Author: Fenek Solère

Jean Raspail

1,636 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

Then he started to count. Calm and unhurried. But it was like trying to count all the trees in the forest, those arms raised high in the air, waving and shaking together, all outstretched towards the nearby shore. Scraggy branches, brown and black, quickened by a breath of hope. All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-like arms. (more…)

Migrant protest in Budapest, September 2015.

1,648 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

I had wanted to write a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if my specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem far-fetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. (more…)

Jeremy Corbyn

1,207 words

Part 3 of 3

God save the Queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
A potential H bomb

God save the Queen
She’s not a human being
and There’s no future
in England’s dreaming

— The Sex Pistols

(more…)

1,961 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here)

“I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”

— William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, about the very first English Peasants’ Revolt against an alien elite

(more…)

923 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

(The title comes from De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a work written by the monk Gildas the Wise in the sixth century AD.)

While bumptious Boris leads a Tory bounce in the polls, Little Englander Brexiteers seem to have finally had their way, and the civic nationalists wear their molded-plastic Union Jack hats and wave their paper-thin flags with pride. (more…)

Venice Inflatable Refugee, an “art project” that was on display in Venice in 2016

2,096 words

I loved her from my boyhood – she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart
Rising like water-columns from the sea.
— Lord Byron

The cupola of St. Mark’s basilica glows against the midnight-blue sky as I follow in Monet’s wake, sailing on a bobbing gondola that is being showered by flickering light, reflecting outward across the windless lagoon through medieval arched windows. (more…)

Dylan Thomas

1,435 words

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

— From Dylan Thomas, “In My Craft and Sullen Art”

(more…)

Ed Miliband, then leader of Britain’s Labour Party, addressing the Labour Friends of Israel in 2014.

3,877 words

Money, it’s a hit
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit
— Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

It was not without a deep sense of irony that I recently came across Guardian columnist George Monbiot’s revealing article entitled “Dark money lurks at the heart of our political crisis,” a piece of investigative journalism that claims to provide an insight into the machinations of those who use cash to influence political outcomes. (more…)

Crystal Pite

2,140 words

I think it was the overly pious tone of her voice that first made my stomach churn: the sickly sentimentality of the pretentious do-gooder, quickly followed by the first sight of Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s pallid face, saying things like, “This creation is my way of coping with the world at the moment,” which immediately sent me rushing to the toilet as if I had food poisoning.

Pite continued, “And I can’t not talk about it. (more…)

1,941 words

“To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies – and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? (more…)

2,446 words

“Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens.” — Genesis 19:24

Despite the fact that reviews of Rhidian Brook’s semi-biographical familial novel The Aftermath (2013) offered the tentative possibility of a balanced insight into one of the most apocalyptic and wholly unnecessary acts of brutality in the whole of the Second World War, I, being the cynic I am, still expected nothing more from the book’s screen adaption than the usual Hollywood-style travesty: (more…)

2,833 words

Part I here, Part II here

The Moons of Gall

“Solange de Cleda re-establishes true normal passion: a profane Saint Theresa; Epicurus and Plato burning in a single flame of eternal feminine mystique.”
–Salavador Dalí, Foreword to Hidden Faces (1944)

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Salvador Dalí meeting with Francisco Franco in 1972.

2,238 words

Part I here, Part III here

Chimeras

I believe, above all, in the real and unfathomable force of the philosophic Catholicism of France and in the militant Catholicism of Spain.
–Salvador Dalí

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