polling station on Election Day in Tucson, Arizona, U.S. November 3, 2020.

REUTERS/Cheney Orr

The Biden administration has said that the reason for wanting a lowering of oil prices was in a bid to deprive Putin of oil revenue to finance his war in Ukraine.

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2 million barrels per day, an output equal to 2% of global supply. This is the biggest slash in pro duction since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

The OPEC+ decision led the relations between two close allies, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, to plunge to their lowest point in decades. The U.S. administration called the OPEC+ decision shortsighted and fired off a number of threaten ing statements to the effect that it was consider ing abandonment of its 77 years of partnership with Saudi Arabia. “The President is disappoint ed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” the White House said.

On October 11, John Kirby, the spokesman for U.S. National Security Council, claimed Saudi Arabia played a critical role in that produc tion cut. Adding that it is “a shortsighted de cision that benefited Russia, at time when no body in any capacity should be trying to benefit Vladimir Putin.”

The Saudis were enraged by what they saw as America’s disrespectful tone and said the West

was often driven by the “arrogance of wealth” when criticizing the OPEC+ group. It also in sisted that the move was prompted by a mar ket decision and rejected the allegation it was intended to target Biden’s administration. The Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman said OPEC+ had needed be pro-active as cen tral banks around the world moved to “belat edly” tackle soaring inflation with higher inter est rates.

There is no doubt that the oil production cuts will likely to push up global oil prices, affecting Democrat electoral prospects alongside deliv ering a blow to Biden, in view of the fact that American voters see the economy as the number one important issue facing the country. However, the OPEC+ group stated the reason behind the cut is financially motivated. One can describe it as a ‘sell more for less strategy.’ After all, the OPEC+ countries are the top oil export ers and even if America or the West don’t agree with their decision or its timing, it is within their right to control at least to some extent the global oil market, and be ‘allowed’ to pursue their own policies even if those policies are not beneficial to the Biden administration’s interests.

Pump jacks operate at sunset in Midland, Texas, U.S., February 11, 2019. Picture taken February 11, 2019. REUTERS/Nick Oxford/File

The Biden administration has said that the rea son for wanting a lowering of oil prices was in a bid to deprive Putin of oil revenue to finance his war in Ukraine. But surely, this should not be at the cost of OPEC+ countries and it is ab surd that Biden would expect OPEC+ to help improve his approval ratings by damaging their own economic prospects.

It is understandable that Biden is not happy about the OPEC+ decision but the use of un diplomatic and rude language coming from the Biden’s handlers and U.S lawmakers about re considering its longtime security-based relation ship with the Kingdom is not helpful.

The U.S. - Saudi relationship goes back almost eight decades, and although oil is an impor tant aspect of it, there are many other elements which are equally as important as oil such as the Saudi counterweight to the Iranian threat and its expansion in the Middle East region, as well as intelligence cooperation and bringing peace and stability to the region. Biden’s threatening tone of opting for retaliation will have negative ef fects not only on the Saudis, but its aftershocks will also be felt in the already turbulent Mid dle East Region. This shortsighted and selfcentered response will also backfire on the U.S. The OPEC+ group decision is not aimed at weakening Biden’s standing in the coming midterm elections. “The idea that Saudi Arabia would do this to harm the U.S. or to be in any way politically involved is absolutely not cor

rect at all,” said Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Min ister of the State of Foreign Affairs. As we are getting closer to Tuesday, November 8, a lot of neurotic and whining bluster has been coming from the U.S. such as, “Election inter ference: oil price hike is Saudi Arabia’s Octo ber surprise against Biden,” or “The Saudis are working to get Trump re-elected” or “OPEC+ oil product cuts are out to hurt Americans.” Congressman Ro Khanna of California told the Intercept, “there is no doubt that the Saudi-led

People line up outside a polling station to cast their votes in Milwau kee, Wisconsin, Oct. 25, 2022. (AP)

“The idea that Saudi Arabia would do this to harm the U.S. or to be in any way politically involved is absolutely not correct at all,” said Adel AlJubeir, the Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs.

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OPEC oil production cuts are a strategic effort to hurt Americans at the pump and undermine our work to tackle rising costs (…). It’s clear that Riyadh is seeking to harm the U.S. and this reaffirms the need to reassess the U.S.-Saudi re lationship.”

One can only wonder if these headlines are an attempt to whitewash or obscure Biden’s own failures since he took office and place the blame on the doorstep of OPEC+ countries. Former President Trump was called a traitor and im

peached for asking the Ukraine for a “favor” to help him politically. However, when Biden did the same with the KSA and asked for a de lay in production cuts until after the midterms, the Democrat-controlled government not only failed to chastise Biden but instead launched a propaganda war against the Kingdom for not do ing the Democrats a “favor.” This is yet another example of the double standards of “American exceptionalism” and the U.S. behaving like a spoiled child when it does not get its way.

UN Continues its Dialogue with Lebanese Government on Refugees

Million People in 5 Arab Countries Need Winterization Aid – UNHCR Official

By Jiwan Soz – Beirut

The United Nations and its agencies in Lebanon are confronting immense challenges particularly as the Lebanese crises worsen.

The economic crisis, for example, has negatively affected the Lebanese and Syrians who live there as refugees after being forced to leave their country due to the ongoing war. There are more than 800 thousand registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon –however, the government estimates that the number is a million and half.

A UNHCR official in Lebanon revealed that development and humanitarian agencies have increased their support to Lebanese people and refugees in Lebanon since the onset of the Lebanese

crisis three years ago, as part of the agency’s primary mission which is “Leave No One Behind.”

Paula Barrachina, UNHCR Head of Communications and spokes person in Lebanon, said that the United Nations is responding to the needs of the most vulnerable people in Lebanon, including refugees, in order to mitigate the impact of the multiple crises on them. She also denied that the organization has reduced any financial assistance available to these people. Below is her full interview with Majalla in Beirut:

Q. What are the services provided by the United Nations in Leb anon, in light of the ongoing crises?

A. Over the past three years, development and humanitarian or

ganizations have increased their support to the Lebanese people, families, communities, and public institutions in order to mitigate the impact of the multiple crises and meet the dire needs of the most vulnerable, as part of its primary mission to Leave No One Behind.

Q. What are the forms of support the agencies provided as part of the UN primary mission?

A. These efforts continue to make a difference in the lives of the most vulnerable Lebanese families. This year alone, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese received in-kind food support, cash as sistance, and critical social and protection services. In addition, hundreds of municipalities were supported at different levels, to strengthen their basic service provision including solid waste management systems, clean energy and clean water projects or conflict mitigation.

Municipalities were also supported with reforestation activities, forest management plans, and community projects. Support is also provided to refugees and migrants in Lebanon, who have also been severely impacted by the current economic crisis.

Q. Is it true the financial assistance to refugees has been re duced? How do you evaluate their situation in Lebanon?

A. Assistance has not been reduced, but note that assistance to refugees is provided in local currency, LBP. Like all communi ties in Lebanon, refugees are deeply affected by the compounded crises and critical situation affecting the country and are making difficult choices to survive every single day, including skipping meals, not seeking urgent medical treatment, and sending chil dren to work instead of school. 90% of Syrian refugee house holds are living below the extreme poverty line and unable to secure their basic necessities. Over half of refugee families are food insecure.

UNHCR’s role in Lebanon includes coordinating the response for all refugees in Lebanon with the government, UN agencies,

and local and international partners. It focuses on issues related to: registration; protection/border monitoring and advocacy; legal aid; civil documentation; psychosocial support; child protection; prevention, risk mitigation; response to gender-based violence; and, resettlement to third countries.

Q. In preparation for winter, will the UN provide exceptional aid to refugees and the Lebanese?

A. UNHCR aims to assist around 1.4 million Syrian refugees and 10,365 Iraqi and refugees of other nationalities with win terization assistance. The protracted nature of the refugee situ ation, coupled in recent years with the impact of the economic and financial crisis and COVID-19 have has led to an exponential rise in extreme poverty and increased protection risks amongst all population groups. Lebanon’s economic woes have been further exacerbated by the Ukraine crisis with a resultant rise in food insecurity, shortages in fuel and possible reduction in humanitar ian aid to Lebanon in the medium term. The aforementioned have severely impacted all aspects of refugees’ lives leading to intensi fied harmful coping mechanisms. The 2022-2023 winterization assistance program in Lebanon plans to provide support for fami lies classified as highly vulnerable or severely vulnerable.

Q. How many are the families classified as extremely poor in Lebanon and Syria?

A. UNHCR estimates that 3.4 million people in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt are in need of critical assistance to help them prepare for and cope during the forthcoming winter.

Q. Some countries are willing to voluntarily repatriate refugees to their country. How do you see this step?

Currently, UNHCR is not facilitating or promoting the largescale voluntary repatriation of refugees to Syria from Lebanon. Nonetheless, thousands of refugees choose to exercise their right to return each year. When voluntary returns happen, UNHCR support is meant to ensure returns are voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable. UNHCR supports and calls for respect of refu gees’ fundamental human right to freely and voluntarily return to their country of origin at a time of their choosing.

UNHCR will continue to engage in dialogue with the Lebanese Government, including with the General Security Office in the context of GSO-facilitated return movements.

“Like all communities in Lebanon, refugees are deeply affected by the compounded crises and critical situation affecting the country and are making difficult choices to survive every single day.”

Lebanon hosts an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Syrian refugees [Getty]

Paula Barrachina, UNHCR

Head of Communications and spokesperson in Lebanon

Yemeni crisis and Iranian Uprising Domestic Failures and External Crises

By Ahmed Taher

The Arab region is experiencing many crises, some of which stem from within while others are a reflection of foreign interventions.

The Yemeni crisis represents a clear example of this overlap, which requires unpacking its compo

nents with the aim of finding effective solutions that alleviate the tragic reality experienced by the Yemeni people since the events of 2011 in gen eral, and since the coup by the Houthis on legiti macy in particular.

This coup represented the starting point for the demolition of the Yemeni state after the Houthis

A military parade displaying Houthi forces and weapons moves through a main street of Sanaa, Yemen, on Sept.

2022 ,21. (Ansar Allah Media via AP)

began controlling its institutions. However, this coup was stopped by Operation Decisive Storm led by Saudi Arabia with an international coali tion that realized from the outset the magnitude of the danger facing the world and the region due to the Iran-backed Houthi domination.

It goes without saying that what Yemen is experiencing today is not the result of recent events only, but that Iran has had a presence in Yemen since the shift adopted by the Houthis when they pledged allegiance to the mullahs of Tehran.

This shift’s intensity escalated with the six wars in Saada in the middle of the last decade (2005-2006), as this represented the beginning of the domestic confrontation in Yemen.

It is a confrontation that witnessed a significant escalation after the events of 2011, as previ ously mentioned, as the Houthi group found an opportunity to pounce on the Yemeni state with the support of Tehran, taking advantage of the chaos that struck many countries in the Arab region between 2011 and 2013.

Hence, it becomes important to shed light on the extent of the intertwining between what is happening in Tehran and its repercussions on what is happening in Yemen. In the past, some considered that the Yemeni crisis and the fluctuations in the pace of its severity were related to the Iranian nuclear issue and the progress or setbacks taking place in ne gotiations.

Tehran has been keen to employ the Yemeni crisis and other crises in the region, such as the Iraqi, Lebanese and Syrian crises, in managing its negotiating processes regarding its nuclear program with the United States and European countries, seeking to achieve gains and score points in favor of its program in order to calm these crises without setting a final solution for them.

Rather, it seeks to better manage such crises to the extent that it achieves its interests and gains tools that enhance its negotiating posture.

Needless to say, this Iranian negotiating ap proach is not new insofar as its success in em ploying it remains contingent on two elements.

The first one is the absence of a regional or international actor in the crisis, which gives Tehran more space to move, contrary to the Syrian crisis in which the Russians played a role in limiting Iranian expansion in that crisis. Iran’s restricted involvement in Syria may be compared to the extensive Iranian role in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.

The second aspect is the absence of an inter nal party capable of confronting the Iranianbacked party, and perhaps what is happening in Lebanon represents a clear example in this regard. The failure of the Lebanese parties to unite in confronting Hezbollah and its allies gave the latter the opportunity to disrupt po litical and economic life, to the extent that Lebanon has reached the edge of a failed state.

In light of the foregoing, the talk becomes about the interconnected and interdependent relation ship between the raging Iranian civil unrest and the escalation of crises in the region in general, and the Yemeni crisis in particular, which this report reviews through two axes:

Yemen and Collapse of Armistice: Back to Ground Zero

In a move that was not expected by many, the Yemeni truce collapsed after it had begun to bear fruit under the auspices of the United Na tions and humanitarian support by Saudi Ara bia.

What Yemen is experiencing today is not the result of recent events only, but that Iran has had a presence in Yemen since the shift adopted by the Houthis.

This UN and Saudi support was felt by all Yemenis as the truce was able to allow the entry of aid to the Yemeni people, including the Houthis. It also enabled them to go out to receive treatment abroad when the airports reopened and the ports were restored.

This comes in addition to facilitating navi gation according to what was agreed upon under the armistice, which was hoped to con tinue to become permanent, and to open the door to serious negotiations between all par ties to put an end to a war that has entered its

second decade.

It represented an initial step in the process of restoring security and stability to the Yemeni state while rebuilding its organizational struc tures.

However, without any prior notice, the Houthi group refused to extend the truce and started to escalate the situation and instigate battles, using all of the weapons smuggled to it from Tehran, in addition to targeting the Yemeni citizens, with a return of the situation to the ground zero again.

It is the escalation that emptied all international and regional efforts of their content on the one hand and revealed the evasive and procrastinat ing policies that have long been pursued by this group, which is breaching national and interna tional legal norms while working for the ben efit of the Iranian state.

Accordingly, it can be said that the Houthi group’s refusal to extend the truce revealed the insistence of the group and its Iranian ally to continue their path to drain and exhaust the Yemeni state.

A military parade displaying Houthi forces and weapons moves through a main street of Sanaa, Yemen, on Sept. 21, 2022.

The Yemeni truce collapsed after it had begun to bear fruit under the auspices of the United Nations and humanitarian support by Saudi Arabia.

As a ceasefire deadline in war-ravaged Yemen lapsed, fears are raised that fresh fighting would wipe out the small gains made by civiliansKhaled Ziad AFP/File

The Houthi group is also trying to impose its will by force, enabling it to win politically in the battle of negotiations to put pressure on re gional and international parties in other matters that are being negotiated. The foremost of these is the Iranian nuclear issue, which is still fluctu ating in light of the complexity of the situation due to the Russian-Ukrainian war and its global and regional repercussions.

Iran and Igniting Yemeni Crisis: A Continuous Strategy

In a different interpretation of the Houthi esca lation in the Yemeni crisis, the primary active Iranian role in supporting this group cannot be overlooked, not only with weapons and ammu nition, but also with funding, experts and de ployment strategies, which confirms what was previously mentioned about Tehran’s strategy in its continuous attempts to steer people away from its domestic crises by igniting external tensions.

This comes while bearing in mind that this strategy is not Iranian-made, but rather an old strategy, known to many countries when their

ruling regimes fail to undertake their domestic responsibilities. Iran is creating external crises to draw the attention of public opinion away from the tragic conditions experienced by the Iranian people.

However, the Iranian people recently rose up against the regime due to the killing of the Ira nian girl Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Ira nian regime’s henchmen, under the slogan of protecting morality.

This incident represented the straw that broke the camel’s back and the matches that set fire to the Iranian body, which became saturated with political pressures and economic crises. The domestic conditions exploded in an unprec edented way, leading to the raising of slogans demanding the overthrow of the mullahs’ re gime.

The regime has not succeeded in achieving any aspirations for a nation which was once among the peoples possessing civilization and culture, and today it stands begging for its basic needs in light of its escalating living crises and re pressed freedoms.

In light of this inflamed Iranian interior that threatens a big explosion from time to time and in light of an external failure in managing negotiations regarding its nuclear program, the mullahs’ regime did not find a way out of its domestic crises except by stirring up unrest in the countries in which it has subordinate wings, whether through its proxies taking a political form, as is the case in Lebanon, or a military form, as is the case in Yemen, or a combina tion of the political and military, as is the case in Iraq and Syria.

In the midst of this, the negotiating position of the Houthi group’s refusal to extend the armi stice in Yemen is explained in light of Iranian pressure on the group to return to the stage of war and conflict, hoping to exert more pres sure on regional states and international actors in the Yemeni crisis in order to relieve pres sure on Tehran on the one hand and divert the attention of Iranian public opinion away from internal failures to external crises on the other hand.

However, despite the achievements of this Ira nian strategy, which it followed previously, as happened in the Green Revolution in 2009, its success this time is facing difficulty in light of

the intensity of demonstrations and the expan sion of their territory and spread into various Iranian provinces and cities.

This comes in addition to the interaction of Ira nian expats in various countries of the world, who took part in demonstrations rejecting inhu mane practices at home and Iran’s interference in the affairs of many countries abroad, exacer bating the intensity of public anger towards the ruling regime and its policies.

In a nutshell, what is happening in Yemen, the aggravation of the situation, the escalation of the battles, and the violation of sovereignty by

The Houthi group is also trying to impose its will by force, enabling it to win politically in the battle of negotiations to put pressure on regional and international parties in other matters that are being negotiated.

Protests across the world have taken place since the death of 22year-old Iranian Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16. (Photo by Taymaz Valley)

the Houthi group, come mainly from the ag gressive Iranian support that demanded a rejec tion of the armistice and return to square one.

Iran has taken advantage of the current moment with its international and regional entangle ments as Tehran realizes that the international system is undergoing transformations among its major actors who are kept busy with how to stabilize their situations, giving Iran more space for movement and escalation.

This comes in addition to Iran’s awareness of the many crises that the region suffers from — politically, economically and security-wise.

Major countries are busy searching for effec tive solutions to these crises, for fear of a wors ening situation that might jeopardize their se curity and stability.

Therefore, Tehran is seeking to use the Yemeni crisis and other crises in the region to allevi ate its domestic failures, in the hope of getting through the current crisis as it did before.

This requires everyone to pay attention to the Houthi escalation in Yemen. This escalation carries with it several dangers that together threaten regional and international security and stability.

New Schisms Threaten EU’s Cohesion

By Jassim Mohamad – Bonn

The European Union is divided once more about many issues. The discord is occurring after wit nessing disagreements that nearly ravaged this un ion or bloc in recent years, which is often described as fragile and more of an economic bloc than any thing else.

Migration was perhaps the most prominent issue in previous years, with many splits over the recep

tion and redistribution of refugees, to the point where many observers considered the Dublin and Schengen agreements to have been cancelled. This prompted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, during the Ukraine crisis and its challenges, to demand the restoration of the bloc’s “internal order,” most notably the requirement of unanimous decisionmaking.

Today, the European Union is put to the test by the crises of energy, gas, subsidies, and arms sup

plies to Ukraine, as well as the rise of military hypocrisy and the adoption of new security and defense policies.

GERMANY: Contrary to popular belief, sup porters of the government’s center-left parties, rather than the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), express the greatest willing ness to defend Ukraine. The majority of cur rent Green Party supporters, as well as a sizable number of SPD voters, want Germany to defend Ukraine. There is a slightly larger proportion of those who vote for the CDU who do not want Germany to defend Ukraine any more than they do already.

FRANCE: Supporters of President Emma nuel Macron and his center-right rival Valérie Pécresse want France to stand up for Ukraine, but unlike Germany, where the majority of vot ers for the largest far-right party (Alternative for Germany) do not want their country to do so, and supporters of the two nationalist leaders Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour are divided on the is sue.

ITALY: This is also true for supporters of all ma jor parties in Italy, which is widely regarded as one of the EU member countries most friendly to Russia. Those who vote for the Democratic Party are most eager to see their country defend Ukraine (55%), but 40% of party supporters dis agree. Similarly, while 54% of those who vote for Italy’s far-right Brothers believe their coun try should not defend Ukraine, 37% believe it should.

POLAND: The vast majority of all party sup porters want Poland to defend Ukraine. When asked whom they trust to protect the interests of EU citizens in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, supporters of the ruling Law and Justice Party are the only group in the Polish govern ment that most people trust to do so - a reflection of the country’s political polarization.

DISAGREEMENT AND DIVISIONS WITHINN THE EU ON THE FOL LOWING ISSUES:

1- Ukraine Support

As for debt management and the migration crisis, observers are concerned about the Eurozone’s economic development. In July 2022, the Eu

rozone’s already large trade deficit increased by €8.1 billion to €40.3 billion. This is by far the largest foreign trade deficit since the currency’s inception in 1999. Along with rising energy im port prices, the evolution of the euro currency is critical.

Owing to the weaker euro, energy imports billed in US dollars are widening the trade gap. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, public debt as a percentage of GDP in the Eurozone was 95.6%, and 88.1% in the European Union. Furthermore, member states are accruing costs as a result of Ukraine assistance. Without counting the cost of military aid, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen estimated the financial contributions made thus far at 19 billion euros. The burdens on member states are likely to be much higher due to state obligations and guarantees.

These figures exclude the costs incurred as a re sult of the Ukrainians granted temporary asylum in an EU country: approximately 1.4 million in Poland, 660,000 in Germany, 431,000 in the Czech Republic, 154,000 in Italy, 142,000 in Spain, and 134,000 in Bulgaria.

For the sake of completeness and order, it should be noted here that, according to official Commis sariat figures, the Russian Federation received nearly 2.6 million Ukrainians. As a result of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the EU27 granted Kyiv the status of EU candidate quickly - and even hastily, according to critics. However, for the time being, preparations for accession nego tiations can only be a source of concern for EU countries, as is their division over Ukraine’s ac cession to the bloc, especially given the German and the Dutch positions.

2- Price Cap On Energy

The German government has responded to criti

Turkey has benefited from its domestic transformation by modelling its Neighborhood Policy after that of the European Union.

Photo by Michele Spatari/ NurPhoto via Getty Images

cism from France and the EU Commissioner over Berlin’s €200 billion gas price relief plan, claiming that Paris is implementing similar en ergy support measures. The massive German scheme, which comes on top of an additional €95 billion in energy price support measures an nounced by Berlin in recent months, has drawn harsh criticism from Italy and almost veiled warnings from French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire, who said Germany risks creating an advantage. It is unjust to impose these support measures on poorer EU countries that cannot af ford them.

Many issues divide France and Germany. “On several issues, we disagree with France and Ger many,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said as

he arrived in Brussels for a meeting of European leaders on October 20, 2022. “You mentioned that working through these differences can take a long time,” he added. The concerns and divisions of Europeans (particularly those of the French and Germans) are currently focused on the issue of rising energy prices.

The European Union discussed the issue on Oc tober 20, 2022, against the backdrop of recordhigh gas and electricity bills. Many companies prefer to close some of their factories rather than pay these bills, resulting in growing social dis content.

A recession is on the horizon, complete with bankruptcies and unemployment. They did not find a silver bullet, but they agreed to ask the Commission to investigate avenues that some, led by Germany, did not want to pursue. French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized his collaboration with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to strengthen the German-French rela tionship and stated that he is working with close technical advisors. The main issue, according to Scholz, was to stop the “boom” in the gas trade.

The Ukraine conflict prompted European NATO allies to commit to spending %2 of GDP on defense at the Wales summit.

Photo Credit: Sergei Chaiko | Dream stime.com

3- Raising The Contribution Rate to NATO to 2%

The EU countries’ collective procurement short fall to support Ukraine and arms supplies has fragmented the defense policy. With 29 differ ent types of destroyers, 17 types of main battle tanks, and 20 types of combat aircraft, European armed forces are largely redundant, compared to the United States’ four, one, and six types, re spectively. The Ukraine conflict prompted Eu ropean NATO allies to commit to spending 2% of GDP on defense at the Wales summit. Some European countries have begun the arduous task of reconfiguring their armies for high-intensity warfare. On the ground, this meant focusing on rebuilding the readiness of heavy, combat-capa ble brigades.

A French general has served as Supreme Com mander of the Allied Powers, and France plays an important role within NATO in helping to balance approaches. It is increasingly listened to in NATO, where it has gained credibility as a result of its participation in a forward presence, as well as its demonstrated operational compe tence in foreign operations. As a result, it is well positioned to advocate for the strengthening of European defense, not against, but alongside, the United States.

4- Visas for Russians

The EU is divided over Russia’s visa ban. On 29th of August, 2022, EU defense ministers are seeking a unified position on whether the EU should prohibit Russian tourists. Can the visa agreement be suspended? According to Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic States, the answer is “yes” and thus they have stopped issuing short-term visas to Russians. Germany, Greece, Cyprus, and the European Commission, on the other hand, were more conservative and opposed a strict travel ban on Russians.

In this regard, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated that the war was the responsibility of Rus sian President Vladimir Putin, making it difficult for him to support a blanket travel ban that would also affect innocent people. The Czech Presi dency of the Council of the European Union has placed the visa issue on the agenda of the infor mal meeting of Defense Ministers scheduled for October 2022 in Prague.

5- EU-Turkey Relations

Looking at Turkish foreign policy in the Mid dle East through the lens of EU-Turkey relations, there is political activity in the region attributed to the reform and dual accession processes, both

Refugees from Ukraine have been crossing at land borders of neighboring countries, like Slovakia | Photo: Radovan Stoklasa/ Reuters

of which are linked to EU actions. Turkey has benefited from its domestic transformation by modelling its Neighborhood Policy after that of the European Union. Some EU countries, most notably Germany, have been chastised for taking a “soft stance” on immigration and the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkey was isolated in the Middle East by ear ly 2021, facing European Union sanctions, and experiencing a sharp economic decline. Turkey reached out to Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and, finally, to Saudi Arabia through out the year. Ankara attempted to defuse its longrunning disputes with all of them through diplo

matic and intelligence contacts.

6- Immigration

According to Dr. Vittoria Meissner, the juxta position of the Ukrainian and Belarusian situa tions on the Polish border has revealed a flaw in the EU’s asylum and immigration policy. While there is universal support for Ukrainian refugees. Germany can help to address double standards and break the downward spiral of EU migration and asylum policy, which has resulted in viola tions of EU values.

On October 22, 2022, European Union leaders renewed efforts to resolve their differences over how to deal with migrants, but they disagreed on the best way forward, with the European Com mission President saying there would be no EU money for this “that is, the construction of barbed wire and walls.” While overall immigra tion figures are low in comparison to the bloc’s population of about 450 million people, the is sue is fueling support for nationalist and populist groups across the European Union, making com promise difficult among the bloc’s 27 members. “We need these people because we are an ag ing society,” said Ylva Johansson, an EU immi

An EU-wide agreement to process asylum claims and redistribute refugees from Africa or the Middle East appears difficult.

Photo Credit: Staysail | Dreamstime.com

Photo by FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP via Getty Images

gration official. It sparked endless debates about where people should live, between the Mediter ranean coast countries where most had arrived, the hesitant easterners, and the more affluent northern states where many newcomers aspired to live. More than a million people arrived on the European Union’s shores in 2015, crowding security and social care networks and fueling farright sentiment.

7- EU-MENA Relations

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the European Union has long attempted to re main neutral, with its representatives maintain ing contact with both the Israeli and Palestinian governments.

Certainly, the EU’s position on this issue will not change anytime soon, and EU institutions will continue to emphasize the importance of resuming peaceful dialogue and respecting Palestinian rights and freedoms, particularly in the Gaza Strip. The European Union has backed Israel’s new govern ment, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, but Brussels is keeping a close eye on key issues such as human rights, settlement activity, and economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.

Germany, on the other hand, has a one-of-a-kind relationship with Israel because of Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust, or the system atic genocide of six million European Jews under National Socialism. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel on May 12, 1965, the two countries’ relationship has continued to deepen and strengthen, both at the official and civil society levels. The estab lishment of the German-Israeli Intergovernmen tal Consultation in 2008 marked the beginning of a new chapter in bilateral relations, during which the two governments met for a round of consulta tions.

Conclusion

- The situation is expected to deteriorate fur ther against the backdrop of massive additional spending by European Union member states on economic and social aid provided to Ukraine, which is prompting the emergence of opposi tion from within the EU countries, particularly in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hun gary, and other countries, which increases dis content with governments due to inflation and price hikes.

- European defense is based on two pillars: NATO and the European Union, but it requires public support to build Europe’s defenses. With the ex ception of France and the United Kingdom, this defense was primarily provided by NATO and the United States, whose expenditures devoted to European defense are estimated at 35.8 bil lion dollars, which is slightly less than France’s defense budget. The United States is critical to NATO’s strategic and tactical nuclear capabili ties. France is a major player in European Un ion defense policy and, with the exception of the Nuclear Planning Group, it needs to strengthen its participation in NATO, which it rejoined in 2009.

- The Union is likely to cancel the visa agree ment, which has been in effect with Russia since 2007, and which speeds up the visa process. This has already been confirmed by EU diplomats in comments to the Financial Times. The suspen sion of the visa agreement will complicate and increase the cost of applying for short-term visas in the Schengen area. A blanket travel ban, which would require unanimous approval, is unlikely.

- The EU and its member countries must under stand Turkey’s new pragmatism in the Middle East and seize emerging opportunities to col laborate with it on a wide range of policy issues, as well as assess the impact of Ankara’s new ap proach on the region, the motivation behind it, and the implications for European politics, as well as potential areas for cooperation and con flict.

It appears that Brussels will have a difficult time fixing the immigration system. Brussels wants to create more legal pathways for skilled migrants to move to the European Union in order to re duce illegal immigration, but this is unlikely to happen.

- Despite the unprecedented consensus within the European Union, which led to the imposition of sanctions on Russia, the political isolation of Moscow and the reception of millions of Ukrain

ian refugees, the EU is still at risk of division. A new poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations has revealed that public opinion in the EU is divided between and within countries over what outcome to push.

- The Ukraine war served as a wake-up call for Europe, which took decisive steps to assist Ukraine while also bolstering European secu

EU Council President Charles Michel (R) arrives with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before a meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (POOL / Reuters)

rity and defense. However, a sustained collec tive effort to transform and rationalize European defense is possible. Without it, more European defense spending may be squandered, and the continent will continue to rely on the US for de fense.

- An EU-wide agreement to process asylum claims and redistribute refugees from Africa or

the Middle East appears difficult.

- What should European Union countries do to fully leverage this bloc, NATO, and estab lish other multilateral formulas to overcome division and avoid a fragmented defense ap proach? Then they can collaborate to invest in capabilities, resulting in a strong and resilient industrial base.

pinion

Europe’s Autumn

Gamal Abd El-Maboud

Autumn has arrived early in Europe this year, and its withered yellow leaves fell in a scene that aligns nature with the destructive effect of the Ukraine war on European economy. It also coincides with the pessimistic expectations of an economic depression accompanied by political failures, strikes, and protests that would not spare any country in the world. Even China is facing an economic slowdown worse than during Covid and lockdowns. Severe political earthquakes are expected, not least of which is Taiwan’s annexation to China or border skirmishes that would pave the way for invasion of South Korea.

These would also include the fall of governments, and the right wing taking hold of power in some European countries. There would be no consolation for hard-working ordinary citizens who would pay the price of their amateur leaders’ adventures, who came to power thanks to social media that is making heroes of people who could not withstand their first crisis. The Ukraine war is undoubtedly the best evidence. After two decades of relative world peace, the war erupted in Ukraine, though it could have been averted if the world were able to read Putin’s messages.

Being a veteran KPG officer who was brought up in the era of Soviet glory, Putin saw his country degraded after the Cold War. In February 2007, he went to the Munich Conference on European Security with the sole intention of kicking off the Second Cold War, banging on the podium and warning against breaking the West›s promises to Russia during Germany›s unification not to expand to the east.

However, NATO admitted Poland, Hungary,

Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia during Russia›s most difficult times, prior to the appearance of the young Czar of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who used his foreign policy as a deadly weapon for internal cohesion and building a Great Russia on the ruins of the collapsed Russia, and he declared his motto:

“Whoever does not mourn Russia›s loss is heartless, and whoever wishes to restore it as it was is brainless; it is more appropriate to build a new great Russia.”

He also halted the unipolar world›s expansion to the east, and he did not wait long when NATO flirted with Georgia. Putin produced a creative chaos that ended with Russian tanks entering the Georgian capital Tbilisi, and exposed the separatist allies in the West who turned the Georgia issue into a frozen conflict just as Ukraine, while highlighting America›s contempt for international law by its invading Iraq and Afghanistan and acting unilaterally in international problems thereby threatening global stability.

Because Putin is a pragmatist and opportunist, he took advantage of the revolution against the Russian leaders in Kyiv, annexed Crimea, and returned the port of Sevastopol to Russia›s arms, reinstating it as its access to warm water.

To commemorate the occasion, Putin rode into Crimea on a motorcycle, surrounded by a team of young bikers resembling military militias during the era of Hitler and Mussolini. It was an unmistakable hallmark of the Russian hawk Putin, who succeeded in dealing with five American presidents and is steadfast in building a new Russia based on foreign policy. He was the sole major player in Syria, thereby exposing Obama›s hesitation. Putin was also a primary power

The Ukrainians will realize that they bet on the wrong horse, and it would have been better for them to negotiate with their neighbor who is good at the game of scorched earth

broker when war broke out between Azerbaijan, which was backed by its ally Turkey, on the one hand, and Armenia, which was abandoned by Russia for regional reasons and in consideration of its potential allies, Turkey and Iran, on the other.

But the war ended with peace talks conducted solely by the Kremlin›s master, to the exclusion of Turkey and Iran, and the reintroduction of the Russian army into the Caucasus, this time under the guise of preserving the fragile peace between the Azerbaijani and Armenian peoples.

The Czar was not satisfied with that so he turned his gaze to the brown continent, particularly the Central African Republic, which had rejected French influence. Russia was singing slogans of human rights and democracy in order to reach the country’s mines, only to have Russia come in and occupy them as well. However, there was something akin to development and cooperation and appreciation of the lessons in human rights that France had not taken into account in any of its former colonies. This is regarded as an unprecedented success for Russian foreign policy, whose influence is also growing in Venezuela and Libya, preparing the return of the Cold War.

As the mechanisms of destruction became more fierce and the lines of confrontation lengthened more than they should, the jewel in the crown of Russian foreign policy was the seizure of the Hamim and Tartus bases in Syria, so that Russia overlooked Turkey›s shooting down of a Russian Sukhoi aircraft for a purpose known only to the Czar, who is no longer hidden after the annexation of Crimea and parts of Ukraine, declaring that Russia has returned to the international arena again and with force.

The West was content to impose sanctions with limited impact on a smaller country like Iran, but it hastened the formation of a tripartite alliance between Russia, Turkey, and Iran, the results of which can be seen in the Russian missile deal to Turkey, the grain exit agreement from Ukraine, and the suicide drones raining down on Kyiv, an unprecedented success for Russia in its decades as an international empire.

The Ukrainian war was a logical result of Ukraine’s attempt to join NATO and threaten Russia’s vital space. Russian tanks were loaded

under the guise of annual border manoeuvres, but they did not return to their bases. The West did not understand or hear Kissinger›s advice, the last survivor of the cold war foxes, who advised NATO to stay away from Ukraine, but no one understood or heard. Rather, on the eve of the Russian invasion, the British Foreign Secretary behaved arrogantly in Moscow, and instead of defusing the crisis, she acted as if she were a Victorian Foreign Secretary, when the policy of battleships always won. The Russian Foreign Minister ignored her and the carriers lowered their tanks on the outskirts of Kyiv, while the real goal was to bite off eastern Ukraine and some of its southern regions in order to make Zelenskyy appeal to the West. This did not and will not save his country from the Russian bear, who returned with unprecedented force and brutality to make Europeans suffer from the cruelty of autumn, waiting for unforeseen disasters, not the least of which was the British Prime Minister changing twice in less than eight weeks. This is a small portion of the fire that lies beneath the ashes of the Ukrainian war. After more than four decades in the United Kingdom, I can almost guarantee that Europeans will not tolerate the deprivation of their fragrant teas accompanied by their favorite biscuits, because when there is a shortage of goods, as happened in the first weeks of the COVID19 pandemic, people forget about order and manners, and battles break out in food stores.

As a result of the increase in popular sympathy for Russia outside the European continent, not love, admiration, or appreciation for Putin, but rather a feeling of anger at the West›s contradictory behavior and policies around the world, and its addiction to the selective opportunistic behavior in other international problems, it is expected that several European governments will fall and the majority will return to the Republican Party in the US Congress.

In the end, I believe the West will have to negotiate with Russia, and the Ukrainians will realize that they bet on the wrong horse, and it would have been better for them to negotiate with their neighbor, the Russian bear, who is good at the game of scorched earth, and employs the freezing weather to keep the world suffering from Europe›s autumn.

ook Reviews

Hitler’s Pope

The current Pope Learned the Lesson

By Mohammad Ali Salih – Washington

This time the Pope seemed to have learned the lesson: he condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine right after it started in February. In April, he said that the Christians of the world should unite to liberate Ukraine. In September, he said that “supplying weapons to Ukraine is morally acceptable for selfdefense.”

And last week, during his Sunday public address at the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square, he condemned the «relentless bombings» of Ukrainian cities, said the attacks had unleashed a «hurricane of violence» on civilians, and appealed to «those who have the fate of the war in their hands» to stop.

Well into the Ukraine war, a book was released by Brown University’s Professor David Kertzer, “The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.”

This is not the first, and might not be the last book, about how the Vatican supported Germany’s dictator and expansionist Adolf Hitler, as well as his ally and mentor, Italy’s Benito Mussolini.

Needless to say, the subject is sensitive for many Catholics, if not for the rest of the Christians, insofar as both Hitler and Mussolini were Christians, though to varying degrees.

But this book didn’t miss a chance to criticize the Vatican, and is probably the most aggressive and formidable assessment. Before it, there was a less aggressive book, Garry Wills’s “Papal Sin,” and John Cornwell’s “Hitler’s Pope,” which was not as aggressive as the title implied. This book’s author, David Kertzer, a professor of history at Brown University, Rhode Island, could be

credited for his decades-long academic interest in the subject, about which he had written a few books, particularly about the contemporary history of Italy.

Among his books: “The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism”; “Prisoner of the Vatican: The Pope’s Plot to Capture Italy”; “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe”; and “The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe.”

Pius XII followed after Popes Pius IX and Pius XI. When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were opened, and Kertzer mined the new material. His aggressive theme was – how the Pope set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power.

Before his election to the papacy, the Pius XII was secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and Cardinal Secretary of State, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with European and Latin American nations, such as the German Reich’s Catholic Church.

While the Vatican was officially neutral during World War II, the German Catholic Church›s role was

Book: “The Pope at War: The Secret His tory of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.”

Author: David Kertzer Publisher: Random House, New York Paper Pages: 641 Price: Paper: $37.50. Electronic: $14.99

controversial. There have been allegations of public silence and inaction about a variety of subjects: the fate of the Jews; aid to the victims of the Nazis during the war; and, a direct condemnation of the war.

Although he maintained links to the German Resistance, and shared intelligence with the Allies, his public condemnation of genocide was considered inadequate by the Allied Powers.

During his papacy, the Catholic Church issued the Decree against Communism, declaring that Catholics who profess Communist doctrine are to be excommunicated as apostates from the Christian faith. This opinion made him, theoretically and practically, an ally of Hitler and Mussolini.

Throughout this decades-old debate, the Pope’s supporters maintained that he was caught between protecting his church, with its 40 million German Catholics, and the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini.

In 1981, a 12volume compilation of the Vatican’s World War II documents was released, but it was suspected that evidence critical of the Pope was held back.

In 2019, Pope Francis allowed outside historians to inspect the archives. It was reported that Kertzer, the book’s author, was in Rome at the door of the archives on the day the files were opened for study.

The new documents showed that Pius XII thought he could come to terms with Hitler. Right after the Pope’s coronation in 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, But the Pope believed he could negotiate with him as

he had done for a long time, and considered him as an ally against communism.

The archive records also revealed that the Pope suppressed decrees attacking racism and antisemitism that his predecessor, Pius XI, had planned to release the day before his death.

The new documents also disclosed secret meetings between Pius XII and a representative of Hitler, only weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

In that meeting, the Pope agreed to avoid involvement in “partisan politics” (criticizing Hitler) in return for Hitler’s ending of restrictions on Catholic schools.

“No one here is anti-German,” the Pope told Hitler’s representative, “ We love Germany. We are pleased if Germany is great and powerful. And we do not oppose any particular form of government, if only the Catholics can live in accordance with their religion.”

There were also the already known warm birthday greetings to Hitler in April 1939, six months after the horror of Kristallnacht, which was the destruction of Jewish properties in Germany.

As expected, defenders of the Pope might not be pleased with the new revelations, and might continue their strategy about the sensitivity of the subject.

This has been the theme about the relations between Jews and Catholics, and indeed all the Christian denominations, who, Hitler or no Hitler, have found it difficult to defend themselves against centuriesold mistreatment, discrimination, imprisonment and killing of Jews.

Finally, this Pope, Francis, defense of Ukraine against Russia has its own implications: about 70 percent of the Ukrainians are Catholic and about 13 percent belong to the Orthodox Church, sister of the Russian one.

Would Pope Francis have been so against Russia otherwise?

While the Vatican was officially neutral during World War II, the German Catholic Church›s role was controversial. There have been allegations of public silence and inaction about a variety of subjects.

Book Cover

rtA Lucian and Freud

At the National Gallery, a great artist is reunited with his doctor

By Bryn Haworth

Many years ago, in my very first visit to Florence, I had a brief love affair with an Italian woman. When I say it was a love affair, perhaps I should qualify that, since the phrase is deceptively conventional, and there was nothing conventional about our story.

The whole thing transpired in a large bedroom in broad daylight, and in the presence of two maids who were rummaging in a chest. Oh, and a small dog, a kind of spaniel, that slept through our entire liaison. I remained fully-dressed throughout, of course – virginal shyness was my chief affliction back then, and I was accustomed to being told I required an older woman to sort me out. Although this one was (give or take a decade) five hundred years my senior, she was remarkably well-preserved for her age. In fact, she looked somewhat younger than I did at that time, and no longer virginal, judging by the expression on her face and the symbolic violence she was wreaking on a flower.

I don’t wish to create the impression that there was anything sordid about all this. Despite the woman’s self-evident knowingness when it came to matters Biblical, we maintained our relations on terms of the utmost decorum. When I first caught sight of her across a crowded room in the Uffizi, it was a text book coup de foudre, an effect I attribute to the odd way her eyes had of following one around the room. At the time, this optical effect gave me the profound conviction that I alone was the object of her gaze. However, it was noon, the gallery was humming with visitors. I was forced to jostle with members of the public just to get near her. As a result, we never had a chance to speak, or even to commune silently, so intrusive was the press of art lovers. It seemed that I was fated to endure what the great critical theorist, Walter Benjamin, referred to as ‘love at last sight’.

Fortunately for us both, I refused to leave things like that. My affliction might have made me awkward in the field of love, but I was a very resourceful in the earlier stages of a campaign. I merely waited for the remainder of the day, then returned at the instant before the gallery closed. Once in, I headed with unseemly haste back to where I remembered seeing her, but the room was still crowded, so instead I dilly-dallied for what seemed like an unconscionably long time around Botticelli’s Venus, entirely unmoved by her beauty.

As the natural light faded somewhat, the visitors slowly decanted through the gallery’s exit. I seized my chance. Almost breaking into a run, I headed directly for the room where I’d first seen her. I was out of breath by the time I managed to track it down again. As I entered, I saw the backs of some stragglers disappear

through a door to the left. At last, I had her to myself. I was all aflutter. As I turned towards her, she looked at me, and this time her gaze was undoubtedly fixed on mine. I was utterly alone with this gorgeous creature, as alone as Titian himself had once been with her, the maids and the little dog notwithstanding. For five minutes, maybe more, I had her completely to myself: anyone else who might be looking at her – anywhere on the face of the planet – was having to make do with a mechanical reproduction. The yellowish Italian light faded imperceptibly as the chatter of the gallery visitors receded into the distance, and there I was, consuming her aura all by myself, like a voluptuary, and all for the price of an extra ticket.

Oddly, the experience of that painting has never faded, but the question that bugs me, decades later, is whose aura I was consuming. Was it the aura of the painting itself, which was the quality Benjamin so privileged over reproductions, or was it the girl the painting depicted? The obvious answer would be the young woman from Urbino, through a mist of my own sublimated hormones, but any image from the top shelf of a newsagent back then might have done just as well. Not unlike the goddess from Urbino, the woman on the magazine cover would be scantily clad, but that wouldn’t make her a nude. On this vexed topic, one naturally refers to the view of Kenneth Clark:

‘The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude,” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders [he means the British] that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practised and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.’

How cute that reference to ‘educated usage’ sounds today. But there’s a more obvious problem with this distinction between naked and nude. If the former implies embarrassment, then it would seem appropriate for a great many so-called ‘nudes’ of Western art, from the very origin of all female nudes – Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite, who is seen hastily (and unsuccessfully) covering herself –to the body of Susanna repetitively exposed to the Elders.

The same involuntary exposure is the cause of Diana’s anger after Actaeon inadvertently stumbles upon her bathing. This particular story fascinated Titian. Embarrassment was arguably the only ‘decent’ accompaniment of female

nakedness, since it delivered the woman from any possible charge of flaunting it. In the parlance of our days, there was an element here of having one’s cheesecake and eating it. The female body could be seductive, but involuntarily so. In the terms outlined by Clark, the border between nudity and nakedness is troubled along gender lines: one man’s nude is another woman’s naked.

Mere nakedness can more readily be distinguished from nudity if it is abject. I think here of the state of almost a hundred migrants dumped by Turkey on the Greek border. This is the condition described by King Lear with such clarity when he addresses what he takes to be a deranged beggar:

‘Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings!’ (Act 3, Scene 4)

At this point, the old king starts tearing off his clothes (‘lendings’ here means clothing of any kind). The thing itself, as Shakespeare calls it, is the fundamental reality of human existence. Reduced to a kind of quiddity, the human body is full of pathos, yet even this condition can become nude when rendered in art. It is arguable that the body in pain is another form of nakedness, and so it appears in Grünewald’s harrowing depictions of the crucifixion, but in more stylised versions we can see the figure of Christ shading into nudity. The question may even be theological, depending on whether the painter wishes to represent the Son of Man as a bare, forked animal, or else as a crucified god.

Before I leave this topic, it’s worth looking at John Berger’s attempt to distinguish one state of undress from the other:

‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises’ (Ways of Seeing, 1972).

This feels a bit like watching a great critic tie himself in knots. Whereas Clark seemed preoccupied with the dignity of the nude, Berger sees its reduction of the body to an object*. There is a hint of exploitation in that word ‘use’.

Nowadays, it is a commonplace to complain that women’s bodies in particular are objectified by the male gaze. The nude is a sham according to this critique, as it serves to prettify the act of colonising the female body. These distinctions may sound arcane, even slightly silly to a British reader. When Peter Cook and Dudley Moore visited a picture gallery full of ‘naked ladies’, it wasn’t the women’s eyes that seemed to follow them around the room – it was their bottoms. We ‘artless islanders’ prefer the comedy of the dirty postcard to the high seriousness of the nude. When there was a campaign to keep Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ in the country, it gained press support not only from the broadsheets, but from the Sun, which featured imitative nude photoshoots using the tabloid›s Page Three models photoshopped onto the painting. Here in merry olde England, when it comes to matters of the flesh, the low brow is never far away.

On the Continent, however, there is a matter-of-factness that makes the British attitude seem puerile. Even before the ideal of the Aryan body was dreamt up by Nazi ideologues, the Germans holidayed on an island called Sylt which was

The obvious parallels between the sitting process and psychotherapy: the regimented one-on-one sessions; the interplay between the observer and the sitter; the accumulated hours fraught with self-examination’

Lucian bare torso

dedicated to nakedness. And still is. Anyone who has watched the behaviour of German tourists on Greek beaches will know that the old Hellenic nakedness is as unabashed as it ever was, just not among the Greeks.

It is intriguing, then, to see the way Britain treats one of its most celebrated portrait painters, Lucian Freud, who was born in Berlin at a time when Walter Benjamin was still living there and experiencing love at last sight in a German park. Freud may have unconsciously brought the ethos of Sylt to our shores, executing an immense catalogue of nakedness in his secluded London studios. He was a bit of a nudist in his own right, as the National Gallery’s present retrospective demonstrates. Superbly curated by a Daniel Herrmann, the show reaches its climax in a vast self-portrait of Lucian Freud wearing nothing more than a slightly ridiculous pair of slippers. I have spoken at length about this image in the article devoted to Saint Lucian.

My object now is to emphasise the German roots of Freud’s extraordinary paintings, though even in doing so I am chary of offending his ghost. Lucian preferred for the most part to downplay his connections with a country that had ejected him.

German throughout, at least until the death of his mother. Beyond this meagre evidence it is hard to gauge his relationship to his birthplace. Herrmann feels that he was in closer touch with the scene there than he lets on, quite possibly as a result of his mother’s art historical talents. But when he was compared with, say, Otto Dix, Freud bristled. In an interview, sitting alongside his old friend John Richardson, he explains why he abandoned sable brushes in the Fifties: Freud: When people said my work had a Germanic quality, I couldn’t bear it!

Richardson: What’s wrong with having a Germanic quality?

Freud: I didn’t like anything to do with all that. No, there’s nothing wrong with it! [laughs]

It is easy to speculate what it was Freud couldn’t bear. One thing might have been the perceived failure to assimilate, though funnily enough he was probably more successful in that than most Englishmen. Nonetheless, his accent gave him away; it would have been mortifying to be found out through one’s style as well. The other likely aspect was the horror that had driven his family here. But there was no reluctance to speak about the war. In this same interview he describes the blitz as ‘wonderful’ and reminisces with delight about partying in the basement of the Ritz while the German bombs fell on the capital. He is unperturbed when Richardson recalls how he used to say of himself and his girlfriend at the time “Diana and I are such fascists!” None of this suggests a man deep in the trauma of exile or even particularly haunted by the German cataclysm. Finally, it may even be a case of not wishing to be influenced by any other artist. That same reluctance kept him immune from a lot of things. Rather than list them, one need only consider his remarkable aloofness from artistic fashion. Everybody else, for the entirety of Freud’s career, would be doing something else.

Whatever the reason for his reluctance, the choice of brush was no trivial matter. Sable brushes had given his work what Herrmann describes as its debt to the Northern renaissance, as if he was ‘trying to erase any trace of making’ in this phase of his career, through a polyfocal approach to detail and by eliminating the fingerprint, as we can see in ‘Girl with Roses’ –

The Freuds had fled persecution when Lucian was ten years old. Nonetheless, he retained his heavily accented English to the very end. I suspect he also spoke

Girl with Roses, 1948

The Refugees, 1941. The man in the dark glasses was the family doctor

But everything changed when he abandoned this smooth style. The change occurred, according to David Dawson (his friend, assistant and model) under the influence of Bacon, who taught him how to be ‘a contemporary artist’. The depiction of flesh has a blistered, clotted appearance in contrast to the background, so that the effect is mixed, with impasto for the flesh and a smoother style for inanimate objects. Again, it is Herrmann who notes that this same heavily overpainted style for the flesh is picked up in the depiction of paint itself; for instance, the stippled mess of the stuff on his studio walls, or the clots and gobbets drying on his palette. This alternation between rough and smooth is particularly obvious in the late self-portraits. As David Kamp explains: ‘Freud’s brushwork would get only freer from there as he swapped out his soft sable brushes for stiff, bristly hog’s-hair ones that he would snip down to nubs. From the 60s forward, the paint got thicker, too – whorled, layered, and smeared as he laboriously built-up form through colour’ (Vanity Fair, February 2012).

Another thing we know from his sitters is that he had no difficulty recalling his past, in the sense of vividness or bitterness. He often spoke with affection about his famous grandfather, for example, though he seemed to disdain psychoanalysis. This disdain may have had something to do with an early experience of therapy at the hands of Willi Hoffer who may have diagnosed him as homosexual – for this dubious account I am indebted to the profusely regurgitating mouth of William Feaver. Despite the reported disdain, there is no avoiding ‘…the obvious parallels between the sitting process and psychotherapy: the regimented one-on-one sessions; the interplay between the observer and the sitter; the accumulated hours fraught with self-examination’ (David Kamp).

In fact, one of his sitters, Cozette McCreery, reported that he would quite literally “begin a conversation with ‘Tell me about your childhood.’” Once, when preparing for a picture that involved feathers ripped from a pillow and cherries, McCreary says he burst out laughing. “I was like, ‘What’s so funny?’

And he said, ‘What would my ancestor have made of this?’” Whether he read his grandfather’s book on jokes I cannot say. What he did often explain was how he borrowed a book of limericks belonging to the old man which included this droll verse:

Those girls who frequent picture palaces Have no time for this psychoanalysis, And although Dr Freud Is extremely annoyed They cling to their long-standing fallacies.

When he repeats this to Richardson, the final word still makes him chuckle. Freud appreciated the double entendre, but he had been warned not to show his grandfather this lampoon for fear of offending him.

The phrase ‘picture palaces’ is an archaic description of cinemas. I suspect the founder of psychoanalysis would have spotted that it might also describe art galleries, but more of that anon. First, I want to consider the ‘obvious’ similarity between the Freudian couch and the Lucian settee or bed, because however obvious the comparison, there is a mystery hidden here. Obviously, it had occurred to Lucian Freud that his professional life had been spent imitating his grandfather’s regime. Like him, he excluded the world from his practice, closing the doors against it. His grandfather, in turn, shadows the artistic enquiry. The analysand, his grandfather’s ‘sitter’, reclines on the famous couch and the doctor sits at the head of it, taking notes. Just as with the doctor’s lengthy series of sessions, so with Lucian a narrative unfolds as more ‘information’ (the assistant’s word) is gathered. Both painter and analyst get to know about their subject as time

passes. There can be no hurry. Nor is the process one way. Neither grandfather nor grandson are clinically removed from the setting, they are both involved in the analysand, possibly to the point of distorting their view (as in the famous case of Dora for Sigmund), sometimes owing to unacknowledged desires, or even acknowledged ones. One might think the problem of scientific objectivity and the perils of transference would be more of an issue for a psychologist than for a painter. Actually, Lucian was convinced that Rembrandt had been too attached to his son for his portraits to succeed. “Rembrandt loved Titus so much he couldn’t quite do him straight,” he once said. “I’m very conscious of Titus disease.” Only by avoiding such an excess of sentiment could the painter and the sitter participate in the quest for truth. The word Lucian used was ‘plausibility’.

Titus by Rembrandt. Freud liked to think of himself as an unsentimental biologist

What Lucian did in the studio has been described in detail by Dawson in terms that hark back to Some Thoughts on Painting (1954), suggesting that the artist never felt the need to revisit the fundamentals of his craft. Extraordinarily, he refused to paint the studio backdrop in the sitter’s absence, as the sitter’s aura would have been missing. This concept of aura was one Freud was faithful to, though not in the sense Benjamin had patented. The aura belongs to the artist’s sitters, not to his paintings. This ‘aura or electricity’ affected the very air in the

When Lucian describes his nocturnal visits to the National Gallery, availing himself of a ‘privilege pass’, he describes it as ‘rather like going to a doctor, for help.’

room. Here is Freud way back in 1954: ‘The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different human individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric light bulb. Therefore, the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with that subject itself.’

There’s that word: psychological. The psyche that does the informing could be the sitter’s, the artist’s, or perhaps a combination of the two, as when souls couple with each other.

The other scene in the dream life of Lucian Freud, beyond the studio, was the picture palace. For the most part, the interviews preserved on film vary from one another in content, but one phrase does recur. When he describes his nocturnal visits to the National Gallery, availing himself of a ‘privilege pass’, he describes it as ‘rather like going to a doctor, for help,’ to reaffirm his belief in something that ‘in my hands has ceased to be plausible… I go with a certain emergency.’

Hence the choice of quotation on the wall of the final room in the present exhibition, taken from Hippocrates, the founding father of medical science: ‘Art is long, life is short’.

I’m not sure though – I suspect Lucian’s mental image is closer to that of a mind doctor than a physician. And the idea of this doctor is code. Like his close friend, Francis Bacon, Freud felt a great need for privacy. In Bacon’s case, this meant he developed a kind of patter for the numerous interviews he conducted, coming out with the same phrases from one interview to the next and delivering the script with a beguiling tone of intimacy, even as he used it to conceal more than he revealed. This tendency to repeat himself every time he appeared on camera was only ever disrupted (in his conversation with Melvyn Bragg) by the befuddling effects of alcohol: “Chin, chin!”

It›s hard not to detect a kind of spiritualism here, though this is the haunting of a space by the living, not the dead. The room is bent into a different shape while the person is there, through a process akin to gravitational lensing. Once they are gone, the room collapses back into inanimation. An apt word for this might be animism, but a kind that attaches to living creatures, dogs included. The séance conducted by Freud is also sacred because the painting retains the image of the departed sitter intact, forever. The painter is involved in a sacralising of the human, turning the transient mortal into something immortal. For this to work the painter has to put in long, gruelling hours, standing up, bending towards the object. As Dawson, himself a sitter, says ‘the more he looked the more information he would get.’ Meantime, as sitter “you became unself-conscious – [Freud] wanted to be invisible… the sitter would make the painting come alive… every brush mark was loaded with psychological energy.”

With Lucian Freud there was no pre-rehearsed account. Maybe this was one reason why he didn’t feel inclined to do interviews. There is this one exception, however: the line about the gallery being his doctor is not only repeated, it is repeated verbatim. There’s a suggestion here of something he has always used when explaining his nocturnal visits, a phrase that has worked in the Colony Club and, on numerous occasions, in his cups.

And, as always, this brings us back to Titian. If the primal scene in Sigmund Freud was about the child’s discovery of its parent’s sexual relations, in the life of the sensual artist that scene might appear in a painting, whether or not there is nudity therein. The young Lucian was familiar with a work by Titian from an early age: there was a reproduction of the Italian artist’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the living room of his father’s flat, a painting which now hangs, coincidentally, in the British Museum in London.

Titian is the realisation of beauty par excellence. Late in his career, Freud’s grandson would refer to a pair of Titian paintings depicting the goddess Diana as ‘simply the most beautiful paintings in the world’ and, in a rare video of the aging artist, we see him in the National Gallery gazing at Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ once more. Someone remarks “It’s such a great painting!” to which Freud responds “But even since we’ve been in here, for me it’s got better!”

Given this might count as one of the most familiar paintings for Freud, it’s remarkable that he claims it has changed since he came in. But he is seeing it with a painter’s eye, either because he is repainting the finished work, or just as an effect of reliving the act of its creation. He sees Actaeon’s ‘silliness,’ for instance, responding to the doomed hunter’s gesture of astonishment. He finds the picture convincing on a level that ‘you feel it must always have been like this.’ To Freud, Titian’s painting is both accomplished and a work perpetually in progress. ‘Oh, that’s the way to live!’ he exclaims, as if the old Venetian has not even finished living, and then, sure enough, he makes the doctor analogy again. If I say there is something spooky about the idea of Lucian wandering the empty spaces of the gallery in the middle of the night, you may think I’m being trivial, and the idea of a grown man and Britain’s foremost portrait artist being allowed

through a side door and ushered into the empty gallery is mundane enough. The situation is complicated, however, by the wording of his two references to this habit: the idea of going to ‘a doctor’ for ‘help’. The role of the doctor here is taken by the gallery, or more specifically by paintings. So, a good thought experiment might be to follow Lucian on one of these strange visits. The gallery has long been closed to the common herd. Feeling he has strayed from the truth and that his current project is not working, Freud fetches up at the entrance and is taken to the room by the guard, then left alone. Thus, he stands in a closed room not unlike the studio, but with a painting taking the place of a sitter. Lucian has swapped roles, allowing the painting to treat him as the sitter. Its ‘help’ is not strictly the kind one would seek from Hippocrates, but nor is the painting a technical aid as such. It’s his mind doctor, and the help Lucian seeks is more the kind sought by the Viennese middle-class citizens, the neurotics and the hysterics, who came to his grandfather’s couch. We know that the help they received was the ‘talking cure’ – the analyst would only intervene discreetly, and most of the talking was done by the patient.

the satyr plays of ancient Greece, or that the ancient writer was the father of European comedy while the satyr plays were lost. The confident stride of the youngest Bacchante, as he drags the head of a deer behind him, foreshadows the self-assurance of the man.

Lucian has come to see the Titian painting which once hung in his parent’s flat in Berlin. The time is the depth of the night in the capital, but it is also pre-war Berlin, and it is not entirely a grown man we see. It is a forgotten child revisiting an unforgotten childhood. I think here of the encounter of Austerlitz with the blue dog in the book by W.G. Sebald. The main character of the book had been taken as a boy from Germany to escape the Nazis, but has forgotten everything that preceded the event, until he belatedly revisits his childhood scene in Prague. When he unexpectedly stumbles upon the very street he once knew, the memory is triggered by the image of a blue dog over a door: ‘…with a branch in its mouth, which I could tell, by the prickling of my scalp, it had brought back out of my past.’

If Lucian is revisiting a lost scene too, then the place of the dog must be occupied by the one in Titian, barking at the young satyr, since – as in the case of the blue dog – this is the detail that would have been closest to the eyeline of the young Lucian and most obviously appealing to the imagination of a child. It is the only figure that looks out, which would usually indicate a self-portrait of the artist. For little Lucian (named after the classical satirist from what is now Syria), it was a self-portrait. His grandfather might even have pointed it out to him: “See, Lucian, that’s you in the picture!” It hardly matters that the true origin of the word ‘satire’ has more to do with a dish filled with various kinds of fruit than

So the grownup standing, entranced, in the silent gallery, in the dead of the night, is really only partially a man. Part of him is beast. Moreover, with regard to time, part of him is still this kid, in the original sense of a young goat, and yapping at his feet is a spaniel, of the same breed as the puppy at the foot of the bed in the ‘Venus of Urbino’. These dogs are also the predecessors of those which recur so persistently in Freud’s work. Going back to the word ‘help’, clearly a painting cannot cure an ailment. The implication is that it imparts to Lucian a solution of some kind. Or else, perhaps, it emboldens him to see a successful solution. Alone with the masterpiece, Lucian begins an encounter with the painting’s aura, but this aura is not primarily the antidote to the means of mass reproduction. Somewhere, hidden in the artefact’s uniqueness, is the telescoping of time. The painting gets ‘better’ in front of his eyes, in the senses of quality and health, as he thinks about it, when there is nothing to interrupt his internal monologue. It’s the ultimate relief from the strain of his work, the daily concentration on his fellow human beings, and from the narrowness of the present. Perhaps this is the only meaningful break the painter gets from his vocation. Here, all the work has been done. The accomplished masterpiece is the remedy for lost time and also proof of the possibility of seeing things, unblinkingly, as they really are. Far from giving him the creeps, Titian makes his scalp prickle as he re-joins the Dionysian retinue and finds himself, again, immortalised by art’s supernatural perspicacity. Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, curated by Daniel Herrmann, is at the National Gallery in London until 22 January 2023.

* Freud seems to have agreed with Berger on this. He preferred to call his nudes ‘naked portraits’ as, according to Dawson, “The word ‘nude’ implied to him an object, not a person.”

Both painter and analyst get to know about their subject as time passes. There can be no hurry. Nor is the process one way. Neither grandfather nor grandson are clinically removed from the setting.

The blue scarf would come later

Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian

oviesM

‘Aftersun’: One of the Year’s Great Debut Films

A Piercing Father-daughter Story

By Justin Chang

Something odd happened to me during a recent press screening of “Aftersun,” a beautifully sculpted and quietly shattering first feature from the Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells. While jotting down a few stray thoughts and details, I turned a page in my notebook and came across a drawing, something my 6-yearold daughter had doodled in bright-orange crayon. That wasn’t odd in and of itself; notebooks get passed around our house like potato-chip bags. But it was the first time the discovery of her handiwork, usually a cute and funny mid-screening distraction, had the effect of nudging me closer to the two characters in front of me — who, it may not surprise you to learn, are a girl and her father.

My apologies for the indulgent personal intro, something I’ve allowed myself only because the process of picking through one’s personal baggage — including the scribbled notes and stray memorabilia our loved ones leave for us — feels entirely germane to what Wells herself is doing. “Aftersun,” opening in theaters after an acclaimed festival run that began at Cannes this year, is what the director calls an “emotionally autobiographical” work, inspired by her recollections of a summer vacation she and her father took together in the ‘90s. It’s a memory piece and, as such, a rumination on the ways in which memories can be at once indelible and imprecise, how they can torment us and fail us and still be the most precious things — maybe even the only things — we have left.

From the opening moments, rendered in the grainy textures of camcorder footage, Wells makes explicit the patient, methodical act of sifting and sorting, of peering with intense concentration into the past. But then the past comes suddenly into focus with a shimmering, almost hyper-real clarity. The sun blazes down

on the pools and deck chairs of a budget resort in Turkey, where 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her 30-something single dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), have come for a late-summer holi day. The hotel isn’t much — the tackiness of the lobby furniture, speaking of memories, will emblazon itself on your retina — but Sophie and Calum take most of their setbacks and letdowns in stride. They have the easy adaptability of two people who are pleasant and undemanding by nature and, it soon becomes clear, a little disoriented in each other’s company.

Sophie lives with her mother (never seen) in Scotland; Calum makes his home in the U.K. This Mediterranean getaway is thus a rare attempt to make up for lost time, though it also carries the unmistakable feel of a farewell. That impression may well be deceptive; the future of Sophie and Calum’s relationship, if they have one, is left unexplored. But something is clearly slipping away here, most obviously Sophie’s childhood, which you can all but see vanishing into the maw of early adolescence. It isn’t just the attention she attracts from boys at the hotel or the mix of fascination, envy and faint skepticism with which she regards the teenage couple making out poolside. It’s that her entire way of seeing her young, emotionally and geographically distant father until now — as an erratic but benevolent presence, more goofy older-brother figure than paternal authority — is about to change and possibly vanish.

Corio, an amazing discovery, somehow conveys these and count less other pinprick impressions without putting any of them into words. There’s a startling translucence to her performance, a willingness to let emotions bleed through gently and unforc edly, that matches the unhurried grace and circumspection of the filmmaking. Much of the story’s meaning can be divined simply from the interplay of Gregory Oke’s cinematography and Blair McClendon’s editing, the way the movie cuts between and around Calum and Sophie mid-conversation, insistently framing

and reframing the scene in a way that suggests the workings of memory itself. At times the off-center compositions, resort setting and exquisitely detailed sound design — every splash of pool water and hiss of Turkish bath steam registers with crys tal clarity — reminded me of Lucrecia Martel’s coming-of-age drama “The Holy Girl,” with its skill at conveying psychological interiority through atmosphere.

Like Martel, Wells knows the power of narrative elision: “After sun” may be a feature-length flashback, but apart from a few lyr ical framing elements, its story unfolds in a spare, self-contained present tense. Apart from a friendly, mostly inaudible phone call from Calum to Sophie’s mom, we learn nothing of their long-ago relationship. And we glean only vague details about the recent accident that shattered Calum’s wrist, save for the sight of his forearm in a cast — an image of little dramatic significance but enormous metaphorical weight. A mantle of sadness hangs over Calum, even with the warmth of his sweet, boyish smile and the vigor coursing through his frame.

The restrained but intense physicality of Mescal’s performance finds intermittent release when Calum practices his tai chi moves or, in a sudden surrender of inhibitions, goes wild on the dance floor. But the actor, as distinct here as he was in his recent sup porting turns in “The Lost Daughter” and “God’s Creatures,”

can hint at a deep, inchoate anguish with an image as simple as Calum having a restless smoke on the balcony while Sophie sleeps. For all his easygoing vibes, he also tends to shut down without warning, invariably when Sophie needs him most, and to feel a guilt afterward that’s all the more terrible because of her quickness to forgive. A scene in which Calum leaves Sophie to stumble her way through a solo karaoke performance seems to distill everything — adolescent awkwardness, parental abandon ment, a chasm that seems to be widening in every direction.

The song Sophie’s singing in that moment is R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” one of several ‘90s hits swirling through a movie with an unerring musical ear for its moment. (The moody Brit pop of Blur’s “Tender” marks that moment as 1999; the Mac arena craze is still in full swing.) But if Wells has assembled a note-perfect evocation of a highly specific chapter — the end of a millennium and possibly something else — it’s when she deliberately breaks with realism that this gently aching movie achieves an overwhelming emotional force.

At times she briefly flashes forward, showing us an older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) in her own early stages of parenthood. At times she shows us the accumulated relics of that long-ago holi day — an ornately woven rug, a faded Polaroid, a postcard mes sage as achingly sincere as it is crushingly inadequate. And final ly she gives us, in astonishing bursts of strobe-lit abstraction, the recurring image of Calum dancing in a faraway nightclub, lost in himself and perhaps lost to her forever. There’s mystery in this image, but also revelation and, astonishingly, recognition. As Wells has noted, “Aftersun” isn’t exactly her story, and glancing personal associations aside, it isn’t yours or mine either. And yet in these moments, for reasons as tough to articulate as they are to shake off, it feels ineffably, unmistakably ours.

‘AFTERSUN’

MPAA rating: R (for some language and brief sexual material) Running time: 1:36 How to watch: Now in theaters

This article was originally published by Los Angeles Times.

“Aftersun” may be a featurelength flashback, but apart from a few lyrical framing elements, its story unfolds in a spare, self-contained present tense.

Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio star as father and daughter in Aftersun.

ports

At The World Cup, Messi, Ronaldo, and Many Other Legends Are Performing Their Last Dance

Many stars who appear ageless in their ability to excite us have begun to confront their futures

By Sarah Gamal

The FIFA World Cup is widely regarded as the most anticipated sporting event on the planet, occurring every four years and at tracting billions of viewers with increasing popularity for each edition.

For many reasons, this edition will be very different from previ ous contests – for the first time, the tournament will be held in the winter rather than the summer. It will also be a period of transition for the players, as the tournament will almost cer tainly be the final dance for many modern-day football icons who have influenced this generation.

The unfortunate reality is that many football legends will com pete in their final major international tournament in 2022, at the Qatar World Cup. As they approach their mid-to-late thirties, stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are facing this unfortunate reality.

Lionel Messi (Argentina)

Nobody can outrun Mother Nature, and Messi is more aware of it than anyone else.

Messi, the star of the French club Paris Saint-Germain, has con firmed that the Qatar World Cup 2022 will be the final game in his football career. The Argentine Flea conducted an interview with the Star+ network and said that the next World Cup would be the final game in his international career with the Argentina

national team. When asked if the upcoming World Cup finals would be his last, Messi replied, “Of course, it will be my last.”

Messi, who was banned from the tournament in 2014 in favor of the German national team despite being the best player in the World Cup at the time, captured many records and achieve ments for his country, and wants to win the world’s most im portant title in his final act.

Messi joins the list of players who will say goodbye to fans after the Qatar World Cup 2022, and may hope for a happy ending in this year’s tournament. Age and fitness are the major reasons for some of them to retire and not participate with their country’s team in the coming season.

Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal)

The same is likely to be said of Ronaldo, who is two years older than Messi and is now a 37-year-old legend. With 117 goals in 189 matches for the Portugal national team, the Manchester United star is the top international scorer in football. He will be 41 by the time of the 2026 World Cup, and like rival Messi, he wants to win the Cup for the first time in his career, and this World Cup could be his last.

Neymar (Brazil)

On the other hand, Neymar da Silva of Paris Saint-Germain has been one of the best players in the world in recent years, but he has admitted that he does not expect to play in the World Cup again after 2022 because the game’s pressures have affected

his body and mind.

Although being under 30 years old, the Selecao star has yet to win the World Cup, despite Brazil’s being the overwhelming favorite.

Neymar stated in an interview with the Spanish television net work DAZN: “I believe this is my last World Cup; I’m not sure if I have the mental strength to deal with football anymore, so I’ll do everything I can to prepare well, to win with my national team, to fulfil my biggest dream since I was a child, and I hope that I can do that.”

Luka Modric (Croatia)

Among the retirees is Luka Modric, without a doubt the best midfielder of his generation. Modric made his World Cup debut in 2006 in Germany. Croatia, his team, was unable to advance past the group stages. It happened again in 2014, and in 2010, they didn’t even qualify for the World Cup.

In 2018, Modric led Croatia to their first World Cup final, which they lost to France. Modric was named the tournament’s best player and received the Ballon d’Or award.

Croatia, led by Luka Modric, is in Group F with Belgium, Mo rocco, and Canada, but is capable of breaking through.

Manuel Neuer (Germany)

Manuel Neuer, goalkeeper for the German national team and Bayern Munich, is approaching his 37th birthday, and it is dif ficult to imagine his competing in a new World Cup after the Qatar World Cup 2022. He previously won the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and was a key factor in Germany’s victory. He was also

named the tournament’s best goalie, earning the Golden Glove. Neuer is widely regarded as one of the greatest goalkeepers in history. In three World Cups, he has seven clean sheets in 16 appearances. He has received numerous trophies and individual honors throughout his illustrious career. He has twice won the UEFA Champions League and has won the Bundesliga for the past ten years in a row.

After a disappointing performance in the last World Cup, Neuer would like to end his career on a high note. His Bundesliga form suggests that, at the age of 36, he is still one of the world’s best goalkeepers. In an interview, he stated that his “sole goal” is to win the World Cup in Qatar in 2022.

The German national team is in Group E with Spain, Costa Rica, and Japan, which will be difficult for the “Mannschaft,” so vet eran Neuer is attempting to bypass the group in order to inch towards a new continental title, drawing on his experience and the expertise of his teammates.

“The unfortunate reality is that many football legends will compete in their final major international tournament in 2022, at the Qatar World Cup.”

Cristiano Ronaldo- (Credit: Soccrates Images/Getty Images)

Lionel Messi- (Credit: Elsa/Getty Images).

Karim Benzema (France)

Benzema, who was the most visible absentee from his country’s World Cup victory in 2018 due to his exclusion by Coach Didier Deschamps, will face a significant chal lenge to lead the “Rooster” team to victory in the Qatar World Cup 2022, after leading them to the European Na tions League title last year.

Simultaneously, he will seek to confirm the reality of his poten tial and technical capabilities as the best player in the world, as well as to make 2022 an exceptional year in the career of the “exceptional” player.

It is worth noting that Benzema is widely regarded as the most successful player in France’s so-called “87th genera tion” as a result of the individual and collective titles and awards he has received since joining Real Madrid in the summer of 2009.

Last season, Benzema was named the top scorer in the Spanish League (“La Liga”) and the top scorer in the Champions League. He won the Spanish League and the Champions League titles, as well as the Ballon d’Or, be

fore competing in the World Cup.

Luis Suarez (Uruguay)

Luis Suarez is regarded as one of the most talented attacking players of his generation. He’s had some memorable World Cup moments, but he’s mostly been in the spotlight for mis behavior.

Luis Suarez’s level has recently declined since leaving Barce lona and Atletico Madrid in Spain, but he aspires to win the most glorious continental title with Uruguay, who compete in Group H with Portugal, Ghana, and South Korea, and Suarez at 35 years old wants to play in the next World Cup despite his advanced age.

He made his World Cup debut in 2010. Uruguay advanced to the semi-finals due to his deliberate handball against Ghana, and he bit Italian player Chiellini viciously during a group

“Messi joins the list of players who will say goodbye to fans after the Qatar World Cup 2022, and may hope for a happy ending in this year’s tournament.”

Robert Lewandowski (Credit: Getty Images).

Neymar da Silva- (Credit: Lucas Figueiredo/CBF)

Real Madrid’s Karim Ben zema celebrates after scoring against Manchester City (AP)

match in 2014.

However, these incidents did not detract from his outstanding performances in World Cup games, where he scored seven goals in three tournaments.

Robert Lewandowski (Poland)

Robert Lewandowski, one of the best strikers of the last dec ade, is 34 years old and in his final World Cup with Poland, which is in Group C alongside Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico.

Before this World Cup, Lewandowski had played in only one other Cup. In Poland’s disappointing 2018 campaign, which ended in a group stage exit in Russia, the Barcelona striker did not score a single goal.

Lewandowski, 34, will be hoping to go out on a high note and deliver the goods in what will most likely be his final opportu

nity to shine at this level.

Thiago Silva (Brazil)

Thiago Silva is a Chelsea defender who is the most important member of Brazil’s defence.

The veteran central defender has negative associations with the tournament, the most glaring of which is seven years of defeats to the German national team. In what will almost certainly be his final World Cup appearance, Silva hopes to lead his country to victory.

The Blues’ legendary defender is 37 years old, and he wants to cap off his international career with the most illustrious title possible.

Angel Di Maria (Argentina)

Angel Di Maria is a Juventus winger and an important member of Argentina’s national team.

The player, who won the last Copa America with a spectacular goal against Brazil, stated that the next World Cup will be his last in his country’s jersey.

Angel, 34, is seeking to retire from international football after the World Cup in Qatar, which is understandable given his age.

“Benzema will face a significant challenge to lead the “Rooster” team to victory in the Qatar World Cup 2022”

Thiago Silva (Credit: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images).

Luca Modric almost led Croatia to glory in 2018 (Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images)

Angel Di Maria of Argentina celebrates after scoring against Italy /Getty Images

Po rt ra it

Ulf Kristersson: From Moderate Party Politician to Sweden’s PM

By Majalla Illustrated by Jeannette Khouri

Sweden’s parliament elected conservative lead er Ulf Kristersson as prime minister on Monday, October 17, in a vote that saw unprecedented support for the traditional right from the Swe den Democrats (SD) ushering in a new political era for the Nordic country.

Kristersson was elected by a margin of 176 votes to 173 after announcing an agreement to form a coalition government with three parties: his Moderate party (M), the Christian Demo cratic party, and the Liberals party, along with parliamentary support from the Sweden Demo crats.

“It feels great, and I am grateful,” Kristersson told reporters after the vote in Stockholm. “I am grateful to the Riksdag for its confidence in me. I’m also humbled by the tasks ahead of us.”

After eight years of left-wing dominance of the country’s political life, Kristersson succeeds Social Democratic Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, who secured the transition by re signing after very close elections.

Ulf Kristersson, born December 29, 1963, is the leader of the Moderate Party (M) and a member of the Riksdag (MP) for Södermanland Coun ty since 2014, and previously for Stockholm County from 1991 to 2000.

He was Minister of Social Security from 2010 to 2014, and was previously the Chairman of the Moderate Youth League from 1988 to 1992.

Ulf Kristersson was born in 1963 in Lund, Skne County but, five years later, the family relocated to Torshälla, near Eskilstuna. As a youth, Kris tersson was a troupe gymnast.

He completed his secondary education at S:t Es kils gymnasium in Eskilstuna and completed a degree in economics at Uppsala University after serving as a platoon commander in the Uppland Regiment from 1983 to 1984.

He worked as a campaigner for the Moderate Youth League (MUF) in Sörmland during the 1985 Swedish general election. On November 26, 1988, he was elected as the new Chairman of MUF, succeeding Beatrice Ask. Kristersson joined the Bildt Cabinet which took power in 1991 and served on the Social Security Committee. He quickly became a vocal critic of the government’s crisis deal with the Social Democrats.

On December 11, 2014, he was appointed as the Moderate Party’s Shadow Finance Minister and economic policy spokesperson. Kristersson an nounced his candidacy for the Moderate Party’s leadership on September 1, 2017, after Anna Kinberg Batra stepped down.

Under his leadership, the Moderate Party (M) has opened up to the Sweden Democrats (SD) since the 2018 Swedish general election and, by late 2021, had entered into an informal rightwing alliance with them and two center-right parties from the dissolved Alliance. In the 2022 Swedish general election, that bloc won a ma jority in the Riksdag, paving the way for Kris tersson to be elected Prime Minister on October

17 after SD backed him.

After Prime Minister Stefan Löfven was de posed on June 29, 2021, Speaker of the Riksdag Andreas Norlén formally charged Kristersson with forming a government. Kristersson had until July 3 to inform Norlén of his potential government.

Kristersson intended to form a coalition with the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Sweden Democrats. Kristersson informed the Speaker on July 1 that he lacked the necessary support to form a government and resigned his mandate. Kristersson was described in a 2018 political profile in The Local as exuding “nice guy vibes: smart, humble and reasonable, easygoing and open to discussion,” while positioning himself to the right of his predecessors on issues such as crime and immigration. In the same profile, he was also described as representing the Moderate Party’s neoliberal wing.

Kristersson has stated that one of his primary political concerns is social mobility. Kristersson stated in his first leadership speech that Sweden should become “a country for hopefuls” and that M should be “a party for hopefuls.”

Concerning asylum, Kristersson states that he supports the integration of refugees into Swed ish society but advocates for mandatory cultural assimilation[vague] and learning of the Swedish language, as well as the requirement that refu gees work and pay taxes.

As for his personal life, Kristersson and his wife, Birgitta Ed, live in Strängnäs and have adopted three children from China.

Technology

5 Tips to Give a Second Life to Your Old Laptop

By Richard Baguley

If you’re like me, there’s an old laptop stuffed in a drawer somewhere that you don’t use anymore. Maybe you up graded, or got a new one through work. Whatever the case, don’t let your tech asset go to waste: There are plenty of cool things that you can do with a spare laptop, no matter how old and bashed up it might be. If it still boots up, it’s still got value.

One thing to note here is that you should reset the laptop and remove all your data. Doing so will ensure that your old pho tos or web browsing habits won’t suddenly reappear.

TURN IT INTO A MEDIA SERVER

How would you like to have your music, movies, and photos available wherever you are? Take your old lap top, copy all your media to an external hard drive and install the app Plex, which runs as a server on the laptop and streams your media to anyone and any device in the house that can run the free client. You can control who (and what they) can watch, and Plex automatically

compresses the media, allowing content to stream over any bandwidth—even on slow connections and on lowend devices.

Plex is free, but some features (such as recording live TV and the advanced indexing features) are only available with a $4.99 a month Plex Pass subscription. Plex Server is a bit complex to set up, but there are helpful installation guides on the Internet.

TURN IT INTO A KID’S COMPUTER

Google Chromebooks are great for your kids: They can browse the web, run Android apps, and perform most of the same functions as a Windows or Mac computer, but with limits that a parent can control. You don’t have to buy a new Chromebook to use the Chrome OS they run, though: Google recently released a version of its Chrome OS, called Flex, that can run on many old laptops. Google has tested it on over 400 older computers, including iMacs from 2010 and Dell laptops from 2014. I’ve installed it on a few old laptops, and it has worked without issues on some that were even older.

Google offers the latest version for free to test out. To install it, create a bootable image on a USB flash drive and boot the laptop from that, then write the Chrome OS Flex software to the hard drive in place of Windows or Mac OS. It sounds complex, but it isn’t that difficult if you follow the instruc tions.

Once installed, use your Google account to configure it, in cluding setting limits on web browsing, which apps it can run, and how long it can be used. It still has a few rough edges, but it’s a great way to give an old laptop a new lease of life.

SET UP A FAMILY CALENDAR

Want to see where all of the family are at a glance?

Set up an old laptop so that it shows your shared Google Calendar, then stick it in the hall so everyone can see what is going on that day. The trick is called Kiosk mode, where a computer is set to run a single app automatically whenever it starts up. (This is the feature that companies use when they display a cer tain advert or webpage on a laptop in a store.)

You’ll need Windows 10 or later installed and run ning to set up Kiosk mode. Press Windows and the S key, then type Settings. That will show you the set tings app. Go into that and look for Accounts, and se lect Other Users on Windows 11 or Family and Other Users on Windows 10. Then click the Kiosk option and follow the instructions. This will create a new user who can only access one program you specify. When it asks you which program, select Microsoft Edge in full-screen mode, and tell it to go to calendar. google.com. Log into your Google account, and you are good to go.

Once that is set up, when someone turns the computer on, it will automatically show your calendar and let them interact with it. Set it to the day view, and eve ryone can see the calendar.

You can also use the same trick on an Android device, like an old phone or tablet. The latter might be an es pecially good pick, as they can be easily mounted on the wall. In Android, the trick is called App Pinning, where you effectively pin one app to the screen so it shows above all others.

BUILD A NETWORK FILE AND A BACKUP SERVER

A network attached storage (NAS) device gives you a central place to put your media, files, backups, and other information. You don’t need to buy an expensive device to get one of these—just attach an external hard drive or two to your old laptop and install TrueNAS Core. This open-source operating system creates a network share

that you can easily control and configure. It can automati cally duplicate your important data on multiple drives, backup your laptop, backup your media to the cloud, or do fancy stuff like automatically back up all the data you store on Google. That way, if Google goes bust, you’ll still have a copy of your documents.

TrueNAS is a complicated operating system, but it is easy to get started with and doesn’t need much memory or pro cessing power to run. It will quite happily run on an old laptop as long as it has a network port, and it is easy to move the system to something faster if you find you need it. It might take a bit of hacking to get it to do what you want, but it will be worth it in the end, as it will give you more digital room, security, and backups that you can rely on.

MAKE A MAGIC MIRROR

Magic mirrors (aka, smart mirrors) use a one-way mirror combined with an old laptop to show you information on a mirrored screen. It’s a great way to combine checking your outfit with checking the weather or brushing your teeth with browsing the news headlines.

You can buld one of these by mounting the laptop screen behind a one-way mirror, a special mirror that reflects light from the front but also lets light in from behind. So, it works like a normal mirror, but what ever is on the computer screen is also visible. If you stick an old laptop behind one of these mirrors, you can see both yourself and the info on the screen.

They aren’t difficult to build: You can buy a one-way mirror from Amazon, or several mirror makers also offer pre-built mirrors and frames to mount the laptop inside. The best place to start with this is MagicMir ror Builders, a community of people who build these devices. As well as offering lots of tips, how-to stuff, and lots of builds from old laptops and other devices, they offer an open-source program that handles grab bing and showing the information on the mirror to make it easier to build one.

This article was originally published by Fast Company.

There are plenty of cool things that you can do with a spare laptop, no matter how old and bashed up it might be. If it still boots up, it’s still got value.

By Heidi Godman

Are you preparing for winter? Perhaps you’re retrieving heavy coats from their summer slumber, getting a check-up for your home’s furnace, and stocking up on road salt for snowy days.

You might also add your health to the list of items to be “win terized,” especially your heart, which faces increased risks dur ing the winter. In addition to the basics -- eating a healthy diet,

doing moderate-intensity exercise (such as brisk walking) for at least 150 minutes per week, and getting enough sleep (seven to nine hours per night) -- take the following steps to protect your heart.

STAY UP-TO-DATE ON VACCINATIONS

ommended COVID-19 vaccinations or boosters. Flu and COVID surge in the winter, and both can harm your heart.

“You can develop cardiovascular problems after COVID, even if you don’t have any heart disease risk factors,” says Dr. Deepak Bhatt, a cardiologist and editor in chief of the Harvard Heart Letter. “And while the flu increases your risk for a heart attack, our research has shown that getting a flu shot is associated with significantly reduced heart attack risks -- as much as 45%.”

CHECK YOUR MEDICINE CABINET

Lots of people have cold and flu remedies on hand for the winter, but these often contain ingredients that pose heart risks. Common culprits include decongestants (such as phenylephrine and pseudoephedrine) and cough sup pressants (such as dextromethorphan), which can raise your heart rate and blood pressure. “Stay away from cold remedies containing decongestants if you have high blood pressure, heart disease, or a history of stroke,” Dr. Bhatt advises.

Cold remedies may also contain ibuprofen (the ingredient in the pain relievers Advil and Motrin) to reduce fever or relieve aches and pains. Ibuprofen is a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drug (NSAID), which may increase the risk for a heart attack or stroke.

MAKE AN EXERCISE PLAN

Aerobic exercise -- the kind that works your heart and lungs -- is crucial for heart health, a healthy immune sys tem, and much more. But it’s easy to stop exercising when the weather turns cold.

Figure out now where you’ll exercise indoors this winter and which types of exercise you’ll do. Perhaps you’d like to work out at home, following an online exercise video. YouTube is a rich source of free exercise videos. Look for one geared toward people in your age group. Other options for exercising indoors include working out at a gym, walk ing indoors at a local mall, or taking classes at a YMCA.

PREPARE FOR SNOW REMOVAL

Shoveling snow or pushing a heavy snow blower makes your heart work overtime, especially in cold weather (which narrows blood vessels). It also increases risk of a heart attack, particularly if you are deconditioned from in frequent physical activity.

Avoid the risk by asking friends, family, or neighbors if they might be available to help you shovel snow this win ter, or by hiring a snow removal company if finances allow

(call now, since they book up quickly).

If you want to shovel snow on your own, remember that the activity requires the same precautions as a strenuous workout, such as preparing the heart and muscles with a warm-up, staying hydrated, going slowly, and stopping if you feel dizzy or you’re out of breath.

START MANAGING STRESS

Get into a regular practice of managing stress now, be fore the winter holidays arrive with their many pressures. Stress triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response, which sends stress hormones throughout the body and makes the heart beat faster, breath quicken, and muscles tense. It’s not harmful if it’s temporary, but chronic stress contributes to clogged arteries and high blood pressure and can lead to heart attacks and strokes. Manage stress by practicing yoga, tai chi, meditation, or deep breathing exercises, and by getting enough sleep and exercising.

COME UP WITH WINTER EATING AND DRINKING STRATEGIES

The winter brings many opportunities to go off a healthy diet or drink too much alcohol, and both affect the heart. Eating lots of food that’s fatty, salty, sugary, or highcalorie may add pounds or increase your blood sugar or cholesterol levels, which can raise cardiovascular disease risk. Drinking too much alcohol can cause a temporary or even permanent irregular heartbeat condition called atrial fibrillation.

Plan now to avoid overindulging. Enjoy holiday or comfort foods only occasionally, in small portions. Limit alcohol to no more than one drink per day, if your doctor says it’s okay. Where can you find the resolve to stick to the rules? Think of the harms you risk if you don’t. “It often takes a heart attack before people get serious about heart health,” Dr. Bhatt says. “It’s much better to be proactive than reactive.”

This article was originally published by Harvard Health Letter.

You might also add your health to the list of items to be “winterized,” especially your heart, which faces increased risks during the winter.

piniono

The Rebirth of Art

Art is one of the clearest mirrors reflecting society and culture. Some would even dare to say that it is a society›s collective memory. The transformation from traditional to modern art has been studied and written about since its occurrence. It is truly the best way to understand our current situation, especially for those clinging to tradition. This article will try to give a brief idea of the main differences and what can be said about society and culture.

measured by subjective intuition, not from transcendental sources or concepts.

By Saif Al-Abri

There are two attitudes artists and thinkers in early modernity had towards the past. As mentioned by Arbogast Schmitt, it was apparent that the Middle Ages did not “evaluate the world through reason but merely based on appearance.” Secondly, they neglected intuition and focused on conceptual distinction as seen in the work of Platonism (Platonic realm) and Aristotle’s ultra-abstract notions of potential, efficient, final and formal causation, etc. The rebirth of art, taking into account these criticisms, can be seen in Matteo Palmieri›s dialogue (1432) and Leonardo Bruni. From this current of thought arose the notion that art is about how an individual reacts to an object, including the feeling and sensuality to which it gives rise. Research sees the celebrated arts of the Age of the Renaissance with its humanism and reforms embodied precisely in this property of art as being subjective. “Mistrust vis-à-vis the world has turned into a deep love for the world” (Pierre Wenger, 1998).

The most important is that the concept of beauty had changed. In the architecture of the Cordoba Mosque, churches, and the classical oud playing, you can see a human effort trying to grapple and connect with what is beyond him. It had a religious fervor—reaching for a beauty that transcended them. The condition for beauty agreed on by most, as articulated by Plato, is the “agreement of the parts with each other and with the whole, and harmony, symmetry, proportion, and their mathematicalgeometrical justification.” This was now

This is what makes modern art unique from traditional art. Art now has to do with intuition and direct experience, not some version of art that has been conceptualized using metaphysics – the priority for modern artists constitutes “objectivity of representation.” Secondly, the individual rather than some transcendental concept is what measures beauty. Although Plato’s definition of beauty as “harmony, symmetry, proportion” holds, this synthesis is not derived through studying the theories underlying nature (metaphysics), traditional mathematics or religious knowledge, but instead such elements can be found within the object painted. By carefully examining the thing, it can reveal its inner rationality and beauty to you. Art is the “subjective illusory creation of such a ‘reality.’ ” Through the framework just described, you can easily understand the transformation from a traditional aesthetic to Renaissance, Mannerism (16th century), Classicism and Baroque (17th century), Rococo (18th century), Neoclassicism (18th century), Impressionism (20th century), Abstract art, etc.

If one thing constitutes modern art and also thought, it is that knowledge, proper knowledge, is not found in conceptual notions but rather in experience. Any insight into anything must begin with direct experience, and that experience is the measure of how much it aligns with reality. We arrive in turn to the individual – mathematics and logic are mental, reality is mind-dependent, a world where there is my truth, your truth, our truth (truth in ideas or proposition), but no truth beyond our self. Hence what follows is really the disintegration of religion, even religious experience is either considered the blind faith of Kant or a psychological experience (William James) nothing more. For a further exposition on the topic, refer to “Modernity and Plato” by Arbogast Schmitt.