#how does great britain work as a country?? what is their relationship to the outside world??

[tropicallamour]

now if you think about it, in l&co, the Problem wouldn’t be able to spread across the ocean to other landmasses, due to the waves/massive amounts of water. meaning it only exists on the island of Great Britain. and since there is little to no mention of other countries in the series, I always assumed that Great Britain became an isolationist nation during the 70s. diplomatic visits and trade must have become nonexistent…

…meaning that in l&co, Ireland is unified and ghost-free

[fumblingmusings]

While I do see the appeal of usuk, I can't really see it. There's a generational resentment from the USA, there's a inferiority/superiority view from england. Idk, looks strange. I have siblings, that's how we behave with each other. But it's cool, just think the special relationship is mostly based on power and convenience nothing else.

Historically rusame doesn't work. I mean yeah, friends at first but then ideologies wreck it. How do you see those two? Historically I do enjoy my porteng and frain but for america it makes sense Canada or alone. I feel there's a quite lack of compromise in USA part. They want to take and their freedom is more important than any sort of relationship.

Woah woah woah I think you sent me like five ship asks in a row so let me just go through them one by one if that's okay! I'll do the France x Spain headcanons in its own ask but here let me run through some ship talk. As I should not need to clarify - I have my preferences certainly, and there are some ships which I cannot stand for one reason or another, but I have never been fussed about trying to un-justify why a pairing wouldn't work. Justify why it would certainly yes yes, but I am not your mother or any figure of authority and I am a big fan of the tag filter and block button, I encourage it with me if it keeps your dash hot take free. Crack ships, historical ships, human aus... whatever floats people's boats! Personally I am a big fan of unhealthy relationships that claw their way into functioning, so that will inform my understanding of the characters. That ain't for everyone.

So!

There's a generational resentment from the USA, there's a inferiority/superiority view from england

That's what makes it great :D

But it's cool, just think the special relationship is mostly based on power and convenience nothing else.

Again, that's kind of the point for me - how do you reconcile two people who are in a metaphorical open marriage of convenience with the fact that maybe they have genuine feelings which are distinct from any political role they play, knowing that they themselves aren't political players. They can potentially have a history that runs directly contradictory the the popular narrative of international relations: what does that look like? I think a lot of people employ that dynamic within Hetalia ships - personally I use it with US UK the most, but they're all party to it.

I have siblings, that's how we behave with each other.

That's cool and I can understand that angle! I have a brother and sister too and we get on like so painfully normally fine, so I always am a bit ???? when it comes to depictions of dysfunctional siblings in media. And that's the crux of it. Of course I see them as fraternal at times. It's really down to the story that the author - Hima or otherwise - wants to tell. The characters are immortal spirits. Tell interesting stories with them, the dynamics are intentionally left vague because it's fun to fill the gaps!

Historically rus ame doesn't work. I mean yeah, friends at first but then ideologies wreck it. How do you see those two?

I think it works in the 19th Century because Russia was often quite friendly with the US, particularly during the Civil War, but only in regards to the Russian Empire A) Liking 'strong' centralised government over federalisation B) It is a land based Empire who does not want a precedent set for splinter sections of the country declaring independence C) Russia hates Britain. America for much of the 19th Century is a bulwark against Britain (and by extension Canada). It was never a particularly important or course changing relationship outside of Alaska, but I can see historic cause for saying you could make something up. A lull of near nothing between WWI and WWII of course. After that it's the tension of MAD etc...

Personally. I am not a fan. Not a huge fan of Ivan in general so... I skip it. But yeah, once Alfred supplants Arthur as the 'real' enemy, any chance of happiness fades. Unless you aren't bothered about something as trivial as happiness in a ship and enjoy carnage. Not for me personally but!!

Historically I do enjoy my port eng and fra in but for america it makes sense Canada or alone. I feel there's a quite lack of compromise in USA part. They want to take and their freedom is more important than any sort of relationship.

Again I am not a fan of Canada and America... genuinely I think it's cause they are just too visually similar (for some I hear that's a perk...). But with every America ship you're gonna have fucked power dynamics. Doesn't matter who it's with. The eb and flow of influence will shift and depend on the other party certainly - some may be more openly defiant only to get shot down in flames, others may choose to try and be subtle only to find that Alfred doesn't do subtle. That's the fun in his ships I find. Can you have him in a romantic relationship where the scales tipped in his favour make everyday life just so utterly dysfunctional it's not worth the trouble?

[cafffine]

Hey guys, I’ve decided to stop publishing Saltcoats for a number of reasons. I'm aware that many of you are going to initially be let down or confused, but hopefully once you’ve read through this post you’ll understand why this had to stop. I’ll try to hit all my points, but of course if you have any questions pls feel free to dm me or reply to this post.

DISCLAIMER: Ending this fic was a decision I came to by myself! No one asked me to do this, though many did help, and if you have something to add please do not bring other tumblr or ao3 users into the conversation unless they’ve explicitly said they’re ok with that. It’s a draining and heavy topic (not to me, but for those affected) and I don’t want to cause anymore unneeded distress.

Also, I’m the only author, all the problems with this story were created by me, and were biases I should have recognized and acted on much sooner. I’m very thankful to all the people that have reached out to me about the negative impacts on this fic, but it really does come down to: I wrote and published a story that was fundamentally ignorant of its setting and racist. So now I have to do my part to apologize and educate myself/take accountability.

First off, this was a flawed concept to begin with because I was trying to do a low fantasy setting with aliens in period clothes and a work of historical fiction at the same time, and those are not things you can go halfway on.

Historical fiction that centers around people of color has a long history of simply going race-blind and faking diversity by giving poc the roles of white people in Eurocentric stories and erasing their identities. (This article about Bridgerton explains the problem better than I could.) And it was something I tried to avoid by still having the Fetts written as immigrants from Aotearoa (NZ), but completely missed the execution on because I didn’t commit to full historical accuracy in all characters and aspects of the story. Meaning, I might as well have gone race-blind because you can’t pick and choose what to include, it’s just as racist.

This creates situations like the Fetts being immigrants facing real life oppression while the Organas, also people of color, are unaffected by the social climate and living as members of the British upper class. That’s not accurate to any version of history and ends up wiping clean any point I was trying to make about race and oppression. That also extends beyond the Fetts, I was not addressing how the american characters come from a country that still allows for the ownership of slaves, the British oppression of Scottish people and their culture, or even an in-depth look at real Queer communities of that era. (and more)

Given the real life historical climate in the 1850s, a multi-racial story like this one is not successful, and is racist in its ignorance of the struggles of poc, immigrants, and the intersectionality that had with class and crime.

In addition, the Fetts being written as criminals, even if it is framed as a morally correct choice*, is still playing into negative racial stereotypes that shouldn’t have been ignored.

* I should add, I don’t mean to make it sound like i’m creating excuses for myself when I give explanations for some of these choices such as “but it was framed as morally correct”, that doesn’t lessen the damage being done, it’s still racist, I guess I'm just trying to show why so many of these things went overlooked for as long as they did, and how easy it is for white/privileged people to find mental loopholes around racism when you’re not being sufficiently critical of yourself.

On another note, the Fetts being indigenous immigrants to Britain in the 1800s is not something I should have tried to tackle in fanfiction - a medium that often lacks nuance and can easily end up romanticizing or glossing over most heavy topics. This goes for period typical homophobia, addiction, and class struggles as well.

That being said! I’m not implying that any of those things should be completely ignored in fanfiction. Addiction, for example, is something very close to me that I do still want to explore in fanfic for the purposes of education and normalization, I’m not telling anyone what not to write, just checking myself. Because in a story like this where literally everything is so heavily dramatized and also applied to characters of color by me, a white person? It’s only going to end up being out of place, lacking in historical accuracy, and wholly disrespectful.

Another major problem I wanted to address is the relationship between a rich white person and a poverty stricken poc. That's a bad stereotype to begin with, but then I tried and failed to frame Obi-Wan as ignorant and biased to a point where his social status plays into the theme of class critique. But, if he’s still being written as Cody’s love interest, all his negative characteristics are ultimately going to be ignored and excused by the narrative (by me).

I’m not trying to end this conversation, I’ll always be willing to talk about this to anyone who’d want to say/hear more, but I don’t want run the point into the ground with over-explanation.

So, in conclusion, this fic had to stop and be broken down into the problem that it was. All white authors who write for the clones need to be hyper-vigilant about the fact that we are creating narratives for poc, and that our inherent racism is always in threat of being baked into in the stories we publish and spread to an audience. I was in the wrong when I wrote this story, and it should never have gone on for this long. I apologize for both my actions, and to anyone I may have hurt along the way.

This is getting posted on ao3 in the fic, and then, for now anyway, the fic is going to be deleted after a week. I’ll leave this post up and answer everyone unless it's someone trying to change my mind. Also, if I ignore an ask please send it again, tumblr might just have deleted it. I don’t want to try and bury this or run from my mistakes, I just don’t think that leaving the fic up where it can still find an audience will do anyone any good. Thank you for reading

If you're interested here's some resources I've been using to educate myself further:

What caused the New Zealand Wars? - An excerpt of the book by Vincent O'Malley of the same title. It gives a good summary of the violent colonization and oppression of Māori people and their culture by the British empire.

NZ Wars: Stories of Waitara (video) - Very educational documentary about the NZ wars and British colonialism. There are some historical recreations that get violent so pls watch with caution.

Historical American Fiction without the Racism - Tumblr post by @/writingwithcolor that talks specifically about Black people in the 1920's, but makes a good point about race and historical fiction in general. I'd recommend any post from this blog, especially their navigation page just a lot of great resources

Who Gave You the Right to Tell That Story? - An article about writing outside of your race that includes a diverse series of testimonials

History of Scottish Independence - Details the colonization of Scotland by the British empire, sort of long, can cntrl + f to "The Acts of Union" for a more direct explanation.

The best books on Racism and How to Write History - A list of well written and diverse works of historical fiction and why they are good examples of representation

I have a lot more that I can share if you're interested (x x x x) but this post is getting a bit too long.

[rein-ette]

hahaha sorry I had to follow up because this is something that interests me so much. Do you distinguish their views on Arthur from his other siblings? For example, are there countries that feel more closely related to Wales and Scotland than to England? Also, where does Tonga fit into these categories (do they have their own since they were never formally colonized and instead signed a Treaty of Friendship?)? And what about the colonies that weren't populated by British citizens like Guyana, do they fall into the categories of the countries that populated them, in this case India?

Tough questions but fascinating ones! I had to do some sleuthing on Wikipedia to answer these with reference to the specific countries you mentioned, but hopefully this is what you’re looking for!

Do you distinguish their views on Arthur from his other siblings? For example, are there countries that feel more closely related to Wales and Scotland than to England?

I’m not sure there are countries that identify more with Scot and Wales than England speaking, since Welsh and Scottish immigration within the Empire was mostly in confined to certain enclaves of larger countries. Examples are the Maritimes of Canada (Nova Scotia, Labrador), various parts of the US, NZ and Australia (formerly New South Wales). But certainly there’s deep feelings of kinship there. Scot’s brusque personality and temper might have gotten in the way a bit of bonding at first, but he’s a softie on the inside and Wales is just, like, soft in general :,) Outside of the Anglosphere, however, I don’t think Scot and Wales developed much of a bond with the colonies. This is somewhat the result of their personalities -- Arthur is a very outward looking character, and his lonely and violent childhood and ongoing problems with Europe means he feels most comfortable on the seas and away, whereas I think Scot and Wales prefer to be with their land and their people, respectively. However, it’s probably also the result of deliberate planning on Arthur’s part: centralization of power is absolutely crucial to the survival of an Empire, as Arthur surely understood, so he would want colonies to feel loyalty only to him.

At the same time though, empires are hard work to maintain, so Scot and Wales probably still travelled frequently gathering intelligence, solving problems, signing agreements, and pruning officials abroad as necessary. That is to say, they held a position of power in the English household, probably second only to Arthur (and maybe Matthew later on, but that’s another thing). So they certainly would have interacted with much of the British empire. Still, I don’t think there was doubt in any colonies’ mind who really had the final say in the empire. Interestingly, there’s a not-insignificant population of Scots in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, parts of Britain’s “Informal Empire”, which makes me think Arthur might have often sent Scot there to manage business/trade while also keeping him away from delicate conflicts/issues he didn’t trust Scot with/just so they didn’t have to see each other :P

Also, where does Tonga fit into these categories (do they have their own since they were never formally colonized and instead signed a Treaty of Friendship?)?

I admit to not knowing much about Tongan history, though I did list it as a protectorate in Group 3 along with countries like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. In terms of “colonial” (if it can be called that) relations, these countries had minimal contact with England himself and basically just minded their own business. Tonga specifically is probably one of those with no particular strong feelings at all towards England -- they’re passing acquaintances at best. Countries like Afghanistan, however, probably have some opinions about British meddling and posturing (considering the contention there during the Great Game, a period of intense rivalry between the British Empire and Russia), and countries like Libya definitely have some opinions about European imperialism as a whole.

And what about the colonies that weren't populated by British citizens like Guyana, do they fall into the categories of the countries that populated them, in this case India?

Guyana I put under the “Taken In as Young Child” list because they were originally a Dutch colony that was formally ceded to Britain in 1814, but after your question I went back and looked into it a bit more. It is a bit of a complex case, because Guyana also retains significant indigenous and black populations as well. I would probably say Guyana was still began as the representation of first Dutch plantation colonies, but did not age very quickly and so was probably only a few years old when it came under British rule. As British Guiana, he was probably an entity similar in nature to the HRE; a half-state that encompassed many rival groups with their own semi-nation like representatives such as the newly freed slave population, the Indian migrants, and the remaining indigenous groups. 

In the beginning of the new anime they actually mentioned off-hand that nations were “mysterious beings who might exist for a day, a week, or hundreds of years and then disappear” (i’m paraphrasing), which I think is a interesting concept and supports the idea of semi-immortal “nation” representatives. As for Guyana’s relationships, he probably has nothing nice to say about Arthur and certainly not the US, who has exerted more influence on Latin American than London has in the last century (and hardly any of it good influence). That sets Guyana apart from and probably even creates some resentment against the “heirs” or “princes” of the British Empire (the Anglosphere + some others), who Arthur truly loved as his own. But being taken in at a young age also makes Guyana different from Tonga or the others in Group 3--hating the only family you’ve ever known for not loving you is not the same as hating someone you met as an adult for telling you what to do.

TLDR: It really depends on the colony. Incidentally, this is why I found the categories so helpful in the first place: not because they generalize all the countries in each group but because they help me identify how each one didn’t fit the pattern in some ways, how each nation’s colonial experience was unique.

[ugly-crying-over-bucky-barnes]

Blue Eyes Epilogue

Summary: After the Garrison is shot up, the youngest Shelby daughter finds a new home in London. She strips herself of her last name and tries to live a peaceful life far away from her brothers’ chaos in Birmingham. But fate leads her right back into it after she runs into Alfie Solomons.

          “Alf?”

           “You alright, love? I heard you getting a bit heated over the phone.” Alfie was at the sink, gently washing the sand off Ezra’s feet. Father and son had been out on the beach that morning watching the waves and the sea birds overhead.

           “I was on the phone with Tommy.” Ella set Sofia down so she could go to Alfie.

           “I figured that much.” He replied sympathetically.

           She walked around to stand by the sink. Ezra gave her a gummy smile, squirming a bit because of the cold water on his toes. Ella grabbed a towel to give to Alfie so he could dry Ezra off. “I just don’t know what to think anymore.”

           “About what, love?” He asked, shutting off the sink and taking the towel from his wife.

           “Just…everything. Tommy was going on and on about how things used to be. I mean-I understand where he’s coming from. He spent all that time looking toward the future, looking at what he could have instead of appreciating what he did have. Now he regrets it because look at everything that’s happened. We’ve lost so many people. But…I like what I have now. I can’t look to the past anymore.”

           “I hate to say it, but your brother’s gone and dug his own grave, hasn’t he? He wanted power and this is what it gave him. The man doesn’t know when to quit.” Alfie wiped off Ezra’s feet even though the toddler gave him a bit of a hard time, kicking his legs and giggling like mad.

           “But we know when to step away, right?” Ella asked quietly.

           Alfie set Ezra down so he could dry his hands off. “What’s the matter, love? Talk to me.”

           Ella wrapped her arms around herself, thoroughly shaken by the world around her. When once she had been so fearless, she was becoming aware of how chaotic things could become. “I’m scared that we’re going to lose everything we’ve worked for.”

           “We’re not gonna lose anything. What are you afraid of losing?” Alfie wasn’t looking to ridicule his wife, he saw the fear in her eyes, and in turn, it worried him. One of his primary jobs was to comfort her.

           “I’m afraid of losing you, I’m afraid of losing the twins, I-I’m afraid of losing my sanity, Alfie.” Her voice broke. “I never expected any of this to happen. Th-this has all gone too far and I can’t take it anymore.”

           “It’s alright love.” He embraced her, pulling her to his chest.

           “It’s not alright, Alfie. I’m not going to give you up because of the things Tommy does. But there are things in this world that I can’t stop.”

           Alfie was starting to pick up on the root of her worry. After all, Mosley was just one man. They could deal with individuals, gangs even. But when there was some sort of movement, with an unknown amount of people following? Well, they couldn’t exactly fight off the world, could they? Even if Tommy Shelby liked to think he could. “The world we’re living in, s’not ideal, is it? But there are more people who are willing to fight this than are willing to stay quiet.”

           “How do you know that?” She asked.

           “Because I fought in a bloody war for the sake of this country.” He reminded her. “I don’t doubt that we’d do it again if we’re threatened again.”

           “But they’re here, Alfie. There are people in Britain who would rather see you hung than fight for you.”

           There were things that Alfie could brush off. He could brush off her brother’s disdain for him. He could brush off the slurs that Darby was so fond of calling him. He could even brush off that he was shot in the eye. But he couldn’t brush off his wife’s concern for him. “What would you suggest we do then, love?” He asked softly, gently petting her hair.

           “I think we should just go somewhere else.” She whispered. “We can go to America, we can put this behind us.”

           “There are fascists in America, El. There ain’t a place on this Earth that’s pure.” He told her truthfully. “America might be further away, but it ain’t much different.”

           Ella couldn’t argue with that. She knew that it didn’t matter how far she went. It didn’t matter if she changed her last name from Shelby. She would always be involved in Tommy’s game. It was her birthright. Something would always bring her back.

           “Mumma.”

           Ella drew away from Alfie so she could scoop Ezra up. “I won’t lose them.” She whispered. It had been painful enough to lose her twins before they were even born. But to lose Ezra and Sofia after she had bonded with them? Ella knew she would never be able to come back from that.

           Alfie nodded. “Well, we’ve got more than enough money to retire. We can sell the bakery, sell the flat in Camden. We can stay here for the rest of our lives.”  

           “I’m scared.”

           “I know. It’s a scary world, but you know we can make it work. It’ll be alright. I promise.”

~~~~~~~~~~

           For the next few years, Ella lived her life very removed from her family. That wasn’t to say she never saw them. She made a habit to keep in touch but wouldn’t involve herself in any business matters. She was vocal about Tommy’s mental state but there wasn’t anything anyone could do. It was all in his hands. And he continued on as the soldier he was.

           Lizzie and Polly confided in Ella often, if only to make sure they weren’t going crazy because of Tommy’s behavior. But they also respected that Ella was raising her own family and had more than enough good reasons to keep her distance.

           For the most part, she and Alfie remained at Margate with the children. Retired and happy to be retired, Alfie was content staying by the ocean. They returned to Camden for special occasions or to see friends and family. But Ella felt much more comfortable at Margate. Going back to London was just another reminder of the trouble brewing. There was unrest, not just in the city, and not just in the country. It was across the continent and Ella felt like everyone was just holding their breath, waiting for the powder keg to explode again.

           Outside of the city, however, she felt much more removed from it all. She could truly enjoy her life as being a wife and mother. She had gained the peace she had always looked forward to.

           As the twins grew, their personalities started to blossom and it was such a lovely thing to see.

           Sofia was a rambunctious little girl who loved the outdoors. One of her favorite things was to trawl the shoreline with Alfie by her side so she could find little sea critters in tide pools. Or sometimes she’d crouch in the garden, hunting for bugs and earthworms. A day without getting her clothes stained with dirt or covered in sand was not a day well spent in Sofia’s eyes.

           Ezra was on the shyer side. He became very bashful when talking to people he didn’t know well and would cling to Ella when they were visiting others in Camden. But he was curious in his own way. Often times, he would have long discussions with his father, simply asking endless questions about how things worked. Where the sun went at night, how did clocks know the time, how did the record player work, why did Cyril have a tail and he didn’t, how come birds fly, how big is the moon. Any little thing would pique his curiosity and he would rush to Alfie for information.

           Trouble was, Alfie wasn’t too sure how to answer his questions most of the time. There were some things he could explain, but most of Ezra’s questions were beyond his expertise. It was a blessing, then, that Ezra learned to read at a very young age. He absorbed books like a sponge and it was hard to get him to stop reading and go to bed.

           Their differing personalities positively enchanted Ella. Despite how difficult motherhood was, she was so happy to take the journey. Every day, her children surprised her and gave her another reminder of how blessed she was.

           It was a difficult balance, trying to keep her children safe while still allowing them to have a relationship with their kin. It was easier to have them around the people from Camden. They grew up with the other children of Ella’s friends and came to know the people they would consider like aunts and uncles.

           But with Birmingham, Ella was very cautious. She understood how easy it was to be swept up into the Shelby Company Limited. Her cousin Michael was a great example. Although raised outside of the family, once he was back in, there was no going back. Ella refused to allow her children to be roped in. Perhaps she was being over-skeptical of her own family. But she was willing to be over-cautious rather than let her guard down.

           Still, she allowed her children to attend parties and holidays with the Shelby family. It was tense, at least in Ella’s shoes. She watched her brothers like a hawk whenever they were around the twins.

~~~~~~~~~~

           One bright summer afternoon, while celebrating Finn’s birthday at Arrow House, Tommy came over to his sister.

           She was sitting in the shade, watching her children play with their cousins on the lawn. Cyril and Anthea were running around with them, just as happy. Alfie was talking with Polly a bits away. The two had grown a well-formed relationship of respect. Polly liked that he had taken care of Ella all those years and Alfie appreciated Polly’s sanity.

           Tommy took a seat beside his sister and pulled out a cigarette. He coughed a bit as he lit it.

           “Y’know, some people are saying smoking is bad for you.” She said. “Maybe you should cut down.”

           “Lots of things in life are bad for you.” He replied and took a drag from the cigarette anyways.

           “Charlie looks so much like Grace now.” Ella did everything in her power to avoid arguments at family functions. She knew there was no point, nothing she could do would change anyone’s minds especially Tommy’s.

           Charlie was kicking a football back and forth with Karl, trying to keep the ball from Anthea. He was so grown from the little toddler that he once was. He was nearly a teenager, had grown like a weed, and indeed was nearly the spitting image of his mother.

           “He’s been asking about her,” Tommy told Ella. “He knows Lizzie isn’t his biological mother, so he’s been asking about Grace.”

           “What did you tell him?”

           “That we lost her before he was old enough to remember her. I gave him all the photographs I had of her. I don’t know what else to do.”

           “I don’t think there’s much else you can do.” Ella shrugged.

           The siblings went quiet for a moment. Tommy smoking and Ella watching the children play.

           “Do you trust me, El?” He asked out of nowhere.

           “Trust you?”

           “Yeah.”

           She glanced over at him to gauge whether he was trying to get a rise out of her or not. But he seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say. “Why are you asking that?”

           “Because it seems like anytime I’m near Ezra or Sofia, you’re looking at me like I’m about to kidnap them or feed ‘em to a lion.”

           She rolled her eyes. “Don’t even say that.”

           “So, you completely trust me, then? I’m just overthinking things, aye?” He challenged.

            Ella crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you.”

           “You’re kin, Ella. They’re kin. Fuck it, even Alfie is kin by now. You really think I’m going to bring them harm?”

           “I trust that you want what’s best for everyone. I trust that all those years ago, you made a conscious decision to help this family. I trust that maybe you didn’t anticipate all of this, and if you had known maybe you never would’ve done any of it. I know you’re a good man, Tommy. I know the person you were growing up. I just…I wish you would quit this. I thought so many times that this would be the one thing that would make you stop. But every time, no matter what happened, you kept at it. I know that if you don’t stop, you’ll be killed. And if that’s something you accept then…there’s nothing else I can do.” She sighed heavily. “But I have to protect my children from that fate. I know you don’t want this for our kids. You said so many times that if we had children, they would never grow up the same way we did. We were supposed to be the ones to stop the cycle, Tom.”

           “I know.” He said in a rare tone of assent.

           “I’m scared,” Ella admitted, trying to keep her composure for the sake of the party. “I’m so fucking scared of everything in this world now, Tommy.”

           Tommy had always known his sister to be fearless. Now it seemed that motherhood had brought up new fears in her. Maybe because she knew what it was like to grow up poor in a dangerous neighborhood. She was familiar with guns before she even went to school. She’d seen death and violence at an early age. It was only a natural instinct to want better for her children. But it didn’t mean she had to have such a crippling fear of everything. “Things are gonna be alright, El.”

           “That’s what Alfie says, that’s what everyone says but I’m not blind!” She exclaimed. “I know that it’s only a matter of time ‘fore…”

           “Before what?” He asked gently.

           Ella shook her head. “It’s a cycle, Tommy, it’s always a cycle. Do you know what I prayed for every night while you and Arthur and John were in France?”

           Tommy could only imagine. She was so young back then. “I don’t-tell me.”

           “I prayed that you three would all come back home safe. And when you did, I prayed that you’d all find nice women and settle down. I prayed that you would all have good lives and be at peace. But then I saw you at the train station and I knew that would never happen. The things you saw over there, the things that happened…I know why you three changed, I get it. But I never anticipated what would happen after that.”

           “I know.”

           Ella looked down at her hands, almost too tired to continue going around in circles with him. Facts were facts and the past was the past. “Do you think we’re going to go to war?”

           Tommy nodded. “Yeah.”

           She swallowed and chewed on her lip. “And that doesn’t scare you?”

           What else could he say? His nightmares were growing more severe, the shovels were getting louder.

           “It terrifies me.”  

~~~~~~~~~~~

           After Finn’s birthday party, Ella felt a little more forgiving toward her family. Maybe if they understood her anxiety, she could trust them a bit more. She also knew that there was no use arguing with Tommy. Both of them understood what it felt like for their sanity to slowly trickle away. They understood what it felt to have the world on their shoulders. They were too alike to blame one another.

           One night, back in Margate, Ella was coming in from bringing Cyril and Anthea out. She shrugged off her coat and hung up the dog leashes. Anthea bolted to Ezra’s bedroom while Cyril hobbled down the hall. The bullmastiff was getting up in age but still had the same docile demeanor he had when she had met him for the first time in London as a pup.

           Ella gave the old dog a pat. “Good boy.” She said softly and followed him into Ezra’s room where Alfie was reading a bedtime story to the twins.

           “My armor is like tenfold…”

           “No, Smaug is still talking so you’ve gotta do the voice!” Ezra protested.

           Alfie chuckled. “Alright, alright.” He cleared his throat and began to rumble in a deep, menacing voice. “My armor is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail is a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath…death!” He read from The Hobbit dramatically.

           Sofia and Ezra laughed, delighted by all the voices their father did for every book he read them. It was commonplace. Alfie always read to them even if he struggled with the strain on his one good eye and often got headaches.

           The eight-year-old twins were always insistent that he read to them, and Alfie wasn’t exactly complaining. He loved their rapt expressions as he read. Sofia often laid on the bed, petting Cyril or Anthea as she imagined the scene her father was describing. Ezra cuddled up close to Alfie in the crook of his arm so he could try and read along with his father. Sometimes he’d stop Alfie and point to a word he didn’t understand, asking for the definition.

           Sometimes, Ella would sit in just to spend those last few moments of the day with her family. But that night, it had grown too late.

           “It’s late, my loves.” She interrupted.

           Sofia looked up and pulled a pout. “Nooooo, mummy it’s not that late!”

           “It’s summer!” Ezra chimed in.

           “It is quite late.” Ella walked into the room.

           “Mum’s right.” Alfie dog-eared the page in the book and began to untangle himself from the children, Ezra on his arm and Sofia sprawled over his legs.

           “But dad hasn’t finished the chapter,” Ezra whined.

           “S’a long chapter, mate.” His father stood and helped him under the covers. “We’ll pick up on the rest of it tomorrow.” He promised. “Not much left of this book anyhow, don’t want to go storming through the rest. Best we take our time ‘n savor it, aye?” He scooped Sofia up so he could bring her to her bedroom.

           Ella tucked Ezra in and kissed his forehead. “Goodnight my love.”

           Cyril took his place in his bed on the floor of Ezra’s room. It was remarkable because the old dog liked sleeping in the little boy’s room. Ella guessed it was because Ezra spent so much time inside reading with Cyril snoozing beside him on the sofa. Meanwhile, Anthea chose to sleep in Sofia’s room. She was very fond of the little girl who always took her out for adventures outside.

           So, Anthea followed them as they brought Sofia across the hall. She hopped up on the bed and curled up by Sofia’s feet.  

           Alfie and Ella kissed her goodnight before retiring to their own bedroom.

           Ella sank into bed as Alfie got ready for the night.

           “Y’know, I like the voices you do too.” She commented.

           “Aye?” He chuckled.

           “Your dragon voice is very nice.”

           “Nice?” He grinned and tossed his shirt to the side. Striding over, he grabbed his wife’s ankles to tug her down the bed.

           She stifled a squeal and giggled. “Alfie!”

           “Hush now. Don’t go waking up the whole house.” He murmured in a low voice and began to creep up her body until they were face to face.

           “Or what? You’ll eat me up?” She teased; her heart started to flutter in her chest. After years of being together, Alfie still never failed to make her swoon. It felt like every night she fell in love with him all over again. Whether they made love or she simply just fell asleep in his arms.

           He laughed and captured her lips with his. One hand pressed into the bed while the other lightly grazed down her side before resting on her thigh.

           When he drew back, she wove her fingers into his hair and pecked his lips a few more times. “I love you, Alfie Solomons.” She murmured.

           “And I love you too, Ella Solomons.” He replied, looking down at her with so much adoration in his eyes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

           August 1940, the Solomons family traveled out to Small Heath. The twins’ birthday had been a few days earlier but they were now going to celebrate with Ella’s side of the family.

           It was a strange time to be celebrating anything. The continent was at war yet again. It had been almost a year since Britain declared war and started to mobilize. Ella got horrifying flashbacks off the time her brothers had been at war. It was so difficult to fathom that they would live through a repeat of the Great War. But this time, eyes were turned to the next generation. The generation that had been too young to fight, now they were ready.

           Ella urged Polly to do everything she could to keep the Peaky boys off the front lines. But it was futile, not with how headstrong they all were, and not with the draft initiated.

           Now they could all only hope this war wouldn’t last as long as the first one did. They could only hope it wouldn’t be as gruesome and wouldn’t claim as many lives.

           “Erdington then Castle Bromwich,” Arthur muttered under his breath as he stood by the kitchen counter, drink in hand.

           “They’re trying to get a better target.” Tommy agreed with a grim look.

           “Enough.” Polly shushed the men, pointing a cake knife at them. “No talk of the war, not tonight. Let the children be children.”

           “Sorry, Pol,” Arthur mumbled.

           Of course, the war was on all of their minds. It was nearly impossible to ignore it.

            Polly brought the two cakes over to set in front of Sofia and Ezra. As she lit the candles, the family gathered around the table and began to sing Happy Birthday.

           Ella was ready with her camera to take a picture of them as Alfie stood behind them, with a proud look on his face.

           But the moment didn’t last long.

           A loud explosion rocked the very ground and was almost immediately followed by a high pitched siren that had become so common to hear in the cities.

           The men who fought reacted the quickest. Alfie grabbed Sofia and Ezra by the hand and hurried them to the cellar doors. Polly gathered the rest of the children as Arthur hurried them all along. Ella set her camera down on the table and blew out the birthday candles so they wouldn’t catch anything on fire. Tommy shut the lights off in the house, making sure everything was off upstairs as well.

           Once dark, he glanced out the window.

           “Tommy, c’mon.” Ella urged and grabbed her brother by the arm.

           The two headed downstairs where the rest of the family was hiding out from the air raid.

           They knew it was a possibility it was a false alarm. There had been dozens. But there was no telling either way.

           “Mummy!” Sofia wailed.

           “I’m here, I’m here.” Ella hushed her softly and gathered her into her arms. Alfie held her and the twins close, gently soothing them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

           It wasn’t a false alarm. Bombs shook the city with such intensity that everyone in the cellar was praying silently or out loud. It felt like they were down there for days when it was mere hours.

           No one could sleep that night. In the morning, Ella left the house, she couldn’t listen to the radio anymore. She walked down to the Bullring and found it in ruins. The buildings had been gutted and ash was covering the ground.

           It was nearly impossible to fully comprehend. People around her stood and stared at the scene in shock as well. Some were crying, others were too lost to react.

           Ella was in such a state that she didn’t notice Tommy standing next to her for a good while. When she did, she glanced up at him.

           He saw the same scared little girl who asked her older brothers not to go to France. She was too afraid they wouldn’t come back. She was still there, the scared girl who was afraid of what war would bring her family.

           “I’ve got a few leads on houses in the countryside. Plenty of space for you and the kids.” Tommy said quietly.

           “We have Margate.”

           “Alfie wants to stay away from any city or town. Anything that might become a target. The country is the best option.”

           “You spoke to him?”

           “Last night.”

           Ella’s stomach was in knots. “Okay.”

           He nodded. “Stay in Margate until then.”

           “We will.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

           Alfie was still at the flat with the rest of the family when Ella returned. He was sitting by the radio with Arthur, both of them silent. Ezra was laying on the carpet, drawing while Sofia sat on Alfie’s lap.

           Arthur turned the volume down a bit when his sister came in. “Alright, El?”

           “Yeah, I think we’re going to go back to Margate.” She said quietly.

           Alfie nodded. “Sof and Ez go get your things, yeah?”

           The kids got up to gather their things as Alfie stood up from the armchair. “Did Tommy talk to you about our plan?”

           She nodded. “Yeah, he did.”

           “That’s okay?”

           “We need to keep them safe.” She concluded. “Anyway, we can.”

           “Okay.” He kissed her forehead and rubbed her shoulder.

~~~~~~~~~~

           It didn’t take long before Tommy bought the Solomons a place in the countryside. A lovely little home with a sprawling garden and plenty of space for the twins and the dogs.

           He saw them off at the train station. Most likely, it would be some time before they saw one another again. Knowing Ella, she would keep her children in the safest possible place until they were guaranteed safety in the outside world. Tommy knew he had to respect that.

           “Bye Uncle Tommy.” Ezra and Sofia chimed off, each giving him a big hug.

           “Be good for mum and dad, aye?” He said gently. “Make sure you give everyone a call once and a while, okay?”

           “Okay!”

           “Tom.” Alfie gave his brother-in-law a hearty handshake. “Thanks, mate.”

           “Of course.”

           Ella swallowed her tears as she hugged Tommy next. “Thank you.”

           “I should’ve done this for you when you asked all those years ago. When you wanted to be free and safe.”

           “I never would’ve met Alfie if you did.” She pointed out with a tearful smile.

           “I guess so.” He chuckled and let go of her.

           “Right, ready then?” Alfie helped the kids up into the car of the train then held a hand out to his wife.

           She nodded. “Ready.”  

-The end

//Thank you to everyone who stuck around for this long! It was so hard to end this but I leave the rest up to season 6 and see how things go from there. Huge thanks to my tag lists. If you’re interested my masterlist of all my oneshots and series are pinned to the top of my blog and my requests are open.I’m currently working on a new Alfie series so stay tuned. In the mean time I have a lot of Alfie one shots with more on the way as well as plenty of Tommy content. 

Thank you again!

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[comrade-meow]

Tom Farr in an excellent article on Medium presents in-depth the central arguments around prostitution decriminalisation, unionisation, and its conceptualisation as work, specifically from a socialist perspective

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic facing numerous countries across the world is undoubtedly a dire time for anyone who in some way depends on a job to provide for their family and keep a roof over their heads. It is not controversial to say that the UK economy and society more broadly has been shaken to its core by the crisis currently facing us, and many have — rightly it should be said — used the situation to highlight just how deeply the past ten years of austerity-driven capitalism in Britain has failed the most vulnerable in our society.

Even before considering the resource shortfall that currently faces us, those who place themselves somewhere on the political Left have not faltered in vocalising their displeasure with the Government’s Ahabian pursuit of ‘balancing the books’ and their slicing away of the perceived State largesse of ‘the last Labour Government’. For all his many faults, it cannot be said that Jeremy Corbyn did not galvanise disenfranchised millenials who had grown tired of the grotesque excesses of capitalism not being shared more equally amongst different generations and demographics.

But this is not a critique of the successes — or more accurately, the failures — of Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing policies. Rather, it is a critique of the rank hypocrisy that has riddled the Left, both in Britain and across the world — particularly those on the Left who consider themselves to be in any way “socialist” — when it comes to advocating for the actual redistribution of social power and wealth in the context of women within prostitution, which has been placed under a microscope in respect of the disastrous consequences Covid-19 is having on them.

Some background for those who may not be au fait with the UK’s response to this crisis: Covid-19 has presented an almost intractable problem for a Government that has built a reputation on wanting to shrink the State even in the face of thousands of deaths resulting from welfare cuts, lack of healthcare provision, and homelessness. When faced with the consequences of inaction — although a more cynical person may suggest it was the prospect of international shaming as opposed to the fundamental value of protecting its citizens’ lives — the Government were minded to finally get their invisible hand well and truly stuck in to the market.

On turned the money tap — Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £330 billion stimulus package to prevent financial disaster, and the State were going to support the economy with an ‘unprecedented intervention’. While analysing the criticism of the Government only doing this when faced with the most dire circumstances is a different story for a different time, suffice to say there are many of us who view the renewed investment after so many years of brutal austerity as akin to closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. It’s the bare minimum, and it should have been done sooner. So this in some ways is a Pyrrhic victory for the Left, in that it has been proven the State can step in to support the most vulnerable in society — albeit the threshold for when the State should ‘step in’ is a fundamental point of contention — but it has come at a great cost.

But this has left a lingering question: if these same Leftist and socialist groups have been so keen to reduce poverty, exploitation, and power inequality, then why have they spent recent years advocating for the continued purchase and sale of women as commodities within the marketplace of sexual exploitation? It should be noted, this reference to women as commodities is not just emotive language used to create a misconstrued narrative. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is used as a precise term which will demonstrate that prostitution is not the sale of labour power as is often claimed by sex trade apologists, but is in fact the sale of women specifically as commodities within the capitalist mode of production.

The Workers’ Revolution is here!

Of course, advocating for the legalisation and/or decriminalisation of prostitution is not something confined to the modern Left or alleged socialists. However, in recent years the idea that ‘sex work is work’ has gathered pace in much of the mainstream media, with many supposedly progressive outlets not giving equal column inches to opposing viewpoints of what is still clearly a contested issue.

It has become the party line (sometimes literally) to never falter from the idea that either any kind of analysis of prostitution as exploitative is regressive or prudish; or, alternatively but closely linked, prostitution is not any more inherently exploitative than any other type of work under capitalism. That is to say, all labour under capitalism is exploitative, but prostitution should not be put on any kind of pedestal as being particularly exploitative, and should be reconceptualised — both legally and intellectually — as work, thus providing the “workers” (prostituted women) with the protection afforded to other types of employment. Or so the argument goes, anyway.

Deviating from this is “whorephobic” and warrants the label of SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist), irrespective of whether you are actually a radical feminist, or “exclude sex workers”.

That’s enough internet for one day

Indeed, many of these same “SWERFs” are survivors of prostitution themselves, or are activists who have spent their lives working alongside and platforming the voices of women who have survived prostitution, which highlights just how jejune this particular slur is.

Stepping outside of the context of Covid-19 for a (lengthy) moment, the crux of this issue is not that Leftist sex trade apologists are somehow forming this opinion in a vacuum — as mentioned, there is myriad press coverage talking about the supposed benefits of allowing unhindered sexual access to the inside of a woman’s body — rather, this ideology is wrong on two fronts: prostitution should not be considered work in theoretical terms, and the reality of prostitution apologism proves it does not work in practice irrespective of whether it is considered “work” or not.

This argument is particularly egregious in its current form as advanced by Twitter socialists/Marxists/”I’m literally a communist(s)” (delete according to relevant Twitter bio) where on the one hand, there have been campaigns and protests to end the relentless free market capitalism that has gutted our society and left little protection for the most vulnerable amongst us; on the other, there has been an indefatigable crusade to glorify and expand a literal marketplace of human bodies there to provide sexual gratification for what is almost always a man.

Seize the means of production? I guess?

As Julie Bindel, author of The Pimping of Prostitution and campaigner against male violence against women tells me:

The sex trade, and prostitution specifically, is the starkest example imaginable of Leftist hypocrisy. Whilst genuine socialists or even soft centrists have a critique of uber capitalism, many will stop short at condemning poor and otherwise vulnerable women and girls having their bodies mined by rich exploiters for their own greedy and selfish benefit. Prostitution represents the interface between the worst excesses of patriarchy and capitalism.

Dealing with the first issue, on whether “sex work” can or should be considered “work”. The argument is formulated on the premise that by refusing to recognise “sex work” as “work” (or to put it another way, labour), then it prevents those within prostitution from receiving the protections afforded to recognised workers within the capitalist mode of production.

Discussions regarding socialist conceptions of work is a complicated issue, and one which has been debated for many years, but it is necessary to analyse this very carefully to put to rest the claim that “sex work is work”.

The first stop on this carousel of misery has to be the question: “what do you mean by sex work?” The phrase “sex work” has become so ubiquitous as to be totally meaningless. Everybody from the woman enslaved by a pimp, to the student who sells pictures of her body parts online with zero physical contact with the purchaser (which, by the way, is not devoid of risk or damaging consequences), to the “high-class escort”, to the strip club performer and all in-between are concertina’d down into a monolith of “sex worker”.

This renders the very real concrete differences between the reality of these situations as totally meaningless, and is indicative of the lumping together of vast swathes of women who have completely different relationships to this alleged work. (To preface, this section will borrow heavily from this superb Struggle Sessions essay, which is highly recommended.)

Take for instance the woman who performs in a strip club. Common “progressive” parlance would dictate that this woman is a sex worker. But this fundamentally misunderstands the concept of work, and the proletarian relation to it within the capitalist mode of production.

The majority of women that work in strip clubs in the UK are self-employed, which immediately distinguishes them from the proletarian who is exploited by a capitalist owner for their labour power, with the goal of extracting surplus value (which would ultimately result in profit). These individuals would be paid a wage for their labour power; the strip performer is not. The same goes for people who “cam”, and any other situation in which somebody earns money for a sexual performance after a third party takes a hosting cut.

Further, these performative types of “sex work” differentiate themselves from prostitution by their very nature. You can tell that even in common understanding, stripping and prostitution are not the same thing because strip clubs go to great lengths to make sex and sexual contact “against the rules” (not that this means prostitution does not occur within strip clubs, of course). While ironically the common thread between the above and non-pimp related prostitution is that none of them constitute work, they are still very much differentiated by the nature of what each circumstance entails.

These situations do not constitute work in the sense that these people are exploited by a capitalist employer as wage labourers, yet somehow they all constitute a monolithic grouping of “sex worker”. These women have been egregiously grouped together under the umbrella of “(sex) worker” by so-called socialists because, and this is the crux of the issue, they do something for money. This is not what is meant by a socialist conception of work.

Further to this, the condensing of all who do something for money that has the common thread of “sexuality” running through it ignores the very distinct class-differences within prostitution specifically. For example, the women who are controlled by pimps — which in the United States for example make up the majority of women in prostitution — are in no way workers. As the above Struggle Sessions essay points out, pimp-controlled prostitution is more akin to slavery than anything else. The woman is both controlled and effectively owned by the pimp, who oversees every aspect of her existence. The idea of applying “workers’ rights” to a woman who is literally owned by a man who profits off repeatedly selling her body is as grotesque as it is laughably bourgeois. Would these pimp-owned women band together to negotiate better terms of their enslavement? Would they negotiate a contract that stipulates when and where the prolific physical violence and abuse they experience can take place?

The same goes for the “high-class escort”. As with the strip performer and the cam performer, there is no “worker exploitation” occurring here as a socialist would understand the term worker (although of course, exploitation is occurring along sex-class lines). In fact, Marx himself stated that for worker exploitation to occur, the following social relation had to occur: firstly, the individual had to be free from any kind of slave-owner or employer (check); and secondly, they had to be “free” from any other means of subsistence, thus being “hurled as free and unattached proletarians on the labour-market”. This second requirement certainly does not apply to situations where a woman can allegedly pick and chose which high-paying contracts she might become party to.

The individual is not being paid a wage for her labour-power, with the capitalist receiving the surplus value. The relationship does not resemble anything akin to a capitalist exploiting a worker for their labour-power, as no capital is invested. It is simply the transfer of revenue from one party to another.

Suffice to say, sex trade apologists ignore this inconvenient stratification, and condense both ends of the spectrum — with the non-pimp owned women in the middle — down into one amorphous “sex worker movement”. By blurring the conception of worker to mean “doing something for money”, this necessarily then includes anybody else who might “do something for money” within the wider sex trade, resulting in a totally ambiguous collective consisting of pimps, brothel owners, porn producers, and strip club owners.

And what of the aforementioned women who are neither pimp-controlled or engaging in sexual performance?

This is where we can get down to the nuts and bolts of the issue. It has become a progressive flavour of the week to draw analogies between the “Wages for Housework” movement of the 70s, advocated for by Marxist-Feminists such as Silvia Federici et al, and prostitution. Advocates of this position draw parallels between those women who contribute to the reproduction of the proletariat labour-force within the contexts of marriage and household work by virtue of their unpaid labour in the home. This is including, but not limited to, cooking, cleaning, care work, and most importantly here, sex.

The common thread that links the location of housework as work (albeit unpaid work) and prostitution as unrecognised work can be found in the Marxist-Feminist analysis of marriage. To quote Federici at length:

It was understood — and the feminist movement has analysed it — that men always sell themselves, or try to sell themselves, in the wage labour market. We also sell ourselves in the marriage market. For many women, getting married is an economic solution, because the division of labour has been organised in such a way that it is much more difficult for women to get access to wage jobs. So, many women marry not because they want to, but as an economic solution for their lives. And you have sex because that is part of your job. We performed this deconstruction of sexuality, of the family, of the relationship between men and women, and we said that marriage is prostitution. In many cases, you can have a good relationship with your husband, but it doesn’t matter. The reality is that the way the state has constructed marriage has forced women to rely on marriage for survival and therefore, to offer sex in exchange for subsistence. The state has put us into the situation of prostitution.

So we have insisted that there is a continuity between the housewife who at night, after washing dishes and the floor, has to open her legs and have sex, whether she wants it or not, whether she’s tired or not — and many women have been beaten up because they refuse sex — and the woman who sells sex on the street. One sells it to one man and another sells it to many men, but there is a continuity between the two.

This, to put it bluntly, is a rather cavalier parallel. Many people would be mystified at the analogy drawn between marriage and prostitution, and argue along the lines of “they’re obviously not the same thing!”, but this misses the point. Federici is right when she states that marriage has, certainly historically and to a greater or lesser degree currently, forced women into a situation where economic dependence necessitates marriage and all that comes with it (in other words, sex). So the parallels between marriage — where the woman “sells it to one man” — and the prostituted woman who “sells it to many men” appear to make economic sense.

This, coupled with the other aspects of marriage — all of the unpaid domestic labour, the cooking, the cleaning, the care work — result in what has been conceptualised in Marxist terms as the reproduction of the work force. By doing all these things, the woman literally reproduces new labourers — and also current labourers who could not face the new working day without this care work — which circuitously results in further extraction of surplus value as the labour force is expanded by the introduction of new workers, and the capitalist can lower wages, thus increasing their profit margins.

Without delving into an analysis of whether wages for housework is a “good” or “bad” thing, the point of the argument is, as Federici states:

“…to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the’ opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it…”

It would seem then that by recognising prostitution as this type of unpaid and unrecognised labour, similar to the woman who “sells herself to one man” within marriage, that the demand for it to be recognised as work is one in which would instigate a new class-recognition amongst women as part of the labour force.

However, and with great respect to Federici who is a tremendous theorist and academic, this seems to gloss over the fundamental relationship between the existence of marriage — and importantly, monogamy — as an institution, and the system of prostitution. To quote Friedrich Engels in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the States:

“We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution.

Thus, it is argued here that the system of marriage and the system of prostitution are necessary, but inverse, correlates. To parse that in a slightly less dry manner: they depend on each other to exist, but at polar opposites of the same conceptual spectrum. To quote Engels again:

monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society

Marriage and prostitution developed hand in hand because it allowed men to act on their non-monogamous impulses by cheating on their wives with a woman who was not his wife. This sounds tautological, but the distinction between the wife and the prostituted woman is absolutely fundamental to understanding why marriage and housework as “labour” is not the same thing as prostitution as “labour”.

The man visits the prostituted woman precisely because she is not his wife. He can utilise her body for sexual relief without any concern for reproduction, or emotional and financial investment (beyond the immediate payment). There is nothing in the relationship between the married man and the prostituted woman that resembles the relationship of marriage as it would be understood in worker terms. Nothing is produced or reproduced in prostitution, and that is entirely the point. Domestic housework and sex may well be reconceptualised as work (although that is not without its problems), as it contributes to the literal reproduction of the labour-pool for the exploitative capitalist; prostitution does not.

This is clear to see in modern day Women’s Strikes— where women take to the streets to highlight that without their unrecognised domestic work, the world would likely grind to a halt. Can the same be said for prostitution as a system of so-called work? It would appear not. It should be noted as well, this is absolutely not a callous analysis of the women within prostitution, or a suggestion that the women should just be “done away with”, it is an analysis of the absolute misery of the system itself. Just as socialists do not hate the workers within capitalism, this analysis does not reflect on the women trapped within prostitution. It is an analysis of a system of brutal and violent oppression and exploitation. To suggest otherwise is to distract attention away from the capitalist in the worker-exploitation dynamic, and from the male punter in the prostitution dynamic.

A separate but related theory that drives the reconceptualisation of prostitution as work is that the women involved are selling their labour-power, and not their bodies. This argument is a rebuttal to the idea that prostitution is effectively akin to slavery, with men purchasing the bodies of women for sexual access. Sex trade apologists obfuscate this issue by claiming that “sex work” is akin to any other “service” work, where the worker provides a service such as waiting tables in a restaurant, and it is the labour-power that produces that service that is being sold.

This sleight of hand remarkably ignores the fundamental basis of what actually happens in prostitution, in that men are purchasing sexual access to the human body specifically because the human body in question is available to do that. Other types of labour do not require this specificity. A company that employs a plumber does not do so on the basis of whether (s)he has a large penis/breasts, or whether their hair colour is the right shade, or whether they fulfill a racist stereotype/fantasy. As long as they can sell their labour-power to undertake plumbing work, this usually suffices. The same cannot be said for prostitution, despite the fact that in a theoretical sense, almost all people would have the physical means to actually “do” prostitution (ie, functioning genitals).

On a fundamental level, men discriminate on the basis of the physical body in front of them — they do not just want sex with anybody, they want sex with that particular woman (or to a lesser extent, the man). The women are segregated and advertised on the basis of their breast size, or weight, or race.

If prostitution truly were just the sale of labour-power as a commodity in the production of sexual gratification as a service, punters would not discriminate between different women, but this is patently not the reality of the system of prostitution. For example, research of punters across five different countries showed that more than 50% had a preference for women that they perceived to be between the ages of 18–25.

Further to this, and yet another example of the fundamentally abhorrent nature of prostitution, race is also a central factor in punters’ decision making, and further highlights the intense class stratification that occurs within prostitution.

In the first instance, research in the US found that African-American women earned the least comparatively to their white counterparts (who earned the most) within escort-prostitution. At SPACE International’s Women of Colour Against the Sex Trade event held in London in 2019, women from across the globe shared their experience of racism within prostitution. Ne’cole Daniels, an African-American sex trade survivor who works with at-risk women and girls in California told the audience:

“The sex trade is built on racism. Black women are paid less [than their white counterparts], and treated even worse.”

Further, many of these same women are not only economically exploited as a result of systemic racism, but it propagates and entrenches racism on the part of punters who seek out women based on their race and ethnicity to act out racist fetishes. When quizzed on his “preference” for different women, one punter in Amsterdam stated:

“The black girls are pretty much down for anything, and the Eastern girls are eager to please. You learn who’s good at giving blowjobs, and who to avoid. [Being with colored girls] is exotic in its way.

This vile attitude is capitalised on by ruthless pimps, with one stating:

“The girls who work here are good at what they do, but [racial preferences and stereotypes] help get clients through the door. How do you say in real estate? It’s a buyer’s market.”

In the study mentioned previously that examined punter attitudes in five countries, racial stratification also played out there, with darker-skinned women being placed at the bottom of the conceptual pile in terms of earnings. A punter in Barcelona was quoted as saying:

If I had to choose, the dark ones would be bottom of my list. I’m not racist, but with black women, you see them on the lowest scale of prostitution. I have nothing against them, but sexually, they don’t interest me. (40-year-old white Spanish male)

This discrimination also plays out in the opposite manner, with punters specifically seeking out women of colour. For example, a 29-year-old white British man living in Spain who specifically sought out African street-based workers when he paid for sex described them as more liable to be ‘drug addicted, unclean and uneducated’. He then said:

I think for me, because I’ve got very nice middle class parents and been brought up in a very nice middle class way, sleeping with a prostitute for me isn’t just sleeping with a prostitute. It’s about like damnation towards society, you see what I mean? It’s like sort of damnation towards everything you feel about yourself as well. So it’s almost like wanting to damn yourself. So it doesn’t even matter what the prostitute’s like.

But, to quote O’Connell Davidson, the author of the above research: ‘It does matter to him — the prostitute needs to belong to a group that is popularly regarded as worthless, dirty and dangerous in order to serve as a medium of damnation.’

Even if prostitution occurred along the same economic-class exploitation lines, where a capitalist exploited the individuals to amass surplus value, it would still not be considered work like any other due to the fact it is a very specific, sexualised body being sold. Even the restaurant server who is hired by the misogynist owner because of her good looks and her alleged willingness to sexualise the service provision through the use of her physical body — for example, by flirting with customers — differentiates itself from prostitution in that it is still productive labour, allowing the owner to extract surplus value by exploiting the server’s labour power, regardless of the fact it may be analogous with prostitution in that both punter and owner have an interest in what type of physical body is “providing the service”.

Running parallel to this, in a study by Eileen McLeod of punters and the women they use, McLeod found that:

nearly all the men I interviewed complained about the emotional coldness and mercenary approach of many prostitutes they had contact with

This self-distancing employed by the women is not only a testament to the specifically degrading and exploitative nature of prostitution itself, but the fact the men complained about this is further proof that those who purchase the women’s bodies wish to be recognised as their owner for the period of time for which they have paid for. They desire acknowledgement, and the psychological presence of the woman, to reinforce their mastery of the woman’s body. If the man was simply interested in sexual relief, he would masturbate, or buy a “sex doll” to imitate — albeit poorly — the physical process of having sex. But he doesn’t. He wishes to purchase the real woman’s body, to engage in a transaction that can only ever exist within the context of prostitution.

This is a key point — if we recall the previous discussion regarding prostitution as a transfer of revenue from one party to another, and not the investment of capital for surplus value — this economic relationship is true for many service provisions, which Marx summed up as encompassing ‘(from) whore to pope’. In other words, all those individuals who are not paid from capital, but as individual service providers with no surplus value extracted.

But prostitution differentiates itself here too. Services such as woodcutting or portering — to use examples from Marx’s Grundrisse — ‘vanish upon consumption’. They are their own commodity. Proponents of the “sex work is work” line attempt to subsume prostitution under the umbrella of labour by stating that sex is the service-commodity produced. But sex cannot be meaningfully separated from the body in prostitution. For the greedy capitalist, he would soon rather utilise a workforce of machines in a relentless desire to extract the most surplus value for the least cost to himself.

Conversely, if we look at the sex-trade-equivalent in the form of sex dolls or robots, they are advertised as being ‘lifelike’.

Thanks, I hate it!

The ultimate goal for anything that isn’t a human body within the sex trade is for it to imitate the human body, as without it the relationship between punter and woman would simply not be the same. While it is true that the punter does not simply want a body to do “anything” (he specifically wants it for sex), the converse is also true: he does not simply want sex from anything. Thus, prostitution is necessarily dependent upon the human body being the object purchased.

Beyond the theories of labour power and employment status, it is actually quite difficult to conceive how prostitution would even function as a typical employee/employer relationship, and this once again reinforces the idea that prostitution is not, at its root, considered to be a situation (or “job”) like any other, even by those who advocate for its inclusion in the labour market.

For example, in 2002 Germany introduced the Prostitution Act 2002, which sought to bring prostitution under pre-existing labour frameworks, with the goal of legitimising the trade to encourage payment of taxes and employee protections. In what was undoubtedly feeble lip-service by the German Government towards the concept of “bodily autonomy”, they included in the legislation the prohibition of brothel owners to demand that a specific sexual service was performed. As O’Connell Davidson points out, this is totally unlike any other “employment contract”, with one brothel owner stating:

The employer’s right to give instructions to employees is limited. What do I do if she says: so, I am not going up to the room with the next three guests? What then? Do I still have to pay her? Can I throw her out?

In this example of course, prostitution would be formulated in precisely the way that any kind of socialist analysis of proletarian work requires it to be, in that an exploitative brothel owner pays a wage to the woman, and then the owner can extract surplus value from her labour. But in what appears to be a consistent trend amongst sex trade apologists and “sex positive” Twitter activists, myopic contradiction is the name of the game, and that is now no longer the type of “employment” that they’re talking about.

This is clear to see in the work of the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, who demand that:

sex work is recognised as gainful employment, [and that] sex workers have access to social insurance which gives the right to unemployment and sickness benefits, pensions and health care’

This does not appear to be objectionable on the face of things, but when read with the following paragraph the entire reconfiguration of prostitution as work collapses:

The fact that sex becomes work does not remove our right to have control over who we have sex with or the sexual services we provide or the condition under which we provide those services. We demand the right to say no to any client or any service requested. Managers must not be allowed to determine the services we provide or the conditions under which we provide them — whether we are employees or ‘self-employed’.

These demands are certainly not enjoyed by other wage-labourers within the capitalist mode of production. Other service providers — such as those within the catering industry — may be able to refuse to serve drunk clientele for example, but they cannot simply restrict access to certain meals on the menu as and when they choose. Nor can they pick and choose which customers to serve based on a personal preference.

Thus, prostitution cannot be meaningfully separated from the sale of the body and is implicitly not viewed as “any other type of labour”, as these protections would theoretically allow the woman to refuse to engage in an act which she does not wish to engage in, with a person whom she does not wish to engage in it with, and certainly the ICRSWE recognise this. Simply put, the differentiation in how “worker protections” meaningfully apply to prostitution necessarily demonstrate that it is like no other “work”, and could not be conceived of as such.

It is also worth briefly considering how exactly tangible “worker rights” might play out within the context of prostitution, to understand fully the impossibility of categorising this as work within the pre-existing labour market. Almost all physical labour jobs have some form of worker protection in terms of health and safety regulations, protective equipment and the like (not that this stops morally bankrupt capitalists from ignoring these and working their labour force to death anyway…). How exactly would this work within prostitution? In this piece, Juno Mac and Molly Smith argue that by reconfiguring prostitution so that it is subsumed into the labour market, it would allow:

…people who sell sex (to) access labor law and other kinds of protection afforded on legal job sites.

What “protection” would actually apply here? In other professions, workers are afforded protection from bodily fluids and potential exposure to disease, for example. Would the women in prostitution be entitled to wear full hazmat suits to prevent the spread of disease and exposure to potentially hazardous substances? This, of course, would not happen as that would change the fundamental nature of prostitution itself.

Further, it is interesting that some proponents of this position do not recognise the hypocrisy in deriding Nordic Model or abolitionist advocates for our supposed “reliance on the corrupt police state” to enforce sanctions against punters, when that is exactly what would happen when a punter reneges on his end of the “contract” by refusing to wear a condom, or by brutally beating and raping the woman in front of him. This is not to say that criticisms of reliance on the police, who are the enforcers of the bourgeois State, are without merit — but it cannot be one rule for the police in one argument, and another rule in the alternative.

The same article quotes ‘sex worker Nickie Roberts’, who in the 1980s stated:

Working in crummy factories for disgusting pay was the most degrading and exploitative work I ever did in my life. I think there should be another word for the kind of work working class people do; something to differentiate it from the work middle class people do; the ones who have careers. All I can think of is drudgery. It’s rotten and hopeless; not even half a life.

Why should I have to put up with a middle class feminist asking me why I didn’t ‘do anything — scrub toilets, even?’ than become a stripper? What’s so liberating about cleaning up other people’s shit?

Indeed, what is so “liberating” about cleaning up other people’s shit? But this rather flippant comment about “degrading and exploitative work” betrays just how oppositional to worker-class solidarity this attitude is. In fact, many out-and-out Marxists such as Alexandra Kollontai in her work Prostitution and Ways of Fighting it went as far as to describe it as ‘labour desertion’. There is an undercurrent of disdain for the working class, where the acknowledgement that the work undertaken by the proletariat is actually not “liberating” at all, and anything else is preferable. This is a perfectly understandable position for the “meritocracy capitalist” to take — ‘life is a rat race, why shouldn’t I succeed’ — but it certainly isn’t a socialist position.

The theory is one thing, but what about the practice? As will be shown, any attempt by alleged socialists to try to reconceptualise prostitution as a workers’ rights issue is destined to fail in that regard as well. For a system that is in direct contravention of various international human rights law obligations whether or not you are examining the issue through a socialist lens, the answer for sex trade apologists to the question “what is the best way to legislate prostitution” apparently lies in decriminalising the whole endeavour, thus allowing the supposed workers to “unionise” and seek worker recognition that way.

This is a frankly ridiculous notion, and to quote the Struggle Sessions essay once again:

Being under the control of a pimp prevents a prostitute from all independent activity and independent thinking. The woman chained by the pimp cannot be organized into a trade union. A union of prostitutes who through some unknown force have ceased to be enthralled to pimps, due to the inevitable emergence of leadership and people who professionally manage such a union, will inevitably just generate its own, internal pimps. This is true because if the union bureaucracy is not completely ineffective (that is, if the union actually exists and functions), they would find themselves enforcing payment from reneging johns, securing housing in times of income shortage, bribing or negotiating with police, and sustaining their professional organizers with dues: they would in essence be pimps with a more charitable subsidiary.

Further:

In the case of prostitutes without pimps (who are not being pimped upon the point of being organized), who basically take contracts independently and have full access to their own income…For them the formation of a union is impossible. After all, a “union” of those who own their own means of production (lumpen or not) is actually called a cartel. Furthermore, the existence of a cartel gives impulse to the hiring of a general staff — plus, the stratification of prostitution would allow the cartel to employ other prostitutes under its protection — this again is a return to pimping.

The unionisation of prostitution is, in the bluntest terms, a total sham that benefits pimps and traffickers. There are numerous examples of this, including The Red Thread in The Netherlands, an organisation which proclaimed to represent “sex workers” despite only having 100 members (the Netherlands has an estimated prostitution population of 25,000), and never having fought a court case on behalf of one of their “workers” to improve their “working conditions” despite the absolute disaster that is prostitution in the Netherlands; or the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU) in Cambodia, which when the women within prostitution were asked of the supposed benefits of the WNU’s work, a WNU representative responded for them by stating that the organisation will help to purchase a coffin for the women when they die. This truly is the socialist revolution we have all been waiting for!

Perhaps most importantly, we can turn our attention to New Zealand, where the sex trade apologist’s utopia is in full swing — including blanket decriminalisation and a quasi-union in the form of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective — to see how this actually plays out on the ground.

The NZPC themselves represent the abject failure of the bourgeois experiment that is prostitution decriminalisation, replete with the corruption and cloak-and-dagger tactics you would expect from a capitalist conglomerate, and not an alleged workers’ rights organisation. As Janice Raymond analyses here, quoting a sex trade survivor and writer named Chelsea who has had first hand experience with the organisation:

The NZPC has skewed its own research data to deceive the public that decriminalisation has resulted in greater safety for women in New Zealand.

Not only that, but due to the new moniker of “work” being applied to prostitution, the very issues that these workers’ rights were meant to prevent — such as not having to engage with a client against their will — have not only remained present, but have been reformulated as “exploitative worker conditions”. This, rather unsurprisingly, has been coupled with the exploitation tactics of greedy pimps and punters, resulting in a situation where:

‘…brothel owners were allowed to offer sex buyers an “all-inclusive” deal, a set payment that permitted them to do anything they wanted to women with no-holds barred. The women couldn’t refuse to perform any activity requested, or determine their own prices.’

The “refusing any activity requested” as you may recall was one of the main “worker demands”of the ICRSWE, which clearly is not actually feasible in practice. This once again proves the inseparable nature of prostitution from the body, in that actually doing prostitution requires the giving of the body to a client, regardless of whether they want to or not. Only now, the quasi-union that is literally dependent upon the continuance of prostitution for its existence euphemistically glosses over the rampant male violence against women — for example, it describes human trafficking as a “working holiday” — in a self-serving attempt to weave their own success story narrative.

The NZPC are also major players when it comes to law and policy reviews of how decriminalisation is playing out, and they occupy three of the eleven seats on the Prostitution Law Review Committee, per s43(2)(g) Prostitution Reform Act 2002. Why then, if the NZPC have the best interests of prostituted women at heart, are they signing off on research that lies about the number of women within prostitution since decriminalisation was introduced in 2002?

On page 13 of the report, the PLRC state:

The Committee endorses the findings of the CSOM that the enactment of the PRA has had little impact on the numbers of people working in the sex industry.

Then later in Section 8, paying particular attention to Auckland:

Research undertaken by the CSOM in February and March 2006 found 253 street-based sex workers in New Zealand…In Auckland 106 street workers…in Wellington 47 street workers…and in Christchurch 100 were recorded. Between June and October 2007, CSOM carried out another estimation of street-based sex workers…In Christchurch 121 street-based workers were counted and in Wellington 44 street-based sex workers were counted. In Auckland, 230 street workers were known to be working.

Further evidence of the PLRC’s intentional obfuscation and outright lying in the report can be found in this article by Samantha Berg, but suffice to say, if the NZPC really did have their “workers’” best interests at heart, then as an organisation that makes up nearly one-third of the PLRC they shouldn’t be endorsing fallacious research.

All of the above does not even take into account that prostitution under decriminalisation has thrived in New Zealand, with nearly 1000 brothel applications being submitted between 2004–2011, resulting in a growth of the exploiter-class, which has made the lives of the women within prostitution considerably worse. As sex trade survivor and co-founder of Wahine Toa Rising Ally-Marie Diamond tells me:

Decriminalisation hasn’t improved the situation in New Zealand. We have seen men become more entitled and demanding in terms of what they expect from women in the sex trade and what they feel they are entitled to because ‘they pay for it’. This has become more apparent since COVID-19 with many men ignoring health and safety warnings.

Women in the sex trade who are assaulted, raped, or attacked very rarely go to police. Young people, especially those of Māori or Pacific Island cultures are being pimped on the streets, and are being trafficked in licensed brothels. Overseas students visiting NZ on student visas and tourist visas are also at extremely high risk. Full Decriminalisation does not protect them. Trafficking is a huge issue in New Zealand, and yet the Government seems to turn a blind eye.

There are no government strategies in place to help women exit. Regardless of the law, exit services are imperative. Support must be there for all women and young people. Bella Te Pania, a Maori woman, tried multiple times to exit, but there was no support for her — she was the fifth sex worker murdered in Christchurch since decriminalisation. One life lost is one too many. Where was her protection, her rights under “Full Decrim”?

And this, rather circuitously I admit, brings us back to the impact of Covid-19 on prostitution. In the context of Covid-19 specifically, and as Renee Gerlich meticulously explains here, upon the introduction of Coronavirus lockdown measures, the NZPC had this to say:

COVID-19 INFORMATION: INSTRUCTIONS TO STOP PHYSICAL CONTACT SEX WORK BY MIDNIGHT WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH 2020

NZPC recognises that sex work is work and is the main form of income for a number of people.

However, with New Zealand going to a Level 4 alert, sex workers are asked to comply with the requirement to stay at home during the four-week period of isolation indicated by the Government. Only those in essential services will be permitted to work. Sex work is not classed among the essential services (doctors, pharmacists, police, ambulance, fire, vets, food production, and supermarkets).

Therefore NZPC wants all sex workers to comply with the four-week closure.

Failure to comply could result in officials arriving at your place of work to enforce compliance.”

The fact that the onus to simply “stay at home” has shifted onto the shoulders of those within prostitution demonstrates a borderline criminally negligent ignorance of the fact that many of these women cannot simply just ‘comply with a four-week closure’ — as recognised by the NZPC themselves — but also fails to protect the very women they are supposedly there to help. As Gerlich points out, the fact that the NZPC are threatening enforcement measures against these women demonstrates that they certainly do not have their best interests at heart, and are far removed from any kind of workers’ union that socialists would otherwise hold in such high esteem. And while a recent article in The Guardian espoused the apparently-innumerable benefits afforded to women within prostitution since decriminalisation — such as “migrant sex wokers being able to move from town to town” (excuse me while my eyes roll out of my head at “migrant sex worker”) — as Michelle Mara dissects here, that too is a smokescreen.

The decriminalisation of prostitution represents the worst excesses of capitalism, and relentlessly commodifies women down into objects until they are perceived to have no further value, and then discarded. While New Zealand is a microcosm of a specific legal approach, analogies of this ruthless free-marketeerism can be drawn with the pornography industry. After all, that is an industry that in effect has been decriminalised along similar industrial lines to prostitution. Performers have allegedly been afforded “workers’ rights” upon legal recognition of their status as “workers”, but this has done little to stop the conveyor belt of human misery that is pornography in the 21st Century, with performers reporting things such as:

It was the most degrading, embarrassing, horrible thing ever. I had to shoot an interactive DVD, which takes hours and hours of shooting time, with a 104 degree fever! I was crying and wanted to leave but my agent wouldn’t let me, he said he couldn’t let me flake on it. I also did a scene where I was put with male talent that was on my ‘no list’. I wanted to please them so I did it. He stepped on my head […] I freaked out and started bawling; they stopped filming and sent me home with reduced pay since they got some shot but not the whole scene.

And:

I got the shit kicked out of me… most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad… I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. They kept filming. [I asked them to turn the camera off] and they kept going.

As pornography has become more ubiquitous, it has become more violent, and in purely economic terms, the market has functioned exactly as it does with decriminalisation. Performers are earning less and less due to absolute market saturation of both performers and content, and the same can be said for prostitution. As New Zealand sex trade survivors Michelle Mara and Rae Story state regarding prostitution post-decriminalisation:

After decrim there were fees for everything and no mercy

and:

Beyond that, the competition (sometimes as many as 50 women a night) was incredibly intense. Because many of the johns were regulars at the brothel, the longer you worked there, the harder it was to induce their fickle attention. If the women did not successfully cultivate “regulars” (which they did by giving the johns everything they wanted), it was not always easy to make money in the long-term. Johns want the newest, youngest girls.

As the restrictions on this market of human bodies have been untethered, it follows the exact same trajectory as any other free market. By leaving the market of prostitution to its own devices, ruthless pimps, traffickers, and punters exploit the economic vulnerability of these women to ensure they pay as little as they can, while extracting as much as they can, whether that be profit in the case of the pimp, or violent, abusive sex in the case of the punter.

This is what makes the apologist attitude of so-called socialists so disgraceful. In the light of Covid-19, all of us on the Left — socialist, Marxist, and otherwise — have recognised that the most vulnerable in society will need the most protection while economic disaster looms overhead. We want to see those who need it most lifted out of the vile free-market capitalist state of misery that has been imposed on them for decades.

By advocating for the idea that prostitution should be decriminalised, these people are condemning vast swathes of women to the very thing they seek to abolish in other social contexts. Prostitution represents the nexus of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, where women’s bodies are commodified into products on the free-market, ready for purchase by men.

To return briefly to the Mac and Smith essay, entitled Sex Is Not the Problem with Sex Work (the implication presumably being that the problem is work), with all due respect, surely the problem lies with both? It is one thing to erroneously elevate prostitution to another form of work within capitalism, and to locate the issue as one of labour; but to simultaneously reject that sex-class inequality is not one of the underlying driving factors of prostitution is to lack any class-analysis at all. It focuses purely on the economic, and does not delve into the sex-class inequality the drives patriarchy as it currently exists.

In her seminal work The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone expounds the idea that the root of female oppression is due to the biological supremacy of men over women as childbearers, and examines the idea that sex was utilised as a tool of oppression to subordinate women. She goes further even than Marx and Engels in analysing how female subjugation occurs. As she states in the introduction of the book:

It would be a mistake to attempt to explain the oppression of women according to this strictly economic interpretation. The class analysis is a beautiful piece of work, but limited: although correct in a linear sense, it does not go deep enough. There is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that Engels at times dimly perceives, but because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate in its own right.

She goes on to state:

Unlike economic class, sex-class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal. Although…this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system — the domination of one group by another — the reproductive functions of these differences did.

This idea that certainly extends to prostitution, which of course still exists within the paradigm of patriarchal supremacy (as well as capitalism, and white supremacy); men’s control of women through sex. Although as has already been explained, prostitution is not reproductive in the same way that male domination over women as a class is predicated upon, it is still, at its root, a domination based on sex.

To ignore or refute this in an effort to defend the system of prostitution suggests that it somehow exists entirely separately and above those same paradigms. Presumably the fact that prostitution is overwhelmingly made up of women; who are economically impoverished; and that women of colour are at disproportionate risk of even further exploitation is all a coincidence?

As Andrea Dworkin said in the 1980s: ‘Only when women’s bodies are being sold for profit do Leftists claim to cherish the free market.’ This quote rings as true today as it did almost forty years ago. If Leftists and self-styled socialists truly want to embrace an emancipatory and radical politics, it is time they stop excusing the grotesque free market sexual exploitation of women across the globe. An authentic Leftist position should hold that these women should be aided and supported to exit the system of prostitution financially, emotionally, and practically, while of course removing criminal sanctions against them, not instead doubling down on this exploitation. The absolute rotten and despairing hypocrisy of these alleged socialists and Lefitsts has been all but driven home in the Covid-19 crisis, which has locked hundreds if not thousands of women into further destitution, oppressively crushed within the market of human bodies that apparently should be relentlessly expanded and ideologically engendered.

This does not resemble anything remotely like a Leftist, progressive, or socialist position, and the hypocrisy must be exposed and objected to at every opportunity. It is time to abolish the vile sex trade once and for all.

Special thanks to Julie Bindel and Ally-Marie Diamond for speaking with me for this article. Ally-Marie is co-founder of Wahine Toa Rising: “an organisation which acts as a voice for vulnerable, exploited women and children in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, who are overrepresented in the sex trade. Like us, they deserve to know they are WORTHY, VALUED, HEARD, SEEN, and LOVED”

https://facebook.com/WahineToaRisingAotearoa/…

Twitter:@WahineToaRising

Many thanks also to SPACE INTL, Feminist Current, and Nordic Model Now who platform the voices of women — specifically in this case Ne’Cole Daniels, Michelle Mara and Rae Story — who have survived and exited the sex trade, and without whom much of this article could not have been written.

[thevividgreenmoss]

Let us now turn to some contradictions and ironies inherent in postmodern thought.

The first irony that strikes me is its great popularity in countries like India and China. All the fundamental presuppositions of postmodern social and economic analyses refer to the structures of advanced capitalism. Looking at things from India, it seems implausible that postmodernist analyses could apply to societies that are not modern even by the standards of 19th century Britain or France or Germany. Nor is it possible to be postindustrial in predominantly agrarian societies.

Definitive decline of the industrial working class is a central tenet of postmodernism. This too does not apply. Given the demographic size of China and its rapid industrialization in recent years, there has been greater expansion of the industrial proletariat there in mere three decades than perhaps in all of Europe during its industrial revolutions. A small number of countries - East and South East Asian countries, plus India, Brazil and Argentina, let us say - has experienced a demographically much larger process of proletarianisation than the West did in all its history, and this has happened precisely during the half century which has witnessed the ascendancy of postmodern ideas in the higher echelons of university education.

As for the great prosperity and generalised ownership of housing and consumer durables that capitalism is said to have delivered, the fact is that (a) the vast majority of people outside the Euro-American zones never experienced anything of the kind, and (b) that kind of prosperity, including homeownership for the working classes, is precisely what is getting dissolved by the current offensives of the capitalist class across Europe and North America. And if the credit system was the great motor for the making of the ‘consumer society’, ‘affluent society’ etc, it is precisely the scale of private and state debts that is bringing that whole phase of American prosperity to a close under our very eyes.

We shall ignore here the absurd idea of the disappearance of the capitalist class in the United States. But something needs to be said about the opposite thesis, regarding the working class. I have already pointed out the actual and historically unprecedented expansion of the proletariat in numerous Third World countries over the past half century. Moreover, the dramatic decline of the industrial working class in the US is an index of the general decline of manufacture in US economy as such, and this decline is proving to be not a sign of prosperity but the key cause of the decline of American economic power as such. That is certainly not the case in the most powerful European economy, namely Germany, where industrial working class continues to have far greater social weight. In another frame, as early as the 1970s, when ideas of the death of the working class were swirling around on both sides of the Atlantic, Harry Braverman, in his brilliant book Labour and Monopoly Capital, had demonstrated that some 90% of the US population owned no income-generating property and relied exclusively on an economy of salaries and wages. A sectoral breakdown of jobs and incomes then showed a very high degree of proletarianisation.

Meanwhile, since at least the advent of Lenin, communists have never believed that the industrial working class will necessarily become the majority of the population or the exclusive agent of revolutionary change; nor has it been postulated that the industrial working class is the only kind of working class we have. The proletariat has always been conceived of as the leading nucleus of a revolutionary movement which will, however, necessarily rely on mobilization of and joint action with other oppressed classes, such as the peasantry, the rural proletariat and the mass of workers in branches other than manufacture, not to speak of numerous other social strata. The postmodernist idea that communism has somehow become irrelevant because the industrial proletariat constitutes only a minority of the population - and even of the proletarianised masses - thus has no bearing on how the role of the industrial proletariat is actually conceived in communist thought.

We can thus say that so far as the social and economic analyses of postmodernism are concerned, we can treat this part of the ideology essentially as a reflection of a particular phase of western, especially US, prosperity, with the assumption that this particular kind of prosperity will now be permanent. Moreover, the ideology is quite an accurate reflection of the class location of the new and prosperous middle class which itself a product of the type of capitalism that arose in the imperialist core of contemporary capitalism during the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ between 1945 and 1973. This class has actually continued to gain during the whole period of the Bubble Economy that speculative capital was able to sustain even after the recessionary trends set in after 1973. Moreover, key producers of such ideologies tend to be concentrated, even when they come from Third World origins, in institutions of higher learning and cultural management in those countries. This highly Westocentric ideology was presented, moreover, as a universalism, i.e., as if conditions prevailing in the West were somehow global conditions and ideas produced in specific circumstances had universal validity.

[...]

About Foucault I shall be brief. He is more a philosophical historian and little concerned with active politics. He was as opposed to the fundamentals of Marxist thought as Lyotard but had absolutely no truck with neoliberalism. His opposition to Marxism can be illustrated with a brief but paradigmatic formulation of his difference from Marxism: ‘no narrative of history can be assembled from the twin sites of political economy and the state.’ What does this mean? First, classes are not the fundamental units of society; economic power is just one kind among many kinds of power; the state is just one social actor among many other kinds of actors; to abolish one kind of state (e.g., the capitalist state) and replacing it with some other kind of state (e.g., the proletarian state) amounts to no more than replacing one kind of power over the people with another kind of power. Second, society is composed of countless complexes and organisms of power: the family, the prison complex, the schooling complex, the medical complex, the technologies for management of sexuality, and so on and on and on. Each has to be addressed in its own terms, not in the overall framework of class struggle.

Such ideas then lead to a very restricted notion of what forms of politics might be permissible. One of Foucault’s key political ideas is that no one can really represent any one else without a coercive relationship with those who are represented. All you can do in the social domain is try to help enhance the power of people to represent themselves. For this you need what Foucault calls ‘micro-politics,’ local, issue-based, time-bound. You help others if you can but you make sure that you don’t try to represent them, since self-representation is the only authentic form of representation.

Foucault’s idea of ‘micro-politics’, local and issue-based, and especially the rhetoric of ‘empowering’ without organizing politically, does authorize the kind of politics that has come to be practised now on such a vast scale by the NGOs and the so-called social movements. His proposition that (a) every society is composed of countless centres of power and great many institutions, and therefore (b) what is required is not a unified political party but a whole plethora of agents addressing those multiple centres of power resonates well with the very structure of the postmodern politics that have arisen in our times, especially in the form of identity politics. And, for all its radical claims, this kind of politics is perfectly acceptable to Anglo-Saxon liberal statecraft which has always understood that capitalist state power is safest when it can fragment the opposition into diverse claimants competing for a share in the national revenue - atomisation of politics, so to speak - and most vulnerable when it has to face a united opposition to its rule. In immigrant societies such as the United States, where the population itself is composed of diverse social groups-distinguished by countries of origin, religious affiliation, racial divides etc--this atomisation of politics in the shape of ‘identity politics’ has always been the principal weapon against class politics, as Marxist historians such as Mike Davis have shown with extensive documentation. By the end of 1960s, this politics of ethnic identity became state policy not only in the US but also in Canada as ‘multiculturalism’ and in Britain as ‘race relations’--increasingly with the high philosophical rhetoric borrowed from French postmodernism. This Anglo-Saxon manoeuvre was then imported into India, often with postmodernist authority; even the word ‘ethnicity’ was a gift to Indian social science from the Ford Foundation and its funded scholars, institutes, publications and seminars. Until the 1970s, hardly any Indian social scientist used this word.

[...]

Let us recall some of the features of American and French postmodernisms we discussed earlier. First, there is a revolt against Enlightenment ideas of Rationality, Universality and Progress. Second, in political theory, there is widespread rejection of the state and political organizations - parties, trade unions etc - as mere bureaucratic machines for mass coercion. Politics, then, can only be local, community-based and issue-based. The Nazi death camps and technologically produced weapons of mass destruction are cited again and again to debunk the idea that Science can be an instrument of human emancipation. Most of the postmodernists equate communism and fascism as ‘totalitarian’ ideologies and systems, borrowing this equation from the Far Right. Rejection of Modernity then often leads to a certain romanticization of thepremodern - the traditional, the primordial - as something authentic (Foucault, for instance, not only debunked communism as ‘totalitarian’ but also wrote essays praising the clerical revolution in Iran). Versions of all this re-appear in various shades of Indian postmodernism - as we shall see below.

The postmodern political forms in India typically take the shape of ‘social movements’, ‘civil society organizations’ and the funded NGOs. It is important to understand these terms. ‘Social movement’ is contrasted to ‘political movements’. Politics addresses the issue of state power, but if state is dismissed as realm of corruption and bureaucratic manipulation then political parties--even workers’ parties which participate in the political field and fight for state power--are also seen as part of that corruption, as yet other kinds of bureaucratic machines. Logically, then, the political is replaced by ‘the social’; the objective now is not to work toward a different kind of state power but to bypass the issue of political power altogether, and to work, in stead, for ‘empowerment’ of individuals, local communities and social groups where they exist, in relation to the specific issues that concern them in their daily lives. The same applies to the concept of ‘civil society organizations’. ‘Civil society’ is equated with ‘the people’ and is differentiated from ‘the state.’ Another term for the same is ‘people’s movements’. All of these typically take the form of the NGO. Much is made of NOT taking state funds, which is said to guarantee independence from the state. This is an interesting claim considering that great many of the most successful NGOs do take money from the Scandinavian governments, German foundations, various institutions of the United Nations, or such entities as Action Aid which is itself an arm of the British government - and for some years, increasingly, the World Bank, Ford Foundation etc. More recently, a number of Indian corporate houses have also moved into this field of patronage for NGOs. In practice, then, the national Indian state is the one that is treated as particularly unworthy, while funding from virtually anywhere else is considered clean.

Now, local work, among particular communities and on specific issues, is as old as 19th century reform movements, and most political parties which have any kind of ideological claims do have such programmes. But all such works was historically done with the idea of building larger and larger unities and organization for emancipation of the nation as a whole, of the peasantry and the working classes as entire social units, or of women on the national scale. What was new with NGOs etc was an exclusive emphasis on local work and the small group, with great contempt for electoral politics and with deliberate refusal to work in terms of classes, national liberation, or even trade union work. The phenomenon of the NGOs--many of whom starting calling themselves ‘social movements’ etc - arose in India as a major, distinct phenomenon when European social democratic parties - with their governments and foundations - began funding such organisations, essentially to compete with communist organizational efforts among the peasantry, the working classes, women and artisanal groups. On the global scale, those social democratic parties were already closely aligned with US imperialism since the beginning of the Cold War but much of the broad left in India which was opposed to the communist parties came to see those very social democratic parties as a progressive, democratic alternative to communism. There is reason to believe that CIA money was also funnelled through those European parties but the anticommunist projects of those parties themselves were now just as extreme as those of US imperialism. They funded anti-communist NGOs not only in India but across Asia and, especially, Africa.

Once that breach was in place, other funders could also move in. This phenomenon remained relatively restricted during the period when ideologies of anti-imperialism, economic nationalism and independent Indian development were strong and, rhetorically at least, the state itself paid lip service to such ideologies. As neoliberalism took hold and those ideologies receded, inhibition about getting funding from foreign agencies and domestic corporates also fell off. Then, as the state started withdrawing from direct involvement in providing social entitlements, it also began farming out some of its own work to NGOs, as had previously been done in weaker states such as Bangladesh. Over time, these ‘social movements’, armed with the rhetoric of ‘micro-politics’ borrowed from French postmodernism have come to occupy more and more of the political space in the name of ‘civil society’ and ‘the social’. This atomization of politics, which undercuts the politics of organized unity against the ruling class and its state, is greatly favoured by global capital itself.

[...]

In an article published in 1993, Dipesh Chakrabarty ascribed this great change in the very nature of the original subalternist project to, in his words, ‘the interest that Gayatri Spivak and, following her, Edward Said took in the project.’ Having thus identified the main influences behind the mutation, he also identifies the precise nature of the shift: from the project to ‘write ‘better’ Marxist histories,’ free of ‘economistic class reductionism’ to an understanding that ‘a critique of this nature could hardly afford to ignore the problem of universalism/Eurocentrism that was inherent in Marxist thought itself.’ This is a significant formulation, since it suggests that subalternism rejected the fundamentals of Marxism not once but twice. In the original project itself, Chakrabarty says, Subalternism rejected what he calls ‘economistic class reductionism’ - in other words, it rejected the idea that (1) that economy was the backbone of any society, (2) that the classes that are fundamental to the working of a capitalist system are the fundamental social forces of that society, (3) the idea that class struggle is the motivating force of history around which other kinds of struggles are shaped, and (4) the idea of the proletarian revolution itself. These are the ideas that are here described as ‘economistic class reductionism,’ which, Chakrabarty says, subalternism rejected at the very beginning. In the second phase, after American postmodernism - represented in this case by Said and Spivak - blessed the project, subalternism also rejected Marxist thought for its ‘universalism.’ Here, ‘universalism’ is again a code word for a number of ideas that are sought to be rejected, such as the idea (1) that there is a common humanity, beyond race or ethnicity or even nationality, which is exploited under capitalism, (2) that the proletariat cannot really emancipate itself without emancipating society as a whole and thus emerging (in Marx’s words) as ‘a universal class,’ (3) that what we have so far had is capitalist universality (my term for what the bourgeoisie calls ‘globalization’) and it cannot be overturned with anything less than a socialist revolution which itself will have to be, eventually, universal (global), and (4) that identities and ethnicities, important as they undoubtedly are, involve, in each instance, only a small part of humanity, whereas exploitation is what is ‘universal’ for the vast majority of humanity, beyond identity etc.

In short, then, rejection of what subalternists, in their code language, call ‘class reductionism’ and ‘universalism’ amounts in fact to rejection of Marxism as a whole, regardless of how often they invoke Gramsci or Mao or whoever.

This rejection of Marxism, coupled with growing identification with postmodernist ideas, and especially with postmodern antirationalism, then leads the subalterns to adopt positions on the issue of secularism and communalism, for instance, which are clearly rightwing even though they cannot be identified with Hindutva politics as such.

Aijaz Ahmad, On Postmodernism

[hollyxqx]

PLAYING WITH FIRE  //  YOONGI  //  05

↪PARING: Min Yoongi x Reader ↪ GENRE: angst » smut » idol!au » enemies to lovers ↪ SUMMARY: Yoongi hates you. Or at least he thinks he does. (AKA the one where you work for BigHit and Yoongi is bad at feelings). ↪ WORD COUNT: 6k ↪ WARNINGS: heavy angst | sex | secret relationships | jealousy | mild possessive behaviour a/n: don’t hate me too much for this chapter lol i promise its for a reason.

ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX

Yoongi could barely control the toothy grin that spread across his face as you practically skipped down the hallway, hand firmly encasing his. It was 1am, the perfect time for a secret rendezvous with someone he wasn't supposed to be with. Talk about taking control of the situation and being smart. People say it all the time but he literally couldn't help himself when it came to you.

Where you were taking him he wasn't aware; Yoongi was happy to be led as long as it was with you. You urged him on further with an encouraging smile thrown over your shoulder. He couldn't control how his heart skipped a beat.

"We can't go in here!" He hissed when he realised what you were up to.

"Be quiet." You reprimanded, holding a finger to his lips for a moment before you pushed open a fire escape door. He was almost certain this was at the very best was frowned upon and at worst - illegal. Left and right he looked up and down the deserted corridor double and triple checking that you were absolutely alone. The coast was clear.

Disobeying every instinct inside that was screaming this is not a good idea he followed you through the open door into the cool air of the concrete stairwell. You kept your grip on his hand tight as you dragged him up the flight of stairs.

"Where are you taking me?" He questioned aloud.

"Almost there." You ignored the question, panting a little from the exertion of this many steps. "It's worth it, I promise."

To his absolute horror you pushed open a door marked 'rooftop: do not enter' as if it was nothing. A thousand terrible images flashed through his mind of him getting caught doing something so wild and then being kicked out of BangTan and having his home country hate him. You could sense his reluctance.

"Yoongi, it's fine, I promise. The night manager of the hotel is a friend of mine. We're not going to get in trouble." You assured. He shot you a confused look.

"Wha - ? How do you know the manager?" He couldn't help but ask.

"Friend of my dad's. I lived in LA during the summer when I was younger you know."

He didn't actually know that. You hadn't really disclosed much about your life before moving to Korea to him and he hadn't asked, hesitant to pry too much assuming you'd tell him if you wanted him to have that information. "Oh." He muttered dumbly.

Now that you were outside the chill air of the summer night felt refreshing and he inhaled deeply, taking it in along with the view of the city below. He looked up at the sky, disappointed that the LA pollution hid the stars in the sky. Turning back to you, Yoongi watched as you wedged the metal door open with a wooden doorstop so it didn't close behind you both.

"The view is great huh?" You asked as you strode over to him.

He looked at you. "It is." He swallowed thickly.

You gently nudged him over to the furthermost concrete edge of the building. He wrapped an arm around your side and  held you tightly against him. "Do you see that tower over there?" You pointed somewhere to the left and he squinted, nodding when he saw what you were talking about. "That's where my father used to live. When my parents divorced that's where I would stay when I came to visit."

"How old were you when they separated?" He asked quietly, a gentle hand stroking your side comfortingly.

"Eleven." You hummed softly. "It was a lot, going back and forth between here and Britain alone but I'm thankful for it now. It made me brave enough to go to new places. Hence Korea."

"I had no idea." He felt a little foolish for not asking more about you sooner. It always seemed as if there never was enough time when you were together, every moment was stolen. He was thankful for the opportunity to learn now however. "I just assumed you were brave. Or stupid. One of the two." He teased, squeezing your hip affectionately.

You rolled your eyes, swatting him on the chest playfully. "There's a fine line between courage and stupidity but I'm going to assume there's a compliment in there somewhere."

Unable to stop himself he placed a tender kiss against your brow, feeling closer to you emotionally in that moment than ever before. Your eyes fluttered shut at his touch. "We're leaving tomorrow." He said quietly, wrapping his other arm around your waist. "This will be the last time we're in each other's company for a long time."

"Yeah." You sighed sadly. "We're both at that point in our lives where our career's are taking off and taking up all of time."

"Timing has never been a strength of mine." He quipped. "When I moved to Seoul I promised myself I would work as hard as possible, with zero distractions. Then I met you."

"Kiss me, Yoongi." You pleaded faintly. He was planning on doing that anyway. Dipping his head he slowly leaned forward, eyes flickering from your mouth to your lips and back again. His lips pressed to yours delicately, carefully, ever so slightly sucking your bottom lip as he pulled away. If this was going to the last time he did not want to rush.

This was a moment he wanted to remember.

"Thank you for bringing me here and sharing more of yourself with me." He murmured against your lips. "I like getting to see more of you."

The way you blushed didn't go amiss and it only made him kiss you harder this time around. Fingertip under your chin he tilted your head upwards for him so you were at the perfect angle, allowing him to gently slip his tongue into your mouth. You rotated in his arms so you were chest to chest and pressed yourself against him.

When you eventually broke apart, you stood on your tiptoes and pressed your foreheads together, smiling like love drunk fools at each other. "You are the best kisser." You giggled.

"I think you bring it out in me." He grinned.

You stood normally again and hugged him, burying your face in his neck. He held you close, just savouring the moment, enjoying having you in his arms. Minutes passed and he felt like he could stay like this for hours. "Yoongi?" You asked, voice muffled by his skin.

The tone of your voice had changed suddenly and it made him nervous. "Yeah?" His throat felt dry.

"What happens now?"

The million dollar question, the one he often asked himself in the quiet hours of the morning unable to sleep and unable to stop his overthinking brain spiral with the 'what ifs'. Truthfully, he didn't know. The only thing that seemed to work for your relationship was taking every moment as it comes. No expectations; no disappointment.

"I don't know." He answered honestly.

"We've been so lucky this far. If people find out - "

" - I know."

It goes without saying. Everyone has seen the articles and the vitriol that spreads like wildfire whenever an idol is caught being anything less than perfect. A relationship is certainly out of the question. A relationship with a staff member, absolutely never.

"I don't want to say this." You began. His stomach dropped and all he wanted to do was kiss you into silence so he didn't have to hear the words that were about to follow that ominous sentence. Everything was perfect right now and he didn't want it to be ruined. It had been a long, arduous road to this point.

"Your career is important to me." You continued. "Just because I don't work for you anymore doesn't mean I don't care. I do. Tremendously. That's why I want to see you do well, well all of the boys obviously. Which is why," You lifted your head to look him in the eye. "I don't think we should continue whatever...this is."

He'd be lying to himself if he hadn't expected this at some point, considering everything had felt like some sort of dream so far. He swallowed thickly, trying not to show you how your words had made him almost feel winded. "If that's what you want."

"No!" You protested, shaking your head frantically. "You misunderstand. I don't want that. Not even a part of me wants that. There is so much going on for both of us and we're young enough that we can be a little selfish and focus on work for a bit. Unfortunately we're in an industry where we can't exactly be open about being together. And we're both so busy is it really fair?"

He sighed.

"I think I get it." He said eventually. "It just fucking sucks. I wish I could date you. Y'know, properly. It's funny, when I was a kid I was so shy I never would have spoken to a girl like you." He laughed at himself. "I'd probably be too nervous to date you if you hadn't started working with us and I'd gotten to know you."

"You? Shy?" You scoffed. " No way. I've seen you onstage don't forget. That is not a shy boy, that's a god damn sexy man."

"It's true!" He contested, wide eyed. "I never wanted to perform. I just wanted to make music."

"Yeah? I didn't know that." You smiled fondly. "Where would our first date be do you think?"

"We've already had it." He smirked, thinking back to the concert you went to together and how he'd spent most of the night watching your reactions.

"Please - that doesn't count. I'm talking about the hypothetical world where I meet shy Yoongi."

He laughed a little. "For our first official date I'd take you for dinner somewhere nice," He hummed pausing in thought. "Then maybe a walk along the beach afterwards. I think something out of the city would suit us."

"You're so cute." You kissed his nose. "I agree, away from the city is better."

"Then, I'd want to kiss you at the end of the date. But I'd probably bottle it at the last second and do something awkward instead."

The two of you shared a genuine laugh. "I would have liked to meet him."

"You'll have to settle for me, sorry."

"He's okay I guess." You smiled, kissing him again. "Nice Yoongi."

"So after tonight we're definitely not doing this again?" He asked to confirm. It felt terrible even saying the words aloud.

"It's for the best. Not forever, just...until we're settled. Then we can do it properly right? No sneaking around?"

His stomach lurched but he nodded anyway. That sounded a lot like forever to him. It wasn't fair, he wanted this to run it's course naturally and once again, being an idol was interfering with his life. As thankful as he was for his career, sometimes he yearned for a little normality.

***

Yoongi's not entirely sure how it happened but it doesn't take long for him to be pushing you roughly up against the concrete wall of the stairwell, sliding his hands up and underneath your shirt. It wasn't his intention but he couldn't help himself. If this was the last time he was going to make it count. You had tried to leave but he'd pulled you back to him, desperate to have you once more.

"Not here," You told him breathlessly. He grunted in agreement but didn't stop, shoving a muscled thigh between your legs to give you something to grind on and guided your hips for you. He just wanted to hear you moan for him and you did. "Seriously, not here. Let's go to my room."

It's easy to slip back to your hotel room unnoticed given the lateness of the hour. He's careful to keep his hands off of you until you're safely behind a locked door.

He laid you down on the bed and hovered over you. The bruise he'd sucked into your skin the day before had darkened over night. As he kissed it he smirked. He was going to leave more tonight wherever he could, purple marks that said I was here, here and here. Maybe you'd remember for a while that you were his at one point, in some way shape or form.

"You're going to think about the way I fuck you tonight for months." He smirked into you skin with a smile and he meant it. You groaned out loud at his words, clutching desperately at him. "I promise." He assured, nipping at your ear.

"I do that anyway." You breathed a laugh as he kneeled on his haunches to have better access to rid you of your skin tight jeans. "The amount of times I've touched myself thinking of you..."

Yoongi froze. He peered up at you through the dark hair that hung in his eyes. "Tell me more." He urged. "What do you think about?" Your jeans were gone and your panties soon followed. He slowly ran his hands up the inside of your thighs before spreading them open for him. "Better yet, show me."

He guided your hand between your legs, encouraging you to masturbate for him. The way you shyly bit your lip as if you were nervous made him weak. His thumbs rubbed circles on your inner thighs as he watched your fingers move intently. "Tell me what you think about." He repeated. He wanted to hear it so badly.

"Mostly I," You took a shaky breath, thighs flexing slightly underneath his palms. "I think about you eating me out. A lot."

"Yeah?" He laid down on his stomach and licked a stripe up your cunt next to your working fingers. "I love eating you out." You stopped for a moment but he placed his hand on yours, telling you to keep going so he could watch how wet you were getting for him.

He rested his head on your thigh, gently sucking a bruise on the tender flesh, making you moan out loud. He kissed the forming bruise a few times after he was satisfied, throwing a smirk your way when you realised what he had done.

"Remember the first time we fucked? On the bus?" Yoongi nodded. "I think about that a lot too."

"Why?"

"Because you're so much dirtier than I thought you were." You both laughed a little. "I love it when you fuck me open with your fingers, feels so good. Honestly I just love it when you just hold me down and fuck me, Yoongi."

He tried to hold in the groan that was bubbling in the back of his throat. Right now he had the patience of a saint, because that's all he wanted to do too. He rid himself of his clothing and hovered over you slowly stroked his aching cock as he watched you, desperate for even a little bit of relief.

"Yoongi I want you." You moaned, back arching off the mattress so much so that your breasts pressed against his chest. "Please."

He wanted you too but was only delaying himself so this moment in time could be frozen a little longer. As soon the sex was over, everything was over.

Lacing his hands through each of yours he pressed them down on the bed next to your head as he pushed his stiff length inside of you. It was so warm and tight and wonderful he stilled completely as soon as he was sheathed, just to commit this moment to memory.

He attached his lips to your neck to distract him from the overwhelming sensation that was already beginning to build. "You're so fucking pretty, baby." He mumbled into your skin. He could smell you; your perfume, your natural body scent and he wanted to drown in it, commit it to memory forever. "I'm lucky I ever got to have you like this."

His hips moved of their own accord, thrusting into you. You keened and moaned, squeezing his hands at the sensation. He always loved how responsive you were to his touch. "It feels amazing. So good Yoongi. You're so perfect."

There was too much he wanted to say. He was afraid of spilling every wonderful thing he'd ever thought about you in that moment. This was an ending. A goodbye of sorts. He couldn't. So he focused all his energy into making you feel as good as possible and not on the things he wanted to say.

He touched your clit with his thumb, just how he knew you liked, feeling you tighten around him. There was a sense of pride every time he made you cum, getting to see you at your peak, just for him. He doubted you were had been like this with other partners before.

"Let me see you cum," He husked, gazing down at you. "Just one more time. Cum for me pretty girl."

You responded to his encouragement by whining his name as you clamped around him. He kept going, stimulating you into over sensitivity and only stopping when you clutched at his wrist, signalling you'd had enough.

Yoongi hoisted you up so you were pressed chest to chest, resting back on his haunches. Desperately he kissed you, tasting some of the sweat that had formed on your upper lip. His hands slid down your body, encouraging you to wrap your legs around his waist. He almost felt as if he couldn't get close enough to you.

"You think you can go again?" He breathed against your lips.

"I don't know but I'm happy to try." You smiled breathlessly as you clung to him.

In a flash he had you on your front, knees straddling your thighs as he entered you again. He leaned down, caging you in with his body and pressing you into the mattress. As his hips slapped against your ass he kissed your shoulders sloppily. He wasn't going to last much longer. You felt too good.

"Fuck me just like that Yoongi." You gasped, hands curling in the sheets, gripping them tightly. "Please, please, please."

Fuck, he was going to cum. Before he could he pulled out and squeezed the base of his cock delaying his impending orgasm. You looked at him, brow furrowed in confusion over your shoulder. You tried to push back on him but he stopped you.

"Turn over baby." He groaned. You rolled onto your back, reaching for him. "Don't want to come too soon." He exhaled, pushing back into you. You whimpered.

Yoongi pushed both of your legs together and rested them over his shoulder as he leaned into you. The angle was much deeper than before and he went as hard as he could. "I'm close again Yoongi, I might come like this." You panted.

"Come like this." He almost begged.

"Yoongi." You almost cried. "Yoongi."

It only encouraged him. He wanted you to come without having to touch yourself. The pace he kept was relentless. "Baby, please. Let go for me."

You did. He followed shortly after, holding himself with a hard thrust inside of you, holding himself as deeply in you as possible. "Fuck." He swore against your skin when he came.

You pushed some hair off of his face. "So good." You murmured, nuzzling into him. "So good."

When both of you reluctantly had cleaned up, maintaining some sort of distance you walked him to the door. Kissing him deeply as a depature was a surprise, but he welcomed it nonetheless.

"Yoongi, this isn't goodbye."

He frowned at your words.

"Yoongi this isnt goodbye. It's see you later. I promise."

***

Blearily he walked back to the room he shared with Namjoon, a little worse for wear and a lot exhausted. Normally after a night with you he would be feeling pretty great about now. There was a heavy emptiness he carried with him this time. Everything would be fine, he knew that having been through much worse in his life, but that rationale still didn't stop him from feeling shitty.

He slipped into the room to find Namjoon already up and on the phone, ordering some room service. He nodded to Yoongi in acknowledging hello. Yoongi shrugged off his jacket and shoes, throwing himself on to his twin bed with a long yawn and closed his eyes. Maybe he could have a quick rest before his turn in the shower.

"I ordered you breakfast, I figured you'd be back in time." Namjoon spoke. Yoongi hummed, unable to open his eyes. "Did you sleep at all last night hyung?"

"Nope."

"You're an animal." Namjoon laughed, correctly assuming what his friend had been up to.

"I'll sleep on the plane." Yoongi yawned again, mentally counting how many hours until the flight. If he could make it through the next six he could rest. He needed coffee urgently.

"Do you mind if I shower first?" Namjoon asked.

"Go ahead. If I'm asleep wake me up when you get out." Yoongi rolled onto his side, curling into a ball. He desperately wanted to quell the ache in his chest, chastising himself for being ridiculous. He found himself dozing off as he heard the soothing sound of the shower start to run.

It felt like thirty seconds had passed when Namjoon shook him awake, but one look at the clock told him it had been close to thirty minutes. Even though he'd requested the wake up call he still grumbled as he groggily sat up. "I'm going to shower."

"Breakfast will be here in about five."

Yoongi nodded and went to the bathroom. He washed and brushed his teeth quickly, eager to get to the coffee that was due imminently. When he returned to the room Namjoon was setting up the food for the two of them.

"Need coffee." Yoongi muttered, going straight for a mug and the pot.

"You're so grouchy when you're tired." Namjoon teased. Which in all fairness was true, but he was grouchy for more reasons than lack of sleep. He was going to have to explain to Namjoon sooner or later, the prospect of which made him feel embarrassed.

They said nothing else as they ate. Yoongi looked at his phone, caught up on some messages and emails he'd missed while with you.

"Y/N ended things with me." Yoongi eventually said. Namjoon looked at him in surprise he went to speak but Yoongi stopped him. "It's for the best. Yes I'm fine, no I don't want to talk about it."

"I..." Namjoon hesitated, confused. "Okay."

"I don't really feel like telling everyone else so if you could, yknow if it comes up. It's not a big deal."

"Sure." Namjoon was still looking at him peculiarly. "Whatever you need."

"It really isn't a big deal."

"I know, you said so."

Yoongi didn't know who he was trying to convince, himself or his friend. He couldn't wait to be on the flight and unconscious for twelve hours.

***

It was business as usual when he landed in Seoul. They had the afternoon off before a night time practice session. Yoongi was thankful to be thrown straight into the deep end with work, it was a welcome distraction. If Namjoon had told the others about you and him, he didn't know. Either way no one mentioned you and for that he was grateful. In time he'd forget and move on.

He didn't entirely trust nor believe you when you said this was on hold, not over. It would be in his best interests to assume it was done for good, he told himself. He'd pined and lusted after you for so long now, he wasn't going to do it anymore. He couldn't allow himself the luxury of that interference. Music came first now, always.

You promised to stay in touch but he wasn't going to hold his breath. Not because he assumed you disliked him but because he knew first hand how busy you were at the moment. A new boy group to manage doesn't leave a lot of free time for a social life, especially with someone who was as busy as yourself. So for now, being your friend was good enough. He wouldn't go back to being cold to you, he'd be the nice, shy Yoongi he promised you he was.

***

The first time he heard from you was through text. Roughly one month after LA. He wasn't expecting it.

from: y/n i'm watching your live stream ;-) nice sweater vest, you look like my dad

He didn't normally look at his phone during his solo lives, so he only received the text after he'd already turned off the connection. He laughed at the text before sending you a reply, defending his taste in fashion. You didn't reply to that text.

The next few weeks turned into months and you remained in contact solely through text.

from: y/n a little birdie @ bighit told me you're going to be blonde for the comeback send me pics!

from: yoongi who spilled?  [ i m a g e  s e n t ]

from: y/n cute cute cute i love it

from: yoongi your turn to send me a pic not bc i miss your face.  I just forgot what you look like

from: y/n [ i m a g e  s e n t ]

from: yoongi there she is now i remember

from: yoongi: you're going to be at the MAMA's?

from: y/n yup

from: yoongi if u get time come say hi

***

"Let me get this straight. You went from hating her, to sleeping with her, to sort of dating, then not dating and now you're constantly flirting with each other through text? My head hurts."

Yoongi looked at Seokjin and shrugged, as they both towelled the sweat off their brows after performing. Waiting in the wings of the stage until it was time to return to their seats. He didn't really have a good explanation for it either. In his mind he was just being friendly. Not that he would speak to every one of his female friends like this. Yoongi double checked to make sure no one could overhear them.

"We're just friends. You all talk to her as well." He defended.

"Not like that I don't." Seokjin smirked. "As if she sends me selfies. Don't think I didn't clock that one. Come on, Yoongi hyung."

"It's complicated." Yoongi sighed, accepting defeat. "I don't think her and I can be just friends but I'm trying."

"It's complicated because of all the loooooove." He laughed, nudging Yoongi with his elbow, who then proceeded to swat at him like he was a pestering insect.

"Shut up." He grumbled.

"She's here tonight, I passed her earlier but she was on the phone." Jin informed him. Yoongi knew that already. "I bet you end up in bed together again. Both of you are fooling yourselves."

Yoongi rolled his eyes and took that as his cue to leave the conversation. A tiny, deeply hidden part of him hoped that would be the case but he wouldn't dare allow himself to feel that. Hope was a dangerous thing.

He wonders if you're feeling as much anticipation and trepidation as he does. Even that thought creates a knot in his stomach.

"Hey blondie." He knew it was you before he looked, turning on his heel to face you. You ruffled his newly blonde locks with a grin.  "You were amazing tonight."

"Thanks." He broke out into a genuine smile, fixing his now mussed up hair. "How've you been?"

"Busy. Good." You answered, returning his smile. It had been months since he'd seen you and he cursed himself for getting so excited just being in your general vicinity. He was supposed to be moving in the other direction. The getting over you for good direction. You waved at Seokjin over his shoulder before your phone chimed with an incoming message. "I've got to run, but we'll be at the BigHit building later? See you there?"

"Yeah, sure."

You're gone as quick as you had appeared, leaving Yoongi dumbstruck in your wake.

Yoongi never saw you that night after everything. Bangtan had won a total of five awards, so he was on a high and looking to celebrate with everyone. He texted you but was left on read with no response. At the very least he had expected a response of congratulations, but his inbox remained empty.

Seokjin was wrong about you ending up together, and Yoongi was disappointed. He should have known better.

*** Time off is a rarity, so to have five entire weeks of schedule free days ahead of him had Yoongi excited. Personal projects that had taken a back seat were now finally able to be a priority for him and he was looking forward to holing himself in the studio for a few days and making some progress. Namjoon and Jimin were going travelling while the rest of the boys were going home to their families.

He had only vague plans to visit his own family but when his mother sent a guilt inducing text, Yoongi made those plans concrete. Nothing like a mother's disappointment to motivate you. He knew he needed to make more of an effort.

Daegu still always felt like home, no matter how long he had been away. Even just the smell of his house (usually whatever his mom was cooking combined with fresh laundry and flowers) made him feel comfortable. His mom gave him a bone crushing hug the instant she first saw him. He definitely had left it too long this time. Yoongi made a mental note to visit more.

It felt good to have a family meal. He remembered sadly that the last time he had shared a table with his parents had been his grandfather's funeral. It wasn't often that Yoongi thought he worked too much or too hard, but he certainly wondered now.

He forced his mother to relax while he washed the dishes, knowing how tirelessly she worked to provide for her family. He just wanted to do something nice for her, however minor or insignificant it seemed to him he knew she would appreciate it.

Yoongi's mother essentially pushed him out the door when he tried to clean the entire kitchen. He had plans with some childhood friends (not that he was particularly excited about them) and his mom knew. She yelled at him with a laugh to go enjoy himself and stop re-arranging her kitchen. Somewhat reluctantly he trudged to the bar he'd agreed to meet at.

They'd been coming to this place since Yoongi was sixteen. As soon as they realised they could get away with buying beer and not having to show ID it became a regular hang out spot for him and his friends. It's not the most amazing place he's ever been to but there's a sense of nostalgia here now that keeps them all coming back.

A quick scan of the room enabled Yoongi to spot Jongdae, sat in the back right corner of the somewhat busy bar. He weaved through the tables, greeting his old friend with a hug when he reached him.

"Even though you're so famous now you haven't changed a bit." Jongdae laughed, patting him on the back. Yoongi merely shook his head with a smile. "There's something I have to tell you - Ara's coming tonight."

"What?" Yoongi frowned, confused. "Does she know I'm - ?"

"Yeah. She knows."

Ara was Yoongi's one and only official girlfriend he'd ever had in his life. They had met in school and dated on an off for years before going separate ways. There was never any animosity between them, but there certainly was no love lost on his part either. He couldn't even remember the last time he spoke to her. He could remember her crying her eyes out when he ended things however. It still made him feel like a total dick, even to this day.

Ara was an adult who just happened to be a part of his childhood friend group. Yoongi was sure she'd moved on. He wasn't in the mood for a stifled awkward evening.

When she arrived she had Jonghyun and Jun in tow. Jongdae beckoned them over to the table. Ara gave Yoongi a polite hello and he relaxed, tension of anticipating an awkward arrival dissipating.

Most of the conversation was centred on him, much to his dismay. Yoongi was an idol and his friends found joy in playfully mocking him.

"He isn't even wearing makeup for us, guess we're not that special." Jongdae teased, squinting at Yoongi's face and pretending to look for traces of non existent foundation.

"Ah, fuck off." Yoongi couldn't help but grin. "You don't understand how irritating wearing makeup is."

"You would know." Jun laughed. Yoongi didn't miss Ara's laugh either.

"Idol life isn't easy." Jongdae mocked. "Just being rich and adored all the time. God, how awful."

"I wish," Yoongi scoffed. "At least you can have a girlfriend without everyone hating you." He said before he could think, alcohol loosening his tongue. Ara looked at him curiously.

"True, true." Jongdae agreed. "You must date a little though? On the down low?"

"I did for a while. It's hard." Yoongi sighed, cursing himself for putting a damper on the conversation. He needed to stop talking before he revealed too much.

"You're single now?" Ara asked, taking him by surprise.

"Yeah." He nodded. "I'm single."

***

He was an idiot for ending up in this situation. This is why I don't drink went through his head as he followed Ara into her home, her fingers laced through his to guide him where she wanted him. He wasn't drunk, he knew what he was doing, he'd just had enough alcohol to lower his inhibitions. Ara was a warm, willing body who wanted him and Yoongi was lonely.

Thoughts of you were creeping into his subconscious and he shook his head, as if to clear his mind. No. He couldn't and wouldn't think of you now. You didn't want him and Ara did. He'd be a fool to even consider you in this moment. Yet he couldn't help himself, memories flashing before his eyes. Like reverse psychology. The more he didn't want to think of you the more he did.

When Ara's lips touched his cock his eyes squeezed shut, willing the image of your lips around him away.  A horrible, gut wrenching thought entered his mind - the idea that you might be doing this with someone else right now and he felt sick. He gripped on to Ara's hair as if to anchor himself to reality. The reality that it was not you who he was in bed with.

It took him forever to cum, despite the enthusiasm Ara gave to the blow job. He was too much in his own head, drowning in memories. If she was offended she didn't show it, much to his relief. Yoongi did his best to get her off as well, not that he had much desire to but he wasn't selfish.

He snuck out of her room before sunrise, feeling a mixture of shame and remorse. All he wanted to do was go home and shower.

He thought about you several times on the walk to his house and wondered if the feeling was mutual. Maybe you were just better at compartmentalizing than he was. Yoongi was a textbook overthinker. He was struggling and admitting it to himself as he stumbled through the streets at 5am felt pathetic. Maybe he should have fought harder for you.

MASTERLIST

[what-is-your-plan-today]

My ramblings and thoughts on US Election day...

Someone on our early morning work call asked me why I was concerned enough about the election to take tomorrow morning off so I could watch it live this evening in the UK. And more so I was given the line again about Trump being better for the UK Post Brexit than Biden would.

Maybe he would be, I don't know, but my response was simple. You see, watching the American election as a Brit is like watching a giraffe on fire running through a fireworks factory. There’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t stop thinking about it and it’s really concerning because you live next to the fireworks factory.

Given the state of our own piss poor Government and Brexit, the thought of Trump getting back in petrifies me for 2 main reasons.

One

I dread to think what fucking 'relationship' BoJo and Trump will continue to forge going forward and how this will impact the utter shit storm that is Brexit.

Back in 2017 when Darth Mayder was PM, she visited the White House and a number of things were discussed, one of which was Brexit. Trump's advice involved Britain threatening to leave the EU within 90 days, intimidating Brussels “with litigation” and embarking on a fast-track US-UK trade deal. In other words, he wanted a rapid hard Brexit. And he did so with 2 motives. The first was mercantilist. Maybot's plan would have forced Britain to conform to Europe’s tariff schedule during a transition period of two years — and likely for far longer. That would have killed American appetite to parley with the UK. Not to mention it would have diluted British food rules to permit mass US imports and scrapped the National Health Service’s role as a price setter, rather than a price taker, for pharmaceuticals.

Such a deal might have been possible before the US midterm elections. But Democrats made it clear they would block any US-UK trade deal if a border reappeared between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland...well shit...would ya look at this.

Who could possibly have thought it?

So whilst Trump's 'advice' is now kind of irrelevant as were 3 years into the whole bollocks process now anyway, I'd LOVE to watch the Tories and Brexit voting wankers crawl their way outta this hole if Biden does get in and the Democrats do indeed stick by their statement. Because a greater relationship with our US cousins was banded as a huge pro from Brexit...

L O L.

And yes, it probably would make things worse for the UK in the long run...possibly...as we can't reverse Brexit now as far as I'm aware, but im sick of being told to "get over it" and "concentrate on coming together to rebuild and make Britain great again" (yes, that IS the slogan used). Well, I didn't burn the house down, so you can fucking rebuild it yourselves.

And then we move to Trump's second motive for wanting Britain to act like cunts in Brexit- the fact his kindred spirit is Nigel Farage. A man who makes Boris look like a cuddly little kitten. He's a vile right wing racist and Trump gives that fuckwit credibility. Which is bad. Very bad in my eyes.

Two

Linked to above, we have SHEEP in this country. And I don't mean the 4 legged type that give us wool. I mean the idiots that merely repeat rhetoric. That swallow right-wing bullshit without so much as a fact check. That believe immigration to be the cause of all ills. That call all Muslims terrorists. That have no respect for anyone outside their little white, Nazi-saluting communities. That you could literally smack in the face with every, single FACT known to man and they'd still dismiss it and tell you that "Islamics are taking over."

The master race, ladies and gents.

Whilst Trump has been in charge, here in the UK that's rocketed, as the ideology is echoed by the Tories and other RW parties who cite him as "having the right ideas." Biden might not be perfect, but him getting in shuts that bollocks down once and for all.

So, to summarise, I sincerely hope that after 4 years of that lunatic running the asylum so to speak the votes go the right way...or should that be left, you get my drift.

My thoughts are with you, and my friends who I spoke to early this morning/last night in Texas, Cambridge and Florida who are all preparing for a shit storm.

I'm with you all... don't fuck it up like we did, please.

Coz maybe if you don't I might escape and come live over in NE...

[aladygrieve]

Merlin/Arthur Fic Rec

** - Favourite

FANDOM CLASSICS

Castle (The Rules by Which We Live) by kickflaw Word count: 16,200 Summary: Merlin knows that getting off fastest when he’s got some BDSM porno playing loud on the computer doesn’t mean he’d really like to be that bloke, gagged and bent over and bound. Right? Notes: Modern AU and the best BDSM I’ve ever read.

Destiny That Darkly Hides Us by Nympha_Alba Word count: 63,000 Summary: It’s 1913, the practice of homosexuality is unlawful, so is the practice of magic. When Arthur Pendragon and Merlin Emrys meet as Cambridge undergrads, they’re both hungry for a real and true connection without secrets. For a short time they believe they may have found it. But war breaks out and separates them, and it seems unlikely that they will meet again. After all, what are the odds? Notes: Includes reincarnation!

Drastically Redefining Protocol by rageprufrock Word count: 46,000 WIP Summary:In which Prince Arthur meets Merlin and all hell promptly breaks loose. Notes: Modern AU in which Merlin is a chain-smoking med student and Arthur is the womanizing Prince of Wales. Includes several companion stories.

**The Student Prince by FayJay Word count: 145,200 Summary: A modern day Merlin AU set at the University of St Andrews, featuring teetotal kickboxers, secret wizards, magnificent bodyguards of various genders, irate fairies, imprisoned dragons, crumbling gothic architecture, arrogant princes, adorable engineering students, stolen gold, magical doorways, attempted assassination, drunken students, shaving foam fights, embarrassing mornings after, The Hammer Dance, duty, responsibility, friendship and true love… Notes: Because really, no rec list is complete without the novel-length jewel of the Merlin fandom. It’s plotty, beautifully written and perfectly in-character, and is especially dear to my heart now that I’ve actually visited St. Andrews. I highly recommend the podfic, as FayJay is an incredible reader.

REINCARNATION/FINALE-COMPLIANT

Hold My Heart Until it Beats by ingberry Word count: 1920 Summary: Arthur dies and waits for Albion to need him again. But most of all he waits for Merlin. Notes: Great use of the Arthur waits trope.

**Hopeless Wanderer by Magnolia822 Word count: 18,500 Summary: Merlin has been wandering the world for hundreds of years alone; one day a young blond man moves into the flat upstairs. But does Arthur remember? Notes: Still my all-time favourite reincarnation fic.

I Keep Going Over the World We Knew (Over and Over) by Mellacita Word count: 51,100 Summary: When Merlin Emrys is sent on a ‘round-the-world assignment, he begins remembering a life of magic, dragons, and kings. To make matters worse, a strange woman starts stalking him along the way. And that’s before he even meets Arthur Pendragon, whose answer to climate change is going to save the world. Because apparently just saving Britain won’t be enough this time around. Notes: Plotty and intricate and very, very cool.

Let Your Heart Hold Fast by Acavall Word count: 3000 Summary: Merlin waits for Arthur’s return, and the only way to hold on to his memories is to write them down. Over and over, again and again, as history marches by. Notes: Works interesting historical references into the reincarnation deal.

Never Let Me Go by LadyVader Word count: 3500 Summary: Merlin has walked the world for a long time waiting for his friends return. Notes: Great use of the rest of the characters.

Now I Will Unsettle the Ground Beneath You by nu_breed Word count: 42,300 Summary: Merlin’s dreams have always fuelled his art, but they’ve always been abstract and removed from reality. Soon after he meets Gwaine, he starts to see vivid images of a past full of death and magic and love for a King who was ripped from him. Things only escalate further when he spends a weekend in the country with Gwaine and meets his group of friends, which includes aristocrat and It Boy, Arthur Pendragon. Merlin soon realises that no matter how hard you try, one thing is certain, you can’t fuck with destiny. Notes: Merlin’s dating Gwaine but he and Arthur can’t keep their hands off each other. I love it.

Old Love, But in Shapes That Renew and Renew Forever by leopardwrites Word count: 3500 Summary: People accept that an old man might live alone. People understand that he might have lost the greatest love he has ever known. Notes: Fics that deal with old!Merlin are never not going to be gut-wrenching.

CANON ERA

A Bet by juxtapose Word count: 1100 Summary: In which the Knights stumble upon a private moment between the Prince and his manservant, Leon is uncomfortable, and Gwaine decides to make a bet. Notes: All the knights are fantastic in this one.

The Accidental Seduction by Ras Elased Word count: 9000 Summary: Arthur’s a bit dim and a prank goes horribly awry, but in the end this works out to the benefit of all involved. Notes: Almost unbearably adorable.

**Finding Home by riventhorn Word count: 7860 Summary: When Gaius retires, a new physician takes over, one that quickly kicks Merlin out of his room and takes it for himself, Arthur finds Merlin sleeping in the stables..and it’s winter. Notes: Good old-fashioned hurt/comfort with a dash of fluff. Probably my favourite canon-era fic.

**Fools of Us All by adelagia Word count: 11,100 Summary: Merlin accidentally makes everybody in Camelot fall in love with him. Everybody except Arthur, that is. Notes: Cute, funny and very in-character.

Freedom Hangs Like Heaven by derryere Word count: 9000 Summary: It’s happened five times and they don’t talk about it. Notes: The unresolved romantic tension will end you.

The Greater Bond by ravenflight21 Word count: 15,500 Summary: When Arthur is kidnapped by slavetraders, Merlin has only one option: to buy him. Playing Arthur’s master has its drawbacks – but it also has extraordinary compensations. Notes: Fabulous trope that also includes fancy dress. What more do you want?

**A Heavy Heart to Carry by ThursdayNext Word count: 12,561 Summary: When Merlin is captured and injured, Arthur must face up to his own feelings for his manservant as well as the many secrets he discovers are being kept from him. Notes: I think this might have been the first merthur fic I ever read. It’s Cold Outside by ionionie Word count: 2500 Summary: Merlin and Arthur get trapped in a cave on a freezing cold night. How do they stay warm? Notes: I’m such a sucker for this trope it’s actually sad.

**Meteorology by fayhe Word count: 4600 Summary: Character study with spot-on cameos from Uther, Morgana, Gaius and even Kilgarrah. Notes: Best Gen.

So That I Might Be Where You Areby cherrybina Word count: 4600 Summary: When a spell goes wrong, Merlin and Arthur are linked together in an unusual way, which leads to lots and lots of UST. Notes: Not kidding about the UST, which works surprisingly well. **Stars Above, Stones Below by Destina Word count: 46,800 Summary: After the disastrous end of his betrothal to Gwen and the regret of his offer to Princess Mithian, Arthur swears off finding a wife until he’s ready to wed. When Merlin offers himself to Arthur as bedmate, Arthur suggests they hand-fast in secret for a single year of mutual pleasure without obligation. As their year together unfolds, and secrets and betrayals unravel around them, Arthur and Merlin learn there is no such thing as uncomplicated pleasure. Everything they thought they knew can change in the span of a single year. Notes: Another one of my absolute favourites. Winterbloom by Shinybug Word count: 6200 Summary: Deep in the woods in the frozen heart of winter, a careless comment leads to a redefinition of Arthur’s relationship with his manservant. Notes: Emotionally-constipated boys shivering in the cold will always be one of my favourite things.

MODERN AU

A Change of Pace by kianspo Word count: 54,600 Summary: The one in which Arthur works in finances and his suits are various (two) shades of grey, Merlin works in advertisement and has no boundaries whatsoever, Morgana drinks rum, Mithian stages a coup, Agravaine is aggravating, and Elena’s house is amazing. Also, Andy Warhol is mentioned in vain, and Arthur and Merlin fall in love in Victorian era style. Notes: In which Arthur has a structured, ordered, boring life, until Merlin comes along.

This Silly ol’ Dance is Perfect for Two by SlantedKnitting Word count: 80,500 Summary: Arthur is young, gorgeous, talented, and captain of one of the best football teams in England; his life should be perfect. But he can’t keep a girlfriend for more than a few months, and it’s not just because he isn’t ready to settle down. When his most recent girlfriend dumps him, he has a rough night at the pub and has to be dragged home by his neighbour, Merlin. Merlin is an archivist, a Ph.D student, and he hates football almost as much as he hates Arthur. They both have their own reasons for not wanting to spend time with each other, but after that disastrous night, remaining silent neighbors doesn’t seem like much of an option anymore. Notes: Plotty and original. Wicked Game by winterstorm Word count: 42,400 Summary: Arthur’s the King of Camelot…nightclub. He can pick and choose who he wants, and he does – often – no promises and absolutely no repeats. The night he chooses Merlin might just be his undoing. Notes: Slight age difference.

[raptured-night]

7&34?

Oh, yay! Thanks for the ask @snapeling!

7. What is your most self-indulgent Snape headcanon? No, your MOST self-indulgent headcanon. That one

I’ve read so many imaginative answers to this one, even a really lovely short about Snape surviving the Battle of Hogwarts to become a bee-keeper. I absolutely adored that one because I have long nursed a little headcanon about Snape as a retired teacher turned bee-keeper in the style of Sherlock Holmes. 

That being said, my most self-indulgent Snape headcanon has long been that the man who once spoke so mesmerizingly about being able to “put a stopper in death” to a class of rapt first-years was also able to have the foresight to be able to survive Nagini’s attack. Rowling laid the foundation for it to be possible and there was enough vagueness surrounding his death in the book that one could easily imagine scenarios where Snape survives and carves a better place for himself in the wizarding world post-war or he succeeds in faking his own death and quietly leaves the wizarding community of the UK behind for a fresh start elsewhere. In the latter scenario, everyone (or mostly everyone depending on if I’m feeling the idea of someone helping him fake his death or him managing it on his own) assumes he died and that his portrait didn’t just appear among the other Hogwarts’ headmasters because they believe he had “abandoned his post” but when his portrait (assuming Harry had one installed in his honor) suddenly comes to life and begins talking many decades later they realize the truth --the real reason that it had not appeared that night is because Severus Snape had not yet died. 

I often go back-and-forth between what life he might make for himself in a scenario where he survives and the wizarding community of the UK is aware of it and the ones in which he survives and fakes his death. In AUs were Snape remains in the wizarding world of the UK and people know he survived I tend to see his life as more fraught with challenges but eventually stabilizing into something better than what he had before. I suspect the people’s views of him would be something similar to what we see of the fandom, in the sense, it might be a varied mix of public acceptance, hatred, and so on. There would be people who overly romanticize him and his role during the war and, to Snape’s own chagrin, seek to make him out to be far more of a tragic victim of circumstance than he would care to be seen as (he might balk at the odd marriage offer he gets from witches in the mail, expressions of sympathy bordering more pity, and even embarrassing assumptions about his sex life and offers, should he wish it, to “lose his virginity” or find comfort in willing arms). There would be others who might urge the Ministry to bring him up on charges and revile him even in the face of Harry’s or other people’s public defense because they just refuse to believe that the man who killed Dumbledore and usurped his position as Headmaster for over a year is anything other than a villain who managed to save his own skin and pull the wool over people’s eyes. 

In the aftermath of the war, and with so much recent loss and fear, Snape would bear the brunt of their outcry for more vengeance (some with the thinly veiled prejudice that didn’t completely die with Voldemort that an “ugly half-blood who came from nothing” could have killed a great wizard like Dumbledore and fooled so many) under the guise of justice and they would project their collective trauma onto him. There would also be survivors of the war who came from families of Death Eaters and said Death Eaters who again slip away from justice that view Snape as either a traitor of the most extreme kind or as a curiosity. Was this man truly so capable an Occlumens that he could conceal from everyone, including Voldemort, his true beliefs and loyalties for so long, or had he successfully managed to play both sides of the war to secure himself a place with whichever side proved to be the victor? Ultimately, I see where his detractors would also be convinced, as many Snaters are, that whatever connection he had to Harry’s mother was something seedy and Snape would have to contend with their hatred. 

Oddly, I see him finding those who revile him easier to reconcile (aside from their assumptions about Lily and what relationship he had with her) than his “fans” who might send him love letters and cast him as some Byronic hero. Largely because he has had to contend with being loathed for much of his life and it’s familiar territory. Being made into a romantic figure or even earning the respect of some people would be new territory he would have to learn to cope with. Learning how to tell the difference between admiration and romanticization, sympathy and pity, etc., would be a rocky course to navigate. I also see a tense and uncomfortable post-war relationship with many of his colleagues at Hogwarts. Their guilt over not trusting him would be difficult for him to contend with; they only believed what he and Dumbledore intended for them to believe. I think a bitter part of him might even privately feel that the guilt some of them felt for believing the worst of him came too little too late and would have been better served during his youth when so many of them seemed to have written him off and turned a blind eye to the Marauder’s bullying. He might be more inclined to avoid those of his colleagues who insist on dwelling on their guilt and rehashing his time as Headmaster. 

For that reason, I have never seen him returning to Hogwarts as very likely. I do indulge in some thought of him and McGonagall eventually coming to an understanding after a few difficult conversations, some of which might be carried out in person over uncomfortable tea or stiffer drinks and some of which might occur through initially tense correspondences that eventually begin to veer off into more comfortable territory and lengthy discussions of topics that have nothing at all to do with the war as time passes. I also like the thought of Snape returning long enough to speak his peace to Dumbledore’s portrait. He would learn Dumbledore had tried to lay the groundwork for him to survive (he intended him to gain possession of the Elder Wand to offer him some protection and not to single him out to be killed but things did not go according to his best-laid plans); he wasn’t just a spy tossed out into the cold with no hope of being saved by a man who didn’t see him as more than a pawn in a much bigger game. Still, there are conversations that need to be had (such as why, from his perspective, Dumbledore once looked at a young Sirius Black and saw a boy who could still be saved even after his attempt at murder but could see nothing more in him than a lost cause to give up on) that Snape was unable to have with Dumbledore while he was still alive when they were still in the middle of a looming war other concerns, by necessity, took priority. 

Those conversations would be difficult and painful but Snape would find that there was still catharsis to be found in the opening of old wounds when they had been left to fester so they could properly begin to heal. In such an AU, my most self-indulgent headcanon is one where Snape learns to take the reigns on his life and become his own master; he makes peace with his demons (for the most part) and allows the ghosts of his past to finally rest. Most importantly, he begins to plan for a future that is his own and reflect on what that means for him. I imagine a Snape that becomes better adjusted (as we see in Cursed Child) in terms of how he copes with his trauma. He would retire from Hogwarts and, finally, relocate from Spinner’s End to make a quiet but contended living for himself in a more comfortable flat or cottage home full of walls lined by shelves of books by applying the knowledge he has acquired over the course of many years not as an over-worked and frustrated teacher who doesn’t enjoy directly working with a classroom but as a prolific writer of educational textbooks on everything from Potions brewing for novice to advance brewers to treaties on defenses against Dark Arts so undeniably valuable they become standard syllabus at Hogwarts and amongst would-be Aurors at the Ministry. 

In AUs where Snape leaves wizarding Britain behind him and fakes his death, the catharsis does not come easily. It’s a process of learning to accept leaving his past behind him, even if parts of it remain unresolved and open-ended, and finding peace in the new life he forges for himself. I like the idea of him leading a private life in another country. Often I imagine him in places like Tangier in Morroco, or Turkey, or Thebes in Egypt, Ethiopia, or Sudan, etc., places steeped in history or at the very cradle of civilization or in places lush with potentially useful and undiscovered species of flora, fauna, or species of magical creature that could be used in potions brewing, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, or Brunei (which share access to the rain forest in Borneo) or Brazil. In this headcanon, Snape would spend his days conducting research into obscure or ancient magical texts, studying potential new magical ingredients for potions, or even rediscovering old ways of brewing lost to many, and making a new name for himself as a talented Potioneer writing under an assumed name. 

I like to imagine this Snape as benefiting from his time outside of the UK; his skin would pick up some color from his time spent outdoors in a warmer climate and if he always remained more on the side of slender he would not be so thin as to seem malnourished. He would gain a healthy bit of mass from his ventures and while he would always be a “substance over beauty” sort, the positive benefits of this new life would be evident through the changes in his appearance and overall demeanor. Enough so that when he came across a person from his past unexpectedly while they were on vacation his appearance and general baring were so altered that they would look right past him and wouldn’t realize until many decades later (by which time Snape would have lived to a ripe old age for a wizard and they too would have begun to feel the evidence of their own advancing years), when Snape’s portrait suddenly came to life among the Hogwarts’ Headmasters and began talking, as a sudden shocking afterthought that the person they had seen had been none other than Severus Snape --wrongly presumed dead after the Battle of Hogwarts and remembered by many witches and wizards, particularly The Boy Who Lived, as the bravest man any of them had ever known. 

34. Pick out a chapstick/lipstick for Snape.

I may be breaking the rules a bit with this one but I have two answers, one serious and more thoughtful and one that just amuses me.

The serious answer is that I could headcanon Snape using a chapstick made from beeswax. It would be colorless (and if it had any flavor then he might indulge in a honey flavor or even a honey lemon flavor, which has the added bonus of being comforting and settling the stomach against any nausea) and protect his lips against chapping as a result of alternating between the colder temperatures of the dungeons and the heat of cauldron flames. This also ties into my favored headcanon of a Snape who keeps bees and finds economical uses for beeswax and honey. 

As an aside, I like using the Burt’s Bees products myself (the company does aim to be cruelty-free and doesn’t test on animals which is a deciding factor in all of the cosmetic products I purchase, although their subsidiary company Clorox, which bought them out in 2007, does do animal testing with some of their products so it’s a bit of a murky territory where you have to debate if supporting one company’s cruelty-free policies balances against the fact their parent company does do animal testing or not; additionally many of the ingredients in their products are also naturally sourced, if not vegan for those who prefer cosmetic products that are both cruelty-free and vegan) and I occasionally indulge when I can afford the extra expense, so there’s that as well. 

The funny answer is there is a brand of lipstick by Jeffree Star Cosmetics called Unicorn Blood and another by Too Faced called Unicorn Tears. Either of those sound as if they could be ingredients in a potion, so I could easily imagine our favorite Potions Master getting a sardonic kick out of using them. 

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 106

Community Care, Values and Welfare State

A welfare state is a state that cares for its most needy citizens such as the elderly, the sick and disabled, children, the unemployed and single parents. The term ‘welfare state’ implies that the state has assumed responsibility for the welfare of its citizens and for the solution of its main social problems. Its principal aim is to improve individual and general welfare at the minimum cost.

The quality of the services provided by the welfare state depends upon its level of prosperity. For this reason, welfare states came into existence in industrialised countries before developing countries. Where these states have been economically and politically stable, improvements in social welfare have been made. However, there has been a claim that in recent years the concept of the welfare state is in crisis and that in practice governments have been unable to meet the needs of vulnerable people adequately. Welfare pluralists have claimed that the welfare state has failed to meet needs and provide services. They assert that the state must withdraw from direct provision and recognise the potential of both the family -especially in providing personal social services, and the voluntary sector. With the provision of services transferred from the state to the community, the cost of social services will become less and effectiveness will increase. However, will ‘the community’ shoulder this responsibility? Can the family be expected to meet the needs as effectively as welfare pluralists envisage. There are serious doubts whether a well formed family structure neighbourhood actually exists.

‘The community’ is now seen as the main source of care for vulnerable people. ‘Community care’ implies ordinary members of local communities such as families, neighbours and friends providing help and care for those who are in need.

Abrams (1977) defines community care as the provision of help, support and protection by lay members of societies acting in everyday domestic and occupational settings. It is possible to say that community care is care provided by the community itself.

The community is composed of families, neighbours and friends. Most of the care for the elderly and for children is provided by families and relatives. Only a limited number of elderly people, children or the disabled are cared for by the statutory voluntary organizations; the rest are looked after by their families and relatives and to a limited extent by neighbours and friends. In the United Kingdom during 1987 fewer than 243,000 out of a total of 8,6 million people aged 65 and over were resident in local authorities’, voluntary organizations’ and the private sectors’ homes. This means that only nearly 3,5% of the total number of elderly people were living in institutional homes: The rest of them were either taken care of by their families or were trying to cope with living on their own.

If the burden of social services provision is to be shouldered by the community, can families, relatives or neighbours manage to act as a realistic substitute for the welfare state? Can they meet the expectations of the welfare pluralists?

In today’s industrial societies most relationships are based on reciprocal interests. Individualism is at its highest level. The ties of kinship and family are withering away. Social and moral values are being undermined. However, as Abrams (1977) points out, the effective social bases for community care are kinship, religion and race, not ‘the community’.

Although the family is seen as the strongest and most reliable source of care, it is at present undergoing severe problems, particularly in Western societies. The family is affected by a number of social and demographic factors, the most significant ones being: the age structure of population, its marital structure, the size of the family and the changing roles of the family members (Nissel: 1980).

The population is ageing. The number of elderly in need is increasing and the level of provision is decreasing. On the one hand number of the people dependant on family care is increasing and is likely to continue increasing; on the other, the number of carers is declining because the idea of having a family is disappearing and the size of the family is getting smaller. Birth rates decreased from 84,3% in 1971 to 64,2% in 1990 in the United Kingdom and the percentage of births outside marriage rose from 8,1% in 1971 to 30,3% in 1990 (Social Trends, 22:1992). This may mean that there will be fewer potential carers when the present generation of parents reach old age (Johnson: 1990). The family is also faced with a changing marital structure. There are increasing numbers of one-parent families caused by separation, divorce and deaths. Many of these single parents have young children. Divorce affects the care negatively; the estimated number of divorcees in Great Britain was about 517,000 in 1971 and increasing to 2,374,000 in 1988 (Social Trends, 20:1990).

Another set of demographic and social factors that affect the relation between the family and the welfare state is the change in household structure. It would be argued that women are more likely than men to be the carers of the family. This is because women have been seen traditionally as the main people responsible for the care of children and the elderly, while the men have been seen as the bread-winners working outside of the home for the family. However, during the last two decades this situation has changed in Western societies. Although most of the family-based care is shouldered by women, the number of women in the labour force has been increasing. According to the statistics, there were 9,3 million women in the British labour force in 1971 and to 11,8 million in 1988. It is also projected that there will be 12,7 million women working in the year 2000 (Social Trends, 20:1990). The number of working women is likely to continue increasing, and as a result this may mean that the care provided by women is likely to decline.

In today’s world, particularly, in Western industrialized societies, the family has gradually been losing its strength and increasingly unable to perform its functions. It may be true to say that we now live in a world where family, social and moral values are being slowly destroyed. Policy makers, politicians and religious scholars are worried about what should be done to avoid the impending consequences.

How can men and women be encouraged to stay in marriage? How can their children be motivated to care for their frail parents? What are the motivations that keep the society in order and ensure that its members help each other? How is altruism managed in societies where individualism exists? How can social solidarity be re-established? There are many other questions; however, most agree that the main problem is with the social and moral values of society.

In recent years, the managers of the welfare state have found it difficult to meet the needs of its ever increasing number of vulnerable people due to high costs, ineffectiveness and lack of resources. This has led them to try to shun all responsibility for provision of services and to put the onus on us ‘the community’.

However, as society as a whole changes, relationships between children and parents, between families, between neighbours are changing. People’s behaviour in a society is usually formed by their social position and by the moral and religious beliefs with which they have been brought up. It may be impossible to expect people to take care of others especially those who are in need, if they do not feel that they should do so. In today’s societies it is clear that most of the elderly parents are not looked after by their children and they have to cope with living on their own which they usually cannot manage. Most neighbours are also reluctant to get to know each other.

We can conclude that societies need to be supported by strong social and moral values which form the norms of social behaviour. Only then people will try to behave as they are expected to as human beings. In this context, I will leave you with the words of the Messenger, upon him be peace:

‘None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself’, ‘He who does not care about his neighbour’s starvation, while he is in wealth, is not among us’, and ‘He who desires that he be granted more provision and his lease of life be prolonged, should treat his kith and kin well’.

[smokehqs]

ANTONIN DOLOHOV

Occupation: Defense Against the Dark Arts professor Age: 37 Gender: Male Pronouns: He/Him Blood status: Pureblood Allegiance: Death Eaters Faceclaim: Oscar Isaac

You knew what it felt like to be an outsider. English wasn’t your first language. You didn’t have the connections that came with Hogwarts and the Slytherin house. But you overcame. You proved yourself more of a snake than any of them, in every sense of the word. You slipped through the cracks into a social standing you could never have imagined as a child in Belarus. Half of the soldiers that surround you were recruited by your hand– sometimes you allow yourself the fantasy that they’re your soldiers and not your master’s.

HISTORY:

Born when magical beings had to live amongst muggles in his country, Antonin Dolohov still remembers his early years in Belarus. He remembers a woman singing, his mother’s hand through his hair, the last look his father had given him before he’d been taken away for multiplying food for his hungry family. He remembers holding his baby sister as they hid under the floorboards of his muggle neighbor Petra’s home while worthless muggles had taken his father and shot him in the woods. The sight of blood littering the green expanse of forest still lingers in Antonin’s nightmares.

Antonin, his siblings, and their mother had lived with Petra for a couple of years after that before his mother eventually took her own life. With no one to look after in Belarus, Antonin and his older brother Piatro were sent to their father’s uncle in Yekaterinburg, Russia, while their sister, Aliena, was sent to their mother’s sister in Sweden.

An exacting man, Rudolf Dolohov ensured that Antonin knew his family name and understood the weight that name had brought years before. Dolohovs, Antonin learned, did not give their loyalty easily. They took what was their due.

The Dolohovs had been in the service of the Russian tsars (many of whom were magical) for centuries. Grigori Rasputin, a wizard masquerading as a muggle mystic and a cousin of Antonin’s great-grandfather, had served the Romanovs for years with considerable influence over the Tsarina. Though history said he had been assassinated, in truth he had helped to betray the royal family and bolstered the Bolshevik revolution.

Dolohovs were duplicitous when it suited them.

But Antonin, while appreciating his ancestor’s contribution, had no intention of being a Bolshevik, had no intention of trading one king for another. He had ambition and a thirst for power, for wealth, for more. As a young man, Antonin had no desire to serve anyone but himself and the other families that had been maligned alongside his own.

Upon entering Koldovstoretz, Antonin realized just how much power one could amass and he resolved to restore the names of the great Belarusian wizarding families. He did not fit in at Koldovstoretz initially, his bloodline unverifiable and his Russian still mingled with the Belarusian dialect that was out of vogue in Moscow. His brother, Piatro, graduated the year after Antonin began and he felt rather bereft when he learned that his younger sister would be attending Durmstrang with their cousins on their mother’s side.

It was that moment when Antonin realized he was alone in the world. Taking the challenge for what it was, he became singularly devoted to restoring his family’s name and amassed a group of similarly minded individuals. They focused heavily on schoolwork - it was difficult to gain power by force if one did not know how to do so - and also cultivated political relationships that would help them in the future. He also learned English, studying to a point where not even the most learned of individuals would be able to tell that his posh London accent had been cultivated in the halls of a foreign school.

Eschewing the advice of his uncle, Antonin came to realize that he could not expect loyalty from others if he was not willing to give it. He became a leader of sorts at Koldovstoretz and his ambition to restore magical society to its rightful place was known throughout its halls. He was often ruthless in his goals, with a vicious streak that reared his head when he felt cornered. Antonin spent summers in Belarus with his brother, learning the ins and outs of the criminal underworld.

It was at Koldovstoretz that Antonin realized his potential and it was also there where he met Katsiaryna. While he did not fall in love with her as quickly as she did with him, Antonin grew to appreciate her dedication to their shared cause and his admiration turned to love over time. She became his family, his partner, and what he valued more than anything else in the world. He proposed with a simple ring he single-handedly fashioned out of gold using a piece of his mother’s jewelry.

A somewhat menial job in the family gold mine in Irkutsk was the most Rudolf could give him after graduation and Antonin had rejected it, not wanting his family’s pity. Instead he moved back to Belarus and navigated the Ciemra on his own after graduation, knowing that he would have to continue to pay his dues and forge connections before he would be able to take back the power that had been denied him.

He drew Katsiaryna into the Ciemra, the Belarusian Wizarding Underworld, where they flourished with a great deal of dedication. Eventually they began to amass more until Antonin found himself running a vast criminal network that assured he would never need to work another day in his life. But he had grown bored, they had amassed more wealth and power than thought possible, and, wanting a new challenge, the Dolohovs had moved to Britain.

To the public, Antonin comes across as a foreign businessman, though what he does business in is always a bit murky. He smiles at strangers on the street, helps those in need, and many remark that he would make a wonderful politician. He is the snake in the grass that most everyone ignores. In private, however, he is singularly loyal to his family and to their ambition. He maintains a decent relationship with his older brother, Piatro, and dotes on his niece. He lost contact with his younger sister after she graduated from Durmstrang and whenever he is out of town on business, he puts out feelers in hopes of finding her.

Antonin is also an ethnocentrist. While he lives in Britain, he generally finds most of their society to be boring - his ultimate goal, after all, is to further bolster Belarusian Wizarding Society. He keeps that part of himself guarded, of course, and only Katsiaryna is aware of just how much he detests some of the people they live amongst. He often refuses to speak English at home, worried about losing his Belarusian roots.

Antonin has the capacity to differentiate between the necessity of muggles - one cannot be at the top if no one is at the bottom, after all - and understands the difference between a muggle and a muggleborn. In his mind, there is such a thing as a useful muggle - one of the first things he’d done after amassing a decent fortune was send enough so that Petra, the woman who had protected him while her kind had tried to obliterate his, would be able to live her last years comfortably. But most of the muggles he encounters are little more than clever apes, and he has no use for them.

Joining the Dark Lord was an easy choice, for it gave Antonin more connections and more opportunities to seek power. Now, he ranks relatively high in the Death Eaters and considers himself one of the Dark Lord’s most valuable recruiters.

Sometimes, though, Antonin considers what his life will be like when the Dark Lord moves onto Europe. When he leaves Antonin in charge in Britain. It is a pipe dream, but one that Antonin aspires to. He may be serving Voldemort but one day it would be Antonin his servants would bow to. He will be the king in all but name, with his formidable queen by his side.  

CONNECTIONS:

Rabastan Lestrange, Rodolphus Lestrange, & Lucius Malfoy: Recruited

Regulus Black: Former recruit, wants dead

Dmitry Nott: Friendly with

Rory McIver: Is Idolized by

Igor Karkaroff: Is disliked by

Rosmerta Dunlap: Is hated by

Blair Wood: Despised by

Katsiaryna Dolohov: Married

Sanya Dolohov: Niece

Fenrir Greyback: Resented by

Augustus Rookwood: Viewed competitively by

FLED · RETIRED

[pythagoreanwhump]

1981 - Pt. 1

This is part one of how my espionage OCs met each other. As suggested in the title, this is set in 1981. It’ll be at least 3 parts, but I don’t know exactly how many yet. In Part 1 Anton and Walter have met each other. David has been mentioned to them but they haven’t met yet. This small series won’t contain any whump, just setting up the relationship between my characters. Well, that’s the plan, anyway. I always find ways to put whump into things that shouldn’t be whump.

As I said, no whump, really tame, so no content warnings, but I’ll still put it under a read more for length

also some of the dialogue is in German. Translations underneath the paragraph in brackets and italics.

“Andrushin, I’ve got a new mission for you.” Melya knocked on the door, dragging Anton out of his trance of staring at the same page of his book for the past 20 minutes. “What are you thinking about?”

Anton shrugged and didn’t answer Melya’s question, responding to his first statement instead. “What mission? Where?”

“Why don’t you have a guess?” Melya had a smile that told Anton he wasn’t going to like whatever it was.

“I’m gonna have to leave the country, aren’t I?” Anton hopped off his bunk bed, already starting to pack.

“Yep. West Germany this time.”

“West Germany?” Anton asked. “Why? What’s in West Germany?” Americans, that’s what. Swathes of American soldiers in nightclubs.

“Your mission is to help train an East German spy. Be nice to him, will you? It’s his first assignment.” Melya handed Anton a file.

Anton groaned, the loudness mostly for dramatics in front of Melya. “Kids. I hate kids.”

Melya pulled Anton’s briefcase away from him and pointed to the file. “He’s only about a year younger than you. You’d know that if you read the case file. You never do until I force you to.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Anton rolled his eyes at Melya and flipped through the file about this Walter. “Who’s this?” He asked as he reached the last page.

Melya peeked over. “Ah, that. That’s supposed to be his target, an American soldier at Ramstein Air Base named David Whitley. You don’t get much information about him because it’s supposed to be Walter’s mission, not yours. All you need to do is keep him out of trouble. I have no idea why they chose you for this, you can barely keep yourself out of trouble.”

Anton reached over, trying to take his suitcase back and continue packing, but Melya pulled it further away from him. “No need to pack yourself,” He said, “Clothes have been provided for you. You’ll get it when you arrive in Bonn. In the meantime,” Melya gave Anton an outfit, “You’ll wear this. You’ll arrive in Berlin first and meet with Walter, and then drive to the West together. A hotel room has already been booked for you, Walter will know how to get there.”

“A hotel room?” Anton asked incredulously as he put on the outfit. It was loose, a sporty T-shirt and jeans. He was using his usual cover again, a university student, and he looked the part dressed like this.

“Es gibt keine Hungersnot,” Melya said with a dry chuckle. “You’re going there on a cargo plane, wheels up in 20 minutes.”

(There is no famine. An East German expression used sarcastically when people talk about how poor the government is. It actually surfaced into use more near 1986-ish but I don’t really care right now)

Walter stood near the border gate nervously, waiting for the Soviet agent he was supposed to work with. Despite having worked at the border crossing for over a year, he has never left his country. If what he was taught growing up was true (which he knew it was at most partially), it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

“Hey! Weidenmann!” A friend called out to him, “Your soviet friend is here!”

A car rolled up and Walter waved. This must be Anton then. Anton got out of the car and motioned for Walter to get into the driver’s seat.

He got in and his friend waved him through. He waved back, suddenly unsure of himself.

“Why did you want me to drive?” He asked Anton in broken Russian.

“Germans drive too fast. It scares me,” Anton replied, his German flawless.

“Your German is very good. Have you been to Germany before?” Walter asked.

“I’m a language analyst, I speak a lot of languages.” Anton looked around, taking in the sight of the West. “Been to East Germany before, this is my first to dem Westen. You?”

Walter looked over at Anton, impressed. “I went to West Berlin on official business once, straight in and out. Other than that I’ve never seen anything outside the DDR. Have you been to anywhere else? What’s the outside like?”

“Oh, dangerous question, young man.” Anton pointed to the radio, signaling that it was probably bugged, and mouthed “later”. “So, tell me about your job before. You graduated last year but this is your first mission. What did you do?”

“Border guard.” Walter was already opening up. Anton seemed friendly. “At the checkpoint we just passed through.”

“Do they know?” Anton gestured backward, asking about Walter’s colleagues at the checkpoint.

“Not officially.”

Anton nodded and smiled. “They’ll be pestering you about your experiences when you get back.”

Neither of them talked much for the rest of the drive. Walter had turned the radio on, hesitantly tuning to the Western stations. The first one that came on was a news channel, talking about Reagan. As soon as he figured out what they were talking about, Walter frantically turned the dial, remembering the warning about bugs from Anton. The next station they found was a comedy show, and Anton frowned, cringing a bit at the bad humor. Finally, they both settled on a music channel. It wasn’t very different from what they listened to at home.

The hotel they arrived at was… shabby. Anton knew that the government was broke, but is this seriously the best they could do? Walter shrugged and got out the car, looking behind at Anton and waiting for him to follow.

There was a woman at the front desk, probably a university student by the looks of her. She asked for Walter and Anton’s passports. Walter was posing as a West German, and she only flipped the passport open and scanned it for a couple of seconds. When Anton handed over his bright red booklet, however, she looked up in surprise.

“Ein Sowjetischer?” She asked.

(A Soviet?)

“Ja,” Anton replied simply.

(Yes)

“Was bringt Sie nach Deutschland?” She asked, leaning forward in curiosity.

(What brings you to Germany?)

“Besuchen bei meinem Freund,” Anton pointed at Walter.

(Visiting my friend)

The girl nodded, sensing that Anton didn’t want to say much more, and handed him his passport back and directed them to their room.

“I’m hungry,” Anton said as soon as they finished settling in. “Come on, let’s go get some food.”

“Sure,” Walter finished putting away his clothes. “What do you wanna get?”

“I don’t know, some street foods?” Anton was already out the door.

As soon as they got out onto the streets, Anton turned to Walter. “So, you wanted to hear about the outside? The room was booked by the government, so it was probably bugged as well. Safer out here. What do you want to know?”

“For starters,” Walter must admit that he was surprised Anton was so forthcoming. The possibility that this was a trap to test his loyalty didn’t occur to him until much later. “Where have you been? America? Great Britain?”

“Both of those, yeah. I’ve been to America multiple times. Britain only once. Finland a couple of times as well. France. I think that’s it.” Neither did Anton think that he shouldn’t trust someone he had just met and tell them all of this.

“Is America, you know, what they say it is? Both the bad and good.” Walter asked.

“Both the bad and good, yeah.” Anton pointed towards the busier section of the city. “Let’s actually get some food so they wouldn’t get suspicious. I mostly went to the big cities, and they seemed prosperous on the surface, but there’s more to it. They have homeless people, can you believe that? Just people lying on the streets, freezing in the winter and under the scorching sun in the summer. They have all their belongings in a shopping cart. And the government just does nothing.” He shook his head. “Anyway, let’s talk about more pleasant things.”

Walter remained silent, not knowing what to say in reply. The propaganda made everything in the west seem so bad, and sometimes he wondered if it was really true. If what Anton said were real, then it wasn’t far from the truth. Maybe exagerrated, but not completely baseless. He sighed, “I thought their government was rich?”

“Of course they are,” Anton scoffed, “They take money from the people and never give back anything. I would be rich too if I did that. Currywurst?” He pointed to a cart with a long line behind it.

Walter shrugged. “Sure, if you wanna stand in line.” He really didn’t want to think about politics right now, so he tried to find other topics to talk about. “So… Do you have a girlfriend?” He asked Anton, his voice teasing.

Anton blushed, but he turned his face away to hide it. One could almost mistake the pink glow for the reflection of the neon lights overhead. “No, do you?”

Now it was Walter’s turn to blush. “I’m engaged. We’re planning to get married next spring.”

“Wow, congratulations!” Anton beamed at Walter. “Come on, tell me about her. What’s her name? How did you meet?”

Walter’s blush deepened. “Her name is Zoe. We’ve known each other since we were kids, we grew up in the same town.”

“Aw, that’s sweet. Have you planned your wedding yet?”

“Not much into detail,” Walter replied, “I think we are going to take our wedding photos at the Alexanderplatz, but maybe that’s a bit too boring. Everyone does that.”

“Well, I can’t give you any advice there.” Anton chuckled. “All I know is that girls like big white dresses. The bigger and whiter the better. My sister has never had a boyfriend and she is still talking about how she’d like an extravagant wedding.”

“Oh, you have a sister?” Walter asked Anton. “I’m an only child.”

“Yeah, She’s just over a year younger than me.” They arrived at the front of the line and Walter quickly ordered while Anton was talking. “She the reason I’m doing this.”

“What do you mean?” Walter asked through a mouthful of food.

“She’s very sick. She has leukemia.” Anton’s voice turned gentle at the discussion of his sister. “They said they’d move her to a better hospital, with the best doctors, if I did this.”

Walter nodded, knowing what Anton meant by this. It seemed like neither of them really wanted to get into this line of work. Whether that was because of the danger, the secrecy, or the less than honorable things they have to do for it. And they obviously didn’t have a choice.

“Should we go back now?” Anton suggested as they both finished their food. “It’s rather late. You’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

“Yeah, sure.” Walter pulled his coat tighter around himself. “It getting cold out here too.”

As soon as they got back to their room, their conversations stopped. They couldn’t be sure what would be safe and what wouldn’t be, on the off-chance that they were being bugged. Anton had fallen asleep almost the minute he lied down, but Walter laid awake, thinking. Think about what Anton had said. Thinking about his mission. Thinking of all the ways he could mess up and everything that could go wrong. He kept telling himself he would do fine, but somehow he just couldn't believe it.

[labourpress]

Jeremy Corbyn speech at the United Nations’ Geneva headquarters

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

Speaking at the United Nation’s Geneva headquarters today, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Labour Party, said:

Thank you Paul for that introduction.

And let me give a special thanks to the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

Your work gives an important platform to marginalised voices for social justice to challenge policy makers and campaign for change.

I welcome pressure both on my party the British Labour Party and on my leadership to put social justice front and centre stage in everything we do.

So thank you for inviting me to speak here in this historic setting at the Palais des Nations in Geneva a city that has been a place of refuge and philosophy since the time of Rousseau.

The headquarters before the Second World War of the ill-fated League of Nations, which now houses the United Nations.

It’s a particular privilege to be speaking here because the constitution of our party includes a commitment to support the United Nations. A promise “to secure peace, freedom, democracy, economic security and environmental protection for all”.

I’d also like to thank my fellow panellists, Arancha Gonzalez and Nikhil Seth, and Labour’s Shadow Attorney General, Shami Chakrabarti, who has accompanied me here.

She has been a remarkable campaigner and a great asset to the international movement for human rights.

And lastly let me thank you all for being here today.

I would like to use this opportunity in the run- up to International Human Rights Day to focus on the greatest threats to our common humanity.

And why states need to throw their weight behind genuine international cooperation and human rights both individual and collective, social and economic, as well as legal and constitutional at home and abroad if we are to meet and overcome those threats.

My own country is at a crossroads. The decision by the British people to leave the European Union in last year’s referendum means we have to rethink our role in the world.

Some want to use Brexit to turn Britain in on itself, rejecting the outside world, viewing everyone as a feared competitor.

Others want to use Brexit to put rocket boosters under our current economic system’s insecurities and inequalities, turning Britain into a deregulated corporate tax haven, with low wages, limited rights, and cut-price public services in a destructive race to the bottom.

My party stands for a completely different future when we leave the EU, drawing on the best internationalist traditions of the labour movement and our country.

We want to see close and cooperative relationships with our European neighbours, outside the EU, based on solidarity as well as mutual benefit and fair trade, along with a wider proactive internationalism across the globe.

We are proud that Britain was an original signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights and our 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined it in our law.

So Labour will continue to work with other European states and progressive parties and movements, through the Council of Europe to ensure our country and others uphold our international obligations.

Just as the work of the UN Human Rights Council helps to ensure countries like ours live up to our commitments, such as on disability rights, where this year’s report found us to be failing.

International cooperation, solidarity, collective action are the values we are determined to project in our foreign policy.

Those values will inform everything the next Labour government does on the world stage, using diplomacy to expand a progressive, rules-based international system, which provides justice and security for all.

They must be genuinely universal and apply to the strong as much as the weak if they are to command global support and confidence.

They cannot be used to discipline the weak, while the strong do as they please, or they will be discredited as a tool of power, not justice.

That’s why we must ensure that the powerful uphold and respect international rules and international law.

If we don’t, the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 will remain an aspiration, rather than a reality and international rules will be seen as a pick and mix menu for the global powers that call the international shots.

Most urgently we must work with other countries to advance the cause of human rights, to confront the four greatest and interconnected threats facing our common humanity.

First, the growing concentration of unaccountable wealth and power in the hands of a tiny corporate elite, a system many call neoliberalism, which has sharply increased inequality, marginalisation, insecurity and anger across the world.

Second, climate change, which is creating instability, fuelling conflict across the world and threatening all our futures.

Third, the unprecedented numbers of people fleeing conflict, persecution, human rights abuses, social breakdown and climate disasters.

And finally, the use of unilateral military action and intervention, rather than diplomacy and negotiation, to resolve disputes and change governments.

The dominant global economic system is broken.

It is producing a world where a wealthy few control 90 percent of global resources.

Of growing insecurity and grotesque levels of inequality within and between nations, where more than 100 billion dollars a year are estimated to be lost to developing countries from corporate tax avoidance.

Where $1 trillion dollars a year are sucked out of the Global South through illicit financial flows.

This is a global scandal.

The most powerful international corporations must not be allowed to continue to dictate how and for whom our world is run.

Thirty years after structural adjustment programmes first ravaged so much of the world, and a decade after the financial crash of 2008, the neoliberal orthodoxy that delivered them is breaking down.

This moment, a crisis of confidence in a bankrupt economic system and social order, presents us with a once in a generation opportunity to build a new economic and social consensus which puts the interests of the majority first.

But the crumbling of the global elite’s system and their prerogative to call the shots unchallenged has led some politicians to stoke fear and division. And deride international cooperation as national capitulation.

President Trump’s disgraceful Muslim ban and his anti-Mexican rhetoric have fuelled racist incitement and misogyny and shift the focus away from what his Wall Street-dominated administration is actually doing.

In Britain, where wages have actually fallen for most people over the last decade as the corporations and the richest have been handed billions in tax cuts, our Prime Minister has followed a less extreme approach but one that also aims to divert attention from her Government’s failures and real agenda.

She threatens to scrap the Human Rights Act, which guarantees all of our people’s civil and political rights and has actually benefited everyone in our country. And she has insisted “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”.

There is an alternative to this damaging and bankrupt order. The world’s largest corporations and banks cannot be left to write the rules and rig the system for themselves.

The world’s economy can and must deliver for the common good and the majority of its people. But that is going to demand real and fundamental structural change on an international level.

The UN has a pivotal role to play, in advancing a new consensus and common ground based on solidarity, respect for human rights and international regulation and cooperation.

That includes as a platform for democratic leaders to speak truth about unaccountable power.

One such moment took place on 4 December 1972, when President Salvador Allende of Chile, elected despite huge opposition and US interference, took the rostrum of the UN General Assembly in New York.

He called for global action against the threat from transnational corporations, that do not answer to any state, any parliament or any organisation representing the common interest.

Nine months later, Allende was killed in General Augusto Pinochet’s coup, which ushered in a brutal 17-year dictatorship and turned Chile into a laboratory of free market fundamentalism.

But 44 years on, all over the world people are standing up and saying enough to the unchained power of multinational companies to dodge taxes, grab land and resources on the cheap and rip the heart out of workforces and communities.

That’s why I make the commitment to you today that the next Labour government in Britain will actively support the efforts of the UN Human Rights Council to create a legally binding treaty to regulate transnational corporations under international human rights law.

Genuine corporate accountability must apply to all of the activities of their subsidiaries and suppliers.

Impunity for corporations that violate human rights or wreck our environment, as in the mineral-driven conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, must be brought to an end.

For too long, development has been driven by the unfounded dogma that unfettered markets and unaccountable multinational companies are the key to solving global problems.

So under the next Labour Government the Department for International Development will have the twin mission of not only eradicating poverty but also reducing inequality across the world.

To achieve this goal we must act against the global scandal of tax dodging and trade mis-invoicing - robbing developing countries and draining resources from our own public services.

In Africa alone an estimated 35 billion dollars is lost each year to tax dodging, and 50 billion to illicit financial flows, vastly exceeding the 30 billion dollars that enters the continent as aid.

As the Paradise and Panama Papers have shown the super-rich and the powerful can’t be trusted to regulate themselves.

Multinational companies must be required to undertake country-by-country reporting, while countries in the Global South need support now to keep hold of the billions being stolen from their people.

So the next Labour government will seek to work with tax authorities in developing countries, as Zambia has with NORAD - the Norwegian aid agency - to help them stop the looting.

Tomorrow is International Anti-Corruption Day. Corruption isn’t something that happens ‘over there’. Our government has played a central role in enabling the corruption that undermines democracy and violates human rights. It is a global issue that requires a global response.

When people are kept in poverty, while politicians funnel public funds into tax havens, that is corruption, and a Labour government will act decisively on tax havens: introducing strict standards of transparency for crown dependencies and overseas territories including a public register of owners, directors, major shareholders and beneficial owners … for all companies and trusts.

Climate change is the second great threat to our common humanity. Our planet is in jeopardy. Global warming is undeniable; the number of natural disasters has quadrupled since 1970.

Hurricanes like the ones that recently hit the Caribbean are bigger because they are absorbing moisture from warmer seas.

It is climate change that is warming the seas, mainly caused by emissions from the world’s richer countries.

And yet the least polluting countries, more often than not the developing nations, are at the sharp end of the havoc climate change unleashes - with environmental damage fuelling food insecurity and social dislocation.

We must stand with them in solidarity. Two months ago, I promised the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, that I would use this platform to make this message clear.

The international community must mobilise resources and the world’s biggest polluters shoulder the biggest burden.

So I ask governments in the most polluting countries, including in the UK:

First, to expand their capacity to respond to disasters around the world. Our armed forces, some of the best trained and most highly skilled in the world, should be allowed to use their experience to respond to humanitarian emergencies. Italy is among those leading the way with its navy becoming a more versatile and multi-role force.

Second, to factor the costs of environmental degradation into financial forecasting as Labour has pledged to do with Britain’s Office of Budget Responsibility.

Third, to stand very firmly behind the historic Paris Climate Accords.

And finally, take serious and urgent steps on debt relief and cancellation. We need to act as an international community against the injustice of countries trying to recover from climate crises they did not create while struggling to repay international debts.  

It’s worth remembering the words of Thomas Sankara, President of Burkina Faso, delivered to the Organisation of African Unity in 1987 a few months before he too was assassinated in a coup.

“The debt cannot be repaid“ he said, “first because if we don’t repay lenders will not die. But if we repay... we are going to die.”

The growing climate crisis exacerbates the already unparalleled numbers of people escaping conflict and desperation.

There are now more refugees and displaced people around the world than at any time since the Second World War.

Refugees are people like us.

But unlike us they have been forced by violence, persecution and climate chaos to flee their homes.

One of the biggest moral tests of our time is how we live up to the spirit and letter of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Its core principle was simple: to protect refugees.

Yet ten countries, which account for just 2.5 percent of the global economy, are hosting more than half the world's refugees.

It is time for the world’s richer countries to step up and show our common humanity.

Failure means millions of Syrians internally displaced within their destroyed homeland or refugees outside it. Rohingya refugees returned to Myanmar without guarantees of citizenship or protection from state violence and refugees held in indefinite detention in camps unfit for human habitation as in Papua New Guinea or Nauru. And African refugees sold into slavery in war-ravaged Libya.

This reality should offend our sense of humanity and human solidarity.

European countries can, and must, do more as the death rate of migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean continues to rise.

And we need to take more effective action against human traffickers.

But let us be clear: the long-term answer is genuine international cooperation based on human rights, which confronts the root causes of conflict, persecution and inequality.

I’ve spent most of my life, with many others, making the case for diplomacy and dialogue… over war and conflict, often in the face of hostility.

But I remain convinced that is the only way to deliver genuine and lasting security for all.

And even after the disastrous invasions and occupations of recent years there is again renewed pressure to opt for military force, America First or Empire 2.0 as the path to global security.

I know the people of Britain are neither insensitive to the sufferings of others nor blind to the impact and blowback from our country’s reckless foreign wars.

Regime change wars, invasions, interventions and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and Somalia have failed on their own terms, devastated the countries and regions and made Britain and the world a more dangerous place. And while the UK government champions some human rights issues on others it is silent, if not complicit, in their violation.

Too many have turned a wilfully blind eye to the flagrant and large-scale human rights abuses now taking place in Yemen, fuelled by arms sales to Saudi Arabia worth billions of pounds.

The see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach undermines our credibility and ability to act over other human rights abuses.

Total British government aid to Yemen last year was under £150 million - less than the profits made by British arms companies selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. What does that say about our country’s priorities, or our government’s role in the humanitarian disaster now gripping Yemen?

Our credibility to speak out against the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims is severely undermined when the British Government has been providing support to Myanmar’s military.

And our Governments pay lip service to a comprehensive settlement and two state solution to the Israel- Palestine conflict but do nothing to use the leverage they have to end the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

70 years after the UN General Assembly voted to create a Palestinian state alongside what would become Israel, and half a century since Israel occupied the whole of historic Palestine, they should take a lead from Israeli peace campaigners such as Gush Shalom and Peace Now and demand an end to the multiple human rights abuses Palestinians face on a daily basis. The continued occupation and illegal settlements are violations of international law and are a barrier to peace.

The US president’s announcement that his administration will recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, including occupied Palestinian territory, is a threat to peace that has rightly been met with overwhelming international condemnation.

The decision is not only reckless and provocative - it risks setting back any prospect of a political settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

President Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly in September signalled a wider threat to peace. His attack on multilateralism, human rights and international law should deeply trouble us all.

And this is no time to reject the Iran Nuclear Deal, a significant achievement agreed between Iran and a group of world power to reduce tensions.

That threatens not just the Middle East but also the Korean Peninsula. What incentives are there for Pyongyang to believe disarmament will bring benefits when the US dumps its nuclear agreement with Tehran?

Trump and Kim Jong-un threaten a terrifying nuclear confrontation with their absurd and bellicose insults.

In common with almost the whole of humanity, I say to the two leaders: this is not a game, step back from the brink now.

It is a commonplace that war and violence do not solve the world’s problems. Violence breeds violence. In 2016 nearly three quarters of all deaths from terrorism were in five states; Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria and Somalia.

So let us stand up for the victims of war and terrorism and make international justice a reality.

And demand that the biggest arms exporters ensure all arms exports are consistent, not legally, but with their moral obligations too.

That means no more arms export licences when there is a clear risk that they will be used to commit human rights abuses or crimes against humanity.

The UK is one of the world’s largest arms exporters so we must live up to our international obligations while we explore ways to convert arms production into other socially useful, high-skill, high-tech industry.

Which is why I welcome the recent bipartisan U.S. House of Representatives resolution which does two unprecedented things.

First, it acknowledges the U.S. role in the destruction of Yemen, including the mid-air refuelling of the Saudi-led coalition planes essential to their bombing campaign and helping in selecting targets.

Second, it makes plain that Congress has not authorised this military involvement.

Yemen is a desperate humanitarian catastrophe with the worst cholera outbreak in history.

The weight of international community opinion needs to be brought to bear on those supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, including Theresa May’s Government, to meet our legal and moral obligations on arms sales and to negotiate an urgent ceasefire and settlement of this devastating conflict.

If we’re serious about supporting peace we must strengthen international cooperation and peacekeeping.  Britain has an important role to play after failing to contribute significant troop numbers in recent years.

We are determined to seize the opportunity to be a force for good in peacekeeping, diplomacy and support for human rights.

Labour is committed to invest in our diplomatic capabilities and consular services and we will reintroduce human rights advisers in our embassies around the world.

Human rights and justice will be at the heart of our foreign policy along with a commitment to support the United Nations. 

The UN provides a unique platform for international cooperation and action. And to be effective, we need member states to get behind the reform agenda set out by Secretary General Guterres. 

The world demands the UN Security Council responds, becomes more representative and plays the role it was set up to on peace and security. 

We can live in a more peaceful world. The desire to help create a better life for all burns within us.

Governments, civil society, social movements and international organisations can all help realise that goal.

We need to redouble our efforts to create a global rules based system that applies to all and works for the many, not the few.

No more bomb first and think and talk later.

No more double standards in foreign policy.

No more scapegoating of global institutions for the sake of scoring political points at home.

Instead: solidarity, calm leadership and cooperation. Together we can:

Build a new social and economic system with human rights and justice at its core. 

Deliver climate justice and a better way to live together on this planet.

Recognise the humanity of refugees and offer them a place of safety.

Work for peace, security and understanding.

The survival of our common humanity requires nothing less.

We need to recognise and pay tribute to human rights defenders the world over, putting their lives on the line for others - our voice must be their voice.

Thank you.

[xtruss]

He Loves Pakistani Cricket. It Doesn’t Love Him Back.

“I don’t think anything prepared me for the hostility I was going to face,” the British-born Wasim Khan says of overseeing a beloved sport in a country where many see him only as a foreigner.

Wasim Khan in Birmingham, England, where he grew up and learned to play cricket.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

— By Tariq Panja | September 9, 2020 | NY Times

LONDON — Wasim Khan has spent his life immersed in Pakistani cricket, even as he spent very little of that life in Pakistan. To his critics, that latter bit is precisely the problem.

Wasim Khan was hooked early. As the son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain, Khan grew up listening to his father, his uncles and his cousins talk passionately about cricket late into the night. They told tales of Pakistan’s cricketing superstars, of its stunning victories, and of the huge crowds that regularly packed the dusty stadiums a world away from the Khans’ home in the Small Heath section of Birmingham, the city that served as a magnet for the generations of migrants from South Asia in the 1960s and ’70s.

Khan was, and is, a Pakistan cricket fan. He was even when he started to show his own talent for the sport, a talent with the bat that earned him a place in England’s under-19 team. Even when he became the first Briton of Pakistani heritage to sign a professional club cricket contract. And even later, when he was appointed to lead the Leicestershire County Cricket Club, becoming the first nonwhite chief executive of a major professional British sports team.

So when he was offered the opportunity to run Pakistan’s cricket board in 2018, Khan had no hesitation. The lure was personal, not just professional.

“Part of the appeal of going back to Pakistan was being with your own people, the whole understanding of the place, the feeling when you get up in the morning and you hear the call to prayer,” he said.

Now, 18 months after taking on the job, whatever romance Khan, 49, had about relocating to the land of his parents’ birth to take charge of a sport that is a national obsession has largely evaporated.

Since moving last year to Lahore, where the Pakistan Cricket Board is based, he has faced an unending torrent of criticism. For the changes he has instituted. For his European upbringing. For the languages he chooses to speak, and his accent in them when he does. But mostly, as he is reminded almost daily, for not being Pakistani enough, for being an “import” doing a job that should be reserved for a Pakistani.

“I don’t think anything prepared me for the hostility I was going to face,” Khan said. “They’ve put me on the back foot right from the word go.”

Khan detailed the daily outpouring of negativity during an interview last month. How a group of board members staged a walkout, followed by a news conference in which they attacked him as an outsider, almost as soon as he had been appointed last year. How his salary was leaked and is now subject to daily debate. And how rumors continue to persist that he was only appointed because of connections to influential political figures close to Pakistan’s cricket-hero-turned-prime-minister, Imran Khan.

To underline the point, he brandished his cellphone. “Look,” he said. “This just came out today.”

The screen loads a YouTube video in which another of Pakistan’s former star players, the ex-captain Javed Miandad, launches into a full-throated assault on the cricket board, and both Khans. (Wasim Khan is not related to Imran Khan.) The diatribe lasts several minutes. Dressed in a blue tunic and sitting in a chair, Miandad fires volley after volley, excoriating Khan, his former teammate, over changes to the cricket board, including the appointment of Wasim Khan.

“Is there a shortage of people in your own country that you had to bring people from abroad?” Miandad says, his voice rising until he is almost shouting. (Weeks later, Miandad apologized for his outburst.)

Being responsible for Pakistan cricket is unlike most other similar roles in professional sports. The scrutiny runs from the office of the prime minister, through the dozens of news channels featuring frothing ex-players and commentators with hours of airtime to fill, and down to streets teeming with children playing impromptu games, mimicking the swashbuckling batting or the fast bowling of their green-shirted national team heroes.

Pakistan’s Sarfaraz Ahmed and Shadab Khan during a match against England last week in Manchester.

Pakistan’s Sarfaraz Ahmed and Shadab Khan during a match against England last week in Manchester.Credit...Pool photo by Mike Hewitt

Then there is the daily reality of managing cricket in Pakistan, which has only recently started to host international teams after a decade-long exile forced upon it after militants attacked a visiting Sri Lankan team in 2009. Domestically, Khan has become the face of a major restructuring of the professional game, a streamlining that has eliminated several teams, cost hundreds of professional players their jobs and sparked protests in the streets.

“There is that emotional pull and he moved back to Pakistan, hoping it would be great,” said Osman Samiuddin, an author and journalist who has written a book about the history of cricket in Pakistan. “And then you get there and reality of situation hits you, and you think, ‘Oh damn, maybe I shouldn’t have done this.’”

Khan shook his head as he recalled the moment a group of board members walked out of a meeting after a motion to block his appointment was not heard. The moment was captured on television cameras as the men held an impromptu news conference to air their grievances. Khan recalled receiving a frantic call from his wife, Salma, who was in Lahore, hundreds of miles away, house hunting for the new family home.

“She rang me in tears, saying, ‘You’re on every TV station right now and it’s saying you’re not going to have a job anymore,’” Khan said. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, it will get sorted.’”

Instead, it has gotten worse. In many ways, the ceaseless criticism is a function of cricket’s centrality to life in Pakistan. But it is also based in the changes to the culture of the way the sport is managed in the country.

“Do you know what the word sifarish means?” Wasim Akram, once the world’s No. 1-ranked fast bowler, asked. He was referring to an Urdu word which suggests a mix of nepotism and favoritism, which he said has long been a function of cricket in Pakistan. Ex-players, relatives of ex-players and influential political figures had for decades benefited from a system that rewarded relationships over professional aptitude.

“We need someone like Wasim Khan to come as a neutral guy, as a person who comes in and sees things differently,” Akram said. His backing was a rare public endorsement for the cricket board chief and the changes he is pursuing. Many of Akram’s former teammates, like his former captain Miandad, typically line up to outdo one another in their criticism.

The demand for such content — the commentaries are broadcast daily on dozens of news channels but also countless personal YouTube channels — is partly explained by the fact that cricket’s popularity has no rival in a country with a population of more than 200 million. Its importance is perhaps best underlined by the central role afforded to the prime minister, whose official title of patron in chief to the cricket board belies its power.

And in Imran Khan, Pakistan has one the most storied cricket players of all time at the helm. Educated at the University of Oxford in Britain, Khan was already a household name well beyond Pakistan’s borders when he played a starring role in Pakistan’s greatest sporting triumph, captaining the team to the 1992 World Cup title.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, led his country to the Cricket World Cup title in 1992.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, led his country to the Cricket World Cup title in 1992. Credit...Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Shortly after sweeping to power as Pakistan’s prime minister in August 2018, Khan set about overhauling the sport in which he made his name.

A club cricket structure that was dominated by so-called department teams — clubs run by some of Pakistan’s biggest businesses — was replaced by six regional teams, in an effort to create a cleaner pathway for talent to the national side and also build a fan base for the club game.

While Imran Khan, in his role as prime minister, is the guiding hand behind the change, Wasim Khan has been the face of it. That has made him a lightning rod for criticism, especially after the changes reduced the number of professionals by more than a half, and led to stories of former cricketers having to suddenly turn to driving taxis and even rickshaws to make a living.

Many have blamed Khan’s foreign origins for the plight of the players.

“Wasim Khan has been imported from England, he has never lived in Pakistan, doesn’t know about Pak cricket,” one of the chief executive’s biggest critics, Mirza Iqbal Baig, a broadcaster with huge social media following, wrote on Twitter.

Khan argues that in time, the new system will yield results. Besides, he said, he had little choice in the matter: the prime minister wanted the changes, and the country’s world rankings — seventh in Test cricket and sixth in one-day internationals — suggest the existing structure is not producing the results that the country and its tens of millions of fans crave.

“If you’re telling me the competitiveness of our structure works,” Khan said, “the stats don’t lie.”

The belief that he is right, though, does little to win over the critics, especially those — like Miandad and others — who reject his authority out of hand because of his British roots.

“He’s got the worst of both worlds,” said Samiuddin, the author. “He understands the country, speaks the language, but he’s not one of them. They’ll treat him like one of them, but never let him be completely in.”

Sitting in the corner of a mostly empty hotel restaurant in London, mulling over what has happened to him, the sadness and hurt that he has endured, Khan ruminated on a philosophical question that he thought he had resolved before trading his homeland for that of his parents.